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More "Formless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who make comprehensible to the latter the utterances of the gods; the demons, he thinks, are servants of the gods and execute their will. They make visible to men in works and words the invisible and inexpressible things of the gods; the formless they reveal in forms and they reveal in concepts what transcends all concepts. From the gods they receive all the good of which they are capable, partially or according to their nature, and share it again with the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... is poured freely into space, but our world is a halting place where this energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells; the selfsame essence takes a million shapes and hues, and finally dissolves into its primitive and almost formless form. The sun comes to us as heat; he quits us as heat; and between his entrance and departure the multiform powers of our globe appear. They are all special forms of solar power—the molds into which his strength is temporarily ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... reappears, but narrowed, and changed almost beyond recognition. Hills, hewn out of solid sandstone, succeed each other at distances of about two miles, low, crushed, sombre, and formless. Presently a forest of palm trees, the last on that side, announces Aswan and Nubia. Five banks of granite, ranged in lines between latitude 24 deg. and 18 deg. N., cross Nubia from east to west, and from ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sound, and looking for it, saw in the opposite direction a formless object, as much darker than the gray of the void as the flame was brighter, and it too was growing larger, and coming. And it seemed to him that this light and darkness were the good and evil of his life, and he watched, to see which would reach ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... dislodged from our brain. Retaining no vindictive feeling towards Mawls - no feeling whatever, indeed - we infer that neither he nor we can have loved Miss Frost. Our first impression of Death and Burial is associated with this formless pair. We all three nestled awfully in a corner one wintry day, when the wind was blowing shrill, with Miss Frost's pinafore over our heads; and Miss Frost told us in a whisper about somebody being 'screwed down.' It is the only distinct recollection we preserve ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... consideration that, "The faculty of speech is the medium of social bliss for superior intelligences in an eternal world;" [51] and who, when he has exhausted censure in condemning the practical instruction of others, thus lavishes praise, in both his grammars, upon that formless, void, and incomprehensible theory of his own: "This application of words," says he, "in their endless use, by one plain rule, to all things which nouns can name, instead of being the fit subject of blind cavil, is the most sublime theme presented to the intellect on earth. It is the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... spirits, with whom I have spoken about this matter, have been deeply grieved at such ignorance in the church about the condition of heaven and of spirits and angels; and in their displeasure they charged me to declare positively that they are not formless minds nor ethereal breaths, but are men in very form, and see, hear, and feel equally with those who ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... enough to be worried about what comes to me. I am only a part of greatness which cannot fail of reaching its end." She thought this all vaguely. She had no language for it, for she was very young; it was formless as music, but as true ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... unmade spheres, And, like a blessing or a curse, They thunder down the formless years And ring throughout ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of twenty-three when he wrote this. That, with so much command of expression and of measure, he should run waste and formless and even void, as he does in other parts of his volumes, is very mysterious and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... much, however, is certain, that the undetermined, widely expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are alone adapted to the sublime, which, if it is to be excited in us through external objects, formless, or moulded into incomprehensible forms, must surround us with a greatness to which we ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... weight, as it rolled from ledge to ledge, accelerated each instant by the force of the cataract. A world, tossed out of gravity and crashing among the planets, could not have been more awfully distinct. Down—down—down—a formless mass of fibre and bone, the mist seemed to buoy it up when it reached the deepmost cascade, and as it disappeared through the tops of the pines I heard the coming ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... fire—whether it had been the barn or the house—had burned itself out. Whatever had happened, it was over. As she stood shuddering, unable to think, not daring to think, her eyes rested upon the bear, huge and formless in the gloom, staring at her, not ten feet away. She answered the stare fixedly, no longer aware of fearing him. Then she saw him turn his head suddenly, as if he had heard something. And the next moment he had faded away swiftly ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist if ever there was one. I turn to his Land of the Dollar and I find New York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote him fairly: I omit his laudatory antitheses. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Then does everything become more mysterious, the sky frowns with clouds, yellow leaves strew the paths at the edge of the naked forest, and the forest itself turns black and blue—more especially at eventide when damp fog is spreading and the trees glimmer in the depths like giants, like formless, weird phantoms. Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... endless long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a death ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a whole ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... feel to be so much more real than our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which to many minds will seem uncalled for and ridiculous. I mean the experiment of trying to visualize, by an arbitrary exercise of fancy, the sort of form or shape which this formless and shapeless thing may be imagined ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... in fitful beauty, Every moment fraught with change, Every break and mystic chasm Opening up a Heaven-range: Now the eastern peaks are kindling Glow as though the Morning's heart Throbbed against them, while the formless Clouds to phantom ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... enemy's fleet. The picture offered by the two fleets in the cold haze of that fateful morning, as a matter of fact, reflected the difference in their fighting and sea-going qualities. The Spanish fleet, a line of monsters, straggled, formless and shapeless, over miles of sea space, distracted with signals, fluttering with many-coloured flags. The English fleet, grim and silent, bore down upon the enemy in two compact and firm-drawn columns, ship following ship so closely and so exactly that bowsprit and stern almost ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... nor wood nor metal.' Within these temples cemented with the blood of oppressed races grin and crouch the hideous, foul demons which usurp the libations, the offerings, and the sacrifices. One only God, infinite, eternal, formless, colourless, fills the immensity of the heavens which you people with a multitude of phantoms. Our God has created us; you have ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... answered at once, and as he stood on the step he glanced back at the city, which, in the dark, showed only the formless bulk of houses and the cold electric lights here and there. Then he heard a light step, and the door was thrown open. He handed his card to the maid, merely saying, "Mr. and Mrs. Grayson," and waited to be shown into the parlor. But the girl, whose face ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... thrown in his lot, in which she stood in the glare of the footlights with a dense packed theatre applauding to madness; scenes not outlined clear and projected in space, but which were to him shapeless silhouettes and dazzling formless patches of light flitting across the extreme background of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... of Deschamps marks an important stage in the history of French poetry. With him and his contemporaries the long, formless narrations of the trouvres give place to complicated and exacting kinds of verse. He was perhaps by nature a moralist and satirist rather than a poet, and the force and truth of his historical pictures gives him ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... organisms of the lowest form, discovered by himself, which have not so much as the organic rank of a cell, but are only corpuscules of mucus, without kernel or external covering, called by him cytod, and arising from an organic carbon formation. The lowest and most formless moneron is the bathybius, discovered by Thomas Huxley, a network of recticular mucus, which in the greatest depths of the sea, as far down as 7,000 metres, covers stone fragments and other objects, but are also found in less depths, in the Mediterranean Sea, for instance. From the moneron ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... known, the master knew nothing at all about music, and the same was true of those around him. It is a matter of conjecture how the master and his followers happened to mistake some absurd and formless motif for one of Beethoven's sublime inspirations. Victor Hugo adapted the beautiful verses of Stella to this halting motif. It was published as an appendix in the Chatiments, with a remark about the union of two geniuses, the fusion of ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... whatever. It alone can be styled "this" or "that" (tode or touto); they rise no higher than "of such kind" or "of what kind or quality" (toiouton or opoionoun ti).[593] It is not earth, or air, or fire, or water, but "an invisible species and formless universal receiver, which, in the most obscure way, receives the immanence of the intelligible."[594] And in relation to the other two principles (i.e., ideas and objects of sense), "it is the mother" to the father and the offspring.[595] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the slight departures from the normal type known as variations and mutations, from the malformations. Certain of the malformations known as monstrosities hardly represent the human type. These are the cases in which the foetus is represented in a formless mass of tissue, or there is absence of development of important parts such as the nervous system or there is more or less extensive duplication of the body. There has always been a great deal of popular interest attached to the malformations owing to the part which maternal impressions are ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... Herschel's belief that by processes of condensation, following the loss of heat by radiation into surrounding space, formless nebulae gravitated into nebula of smaller and smaller volumes until finally the planetary form was reached, and that planetaries were the ancestors of stars in general. That the planetaries do develop into stars, we have every reason to believe; but that all nebulae, or relatively ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... staring at the tumbler, watching little bubbles, revelling in what remained of his exquisite faculty of minute sight—with a feeling of great peace; and thought prayerfully; lost himself in a kind of formless prayer without words—lost himself completely. It was as if the wished-for dissolution were coming of its own accord; Nirvana—an ecstasy of conscious annihilation—the blessed end, the end of all! as ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Moses what science in our day is only beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos? ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood, or the era when the earth was formless and void. It is mere futility to talk of cause and effect in connection with a string of arbitrarily chosen incidents of this sort. Cause and effect, in Turgot's sense of history, describe a relation between certain sets or groups of circumstances, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... out what manner of creature it was which gripped the satchel's handle and whose eyes pulsed back greenish flares into the torch's dim glow. But it was an animal of some kind;—distorted and formless in the wavering finger of blunted light; but still an animal. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such "household arts" as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... religious are too volatile to remain in the solution or salt of any bottled creed. Like the wandering lights of the Russians, answering to our will-o'-the-wisp, they are the souls of still-born children. There is, for example, the insubstantial and formless but pleasing conception of the Indian Veda. In the Ramayanam the moon is a good fairy, who in giving light in the night assumes a benignant aspect and succours the dawn. In the Vedic hymn, Raka, the full moon, is exhorted to sew the work with a needle which cannot be broken. Here ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... is not many, and therefore has no parts, and therefore is not a whole, which is a sum of parts, and therefore has neither beginning, middle, nor end, and is therefore unlimited, and therefore formless, being neither round nor straight, for neither round nor straight can be defined without assuming that they have parts; and therefore is not in place, whether in another which would encircle and touch the one at many points; or in itself, because that which is self-containing ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... first corner, he had an uneasy feeling that a thing—a formless, unimaginable thing—was dogging him. He had thought of going down to his club-room; but he now shrank from entering, with this thing near him, the lighted rooms where his set were busy with cards and billiards, over their liquors and cigars, and where the heated ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... fundamental ideas were profoundly incompatible. We were both still very young in quality, we had scarcely begun to think ourselves out, we were greatly swayed by the suggestion of our circumstances, complex, incoherent and formless emotions confused our minds. But I see now that in us there struggled vast creative forces, forces that through a long future, in forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far more than Mary I was accepting the conventions ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... no second bidding. While the men talked, an insidious depression had stolen over her spirit—and brooded there, light and formless as a river mist. Half an hour with her fiddle, and Lance at his best, completely charmed it away. But the creepiness of it had been very ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... nearer his grave than ever before in all his wild experience, for somehow doom, shadowy and formless, like the atmosphere of an awful dream, enmisted those words; but he was no weakling to quit at the height of desperate conflict. He was strong, expert, and game to the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... thousand years I slept beneath the sod, My sleep in 1901 beginning, Then, by the action of some scurvy god Who happened then to recollect my sinning, I was revived and given another inning. On breaking from my grave I saw a crowd— A formless multitude of men and women, Gathered about a ruin. Clamors loud I heard, and curses deep enough to swim in; And, pointing at me, one said: "Let's put him in." Then each turned on me with an evil look, As in my ragged shroud I stood ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... across the stage, and their motions as they moved to and fro behind the curtain were plainly recognized. The deception was perfect, and the effect was startling. One almost believed that he saw the forms of formless creatures. And this is what we may do in viewing the operation of the Creative Will—we may take a look at the moving form of the Will behind the curtain of the forms of the manifestation of life. We may see it pressing and urging here, and bending there—building up here, and ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... composed of all four elements—of earth, of water, of fire and of air—in equal proportions. One part each, lending each its own essential quality to the mixture, so that the sky is solid as earth, radiant as fire, formless as water, insubstantial as air. And the sky is cracking and falling, as you have seen for yourself. The effects are already being felt. Gamma radiation is flooding through the gaps; the quick-breeding viruses are mutating ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... to himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up; and, by strict deductions from admitted dynamical principles, shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... rather, pure Eternal Stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God as with a mantle didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite!" ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... breaking at the foot of the ramparts, or the whisper of the breeze amongst the palm-trees. I caught sight of mysterious couples sitting in the shadows of the alamos, black dresses and mantillas blending with the men's "capas," and from these formless groups a stifled murmur rose, with the noise of fans, like the beating wings of an imprisoned bird. I wandered through the streets and the Plazo Santo Antonio. I saw delightful balconies and glistening eyes that shone behind the lattices; exquisite forms glided over the white flags ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... a, privative, and morfe, form), a term used in chemistry and mineralogy to denote the absence of regular or crystalline structure in a body; the adjective "amorphous,'' formless or of irregular shape, being also used technically in biology, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would be only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet, again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and formless, with a moaning cry for Justice—Justice—Judgment on him who had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many a Hall was spilt by the men of Percival Reed's clan without ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... seemed, however, but a natural evolution in his present mental and spiritual exaltation. It was as if the page were a blank sheet and he were wielding an invisible pen. Although, before he took up the letter, he had had no idea of its contents beyond a formless, general intuition, as soon as he began to read he was clearly aware of every coming word and sentence and sentiment in it. So strong was the impression, that once he involuntarily dropped the note and, picking ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... someone, Marto he thought, shouting his name and calling "Sumidero! Sumidero!" He did not understand, and kept right on. Others were shouting at Tula with as little result, the clatter of the horses and the rumble of the breaking storm made all a formless ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... lovesick girl. She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move, afraid to breathe lest she break the wonderful spell of the magic. Not only her basic common sense, but the very soul that shaped her body had become as light, as sweet, as formless as ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... worn by officers attached to the Base, graceful nursing uniforms, haphazard convalescent uniforms, discoloured blue uniforms of French permissionaires. Everybody is bilingual, speaking, if not both English and French, either one or other of these languages and the formless Angliche patois invented by Tommy and his hosts of the occupied zone. And everybody, soldier and civilian, treats as a matter of course the strange metamorphosis of what was formerly a haven for ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendor of their ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... with these girls' letters before him, and lost himself in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young man thinks about young girls; his soul is suffused with a sense of their sweetness and brightness, and unless he is distinctly in love there is no intention in his thoughts of ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... had the same idea the name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, La Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but "the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland—formless grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... Death? Pale forms of men To formless clay resolve again; Sarcophagus of graven stone, Nor solitary grave, unknown, Mausoleum, or funeral urn, No answer to our cries return; Nor silent lips disclose their trust; "Ashes to ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... colors, the eager expression of features that must once have been eminently handsome—above all, the air of almost ferocious authority, with which she was speaking, struck him as strangely out of place in that solitary spot. Beyond this, he felt a vague impression, impalpable and formless, of some connection between that woman and former events of his own life. It might have been her dress so foreign to the place, or her humble mode of life. The Madras kerchief, folded in a turban over the black hair falling down each side of ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... photographs were not to be purchased in the Burlington Arcade—she had kept out of that; but she looked more than ever as they would have represented her if they had been obtainable there. There were times when Laura thought her brother-in-law's formless desistence too frivolous for nature: it even gave her a sense of deeper dangers. It was as if he had been digging away in the dark and they would all tumble into the hole. It happened to her to ask herself whether the things he had ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of their silent god, where scorn and passion contend for place. The dim lights, the shadows blending with them, the fine harmony of colors, the wild harmony of sounds, the fantastic phantoms, the overcoming sentiment, all the poetry and the pity of the scene,—the formless longing, the undefined sense of wrong! ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... at the front of the camera. And—an experience I am familiar with now—I seemed to rush into the bottomless darkness of that hole and back again, at the rate of thousands of times a second, arriving at some formless destination and each time feeling it take on more ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... father after supper, standing up between the folding doors of the library, acting out the whole narrative with furious gestures. Once he even wrote a little poem which seriously disturbed the Old Gentleman, filling him with formless ideas and vague ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He had taken the day boat from Albany, and about the middle of the ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... movies and the week-end's dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... rolled over both the fugitives—a groan, or rather howl, of rage, and despair, and agony, appalled even the hardest on whose ear it came. Morton sprang to his feet and looked below. He saw on the rugged stones far down, a dark, formless, motionless mass—the strong man of passion and levity—the giant who had played with life and soul, as an infant with the baubles that it prizes and breaks—was what the Caesar and the leper alike are, when the clay ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rose to her ordinarily pale cheeks, corresponding with a formless gladness permeating his own being. She wore ruffled lavender with a clear lace pelerine caught at her breast by a knot of straw-coloured ribbon and sprig of rose geranium. "Mr. Penny," she said, with a little gasp of surprise; but her ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image of the forteresse ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the forest routine, gave ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... offering. An old man named Johnson who sat near us was already beginning to breathe heavily, preparatory to sinking into his regular Sunday snore. Then those words from the preacher, bringing me suddenly—how shall I express it?—out of some formless void, to intense consciousness—a ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and potent immensity ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Svanhild, do not jest: behind your scoff Tears glitter,—O, I see them plain enough. And I see more: when you to dust are fray'd, And kneaded to a formless lump of clay, Each bungling dilettante's scalpel-blade On you his dull devices shall display. The world usurps the creature of God's hand And sets its image in the place of His, Transforms, enlarges that part, lightens ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... of night had settled upon the river. Stars twinkled overhead. The high, scrub-timbered shore loomed formless and black, and the flat bottom of the scow rasped harshly on gravel. Vermilion leaped ashore, followed by the scowmen, and Chloe assisted Big Lena with the still unconscious form of Harriet Penny. As if by magic, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... eye, in the still, small hours, sees moving in the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large portions of the room with some formless presence ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, {7} like it, containing within it a promise and a ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... to Winfried and his companions. A great throng of people were gathered around it in a half-circle, their backs to the open glade, their faces toward the oak. Seen against that glowing background, it was but the silhouette of a crowd, vague, black, formless, mysterious. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... rolls his stone. I have not forgotten Tantalus; but he stands elsewhere, stands parched on the Lake's very brink, like to die of thirst, poor wretch! Then there is the numerous class of neutral characters; these wander about the meadow; formless phantoms, that evade the touch like smoke. It seems that they depend for their nourishment upon the libations and victims offered by us upon their tombs; accordingly, a Shade who has no surviving friends or relations passes a hungry time of it ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... He seized his companion by the arm and, leaning forward, stared across the level garden into the shadows opposite. Something was moving there, under the trees; the men could see that it was white and formless, and that it ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... wander with her through the woods when she went in search of food, she generally left him hidden in a thicket or behind a bush or a fallen tree. There he spent many a long, lonely hour, idly watching the waving branches and the moving shadows, and perhaps thinking dim, formless, wordless baby thoughts, or looking at nothing and thinking of nothing, but just sleeping the quiet sleep of infancy, and living, and growing, and getting ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... an opal—all sparkle when you move it, and at rest dull, most undeniably dull. No, that wasn't it exactly. She was a looking-glass for other people's personalities (he hated the horrid word, and apologised to himself for using it), formless and colourless, reflecting form and colour. After a moment's satisfaction with this last fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of metaphor. That was not his way. To find out what lay at the bottom of this shifting personality, what ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... that flame forth the doubtful truth, that tell their own story and need no interpreter, the high ideal instances that talk in verse because it is their native tongue and they can no other. He has found,—or rather nature lent it to him, the universal historic solvent, and the dull, formless, miscellaneous facts of the common human experience, spring up in magic orders, in beautiful, transparent, scientific continuities, as they arrange themselves by ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... is not bad, I think. But what a difference between the two languages in the matter of precision! It is like the difference between stump and graving-tool—the one showing the effort, the other noting the result of the act; the one making you feel all that is merely dreamed or vague, formless or vacant, the other determining, fixing, giving shape even to the indefinite; the one representing the cause, the force, the limbo whence things issue, the other the things themselves. German has the obscure depth of the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... public and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying data—chapter and verse—in support of the assertions I have made. They do it abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, and smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a considerable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of things heard and seen—data and memoranda which I designed to use in the already projected book which is now in your hands. Such ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Universe less a mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffused matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... he shut out everyone and flung himself on his bed, in a state of stupor that weighed him down till night—a sort of dull torpor of brain, with utter exhaustion of physical strength—a misery of formless thought. Towards evening one persistent idea aroused him ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... wanting where he was most ambitious to excel. It was a thing to lay to heart, an epochal page in his history which sleep alone could fitly round. Nevertheless, a disturbing impression of something essential left undone haunted the borderland of dreams to remain formless till morning, when his pocket handkerchief jerked a note odorous of patchouli ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... but he scarcely troubled himself to wonder what. The girl was doubtless making herself boudoirs or something of the sort in a new part of the house. He closed his eyes entirely, there in the dusky room, and let the web of dreary, gray, formless thought ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... understanding of the ears in the valley (if not indeed under the water and worse still), strengthens me in my higher endeavors,—and you, dear friend, will have to bear some of the responsibility if I go on writing more such "confused," "formless," and, for the every-day ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... in language, and no ideas in the mind,—things which can only be conceived while they are visible,—the intense hollow blue of the upper sky melting through it all,—showing here deep, and pure, and lightless, there, modulated by the filmy, formless body of the transparent vapor, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and gold. Now there is no connection, no one link of association or resemblance, between those skies and the work of any mortal hand but Turner's. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... find that some of Kabr's finest poems have as their subjects the commonplaces of Hindu philosophy and religion: the Ll or Sport of God, the Ocean of Bliss, the Bird of the Soul, My, the Hundred- petalled Lotus, and the "Formless Form." Many, again, are soaked in Sf imagery and feeling. Others use as their material the ordinary surroundings and incidents of Indian life: the temple bells, the ceremony of the lamps, marriage, suttee, pilgrimage, the characters of the seasons; all felt by him in their mystical aspect, as ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... for a wholesale Exchange of Civilian Prisoners. I should add that the book is illustrated with a number of drawings of Ruhleben made by Mr. STANLEY GRIMM, an artist of the Expressionist School (whatever that may mean). These are vigorous and arresting, if, to the unmodern eye, somewhat formless. But they are part of a record that all Englishmen can study with quickened sympathy and a great pride in the courage and resource of our race under conditions needlessly brutal at their worst, and never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... and around them there scuttled formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel by means of a tractor ray. Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like metal-studded mass of leathery substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... shape of the sea-mist, A shape of the brumal Rain, and the darkness Fearful and formless; Day dawns ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the Count bent low to watch what he was doing. The look of torture upon his face increased. It was terrible, and made upon Domini an indelible impression, for she could not help connecting it with his vision of her future, and it suggested to her formless phantoms of despair. She looked into the sand, as if she, too, would be able to see what he saw and had not told, looked till she began to feel almost hypnotised. The Diviner's hands trembled now as they made the patterns, and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... light. An hour of madness!... The exasperated Elements, let loose from the cage in which they are held bound by the Laws which hold the balance between the mind and the existence of things, reign, formless and colossal, in the night of consciousness. The soul is in agony. There is no longer the will to live. There is only longing for the end, for ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, unilluminating way as the Dutch painters; finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere act of placing them in a picture. The world existed for him as something formless which could be cut up into little pictures. He saw no farther than the lines of his frame. The interest of the thing began inside that frame, and what remained outside was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the seaboard. So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed his sleep. Then the dreams ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... the process that annually clothes the turf with wealth and beauty. The leaves put out, rustle in the winds, and fall to their rest, while others follow. The fierce, fiery energy of the lightning writes the truth upon the scudding clouds. The formless waves that in the atmosphere ripple and dash against the cheek, tell of a restless ocean around us, a medium of health and sound. From the world that rolls, to the summer flies that float on the air and glance in the sun, the truth is proclaimed ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... after the death of Andre, Dr. Baraduc took the first photograph of the coffin in which the body was deposited. When this plate was developed, it was discovered that, emanating from the coffin, was a formless, misty, wave-like mass, radiating in all directions with considerable force, impinging upon the bodies of those who came into close proximity to the coffin, as though attracted to them by some magnetic force. On one occasion, indeed, the force of this projected ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... struck a silver note, and instantly this vain fantasy vanished; what was the use of regarding the two wine-filled cups when he knew that Nina was far and far away? He sprang to his feet and went to the window, and gazed out into the black and formless chaos beyond. ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... stone the Bible is written on both sides; or it has a letter which is its exterior and an interior spirit or meaning. The history which constitutes its letter illustrates those principles which constitute its meaning. The formless must be put into form to be apprehended. Mistaking the form for that substance which has been brought to the level of human apprehension by its means, is the error which constitutes the basis of dogmatic theology. Error in a premise compels ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... now reached such a formless, featureless landscape, that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... a product of superior intelligence—not a Sketch Book, but a single canvas with an infinitude of details; not a Sentimental Journey—although Heine can outdo Sterne in sentimentality, he too persistently outdoes him also in satire—the work, fragmentary and outwardly formless, is in essence thoroughly informed by a two-fold purpose: to ridicule pedantry and philistinism, and to extol nature and the life of those ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... wrath on me, what time in night Beneath shut lids the spirit's eye sees clear. The dart that flies in darkness, sped from hell By spirits of the murdered dead who call Unto their kin for vengeance, formless fear, The night-tide's visitant, and madness' curse Should drive and rack me; and my tortured frame Should be chased forth from man's community As with the brazen scorpions of the scourge. For me and such as me no lustral bowl Should stand, no spilth of wine be ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... Communique to cut off the possibility of pursuing, from different quarters, the points on which they had not expressed themselves to be in unity. And secondly, it is plain that by the same Communique it was not intended to cut off the possibility of advancing claims which during these very formless negotiations had not been brought forward, so long as the general decisions of the Communique, ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits and witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS of decadence—which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine token of the German ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... morfe, form), a term used in chemistry and mineralogy to denote the absence of regular or crystalline structure in a body; the adjective "amorphous,'' formless or of irregular shape, being also used technically in biology, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... My strange, formless fears for Berna were soon set at rest. She was awaiting me. She looked better than I had ever seen her, and she welcomed me with an eager delight ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and formless world. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... acute angle than will ever the celebrated tower of Pisa, past ugly heaps of brick and rubble—the ruins of once fair buildings, on and on until we pulled up suddenly before a huge something, shattered and formless, a long facade of broken arches and columns, great roof gone, mighty walls splintered, cracked and rent—all that "Kultur" has left of the ancient ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... hesitating entrance, did not seem in the least disconcerted. He was a tall man, looking even taller by reason of the long formless overcoat he wore, known as a "duster," and by a long straight beard that depended from his chin, which he combed with two reflective fingers as he contemplated the editor. The red dust which still lay in the creases of his garment and in the curves of his soft felt hat, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... building still standing, but so damaged that it might collapse at any moment, and therefore uninhabitable. The handsome ballroom, which formed a separate wing, was nothing but a pile of rubbish, a formless mass of bricks and plaster. The dining-room, making the corresponding wing, was built entirely of wood, and had consequently escaped injury. This dining-room was a very lofty hall, paved with marble and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... of the union of the Church to Christ, was the essence of marriage, and the mutual consent of the couple alone sufficed to constitute marriage, even without any religious benediction, or without any ceremony at all. The formless and unblessed union was still a real and binding marriage if the two parties had willed it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Georgie and she felt safer on or near the seaboard. So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed his sleep. Then the dreams would come ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... if attempting some generality. She could not complete it, and looked out absently upon Italy in the wet. The whole life of the South was disorganized, and the most graceful nation in Europe had turned into formless lumps of clothes. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of the Creation is certainly wrong. That man was not created as man, but that he has grown to be what he is through a series of stages. According to Professor Haeckel, the pedigree of man is as follows:—1. Monera—formless little lumps of mucus matter supposed to be originated by spontaneous generation. 2. Amoebae—a little piece of protoplasm enclosing a kernel. 3. Synamoebae—a collection of Amoebae. 4. Planaeada. 5. Gastraeada, ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that "No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... concerned, viz. u, o, p, b, and m. Eventually articulate speech becomes impossible, and the only expression remaining to the patient is laryngeal phonation, slightly modulated and broken into the rhythm of formless syllables. ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest 10 The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite. Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing, Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne With other notes then to th' Orphean Lyre I sung of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... sailors and more daring leaders never bore down upon an enemy's fleet. The picture offered by the two fleets in the cold haze of that fateful morning, as a matter of fact, reflected the difference in their fighting and sea-going qualities. The Spanish fleet, a line of monsters, straggled, formless and shapeless, over miles of sea space, distracted with signals, fluttering with many-coloured flags. The English fleet, grim and silent, bore down upon the enemy in two compact and firm-drawn columns, ship following ship so closely and so exactly ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... and looking for it, saw in the opposite direction a formless object, as much darker than the gray of the void as the flame was brighter, and it too was growing larger, and coming. And it seemed to him that this light and darkness were the good and evil of his life, and he watched, to see which would reach him first, but felt no surprise or regret when he ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... mosaic of the sacrifice half the head from the eyes upwards and part of the arms of Abel are repainted, the legs have become dropsical under repair. The figures of Abraham and Isaac are almost completely repainted, and the hands and feet are formless for that reason. This mosaic is repaired in two different ways with white cubes coloured over and with painted stucco. In the mosaic representing the tender of privileges the nimbi as already stated are new, but besides, the lower part of all the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... consonance put together on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember that Anglo-Saxon verse—now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked among the strictest prosodic kinds—was long thought to be as formless as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which almost all mediaeval literature has had during the last century, it is certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if it exists, should not have been ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... truth once known. Like winds from God God's message on them fell. Old bonds of sin, Snapt by the vastness of the growing soul, Burst of themselves; and in the heart late bound Virtue had room to breathe. As when that Voice Primeval o'er the formless chaos rolled, And, straight, confusions ceased, the greater orb Ruling the day, the lesser, night; even so, Born of that Bethlehem Mystery, order lived: Divine commandments fixed a firmament Betwixt man's lower instincts and his mind: From unsuspected summits of his spirit The morning shone. ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... cried Hurliguerly. It was indeed the boat which Hearne had stolen, and it was simply smashed to pieces; in a word, only the formless wreckage of a craft which has been flung against rocks by the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... was still a chink of light above the sill, a warm, mild glow behind the window; the roof of the cottage and some of the banks and hazels were defined in denser darkness against the sky; but all else was formless, breathless, and noiseless like the pit. Dick remained as she had left him, standing squarely on one foot and resting only on the toe of the other, and as he stood he listened with his soul. The sound of a chair pushed sharply over the floor startled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cage had materialized. We were hoping its occupant had seen the girl, and not us. A breathless moment passed while we stared for the first time at this strange thing from the Unknown.... A formless, glowing mist, it quickly gathered itself into solidity. It seemed to shrink. It took form. From a wraith of a cage, in a second it was solid. And so silently, so swiftly, came this thing out of Time into what we call the Present! The dim yard a ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the artist's dream. The great factory, with its whirling mechanisms and glowing furnaces, is the material manifestation of the promoter's financial imagination. The jeweled ornament, the book, the steamship, the office building, all are but concrete realizations of human thought molded out of formless matter. ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... wireless alone! And that is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used—and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown—as unknown ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which to many minds will seem uncalled for and ridiculous. I mean the experiment of trying to visualize, by an arbitrary exercise of fancy, the sort of form or shape which this formless and shapeless thing may be ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... combine in New York, into an impressive whole. They clamour blatantly of their size, and that is all. And if the city be hideously aggressive, what word of excuse can be found for the outskirts, for the Italian and Chinese quarters, for the crude, new districts which fasten like limpets upon the formless mass of Chicago? These, to an enduring ugliness add a spice of cruelty and debauch, which are ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... "that" (tode or touto); they rise no higher than "of such kind" or "of what kind or quality" (toiouton or opoionoun ti).[593] It is not earth, or air, or fire, or water, but "an invisible species and formless universal receiver, which, in the most obscure way, receives the immanence of the intelligible."[594] And in relation to the other two principles (i.e., ideas and objects of sense), "it is the mother" to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... imperishable garb of language. But this also is vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable than what is made. Not words nor works, but only that which is formless endures, the vitality that is another name for change, the breath that fills and shatters the bubbles of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail from an unknown world,—all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing. I did not love it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother, she whom now I saw unfolding like the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... this in silence! Oh, shame, and weakness and passion of hot blood; and women's eyes, and cruel, bitter tongues; and jealousy, maddening jealousy, hideous, formless, vague, reaching he knew ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... have said seemingly, because the beliefs of a people such as this are difficult to get at, and even when one has got at them almost impossible to comprehend. One writer has termed the religion of the Ainos, "a very primitive nature-worship," and their gods "invisible, formless conceptions." Such definitions do not convey much information. Nature-worship is a vague description and "invisible, formless conceptions" of the deity or deities are not confined to the Ainos. Possibly, like all peoples but little ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... quality of horror about them. It was not so much that the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... amongst the rocks. The moon was rising, illumining the sky, but not yet sending down her light on the foaming, flying Ogowe in its deep ravine. The scene was divinely lovely; on every side out of the formless gloom rose the peaks of the Sierra del Cristal. Lomba- ngawku on the further side of the river surrounded by his companion peaks, looked his grandest, silhouetted hard against the sky. In the higher valleys where the dim light shone ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... rocky outpost; the highest of the hills where the peninsula turned abruptly to the south, and, scrupulously refraining from a downward glance at the Battery of Yerba Buena, stood looking out over the bay to the eastern mountains: dark, almost formless, wrapped in the intense and menacing mystery of that last hour ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... business and in the business part of politics had been with tangible foes, with material things; and his weapons had been material things: coercion, bribery (more or less sugar-coated), cheating, and often in these later years the roar of his voice or the power of his name. But now, facing the formless, impersonal thing called public opinion, hitherto unknown in his scheme of things, he was filled with uncertainty ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... was abruptly, unmistakably, replaced. No one else, and for so little perceptible cause, could make him as mad as Fanny frequently did. He put on his waistcoat, changed his money from the trousers on the bed to those he was wearing, in a formless indignation. This wasn't his fault, he repeated; positively, judged by her manner, he might be doing something wrong. Fanny even managed to convey a doubt of Mrs. Grove, Mrs. William Loyd Grove. But she couldn't ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... insidious, had estrangement come, Until at last, one knew not how it fell, And little cared, if sober truth were said, She and the father no more climbed the hill To Twelfth Night festival or May-day dance, Nor commerce had with any at The Towers. Yet in a formless, misty sort of way The girl had place in Wyndham's mind—the girl, Why, yes, beshrew him! it was even she Whom his soft mother had made favorite of, And well-nigh spoiled, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured, he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might attract the ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... mute and enduring, within their berths, and cheering them with the latest reports of progress. Althea looked in upon them frequently, and she read all her books, and much of her time, besides, had been spent in long, formless meditations—her eyes fixed on the rippled, grey expanse of the Atlantic while she lay encased in furs on her deck chair. These meditations were not precisely melancholy, it was rather a brooding sense of vague perplexity that filled the ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and forming hands; capable of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of the sea? The white surf rages in vain against the ramparts built by poor atoms of scarcely nascent life; but only ridges of formless ruin mark the places where once dwelt our noblest multitudes. The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps, in homes that consume them like graves; and night by night, from the corners of our streets, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... England. They had no connection with any recognised religious community, but the members of it had belonged to many—to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came—by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the looseness ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... children reared in Domremy were called the Children of the Tree; and they loved that name, for it carried with it a mystic privilege not granted to any others of the children of this world. Which was this: whenever one of these came to die, then beyond the vague and formless images drifting through his darkening mind rose soft and rich and fair a vision of the Tree—if all was well with his soul. That was what some said. Others said the vision came in two ways: once as a warning, one or two years in advance of death, when the soul was the captive of ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... go to Lochias because she hoped to enjoy the spectacle of Antinous in the flames. Here, before her, was a nobler display, and yet her lively imagination which often, sometimes indeed against her will, gave shape to her formless thoughts—called up the image of the beautiful youth surrounded by the glowing glory which still painted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... second bidding. While the men talked, an insidious depression had stolen over her spirit—and brooded there, light and formless as a river mist. Half an hour with her fiddle, and Lance at his best, completely charmed it away. But the creepiness of it had been very real: ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... incomprehensible forces were locked within that formless mass? By what manner of race as yet unborn had its elements been brought together—no, no—would they be brought together? How assume a comfortable mental attitude toward this creation whose present existence so long ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the shrinking and timid feet of a lovesick girl. She was afraid to go forward, afraid to move, afraid to breathe lest she break the wonderful spell of the magic. Not only her basic common sense, but the very soul that shaped her body had become as light, as sweet, as formless as liquid honey. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... their own day. Thus we find that some of Kabr's finest poems have as their subjects the commonplaces of Hindu philosophy and religion: the Ll or Sport of God, the Ocean of Bliss, the Bird of the Soul, My, the Hundred- petalled Lotus, and the "Formless Form." Many, again, are soaked in Sf imagery and feeling. Others use as their material the ordinary surroundings and incidents of Indian life: the temple bells, the ceremony of the lamps, marriage, suttee, pilgrimage, the characters of the seasons; all ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... inkling of this. She is under the impression that she is one of the world's cosmic forces. In the rag-bag of her brain whence she fishes out the innumerable formless and gaudy-coloured pilferings from which she fashions her "special articles," she cherishes an extraordinary illusion that she is a sort of modern Hypatia. She says Aspasia, but that is only because she has confused Kingsley's heroine ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Evil Wind." In fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one walk under, or as it were ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... suggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he published by way of vindication. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service. Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of manuscripts that would be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse—that formless, fluent gush of sentimentalism—it might have passed as an error of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty and beauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of tuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. There is not a ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Brigands are here: the Brigands are there; the Brigands are coming! Not otherwise sounded the clang of Phoebus Apollos's silver bow, scattering pestilence and pale terror; for this clang too was of the imagination; preternatural; and it too walked in formless immeasurability, having made itself ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Near by the corpse of the child that serv'd in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl'd whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... handsome president who dresses in good taste and can talk. Girls,"—Molly raised her hand as if calling upon heaven to strengthen the force of her arguments,—"we don't want a thin, lank president without any shape" (sounds of tumultuous laughter and the beginning of applause)—"one of those formless, backboneless people who can't talk and who dress in—well, ragtags. I tell you, girls, Margaret is the president for us. She's been a mighty fine president for three years and I don't think we ought to try experiments on a new one at this stage in ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some one to say ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... tugs at my breast With formless lips, Like a heavy baby, Attenuates me, Draws me through myself into it. I sit in the womb of an idiot, Helpless before its mouthing tenderness. The huge flap ears are attentive, And the soundless face bends toward me ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... precisely in regard to the Ninth Symphony. It is said, for instance, that this symphony "is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, and music especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime" (p. 428). It is true that a critic as severe as Gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happened to confirm one of his doctrines; but Strauss is "far from going to these problematic productions" ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... further before I slept. I had gone thus but a few yards, my gaze now on the difficult path before me, now upon the sea, when, chancing to look towards the bluff I have mentioned, I stopped to stare amazed, for in this little distance, this formless headland, seen from this angle, had suddenly taken a new shape and there before me, plain and manifest, was the rough semblance of a lion's head; and I knew that betwixt it and the high cliff whereon I stood ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... just as the band played the closing bars of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... with clouds, yellow leaves strew the paths at the edge of the naked forest, and the forest itself turns black and blue—more especially at eventide when damp fog is spreading and the trees glimmer in the depths like giants, like formless, weird phantoms. Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Chaldea contemptuously, "you take me for a fool, saying more than I can do. But know this, my precious angel"—she fumbled in her pocket and brought out a more or less formless piece of lead—"what's this, may I ask? The bullet which passed through Hearne's heart, and buried itself in ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... my consolation for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this publication of myself.—After ten or twelve weeks I think I shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... done when blood ran warm in his veins. At other times he would be only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet, again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and formless, with a moaning cry for Justice—Justice—Judgment on him who had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many a Hall was spilt by the ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... change lay, but subtly as the encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death—the horror was that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... mass of incoherence and confusion. As for following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French national language during these three centuries, and marking how it issued from this formless and vulgar chaos, there are not facts and documents enough for our guidance throughout that long travail; but when the thirteenth century begins, when Villehardouin tells the tale of the crusade, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... bairns hae gien him," said Janet to herself, but continued to gaze at him, in questioning doubt of her own solution. She could not recall having ever heard of a Sir in the family; but ghosts of things forgotten kept rising formless and thin in the sky of her memory: had she never heard of a Sir Somebody Galbraith somewhere? And still she stared at the child, trying to grasp what she could not even see. By this time Gibbie was standing quite still, staring at her in return: he could not think what ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Nature—chiefly on the great vault we call Heaven, the Upheaved. Shapely but undefined; perfect in form, yet limitless in depth; blue and persistent, yet ever evading capture by human heart in human eye; this sphere of fashioned boundlessness, of definite shapelessness, called up in her heart the formless children of upheavedness—grandeur, namely, and awe; hope, namely, and desire: all rushed together toward the dawn of the unspeakable One, who, dwelling in that heaven, is above all heavens; mighty and unchangeable, yet childlike; inexorable, yet tender as never was mother; devoted as ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization of a neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner when it turned out to be only a cold, and he could take a few minutes to be himself. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... writers to any or all of man's possible post-mortem conditions, so this word "elemental" has been used at different times to mean any or all non-human spirits, from the most godlike of the Devas down through every variety of nature-spirit to the formless essence which pervades the kingdoms lying behind the mineral, until after reading several books the student becomes absolutely bewildered by the contradictory statements made on the subject. For the purposes of this treatise it will perhaps simplify matters to restrict its ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... must be a master of Human Words. The message from God which we carry is to become a message to men, and therefore we must know how to introduce it successfully to their notice. Strong as our own conviction may be, yet it may be crude and formless; and, before it can become the conviction of others, it must take a shape which will arouse their attention. It may belong to a region of thought with which they are unfamiliar, and it has to be brought near, until it enters the circle of their ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... the dancing became wilder, more savage. In the light of the fire the mamaloi swayed, holding the screaming child, and close to the flames crouched the cripple. The hymn had given place to the formless chant, through which the minors quivered like the wails of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... length. "My Grandmother's Garden", by Ida Cochran Haughton, is a truly delightful bit of reminiscent description which deserves more than one reading. "A Little Girl's Three Wishes", by Mrs. R. M. Moody, is entertaining in quality and correct in metre. It is a relief to behold amidst the formless cacophony of modern poetry such a regular, old-fashioned specimen of the octosyllabic couplet. "Two Little Waterwheels", by Dora M. Hepner, is an exquisite idyllic sketch. In the second paragraph we read of a channel "damned" up by a projecting root of a tree; which somewhat surprises ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It was ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common consciousness. Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously, we must all perforce ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... one side to the bright zenith, and thence lapsed confusedly down the opposite descent. The dark end of the room presented a cloud of gloomily fantastic shapes, swerved from the main stream, and becoming darker and more formless the farther they receded, till at the last they were lost in a murky shadow. Not entirely lost, however; for as Balder gazed awfully thitherward, the shadow seemed to resolve itself into a mass of intertwined and struggling ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... every side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days none of the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved more than a half of their original height;[152] all that remains is a formless mass encumbered with heaps of debris at its foot, and yet, as every traveller in the country has remarked, these ruined monuments have an extraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They give an impression ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... He had been thinking along the same lines as Jim: that bloated, swollen brain seemed a very vulnerable thing. Soft and boneless and formless, contained only by the dirty-white, membranous skin, it did appear a tempting target for a spear thrust. And now, sluggish with its meal, it seemed less alert and ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... formless to her as ghosts, but she could not help imagining bodies and faces and clothes to fit the voices. She could not help forming likes and dislikes. She would have been glad to have any of them come to see her, to ask how ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity: and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical mind. But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that was nothing other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... remarked that, though he did not object to it in the least, they had better take care, as this man would turn them all out before long. This man was, in fact, to stand at the helm of Piedmont, with short intervals, till he died, and was to carve out from the block of formless marble, not the Italy of sublime dreams, which, owing her deliverance to her sons alone, should arise immaculate from the grave a Messiah among the nations, but the actual Italy which has been accomplished; imperfect and peccable as human things mostly are, belonging rather to prose ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... a man, a young man, and knew what I know to-day, I would think of myself as the masterful creature Of all the Masterful plan; The Formless Cause, with form and feature; The Power that heeds not limit or ban; Man, wonderful man. I would do good deeds, and forget them straightway; I would weave my woes into ropes and climb Up to the heights of the helper's gateway; And Life should serve me, and ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... crystal ball, a worth it owns, Greater than graven Erythrean stones; Rude though it seems, a formless mass of ice, 'Tis justly counted 'mongst our gems ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... again after the departure of the second lieutenant, now drew a long breath, threw up her shoulders, and half turned as if to reenter the church. The hesitating private, beholding the new angle of her face thus revealed to him, darted swiftly forward with a cry that was formless but eloquent. The nurse stayed motionless, but with eyes widened upon the approaching figure. The advancing private had risen wearily, and his first steps toward the church had been tired, dragging steps, but for the later distance ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... his eye over the different objects of which the universe is composed, he will observe with astonishment that we can descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. He will recognize this gradation as the great work of Nature; and he will observe it not only as regards size and form, but also in respect of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... mental temperaments and our fundamental ideas were profoundly incompatible. We were both still very young in quality, we had scarcely begun to think ourselves out, we were greatly swayed by the suggestion of our circumstances, complex, incoherent and formless emotions confused our minds. But I see now that in us there struggled vast creative forces, forces that through a long future, in forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far more than Mary I was accepting the conventions of our time. It seemed to me not merely reasonable ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Kepler and in more recent times by Wright and Swedenborg. This so-called "nebular hypothesis" assumes that in the beginning all space was uniformly filled with cosmic matter in a state of nebular or "fire-mist" diffusion, "formless and void." It pictures the condensation—coagulation, if you will—of portions of this mass to form segregated masses, and the ultimate development out of these masses of the sidereal bodies ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in "Lelio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... in War, Greed, Materialism, and the general principle of Devil-take-the-hindmost—and the clearing of the ground for the new order which is to come. So there is hope for the human race. Its evolution is not all a mere formless craze and jumble. There is an inner necessity by which Humanity unfolds from one degree or plane of consciousness to another. And if there has been a great 'Fall' or Lapse into conflict and disease and 'sin' and misery, occupying the major part of the Historical period hitherto, we see ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished, here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail, vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top, like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Nay, Svanhild, do not jest: behind your scoff Tears glitter,—O, I see them plain enough. And I see more: when you to dust are fray'd, And kneaded to a formless lump of clay, Each bungling dilettante's scalpel-blade On you his dull devices shall display. The world usurps the creature of God's hand And sets its image in the place of His, Transforms, enlarges that part, lightens ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... vague and blurred his senses now became preternaturally acute. His surroundings were no longer dim and formless, rather everything grew inhumanly sharp and vivid. To the end of his life he would preserve an extraordinarily faithful recollection of the room into which Cheniston presently ushered him—the usual ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... a passage of mad triumph and terror. The Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence and ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... which bud out one from the other, and manufacture the supporting skeleton we know as "the sponge of commerce" itself. Under the microscope, these living sponge-units appear in various guises and shapes. Some of them are formless, and, as to shape, ever-altering masses, resembling that familiar animalcule of our pools we know as the Amoeba. These members of the sponge-colony form the bulk of the population. They are embedded in the sponge substance; they wander about through the meshes of the sponge; they seize food ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... firelight flickered and they saw shadows, such as the moon, when low in the heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man; but yet they were shadows neither of man, nor God, nor of any familiar thing. They were dark, vague, formless and indefinite, and they quivered—quivered with a quivering ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... The illusion of the great sun; the illusion of the shadow-casting hills; the illusion of waters, formless and multiform; the illusion of—Nay, nay I what impious fancy! Accursed girl! yet, yet! why should he curse her? Had she ever done aught to merit the malediction of an ascetic? Never, never! Only her form, ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... intense to the eye as when it is entirely above the horizon; the radiant orb is seen with its protuberances and its burning atmosphere. It rises slowly, like a luminous god, in the depths of the black sky, a profound and formless sky in which the stars shine all day, since they are not hidden by any atmospheric veil such as conceals them ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... many, and therefore has no parts, and therefore is not a whole, which is a sum of parts, and therefore has neither beginning, middle, nor end, and is therefore unlimited, and therefore formless, being neither round nor straight, for neither round nor straight can be defined without assuming that they have parts; and therefore is not in place, whether in another which would encircle and touch the one at many points; or in itself, because that which is self-containing is also contained, ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... already in existence. In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... roof below roof; at an angle of 45 degrees, to the pier and bay, 200 feet below, and in front, another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... gaze out over the starlit scene. It was almost the same viewpoint from which he had his first sight of Glora's world only an hour or two before. The distant island beyond the city showed plainly with the shining water around it. The vegetation there was growing! And there were dark, horribly formless blobs lurching outward and rising with monstrous bulk against the background ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... in the early morn of Time, Called from the formless clod, Came Man, to start the weary climb From wild ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Life crawled up from the slime of the sea-bottoms and became Man because of inherent greatness bred into him before the dawn of time. But perhaps this urge was not as formless ...
— Reluctant Genius • Henry Slesar
... inevitable flow, this deeply necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust? ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... changed we picked it up again. We were among trees now, and the mountain sides were green with oak and poplar, though as we dropped the landscape darkened into desolation. The bleak corner of the world towards which we were speeding had that formless, featureless look which one sees on common faces, as if it had been shaken together carelessly by the great Creator in an ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the way. About 50 yards in front of me I saw a dark and confused mass slowly moving. Thinking to meet with a party of coolies from a neighbouring mine, who were perhaps going for provisions, I advanced for another 40 paces, then stopped short and was fixed to the spot. The formless mass had taken the shape of nothing less than an ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... But the earliest thinkers are said to be hylozoists, rather than strict materialists, because of their failure to make certain distinctions in connection with the processes of matter. The term hylozoism unites with the conception of the formless material of the world (hyle:), that of an animating power to which its formations and transformations are due. Hylozoism itself was not a deliberate synthesis of these two conceptions, but a primitive practical tendency to universalize the conception, of life. Such "animism" instinctively ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... ruddiness, just seen through the thin tops of the firs. The fire—whether it had been the barn or the house—had burned itself out. Whatever had happened, it was over. As she stood shuddering, unable to think, not daring to think, her eyes rested upon the bear, huge and formless in the gloom, staring at her, not ten feet away. She answered the stare fixedly, no longer aware of fearing him. Then she saw him turn his head suddenly, as if he had heard something. And the next ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... fore-or back-ground, according as one looks at the picture. The Marmorata is at the foot of the Aventine, the most lonely and unvisited of the Seven Hills. From among the vegetable-gardens and cypress-groves which clothe its long flank rise large, formless piles, whose foundations are as old as the Eternal City, and whose superstructures are the wreck of temples of the kingly and republican periods, and palaces and villas of imperial times, and haughty feudal abodes, only to be distinguished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... was as follows:—Camilla has dreamed overnight that her lost mother came to her bedside to bless her nuptials. Her mother was folded in a black shroud, looking formless as death, like very death, save that death sheds no tears. She wept, without change of voice, or mortal shuddering, like one whose nature weeps: 'And with the forth-flowing of her tears the knowledge of her features was revealed to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was ever his tribute to the sex, rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand of her hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... all the Pharaohs, from whom he imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names, which we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his building also. Some ruins, lying beyond Abydos, are too formless to do more than indicate the site of some of his structures. He enlarged the temple of Harshafitu and that of Osiris at Heracleopolis, and, to accomplish these works the more promptly, his workmen had ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... molecules there is nothing descriptive that can be said about it. A molecule or a particular mass of matter could be identified by its form, and is thus in marked contrast with any portion of ether, for the latter could not be identified in a similar way. One may therefore say that the ether is formless. ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... to the third, he made the same reply. Action, first, last, and all the time, is the great principle of life and progress. Without it the most perfect engine, gigantic in proportions and costly in equipment, is a dead thing, valueless as the formless mass of ore it once was. But that marvelous product of man's hand and brain, plus steam, becomes a veritable giant ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... the mundane again immediately after these undreamed of and supernormal experiences. Holding Pearl, who still clung to him frantically, cowering and trembling against him, he leaned upon the rough, projecting walls of his cabin and gazed with awed and still unbelieving eyes into this new and formless world, yet obscured ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... encloses all we know, or can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable, a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius shoots through it, and its elements rush together and glitter before ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... substance, and Europe was satisfying this instinct. Pale and colorless herself, mentally perhaps anaemic or at least lethargic, she discovered in herself a passion for color and richness. Certain formless dreams about life began to haunt her mind—vague desires of warmth and color and emotion. Thus Paris was developing the latent possibilities of sensuousness in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... is about, nor what the issues of the battle are, can be grasped. Good lawyers are good thinkers and usually plain talkers. The present-day revolt against the confused pleadings may go to the opposite extreme and abolish them all, leaving the case to be presented as formless and loose. The vexed question of the proper form of a pleading may delay justice until it is determined on appeal from the City Court to the Supreme Court, then to the Appellate Division, then to the Court of Appeals. In the meanwhile the clients may die, the money in suit ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... man, and would arrive, though tired and hungered. Not until the sun sank behind the upper pines did any sense of her own loneliness assail her. Then she bethought her that with night, if he delayed, the forest would wrap her around, formless, haunted by wild beasts. The singing of birds, never in daylight utterly drowned by the roar of the fall, had ceased about her; the call of the hidden chickadees, the cheep-cheep of a friendly robin, hopping in near range of the cooking-pot, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... season when Nature brews the irresistible philter. Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding—where opposition is fated to avail not—is graceful in proportion to its readiness, I surrendered as ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... his own mind. To him x is a known quantity all along. In any picture that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... in their decorative designs. Fig. 55A shows one of these animals which has just eaten a man. Both figures are so realistic that the intention of the weaver is apparent. In B, D, E, and F, the animal is still realistic, but the man disappears, and in his place is a formless object or straight lines which are identified as ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
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