"Soundless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cabin I stood still, listening in the lobby at the foot of the stairs. A faint snore came through the closed door of the chief mate's room. The second mate's door was on the hook, but the darkness in there was absolutely soundless. He, too, was young and could sleep like a stone. Remained the steward, but he was not likely to wake up before he was called. I got a sleeping- suit out of my room and, coming back on deck, saw the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Jervas pursed his lips in a soundless whistle and smoothed snowy shirt-frill with ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... and he caught the pallor of her hands, searching swiftly, and then a muffled clink.... Next moment, a wraith with soundless steps, she was back at his side again, urging him on with her. They passed the stairs; he felt the soft yield of carpet beneath his feet; they passed that recumbent figure and now he heard the rhythm of a sleeper's heavy breath, escaping muffledly ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of the King became intensified. Quietly folding his arms, he took his stand by the coffin of the dead in silence. The dashing spray that leaped at the masts of the vessel,— the wind that scooped up the billows into higher and higher pinnacles of emerald green, might have been soundless and powerless, for all he seemed ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in the castle. The very soldiers, as they saluted her as the wife of their general, appeared to gaze upon her with rude, yet earnest commiseration; but neither word nor rumor reached her ear. Several times she essayed to ask of her husband, but the words died in a soundless quiver on her lip. Yet if it were what she dreaded, that Stanley had fulfilled his threat, and they had fought, and one had fallen—why was she thus summoned? And had not Morales resolved to avoid him; for her sake not to avenge ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... of Hermas did not answer to the musician's touch. The strings of his heart were slack and soundless; there was no response within him. He was neither shepherd, nor king, nor wise man, only an unhappy, dissatisfied, questioning youth. He was out of sympathy with the eager preacher, the joyous hearers. In their harmony he had no part. Was it for this that ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... divided into two parties, and keeping within the deepest patches of shadow, bore down upon the nearest pickets with a fierce, soundless rush,—the most disconcerting form of attack to sleepy sentries in the small hours, when life and courage are at their lowest ebb. But the picket sentries happened to be Sikhs; and they are ill men to tackle at close quarters or ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... whether Veronese does right in allowing cats and monkeys to join the company of kings: but whether, supposing the subjects rightly chosen, they ought on the canvas to look like real angels with real violins, and substantial cats looking at veritable kings; or only like imaginary angels with soundless violins, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... and die away as the dark figure crossed the third streak of moonlight. A strange awe fell upon them all, and no one spoke, but stood watching for the appearance of the shape. Nearer and nearer it came, with soundless steps, and as it reached the sixth window its outlines were distinctly visible. A tall, wasted figure, all in black, with a rosary hanging from the girdle, and a dark ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... the remains of the night with an iron crutch. The half-extinguished Cafe Kloesschen, a gleaming fragment, lay still in the soundless morning. In the background sat the last customer. Kuno Kohn had let his head sink back on his trembling hump. The scrawny fingers of his hand covered his forehead and face. His whole body ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected that they should reveal the world I dwell in to be flat, formless, colourless, without perspective, with little thickness and less solidity—a vast solitude of soundless space. But who shall put into words limitless, visionless, silent void? One should be a disembodied spirit indeed to make anything out of such insubstantial experiences. A world, or a dream for that matter, to be comprehensible to us, must, I should think, have a warp of substance woven ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... a void and soundless river On the outer edge of space, Where the body comes not ever, But the absent dream hath place, Stands a city, tall and quiet, And its air is sweet and dim; Never sound of grief or riot Makes it ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... brightly illuminated, the man who kept that watch was suddenly met by a person wearing a masque, and armed at all points. His surprise and consternation were great, and the more so as the steps of The Masque were soundless, though the floor was a stone one. The guard, but slightly prepared to meet an attack, would, however, have resisted or raised an alarm; but The Masque, instantly levelling a pistol at his head with one hand, with ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Lincoln's voice was swept away and drowned, and a rush of people followed on the heels of the tumult. These intruders came towards him and Lincoln gesticulating. The voices without explained their soundless lips. "Show us the Sleeper, show us the Sleeper!" was the burden of the uproar Men were bawling for ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the medium height, and added to the sense of grandeur conveyed by her presence. Her carriage was erect to the verge of stiffness, and her step too firm to be quite soundless. Advancing years had not produced any unseemly embonpoint, nor had her figure fallen into the opposite extreme, and sharpened into meagre angularity; its outline retained sufficient roundness not to lose ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... snow-soft water, more dark than the roof of the pines above, Strikes forth, and is glad as a bird whose flight is impelled and sustained of love. As a sea-mew's love of the sea-wind breasted and ridden for rapture's sake Is the love of his body and soul for the darkling delight of the soundless lake: As the silent speed of a dream too living to live for a thought's space more Is the flight of his limbs through the still strong chill of the darkness from shore to shore. Might life be as this is and death be as life that casts off time as a robe, The likeness of ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This last is his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... feeling—as Miss Vanderpoel had felt—rather as if the whole thing was a dream. This came upon him when, with Mount Dunstan and Penzance, he walked through the park and the curiously beautiful old gardens. The lovely, soundless quiet, broken into only by bird notes, or his companions' voices, had ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shouting again. His head thrown back, he called sentence after sentence aloft while the three ships soared back and forth above their heads, soundless as bats. One of the three rose steeply and soared away toward the city. Their captive, grinning, turned and nodded his head satisfiedly. Then he sat down ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was made safely in the circle of Air Guardsmen. There was a small hospital plane standing beside it in a moment, and as Arcot's ship released it, and then hung motionless, soundless above it, the people watched it in wonder and excitement. They wanted to see Arcot perform; they clamored to see the wonderful powers of this ship in operation. Air Guardsmen who had witnessed the flying game of tag between these two super-air machines had told of ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... the ship. They were traffic-sounds, recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and nobody knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words, but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless ship. ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... he was standing at the steps. She would not look up. She thought if she did not, he would go away. She did not know either the Indian or the lover nature. After a time, finding the consciousness of the soundless presence intolerable, she looked up, and surprised on Alessandro's face a gaze which had, in its long interval of freedom from observation, been slowly gathering up into it all the passion of the man's soul, as a burning-glass draws the fire of ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... dubious moment the little man hung back. To his quick Celtic instinct there seemed to inhere, in that open, dark, and silent window, something as sinister and repellent as the inscrutable, soundless menace of a revolver presented ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... door-step Lingered long in Evangeline's heart, and filled it with gladness. Carefully then were covered the embers that glowed on the hearth-stone, And on the oaken stairs resounded the tread of the farmer. Soon with a soundless step the foot of Evangeline followed. Up the staircase moved a luminous space in the darkness, Lighted less by the lamp than the shining face of the maiden. Silent she passed the hall, and entered the door of her chamber. Simple ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... down the full and slumbery Fal seemed nearly a soundless thing. But all the real river-noises were there; the birds were singing endlessly in the groves; the gulls with their hoarse language were flying seawards from the mud-flats of Truro; the water was gently lapping ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... before, and had together been received into the Catholic Church. Now it was all fragrant with flowers and herbs; a pair of tall lilies leaned their delicate heads towards the altar, as if to listen for the soundless Coming in the Name of the Lord; underfoot all about the altar lay sprigs of sweet herbs, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay-leaves; with white blossoms scattered over them—a soft carpet for the Pierced Feet; not like those rustling palm-swords over which He rode to death last ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... them struck the shining, retreating container. It exploded with a monstrous, soundless, violence. It had been a rocket's war head. There could have been only one reason for it to be introduced into a Plumie ship. Baird ceased to be shaky. ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... borne irresistibly upward on the human tide, there was one overpowering moment of fear and clamor, in which the cry of "The Prophet! The Prophet!" dominated her consciousness; then, to her, the world became suddenly and mercifully sightless, soundless, ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of an amused dreamer, at the white ivory skin it set off so well, at the one visible ear that heard nothing, or if it did, translated it into dream, and the faint rhythmic movement that vouched for soundless breath. She looked as long as she dared, then moved away. But she had barely got her head back on her pillow when "Was that you, mother?" came from the next room. Her mother always said of Sally that nothing was certain but the imprevu, and ascribed to her a monstrous perversity. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... up, we landed and made camp at a spot where the bank rose sharply for a hundred yards to a level stretch of ground. Our canoes were moored to trees. The axemen cleared a space for the tents; they were pitched, the baggage was brought up, and fires were kindled. The woods were almost soundless. Through them ran old tapir trails, but there was no fresh sign. Before nightfall the surveyors arrived. There were a few piums and gnats, and a few mosquitoes after dark, but not enough to make ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... its long, slender neck, of swanlike curvature; the head, wide between the eyes, and tapering to a muzzle which a lady's bracelet might have almost clasped; its motion, step long and elastic, tread sure and soundless—all certified its Syrian blood, old as the days of Cyrus, and absolutely priceless. There was the usual bridle, covering the forehead with scarlet fringe, and garnishing the throat with pendent brazen chains, each ending with a tinkling ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... nameless streams, portaged o'er hill and plain; We burnt our boat to save the nails, and built our boat again; We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn; We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn. O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly; By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky; By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... long interval the two men sat in silence. Kano leaned forward from time to time, filling the small cup which Tatsu—half in revery it seemed—had once more drained. The old servant now and again crept in on soundless feet to replace with a freshly heated bottle of sake the one grown cold. So still was the place that the caged cricket hanging from the eaves of Ume's distant room beat ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... solitary watercourse with margin of cottonwoods or willow thickets flowed here to stripe the dingy, yellow world with interrupting green, nor were cattle to be seen dotting the distance, nor moving objects at all, nor any bird in the soundless air. The last gate was shut by the Virginian, who looked back at the pleasant trees of the ranch, and then followed on in single file across the alkali of ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... shadows, the dawn having barely lifted the hem of night's purple raiment from the edge of the world; out into the desert stretching silver-grey, soundless, half-waking; just stirred by the light touch of the breeze, which, heralding the dawn, sends little spirals of sand dancing away to the east and away to the west and blows out the stars ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... points of light, two luminous spots, side by side, taking on, as he faced them, all the mysteries of all the primeval night which man ever faced. He felt like a hunter, in some jungled midnight, a midnight breathless and soundless, who looks before him, and slowly discerns two glowing and motionless balls of fire—who can see nothing else, in all his world—but from those two phosphorescent points of light knows that he is being watched and stalked and hunted by some padded ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... wall, let both hands drop nervelessly at her sides. "I don't believe ... he was ever given a fair chance." Her lips shaped the words she had just heard in a soundless echo. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... custom, and then the outline of the woman apart from the others with the children about her. Henry now lay entirely flat, and his motions were genuinely those of a serpent. It was by a sort of contraction and relaxation of the body that he moved himself, and his progress was absolutely soundless. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her hand, pressed it. She glanced at him without replying, looked away, back again. Her bosom rose and fell with a slow and tremulous movement, as though stirring with deep, soundless sighs. A little smile hovered ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... spoke face to face with a man, he never seemed to be giving more than half his attention, for might not some one else approach if he lost himself in order to listen to any one voice? He had covered half the length of the room with that soundless step before she heard, and rose with a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Michael's hand violently, looking with flaming eyes of rage into his, and added something, but not audibly. Only her lips moved, her teeth chattered, and her eyes rolled—they were soundless words. What could she have said? Timar stared in a dazed way like a sleep-walker, then suddenly raised his head to ask Athalie something. He was alone—only the key grasped in his hand showed ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... of hearth and home and love, Strayed away along the margin of the unknown tide, All its reach of soundless calm can thrill me far above Word or touch from the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... mounting a perceptible grade toward the foothills: the sluggish stream they had paralleled all day ran swift here. Once, where the trail twisted near the bank, they heard the rush of rapids, and a mile farther on they came in sight of a curiously soundless waterfull. They had reached the Bogobo country but the afternoon quiet was unbroken by the sound of agongs. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds—a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... down the soundless valley Thunders, and dark is here; And the wind blows, and the light goes, And the night is ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... stood starkly under their raiment of snow— mighty forest giants—beneath them clustered prickly firs, junipers and alders. The stillness was profound. Demid sped from trap to trap, from snare to snare, over the silent soundless snow. He strangled the beasts; he fired, and the crack of his gun resounded through the empty space. He sought for the trail of the elks and wolf-packs. He descended to the river and watched for otters, caught bewildered fish amidst the broken ice, and set his nets afresh. The ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... back among the pillows, breathing heavily, the perfect picture of exhaustion. Jarvis came near on soundless feet and applied a wet cloth to his ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. If the book was a poem, the words disappeared, or took the subordinate position of an accompaniment to the succession of forms and images that rose and vanished with a soundless ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Miro's voice was choked with passion. "Well, there are ways to make you." With one foot he kicked at the open slab, while his weapon commanded them unwaveringly. There was a smooth soundless rush. Grant knew that the wall was an unbroken surface again. They were cut off on the secret side of the island, ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... rears its dusky head Aloft, and covered by a plain blue stone Briefly inscribed, a gentle Dalesman lies; From whom in early childhood was withdrawn The precious gift of hearing. He grew up From year to year in loneliness of soul; And this deep mountain valley was to him Soundless with all its streams. The bird of dawn Did never rouse this Cottager from sleep With startling summons; not for his delight The vernal cuckoo shouted, not for him Murmured the labouring bee. When stormy winds Were working the broad bosom of the Lake ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... huge chests, and many sacred garments. At the extreme distance her mother was reclined on a bench, her head supported by a large crimson cushion, and her father kneeling by her mother's side. With a soundless step, and not venturing even to breathe, Venetia approached them, and, she knew not how, found herself embraced by both ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... they fastened the boat to it, and stepping out, moved through the dense mist to where the hut loomed indistinctly before them, looking in the blank and awful stillness like a forlorn wreck drifting upon an infinite sea of soundless foam. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... came up; Dysart merely became mute; Geraldine looked around with a start; her lips parted in a soundless, mechanical greeting, then the flush in her cheeks brightened; and as she rose, Dysart got onto his feet and stood silently facing ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... toward the Martian Princess and the searchers on the hull. He cried out in the soundless dark. The searchers had left the hull and were pursuing him through open space. Their speed far exceeded his. It was futile to run before them—and futile to leave the haven of the Martian Princess. His only ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... way to the hydro, Sinbad at his heels. But in a moment the cat was back, leaping up on Dane's knee. He did not curl up, but rubbed against the young man's arm, finally reaching up with a paw to touch Dane's chin, uttering one of the soundless, mews which were his bid ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... awful current. Dante's poem seems but a speck to the reader submerged in the almost Biblical verses with which Swedenborg renders palpable the Celestial Worlds, as Beethoven built his palaces of harmony with thousands of notes, as architects have reared cathedrals with millions of stones. We roll in soundless depths, where our minds will not always sustain us. Ah, surely a great and powerful intellect is needed to bring us back, safe and sound, to our own ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... of the great empty space opened up between him and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... with the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments—pipes, cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale, as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundless now, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate bewilderments ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... lingered in the soundless saloon long after the fire had gone out. There was no danger of her feeling the cold; she was in a fever. She heard the small hours strike, and then the great ones, but her vigil took no heed of time. Her mind, assailed by visions, was in a state ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... fussed considerably over the extraction of the key, halted in the hallway, appalled by the utter loneliness of the darkened rooms. Beyond in the library a clock boomed loudly through the quiet. Somewhere upstairs a dull, choking rasp broke the soundless gloom. Aunt Agatha began to ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... tongue and lips, the maiden's dumb; But if by quick and apprehensive look, By motion, sign, and glance, to give each meaning, Express as clothed in language, be term'd speech, She hath that wondrous faculty; for her eyes, Like the bright stars of heaven, can hold discourse, Though it be mute and soundless. —OLD PLAY. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the door, And no one hears his soundless tread, And no one sees his veiled head, Or silent hand, put forth ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... referred in any other way than this to what they had owned or what they had lost, but sat long silent, and the tiny lamp cast a glow on the frost flowers like a garden—two poor Icelanders, man and wife, who put out their light and go to sleep. Then begins the great, soundless, Canadian winter night.— ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... presently the sweet enemy was again within his outworks. Once more he roused himself, heard the storm raving on—over buried graves and curtained beds, heedless of human heeding—fell a-listening to its shriek-broken roar, and so into a soundless and dreamless sleep. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... doors were closed—he was still and fair, What sound moved up the aisles? The dead priests come with soundless prayer, Their faces wearing smiles. And this was the soundless hymn they sung: "We watch o'er you to-night; Your life was beautiful, fair and young, Not a cloud upon its light. To-morrow—to-morrow you will rest With the virgin priests whom ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... maid—it seemed a Frank must differ from a son of the Arabs. Once more Iskender had erred in attributing to the Emir his own sensations, and been punished for it as for an offence unthinkable. Once more he gazed into a soundless gulf, impossible ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... queer uncontrollable qualm that comes to every one who finds himself suddenly on the edge of a soundless deep. ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... being himself, Slow, and unquestioned, And inordinately there, O stoic! Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence, Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos, And biting the frail grass arrogantly, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... for each, (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—0 heaven! The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!) This glaze of God's serenest purest sky, This film of Satan's seething pit, This heart's geography's map, this limitless small continent, this soundless sea; Out from the convolutions of this globe, This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus, Mars, This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe, Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;) These ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of May and on your wings Bear me away with drowsy winnowings To some far twilight land where steals a stream From out the cool and soundless groves ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... the most silent woman I ever met. She could pass a whole day without uttering a word, and did not seem to suffer any ennui from her silence. In the house she wore always, like the other inhabitants of the village, men and women, soundless felt socks, which slipped readily into the wooden sabots used for walking out-of-doors. I was beginning to learn to walk in sabots myself, for the time was drawing rapidly near when otherwise ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... little court offers hospitality to the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept), is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the church. It is ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... eyes behind the mask, his delicate, thin lips grew tense in what seemed to be a smile—or a soundless sort ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... The living soul of Spring. Death's chamber seemed As though clear sunshine and a singing bird Therein had entered. From the precious herb She poured into a golden bowl the sap, Sparkling like wine; then with a soundless prayer, White as the dead herself, she held the cup To Raschi's mouth. A quick, small flame sprang up From the enchanted balsam, died away, And lo! the color dawned in cheek and lips, The life returned, the sealed, blind lids were raised, And in the glorious eyes love reawoke, And, looking up, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... all sounds save from the immediate machine-guns and the big hounds above; to his eyes the swaying strings of infantry smoke-puffs in the valley were spectral and soundless. ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... herself into a young lady the moment she addressed this man, and spoke now with the self-possession of one accustomed to courtesies. Even at that age her soft cultivated voice and easy assurance of manner, and above all her laugh, which was not the silvery laugh of fiction, but the soundless laugh of good society, marked the class to which she belonged; and as he stumbled along beside her, her new acquaintance wondered how it happened that she was at once so well-bred and so shabbily dressed. He ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of the gray dawn, while the house was in utter stillness, and rising at once, rose and dressed herself with soundless haste. It was hard indeed to go and leave James thus in danger, but she had no choice! She held her breath and listened, but all was still. She opened her door softly; not a sound reached her ear as she crept ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... on the slender lines, And the news of the world runs under their feet,— How value rises, and how declines, How kings with their armies in battle meet,— And, all the while, 'mid the soundless signs, They chirp their small gossipings, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... spruce and balsam and cedar glistened as if bathed in enamel. And the moon came on, and mellow floods of light played in the valleys and plains, and danced over the forest-tops, and in voice-less and soundless miracle called upon all living things to look upon the glory of God. In his soul Jolly Roger McKay felt the urge and the call of that voiceless Master Power, and through his lips came an ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... an army in line of battle, but quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint granite purple which seems, in its far-away height, as unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds it;—the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic death, that it looks ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... hypnotism of moonlight.—Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of colour. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... morning after the vicomte's singular confession, he had spoken a few words to the Black Kettle. From that hour the vicomte made no move that was not under the vigilant eye of the Onondaga. Wherever he went the Black Kettle followed with the soundless cunning of his race. Thus he had warned the settlement of what was going on at the hunting hut. Victor, having met him on his way up the trail, was first to arrive ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... hidden riches. In some, waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss from which ravishing hats rose like tropical orchids. In others, the pink throats of gramophones opened their giant convolutions in a soundless chorus; or bicycles shining in neat ranks seemed to await the signal of an invisible starter; or tiers of fancy-goods in leatherette and paste and celluloid dangled their insidious graces; and, in one vast bay that seemed to ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... he was soon vividly conscious that the wolves—not the Gray Master alone, but the whole pack also—were keeping pace with him through the soundless dark beyond the rim of the spruces. But not a hint of their grim companioning could he see or hear. He felt it merely in the creeping of his skin, the elemental stirring of the hair at the back of his neck. From moment to moment he expected ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... now and was making for the ladder with the soundless agility of her race. I grasped McCord's wrist and dragged him after me, the lantern banging against his knees. When we came up the cat was already amidships, a scarcely discernible shadow at the margin of our lantern's ring. She stopped and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Serene, but sure of life as ere a ray Springs, or the dusk of dawn knows red from grey, Being as a soul that knows not quick from dead. From far beyond the sunset, far above, Full toward the starry soundless east it blows Bright as a child's breath breathing on a rose, Smooth to the sense as plume of any dove; Till more and more as darkness grows and glows Silence and night ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... about—'er?" Here he fell to combing his hair again with his whip-handle, while his quick, bright eyes dodged from my face to the glowing forge and back again, and his clean-shaven lips pursed themselves in a soundless whistle. And, as I watched him, it seemed to me that this was the question that had been in his mind ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... blue as the blue lagoons of the sky among drifting snow-white moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the pastures were in a still sleep: their tremulous leaves made no rustle, though there was a soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows, as in the dark water of a pool where birches lean in the yellow hour of the frostfire. Upon the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping, and yearling kids opened and closed their onyx eyes among ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... the best houses. In a crisis like that of Black Friday the sluice-gates of passion open. Cloaked in the masquerade of genuine distrust, came forth whispers whose only origin was in ancient enmities, long-treasured spites, the soundless depths of unquenchable malignities. Firms of staunchest reputation felt the rapier-stroke of old angers. The knowledge that certain houses were large holders of particular stocks was the signal of attacks upon the shares. Despite of outside ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... his elbows on the rail, his eyes upon the darkening surface of the river, as it swept down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... basely injured. Was the great treasure-ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain and treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the seaweed, her cabin a breeding-place for fish, soundless but for the dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle upon her battlements—that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag Bay? Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of the foreign brig—was this shoe-buckle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as the truth clamored in her brain, the self-evidence of it stunned her. But she was young, and the shamed recoil came automatically. Incredulous, almost exasperated, she raised her head to confront him; the red lips parted in outraged protest—parted and remained so, wordless, silent—the soundless, virginal cry dying unuttered on a mouth that had imperceptibly ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... her botch-work, turn about And stare disdain at me, her finished job? Why was the place one vast suspended shout Of laughter? Why did all the daylight throb With soundless guffaw and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... exalt the whole course of his after-life, might be formed, when in some dreamy twilight he met, through his own tears, the fixed eyes of those shadows of the great dead, unescapable and calm, piercing to his soul; or fancied that their lips moved in dread reproof or soundless exhortation? And if but for one out of many this were true—if yet, in a few, you could be sure that such influence had indeed changed their thoughts and destinies, and turned the eager and reckless youth, who would have cast away his energies on the race-horse or the gambling-table, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... and gravely impressive in this interminable line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely still; a close-packed, silent file, waiting, waiting in the vast deserted night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a movement, there under the night and under the slow-moving mists ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to her. A lull had descended on the house—a new order developed out of the morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving, for the hundredth time, her few moments ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... taunting suggestion; and George, too, glanced through his window across the crowded street into the shattered window whence issued the Voiceless Speech. In that jagged frame in the raw November air still stood Mrs. Harvey Herrington, turning the giant leaves of her soundless oratory. The heckling request which then struck George's eyes began: "Will Candidate ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... sunlight fell, no underbrush grew. All was still and vague and dusky as in pillared aisles. There were no birds, no animals, nothing living except the giant columns which bore a woven canopy of leaves so dense that no glimmer of blue shone through. Centuries had spread the soundless carpet that we trod; eons had laid up the high-sprung arches which vanished far above us where vault and column were dimly merged, losing all form in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... corners of the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... to herself for a while, until Lark really slept, then she buried her head in the pillow and her throat swelled with sobs that were heavy but soundless. ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... of the delusive character of all that splendor of color. He lifts a box from the ooze: he appears to have uncorked the world. The hold is a bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless depth. The bottom of the sea seems loopholed with cavities that pierce the solid globe and the dark abysses of space beyond. The diver is surrounded by pitfalls, real and imaginary. There is no graduation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... fast,—mounting by help of power superhuman. High zones of mist they passed; and they saw below them, ever widening as they climbed, a soundless flood of cloud, like the tide of a ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... feeling soon grew downright oppressive: it must be like this to be dead, thought Laura to herself; and inconsequently remembered a quarter of an hour she had once spent in a dentist's ante-room: there as here the same soundless vacancy, the same anguished expectancy. Now, as then, her heart began to thump so furiously that she was afraid the others would hear it. But they, too, were subdued; though Cousin Grace tittered continually you ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... vitality Engendered, in his image cast, Part of the Nature-song whereof the last Chord soundeth never in the harmony. 'Psyche'! Thy form is shadowed o'er with pain Born of intensest longing, and the rain Of a world's weeping lieth like a sea Of silent soundless sorrow in thine eyes. Yet grief is not eternal, for clouds rise From ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... wholly unconscious of the change. Beneath him, in a space between the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a putative score, lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against each other with the soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about was he able to discern a figure in ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... in its soundless affray, Heaven its vaulting of dark-blue is framing, Where from infinity deep stars are flaming, Earth's masses sink into vapor away. Fleeing the darkness, the eyes seek the city, Meet with its torches a corpse borne in pity; These seek ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... died since superstition and the ebb and flow of mutual mistrust began to smother it in modern practises. But neither priest nor alien could make it shame for maidenhood to choose which way its utmost honor lies. Ye know your hearts' delight. Goodness, love and soundless fealty are the attributes your manhood hungers for. Of those three elements is womanhood. And so, as Shri—goddess of all good fortune—comes ever to her loved one of her own accord and dowers him with richer ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Wade climbed the trail up toward the mountain-basin, where he hunted most these days, he expected the fog to lift. But it did not. The trail under the hoofs of the horse was scarcely perceptible to him, and he seemed lost in a dense, gray, soundless obscurity. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... beauty of the Swiss scenery did she find rest, not by the calm lakes of sapphire blue in which she saw reflected the rugged mountains, soul-satisfying in their majestic grandeur, not in the soundless, the mysterious regions of the eternal snows—but in the north of Holland, where she found herself when autumn fell, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... that smiled upon his birthday here Weeps on the grave that holds him undefiled Whose loss makes bitterer than a soundless tear The ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... adobe-walled quadrangle, sleeping like some monstrous ruminant in a hollow of the Contra Costa Range. I recalled, in the midst of this noisy picnic, the slumberous coolness of its long corridors and soundless courtyard, and hailed it as a relief. The telegram was a sufficient excuse for my abrupt departure. In the morning I left, but without again seeing either ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... the artificial water. The sky was melancholy and grey, and the park lay before her, hushed and soundless. Through the shadows of the darkening island two swans floated softly, leaving behind slight silver lines; above, the swallows flew high in the evening. There was sensation of death, too, in this ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... repetition of the permission. Whatever the madness of Mad Maitland, he was concerned only to profit by it. Never before had the long arm of the law stretched hungry fingers so near his collar. He went, springing down the hall in long, soundless strides, vanishing ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Appius seeks, unmoved for years These soundless caverned rocks, in quest to learn Hesperia's destinies. At his command To loose the sacred gateways and permit The prophetess to enter to the god, The keeper calls Phemonoe; (13) whose steps Round the Castalian fount and in ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... the heavy incompatibility of the best intentioned adult intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger's pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... surprise and pleasure made both men follow her example. It was only a coasting vessel, which had come rather close to the shore, and was sailing swiftly by, before the freshening breeze; but Its broad, white sails, with the moonlight upon them, and its gliding, soundless motion, gave it an unearthly effect, as of a phantom of light floating between the dark sea and sky, or a great white-winged spirit sweeping past. When it had vanished into the distance and darkness, Rose turned, and looked ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of the air, such in its transparency, such in its gossamer lightness. Does the angel touch the pillar with his foot? Oh no! Even that would be something, but even that is not allowed. In his soundless flight across it, he suffers the hem of his impalpable robe to sweep the surface as softly as a moon-beam. So much and no more of pollution he endures from contact with earthly objects. The lowest extremity of his dress, but with the delicacy of light, grazes the granite ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... SOUNDLESS. Places assumed formerly to be bottomless, but thousands of fathoms are now measured. Our elders little thought of a submarine telegraph across ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... they?—those experiments tried with the truth that consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now playing with the thought that Eugenio might inclusively assist her: he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she should just stupidly and awkwardly want—any more want a life, a career, a consciousness, than ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Lake of Tears which my grief discovered, I laid dead Love with a passionate kiss, And over those soundless depths has hovered The sweet, sad wraith of my ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the verdant velvet of an English lawn shaded at the lower end by a clump of exotic trees, in the midst of which stood a Chinese pagoda with soundless belfries and motionless golden eggs. The greenhouse concealed the garden wall on the northern side, the opposite wall was covered with climbing plants trained upon poles painted green and connected with crossway trellises. This lawn, this world of flowers, the gravelled ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... climbed these steeps seeking peace and help, pinning their hopes to burning joss stick and tinkling bell and mystic words, and in Western lands were other pilgrims entangled likewise in the mazes of dogma and form. But here among the stars, in the empty, soundless space of the white night, the gods that man has created seemed to vanish, and there stood out clear the hope ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... eloquent stillness of terrible cold! The town was soundless. Chickens humped in their feathers were freezing on their roosts, horses and cows tied in their stalls were suffering, and, as always, she visualized the desolate white stretches where hungry coyotes, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... inquisitively. Only the grandmother's golden eyes did not look at him angrily. On the contrary, they dilated and shone with joy. Her wrinkled eyelids ceased to tremble, and the thin lips moved and pronounced with the same soundless whisper as before: ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... and dared not wind about their calm clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall have perished these still will reign on:—the slow, sure, soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Esplanade fountain, and the formal length of the Mall, together with—flung against the sky—the multitudinous lighted windows of Central Park West, the high rippling shimmer of the monumental lifted electric signs on Broadway. Other cars passed, swift and soundless, he saw their occupants and then they were gone: an aged man whose grey countenance might have been moulded in sand with a frigid trained nurse; a couple desperately embracing in a taxi-cab; a knot of chattering ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... There was nothing to stay her progress, for the great mastiff Hero, since Hugo Jocelyn's death, had taken to such dismal howling that it had been found necessary to keep him away from the house in, a far-off shed where his melancholy plaints could not be heard. Treading with light, soundless footsteps down the stairs, she reached the front-door,— unbarred and unlocked it without any noise, and as softly closed it behind her,—then she stood in the open, shivering slightly in the sweet coldness ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... corporeal sight, Prometheus came, and from the floods of day Sunn'd his clear soul with heaven's internal ray, The expanding spark divine; that round him springs, And leads and lights him thro the immense of things, Probes the dense earth, explores the soundless main, Remoulds their mass thro all its threefold reign, O'er great, o'er small extends his physic laws, Empalms the empyrean or dissects a gaz, Weighs the vast orbs of heaven, bestrides the sky, Walks ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... The hands kept steadily at their work. Nothing more occurred to disturb the monotony of the scorching days and soundless nights; the schooner sat as easily on the unbroken water as though built to the bottom. Soon the night watch was discontinued. During these days the three officers lived high. Turtle were plentiful, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... morning of August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the report. Revolver shots had of late cracked from different parts of the grove—spies ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... of guests were sauntering toward their homes Across the fields, and far, on hillside paths, Gleamed the white robes of maidens. Sella grew Weary of the long merriment; she thought Of her still haunts beneath the soundless sea, And all unseen withdrew and sought the cleft Where she had laid the slippers. They were gone! She searched the brookside near, yet found them not. Then her heart sank within her, and she ran ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... visitors, caused no talk, rose late, went out together upon the lake, knew, in short, the happiness of which we all of us dream. It was a simple little house, with green shutters, and broad balconies shaded with awnings, a house contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white couches, soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new view of the lake; in the far distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of changing color and evanescent ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... profound silence spread itself through the sleeping house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river broke the stillness under the stars. But all through this silence and this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my dressing gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all the frightened tales of the morbid ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various |
