"Sunless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pleasant to think of. One gets so many inhuman letters, ovine, bovine, porcine, etc., etc.: I wish you would write a little oftener; when the beneficent Daimon suggests, fail not to lend ear to him.' Another, who has since followed him 'from sunshine to the sunless land,' and to whom he wrote of domestic affairs, said, 'The striking feature in his correspondence with me is the exquisite tenderness of feeling which it exhibits in regard to all family matters; the letters might have been written by a mother or a sister.' He said of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... a murmur as of waves That grope their way through sunless caves, Like bodies struggling in their graves, Carolina! And now it deepens; slow and grand It swells, as rolling to the land, An ocean broke upon the strand, Carolina! Shout! let it reach the startled Huns! And roar with all thy ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... Court the sunless air Grows faint and sick; to left and right, The cowering houses shrink from sight, Huddling and ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... dreams to sweep 1300 With whirlwind swiftness—a fall far and deep,— A gulf, a void, a sense of senselessness— These things dwelt in me, even as shadows keep Their watch in some dim charnel's loneliness, A shoreless sea, a sky sunless and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... be dark as the dawn is bright, And bright as the night is dark on the world—no more. Light slays not darkness, and darkness absorbs not light; And the labour of evil and good from the years of yore Is even as the labour of waves on a sunless shore. And he who is first and last, who is depth and height, Keeps silence now, as the sun when ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... were only too fully realized. Never was a more miserably monotonous journey. After riding for weeks, through sodden, sunless forests and trackless wastes we had to abandon our mules and take to our feet, spend weeks on nameless rivers, poling and paddling our canoe in the terrible heat, and tormented almost to madness by countless insects. Then the rains came on, and we were weather-stayed ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... station is no drawback, provided it is passable at all times of the year. This one was obviously poor, even in summer. Finally a real estate broker showed us a picture of a modest 18th century farm cottage. We visited the place one dreary sunless day in late March, investigated the neighborhood, determined the time required to drive to the nearest railroad station, and bought it, all in ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... dreams; sharp-tongued but industrious and warm-hearted Mrs. Woods; the musical German girl, with memories of the Rhine; and the Indian chief and his family. The Columbia rolled below the tall palisades, the opposite bank was full of cool shadows of overhanging rocks, sunless retreats, and dripping cascades of glacier-water. Afar loomed Mount Hood in grandeur unsurpassed, if we except Tacoma, inswathed in forests and covered with crystal crowns. The Chinook winds were blowing coolly, ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink,— Companion of the morning star at dawn, Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald—wake! O wake! and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... over the lip of the fall, twenty feet above us, in a curve like a scimitar, passed in one sheet the spot where we stood, and dived into a sunless pool thirty feet below with a thunderous boom. What it may have been in full phases of the stream, I know not; yet even now it was sufficiently magnificent to give pause to a dying soul eager to shake off the restless horror of the world. The flat ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path Frona came upon a man spread carelessly in the mud. He lay on his side, legs apart and one arm buried beneath him, pinned down by a ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort, the morals, the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all consideration for the occupants, so rambling and haphazard in the disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous, generous, rational, religious family ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dawn is wading Through this waste of sunless greens, When the flushing hues are fading On the peerless cheek of queens; When the mean shall no more sorrow, And the proudest no more smile; As old age, youth's fatal morrow, Spreads its cold light wider all ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his progress—seems so gently softened in character—seems so refined from the old affectations, so ennobled above the old cynicism—and, above all, so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that—well, need I finish the sentence?—the reader will complete what ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "double-fatal" yew itself was supposed to be in other days. The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead." ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of the lark ne'er floats To this region of sunless cloud; Nor hath eagle bird the silence stir'd, With his ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... The pillared woods, Where silence breathes sweet breath:— O labyrinth, O sunless gloom, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... uncertain through the last week, and yesterday morning, too, was misty and sunless; notwithstanding which we took the rail for Kenilworth before eleven. The distance from Leamington is less than five miles, and at the Kenilworth station we found a little bit of an omnibus, into which we packed ourselves, together ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... buggies, hacks, two-horse wagons, with wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, in white dresses, flowered hats, and many ribbons, and with dinner-baskets stuffed with good things to eat—old ham, young chicken, angel-cake and blackberry wine—to be spread in the sunless shade of great poplar and oak. From Bum Hollow and Wildcat Valley and from up the slopes that lead to Cracker's Neck came smaller tillers of the soil—as yet but faintly marked by the gewgaw trappings of the outer ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... constantly during long hours of tedious clambering yesterday, when he followed the channel of Garden Creek through its tortuous course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses—debris, superstition said, of cataclysm—of the Crucifixion, when the mountain crests tore themselves asunder, and cast their pinnacles into the abyss for rage and grief. The searcher ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... dead and gone, When in immarcescible regions My temple rots and soul doth storm and mourn As bones of mine adorn an early grave? Who'll hear and know that I worked hard and long, That twin sighs and tears storm'd me by legions, My life, a sunless one—bleak and forlorn. No ray of light ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... I hear thy martial footsteps fall— Thine arms shall hang, dull trophies, on the wall— Fallen the stem of Troy! Thou go'st where slow Cocytus wanders—where Love sinks in Lethe, and the sunless air Is dark to ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... been so: yea, that threatenings Of coming down-drip on the sunless gray, By the then possibilities in things Were wrought more bright than ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... in sullen tarns after nightfall, to lean over the ledge and dip one's naked feet in the spray of cataracts, to plough a solitary path into the heart of forests, and to sleep and dream for hours amidst the sunless glades, on twilight hills to meet the apparition of the winter moon rising over snowy wastes, to descend by her ghastly light precipices where the eagles are sleeping, and returning home to be haunted by night visions of mightier mountains, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the wheel chair—the phantom because of which that other phantom was traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... our second winter-quarters. Again came December, and all our drear sunless gloom, made worse by the fact that the windmill would not work, leaving ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind; for he was happier, while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and the remainder are ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either side of the church, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep- seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended. This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... of conversation and lasted them during a considerable part of their drive. Nearly the whole of the way lay through the jungle, here and there narrowing to little more than a track over which great forest-trees stretched their boughs. It was all new country to Olga, and the quiet, sunless depths as they advanced, held her awe-struck, spellbound. She gazed into the thick undergrowth with half-fearful curiosity. Once, at a sudden loud flapping of wings, she ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... that rake the mountain summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land! ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... society, and he and his companions had often roamed the stream in little schools and bands, but of late years his tastes seemed to have undergone a change, and he kept to himself and lurked in the shady, sunless places till his skin grew darker and darker, and he more and more resembled the shadows in which he lived. His great delight was to watch from the depths of some cave-like hollow under an overhanging bank until a star-gazer, ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... the same impulse and the same thought, they looked ahead of them. Half a mile farther on the mountains closed in until the gorge between them was dark and sunless. ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... and the sunless day went down Over the waste of waters; like a veil Which, if withdrawn, would but disclose the frown Of one whose hate is masked but to assail; Thus to their hopeless eyes the night was shown, And grimly darkled o'er their faces pale, And the dim desolate deep: twelve days ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the flat hollow of a large vine. The sky was murky as usual, but the soft warm feel and smell of the growth around him, with its color and brightness, made up for a sunless sky. ...
— George Loves Gistla • James McKimmey
... Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... sunless rivers weep Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a charmed sleep: Awake her not. Led by a single star, She came from very far To seek where shadows are Her ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Hodge had been assigned to the "cock-loft" of the third division, which meant the top floor on the north side of the barracks—the sunless side. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure, clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... from forgetting. Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art, Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart, Mourns thee of many his children the last dead, And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes, And over thine irrevocable head Sheds ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces, And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests, Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force, Goal, and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and out, never get beyond the crowded city, with the exception of dragging themselves and their children now and then to the parks on holidays or hot summer evenings. The majority, especially the inhabitants of the East of London, never get away from the sunless alleys and grimy streets in which they exist from year to year. It is true that a few here and there of the adult population, and a good many of the children, have a sort of annual charity excursion to Epping Forest, Hampton Court, or perhaps ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... know that we are any more likely to meet danger in this canon than we are out of it," said I; "but it's one of the most dismal and sunless places ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... Elenko to teach Prometheus than she could learn from him. How trivial seemed the history of the gods to what he now heard of the history of men! Were these indeed the beings he had known "like ants in the sunless recesses of caves, dwelling deep-burrowing in the earth, ignorant of the signs of the seasons," to whom he had given fire and whom he had taught memory and number, for whom he had "brought the horse under the chariot, and invented the sea-beaten, flaxen-winged ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... this invariable daily flooding of the three decks of a frigate, as a man-of-war's-man, White-Jacket most earnestly protests. In sunless weather it keeps the sailors' quarters perpetually damp; so much so, that you can scarce sit down without running the risk of getting the lumbago. One rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was driven to the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... who on the sunless side Of a romantic mountain, forest crown'd Beneath the whole ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's track; Whilst above, the sunless sky Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Riving sail, and cord, and plank, Till the ship has almost drank Death from the o'er-brimming deep; And sinks down, down, like that sleep When the dreamer seems ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... heard than seen, seems to be fretting in vain efforts to escape from its dark and gloomy prison." In the gorge itself the current was restrained, and boats could cross from bank to bank without difficulty. It was an eerie feeling to glide over the sunless water shut in by the stupendous sidewalls of rock. At a sandy spit to the west of the gorge we landed and put things in order. And here I stood and watched the junks disappear down the river one after the other, and I saw the truth of what Hosie had written that, as their masts are always unshipped ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... to come a change. No longer need the carefully sponged and darned black alpaca gowns flaunt their wearers' poverty to the world, and no longer would they force these same wearers to seek dark corners and sunless rooms, lest the full extent of that poverty become known. It had taken forty years of the most rigid economy to save the necessary money; but it was saved now, and the dresses were to be bought. Long ago there ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... from what I have told you already, that, now Bobby is gone, there's nothing to keep me here, and I'm following my own idea of letting the whole blasted thing slide. I only worked this racket for the sake of him. I'm sorry for him, but I suppose the poor little beggar couldn't stand these sunless, God-forsaken longitudes any more than I could. Besides that, as I didn't want to trust any lawyer with my secret, I myself had hunted up some books on the matter, and found that, by the law of entail, I'd have to rip up the whole blessed thing, and Bill would have had ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... almost along the very verge of the steep-to coast, and as we tramped over the rich red soil we had the bright blue sea beneath us on our left, and the dark and almost silent bush on our right. I say 'almost,' for although in these moist and sunless seaboard tracts of what we Australian-born people call bush, and English people would call wood or forest, there was no sound of human life, there was yet always to be heard the thump, thump of the frightened scrub wallaby, and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... and down, in sun and shadow; now aloft on the bare ridge among the rocks and birches, with the lizards and the snakes; and anon in the deep grove among sunless pillars. Now she followed wandering wood-paths, in the maze of valleys; and again, from a hill-top, beheld the distant mountains and the great birds circling under the sky. She would see afar off a nestling hamlet, and go round ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last bonnet and gown made by the class had been sent to the hospital the teacher was surprised by a visit from Arline, a heedless and hitherto disinterested member of the class. It was a bitter cold day, the sunless air penetrating ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. They are countless, voiceless, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... winds, and waves, take back your child! Upon thy balmy bosom, Mother Nature, Where my young spirit dreamt its years away, Give me once more to nestle: I have strayed Far through another world, which is not thine. Through sunless cities, and the weary haunts Of smoke-grimed labour, and foul revelry My flagging wing has swept. A mateless bird's My pilgrimage has been; through sin, and doubt, And darkness, seeking love. Oh hear me, Nature! Receive me once again: but not alone; No more ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... a keen look at his companion, but could discern in him none of the common symptoms of guilt. The priest, however, was a mine of sunless riddles, one lode connecting with another; it was idle attempting to explore them all at once. So the young man recurred to that vein which was of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea." ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... key to the West, and we must bravely unlock the portals; we can buy no lamp that will banish the night. We have always kept our time by the sun. When we pass through the gates of this dying day, we shall pass into a sunless land, and for us there shall be no more time, a forever-land of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... and ever increasing in volume I heard the trembling crash of some great water falling. What narrow isles of sky were visible between the branches lay sunless and still. Yet already, on a mantled pool we journeyed softly by, the waterlily was unfolding, the swan ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... the result of his experiments in one of the heaviest folios of the day. And, for all these purposes, the gem itself could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a somewhat similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice, which he found in a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded, in all points, with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The critics say, that, if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldness ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Thun to the Rhine and North Sea, whilst you keep the other in another little stream, whose particles will pass by the Rhone gorge and valley through the Lake of Geneva to the great Rhone and the Mediterranean. Three incomparably fine days—September 17th, 18th, and 19th—atoned for three weeks of sunless cloud. One of them we spent in the high valley of Rosenlaui, where are hairy-lipped gentians and the blue-iced glacier, but of these I have not space to tell. Then the clouds and the rain resumed their odious domination, and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... spot on the sun—humanity, God's mistake in the great plan of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the cold of the sunless places in the golden dominion ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... with venerable trees, and the moisture they gave the old brown and black bricks in the contiguous houses, some of them still stylish, and all their windows topped with marble or sandstone, gray with the superincumbent weight of time or neglect. Large rear additions and sunless sideyards carried out the idea of a former gentry. Some buttonwood trees, now thinning out with annual age, conveyed by their speckled trunks the notion of a changing social standard, white and brown, native and foreign, while the lines of maples ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... evergreens, and the gall-oaks, and karoobah-trees, our path often became very narrow—sometimes subsiding into sunless hollows, then mounting afresh into a chequered brilliancy—but always passing between woods of dark and glossy foliage. At one place was a pretty spring of water, where one of the party halted to drink while the rest proceeded. On finding him fail ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... of the room; a crazy stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon darkness. There was something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a millionnaire ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... sister sees those eyes o'erflow, And fondly waits for thee; That still she hears the young birds sing, And sees the chaplet wave, Which every morn thy light hands bring, To dress her early grave; And in a brighter, purer sphere, Beyond the sunless tomb, Those virtues that have charmed us here In fadeless ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... which are strange and wild This is perchance the wildest and most strange, And showeth man most utterly beguiled, To those who haunt that sunless City's range; That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating 5 How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting, How naught is constant ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... since his first visit to the palace; and as he climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses rocked against the sunless sky, like living creatures in pain. He had to traverse a long subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from its floor ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... finger finely twined The subtle thread that knitteth mind to mind; There that strange bridge of signs was built where roll The sunless waves that sever soul from soul, And by the arch, no bigger than a hand, Truth travell'd over to ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this life, have received permission from Pluto, King of the Shades, to return to this world and make known to you, less fortunate mortals, your destiny. While lounging idly on the banks of the "River of Oblivion," the sovereign of that sunless region permitted me to read in his "Book of Life." Listlessly turning over the pages I saw a name in bold characters: "W. L. Mason, City, County and State of New York." Then the pages began to turn of their own accord ...
— Silver Links • Various
... will give no place. Oh! what is life when only shadows fall! Oh! what is love, when love is past recall! My laurel wreath unto the winds I fling, For worldly praise I never more will sing. Oh! tears, what do you here—keep back, I say, Each human life must know a sunless day." ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... could I see, but hear, Its wondrous and harmonious strings, In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, From Dian's circle light and near, Onward to vaster and wider rings, Where, chanting through his beard of snows, Majestic, mournful Saturn goes, And down the sunless realms of space Reverberates the thunder ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... hours of the day. By-and-by the clouds thickened yet more, and one or two drops of rain were felt. It was very little, but Ruth feared a shower for her delicate Elizabeth, and besides, the September evening was fast closing in the dark and sunless day. As they turned homewards in the rapidly increasing dusk, they saw three figures on the sand near the rocks, coming ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by what gate or from ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... sunless April day, Thy early smile has stayed my walk; But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, I passed thee on ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... urban treadmill. Can you beat it? Unquestioned profit does not attend the migration. It stands to reason that some of the very advantages sought have been sacrificed on the altar of the drift cityward. Let us say you have your individual domicile or the cramped and sunless apartment you dub your habitation within corporate limits. Does that mean that the privileges of the city are at your disposal, so that you have merely to reach forth your hand and pluck them? Well, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... expended on these two porches of Chartres," says Viollet-le-Duc, "would be enough to establish the glory of a whole generation of artists." We begin with the north porch because it belonged to the Virgin; and it belonged to the Virgin because the north was cold, bleak, sunless, windy, and needed warmth, peace, affection, and power to protect against the assaults of Satan and his swarming devils. There the all-suffering but the all-powerful Mother received other mothers who suffered like her, but who, as a rule, were not powerful. Traditionally ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... come when the night of this sunless world shall be over, and the morning of eternity shall break upon us; it may be that in the hour of death we shall find that our work has not been so fruitless as we feared: on the quiet beach we shall see Jesus standing and know that it is He. Then ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... forever, water lilies damp and cool, And the mystic lotus shining through its white waves beautiful, In those dusk and sunless valleys, where no steps of mortals tread, Bind the white brows of the living, whom we blindly call ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... Followed the plunging ploughshare of hewn pine, And closed, as when deep sleep subdues man's breath Lips close and heart subsides; and closing, shone Sunlike with many a Nereid's hair, and moved Round many a trembling mouth of doubtful gods, Risen out of sunless and sonorous gulfs Through waning water and into shallow light, That watched us; and when flying the dove was snared As with men's hands, but we shot after and sped Clear through the irremeable Symplegades; And chiefliest when hoar beach and herbless cliff Stood out ahead ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... be sad. That men and women should be so warped and twisted by the pressure of the years out of semblance to themselves; that circumstances should so wall in their lives with insurmountable cliffs of granite facts, compelling them to tread the sunless gorge; that the coldness of death alone could open the ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... go to Stinking Lake and sleep. ... And wake with the faint stench of sulphur in his throat. ... And see the worm-like leeches unfolding in the shallows, and the big, reddish water-lizards, livid as skinned eels, wriggling convulsively toward their sunless ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... The next day was sunless and colder. Twice that morning Sissy Cameron stopped Bates at his work to urge her determination to leave the place, and twice he again set his reasons for refusal before her with what patience he could command. He told her, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... mosses, now revealed and starved by the drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, figworts, and persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. Insect life did not abundantly manifest itself, for the day was sunless; but now and again, with crisp rattle of his gauze wings, a dragon-fly flashed along the river. Through these scenes the Teign rolled drowsily and with feeble pulses. Upon one bank rose the confines of Whiddon; ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... seed all viewless fell Within the mellow soil to dwell,— Silent the fall as that of pebbles Cast in oblivion's sunless well. ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... trail lay on the rim of a deep declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... islands off-shore, to increase in numbers and develop new skills of civilization. No, knowing the stubbornness which was bred into their small, furry bodies, Dalgard did not believe that many of the sea people would willingly go back into the sunless depths. They would not surrender tamely to the rulership of the ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... began to ask, and then his voice broke. The emaciated figure before him, the face bleached with the ghastly pallor which a sunless prison gives, the deep sunken eyes looking like coals of fire, eating their way into his brain, the tattered clothing, the long unkempt hair and beard, prematurely whitening, and filled with filth, the fingers grown claw-like ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note, where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... the pitiless waves came crashing down on the sand. They were so mighty, so unrelenting in their grim beauty. If one must be drowned, it would have been better to die in a sunless sea, not in the gorgeousness of a day like this. Five. Six. Then Theodora sprang forward with a little, low, choking moan. The seventh wave washed up at her very feet the form of her husband, still breathing and with Mac's body dangling from his ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... even more dense than that of Tehuantepec, with trees, plants, and all the stationary forms of nature struggling like an immense multitude fighting for life, the smaller and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and unassertive trampled to death underfoot on the dank, sunless ground. We crossed the now considerable river by a three-span bridge, and entered the banana country. English-speaking Negroes became numerous, and when we pulled in at the station of Quiragua, the collection of bamboo shanties I had expected ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... pewter beer measure. The woman rose as Robert entered, and courtesied very humbly to the young barrister. She looked about fifty years of age, and was dressed in rusty widow's weeds. Her complexion was insipidly fair, and the two smooth bands of hair beneath her cap were of that sunless, flaxen hue which generally accompanies pink cheeks and white eyelashes. She had been a rustic beauty, perhaps, in her time, but her features, although tolerably regular in their shape, had a mean, pinched look, as if they had ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... salt air again, and the stronger and more mist-laden the better to knock out foul exhalations sucked in these nine years from musty walls. 'Twill be sweet to have the wind rap from us the various fungi that comes from sunless chambers. Ah, a stiff breeze will rejuvenate thy fifteen years one month to a lusty, crowing infant and my forty all-seasons to ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... the waters of the Spanish Main. John Hawkins had been cruising the West Indies exchanging slaves for gold, when an ominous stillness fell on the sea. The palm trees took on the hard glister of metal leaves. The sunless sky turned yellow, the sea to brass; and before the six English ships could find shelter, a hurricane broke that flailed the fleet under sails torn to tatters clear across the Gulf of Mexico to Vera Cruz, the stronghold of ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... England that we knew—but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.' But what of that? There—surely there, in Sleswick—had been discovered for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... low spirits,' said Bhme, who was installed on a seat beside me, voluminously caped and rugged against the biting air. It was a still, sunless day. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... those youthful hearts were bleak and bare, That not a germ had ever flourished there, Unless perchance the night-shade of despair, Which blooms amid the sunless wilderness. ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... fight Fleetfoot Achilles. And she heard the voice, And all her heart exulted, for she weened That she should on that dawning day achieve A mighty deed in battle's deadly toil Ah, fool, who trusted for her sorrow a dream Out of the sunless land, such as beguiles Full oft the travail-burdened tribes of men, Whispering mocking lies in sleeping ears, And to the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... aimlessly on chill, unfathomable sorrow. He swam on, and heard at last the splash of the waves on the shore. His feet touched bottom. He slipped and slid among large slimy stones, worn incredibly smooth by their age-long washing in this sunless place. He struggled forward breast-deep, waist-deep, knee-deep, in the black water. He reached dry ground, crawled upwards till he felt the boulders no longer damp, and knew that he lay above the reach ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... with the little children as well as with those who are stricken in years. The merchants grind us down, and we must needs do their bidding. The priest rides by and tells his beads, and no man has care of us. Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning, and Shame sits with us at night. But what are these things to thee? Thou art not one of us. Thy face is too happy.' And he ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... him in mind of the "Pilgrim's Progress." He heard the stable clock strike three, and caught a glimpse, over the shrubberies, of its cupola and gilt weather-cock. And then a turn of the road brought him under the gloomy northern face of the house, with its broad carriage sweep and sunless portico. Half the windows on this side had been blocked up and painted black, with white streaks down and ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wanderer of the forests at first, she may have been. She had searched for years. And she was still searching for him when he had met her that night on the Transcontinental! For it was she—Marge O'Doone, the mother, the wife, into whose dark, haunting eyes he had gazed from out the sunless depths of his own despair! Her mother. Alive. ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... then, abroad for them. Upon the cucumber frame in the sunshine perhaps there may be seen an ant or two, almost the first out of the nest; the frame is warm. There are flowers open, despite the cold wind and sunless sky; and as these are fertilised by insects, it follows that there must be more winged creatures about than we are conscious of. How strange it seems, on a bleak spring day, to see the beautiful pink blossom of the apricot or peach ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... whose quick sound Makes softer the soft sunless patient air, And the wind's hand is laid on my thin hair Light as a lover's, and the grasses round Have odours in them of green bloom and rain Sweet as the kiss wherewith sleep ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to describe the boundless difference that we discovered between the manners and sentiments of these people and ourselves. Some of our sages endeavoured to account for it upon philosophical principles, and attributed much to the climate of those dark, watery, and sunless regions in which they were bred and born: 'for,'said they, 'how can men living surrounded by water, and who never feel the warmth of the sun, be like those who are never a day without enjoying the full effulgence of its rays, and do not even know what the sea means?' But the men of the law settled ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... pleased her to make the circling ripples, and watch them glitter like gems. She knelt down by the brink, and played there like a child, dabbling her long tresses in the water, and flinging them loose again to see the water drip from the ends, like a string of pearls in the sunless light. ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... and when he came forth into the air, its breath, which, though sunless, was hot and arid, smote witheringly upon him. His frame, not yet restored from the effects of the deadly draught, shrank and trembled. The officers ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... sunless cavern cold, Like one who flies a crime, Fearful, and old as God is old, The spirit shrank from time; For a stifled scream was the angry gold Of the weird sunset, and the noonday bold Was the stare on the face of ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... the mountains of old Joetunheim That girdle still the unmeasured seas of ice With horror and strange dread. Innumerable, In ever-winding labyrinths, glacier-thronged, Those mountains raise their heads among the stars, That palsied glimmer 'twixt their sunless bulks, O'er-shadowing seas and lands. O'er Joetunheim The glittering car of day hath never shone: There endless twilight broods. Beneath it sit The huge Frost-Giants, sons of Oergelmir, Themselves ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... all night about the fold Of the North-star, hath shrunk into his den. Scared by the blithesome footsteps of the Dawn, Whose blushing smile floods all the Orient; And now bright Lucifer grows less and less, Into the heaven's blue quiet deep-withdrawn. Sunless and starless all, the desert sky Arches above me, empty as this heart 10 For ages hath been empty of all joy, Except to brood upon its silent hope, As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now. All night have I heard voices: deeper yet The deep low ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits, was melancholy enough; but it ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the smoke curling up from his cigar, he slipped back into the world of his active being, and made no effort to obscure the faces that looked upon him. They were those of his mother and sisters, thought of whom carried him to the northern island, now grim, cold, and sunless beneath its lowering sky. These relatives still lived where his boyhood had been passed, a life strangely unlike his own, and even alien to his sympathies, but their house was still all that he could call home. Was it to be always ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... daughter, and have hoped to become the master at no great cost of the innocent work-woman, whose nimble and dimpled fingers, youthful figure, and white skin—a charm due, no doubt, to living in this sunless street—had excited his admiration. Perhaps, again, some honest clerk, with twelve hundred francs a year, seeing every day the diligence the girl gave to her needle, and appreciating the purity of her life, was ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac |
