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More "Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twenty feet above the floor, which serves as window, door, and chimney, and which is reached by a round log with holes in it, that stands perpendicularly in the centre. The beams, rafters, and logs which compose the yurt are all of a glossy blackness, from the smoke in which they are constantly enveloped. A wooden platform, raised about a foot from the earth, extends out from the walls on three sides to a width of six feet, leaving an open spot eight or ten feet ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the punishment of the Big Man on Twm Cwm, persons, because Twm speeched against the capel. Was he not put in the coffin in his farm trowsis and jacket? And do you know, the Big Man cast a brightness on his buttons for him to be known in the blackness of hell." ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great book, I say ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... profuse, His vineyard grows; part, wide extended, basks In the sun's beams; the arid level glows; In part they gather, and in part they tread The wine-press, while, before the eye, the grapes Here put their blossoms forth, there gather fast Their blackness. On the garden's verge extreme Flowers of all hues[040] smile all the year, arranged With neatest art judicious, and amid The lovely scene two fountains welling forth, One visits, into every part diffused, The garden-ground, the other soft beneath The threshold steals ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... building in which he was confined, lay a world that was not Earth, circling a sun that was not Sol, and that the ship had gone and would never come back. He was alone, abandoned. He thought of the ship, a silver streak now in the implacable blackness of space, threading its way homeward through the stars to Sol, to Earth. The utter desolation which swept over him at the impact of his aloneness was more than he could endure, and he forced himself to think of ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... over and bury fortress and valley, and one spear-like gleam of bleak sunshine lighting up a few of its windows and a few square yards of its western wall. Of course I had never been guilty of such a madness as to think of approaching the place by anything but wile and stratagem; and its bulk and blackness and the thickness of its walls had nothing in the world to do with the success or failure of my enterprise, and yet I could not resist a feeling of discouragement which almost amounted to a sense ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... I excuse it? There are things done which are holy as the heavens,—which are clear before God as the light of the sun, which leave no stain on the conscience, and which yet the malignity of man can invest with the very blackness of hell! I shall know why I pay this L500. Because she who of all the world is the nearest and the dearest to me,"—she looked up into his face with amazement, as he stood stretching out both his arms in his energy,—"has in her impetuous folly committed a grievous blunder, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... to Kate presently, as she ran, that the wind was a friend, trying to help her. The driving rain on her face cleared her brain. Even the lightning was a friend, for without it she could not have seen a foot of her way ahead in the blackness. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... cooking-fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day—in the mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you prepare for ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... dismal, protracted, nerve-racking. Nor was that all, for they could now discern the pat-pat, pat-pat of footsteps—long, soft, loping footsteps, as of huge furry paws or naked human feet. However, they could see nothing—nothing but blackness, intensified by the feeble flickering ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... washed and decked for our coming. Birds were singing, rainbows glancing, in quivering, water-laden trees; flowers were shimmering in the sunshine; the young growth was springing up glorious from the blackness of desolating winter fires. Such tender tones of pink and gray! such fiery-hearted reds and browns and olive-greens! such misty vagueness in the shadows! such brilliance in the sunlight that melted through the openings of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Fish in, is to take Butter and Salet Oyl, first well clarified together. This hath not the unsavoury taste of Oyl alone, nor the blackness of Butter alone. It fryeth Fish crisp, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... whether she was thinking of her apron of moss-rosebuds or of her opportunity for moral sublimity. Before reaching the door she turned away and stood gazing at an old picture, indistinguishable with blackness, over an altar. At last they passed out into the court. Glancing at her in the open air, Rowland was startled; he imagined he saw the traces of hastily suppressed tears. They had lost time, she said, and they must hurry; she sent Assunta to look for a fiacre. She ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... which they sat, was lost in the dusk, and a wind, heavy with damp, came moaning out of the vast wilderness. Thunder rumbled on the horizon, then cracked directly overhead, and flashes of lightning cut the blackness. ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by cords dropped a shadow like a huge spider on the pale patch of lighted ground below. The night was warm and rather dark; no one was about at that hour; the only sound was the gurgle of the fountain in the corner, where the water-jets gleamed out of the blackness like rods of twisted crystal. He entered the narrow street, or rather alley, leading to the bridge. In the state of blank misery he was in his eye seized upon the smallest objects as if to distract his mind, and he observed—as he might not have done had he been happy—that in ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... black with people all gesticulating and pointing excitedly out toward a great shape which, looming grayly against the lifting blackness of the sky, staggered and swayed like a drunken thing in the grip of the ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... spoke she looked into the water, and my father looked too; and they both trembled. Deep down in the blackness of the sea was it that they saw—yet it quickly came nearer and nearer, like unto a great flame of white fire. It was a tanlfa. Like flashes of lightning did my father dash his paddle into the water and urge the canoe to the land, for he ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... little English army, John of Hainault seized the bridle of King Philip's horse and led him away, led him away from the danger and tumult of the battle-field. Out into the quiet country they rode in silence, with five horsemen only following them. On they journeyed through the blackness of the night and on until they reached Amiens. But of their flight or journey or destination, not one of the victors thought or cared, for the battle-field had become the seat of ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... than I can that the considerable differences between female and male house-sparrow, or much greater brightness of male Parus caeruleus (both of which build under cover) than of female Parus, are related to protection. I even misdoubt much whether the less blackness of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... utterly alone and miserable. But in spite of his resolution his eyes soon closed again. He was awakened, this time by his horse stumbling over some unseen obstacle. He could see nothing in any direction. The blackness and rain shut him in like a fog. He turned at right angles to find the trees which lined the road, but there were no trees. He swung his horse around and went in the other direction, but he found no trees—only an impenetrable darkness which pressed in upon him with a heaviness ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... injustice of their treatment that weighed upon them like a burden that human nature could not bear. They had come to lift such a burden from the backs of another nation, and they had been treated like dogs all the way over! Like the low rumbling of oncoming thunder was the blackness of their countenances as they marched up, up, and up into Brest. The sun grew hot, and their knees wobbled under them from sheer weakness; strong men when they started, who were fine and fit, now faint like babies, yet with spirits unbroken, and great vengeance in their hearts. They would ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... reached the canyon gates. In the blackness of the gorge, with only the light of a narrow strip of stars overhead, he was forced to ride more slowly. But his confidence that he would find her at the Ranger Station had increased as he approached the scenes of her girlhood home. To ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... fancied the others were gazing expectantly towards the shadowy blurr of the bluff, which rose a trifle clearer now against the skyline. He felt, with instinctive shrinking, that their search would be rewarded there in the blackness beneath the trees. The pace grew faster. Men glanced at their neighbours now and then as well as ahead, and Breckenridge felt the silence grow oppressive as the bluff rose higher. The snow dulled the beat of hoofs, and the flitting figures that rode with him passed on almost as noiselessly as the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... the wide window near my bed and gazed out upon the yet luminous City of Occupation. The picture was of surprising strangeness and beauty. Far off, until melting into the encroaching edges of an outer blackness, the City extended its folds and surfaces of light. The streets were empty, the music of the Chorus Halls stilled. Here and there, a spirit was moving slowly through the streets, a half-made Martian; a breeze soft and salubrious stirred the thickly leaved ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... disposition of its members and in such things as are necessary for an animal's life. Secondly, a thing is said to be perfect relatively: and this perfection regards something connected with the thing externally, such as whiteness or blackness or something of the kind. Now the Christian life consists chiefly in charity whereby the soul is united to God; wherefore it is written (1 John 3:14): "He that loveth not abideth in death." Hence the perfection of the Christian life consists simply in charity, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... her range of vision was much circumscribed. The sea was covered with light waves, which, as they rose and fell, scarcely had any effect in giving motion to the vessel. The hue of the ocean was, in some places, almost of an inky blackness; in others it was lighted up with phosphorescent flashes, which, seen amid the surrounding darkness, seemed as brilliant as if composed of real fire—their reflection being caught by the light foam which ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... early, tramping back over the dusty road, convinced that the downpour for which they all yearned was at hand. There was no moonlight that night, only a hot blackness, illumined now and then by a brilliant dart of lightning that shocked the senses and left behind a void indescribable, a darkness that could be felt. There was something savage in the atmosphere, something primitive and passionate that ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... I ain't." Mr. Beale was confused by the two desires which make it difficult to confess anything truthfully—the desire to tell the worst of oneself and the desire to do full justice to oneself at the same time. It is so very hard not to blacken the blackness, or whiten the whiteness, when one comes to trying to tell the truth about oneself. "But I been a beast all the same," said ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... down again: down into a dim deep pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. But his body had never been more alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... not answer him, for I was at the moment straining my eyes into the blackness on the weather-bow, where I fancied I had caught, a second or two before, a deeper shadow. There were moments when I thought I saw it again, but so profound was the darkness that it really seemed absurd ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... but the sitting-room in the Albany looked quite different to Bertie as he entered it. Was it only a few hours before, he wondered, that he had stood there by the window in the act of taking that life which had become too great a burden to bear? And in the blackness of his despair, when he saw no glimmer of hope, the clouds had rolled away. He glanced at the pistol, harmlessly resting on a shelf, and a rush of gratitude filled his heart and brought tears to his eyes. He clasped his friend's hand and tried ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the sea over the face of a dizzy cliff. A falcon, on their approach, started with rustle of wings from its ledge and then swayed crazily over the abyss. Watching this bird, the bishop felt a sudden voice in his stomach. A sensation of blackness came before his eyes—sky and sea were merged together—his feet were treading on air. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... scarlet and green drawing-room, whose apparel made so vivid a setting for their unaccustomed costumes, each tried nervously to find a seat, desirous of hiding the emphatic blackness of his trousers. There seemed a sort of indecency in that blackness and in the colour of their gloves—a sort of exaggeration of the feelings; and many cast shocked looks of secret envy at 'the Buccaneer,' who had no gloves, and was wearing grey trousers. A subdued hum of conversation ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray; three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the rays of the sun like a holy picture, rested our Stephen, sleeping. Mother sat beside the bed. There was a humming in my ears and blackness before my eyes, and if father had not jumped and caught me I would have fallen over. It was long before they brought ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... awake a full three hours after the dark had come, and he rose only twice from his reclining position, each time merely to replenish the fire which remained a red core in the circling blackness. Always he was listening and always he heard nothing but the usual sounds of the forest and the night. The darkness grew denser and heavier, but after a while it began to thin and lighten. The sky became clear, and the great stars swam in the dusky blue. Then ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the heavens of late a new star, that burst upon astonished astronomers in a void spot; but its brilliancy, though far transcending that of our sun, soon began to wane, and before long, apparently, there will be blackness again where there was blackness before. So all lights but His are temporary as well as derived, and men 'willing for a season to rejoice' in the fleeting splendours, and to listen to the teacher of a day, lose the illumination ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... otherwise than shameful. Adopt it, and you will cover the country with dishonor. Adopt it, and you will fix a stigma upon the very name of republic. As to the imagination, there are mountains of light, so are there mountains of darkness; and this is one of them. It is the very Koh-i-noor of blackness. Adopt this proposition, and you will be little better than the foul Harpies who defiled the feast that was spread. The Constitution is the feast spread for our country, and you are now hurrying to drop ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... often been abroad alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be her foes also. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness,—then suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... In the blackness of the November night, the chauffeur, mistaking the entrance to a house, had run up a back lane and ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... idea. Persuasion would have been as effectual in moving yonder blackened corpse into healthy life, as in moving to a sense of duty to themselves, men who could see nothing but the deadness around them, and whose minds saw only, under all, the blackness of immediate destruction. Those who were victors, until now, literally rushed from the fort. The reinforcements of the British soon arrived, but the explosion had again given the defenders heart, and they too, having received reinforcements, after some ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... (the blackness of this man's heart revolted me). "There is no seductive shape that the tempter does not assume, my child. Wit in itself is not to be condemned, although the Church shuns it as far as she is concerned, looking upon ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... European waiters. The maids, under Mrs. Jordan, were also East Indian women, and they were very picturesque in their saris, or head coverings, of gay colors, with brilliant teeth gleaming out of their swarthy faces, and eyes like beads for blackness. Even the boys who answered bell-calls and polished the brasses and the shoes, were from Soudan or Bombay, and the stokers down in the engine-room were Seedees, black as the coals they kept flinging into those yawning red mouths, which made one ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... swiftly across the heavens now and again eclipsed the bright face of Goro, the moon, and forewarned the ape-man of impending storm. In the depth of the jungle the cloud shadows produced a thick blackness that might almost be felt—a blackness that to you and me might have proven terrifying with its accompaniment of rustling leaves and cracking twigs, and its even more suggestive intervals of utter silence in which the crudest of imaginations might have conjured crouching beasts ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fell during the hours of darkness. Only the lightning came, as soon as the sun was down, blazing, flaring, and flashing round the horizon and high overhead; disturbing the darkness as the patter of a tattoo disturbs silence; punctuating the night into periods of sombre, awful blackness by moments of dazzling, blinding white fury, that made the eyes tingle through the succeeding moments of dark, and the ears shrink and tremble, anticipating the rending thunder-crash which never came. And always was the air hot and dry, and the wind, when it blew, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... respiration of the ardent Mr. Stobell, coupled with a word or two which had filtered through the window, that the ingenious Mr. Chalk was using him as a stalking-horse. From the fact that Mr. Stobell made no denial it was none the less evident, despite the growing blackness of his appearance, that he was a party to the arrangement. The captain ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... beyond all things that men know. And he came to the dark country where there was no sunshine nor spring, but it was always dreary winter; where mountains were piled up like blocks of ice, and where great caverns yawned hungrily in blackness. And this was Jotunheim, the land ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... reflecting the light so that the block-house and the encumbered enclosure, with its piles of boxes and rough furniture, with here and there a tent, rapidly grew lighter and lighter, but with shadows of intense blackness marked out where the light ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... flooded the country with its glare, and after sailing nearly in front of the house it shrank into a scarlet cross not larger than a man's hand. Then in a shower of sparks it ceased, its absence making the blackness almost corporeal. Instinctively the hands of the two indulged in a long pressure, and Mila quickly adjusted the lamp. But Gerald still stood at the window a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... conscious that he had given his last aid and must stand aside. Gladys knelt by the bed with folded hands, her golden head bowed in deep and bitter silence. She saw her last friend drifting towards the mystic sea, and felt as if the blackness of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted. And immediately from a dismantled stall in the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... he, since now no flight availed to 'scape that peril's hold, Pours from his mouth a mighty smoke, O wondrous to be told! Enwrapping all the house about with blinding misty shroud, Snatching the sight from eyes of men, and rolling on the cloud, A reeking night with heart of fire and utter blackness blent. Alcides' spirit bore it nought; his body swift he sent With headlong leap amid the fire where thickest rolled the wave Of smoke, and with its pitchy mist was flooding all the cave; Cacus he catcheth ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... like the day of Judgment shinin' through the darkness of men's lives and bringin' out the hidden things. Way out in the distance where nothin' could be seen but blackness and shadows, the beam would fall and a island would stand out plain before us, houses with men and wimmen on the piazzas, a boat house, a boat with men and wimmen and children in it. You could see for one dazzlin' ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... was that there, on the Clyde, John's mother and I came out of the blackness of our first grief. We began to be able to talk to one another. And every day we talked of John. We have never ceased to do that, his mother and I. We never shall. We may not have him with us bodily, but ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... you can say such a thing, Scribe, still I ask you to say it if you can. As to why I fear, it is because I seem to feel the near shadow of some woman lying cold upon me and building a wall of blackness ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... hand, gave him my parting message home, and then crouched and pushed the boat into and down the stream. As I lifted my hand from her and she glided into the blackness, I felt in my heart that the last link with the old life was broken. Then, as I rose to my feet, a hand was placed on my arm, and I tingled in every fibre at this sweet ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the dash and desperation of a steeple-chase. The skipper of each craft is at his own helm, roaring out orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors. With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck. One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Oh, it drives one back to God in an agony of mingled longing and despair to see this mighty multitude that will not come and be saved, drifting along in darkness and wretchedness through this life to the blackness of darkness beyond! And this is intensified by the thought of the children now quite numerous in our Chinese communities. We know to what the daughters are destined. We know what it is that gives them, in this country, a special money value; and as to the sons, one can scarcely conceive circumstances ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and fell upon our ears through the wild yelling of the hurricane as if it had been but a gentle summer breeze; while the billows burst upon the weather side of the island until we ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... annual interest is the dark. Having fallen asleep all the summer by daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulus of fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows. There is a frolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with the ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... sitting before the campfire, in the chill blackness just beginning to turn gray. Then swift hands and lean strong arms went at beds and packs, horses and saddles. When dawn broke the hunters were on their way, far up ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... his in a way which at dawn my eyes have gazed into the morning star rising near to me over the little wood at the Chateau de Grez. I did not for many days know whether those eyes were gray or blue or purple, for when I regarded them I forgot to decide, and also they were so deep and shadowed by the blackness of their lashes and brows that such a decision was difficult. At this time I only knew that in them lay the fire of the lightning over Old Harpeth when the storm breaks, the laugh of the very small boy who splashes bare feet in the water with glee, and also a coldness ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... fourth, while in the intervals Fairchild's eyes sought out the sulky, sullen form of Maurice Rodaine, flattened against the wall, eyes evil, mouth a straight line, and the blackness of hate discoloring his face. It was as so much wine to Fairchild; he felt himself really young for the first time in his life. And as the music started again, he once more ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... century before. At the farther end was a tower with an open belfry, choked in a tangle of vines and bushes, within which the bell was dimly visible through a crust of spiders' webs and birds' nests. Patches of moss and vegetable mold relieved the blackness of the stones, and a venerable ivy plant clung like a rotten fish-net to the wall. It was a weird, yet fascinating picture; for the house, like a rocky cliff, looked as if it had grown where it stood. Parts of the building were crumbling, and decay had laid its hand more ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... the dry leaves from the trees. Kemp, exiled, as it were, from the Pavilion, sat in the big car and watched the gathering blackness. Finally he got out and put up the curtains. Everything would be ready when Dalton came. He knew better, however, than to warn his master. George was apt to be sharp when his ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... all through his watch of four hours. Their next watch began in the middle of the night, and Mark Twain tells how surprised and disgusted he was to learn that pilots must get up in the night to run their boats, and his amazement to find Mr. Bixby plunging into the blackness ahead as if it had been daylight. Very likely this is mainly fiction, but hardly ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... away and walked with exaggerated carelessness in the direction of the door. He even went outside and peeped through the crack, but the sleepers did not stir. He glanced into the blackness behind, and then came ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... a further example: confirmation that the crow is white. May its blackness not be said to be only a shading which is not the real fact? Its feathers are white inside, its body, too; and these are the stuff of which the bird is made. As its blackness is a shading, the crow turns white as it grows old—some such have been seen. What is black ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... not always to be had pure, even in the neighbourhood of Blenheim. This spaniel may he distinguished by the length and silkiness of the coat, the deep fringe about the ear, the arch and deep-feathering of the tail, the full and moist eye, and the blackness ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State. Mr. Underwood, of Virginia, dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... was superbly dressed. A rich robe of velvet, embroidered with gold, fell in heavy, glistening folds around her graceful figure; a diadem of brilliants sparkled like a constellation upon the blackness of her luxuriant hair, and her exquisite neck and arms were covered with costly gems. She had just completed her toilet for a dinner given by the Princess Karl Liechtenstein, when Podstadsky had met her with the alarming intelligence ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... window of the orchard room, but saw only the reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes. ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... terminating in a large Tudor oriel or flat bay window looking east. In this oriel they had sat for some time watching the flashes, and the wintry landscape revealed for an instant and then plunged into outer blackness. The gallery itself was not illuminated, and the effect of the lightning was ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... rattled overhead; and the wind swept down so that the whole earth trembled. A horror of wrath and darkness has overwhelmed the world; and what of the patient choristers now? No longer are their voices heard amid the appalling fury of the hurricane; the sudden lightning-flash reveals nothing in the blackness; the powers of evil have overcome; and the universe has lost its hope. But now there comes a lull; and suddenly—far away, and faint, and triumphant—rises the song of reliance and joy. The demons of the night mutter and moan; ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... will yer?" said the master to his guest. H'yer, you Axylone," he continued to his eldest born, " fo'd up yer han's while Bre'er 'Liab ax de blessin'. You, too, Capting," shaking his finger at a roll of animated blackness on the end of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a genuine native African, and a most original and interesting specimen of his race. His thin, close-cut lips, straight nose and European features contrasted strangely with a skin of ebon blackness, and the quiet, simple dignity of his manner betokened superior intelligence. His story was a strange one. When a boy, he was with his mother, kidnapped by a hostile tribe, and sold to the traders at Cape Lopez, on the western coast of Africa. There, in the slave-pen, the mother ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... strange story," said Chobei who had listened with indignation. "This Banzayemon, before I knew the blackness of his heart, was once under my protection. But after he murdered Sanza, hard by here, he was pursued by these two apprentices of mine, and since that day he has been ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... gusts or violent storms of wind and rain, which are more or less feared, but which may always be known from other storms on their approach, by the blackness of the clouds above, with the segment of a circle of lighter cloud just beneath the ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... the pause to interrupt him somewhat petulantly. "And if we succeed?" I said, in a questioning voice, for I was in that happy age of youth and that sanguinity of temperament which makes it hard to realize that failure can associate its grayness or its blackness with one's own bright colors ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... come, Felix trembled." To him the prisoner of that memorable day spoke as the representative of outraged deity. In his voice the hardened Consul heard the echo of his own disregarded conscience, and was reminded of his "more perfect knowledge of that way" which would one day make all the deeper the blackness of his condemnation. The joints of ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... Jones, the greatest architect in the land, joined Ben Jonson in making his plays splendid by inventing scenery for them. This scenery was beautiful and elaborate, and was sometimes changed two or three times during the play. One of these plays called The Masque of Blackness was acted by the Queen and her ladies in 1605, and when we read the description of the scenery it makes us wonder and smile too at the remembrance of Wall and the Man in the Moon of which Shakespeare made such ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... The darkness and blackness of the place were uncanny. We all sat looking into the fire. Somebody said, "Injuns would not have such ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... table adjoining. However, the brave advance of the lobster, the porterhouse, and the champagne bucket diverted him, and he tucked a napkin under his flabby chin with a genial smile. Then the smile shrivelled; waiters, porterhouse, lobster, champagne, winked out in utter blackness, and Chuck O'Rourke ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... chief carries an old head on young shoulders," at last he said approvingly. "He speaks truly when he says that the air is thick with danger. When the blackness of night comes, then will come, also, those who make war from behind the trees of the forest. In the darkness, how is the young white and his friends to tell enemies from friends? The jackals will wriggle through and over the wall of trees ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... touched his arm, they saw an arch of blackness before them. They had walked straight to a door—not a very inviting one, for it opened upon an utterly dark passage. Where there was only one door, however, there was no difficulty about choosing. Richard walked straight through it; and ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... a half-length figure appearing at a window,—the blackness of the background, and the light upon the face, cause it to appear like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the flame of an ordinary spirit-lamp coloured by common salt be held in front of the instrument, so that the ray of direct solar light passes through the flame before entering the spectroscope. The observer sees at once the two lines known as D flash out with a greatly increased blackness and vividness, while there is no other perceptible effect on the spectrum. A few trials show that this intensification of the D lines is due to the vapour of sodium arising from the salt burning in the lamp through which ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall, a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture, framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to him. (Nevertheless, for a moment he thought of her as the daughter of Sir Thomas More.) She was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... while the lime contained in cups absorbed the carbon dioxide as fast as they exhaled it. They had darkened those windows through which the sun was actually pouring, for, on account of the emptiness of the surrounding ether and consequent absence of diffusion of light, nothing but the inky blackness of space and the bright stars looked in at the rest. On raising the shades they got an idea of their speed. A small crescent, smaller than the familiar moon, accompanied by one still tinier, was all that could be seen of the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and then, so far as with his poor human lips he may declare it, far beyond all these, he proclaims that "heaven is bright." But Gaspar, and such other landscapists, painting all Nature's flowery ground as one barrenness, and all her fair foliage as one blackness, and all her exquisite forms as one bluntness; when, in this sluggard gloom and sullen treachery of heart, they mutter their miserable attestation to what others had long ago discerned for them,—the sky's brightness,—we ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... so, not so, unless we weep for joy. The cloud that has so long hung over us in blackness is beginning to break. We have experienced more of gladness this day than has been ours since the last report that the Messiah ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... I could find to say. His long steps rapidly carried him away and he disappeared in the misty blackness. ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this there is nothing wonderful, nothing ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... so dense that I could not see the sparse houses I chanced to pass, nor did I know where I was any more. I urged forward blindly, walking towards the light, which was all that broke the blackness before me; its faint illumination seemed to me somehow to be kindly, inviting, irresistible. At last I came to a halt in front of a building I had never before seen, although I thought myself well acquainted with that part of the city. It ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the more difficult. There is no difficulty, however, in the first comparison, "I am black as the tents of Kedar," but only in the last. For Kedar, which is interpreted to mean "darkness" or "gloom," may be compared with blackness justly enough; but the curtains of Solomon are not so easily likened to beauty. Moreover, who does not see that "tents" fit harmoniously with the comparison? For what is the meaning of "tents" except our bodies, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... boiling. He sat down on the parapet, thick blackness all about him. Whatever had been his father's shortcomings, they had always clung together—and now they were separated by words which had cut like a knife. It was useless to tell himself that his father was not responsible. Out of the heart ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... had taken life in her; and, as if this were not enough, the scarlet letter, at a climax of the dark story, lightens forth over the whole heavens as a symbol of what cannot be hid even in the intensest blackness of night. The continual presence of the letter seems to have burnt into Hawthorne's own mind, till at the end of the narrative he says he would gladly erase its deep print from the brain where long meditation ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... through the utter blackness of the brackish water until his head broke surface again. Then he went on along the great conduits that were above the level of ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... speaking to absolute blackness now, for it was darker immediately following the revolver flash than before. But he felt a man's hand thrust about his arm, and he knew ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... through this weird region most fascinating and mysterious. At night it appears as a vast plain gleaming with lights and studded with dark objects, half seen and suggesting primitive machinery of uncouth proportions. Huge lengths of pipes creep from the shadows on one hand into the far-off regions of blackness ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... flashlight. Suddenly, he stumbled; was falling over something soft, like an animal or a man. Cursing low and involuntarily, he managed to roll over so that he fell on his back. He saw the form, a patch of irregular blackness in the darkness around him and knew it for a body. He got to his feet glancing around, not knowing what this meant. He bent over the form, keeping the furnace beam's muzzle only a few inches from it, but too far back to be grabbed suddenly. He couldn't see the man's clothing very ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying to outplay ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was That one should think of disobedience, Poor OLIVE heard, with looks of agony Fixed on the speaker's face—that Northern face, Wild in its power and in its beauty weird. The starry halo of that tintless crown, The midnight blackness of her plentiful hair, Set off the splendor of the countenance On which the maiden bent her pale regard. A jealous terror urged ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... straight to the ruins of the old trading-post. The spot looked more forlorn than ever, for the storms of the summer had washed some mud over part of the ground, and grass and weeds flourished amid the blackness. ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... opened noiselessly, sending a broad beam of gray, full of shadows and misty lights, through the even blackness of the night, the deer stood revealed—a beautiful creature, shrinking back into the forest's shadow, yet ever drawn forward by the sudden ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... garden behind: both ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that little was half-swallowed by the general brownness. A tall eight-day clock stood in one corner, up to which, whoever would learn from it the time, had to advance confidentially, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... in the least. I don't even care who she was. Permit me to wish you much joy with her. Why don't you go on?" irritably, forgetting that it was she who delayed progress. His smile was invisible in the blackness above the lantern. There were no words spoken until after they had reached the little door in ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... out her hands and Shann saw now, lying on a slowly closing palm, a disk such as the one Thorvald had shown him. The Terran had only one moment of fear and then came blackness, more absolute than the dark of any night ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... upon his exertions, until Sampson clasps him in his arms, and a "God bless you!" is upon the lips of every man, save the captain, who, having received a slight wound from a harpoon, and irritated by their bad luck, utters a curse which vies in blackness with ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... out with the crowd, swept through the chute to the ferryboat, swept aboard. He followed the crowd forward and stood in the bow. Black as ink the Bay of San Francisco stretched before him. Like fireflies the lights of vessels scurried through the blackness. Beyond the black water blinked the countless eyes of San Francisco, above these the rosy glow which had beckoned ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... of the blackness of many burnt bodies, which we may find to be nothing else but this; that the heat of the fire agitating and rarifying the waterish, transparent, and volatile water that is contain'd in them, by the continuation of that action, does ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... darker, with a strange white smother, instead of the natural blackness of night. It was a night of storm and death superadded to the night of nature. The mountains were all hidden, wrapped about, overawed, and tumultuously overborne by it, but in the midst of it waited, quite unconquered, this little, unswerving, living ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... came back thickly across the roaring torrent. The circles grew smaller. Tommy knew that he was being sucked nearer and nearer to the edge of some terrific whirlpool in that inky blackness. Now he could no longer hear Dodd's shouts, and the shell was tipping so that he could feel the water rushing along the edge of it. But for the exercise of centrifugal force he would have been flung from his perilous ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... at the mouth, and finally tore up the benches in order to attack the judges with the fragments. He was sent first to the castle of Edinburgh and afterwards to the Bass, 'for a change of air' as the record quaintly says. Finally, he was despatched to Blackness Castle, where he remained close in hold till the revolution. Not till June 5, 1689, were his prison doors thrown open, but even then Alexander Gordon would not go till he had obtained signed documents from the governor and officials of the prison to the effect that he had never altered ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... said. "I haven't seen one for a week. Coming out of the blackness it gives a man ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was riding hard and fast on his gloomy errand. Nine days and nights he rode through valleys so deep and dark that he could not see his horse. Stillness and blackness and solitude were his only companions until he came to the golden bridge which crosses the river Gjol. The good horse Sleipner, who had carried Odin on so many strange journeys, had never traveled such a road before, and his hoofs ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of mist; gauzy below, fringed with white tufts and streamers, deepening above into the blackness of utter night. Below it a long gulf of soft yellow haze in which, as in a bath of gold, lie delicate bars of far-off western cloud; and the faint glimmer of the western sea, above long knotted spurs of hill, in deepest shades, like a bunch of purple ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Island, one great branch stretching upward, bare and moveless, from the side, like an arm raised to heaven in wonder or in menace towards the house; the lake, in part swept by the icy splendour of the moon, trembling with a dazzling glimmer, and farther off lost in blackness; the Fells rising from a base of gloom, into ribs and peaks white with snow, and looking against the pale sky, thin and transparent as a haze. Right across to the storied woods of Cloostedd, and the old domains of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heat-lightning; over our heads in the light-blue frosty sky twinkled the little stars; on all sides gleamed the ruddy flames of the smoking watch-fires; near us, the white tents stood out in contrast to the frowning blackness of our earth-works. The light from the nearest watch-fire, around which our servants, engaged in quiet conversation, were warming themselves, occasionally flashed on the brass of our heavy guns, and fell on the form of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the old volcano was a pit of blackness in the midst of gray ash and the red-yellow of cinders. Beside it were other flecks of color: red, moving bodies; metal, that twinkled brightly under the desert sun—and in an instant they were gone. Nor did Smithy, throwing the thundering plane close over ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... an interminable ride even at the speed which we were making. Twelve miles in the blackness of a country night can seem ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls; it was you put ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... a flower-pot!" cried Meg, as a brilliant shower of red and yellow sparks bloomed out against the velvet blackness ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... the presence of that pure eye, and he also felt, and was mistaken in feeling, that somehow or other he would be safer if he was not so near the Master. Well, if it were true that Jesus Christ brought God near to him, and if it were true that the proximity of God was the revelation of his blackness and the premonition and prophecy of evil to himself, would getting Christ out of the boat help him much? The facts would remain the same. The departure of the physician does not tend to cure the disease; and thus the cry,' Go away from me because I am sinful,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... oak after long burying and soaking in water, (which gives it a wonderful politure) as that it has frequently been taken for a course ebony: Hence even by floating, comes the Bohemian oak, Polish, and other northern timber, to be of such excellent use for some parts of shipping: But the blackness which we find in oaks, that have long lain under ground, (and may be call'd subterranean timber) proceeds from some vitriolic juice of the bed in which they lie, which makes it very weighty; but (as the excellent naturalist and learned physician Dr. Sloane observes) it dries, splits, and becomes ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the land, since the Christians destroyed them utterly. Octa and Ossa, the lords of their host—these troublers of Britain—were taken alive. They were led to London, and set fast in a strong prison, bound in iron. If any of their fellows escaped from the battle, it was only by reason of the blackness of the night. He who was able to flee, ran from the field. He tarried not to succour his own familiar friend. But many more were slam in that surprise than ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... from basement to roof. You could never have guessed that within a stone's throw there was an open sheet of water and big ships lying afloat. The few gas lamps showing up a bit of brick work here and there, appeared in the blackness like penny dips in a range of cellars—and the solitary footsteps came on, tramp, tramp. A dock policeman strode into the light on the other side of the gate, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... square hole to the well-shaft above. Like the stones in the outer chamber, the cement was coated with scales of dried mud. The shaft was now certainly closed at the top, for in the daytime not a ray of light penetrated into its blackness. ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the train specified at Twenty-Second Street. The doctor was looking for me from the rear platform of a car. It was a local train, and crept slowly out through the smoky blackness of South Chicago, illuminated here and there by the flaming chimneys of her great iron furnaces, to the little city of pungent smells, of petroleum tanks and oil refineries, in Northern Indiana. The doctor was ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the sable covering. On either hand of Mr. B. we sit, occupying the posts of honor. On the right and left of Mrs. B., and at the opposite corners from us, sit two other guests, one a colored merchant, and the other a young son-in-law of Mr. B., whose face is the very double extract of blackness; for which his intelligence, the splendor of his dress, and the elegance of his manners, can make to be sure but slight atonement! The middle seats are filled on the one side by an unmarried daughter of Mr. B., and on the other side by a promising son of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... yer done git fer being so contrary-like, will yer?" said the master to his guest. H'yer, you Axylone," he continued to his eldest born, " fo'd up yer han's while Bre'er 'Liab ax de blessin'. You, too, Capting," shaking his finger at a roll of animated blackness on the end of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... distance of about a couple of hundred yards; but inshore of us the shadow of the island lay jet-black upon the surface of the water, completely hiding all evidence of movement in that direction, even when I attempted to probe the blackness with the night glass. Therefore we were obliged to trust quite as much to our ears as to our eyes for warning of the approach of an enemy; but even they did not help us much, for the island was but a small one, and the thunder of the surf upon its weather shore, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... an old head on young shoulders," at last he said approvingly. "He speaks truly when he says that the air is thick with danger. When the blackness of night comes, then will come, also, those who make war from behind the trees of the forest. In the darkness, how is the young white and his friends to tell enemies from friends? The jackals will wriggle ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... from the crests had been sprinkled over them. On their left, the craggy wall sloped almost vertically downward, the projecting masses of rock displaying the same, fairy-like covering, ending in a vast, yawning pit of night and blackness, into whose awful depth the ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... the lights and sat out on the little balcony. The moonshine was glorious. So dense was the earth-blackness that the few lights twinkling here and there were more like fallen stars. Presently she heard a sound. It was her father, returning as silently as he could. She heard him fumble among the knickknacks on the mantel, and then ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... to itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, and honoring him because he could have read those words with the eyes that were so blue amid the general Spanish blackness of eyes. He imparted a quiet from his own calm to our nervousness, and if we had appealed to him on the point I am sure he would have saved us from the error of breakfasting in the station restaurant at the deceitful table d'hote, though where else we should have ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... in a cold, dark room, and he saw gleaming through the blackness a tearful, wistful face which he knew was Nannie's. She was in trouble—she wanted something, she was calling him in weird, spirit fashion, ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... to scream out wildly in unreasoning, suffocating fear. He fought it down, struggling to sit up in the blackness, his whole mind turned in bitter, hopeless hatred at the ones who had hunted him for so long, and ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... in regard to the other sin is venial blackness. Whether the teller of such a tale as this should say so outright, may be matter of dispute; but, unless he say so, the teller of this tale does not know how to tell his tale truly. Blackness such as that will be all condoned, ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... blackness of the woods was illuminated by the fitful gleam of a distant fire. Tom could see more plainly now, and he managed to count about ten dusky figures hurrying along, four being close to him, to prevent his ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... should have been a moon three-quarters full, but, in the evening, clouds had drifted across the sky and closed over all heavily, so that no moonlight was to be seen, save when a rare sudden gust made a ragged rent, for a moment, in the blackness. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Albany looked quite different to Bertie as he entered it. Was it only a few hours before, he wondered, that he had stood there by the window in the act of taking that life which had become too great a burden to bear? And in the blackness of his despair, when he saw no glimmer of hope, the clouds had rolled away. He glanced at the pistol, harmlessly resting on a shelf, and a rush of gratitude filled his heart and brought tears to his eyes. He clasped his friend's hand and ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... penetrated into the closed chambers. Uncle Percival was at his flute again; he had arisen in the night to resume his impassioned piping; and, rising hurriedly, Laura lit her candle and went out into the hall, where a streak of light beneath Angela's door ran like a white thread across the blackness. Listening a moment, she heard inside the nervous pacing to and fro of tired yet restless feet, and after a short hesitation she turned the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... I'm black in the face!" And then while he glowed at her and she wondered if he would pointedly look his lies that way, and if, in fine, his florid, gallant, knowing, almost winking intelligence, common as she had never seen the common vivified, would represent his notion of "blackness": "See here, Julia; I'll ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... lights that showed Berthwer town beyond. A single red lamp glowed dully far to the west; it belonged to a steamer that they had seen come to her moorings in the afternoon. There were no other vessels showing lights. The rest was black with a blackness sentient of vague forms—an impenetrable wall of darkness that seemed to stand between them and ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... Hampden and St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his father's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have seen his mood during the years of personal rule, as he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness" amidst fancies of coming death, the melancholy which formed the ground of his nature feeding itself on the inaction of the time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the tyranny was over. His father had sat, with three ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... takes her place by the stricken man's bedside, a great sadness and pity for the first time on her face. The White Room is locked—Lady Helena keeps the key—one pale light burns dimly in its glittering vastness. And as the night closes in blackness over the doomed house, one of the policemen comes in haste to Superintendent Ferrick, triumph in his face. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... time might pass it. Leading the way into the passage, that extended underground directly back from the river, he was closely followed by Rene, and the two groped their way slowly through the intense blackness. It seemed to the white lad that they must have gone a mile before they came to the end, though in reality it was but about ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... a bit better. I must say they do understand making coffee." Without more ado he ate his bread ravenously, and, in spite of its blackness and heaviness, felt very much refreshed when he had finished. The coffee was certainly good, and George drank it sparingly, lest it should be long ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... running the whole length of the south wing, and terminating in a large Tudor oriel or flat bay window looking east. In this oriel they had sat for some time watching the flashes, and the wintry landscape revealed for an instant and then plunged into outer blackness. The gallery itself was not illuminated, and the effect of the ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... covered,—these advantages can make us forgive the odious sable broadcloth suit, which appears to have been adopted by society on the same principle that condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual and uniform blackness. Mr. Bernard, introduced by Mr. Geordie, made his bow to the Colonel and his lady and to Miss Matilda, from whom he got a particularly gracious curtsy, and then began looking about him for acquaintances. He found two or three faces he knew,—many more strangers. There ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... which to place his fingers. The cold waters closed around him. He tried to swim, to keep afloat, but the oil-skin suit hindered him. He battled with the desperation of despair. It was a terrible fight he made for life there in that inky blackness, with the water surging about him, and trying to win him for its victim. It seemed that he had been struggling for a long time, and could resist no longer. His strength was going, and he had little power for any ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... the wall of a roomy stope beyond the door did not in the least surprise him. He had expected something of this sort. When he had topped the ladder and found himself in a chamber that stretched away into blackness, he grunted again his mental confirmation of a theory working out beautifully in fact. His candle held close to the wall, he moved forward along the well-trodden path, looking for a door. Mechanically he noticed also the formation of the wall and the ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... pictured Jesus, lying in a blue shirt prostrate beneath the cross, the blackness of which bedimmed the gold of His aureole. Then, with her glance wandering ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss. The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan, So, (But would I could know, but would I could know,) With your question embroid'ring the dark of the question of man,— So, with your silences purfling this silence of man While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... make the forest jar at every scream, until he was far away on the lake shore. The clap of thunder awoke my father and mother. The chief, hearing the screams of the panther, seized his weapons of war and tried in vain to penetrate the surrounding gloom, for the blackness of the storm-cloud made the forest a dungeon, occasionally illuminated by flashes of electric fire from the arching clouds over our heads, which could not be penetrated by mortal eye. The chief again gathered up the few burning brands that remained, and piled high his fuel. This ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... when it lacks nothing in the disposition of its members and in such things as are necessary for an animal's life. Secondly, a thing is said to be perfect relatively: and this perfection regards something connected with the thing externally, such as whiteness or blackness or something of the kind. Now the Christian life consists chiefly in charity whereby the soul is united to God; wherefore it is written (1 John 3:14): "He that loveth not abideth in death." Hence the perfection ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... by the blackness of tree-covered ground in starlight, there was an irregular shape of brightness. It was miles long. It reflected the stars. It was the flood-control reservoir behind the Polder Dam. There was no power-plant here. This reservoir merely took the place of some hundreds of ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... the face of a dizzy cliff. A falcon, on their approach, started with rustle of wings from its ledge and then swayed crazily over the abyss. Watching this bird, the bishop felt a sudden voice in his stomach. A sensation of blackness came before his eyes—sky and sea were merged together—his feet were treading on air. He promptly ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... stand white and gleaming, like the out-door palace of a Russian queen. How softly and eagerly this coming tide swirls round them! All day the fishes haunt their shadows; all night the phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and washes with long, refluent waves along their sides, decking their blackness with a spray ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... lock which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when it snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut out the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom. Then, it was, came the opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... day was exceedingly warm while, though clouds of fantastic shape had been gathering on the horizon since morning and driving before a light breeze across the sun, it was clear that, for all their menacing blackness, they did not really intend to form a thunderstorm and spoil our last day's pleasure. Moreover, towards afternoon some of them broke, grew pale and elongated, and sank to the horizon again, while others of them changed to the likeness of white transparent ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... fire-color. I was long puzzled by Homer's calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the color of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle's idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness, heated or lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a color may be called purple because it is light subdued (and so death is called "purple" or "shadowy" death); or else it may be called ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... coaches had their curtains drawn. At the station at Esbly the same situation—a few lights, very low, on the main platform, and absolutely none on the platform where I took the narrow-gauge for Couilly. I went stumbling, in absolute blackness, across the main track, and literally felt my way along the little train to find a door to my coach. If it had not been for the one lamp on my little cart waiting in the road, I could not have seen where the exit at Couilly was. It ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... speed of the Esmeralda she was a sloth when compared with the speed of the wave from such an earthquake. From the glare of the illumination to perfect darkness the contrast was sudden and extreme. But the blackness of the ocean was soon whitened by the snowy plumes of the avalanche of water which was now racing us, far astern as yet, but gaining fast. I, who had no business about the ship requiring my presence in any special part, decided to wait on deck and lash myself to the forward, which ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified could she be, in such a condition, for a race of any kind; and against two such obstinate brutes ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... N. darkness &c adj., absence of light; blackness &c (dark color) 431; obscurity, gloom, murk; dusk &c (dimness) 422. Cimmerian darkness^, Stygian darkness, Egyptian darkness; night; midnight; dead of night, witching hour of night, witching time of night; blind man's holiday; darkness visible, darkness that can be felt; palpable obscure; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and terrible in another. The poisoned chalice, the glittering dagger suspended over the head of the sleeper; wizards and phantoms with hideous masks, those half dim shadows, more terrific than the brightness of flame or the blackness of night; these, and such as these, he had made the companions of his more pleasing pictures. No sooner had the king entered the room than a cold shiver seemed to pass through him, and on Fouquet asking him the cause of it, the king replied, as ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... his nerve," was Bill's rejoinder as they shouldered their sacks and slipped off into the deep blackness shrouding the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... light before plunging in, showed us a long, long, straight passage cut through the mountain, with an oval roof arched like an egg. Except for a few yards ahead, where the way was lit up and the arch of close-set stones glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had a spine made of diamonds, Jonah ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... learned it from one nearly concerned. I—I—" He put his hand to his throat as if he were choking, arose, and walked a few paces and came back. "It was over there near Gordonsville—under a sunset sky much like this. What did I do that night? I have a memory of all the hours of blackness that men have ever passed, lying under forest trees with their faces against the earth. You see me standing here, but I tell you my face is against the earth, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood, and compared the blackness of the raven, and whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady that best he loved, which was blacker than jet, and to her skin which was whiter than the snow, and to the two red spots upon her cheeks, which were redder ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... Adopt it, and you will fix a stigma upon the very name of republic. As to the imagination, there are mountains of light, so are there mountains of darkness; and this is one of them. It is the very Koh-i-noor of blackness. Adopt this proposition, and you will be little better than the foul Harpies who defiled the feast that was spread. The Constitution is the feast spread for our country, and you are now hurrying to drop into its text a ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... position against the cushion, while the son took place on the divan, his head in her lap. Both of them, looking out of the opening, could see a stretch of lower house-tops in the vicinity, a bank of blue-blackness over in the west which they knew to be mountains, and the sky, its shadowy depths brilliant with stars. The city was still. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... A flash broke the blackness ahead of him. The bullet sank into the woodwork just above his head with a vicious splash. But he refrained from reply. Another crack split the silence, and the wall to the left of him flung back its response. Still ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... cordials entirely, to such a degree, that he—Romany chal—imagines he is right in everything he says and does, and he ought to have perfect liberty to go anywhere or do anything. Some have attempted to paint him white, and in doing so have worked up the blackness from underneath, and presented to us a character which excites a feeling in our notions—a kind of go-between, akin to sympathy and disgust. Not a few have thrown round the Gipsy an enchanting, bewitching halo, which an inspection has proved nothing less than a delusion and a snare. Others ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... I dropped from the clouds, but the mist kept the light very white though rather dim. Now a sudden blackness seemed to rise up underneath my descending feet, and at the same moment the mist thinned out till I could see for a space all round below me. This space was green and almost before I realised what the greenness meant I was sitting in a field ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... Niccola shuddered horribly. Then the vision screens flared from such a light as might herald the crack of doom. There was a brightness greater than the brilliance of the sun. And then there was a wrenching, heaving shock. Then there was blackness. Baird was flung across the radar room, and Diane cried out, and he careened against a wall and heard ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... left alone, they strolled out, pipe in hand, upon the terrace. They could see the fells tower darkly against the soft sky, and a tarn that lay in the blackness of the valley beneath them was revealed by its pale gleam. A wonderful mingling of odors stole out of the still ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... subdue his curiosity, though he fervently informed himself of the thousand and one kinds of an unblessed fool he was for bothering his head about her. Nor could he banish her image. Her figure kept rising before him out of the hot, dusty blackness: as she had appeared before the jury yesterday, slender, spirited, clever—yes, she had spoken cleverly, he would admit that; as she had appeared in her parlour that afternoon, a graceful, courteous, self-possessed home person; as ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... up above. Another moment, and I was alongside him, peering down into the danger ring below, while the rain thrashed down upon us so furiously that it was all we could do to see or hear. We could, indeed, see nothing save what was right under our hands, for the dead blackness of the night was a thing to ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet of forget-me-nots ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... in the ark, where he might abide in safety amidst the wreck and horrors of a sinking world? And when conscience writes bitter things against him, and makes him possess the iniquities of his youth; when the heavens are gathering blackness, and before him he sees, at the opening into eternity, the piercing eyes of Omniscience looking fully on him through the terrors of insulted, incensed omnipotent justice: does the believer need any compulsion to drive him out of his own lying refuges, and constrain him ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... memory the thoughts of Pierre le Rouge stopped. The picture of the falling card remained; all else went out in his mind like the snuffing of the candle. Then, as if he heard a voice directing him through the utter blackness of the room, he knew what ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... suddenly under the stress of ropes from the Norham Castle, and the ghastly and intolerable dead—Algerines and Spaniards—could not scare the British sailors eager for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world." Having visited Venice, Vicenza and Padua—cities and mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished poem—Browning returned home by way of Tyrol, the Rhine, Liege and Antwerp. It was his ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... forth upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fastened instantly on overhanging roof, and the shingled screen of the veranda; had darted up the dry wooden stairway, devouring banister, railing, and snapping pine floor, and then, billowing forth from every crack, crevice, and casement of the upper floor streamed hissing and crackling on the blackness that precedes the dawn, a magnificent glare that put to shame the feeble signal fires lately gleaming in the mountains. Luckily there was no wind—there never was a wind at Sandy—and the flames leaped straight for the zenith, lashing their way ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... termination in ish may be accounted in some sort a degree of comparison, by which the signification is diminished below the positive, as black, blackish, or tending to blackness; salt, saltish, or having a little taste of salt; they therefore admit no comparison. This termination is seldom added but to words expressing sensible qualities, nor often to words of above one syllable, and is scarcely used in the ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... Undy; but that acute gentleman saw clearly that he could not contend against the fact of the property having been fraudulently used; but he saw that he might induce the jury to attach so much guilt to Undy, that Tudor would, as it were, be whitened by the blackness of the other's villany. The judge, he well knew, would blow aside all this froth; but then the judge ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... a bright moon which threw into inky blackness the depressions of the rugged mountains and threw up their projections into a blue glare. It was almost as light as day under that wonderful African moon. Had there been any one near the boy must have ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... obscurity of their history, that makes them interesting; the roofs are usually arched, and the walls are often supplied with niches, and covered with a coating of tar of some thickness, and intense blackness. The galleries are low, arched, and admit one person at a time, or a line of persons with ease; they often form the ascent to the upper caves now inhabited, but originally they were enclosed in the rock, they are defended in such cases by ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... to be observed. The coon-hunter is a pure-blooded African, with features immobile as those of the Sphinx. And from his colour nought can be deduced. As already said, it is the depth of its ebon blackness, producing a purplish iridescence over the epidermis, that has gained for him ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of them you know pretty well the story of all. It is the good lives that furnish attractive reading, because there is so much individuality and variety in them, so many pictorial lights and shadows. A novel in which all the characters are mean, would be read by nobody. The blackness needs to be relieved by something good, for darkness is always monotonous. Bad men show a dreary sameness in their thoughts and doings, their rise and fall. The godly are like nature illumined by the sunlight, manifold and infinite; ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Outside was the blackness of the cold winter night; inside the grayness of stained walls lighted by the glow from the blazing fires. A few pieces of statuary, copies of the work of the idealistic Greek period, stood in the hall and the living room. All that meant merely comfort, homelikeness—all in a word ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... sake, if not for my own; but I said to myself, 'No, Derry Duck, you are all pitch, you can't be made white;' and Satan helped me to hold on to that way of thinking. Your scripture gave the lie again and again to that. It seemed to say to me, You choose blackness and damnation, when God asks you to wash and be clean. What I've suffered these weeks, no soul out of perdition can tell. The devil clung to me. He would not let me go. He claimed me for his own. ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... next day found us approaching the Lone City. We did not need to surmise now that Tao would be warned, for far away on the horizon ahead we saw the beams from his great projectors mounting up into the blackness of the sky. Some four miles from the Lone City the river we were ascending swept off to the right. This was its closest point to the city, and here we disembarked. There were several docks and a few houses, but we found them ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... burn so—And they are happy there Together—'twas my work—and now I wish That seas convuls'd by tempests were between them; And an eternal veil of blackness girded The one from the other—each in separate light, But still apart! apart! O horror, why Doth their communion cast such hopeless gloom Upon me, more than all a father's guilt, A sovereign's woe?—O daughter of a traitor! Traitoress! Thou lovest ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... opposite side of the valley. What is left of the waning light shows the rough track over the heather to High Horcum. The huge shoulders of the moors are now majestically indistinct, and towards the west the browns, purples, and greens are all merged in one unfathomable blackness. The tremendous silence and the desolation become almost oppressive, but overhead the familiar arrangement of the constellations gives a sense of companionship not to be slighted. In something less than an hour a light glows in the distance, and, although the darkness ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... glimmering into it through two lesser openings, which perforate the opposite sides of the promontory. It is a strange, ghostly-looking place; there is a sort of moonlight greenness in the twilight which forms its noon, and the denser shadows which rest along its sides; a blackness, so profound that it mocks the eye, hangs over a lofty passage which leads from it, like a corridor, still deeper into the bowels of the hill; the light falls on a sprinkling of half-buried bones, the remains of animals ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... spirit of Jeremiah returned to him again, and he rose up and prophesied; and in his prophecy he said, "There shall be a Tree set up, which shall make the barren trees fruitful, and the proud and fruitful trees barren; and the snow shall be turned to blackness, and the sweet waters become bitter, and the scarlet shall be white as wool. Moreover, He shall bless the isles that they shall bear fruit by the word of His mouth; and He shall satisfy the hungry souls." And thereafter he began to speak ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... coquettish hat and feathers, and the powdered puffs and curls that descended to her shoulders. She had a gay air with her, too. She bore her head proudly. The patches on her cheek seemed not half so black as the blackness of her eyes, so full of a dark mischievous light were they; and the redness of the lips—a trifle artificial, no doubt—as she smiled seemed to add to the glittering whiteness of her teeth. The proud, laughing, gay coquette: no wonder all ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... heart was violently agitated; blackness came before her eyes; she thought she cried aloud; but she really sat there mute, with fixed ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... half hour he walked to and fro along the sea-wall, between the blackness of the sky and the lead-coloured water, and then his thoughts turned to the downs above this stricken place, where, even in the sultriest days some breath of wind was always moving. Just opposite him, on the other ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... was heavy with dread and nerves that were quivering with fear. The brightness, the beauty, and the joy, of her womanhood, she felt to be going from her as the sunshine goes under threatening clouds. The blackness, the ugliness, and the sorrow, of life, she felt coming over her as fog rolls in from the sea. The faith, trust, and hope, that is the soul of womanhood was threatened by doubt, distrust, and despair. The gentleness, sensitiveness, and delicacy, that is the heart of womanhood was beset by coarseness, ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... keeping them for the feast when he came home; but if he wasn't to come, what should she do? She raised herself. Above the wet roofs sky-rack was passing wild and dark, but in a little cleared space one or two stars shone the brighter for the blackness below. "I must look on the bright side," she thought, "or I can't bear myself." And she went in to cook the ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... the blackness, with eyes and ears on the strain, and both little shoulders humped against the expected apparition of Tom—or worse, she would become aware of the footsteps ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... such a source, we securely bucked the sullen fool, rolled his body close against the wall out of sight of any chance visitant, and then made preparation to explore our prison-house and discover for ourselves the mystery of this gloomy cave. The dense blackness showing directly ahead seemed to promise an extension of passageway into the rock; so, lighting a pine knot at the altar fire, and bidding Cairnes follow me closely, I led forward down the narrow tunnel. The floor was uneven, while so irregular and rough appeared roof and walls ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... ground. The sliding door on the left side of our car was locked: on the other side jagged walls, dripping wet to the touch, jutted so close that a thin man couldn't have walked between them and the car. Everywhere pitch blackness, the blackness of the tomb. The consumptive soldier pulled a candle from his kit, balanced it in the straw, and over it warmed his hands. If that candle had toppled over in the straw we wouldn't have had a rat's ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... was a broken wall of blackness, patched with lights about which moved hazy suggestions of human activity. The bank we were following offered a prospect even more gloomy—a dense, dark mass, amid which, sometimes, mysterious half-tones told of a dock gate, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... appeared in the openings, each one casting a patch of inky blackness upon the snow. Then the travellers passed a larger group of dwellings, all silent and unlighted; and beyond, they saw a great house, with many outbuildings and enclosed courtyards, from which the hounds bayed furiously, and a noise of stamping horses came from the stalls. But there ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... the king, the partial paralysis of justice, the transference of the capital, the weight of wars, and, at lowest, the craving for something new. Few reigns or lives set in unclouded brightness. The western horizon is often filled with a bank of blackness. Strangely enough, Absalom invited two hundred men to accompany him, who were ignorant of the plot. That looks as if its strength was outside Jerusalem, as was natural. These innocents were sufficiently associated with Absalom to be asked to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... forces. And that was that. The advance halted waiting for the Line to come up, and a host of small actions took place as the forward screening forces collided. Chase was in the control chair, hanging in the blackness of the infra band on the edge of normal space. But we weren't flicking in and out of threespace like some of the others. We had a probe out and the main buffeting was taken by the duralloy tube with its tiny converter at its ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... the dark, cold night until the lighted windows of Tranquil Vale showed softly in the blackness. There was a light in the front room of No. 5, and the sound of somebody moving hurriedly about followed immediately upon Mr. Vyner's knock. Then the door opened and Captain Trimblett stood ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... among the English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of the other fortresses, destroyed the works, and retired ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... Blackletter face. His first fount, cut for Mr. D. B. Updike, of the Merrymount Press, Boston, and known as the "Merrymount," is shown in 64. Intended for large pages and rough paper it necessarily shows to disadvantage in the example given, where the blackness and weight of the letters makes them seem clumsy, despite the refinement ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... tones which lay thinly across the west, pressing upon the ragged, heaving horizon; the splendor and intense brilliancy of the million stars; the vast imposing circle of untamed water, the purple of its flowing mountains and the velvet blackness of its sweeping valleys; the monotonous seething round the boring prow and the sad gurgle of the speeding wake; the weird canvas shadows rearing heavenward; and above all, that silence which engulfs all human noises simply by its ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... of this young girl's complexion, the raven blackness of her hair, her marked yet delicate features, and the general impression produced by her dark coloring, were reasons why she seemed older than the rest. It was Jacqueline's privilege to exhibit that style of beauty which comes earliest to perfection, and retains ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... have his bad soul in a bad body. Look you, can't you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul of that child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine? They'll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will come quicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, having the bad soul that he has, God was to set him in heaven. But, look you, Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that God is not asking them to choose the better and the quicker way, and there isn't a day or an hour that He isn't asking you and me and every one else ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... For a moment Dixon leaned over to listen to his breathing, and then dragged himself slowly and painfully out into the day. The fire was out. A leaden blackness still filled the sky; deep, silent gloom hung in the ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... something visible in my view, but my eyes did not seem able to receive the impressions. I realize now they were not yet adjusted to the new form of light. Gradually, as I looked, objects of definite shape began to emerge from the blackness. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... purchasers in the richly garnished repertoire of the worthy Colnaghi. Indeed it is a painful, and almost repulsive, subject. Laugier's portrait of Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand exhibits his prevailing error of giving blackness, rather than depth, to his shadows. Black hair, a black cravat, and black collar to the coat—with the lower part of the background almost "gloomy as night"—are not good accessories. This worthy engraver lives at present with his wife, an agreeable and unaffected little woman, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... two walls of stone, and over them a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of sky,—so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous shadows, was all unguessed by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... the arrival of Sam Ryder and Carleton, two other members of the cast of "Down by the Sea" attracted the attention of the garrulous Asaph and led the latter, in their company, upstairs. A moment or so later another figure approached from the blackness to the circle of light cast by the big ship's lantern over the ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Perceiving that my shoelace was untied, I stooped to refasten it, and when I looked in the room again saw Desmond standing under the chandelier, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the floor, his hair disordered and falling over his forehead; its blackness was intense against the relief of the crimson wall-paper. Was it that which had unaccountably ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... hill. It was a sound which had nothing to do with the storm. It was the voices of men, urgent, strident. A tiny spark suddenly grew out of the blackness. It was moving, swinging rhythmically. A moment later shadowy figures moved in the darkness. They were vague, uncertain. But they came, following closely upon the spark of light, which was borne in the hand of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the roar of the waterfall was loud in their ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost directly, Lady Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on which the house was built. The boat glided through it into cover, and the arrow of light at the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the plash of the oars made a curious sound, full of sudden desolation and weariness. A bat flitted over the arrow of light and vanished, and the head of a swimming rat was visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... struck the ship just forward the mainmast and exploded, tearing a great hole in the side, extending far below the water-line. In the blaze of light that followed, the men in the David cheered wildly, and the next moment blackness overwhelmed them. ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... suffered. From many a porch, and many a latticed oriel, a long shadow stretched eastward, like a death flag streaming in a wind unfelt of the body—or a fluttering leaf, ready to yield, and flit away, and add one more to the mound of blackness gathering on the horizon's edge. It was the main street of an old country town, dwindled by the rise of larger and more prosperous places, but holding and exercising a charm none ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... know all to be illusion, cheat—itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper—not a divine hope—it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all—the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... barbarian drinkers may perhaps prolong the orgy of luxury a few hours into the night of time; but the venom we shall bequeath them will promptly be mortal for them, as it was for us, and all will drop back into blackness.... ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... instant, it seemed to Houston as though the glorious sunlight had suddenly turned to blackness, a blackness in which the scrap of paper gleamed white before him, its red spots glowing like spots of flame. He seemed again to see Morgan as he looked when parting from him the previous evening; the haggard face, with its hollow eyes and faint, pathetic smile, and as he recalled his ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... For Elijah, the great prophet of the Old Covenant, was inextricably mingled with all the Jewish expectations of a Messiah, and these expectations were full of wrath. The coming of Elijah would be the coming of a day of fire, in which the sun should be turned into blackness and the moon into blood, and the powers of heaven should be shaken. Already the noonday sun was shrouded in unnatural eclipse; might not some awful form at any moment rend the heavens and come down, touch the mountains and they should smoke? The vague anticipation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... great flash came blackness. The fire seemed for a time to have been extinguished. Gradually here and there, far below, bits of burning tinder gleamed, fiery stars in an inverted heaven. Soon the ruins were again blazing. They soared ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and to many and sundry, a god—a source of life, a source of food, a fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness of thunder and punishment—in short, a man-master whose record was fourteen living and adult sons and daughters, six great- grandchildren, and more grandchildren than could he in his ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... she said. "It was only fright because I lost my way in the dark and couldn't find the door, and it was so ghastly running into another person in the blackness like that. Father, I wish you would tell them not to put out the lights in this room so early. It's the second ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... apartment than her room at home, and looked comfortable enough in the glow of the great fire of logs. The hangings of the bed were dark and heavy, and the carved oak furniture was also sombre in its polished blackness; but there was a thick square carpet on the floor, which was a luxury Kate had never possessed in her bed chamber before, and the mirrors and silver sconces for the candles all bespoke an ease and luxury ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored "The Cherry Blossom Tablet"—that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, "Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy," and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, "This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... sounds of pursuit, and at last, with minds relieved, if not quite certain, plodded on into the obscurity. They had entered, it seemed, an aisle of a forest which stretched, darkly impenetrable, on either side. Before them, blackness, darkness within dark, like a cave, a smell of dampness like a dungeon. The sky lightened for a moment and they saw the shape of leaves and tree fronds far above them like a pattern on a carpet—a pattern ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... in the Adriatic, the transports travelled only by night during the first part of the voyage. To a landsman it was incomprehensible how it was possible for us to pursue our zigzag course in the inky blackness and avoid collisions, particularly when it was borne in mind that our ship was English and our convoyers were Japanese. During the afternoon we were drilled in the method of abandoning ship, and I was put in charge of a lifeboat and a certain section ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... seemed to creep over Dave, and despite the blackness of the situation, his heart for the moment felt light. He gazed with emotion at ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... slowly and cautiously down the rope. It was a good stout one and he had no real misgivings. Yet the situation was unusual enough to have a piquant flavor. In the first place the darkness was more than inky in character, the kind of blackness in comparison with which the blackest night seems luminous. Then there was the peculiar quality of the air, so different from anything above ground, that the words chill, and dampness, had no special relation to it. In the strange, tomb-like silence, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... mesdames come within?" A matron speaks. It is what we have been hoping, and we follow eagerly, escorted by the troupe. Inside the door it is blackness. We tread an earth-floor, and by sounds and scents infer that this is the stable. We pass up some dark, uncertain stairs, and stand in the living-room of the family. It is long, dark and low-ceiled. The rafters are discolored with smoke, the board-floor with wear, the walls with ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... shadow, moved across the room to the door, tried the lock, slipped an inner bolt into place, then returned halfway back to the windows, and paused by the wall. A match flame spurted through the blackness; and then, hissing as though in protest, the miserable, clogged gas-jet, blue with air, still leaving the corners of the room dim and murky, grudgingly lighted up its immediate surroundings—and Jimmie Dale, immaculate in evening clothes, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rigid, every muscle locking in mid-motion. He felt momentum topple him slowly forwards; then he was no longer falling but stopped, tilted off-balance at a grotesque angle, suspended in a web of forces he could not feel. Not the slightest sound had come from Kilby, invisible in the blackness ahead of him. ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... Soothingly I was informed that this was an exceptional season, and that the good snow might arrive at any time. After waiting a few days, I gladly hailed a broad-browed cloud coming grandly on from the west in big promising blackness, very unlike the white sailors of the summer skies. Under the lee of a rim-ledge, with another snow-lover, I watched its movements as it took possession of the canon and all the adjacent region in sight. Trailing ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... before the campfire, in the chill blackness just beginning to turn gray. Then swift hands and lean strong arms went at beds and packs, horses and saddles. When dawn broke the hunters were on their way, far ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... with you, feeding themselves without fear: Clouds they are without Water, carried of Winds; Trees, whose Fruit withered, without Fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the Roots: Raging Waves of the Sea, foaming out their own Shame, wandring Stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of Darkness for ever."] ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... growing rarer and rarer as it approaches the infinite ocean of aether. Gone for ever is the old delusion of a solid Heaven overhead, with windows in it, through which God and the angels looked down upon the earth and its inhabitants. And what site is there for Heaven out in the cold blackness ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... being deposited beside the half-portion of his family, puffed himself up, sank his long neck into his shoulders, and evidently went to sleep. I shivered up close to him and looked over my shoulder into the blackness behind the teeth and then didn't look again until I heard the soft pad of the weird leather ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reach out for some knowledge of those who have died, and go almost into madness because we can grasp nothing. Silence unbroken, darkness impenetrable ever guard the mystery of death. In the long ages since the cave man ran that day, love and hope have in faith erected, beyond the grim barriers of blackness and despair, fair pavilions of promise and consolation, but to the stern examiners of physical fact and reality there has come no news from beyond the walls of silence since. We clamor tearfully for some word from those who are dead, but no answer comes. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan ratified on June 10, in six days after the amendment was submitted by Congress. Kansas and New York ratified in special session and Ohio in regular session on June 16. Pennsylvania ratified on June 24, its blackness wiped off the map. The change of black Massachusetts to the ratified white on June 25 gave another big impetus to the campaign. Texas distinguished itself by ratifying on June 28. This made nine ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... 100 Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost That it should spare the eldest flower of spring: Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch Even now a city stands, strong, fair, and free; Now stench and blackness yawn, like death. Oh, plead 105 With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence, Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man! Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words, In deeds a Cain. No, Mother, we must die: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... could believe Guy's prophecies would come true, but in a few moments the cool breeze was distinctly felt, the sun went under a cloud, and the boat began to move. It was a sudden squall, and the clouds thickened and massed themselves into great hills of blackness; the water turned dark and began to rise in little threatening billows, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and then without warning the rain came. Thunder and lightning added to the excitement of the occasion, and in less than fifteen minutes the ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving her hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two disappeared into the blackness. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... standing amid showers of sparks as the brilliant metal slips to and fro among the rollers that mould it into the forms of commerce. If upon a summer evening one shall rest amid the sweet air and the rustling trees upon the hill-top, he may hear coming up from this dusky, grimy blackness of the mills and the railway the soughing of the blowers of the blast-furnaces, the sharp crack of the exploding gases in the white-hot iron, the shriek of the locomotive whistle and all night long the roar and rattle of the passing trains, but so ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... welcomed by her Free Sisters to her place among them, with no stain of bribes in her hands, and with no soil of meanness upon her garments. And then the "peace" and "prosperity," which President Buchanan saw in vision on the eve of May-day, will indeed prevail and be established, while the blackness of infamy will brood forever over the memory of the magistrate who used the highest office of the Republic to perpetuate the wrongs of the Slave by the sacrifice of the rights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... swimming through utter blackness, sucking at him, pulling him together out of nothingness. Then, abruptly, he was aware of being alive, and surprised. He sucked in on the air around him, and the breath burned in his lungs. He was one of the dead—there should be no ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... of the river, and into a grove of fir which presently deepened and thickened as it spread up a gently shelving hillside. The lights of the town behind them disappeared; the gloom increased; presently they were alternately crossing patches of moonlight and plunging into expanses of blackness. And Betty, after stumbling over one or two of the half-exposed roots which lay across the rough path, slipped a ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... match thereto and sending a few initiatory puffs into the air, these mountaineers made off in the darkness toward their homes in different directions. Some went in groups, some by twos, some singly. Seen from a distance in the blackness of the night these companies resembled a regiment of glow-worms in a potato patch. From over the flint hills in the distance came the familiar rattle and rumble of old-fashioned lumber wagons whose occupants had come far to hear the much-discussed preacher ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... corner, nor the motion of Philip's back, nor the long shadow of our britchka as it came bowling along behind us brought me any relief. I concentrated my whole attention upon the distance-posts ahead and the clouds which, hitherto dispersed over the sky, were now assuming a menacing blackness, and beginning to form themselves into a ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... gasping cry of wonder, and then I saw her slip forward on to her knees beside Golden Star's pillow, and as the light fell upon the two faces—the living and the dead—the likeness between them was so perfect, save for the golden gleam of Joyful Star's hair and the lustrous blackness of the tresses that framed my dead love's face, that they seemed to me as sisters, one watching over ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... abyss of blackness, Into its cavernous chaos, I saw birds wing. Sweeping down Through the mist Of its mighty waters, Undaunted by the roar, Unmindful of the churning, Of the terror of its power, On sure pinions And happy in flight They dipped and soared and Mounted, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... but the intense blackness beyond time and space. I could not see the Other nor conceive of it. It was pure intelligence, stripped of flesh. It was alive and it had ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... she did not grasp the full import of the situation. She understood only that before her lay a letter written by Bertha Dorset, and addressed, presumably, to Lawrence Selden. There was no date, but the blackness of the ink proved the writing to be comparatively recent. The packet in Mrs. Haffen's hand doubtless contained more letters of the same kind—a dozen, Lily conjectured from its thickness. The letter before her was short, but its few words, which had leapt into ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... and residence in the scrub was lighted brightly in the midst of the 'close', solid blackness of that moonless December night, when the sky and stars were smothered and suffocated by ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... his feet lay the quiet strip of garden, lawn and bush; beyond, the lamps burning on the parapets of the Embankment, and beyond them, the river shining in the starlight, polished and lucent like a slab of black marble, with broad regular rays upon it of a still deeper blackness, where the massive columns of Hungerford Bridge cast shadows on the water. An engine puffed and snorted into the station, leaving its pennant of white smoke in the air. Through the glass walls of the signal-box above the bridge Drake could see the men in a blaze of light working at the ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire, or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning splendor that Kieran could ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... great severity. In his last illness I was sent for, and watched beside his death couch. The girl on whom he had so often inflicted punishment, haunted his dying hours; and when at length the king of terrors approached, he shrieked in utter agony of spirit, "Oh, the blackness of darkness, the black imps, I can see them all around me—take them away!" and amid such exclamations he expired. These persons were of one of the first families ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sudden gusts or violent storms of wind and rain, which are more or less feared, but which may always be known from other storms on their approach, by the blackness of the clouds above, with the segment of a circle of lighter cloud just beneath the dark, and above ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... to the daughter of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west were made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of the ground when it had been ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... placed against the narrow door. At a sign from Fawkes, Keyes drew aside the bed, disclosing in the floor the outlines of a trap door, which covered an opening to the cellar beneath. Stooping, he raised the heavy cover, revealing the top rounds of a rude ladder leading into the blackness below. ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
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