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More "Darkling" Quotes from Famous Books



... standing on a grey sea-bank He felt the wind fitfully shift and heave As toward a stormier eve; And all the wan wide sea shuddered; and earth Shook underfoot as toward some timeless birth, Intolerable and inevitable; and all Heaven, darkling, trembled like a stricken thrall. And far out of the quivering east, and far From past the moonrise and its guiding star, Began a noise of tempest and a light That was not of the lightning; and a sound Rang with it round and round That was not of the thunder; and a flight As ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy auguries disclose The Highland seer's anticipated woes, The bleeding phantom of each martial form Dim in the cloud, or darkling in the storm; While sad, she chants the solitary song, The soft lament for him who tarries long— For him, whose distant relics vainly crave The coronach's wild ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... Darkling, he fixed Malua with his eyes, Noting each shadow of his changing thoughts, When the dear dreams centred on Taka, dreams Dimming his sight. Holding his lips apart, He slowly rose, Uhila following, For in the dark the music ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay

... silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to deteriorate in quantity and quality, and then I know that credit is tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, and his first bright confidence is gone. He regards one now through the darkling panes with a gloomy animosity. He suspects one all too truly of dealing with the "Stores." ... Then suddenly he has gone; the savings are gone, and the shop—like a hungry maw—waits for a new victim. There ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... Now, in their sunset home on Libya's heel, Phoenicia's sons unwonted chillness feel: Now, with his targe of willow at his breast, The Syracusan bears his spear in rest, Amongst these Hiero arms him for the war, Eager to fight as warriors fought of yore; The plumes float darkling o'er his helmed brow. O Zeus, the sire most glorious; and O thou, Empress Athene; and thou, damsel fair, Who with thy mother wast decreed to bear Rule o'er rich Corinth, o'er that city of pride Beside whose walls Anapus' ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... of it! oh the joy of it! Even amid my dream, methought we questioned its reality, so unearthly in its perfectness, it seemed. We stood upon the college-green, and the sun was going down with a strange, darkling splendor; and from afar, ever and anon came the thunder roll of battle; but we had nought to do with it; our part was done; our time was out; we were to fight no more. And there we stood, watching the students' games; and there too was poor Hale, merry and full ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon

... second-cabin barrier thinking this, the first time she saw the passenger with the red hair. She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having unconsciously intruded and having ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... rested. When two hearts have thus by mutual gift bestowed themselves the one upon the other and become fused and molten into one, is it possible ever to sever the connection? But the kiss they had exchanged the day before, among the darkling shadows of the forest, was replete with the joy of their new-found safety and the hope that their escape awakened in their bosom, while this was the kiss of parting, full of anguish and doubt unutterable. Would they meet again some ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... away is gliding The pleasant Oxus's stream, I see the green glades darkling, I see the clear pools gleam. I hear the bulbuls calling From blooming tree to tree. Wave, bird, and tree are singing, 'Away! ah, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... sees no roses darkling, No stately hollyhocks dim; She is only thinking and dreaming Of the garden, the night, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... good-naturedly; and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace in his nurse's arms, from ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... us far on our way, and beautiful is the road; high above, beech- and pine-woods, and sloping down to the road green banks starred with large blue and white campanula, with, darkling amid the alders, the noisy ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... the singer, which enhanced the mystery of her melody and the charm of her young voice. Presently other voices joined in, all in the same meditative, somewhat doleful rhythm. Gayer strains would have sounded sacrilegiously out of tune with the darkling glint of the river, with the mysterious splash of its waves against the bobbing bulkheads of the pier, with the starry enchantment of the passing ferry-boats, with the love-enraptured solemnity of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... they came to the open land They wheeled, deployed and stood; Midmost were Marcus and the King, And Eldred on the right-hand wing, And leftwards Colan darkling, In the last shade ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton

... a bit does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter or to parley with fortune—when she declares against him he takes ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... believe the wonders I have witnessed, I confine the recital of my adventures to the social circle. But what profession affords such scope for varied incident as that of the soldier? Change of clime, danger, vicissitude, love, war, privation one day, profusion the next, darkling dangers, and sparkling joys! Zounds! there's nothing like the life of a soldier! and, by the powers! I'll give you a song ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... barren plains no longer spoke of a boundless freedom and the elemental battle. These things had become something to forget in the absorbing claim of a life to come, wherein the harshness of battle had no place. The darkling woods, scarce trodden by the foot of man, no longer possessed the mystic charm of childhood's fancy. The trackless wastes held only threat, upon which watchful eyes would now gladly close. The stirring glacial fields of summer, monsters of the ages, boomed out their maledictions upon ears deaf ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... clouds fast gather, The forest-oaks roar— A maiden is sitting Beside the green shore,— The billows are breaking with might, with might, And she sighs aloud in the darkling night, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... with lurid flashes gathered darkling, thick and high, Lines of cranes like gleams of laughter sailed ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous

... Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, In low pursuit; Know, prudent, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... beneath the silent night Where'er they went, to lead their darkling way, The cloud of glory lent its guiding ray And shone more splendid ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... the woman, her face darkling with passion, "he is Victor's brother, and he is no good. He drinks and gambles and makes the big noise with his mouth. Bou, wou, wou! I am the big man! I can do this! I can do that! I am the best man in the world! Always ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,— Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory—to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! Never ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... Through the darkling night, faintly visible in the feeble starlight—there was no moon—were driving shapes, a full score of them converging ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner

... lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights flashed up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and shops were lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath the awnings of an open-air cafe. In the distance, somewhere, a band swung into the dreamy rhythm of a haunting waltz. Scattered ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... Darkling{7} I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... happened she was being hurried through the clear summer night past the long garden-walls of Grange Lane. The stars were shining overhead, the leaves rustling on all sides in the soft wind—not a soul to be seen in the long line of darkling road. Miss Dora had no breath to speak, however much disposed she might have been. She could not remonstrate, having full occasion for all her forces to keep her feet and her breath. When Mr Wentworth paused for an instant to ask "which way did she go?" it was all Miss Dora could ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... shouldst indeed see wondrous things * That would efface all sorrows and disperse all sores of sprite:' Then deigned our Caliph's Bride to cry, 'Where is that dress of thine?' * And I replied, 'In house of him kept darkling as the night.' So down upon it pounced Masrr and brought it unto her, * And when 'twas there each feather cast a ray of beaming light: Therewith I took it from his hand and opened it straightway * And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... the day, And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway, Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path, Darkling they ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... dreams— Let speculation pass, nor progress touch Thy silvan homes with hard, unhallowed hand! The light wind whispers, and the air is rich With vapours which exhale into the night; And, round me here, this village in the leaves Darkling doth slumber. How those giant pears Loom with uplifted and high-ancient heads, Like forest trees! A hundred years ago They, like their owner, had their roots in France— In fruitful Normandy—but here refuse Unlike, to multiply, as if their spirits Grieved ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair

... folding camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... proceed no farther, being himself unfortunately blinded by a stroke of the impatient youth's switch across his eyes. Enraged at once by the smart and the indignity, the falconer started up, and darkling as he was, for his eyes watered too fast to permit his seeing any thing, he would soon have been at close grips with his insolent adversary, had not Roland Graeme, contrary to his nature, played for once the prudent man and the peacemaker, and thrown ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling; Now smoking and frothing Its tumult and wrath in, Till, in this rapid race On which it is bent, It reaches the place Of ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... of the city ran down the hill to their home, in infinite astonishment. And ere they reached it, Elizabeth was weeping with dismay, and the darkling ground about them was white and brittle and active with ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... indifference. After defying and being expelled by Louis XV., he adopted (what has never, perhaps, been observed) the wild advice of d'Argenson ('La Bete,' and Louis's ex- minister of foreign affairs), he betook himself to a life of darkling adventures, to a hidden and homeless exile. In many of his journeys he found Pickle in his path, and Pickle finally made his labours vain. The real source of all this imbroglio, in addition to an exasperated daring and a strangely secretive temperament, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... darkling sweep of desert had been transformed. It was now a world of red earth and gold rocks and purple sage, with everywhere the endless straggling green cedars. A breeze whipped in, making the fire roar softly. The sun felt ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... grilling him with eyes. Newcomers received the story of the crime in darkling whispers; and the outcast sat and sat and sat, and squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. (He did one or two things with his spine which a professional contortionist would have observed with real interest.) And all this while of freezing suspense was but the criminal's detention awaiting trial. A known ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood: Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seem to touch the goal ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... us with the music of the spheres. Suddenly, unheralded, up over the summit of Mount Moriah came the full moan, a silver disc, a lucent, steady orb, globular and grand, filling the valleys with light, touching all things into a hushed and darkling splendor. To us, standing alone, far from sight of human face or sound of human voice, it seemed the censer of God, swung out to receive ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... together, side by side, through leafy byways and winding paths, past smiling cornfield and darkling wood; we talked of the Government, of country and town, of the Fashionable World and its most famous denizens, concerning which last my companion's knowledge seemed profound; we spoke but little of books, of which he seemed amazingly ignorant—in ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... light of day declineth, And a swift angel through the sky Kindleth God's tapers clear, With ashen staff the lamplighter Passeth along the darkling streets To light ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... blossomed like a flower of wondrous worth, A rare, sweet flower of heaven that ne'er should die, Altho' the vase in which it grew should lie Most rudely rent amid the darkling dearth. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... of the London Ghetto sat at their porches basking in the evening sunshine. Children were playing on the steps. Fathers were smoking at the lintel. Smiling faces looked out from the various and darkling draperies with which the warehouses were hung. Ringlets glossy, and curly, and jetty—eyes black as night—midsummer night—when it lightens; haughty noses bending like beaks of eagles—eager quivering nostrils—lips curved like the bow of Love—every ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... lilies burn Along the marsh, and hillward the roads are sweet with fern. All day the windless heaven pavilions the sea-blue, Then twilight comes and drenches the sultry dells with dew. The lone white star of evening comes out among the hills, And in the darkling forest begin the whip-poor-wills. The fireflies that wander, the hawks that flit and scream, And all the wilding vagrants of summer dusk and dream, Have all their will, and reck not of any after thing, Inheriting no sorrow and no foreshadowing. The ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman

... the plain, near where the adjoining forest loomed darkling, the tall grass parted to disclose a black form. Was it only a deceiving shade cast by a leafy branch—only a shadow? Slowly it sank, and was lost. Once more the gray, unwavering line of ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... The darkling day that gave its bloodred birth To Milton's white republic undefiled That might endure so few fleet years on earth Bore in him likewise as divine a child; But born not less for crowns of love and ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... us far the Rushy Moors are spread: Soon will the Sun withdraw her chearful Ray: Darkling and tir'd we shall the Marshes tread, No Lay unsung to cheat the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... papers shot continuously, and were snatched up by servers, who distributed them in smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... one joy From earth can reach souls freed from earth's alloy, 'Tis sure the joy to know kind hands are here Drying the widow's and the orphan's tear; Helping them gently o'er lone life's rough ways, Sending what light may be to darkling days— A better service than to hang with verse, As our ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... Richard! if my brother died, 'Twas but a fatal chance; For darkling was the battle tried, And fortune sped ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... paradise the canon is guarded; but like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... through the city—the same mighty fatherly river that washed the walls of his native town up north. In the river Christophe could recover the memory of his childish dreams.... But in his sorrow they took on, like the Rhine itself, a darkling hue. In the dying day he would lean against the parapet of the embankment and look down at the rushing river, the fused and fusing, heavy, opaque, and hurrying mass, which was always like a dream of the past, wherein nothing could be clearly seen ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... later, far out in the night, The stars shall over me wing their flight; Sooner or later my darkling dews Catch the white ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... glass through which he sees darkly and often with a darkling mind, the all-pervasive Presence; it is the veil—the veil that ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... marble, the fixed gaze Of dead and dying eyes, that was the time When first I looked on death, and when I woke >From my deep swoon, I felt the night air cool Upon my brow, and the cold stars look down, As swift we galloped o'er the darkling plain And saw the chill sea-glimpses slowly wake, With arms unknown around me. When the dawn Broke swift, we panted on the pathless steeps, And so by plain and mountain till we came to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... Summer, and thy Autumn's mellowed haze, If rightly lived and rightly spent, will bring rare, happy days, That temper with their sunshine the frigid Winter's wrath, When gathering storms are darkling o'er life's declining path, And lend a ray celestial that hoarded gold ne'er gave To lighten all thy journey, from the ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy

... consented; and each one's particular fear was turned, ah me! to my single destruction. And now the dreadful day was at hand; the rites were being ordered for me, the salted corn, and the chaplets to wreathe my temples. I broke away, I confess it, from death; I burst my bonds, and lurked all night darkling in the sedge of the marshy pool, till they might set their sails, if haply they should set them. Nor have I any hope more of seeing my old home nor my sweet children and the father whom I desire. Of them will they even haply claim vengeance for my flight, and wash away this ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! He whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter would follow? Till lo, the little touch, and youth ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... passed a swift current, indeed, but quite unthinking of the price paid for their safety. Looking back on the darkling river, they saw ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson

... from the allegiance which we pay—and women especially like to pay—to the tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the part of other women—such other women as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget Those other two equalled with me in fate, So were I equalled with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old: Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... with foolish, unfounded hopes and he never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here "as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be "true ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... far thou heardest her, but nigh; Nigh, 'twixt the waste's edge and the darkling sky. Turn back again, too soon ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris

... Whoever would with success try this spell must strictly observe these directions. Steal out all alone to the kiln, and darkling, throw into the pot, a clue of blue yarn: wind it in a new clue off the old one; and towards the latter end, something will hold the thread: demand, wha hauds? i.e., who holds? and answer will be returned ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... that heartless, cold expression All my being terrifies— Though my darkling fear is lessened By thy frank and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... to cross by way of the Pont des Invalides—how unwisely was borne in upon him almost as soon as he turned from the brilliant Quai de la Conference into the darkling rue Francois Premier. He had won scarcely twenty yards from the corner when, with a rush, its motor purring like some great tiger-cat, a powerful touring-car swept up from behind, drew abreast, but instead of passing ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... festivities, as you may remember, for you were our honoured guest at the time, and greatly displeased at his absence," he resumed, after a few seconds of darkling reflection. "None of us knew where he had flown to, for he did not evidently consider his owl's nest sufficiently remote; but we had his fraternal blessing to sustain us. And after that he continued to make periodical disappearances to his ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... legend, and a warning to the young; a Richard in the bush to frighten colts. He was preached at boys caught playing marbles "for keeps": "Do you want to grow up like Joe Louden?" The very name became a darkling threat, and children of the town would have run had one called suddenly, "HERE COMES JOE LOUDEN!" Thus does the evil men do live after them, and the ill-fame of the unrighteous increase when ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... finding her upon the spot, or that the humour of silence that seized her before may again return. No, I will not, to save being thought a fool, neglect the course she points out. Many of her class set out by being impostors and end by becoming enthusiasts, or hold a kind of darkling conduct between both lines, unconscious almost when they are cheating themselves or when imposing on others. Well, my course is a plain one at any rate; and if my efforts are fruitless, it shall not be owing to over-jealousy of my own ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... beams of the sun vanished from the broad horizon, than a small, gentle rain began to fall, and the light as well as brightness of the day became obscured by darkling clouds. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... lukewarm and conforming souls Mrs. Nitschkan cast a darkling eye. It was the recalcitrant, the defiant, the professing sinner upon whom ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... and usually forced to thrust the stuff away in despair, and go unhappily to bed, conscious that after all his labor he had done nothing. And these were moments when the accustomed vision of the land alarmed him, and the wild domed hills and darkling woods seemed symbols of some terrible secret in the inner life of that stranger—himself. Sometimes when he was deep in his books and papers, sometimes on a lonely walk, sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen "society," he would thrill with a sudden sense of ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... improved during the night; and, for the first time since leaving the Hebrides, the sun had got the better of the clouds, and driven them in confusion before his face. The sea, losing its dead leaden colour, had become quite crisp and burnished, darkling into a deep sapphire blue against the horizon; beyond which, at about nine o'clock, there suddenly shot up towards the zenith, a pale, gold aureole, such as precedes the appearance of the good fairy at a pantomime farce; then, gradually lifting its huge back above the water, rose a silver ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... correspondent. But however soft the answer, I question whether the wrath will be turned away. Will there not be a coolness between him and the lady? and is it not possible that henceforth her fine eyes will look with darkling glances upon the pretty orange cover of ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and you, Flaccilla, to you, my father and mother, Here I commend this child, once my delight and my pet, So may the darkling shades and deep-mouthed baying of hellhound Touch not with horror of dread little Erotion dear. Now was her sixth year ending, and melting the snows of the winter, Only a brief six days lacked to the tale of ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning from the innumerable boughs 20 The strange deep harmonies that haunt his breast: Pleasant shall be thy way, where meekly bows The shutting flower and darkling waters pass, And where the o'ershadowing branches ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare himself ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... field so wide and sunny Where the summer clover is, Where each year the mower searches For the nests of wild-bee honey, All along these silver birches Stand up straight in shining row, Dewdrops sparkling, shadows darkling, In the early morning glow; And in gleaming time they're gleaming White, like ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... good mile behind me. The sun had already sunk over the crest of the cliffs, and I could just see the mounted savages through the darkling gloom—still fallowing as fast as their horses could gallop. In five minutes after, I had entered the gorge. The twilight continued no longer: in the canon it was night. I followed the stream upwards, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... Note-Books, Vol. I.] how the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association, even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in Boston. Some of the letters which his sisters wrote him show a delightful solicitude reigning at ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... table was in front of them, and one leapt upon its edge, but as he leapt, the old knight, all his years and sickness forgotten now, sprang forward and struck downwards, so heavy a blow that in the darkling mouth of the passage the sparks streamed out, and where the Saracen's head had been, appeared his heels. Back Sir Andrew stepped again to win space for his sword-play, while round the ends of the table broke two fierce-faced ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... with good effect. Fear, and the other low and bad qualities of the slave, are appealed to, but never the good. The relation, therefore, between capital and labor, which ought to be generous and confiding, is darkling, suspicious, unkindly, full of reproachful threats, and without concord or peace. This condition of things renders the interests of society a prey to politicians. Politics cease ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... climbing, Crabs from the great sea, Sea that is darkling. Black crabs and gray crabs 5 Scuttle o'er the reef-plate. Billows are tumbling and lashing, Beating and surging nigh. Seashells are crawling up; And lurking in holes 10 Are the eels o-u and o-i. But taste the moss akahakaha, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... weeks I had been adrift, and how feebly I had resisted them. I asked myself if there were not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star, as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had missed before—a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of gold; ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... knows, sees all is well; How God had stayed his will and shaped his way, To bring the light to those that darkling dwell With gains ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... midst the leafy bower Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night, With her sweet brood, impatient to descry Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, In the fond quest unconscious of her toil: She, of the time prevenient, on the spray, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... you trow, nuncle, The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had its head bit off by its young. So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... gods think to speak outright to man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... brought to on the highest and most solitary part of the by-road. On the left, a row of fieldside trees beshaded it; on the right, it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his eyes returned to the cabman's face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John's communication, with the air of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... means: And I was fearful even of clouds that drive Across the dawn, and die—of all, of nought - Winds whispering on the darkling ways of thought, Sunbeams that flash like fire, and hopes like fears That slay themselves, and live again, and die. But in mine eyes thy light is, in mine ears Thy music: I am thine, and more than I, Being half of thy ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... silent, and stared at the old woman darkling. Then very slowly, "I said he was my father's friend; I have invited him to my house, and come he shall," she said; and with that she walked off to her room, where she sat staring at the wall all the evening. Miss M'Glashan, for that was the aunt's name, read a large bible in the kitchen with some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... earth; My father's ark of safety hath announced it; The very demons shriek it from their caves; The scroll[151] of Enoch prophesied it long In silent books, which, in their silence, say More to the mind than thunder to the ear: And yet men listened not, nor listen; but Walk darkling to their doom: which, though so nigh, Shakes them no more in their dim disbelief, 280 Than their last cries shall shake the Almighty purpose, Or deaf obedient Ocean, which fulfils it. No sign yet hangs its banner in the air; The clouds are few, and of their wonted texture; The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... "Darkness," Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and the degradation ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... will blame him if his thought recurred, At such a time, to England and the maid Beloved, to whom he gave his plighted word Ere parting? Who will wonder at the shade Of sorrow darkling on his troubled brow, As he reflects on what may not ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats

... neighing of a horse startled him, and he looked across the woods beyond the house, the direction, he calculated, whence the sound came. But there was no horse to be seen. Nothing except the darkling cover of pine woods. It was strange. He was sure the sound came from that direction. No; there was certainly nothing in the shape of a horse out there. There wasn't even a cow. Perhaps it was a "stray" amongst the trees. So he dismissed the matter from his mind and chirruped ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... sought to engage myself with the papers of an approaching suit, but it was impossible to ignore the darkling cloud of disaster which impended. I ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... stepped inside. She saw a folding camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself beside her. His weight brought down ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... and blue; And in one hand a three-pronged spear He holds, the sceptre of his fear, And with the other shakes the reins Of his steeds, with foamy, flowing manes, And coures o'er the brine; And when he lifts his trident mace, Broad Ocean crisps his darkling face, And mutters wrath divine; The big waves rush with hissing crest, And beat the shore with ample breast, And shake the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... wild desire,— Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory—to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— This is the same voice: can thy soul know change Hail then, and hearken from the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... a last retreat Deep in the darkling dell, Where stands, amidst embowering oaks, A ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... A darkling figure, he attained tragedy in leaving the life that had used him so shabbily. Three young gunmen came in one night, tied him up and left him on a pile of coal in the cellar while they went through the trunk room. When the janitor found him ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form. She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... fugitives roam 'Mid imbosk caves and moaning dales To piercing screes of purple gloom, Where gurgling sighs and rasping moans,— Each bloody vampyre's home of loam As life-tides drip to scarlet vales,— Unshadowed haunts of darkling Doom! Add terror to the rasping groans That roaring surfs of rubic blood Fling to each afrite's acrid crypt. And mildewed skulls and ashen bones That lie before each pillared mount, Speak tidings of a leprous flood. And where giants' carcants flare and sit, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque

... night Approaching to the lines, be fired on. Yet yielding to her prayer, he let her go, Giving her all he could, letters to Gates, And for her use an open boat. Thus she set forth, with Chaplain Brudenell For escort, her maid, and the poor Major's man— Thus was she rowed adown the darkling stream. Night fell before they reached the enemy's posts, And all in vain they raised the flag of truce, The sentry would not even let them land, But kept them there, all in the dark and cold, Threatening ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon

... I saw that flood, Which now so dull and darkling steals, Thick, here and there, with human blood, 35 To turn the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... in the West. The night falls darkling over the ocean. They are gone: but their hearts are at home yet a while. In silence, with a heart inexpressibly soft and tender, how each man thinks of those he has left! What a chorus of pitiful prayer rises up to the Father, at sea and on shore, on that parting night at home by the vacant ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and cliques within cliques that made a labyrinth of the palace and extended to all the Seven Coasts. But I did not worry. I left that to Hendrik Hamel. To him I reported every detail that occurred when he was not with me; and he, with furrowed brows, sitting darkling by the hour, like a patient spider unravelled the tangle and spun the web afresh. As my body slave he insisted upon attending me everywhere; being only barred on occasion by Yunsan. Of course I barred him from my moments with the Lady Om, but told him in general what passed, with exception of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... park with a girl whom he afterward declined to make his wife. Minola did not care to meet any of the joyous couples or their friends, and even already the twitter of voices and the titter of feminine laughter were beginning to make themselves heard among the darkling paths and across the broad ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... meet the self-same waste again— The same drear wilderness of stern decay; Its former pride, the phantom of a day; A song of summer-birds within a bower; A dream of beauty traced upon a flower; A lute whose master-chord has ceased to sound; A morning-star struck darkling to the ground." ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer

... to incite the Rube by rousing his temper. And then, as the gong rang and the Rube was departing, Nan stepped forward for her say. There was a little white under the tan on her cheek, and her eyes had a darkling flash. ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... clearer through the density Of darkling woods, do I behold The intervening flecks of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... lessened by means of a sliding resistance. Here, as much as in the natural phenomenon, our reason finds it difficult to acknowledge that the surface gleaming in a whitish sheen should be the one which ordinarily appears as darkling blue, and that the one disappearing into darkness should be the surface which normally ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... to the amphitheatre. Accordingly, two by two, the bishop leading the way with the sainted woman Anna, they walked to the gates. Here a guard of soldiers was waiting to receive them, and under their escort they threaded the narrow, darkling streets till they came to that door of the amphitheatre which was used by those who were to take part in the games. Now, at a word from the bishop, they began to chant a solemn hymn, and singing thus, were thrust along the passages to the place ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... ye darking Arches above him! Loveliest weather, Born of blue ether, Break from the sky! O that the darkling Clouds had departed! Starlight is sparkling, Tranquiller-hearted Suns are on high. Heaven's own children In beauty bewildering, Waveringly bending, Pass as they hover; Longing unending Follows them over. They, with their glowing Garments, out-flowing, Cover, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... of Sulaco. Far away to the south groves of palm trees edged the curve of the harbour shore. The distant peaks of the Cordillera had lost their identity of clearcut shapes in the steadily deepening blue of the eastern sky. The doctor walked briskly. A darkling shadow seemed to fall upon him from the zenith. The sun had set. For a time the snows of Higuerota continued to glow with the reflected glory of the west. The doctor, holding a straight course for the Custom House, appeared lonely, hopping amongst the dark bushes ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... north, with raucous cry, Through tracts and provinces of sky, Every night alighting down In new landscapes of romance, Where darkling feed the clamorous clans By lonely lakes ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... Rene!" exclaimed the woman, her face darkling with passion, "he is Victor's brother, and he is no good. He drinks and gambles and makes the big noise with his mouth. Bou, wou, wou! I am the big man! I can do this! I can do that! I am the best man in the world! ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... who distributed them in smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... her so. He could not understand what it was that made a darkling mist of her eyes and gave her parted lips such ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... satisfaction, and straining the Hungarian to his breast, "O my son," said he, "you see what recompense Heaven hath in store for those who pursue the paths of real virtue; those paths from which I myself have been fatally misled by a faithless vapour, which hath seduced my steps, and left me darkling in the abyss of wretchedness. Such as you describe this happy fair, was once my Serafina, rich in every grace of mind and body which nature could bestow. Had it pleased Heaven to bless her with a lover like Renaldo! but no more, the irrevocable ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... saw her sitting there, the breeze blowing tendrils of bright hair about her face, her strong, lithe hands clasped youthfully about her knees, her beautiful eyes darkling or brightening with the thoughts that passed, could not have connected her with the mere ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... and mediaeval palazzi with carved doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... the auspicious day, When from the mountain where he darkling lay, The Polish sun into the firmament Sprung all the brighter for his late ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... left darkling in the long eclipse That veils the noonday,—you whose finger-tips A meaning in these ridgy leaves can find Where ours go stumbling, senseless, helpless, blind. This wreath of verse how dare I offer you To whom the garden's choicest gifts ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... With the cunning of the Dwarf-kind and the masters of the sword; And he drank and smiled on Grimhild above the beaker's rim, And she looked and laughed at his laughter; and the soul was changed in him. Men gazed and their hearts sank in them, and they knew not why it was, Why the fair-lit hall was darkling, nor what had come to pass: For they saw the sorrow of Sigurd, who had seen but his deeds erewhile, And the face of the mighty darkened, who had known but the light ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris

... therefore can be expected, for offering to the public a short sketch of the life of John Hodgkinson—a man, who, though dropped, at his birth, a darkling, into the world, contrived by the exercise of his personal endowments, without aid, friend, influence, or advantage, save those which nature in her bounty vouchsafed him, to mount to the highest rank in his profession—a profession ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... fire upon my grave When I am dead. 'Twill softly shed its beaming rays, To guide the soul its darkling ways; And ever, as the day's full light Goes down and leaves the world in night, These kindly gleams, with warmth possest, Shall show my spirit where to rest When ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... splendid, giant-like I stood On a white cliff, topped by a darkling wood. Below me, placid, bright and sparkling, lay The equal waters of a lovely bay. White cliffs surrounded it—and calm and fair It lay asleep, ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit

... some faked nature place, In Wonderland, in Nonsense Land, Two darkling shapes met face to face, And ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells

... Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... winter day closed in so fast, Scarce for his task would dreary daylight last; And in all weathers—driving sleet and snow— Home by that bare, bleak moor-track must he go, Darkling and lonely. Oh! the blessed sight (His pole-star) of that little twinkling light From one small window, thro' the leafless trees, Glimmering so fitfully; no eye but his Had spied it so far off. And sure was he, Entering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... the lights in the farm-house. He heard the two Wrinkles, with cracked voices, singing a hymn as they sat in their rocking-chairs on the porch. The very stars seemed to hang lower from the darkling mystery overhead; he felt light enough, in his boundless content, to rise to them and drink at their twinkling founts. His soul seemed to swell to the point of bursting. "Oh, God, I thank Thee!" he said, deep within ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben

... Mother of our God; Hail, thou Ever-sinless Virgin, Gateway of the blest abode. Ave; 'tis an angel's greeting— Thou didst hear his music sound, Changing thus the name of Eva— Shed the gifts of peace around. Burst the sinner's bonds in sunder; Pour the day on darkling eyes; Chase our ills; invoke upon us All the blessings of the skies. Show thyself a watchful Mother; And may He our pleadings hear, Who for us a helpless Infant Owned thee for His mother dear. Maid, above all maids excelling, Maid, above all maidens mild, Freed from sin, oh, make our bosoms ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... she folds her arms, (an attitude which becomes her mightily,) and, still sitting on the door-step, gossips away the evening in comfortable idleness, while her father and I indulge in the fragrant pipe, and watch the lights shining out, one by one, in different quarters of the darkling bay: at these moments she is as pretty, as cheerful, as careless as it becomes a sensible woman to be. What a pride the Captain takes in his daughter! And she, in return, how perfect is her devotion to the old man! He is proud of her grace, of her tact, of her good sense, of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... of feathers rich and rare that did the eyes delight: An it were now on me thou shouldst indeed see wondrous things * That would efface all sorrows and disperse all sores of sprite:' Then deigned our Caliph's Bride to cry, 'Where is that dress of thine?' * And I replied, 'In house of him kept darkling as the night.' So down upon it pounced Masrr and brought it unto her, * And when 'twas there each feather cast a ray of beaming light: Therewith I took it from his hand and opened it straightway ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... of spirit, it seemed something of epic quality, full of a strange, unreal grandeur. Faint red lights here and there revealed nothing of the tunnel; they but lent mystery to dimly seen arches and darkling bastions, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the skies higher yet. Leaves floated in a still, deep pool, were caught in a maddening eddy, and hurried frantically away, unwilling, frenzied, helpless, unknowing whither, never to return,—allegory of many a life outside those darkling solemn mountain woods, and of some, perhaps, in the midst of them. The reflection of the cliffs in the never still current, of the pines on their summits, of the changing sky growing deeper and deeper, till its amber ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... as the world I should foreknow Up into which I was about to rise— Its rains, its radiance, airs, and warmth, and skies, How it would greet me, how its wind would blow— As little, it may be, I do know the good Which I for years half darkling have pursued— The second birth for which ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... you know, nuncle, The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had it head bit off by it young. So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... of ill-omen, and the darkling sky but reflected the gloom of our faces; our thoughts were in keeping with the day, for we had lost a shipmate, one among us was gone, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... employ several adjectives that are not used in prose, or are used but seldom; as, azure, blithe, boon, dank, darkling, darksome, doughty, dun, fell, rife, rapt, rueful, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... devise means of freeing ourselves from it, we ought at once to set about the employing of those means. It would be the most wretched and imbecile fatuity, to shut our eyes to the impending dangers and horrors, and "drive darkling down the current of our fate," till we are overwhelmed in the final destruction. If we are tyrants, cruel, unjust, oppressive, let us humble ourselves and repent in the sight of heaven, that the foul stain may be cleansed, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... But however soft the answer, I question whether the wrath will be turned away. Will there not be a coolness between him and the lady? and is it not possible that henceforth her fine eyes will look with darkling glances upon the pretty orange ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable

... crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! 30 He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning

... friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... been lulled in the long calm of the respite, and when roused again, even by this sudden sorrow, she woke to her old trust and hope. And when she listened to the expressive though calm rehearsal of that solemn sunrise-greeting to the weary darkling fishers on the shore of the mountain lake, it was to her as if the form so long hidden from her by mists of her own raising, once more shone forth, smoothing the vexed waters of her soul, and she could say with a new thrill of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Love's endangered state, Wrought by keen anguish mad, I struck at fate, Prostrating mockingly in sport or hate The aspirations, darkling, we Cherish and resolve ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner

... you, Flaccilla, to you, my father and mother, Here I commend this child, once my delight and my pet, So may the darkling shades and deep-mouthed baying of hellhound Touch not with horror of dread little Erotion dear. Now was her sixth year ending, and melting the snows of the winter, Only a brief six days lacked to the tale of the years. Young, amid dull old age, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... moving worlds presides, Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides, On darkling man in pure effulgence shine, And cheer the clouded mind with light divine. 'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast, With silent confidence and holy rest; From thee, great God! we spring, to thee we tend, Path, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... of the Times can have for us is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What are we, and Whither we tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea; but from what port did we sail? Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

... bit does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter or to parley with fortune—when she declares against ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... that long road she went to seek mankind; Here were the darkling coverts that she beat To find the Hider she was sent to find; Here the distracted footprints of her feet Whereby her soul's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... when darkness fills The dismal days with darkling ills, Rest in the calm the promise gives, That Christ, thy Light ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie

... roses darkling, No stately hollyhocks dim; She is only thinking and dreaming Of the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence. He who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow-beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving

... the moon now peers Out of darkling clouds. The sad, Sleepless waterfalls forever Roar into ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... sometimes forget So were I equall'd with them in renown, Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace; Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old: Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... stimulent to labor and effort, viz.: the lash, when another, viz.: money, might be added with good effect. Fear, and the other low and bad qualities of the slave, are appealed to, but never the good. The relation, therefore, between capital and labor, which ought to be generous and confiding, is darkling, suspicious, unkindly, full of reproachful threats, and without concord or peace. This condition of things renders the interests of society a prey to politicians. Politics cease ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... spread a shadow, cast gloom, throw gloom, spread gloom. extinguish; put out, blow out, snuff out; doubt. turn out the lights, douse the lights, dim the lights, turn off the lights, switch off the lights. Adj. dark, darksome^, darkling; obscure, tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; nocturnal; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Love was never yet without The pang, the agony, the doubt, Which rends my heart with ceaseless sigh, While day and night roll darkling by. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... ye show, Why, lads, so silent here to me, Your watchmate of times long ago? Once, for all the darkling sea, You your voices raised how clearly, Striking in when tempest sung; Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly, Life is storm—let storm! you rung. Taking things as fated merely, Childlike though the world ye spanned; Nor holding unto life too dearly, Ye who held your lives in hand— ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... scenes that followed. Darkling, I passed again through the station called Sybaris, and on and on by the sea-shore, the sound of breakers often audible. From time to time I discerned black mountain masses against a patch of grey sky, or caught a glimpse of blanching wave, or felt my fancy thrill ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... more distinct than all else, staring from the surrounding darkness of the walls, the glorious, palpitating semblance of a warrior of long ago. The strangely living lips, the dusky hollows where thoughtful eyes gleamed darkling. The glint of armor half covered by velvet and fur. A gloved hand that seemed to caress a sword hilt, that caught one crashing ruby light upon its pommel—the matchless Heim Vandyke—the silent, attentive watcher who had seen his sacking of ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... and they were now brought to on the highest and most solitary part of the by-road. On the left, a row of fieldside trees beshaded it; on the right, it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his eyes returned to the cabman's face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John's communication, with the air of one ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... they saw rocks. Darkling and indistinct they loomed up out of the white opaque light. As the children approached they almost bumped against them. They rose up like walls and were quite perpendicular so that scarcely a flake of snow could ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... Throughout his vast divinity the deeps Concurrent thrilled with action, and away, As sweeps a thunder-cloud across the sky In harvest-time, preluded by dull blasts; Or some black-visaged whirlwind, whose wide folds Rush, wrestling on with all 'twixt heaven and earth, Darkling he hurried, and his distant voice, Not softened by delay, was heard in tones Distinctly terrible, still following up Its rapid utterance of tremendous wrath With hoarse reverberations; like the roar Of lions when they hunger, and awake The sullen echoes from their forest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... singer, which enhanced the mystery of her melody and the charm of her young voice. Presently other voices joined in, all in the same meditative, somewhat doleful rhythm. Gayer strains would have sounded sacrilegiously out of tune with the darkling glint of the river, with the mysterious splash of its waves against the bobbing bulkheads of the pier, with the starry enchantment of the passing ferry-boats, with the love-enraptured ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... thy children, gentlest Mother, Pray'rful hearts to thee arise; Hear us while our evening Ave Soars beyond the starry skies. Darkling shadows fall around us, Stars their silent watches keep; Hush the heart oppress'd with sorrow, Dry the ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various

... friendship and declare how high I hold you as a journalist and a man. Or I might speak of those years at Washington when in the gallery we worked shoulder to shoulder; I might recall to you the wit of Hannum, or remind you of the darkling Barrett, the mighty Decker, the excellent Cohen, the vivid Brown, the imaginative Miller, the volatile Angus, the epigrammatic Merrick, the quietly satirical Splain, Rouzer the earnest, Boynton the energetic, Carson the eminent, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... crypto-Catholic, but he was not permitted to practise one creed and profess another. THAT the Pope would not stand. So it was on his death-bed that he made his desperate plunge, and went, it must be said, bravely, on the darkling voyage. ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... clear, colourless, grey overhead; the dock like a sheet of darkling glass crowded with upside-down reflections of warehouses, of hulls and masts of silent ships. Rare figures moved here and there on the distant quays. A knot of men stood alongside with clothes-bags and wooden chests at ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... I looked up again the woman was old. And the woman was old and hoary with years, and her body had shrunk with age, and she had very little life left. But when I looked up the sky was darkling toward night, yes dark like night, and the woman was without hair. I looked to her and knew her not and knew not the sky, and when I looked toward the woman she ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... to me as if there never had been such a day. I look at the sky as we drive along to the station. Call it sapphire, turquoise—indeed! What dull stone that ever lived darkling in a mine is fit to be named even in metaphor with this pale yet brilliant arch that so softly leans above us? It seems to me as if all the people we meet were handsome and well-featured—as if the Elbe were the noblest river that ever ran, carrying the sunlight in flakes of gold and diamond ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... mutually to understand the infamy of the situation. The Impostor had been secretly watching us. He had envied us our happiness. Into his degenerate mind had stolen the darkling and criminal thought that he—Audacious Scoundrel—might impose upon me by pretending he was not merely "a robin" but "The Robin"—Tweetie himself and that he might supplant him in my affections. But he had been confounded and cast ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... reached the outlying Cruisers, and nearly dark when the first ship in the Battle Fleet hailed them. Then hail answered hail as one Battleship after another rose towering above them into the darkling sky, and one by one ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... his dwelling rose above the trees and he saw the darkling panes of his own windows. Soon his lamplight would glow through them, and he would be in the armchair with his book and his pipe. The picture brought back a surge of his conquering spirit. Nothing he had set his hand to had beaten him yet. If he fought as he had ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... should not she best know, love best, And best of all souls understand The very soul of freedom, scanned Far off, sought out in darkling quest By ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... fountain cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb of the faith ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... morning he arose from a few hours' sleep, and beheld the bright sunshine lighting up the glorious Canadian world. Looming giants by moonlight are reduced to very ordinary obstacles by daylight; and the set of desponding thoughts which had weighed upon the young man as he contemplated the inky river and darkling country, seemed now to belong to another phase of being. Despondent! with the wide free world to work in, and its best prizes lying beside the goal, ready for capture by the steady heart and active ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... any affairs. Jehane saw him fed without a twitch of the lips. She was in a great mood, a rapt and pillared saint; but when mass was over and his thanksgiving to make, she got up and hid herself away from him in the shades. There she lurked darkling, and he, lunging out, swept with his sword's point the very edge of her gown. She did not hear him go, for he trod like a cat; but she felt him touch her with the sword, and shuddered once or twice. He went out of the courtyard ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... her heed to the east; where, down the darkling, lamp-studded canyon of a cross-town street, stark against a sky pulsing with the faintest foreboding of daybreak, the gaunt, steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood—in its harshly angular immensity as majestic as the blackened ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... if his thought recurred, At such a time, to England and the maid Beloved, to whom he gave his plighted word Ere parting? Who will wonder at the shade Of sorrow darkling on his troubled brow, As he reflects on ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats

... its master's flying Touched by some few moons first the darkling goal Where shades rose up to greet the shade, ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... optimistic dominie," said Senator Gruff, "was being shown through Sing Sing Prison. In his company went a pessimist who took darkling views of humanity in the lump, and particularly what fractions of the lump had gotten themselves locked up. The pessimist could see no good ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... he sprang off the thwart and resumed his task of baling with renewed zest. "Nevertheless," he continued, "it will be well to keep her afloat as long as we may, since she affords a bigger mark to steer for than would the heads of us two afloat upon the darkling water." ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... cometh and the ending of the strife; And to-morrow and to-morrow shall we take the hand of life, And wend adown the meadows, and skirt the darkling wood, And reap the waving acres, and gather in the good. I see a wall before me built up of steel and fire, And hurts and heart-sick striving, and the war-wright's fierce desire; But there-amidst a door is, and windows are therein; And the fair ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... their boughs, and clove them on the sward, And bound the logs behind their steeds to draw, And drave them homeward; and the snorting steeds Went straining through the crackling brushwood down, And by the darkling forest-paths the Gods Follow'd, and on their shoulders carried boughs. And they came out upon the plain, and pass'd Asgard, and led their horses to the beach, And loosed them of their loads on the seashore, And ranged the wood in stacks by Balder's ship; And every God went ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... sun of August 17, 1777, were glancing down the long valley, which opening to the East, lets in the early rays of morning, upon the village of Stockbridge. Then, as now, the Housatonic crept still and darkling around the beetling base of Fisher's Nest, and in the meadows laughed above its pebbly shoals, embracing the verdant fields with many a loving curve. Then, as now, the mountains cradled the valley in their eternal arms, all round, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad—white, or less white, or even darkling,—the ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... with strokes of smooth swift wings Round the rocks beyond foot's reach, past eyesight's counting, Up the cleft where iron wind of winter rings Round a God fast clenched in iron jaws of fetters, Him who culled for man the fruitful flower of fire, Bared the darkling scriptures writ in dazzling letters, Taught the truth of dreams deceiving men's desire, Gave their water-wandering chariot-seats of ocean Wings, and bade the rage of war-steeds champ the rein, Showed the symbols of ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... what tower of darkling chance Or dungeon of a narrow doom, Dream'st thou of battle-axe and lance That for the cross make crashing room? Come! with strained eyes the battle waits In the wild van thy mace's swing; While doubters parley with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... and flow; The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, O'erlap and move the universe; The workings of the law whence springs The rhythmic harmony of things, Which shapes in earth the darkling spar, And orbs in heaven the morning star. Of all I see, in earth and sky,— Star, flower, beast, bird,—what part have I? This conscious life,—is it the same Which thrills the universal frame, Whereby the caverned crystal shoots, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... rose a fearful cry, That drowned the voice of revelry, And then a glare so fiercely bright, It paled the torches' waning light, And as its blaze more redly glowed, Leaving no niche or grey stone darkling, A deep and deadly current flowed To ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... where the ship rocked at the pier of Leith. They must have got down to some dark spot on the northern slopes, where there would be no city watchman or late passer-by to give the alarm, and all would be clear and still before them to the water's edge—though a long, weary, and darkling way. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... had resisted them. I asked myself if there were not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star, as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had missed before—a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of gold; for a wonderful ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George's Hill and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... wealth I carried in life's pack— Youth, health, ambition, hope and trust; but Time And Fate, those robbers fit for any crime, Stole all, and left me but the empty sack. Before me lay a long and lonely track Of darkling hills and barren steeps to climb; Behind me lay in shadows the sublime Lost lands of Love's ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... a darkling cloud appears, And grows in blackness till the scathing shaft Comes forth with swelling thunder, so the cloud, Black unto bursting with the wrath divine, Hung o'er the head of Israel's erring King. The light of heavenly faith from him was gone, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... light through the deep midnight of the sky where the other worlds wandered. Then the yellow moon came from her palace, wrapping herself at first with a mantle of golden mist, as if—Godiva-like—she shrank from loosening her garments; but the need of the darkling earth pressed upon her, and she dropped her covering and rode forth ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall

... not destitute of that accomplishment, and that he liked, of all things, to be by a darkling river, where you came across the night side of nature in the way of ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... of Towhead (Tete d'etoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in his sack, to the Seine waters; plunging into Night: for Dame de Nesle how cares not for this world's gallantry, heeds not this world's scandal; Dame de Nesle is herself gone into Night. They are all gone; sunk,—down, down, with the tumult they made; and the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Revisit my sad heart, auspicious Smile! As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam: What time, in sickly mood, at parting day 5 I lay me down and think of happier years; Of joys, that glimmer'd in Hope's twilight ray, Then left me darkling in a vale of tears. O pleasant days of Hope—for ever gone! Could I recall you!—But that thought is vain. 10 Availeth not Persuasion's sweetest tone To lure the fleet-wing'd Travellers back again: Yet fair, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... and soft and slow, From darkling earth and darkened sky Wide wings of gloom waved to and fro, ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... address, Madame Rameau hastened to her son's apartment alone through the darkling streets. The house in which he lodged was in a different quarter from that in which Isaura had visited him. Then, the street selected was still in the centre of the beau monde—now, it was within the precincts of ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace in his ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ye were sleepin' on your pillows, Dream'd ye ought o' our puir fellows, Darkling as they faced the billows, A' to fill the woven willows. Buy my caller herrin', New drawn ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... It had a fine effect to enter the Gothic library at dusk, as Miss Seward says she first entered it. The prismatic lantern diffused a light gloomily glaring, assisted by the paler flames of the little lamps on the chimney-piece. Through the open windows was shown a darkling view of the lawn, of the concave shrubbery of tall cypresses, yews, laurels, and lilacs, of the wooded amphitheatre on the opposite hill, and of the gray, barren mountain which forms the background. The evening star had risen above ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... gold and opal silence of the dawn on the canals away from Venice. No one was up but the sun, who did as he liked with the facades and the bridges in the water, and made strange lovelinesses in narrow darkling places, and showed us things in the calli that we did not know were in the world. The Senator was really depressing until he gradually lightened his spirits by working out a scheme for a direct line of steamships between Venice and New York, to be based on an agreement with the Venetian ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... sun may shine upon the clod till it is warm, Warm for its own poor darkling self to live. He smites the diamond, and oh, how glows the gem, Chilling itself, irradiant, ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... autumn shone, Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone: Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower. Stars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the starbright air Made the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... baling with renewed zest. "Nevertheless," he continued, "it will be well to keep her afloat as long as we may, since she affords a bigger mark to steer for than would the heads of us two afloat upon the darkling water." ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... not tell him all The evil that my boding heart predicts! Who's there? The door ne'er opens, but I look For tidings of mishap. Suspicion lurks With darkling treachery in every nook. Even to our inmost rooms they force their way, These myrmidons of power; and soon we'll need To fasten bolts and bars upon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... Crabs from the great sea, Sea that is darkling. Black crabs and gray crabs 5 Scuttle o'er the reef-plate. Billows are tumbling and lashing, Beating and surging nigh. Seashells are crawling up; And lurking in holes 10 Are the eels o-u and o-i. But taste the moss akahakaha, Kahiki! how the sea rages! The ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... mass of crumbling coffins—some belike (The undermost) with their contents crush'd in, Flatten'd, and shapeless. Even in this damp vault, With more completeness could the old Destroyer Have done his darkling work? Yet lo! I look'd Into a small square chamber, swept and clean, Except that on one side, against the wall, Lay a few fragments of dark rotten wood, And a small heap of fine, rich, reddish earth Was piled up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... For the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward

... dear to me the coming forth of stars! After the trivial tumults of the day They fill the heavens, they hush the earth with awe, And when my life is fretted pettily With transient nothings, it is good, I deem, From darkling windows to look forth and gaze At this new blossoming of Eternity, 'Twixt each To-morrow, and each dead To-day; Or else, with solemn footsteps modulate To spheral music, wander forth and know Their radiant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... as the bird, who 'mid the leafy bower Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night With her sweet brood; impatient to descry Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, In the fond ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... combination of white and crimson between the gleaming surfaces of dark wood; and the whole room had an air of splendour with marble consoles, gilt carvings, long mirrors and a sumptuous Venetian lustre depending from the ceiling: a darkling mass of icy pendants catching a spark here and there from the candles of an eight-branched candelabra standing on a little table near the head of a sofa which had been dragged round to face the fireplace. The faintest possible whiff ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... Amphidamas it pass'd To Molus as a hospitable pledge; He gave it to Meriones his son, And now it guarded shrewd Ulysses' brows. 320 Both clad in arms terrific, forth they sped, Leaving their fellow Chiefs, and as they went A heron, by command of Pallas, flew Close on the right beside them; darkling they Discern'd him not, but heard his clanging plumes.[11] 325 Ulysses in the favorable sign Exulted, and Minerva thus invoked.[12] Oh hear me, daughter of Jove AEgis-arm'd! My present helper in all straits, whose eye Marks all my ways, oh with peculiar care 330 ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... night's deck-watch ye show, Why, lads, so silent here to me, Your watchmate of times long ago? Once, for all the darkling sea, You your voices raised how clearly, Striking in when tempest sung; Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly, Life is storm—let storm! you rung. Taking things as fated merely, Childlike though the world ye spanned; Nor holding unto life too ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... from the hives, With loud hum on a spring day pouring forth. So to the fight the warriors followed these; And, as they charged, the thunder-tramp of men And steeds, and clang of armour, rang to heaven. As when a rushing mighty wind stirs up The barren sea-plain from its nethermost floor, And darkling to the strand roll roaring waves Belching sea-tangle from the bursting surf, And wild sounds rise from beaches harvestless; So, as they charged, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... and the inclement air Persuades men to repel benumbing frosts With pleasant wines, and crackling blaze of wood; Me lonely sitting, nor the glimmering light Of make-weight candle, nor the joyous talk Of loving friend, delights; distressed, forlorn, Amidst the horrors of the tedious night, Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal thoughts My anxious mind; or sometimes mournful verse Indite, and sing of groves and myrtle shades, Or desperate lady near a purling stream, Or lover pendent on a willow-tree. Meanwhile ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... end of my pilgrimage, wearied but tranquil, assured of rest and welcome. The freshness and blithe eagerness of the morning are over, the solid hours of sturdy progress are gone, the heat of the day is past, and only the gentle descent among the shadows remains, with cool airs blowing from darkling thickets, laden with woodland scents, and the rich fragrance of rushy dingles. Ere the night falls the wayfarer will push the familiar gate open, and see the lamplit windows of home, with the dark chimneys and gables outlined against the green sky. Those that love him are awaiting ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... nature is the glass through which he sees darkly and often with a darkling mind, the all-pervasive Presence; it is the veil—the veil that ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... Lancaster. It seemed the work of enchantment, so suddenly and so strangely did the fires shoot forth. As the beacon flame increased, it lighted up the whole of the extensive table-land on the summit of Pendle Hill; and a long lurid streak fell on the darkling moss-pool near which the wizard had stood. But when it attained its utmost height, it revealed the depths of the forest below, and a red reflection, here and there, marked the course of Pendle Water. The excitement of the abbot and his companions ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... love when the shy dawn unfoldeth The enchanted radiance of the morning sun— Recall our love when darkling night beholdeth Veiled trains of silvery stars pass one by one, When wild thy bosom palpitates with pleasure, Or when the shades of night lull thee in dreamy measure; Then lend a willing ear To murmurings far and near: Recall ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments of his eternal quest, the curtain of his mind would rise on that unforgettable scene—the cliffs, the rocks, the darkling outline of Flint House, with a feeble beam of light slanting down from the upstairs window at the back which looked out on the sea. Then the gush of light from the open door, and her shape stealing forth into the darkness, followed by another—Thalassa's. And then, the final phase—the desolate ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... strength, not often Among us darkling here the lord of light Makes manifest his music and his might In hearts that open and in lips that soften With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine. Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine, And nourished them indeed with bitter bread; Yet surely from his hand ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... upsprung the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas By each was cleaving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... of rigging. With a few rapid turns he knitted himself to his foe. The wind now acting on the sails of the Serapis forced her, heel and point, her entire length, cheek by jowl, alongside the Richard. The projecting cannon scraped; the yards interlocked; but the hulls did not touch. A long lane of darkling water lay wedged between, like that narrow canal in Venice which dozes between two shadowy piles, and high in air is secretly crossed by the Bridge of Sighs. But where the six yard-arms reciprocally arched overhead, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... never seen her so. He could not understand what it was that made a darkling mist of her eyes and gave her parted lips such ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... channels past our telling, Gentle, resistless, welling, welling, welling; Through what blind ways, we know not whence You darkling come to dance and dimple— Strange little spring! Nature hath no such innocence, And no more secret thing— So mysterious and so simple; Earth hath no such fairy daughter Of all her witchcraft shapes of water. When all the land with summer burns, And brazen noon rides hot and high, And tongues ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... and effort, viz.: the lash, when another, viz.: money, might be added with good effect. Fear, and the other low and bad qualities of the slave, are appealed to, but never the good. The relation, therefore, between capital and labor, which ought to be generous and confiding, is darkling, suspicious, unkindly, full of reproachful threats, and without concord or peace. This condition of things renders the interests of society a prey to politicians. Politics cease ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... shadow o'er him crept. Again he spake: 'That harvest won, when centuries have gone by, What countenance wilt thou wear? How oft on brows Brightened by Baptism's splendour, sin more late Drags down its cloud! The time may come when thou This day, though darkling, yet so innocent, Barbaric, not depraved, on greater heights May'st sin in malice—sin the great offence, Changing thy light to darkness, knowing God, Yet honouring God no more; that time may come When, rich as Carthage, great in arms as Rome, Keen-eyed as Greece, this isle, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... and go, The tided oceans ebb and flow; The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, O'erlap and move the universe; The workings of the law whence springs The rhythmic harmony of things, Which shapes in earth the darkling spar, And orbs in heaven the morning star. Of all I see, in earth and sky,— Star, flower, beast, bird,—what part have I? This conscious life,—is it the same Which thrills the universal frame, Whereby the caverned crystal shoots, And mounts ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them—ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication. For his simple heart Might not resist the sacred influences Which, from the stilly twilight of the place, And from the gray old trunks that ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... the inference is that everybody does. As for the lady, that is not so hard of belief. It very seldom is—with women. They sit so much at windows, that pretty soon their eyes become windows themselves—out of which the soul looks darkling, but preening; out of which it sometimes launches itself into the deep, wooed thereto or not by aubade or serena. But a man, with his vanity haunting him, pulls the blinds down or shuts the shutters, to have it decently to himself, and his looking-glass; and you are not to know what ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... he knows, sees all is well; How God had stayed his will and shaped his way, To bring the light to those that darkling dwell With gains that ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... heart, we have reason to tremble. A conscience quick and sensitive, under the presence of the indwelling Spirit, is like the safety-lamp of the miner, a ready witness and a mysterious guardian against the deathful damps, that unseen, but fatal, cluster around our darkling way. To neglect prayer and watching, is to lay aside that lamp, and then, though the eye see no danger and the ear hear no warning, spiritual death may be gathering around us her invisible vapors, stored with ruin, and rife for a ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they led one clothed in white, whose head ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... their secret, and smite us with the music of the spheres. Suddenly, unheralded, up over the summit of Mount Moriah came the full moan, a silver disc, a lucent, steady orb, globular and grand, filling the valleys with light, touching all things into a hushed and darkling splendor. To us, standing alone, far from sight of human face or sound of human voice, it seemed the censer of God, swung out to receive ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... with her, but a little love-song Elizabeth had learned from Robert Burrell. Her foot had that spring to its lift and fall that shows there is a young innocent heart above it. In and out among the glades she went, almost as brightly and musically as the brook whose sparkling and darkling course she followed. When but a few hundred yards down the path, someone called her. She thought it was a fancy and went onward, nevertheless feeling a sudden silence and trouble. Immediately she heard footsteps and the rustling swish of parting ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... eyes to those of Megabyzus, he saw them filled with a strange fire—eyes like those of an evil spirit, gleaming behind the living windows of darkling hue. It was but for a moment, and the priest ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... thinking this, the first time she saw the passenger with the red hair. She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having unconsciously intruded and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter or to parley with fortune—when she declares against him ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... with hope to guard us against the whales. Not a whit from me could he float afar o'er the flood of waves, haste o'er the billows; nor him I abandoned. Together we twain on the tides abode five nights full till the flood divided us, churning waves and chillest weather, darkling night, and the northern wind ruthless rushed on us: rough was the surge. Now the wrath of the sea-fish rose apace; yet me 'gainst the monsters my mailed coat, hard and hand-linked, help afforded, — battle-sark braided my breast to ward, garnished with gold. There grasped me ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous

... loom; And naught aroused me save his weeping voice of tender tone * And whispered I, 'Fair fall thy foot and welcome and well come!' His cheek I kissed a thousand times, and yet a thousand more; * Then clipt and clung about his breast enveiled in darkling room. And cried, 'Now verily I've won the aim of every wish * So praise and prayers to Allah for this grace now best become.' Then slept we even as we would the goodliest of nights * Till morning came to end our night and light up ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... still alive. They drew up at the very gate where he had whispered her name; the end of the yew walk, where he had sat on a certain night, showed beyond the house; and half a mile behind lay the meadows, darkling now, where he had first met her face to face in the sunset, and the sluice of the stream where they had stood together silent. And all was like a landscape seen through colored paper by a child, it was of the uniform ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... bold word for God and the Truth, until, fulfilled of experience as of knowledge, God set up before him a canvas of utter darkness: he had to fill it with creatures of radiance. God blinded him with his hand, that, like the nightingale, he might "sing darkling." Beyond all, his life was pure from his childhood, without which such poetry as his could never have come to the birth. It is the pure in heart who shall see God at length; the pure in heart who now hear his harmonies. More than all yet, he devoted ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... a shaky voice, after an interval of gulping, though she was unable to lift her eyes, and the darkling lids continued to veil them. She spoke hurriedly, like an ungifted child reciting something committed to memory, but her sincerity was none the less ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington

... Though the fountain cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... first line of men broke into the courtyard, Brian fired the remaining three cannon as fast as he could touch linstock to powder. The bullet-hail tore the front ranks to shreds, but through the darkling smoke-cloud he saw other men come leaping, and knew ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... tricks and artifice I must bow my pride! base are my enemies—uncertain my friends! and verily, in this struggle with blinded and mean men, the soul itself becomes warped and dwarfish. Patient and darkling, the Means creep through caves and the soiling mire, to gain at last the light which ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... hundred feet. The lake itself was not visible until they came upon its very margin, for it lies deep down in a dark hollow among lofty precipices, which, with startling abruptness, descend to the edge of the darkling waters. To cross the lake the traveller must trust to his swimming powers, or to a curiously frail kind of boat which the natives construct on the spot with equal skill and rapidity. Ida Pfeiffer was nothing if not adventurous, and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... universal cry of the woods,—food, food, food; and it is the cry of civilization as well. There is no dingle dell, where the harebell and the anemone grow, where the pine and the spruce stand darkling and sweet peace seems to fold her wings and sit brooding, but danger is there. Danger that crawls and creeps and runs with great bounds. Danger upon velvety paws, that fall on the mosses of the forest carpet ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... deeps Concurrent thrilled with action, and away, As sweeps a thunder-cloud across the sky In harvest-time, preluded by dull blasts; Or some black-visaged whirlwind, whose wide folds Rush, wrestling on with all 'twixt heaven and earth, Darkling he hurried, and his distant voice, Not softened by delay, was heard in tones Distinctly terrible, still following up Its rapid utterance of tremendous wrath With hoarse reverberations; like the roar Of lions when they hunger, and awake The sullen ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... upon the land that atmosphere of serenity, of peace, that is the peculiar property of California's foothill valleys in the late afternoon; the world seemed very distant and not at all desirable, and to Kay there came a sudden, keen realization of how this man beside her must love this darkling valley with the hills above presenting their flower-clad breasts to the long spears of light from the dying day. . ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... hung a bluish haze showed themselves between the hills. The latter were more precipitous; and the brush had now given way to pines of better size and quality than those seen lower down. The river foamed over rapids or ran darkling in pools and stretches. Along the roadside, rarely, we came upon rough-looking log cabins, or shacks of canvas, or tents. The owners were not at home. We thought them miners; but in the light of subsequent knowledge I believe that ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... now peers Out of darkling clouds. The sad, Sleepless waterfalls forever Roar into ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... success try this spell must strictly observe these directions. Steal out all alone to the kiln, and darkling, throw into the pot, a clue of blue yarn: wind it in a new clue off the old one; and towards the latter end, something will hold the thread: demand, wha hauds? i.e., who holds? and answer will be returned from the kiln-pot, ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... DEAR friends, left darkling in the long eclipse That veils the noonday,—you whose finger-tips A meaning in these ridgy leaves can find Where ours go stumbling, senseless, helpless, blind. This wreath of verse how dare I offer you To whom the garden's choicest gifts are due? The hues of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... of which has its roots in the unseen, is that world which the mass of men are in a conspiracy to ignore and forget. And just as the sleeper is unconscious of all around him in his chamber, and of all the stir and beauty of the world in which he lives, so the bulk of us go blind and darkling through life, absorbed in the things seen, and never lift even a momentary and lack-lustre glance to the august realities which lie behind these, and give them all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... on they surged, with flashing spears and scimitars. The overthrown table was in front of them, and one leapt upon its edge, but as he leapt, the old knight, all his years and sickness forgotten now, sprang forward and struck downwards, so heavy a blow that in the darkling mouth of the passage the sparks streamed out, and where the Saracen's head had been, appeared his heels. Back Sir Andrew stepped again to win space for his sword-play, while round the ends of the table broke two fierce-faced ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... soft and slow, From darkling earth and darkened sky Wide wings of gloom waved to and fro, ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... search me out,— Hark, to the whistle and the shout! If farther through the wilds I go, I only fall upon the foe; I'll couch me here till evening gray, Then darkling ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison

... children of the city ran down the hill to their home, in infinite astonishment. And ere they reached it, Elizabeth was weeping with dismay, and the darkling ground about them was white and brittle and active with ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... then, shall Hope and Fear their objects find? Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind? Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise, No cries invoke the mercies of the skies? Inquirer, cease! petitions yet remain, Which Heaven may hear, nor deem Religion vain. 350 Still raise for good the supplicating voice, But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice; ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... breast, "O my son," said he, "you see what recompense Heaven hath in store for those who pursue the paths of real virtue; those paths from which I myself have been fatally misled by a faithless vapour, which hath seduced my steps, and left me darkling in the abyss of wretchedness. Such as you describe this happy fair, was once my Serafina, rich in every grace of mind and body which nature could bestow. Had it pleased Heaven to bless her with a lover like Renaldo! but no more, the irrevocable shaft is fled. I will not taint your enjoyment ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... they clambered on; yet she gave no signs of drowsiness—only of a mortal weariness which seemed to attack the very springs of life. The pomp and pageantry of the heavens, burning with all the pigments of the rainbow, failed to appeal to a soul shut within dungeon bars. Rocks and mighty gorges darkling to the eye and stirring to the imagination held no story for her; she looked neither to the right nor to the left while the beauty lasted, much less when the last gleam had faded from the mountain tops and a troop of leaden ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... scattered now? To them was linked the long forgotten quiver Of nights of youth, those evening hours in which Vague fear with monstrous, sultry happiness Was mingled, and the perfume of young locks With darkling ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... reflection of a homeward-bound hawk in the skies higher yet. Leaves floated in a still, deep pool, were caught in a maddening eddy, and hurried frantically away, unwilling, frenzied, helpless, unknowing whither, never to return,—allegory of many a life outside those darkling solemn mountain woods, and of some, perhaps, in the midst of them. The reflection of the cliffs in the never still current, of the pines on their summits, of the changing sky growing deeper and deeper, till its amber tint, erstwhile so crystalline, became of a dull tawny opaqueness, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... who saw her sitting there, the breeze blowing tendrils of bright hair about her face, her strong, lithe hands clasped youthfully about her knees, her beautiful eyes darkling or brightening with the thoughts that passed, could not have connected her with the mere passivity ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... he was not destitute of that accomplishment, and that he liked, of all things, to be by a darkling river, where you came across the night side of nature in the way of ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... master's flying Touched by some few moons first the darkling goal Where shades rose up to greet the shade, ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... more; methought I saw that flood, Which now so dull and darkling steals, Thick, here and there, with human blood, 35 To turn ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... be gradually lessened by means of a sliding resistance. Here, as much as in the natural phenomenon, our reason finds it difficult to acknowledge that the surface gleaming in a whitish sheen should be the one which ordinarily appears as darkling blue, and that the one disappearing into darkness should be the surface which normally presents ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... meet for him who rules to drive away his stress— He, being god, should lightnings hurl and make a wilderness— But, haste! for night is darkling—soon, the festival it brings; Already see the hydra show its ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... poem "Darkness," Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... waves roll darkling on, And with the current we must go, Perchance to meet some cheerful beams Of ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young

... Is now our dearest friend; the Prince Asander, Though of a hasty spirit and high temper, Dwells in such close, concordant harmony With his loved wife that he is wholly ours; And yet though thus at peace, rumours of war And darkling plots beset us. Is it not thus? Have ye ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... of Norway spruce drawn about it like a funeral scarf. The panelled wooden shutters of the front windows were never opened, and a stranger passing by would have thought the house uninhabited; but all Elmerton knew that behind those darkling hedges and close shutters, somewhere in the depths of the tall many-chimneyed house, lived—"if you can call it living!" Mrs. Tree said—Miss Virginia Dane. Miss Dane was a contemporary of Mrs. Tree's,—indeed, report would have her some ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards

... dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the hollow and flinging a wet orange gleam to the west, a tumble of creamy foam about her to her rolling, shadows like the passage of phantom hands hurrying over her sails to the swaying of her masts, and the swelling sea darkling from ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... aloft. Through the darkling night, faintly visible in the feeble starlight—there was no moon—were driving shapes, a full score of them converging ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner

... believed that he had a soul, but that his soul would die with his body. We then asked him why two and two made four: he said he could not tell, and yet acknowledged he was bound to believe it. The countenances of many around beamed with joy at seeing this darkling perplexed; and we did not shrink from exhorting him to repentance and faith in Christ, who died for him and for ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... long darkling, dawns, and first The mother looks upon the new-born child, Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled When her soul knew at length the Love it nursed. Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay Quickening ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... the human will. To such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... weight of earthly evil bent, In varied toils and woes thy days were spent; 'Till cold Misfortune, with unceasing lower, Weigh'd down thy soul, and deaden'd every power, Reflection's lamp withdrew her guiding ray, And fail'd to point thee on thy darkling way, And thy wild soul prepared to launch alone From Night's dark bosom into worlds unknown: When, sent by Heaven thy earthly deeds to guide, And o'er thy term of varied life preside, I check'd thy course: and Providence by me Unfolds her secret ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker

... came down a long reach of the Shenandoah crossed the road. The ford was waist-deep, but the tall Virginians, plunging without hesitation into the strong current, gained the opposite shore with little loss of time. The guns and waggons followed in long succession through the darkling waters, and still the heavy tramp of the toiling column passed eastward through the quiet fields. The Blue Ridge was crossed at Ashby's Gap; and at two o'clock in the morning, near the little village of Paris, the First Brigade was halted on the further slope. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... being expelled by Louis XV., he adopted (what has never, perhaps, been observed) the wild advice of d'Argenson ('La Bete,' and Louis's ex- minister of foreign affairs), he betook himself to a life of darkling adventures, to a hidden and homeless exile. In many of his journeys he found Pickle in his path, and Pickle finally made his labours vain. The real source of all this imbroglio, in addition to an exasperated daring and a strangely secretive temperament, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... distance ringing, Lightly swinging In the air; 'Tis the water in the dell Where the elfin minstrels dwell, Falling in a rainbow sprinkle, Dropping stars that brightly twinkle, Bright and fair, On the darkling pool below, Making music so; 'Tis the water elves who play On their lutes of spray. Tinkle, tinkle! Like a fairy silver bell; Like a pebble in a shell; Tinkle, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... and smiled on Grimhild above the beaker's rim, And she looked and laughed at his laughter; and the soul was changed in him. Men gazed and their hearts sank in them, and they knew not why it was, Why the fair-lit hall was darkling, nor what had come to pass: For they saw the sorrow of Sigurd, who had seen but his deeds erewhile, And the face of the mighty darkened, who had known but the light ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris

... of poverty which may be nobly accepted and gaily borne; but Vinet, devoured by ambition, and feeling himself guilty towards his wife, was full of darkling rage; his conscience grew elastic; and he finally came to think any means of success permissible. His young face changed. Persons about the courts were sometimes frightened as they looked at his viperish, flat head, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one. Omen? omen? —the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint. —Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... expressed it in words, but he had a feeling that whatever he was meant to do, God would see that he did, so long as he gave himself wholly to the work. One evening when the Southern Cross was lifting above the darkling sea, and the violins were crooning something with a weird burden to it, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... priest opened to them, and, seeing at a glance what was wanted, guided them through a white-washed corridor to a living-room where a crucifix hung on the wall and the table had a red cloth; by this into a dim and stony sacristy, whence they emerged into the back of a darkling little church, with shadowy candlesticks and kneeling-benches, the whole full of a cold, complex odor of old incense and old humanity and, one ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... disinherited successor groans, Needy child of holy parents. These treasures are concealed in secret, In corners of the churches; And it is believed the height of piety To strip your sweet children. Bring out your treasures, Which by evil arts of persuasion You have heaped up and hold, Which you shut up in darkling cave. Public utility demands this, The privy purse demands it, the treasury demands it, That the soldiers may be paid for their services, And the commander may benefit thereby. This is your dogma, then: Give every man his own. Now Caesar recognises his own Image, stamped on the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion

... were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them—ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems—in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the Mightiest ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... can be expected, for offering to the public a short sketch of the life of John Hodgkinson—a man, who, though dropped, at his birth, a darkling, into the world, contrived by the exercise of his personal endowments, without aid, friend, influence, or advantage, save those which nature in her bounty vouchsafed him, to mount to the highest rank in his profession—a profession to excel in which, requires more rich ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... in a long cloak and drew its hood over her head. Then she slipped from the house and stole like a ghost through the darkling streets and out of the Maren or Sea Poort, where the guard let her pass thinking that she was a country woman returning to her village. Now the moon was rising, and by the light of it Lysbeth recognised the place. Here was the spot where she had stood on the day of the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... arrived at a hillside, at the foot of which lay the lake, whose darkling waters were just distinguishable through an opening in the trees. As the duke was debating with himself whether to go on or retrace his course, the trampling of a horse was heard behind them, and looking in the direction ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... confidential, But when into the lamp-bright zone you flit, I shrink into some corner penitential. A well-dressed crowd, their tailors all unpaid, Throng round you there, and cuffs and collars glisten; Of pity's blindness, as of scorn, afraid, I shun the merry fray, and darkling listen, For who could urge the timidest of suits, Conscious of such indifferent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various

... across country to where the ship rocked at the pier of Leith. They must have got down to some dark spot on the northern slopes, where there would be no city watchman or late passer-by to give the alarm, and all would be clear and still before them to the water's edge—though a long, weary, and darkling way. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... of it. We're good in emairgencies, the now; when the time comes when we get a glimmer that all life is emairgency and tremblin' peril, that every turn may be the wrong turn—when we can see that our petty system of suns and all is nobbut a wee darkling cockle-boat, driftin' and tossed abune the waves in the outmost seas of an onrushing universe—hap-chance we'll no loom so grandlike in our own een; and we'll tak' hands for comfort in the dark. 'Tis good theology, yon wise saying of the silly street: ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... stood broadside to them a very plain, two-story house of uncoursed gray rubble, whose open door sent forth no welcoming gleam. Its windows, too, save one softly reddened by a remote lamp, reflected only the darkling sky. This was their home, called by every ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

... fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a very darkling mood—"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives? Wouldn't ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... the growl. I saw a little old man in a chair much too big for him, and in a wig much too big for him. His head was bent forward until his sharp chin touched his breast, and out from under his darkling brows a pair of little eyes flashed angrily and arrogantly. All faces were turned toward him, and all ears were open to his growls. He was the king; ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious than the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... had been suddenly and irrevocably cut off from it. I gossiped as well as I could of this and that. All the time the strangeness of him was shaping itself in my mind; and as I talked I peered at his odd, pallid face in the dim light of the binnacle lantern behind me. Then I looked out at the darkling sea, where in the dimness his little ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... ye gloomy Vaulted abysses! Tenderer, clearer, Friendlier, nearer, Ether, look through! O that the darkling Cloud-piles were riven! Starlight is sparkling, Purer is heaven, Holier sunshine Softens the blue. Graces, adorning Sons of the morning— Shadowy wavings— Float along over; Yearnings and cravings After them ...
— Faust • Goethe

... deep slumberer, when some flitting light half startled him into awaking, yet left him half enveloped in dreams—so to me, in the strict embrace of the Shadow came that light which alone might have had power to startle—the light of enduring Love. Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp earth. Upon my mouldering bones there descended the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... waited, darkling, till the dawn Should touch me into bloom, While all my being panted To outpour its first perfume, When, lo! a paler flower than mine Had blossomed in ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... seest, what saying was this of thine, God, that thy power has breathed into my lips? 280 For from no sunlit shrine darkling ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... supporting me, leave off now, lay me down, I have no strength in my feet. Death is near, and darkling night creeps upon mine eyes—my children, my children, no more your mother is—no more.—Farewell, my children, long may ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... family at top with many heads and slender brains; a band of brothers and cousins wrangling, intriguing, tripping up each others' heels, and unlucky Rudolph, in his Hradschin, looking out of window over the peerless Prague, spread out in its beauteous landscape of hill and dale, darkling forest, dizzy cliffs, and rushing river, at his feet, feebly cursing the unhappy city for its ingratitude to an invisible and impotent sovereign; his excellent brother Matthias meanwhile marauding through the realms and taking one crown ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... to go. No doubt he felt unusually irritable. "By the holy smoke!" he exclaimed. "I wish there wasn't a baby under the Canopy!"—and while I was trying to puzzle out and piece together all these darkling hints and inferences, the Old Squire came up stairs and after a word with Addison and Gram, told me that I would have to rig up, get on old Sol's back and take my first turn riding for Dr. Cummings. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... went, grilling him with eyes. Newcomers received the story of the crime in darkling whispers; and the outcast sat and sat and sat, and squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. (He did one or two things with his spine which a professional contortionist would have observed with real interest.) And all this while of freezing suspense was ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... on the opposite side of the deck, resolved to accept Bassett's own definition of their relations—markedly expressed in Bassett's back and shoulders that were stolidly presented to him. Dan, searching out the lights that were just beginning to blink on the darkling shores, found the glimmering lanterns of Mrs. Owen's landing. Sylvia was there! It was Sylvia he had come to see, and the coldness with which Morton Bassett turned his back upon him did not matter in the least. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George's Hill and the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... and see The raindrops flaming goldenly On the stream's eddies overhead And dragonflies with drops of red In the crisp surface of each wing Threading slant rains that flash and sing, Or under the water-lily's cup, From darkling depths, roll slowly up The bronze flanks of an ancient bream Into the hot sun's shattered beam, Or over a sunk tree's bubbled hole The perch stream in a golden shoal: Come, ye sorrowful; our deep ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... which are a part of the mystery of the west, of the forests, of the greenwood, of the meads, of the laughing coast, white as with dawn in the east, darkling in the west, I know not how to speak, for in England of my heart we take them for granted and are satisfied. They fill all that quiet and fruitful land with their own joy and beneficence, and are a part of God's pleasure. Because of them the name of England of my heart might be but Happiness, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... Mountain rill, that darkling, sparkling, Winds and wanders down the hill, 'Mid the rushes, whispering, murmuring, Oh that I ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... As the messenger hastened with the King's billet-doux, and the Brethren on the northern frontier were setting out for Poland, Augusta and Bilek were on their way to the famous old castle of Prglitz. For ages that castle, built on a rock, and hidden away in darkling woods, had been renowned in Bohemian lore. There the mother of Charles IV. had heard the nightingales sing; there the faithful, ran the story, had held John Ziska at bay; there had many a rebel suffered in the terrible "torture-tower"; and there Augusta ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... canon is guarded; but like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the birds are ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... thou art! And yet there dwells Within thy sylvan solitudes A memory which darkling broods And all ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... dismayed! when darkness fills The dismal days with darkling ills, Rest in the calm the promise gives, That Christ, ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie

... Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and—the germ of Byron! Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs. Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character. So too Byron's gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni. This is so obvious that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note, parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour." Sir Walter did ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... single destruction. And now the dreadful day was at hand; the rites were being ordered for me, the salted corn, and the chaplets to wreathe my temples. I broke away, I confess it, from death; I burst my bonds, and lurked all night darkling in the sedge of the marshy pool, till they might set their sails, if haply they should set them. Nor have I any hope more of seeing my old home nor my sweet children and the father whom I desire. Of them will they even ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... dwelling rose above the trees and he saw the darkling panes of his own windows. Soon his lamplight would glow through them, and he would be in the armchair with his book and his pipe. The picture brought back a surge of his conquering spirit. Nothing he had set his hand to had beaten him yet. If he fought as he had fought for his education, was fighting ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... vanish'd as the day Passes, and leaves the darkling earth behind; And overhead the April sky was grey, But Helen's arms about her lord were twined, And his round her as clingingly and kind, As when sweet vines and ivy in the spring Join their glad leaves, nor tempests may unbind The woven boughs, so ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... outlines, as though a mighty torrent had once surged between them, forcing the very rocks to crumble before its headlong career. But now only a gentle stream wandered through the broad bed, here shallow over the sand, there darkling in a still pool, now making a green willow-shaded island, and now a deep rock-bordered channel, doing its best with the various graceful devices of a happy little stream to compensate for the absence of the river, to whose former existence the cliffs bore silent witness and the pines testified ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... that did the eyes delight: An it were now on me thou shouldst indeed see wondrous things * That would efface all sorrows and disperse all sores of sprite:' Then deigned our Caliph's Bride to cry, 'Where is that dress of thine?' * And I replied, 'In house of him kept darkling as the night.' So down upon it pounced Masrr and brought it unto her, * And when 'twas there each feather cast a ray of beaming light: Therewith I took it from his hand and opened it straightway * And saw its plumd bosom and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... asked whether the stars form a system, and if so, whether that system is permanent. We are not able to answer yet. We have said that the sun would in time become as icy cold and dead as the moon, and then the earth would wander darkling in the voids of space. But the end of the earth, as prophesied in the Word, is different: "The heavens will pass away with [Page 238] a rushing noise, and the elements will be dissolved with burning heat, and the earth and the works therein will be burned up." The latest conclusions ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... "The darkling pathway o'er the restless waters Of seven seas that circle Death's domain I trod, and followed after earth's sad daughters Torn from their loved ones and ne'er ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... not speak. A stone could have been no colder as she stood in the light of the fire, her face still and strong, the eyes darkling, luminous. There was on her the dignity of the fearless, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... reserved to take an early opportunity of reading, but replaced for the present, and, having come at last upon one hopeful-looking key, I made haste to return before my candle, which was already flickering in the socket, should go out altogether, and leave me darkling. When I reached the kitchen, however, I found the grey dawn already breaking. I retired once more to my chamber, and was ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... an eye, darkling as an eagle's, on Bernadotte. "And what are they saying of me?" ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an old-fashioned ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... done it, his still darkening, melodramatic manner misleads the audience into supposing that in Act III, he will make away with his objectionable wife, possess himself of the two hundred pounds, and then, just at the moment when, with a darkling scowl and a gleaming eye, he steps forward to claim his affianced bride, Scollick, Mr. ALFRED HOLLES, hitherto only known as the drunken gardener, will throw off his disguise, and, to a burst of applause from an excited ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various

... would read Michelet's Louis Quatorze et la Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged tragedies of Madame and of Moliere, as they look, darkling and sombre, out of their niches in the great gingerbread facade of the Grand Age, go wonderfully ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... colourless, grey overhead; the dock like a sheet of darkling glass crowded with upside-down reflections of warehouses, of hulls and masts of silent ships. Rare figures moved here and there on the distant quays. A knot of men stood alongside with clothes-bags and wooden chests at their feet. Others were coming ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine. No—not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling sky. Just by it there's a group of stars like a ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... and went to the window, gazing out a moment into the darkling night where unknown myriads of mosquitoes lurked all unconscious of the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... a forgotten streak of day That trembles through the hemlocks' darkling bars, And still, my heart, still some divine delay Upon the threshold holds ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... Like darkling birds her eyelashes Upon her cheek lay fluttering light. Her kirtle's swinging cadences Displayed her limbs ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier

... servers, who distributed them in smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... had been precipitated into the Seine so unexpectedly and with such violence he kept control of his wits: he did not utter a cry as he fell head foremost into the darkling river. He was an excellent swimmer: all aching as he was, he let himself go with the current and presently reached the sheltering arch of the Pont Neuf. There he ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... the word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens a prospect. There are moments when the music of "Pelleas," the fine fluid line of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pass and vanish into one another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe vast darkling forms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments of human intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The tenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art. And tenderness, after all, is the most intense ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld









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