"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... levelled their spears. Felix fixed his eye on one of the gipsies who was ordering and marshalling the rest, a chief. He drew the arrow swiftly but quietly, the string hummed, the pliant yew obeyed, and the long arrow shot forward in a steady swift flight like a line of gossamer drawn through the air. It missed the chief, but pierced the horse he rode just in front of the rider's thigh. The maddened horse reared and ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... his dreams he chased rabbits or found partridge-eggs. Oblivious of passing hours, and profoundly immersed in speculations concerning her future, the girl sewed on, working scallop after scallop, and flower after flower, in the gossamer cambric between her slender fingers. Stars that looked upon her early in the night had gone down into blue abysms below the horizon, and the midnight song of a mocking-bird, swinging in a lemon-tree beneath her window, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... to mean high hilarity and big business to the spider. Along the hedge near the station there were wonderful great webs, as big as the shield of Achilles. What a surprising passion of engineering the spider must go through in the dark hours, to get his struts and cantilevers and his circling gossamer girders properly disposed on the foliage.[*] Darkness is no difficulty to him, evidently. If he lays his web on the grass, he builds it with a little tunnel leading down to earth, where he hides waiting his breakfast. But on such a morning, apparently, with thousands of webs ready, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the false veneer of civilisation peeled off long ago," the Maluka said, adding, with a sly look at my discarded gloves and gossamer, "It's wonderful how quietly the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... room, she had never seemed more exquisite, nor more desirable. She was dressed all in white, with arms and shoulders bare, her fair hair dressed in the quaint mode of the moment with a high comb and a multiplicity of curls. She had a bunch of white roses in her belt and carried a shawl of gossamer lace that encircled her shoulders, like a diaphanous cobweb, through which gleamed the shimmering whiteness ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... like a sylph or a dainty shepherdess of Dresden china, and should have been arrayed in gossamer robes, rather than in the deep mourning she affected. Indeed, Lucian considered that such weeds were rather premature, as Mrs. Vrain could not yet be certain that the murdered man was her husband; but she looked so charming and childlike a creature ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... fingers, dropped to the floor. With a purely automatic movement, I bent to recover it for her; she leaned down to receive it. Her pale face and lovely dilated eyes were close to me for a fleeting second, and though her lips did not move, I seemed to catch the merest breath, the faintest gossamer whisper ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... natural a supposition, that Miss Thusa's iron features relaxed a little, and she glanced round the enclosure, more in condescension than hope, surveying the boughs of the lilacs, drooping with their weight of purple blossoms, and peering at the gossamer's web. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the passage and opened the door suddenly. Such a dainty pretty Dot, in her new blue muslin dress that almost reached to the ground, and fitted closely to her slender little figure, and a new white straw hat with a new white gossamer floating out behind waiting to be tied when the kisses were all ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... life-long, if he could manage to please her; and little Kitty Spruce being permitted by her mother to peep at the 'new lady' through the staircase window, could only draw a long breath and ejaculate: "Oh! Ain't she lovely!" while she followed with eagerly admiring eyes the gossamer trail of Maryllia's white gown on the soft turf, and strained her ears to catch the sound of the sweet voice which suddenly broke out ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... to go in for smaller game again; but in all our experience we never knew a salmon fisher who did not enjoy trout-fishing as much in its own way as ever he did that of the nobler animal. There is something in the gossamer gut and small flies irresistibly attractive to all sportsmen, and from which no amount of ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... the beeches, as I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through, To catch some golden cord that I saw gleaming Like gossamer against the autumn blue. ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... of his sort here," the girl remarked; "his soul would fit in a flea-track." She spied the Bronco Kid sauntering back towards her and joined him. He leaned against the wall, watching the gossamer thread of smoke twist upward from his cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the surroundings, and showing no hint of the emotion he ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them to the demands of fancy and thought. The nice optics that see what is not to be seen have passed into a sarcastic proverb; yet those are precisely the eyes that are in the heads and brains of all ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Jamaica, when the sun, appearing through a cloudless and serene atmosphere, illumines with his rays the summits of the mountains, and gilds the leaves of the plantain and orange-trees. The plants are spread over with gossamer of fine and transparent silk, or gemmed with dew-drops, and the vivid hues of industrious insects, reflecting unnumbered tints from the rays of the sun. The aspect of the richly cultivated valleys is different, but not less pleasing; the whole of nature teems with the most varied productions. ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... upturned, one hand flung across his brows to shield his eyes, for the light outside the sill seemed dazzling after the semidark of the flat, he scanned first the opposite roof edges, a whole story higher than he, where sparrows were alighting, and where smoke plumes curled like veils of gossamer; next ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... away, gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... inspired needle, and others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary's exclamations of delight and longing ranged from every possible dress to every impossible one, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the true sport does not begin till the May-fly comes in, which he generally does in June. Then the Kennet is a lovely and seductive spectacle to the angler. Between the turns of sun and shower the most beautiful delicate insects, frail as gossamer and fair as a fairy, are born, and flit for their hour, and float down the water, soon to be swallowed by the big four-pound trout. He who has no experience of this angling, and who comes to it from practice in ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... for the toasted cheese of Wales and England. There is Christopher North's eloquent "threads of unbeaten gold, shining like gossamer filaments (that may be pulled from its ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... return to Le Bocage before she left it to go out and carve her fortune in the world's noisy quarry. The light danced over her countenance and form, showing the rich folds of her crimson merino dress, with the gossamer lace surrounding her white throat and dimpled wrists; and it seemed to linger caressingly on the shining mass of black hair, on the beautiful, polished forehead, the firm, delicate, scarlet lips, and made the large eyes look elfish under ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... scarcely lifted their gossamer veils from the dreaming sea, when the pinnacled rocks of Rum and Aye, the outposts of the Banda group, pierce the swathing vapours. The creamy cliffs of Swangi (the Ghost Island), traditionally haunted by the spirits of the departed, show their spectral outlines on the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of The Fairy Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody. The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been published. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... the annex of a fashionable restaurant practically out of doors—a cool green lawn for a carpet and a fountain playing close at hand. Mary wore a white dinner-gown, gossamer-like and airy. Her rich brown hair was tastefully arranged, her voice had never seemed to him so soft and pleasant. All around was the hum of cheerful conversation. A little world of people seemed to be there whose philosophy of life after all was surely the only true one, where hearts were ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... leisurably forth and back, and always close behind his heels the earth was white with these birds inspecting the fresh-turned furrow. The furze-bushes below him were braided with cobwebs, and the stays, lifts, and braces of the barque might have passed also for threads of gossamer spun from her masts and yards, so delicately were the lines indicated against the hillside. In the sand-barge, three men were chanting as they worked; and their song, travelling across still sky and water, rose audibly above the stir of traffic even ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by her father's knee, and held the crystal ball in the hollow of her hands against the sable of his velvet robe. She passed one hand swiftly twice or thrice over her brow, as though to clear away some cobwebs, gossamer thin, that had folded themselves across her vision. Then, in the same wistful, wind-soft voice, she began to speak. And as she spoke all that I had loved and known began to pass from before me. I forgot my father. I forgot the Red Tower. I forgot (God forgive me, yet ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... flowering at the tops of the hedges, where in the morning gossamer lies like a dewy net. The gossamer is a sign both of approaching autumn and, exactly at the opposite season of the year, of approaching spring. It stretches from pole to pole, and bough to bough, in the copses in February, as the lark sings. It covers the furze, and lies along ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... string you names of districts, cities, towns, The whole world over, tight as beads of dew Upon a gossamer thread: he sifts, he weighs; All things are put to question; he must live Knowing that he grows wiser every day, Or else not live at all, and seeing too Each little drop of wisdom as it falls Into the dimpling cistern of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... moon glimmered across the water and folded the land in a gossamer veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desire to go ashore that had seized upon him the night before, reasserted its influence. The face of Millie Stope floated about him like a magical gardenia in the night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressure longer than before; but in the ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!—Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, which ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... radically, unaffectedly nonchalante than she: a weak, transient amaze was all she knew of the sensation of wonder. Most of her other faculties seemed to be in the same flimsy condition: her liking and disliking, her love and hate, were mere cobweb and gossamer; but she had one thing about her that seemed strong and durable ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... gossamer her robe was Around her lightly drawn, A filmy summer-garment That fairy maidens don To make them look like angels Croqueting on ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... are equal to flying, or at least manage to be wafted along by the breeze, when they want to take a trip. The silk these throw out is occasionally called 'gossamer;' it is slight, and not unlike the true gossamer, made by web-spinners of various sorts, which we usually notice in autumn, covering bushes and grassy spaces. The family to which the airy spiders belong is notable, because it contains those species which have a likeness to crabs ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... hear this "Raphael of Music" at the piano, so many and so eloquent have been the descriptions given of his playing. It is easy to fancy him sweeping the ivory keys with his gossamer touch that enveloped with ethereal beauty the most unaccustomed of his complicated chromatic modulations. We can feel his individuality pulsating through every tone evoked by those individualized fingers of his as they weave ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... they not likewise offered to love in this poem of luminous flowers murmuring their sadness to the heart, cherishing its hidden transports, its unuttered hopes, its illusions which gleam and fall to fragments like the gossamer of a summer's night? ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... abruptness of Richard's words and the calm determination plainly foreshadowed in them. Trained by years of experience in a Court where intrigue imbrued the very atmosphere, ordinarily he was equal to any emergency. But all his schemes of the past were as gossamer to the conspiracy in which he was now entangled, and since the previous evening—when the unexpected arrival of Gloucester had hung their whole plot upon his shoulders until he got the King to London—the ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... and the daisies grow, And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun On sunless days in winter; we shall know By whom the silver gossamer is spun, Who paints the diapered fritillaries, On what wide wings from shivering pine ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... You are gossamer-winged, little brother of mine, Tissue winged, like the mist That broods where the marshes melt into a line Of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... dew its wet gossamer threw Upon Leipzig's lawns, leaf-strewn, Where lately each fair avenue Wrought shade for ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... translation beneath the German lines, then pushed them away, her cheeks the pinker. They were as bad as French postcards, she thought, aghast. Whose room was this, anyway? Whose piano was this? Whose was the lacy negligee she had worn and the gossamer lingerie the maid had placed in the chiffonier for her? Was ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... level rays of the rising sun; running like silver threads through all the other music, could be heard the fine trills of the field sparrows; the swinging chant of the creeping warblers and the loud rattle of the Tennessee warblers ran high up in the scale, furnishing a gossamer tenor; that golden optimist, the Baltimore oriole, piped his cheery recitative in the tops of the trees; chickadees supplied the minor strains and tufted titmice the alto; four or five turtle doves soothed the ear with their meditative cooing; while the calls and ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... from mine own self, not him; Your royal sister cannot last; your hand Will be much coveted! What a delicate one! Our Spanish ladies have none such—and there, Were you in Spain, this fine fair gossamer gold— Like sun-gilt breathings on a frosty dawn— That hovers ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... with a thin gossamer shawl about her shoulders, would come down from her bedroom above and join her husband. Then young Oliver himself would come bounding in, always a little late, but always with his face aglow and always bubbling over ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... adaptation, a proper setting for this winged gem,—the body of it composed of a white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles beside the tone of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... velvet or brocade, cut in Pompadour shape, with a profusion of beautiful lace. All her ornaments should match in character, and she should be as unlike her charge as possible. The young girls look best in light gossamer material, in tulle, crepe, or tarlatan, in pale light colors or in white, while an elderly, stout woman never looks so badly as in low-necked light-colored silks or satins, Young women look well in natural flowers; elderly women, in feathers and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... hunters when Kargynda turns at bay. Close, Children of the Starlight! close, for the Emerald Throne! Close round the life that closeth your life within the zone! Rests the Golden Circle's glory, rests the silver gleam on her Who shall rein Kargynda's fury with a thread of gossamer. He metes not mortal measure, He pays not human price, Who crowns that life's devotion with the death of sacrifice! Woe worth the moment's panic; woe worth the victory won! But the Night is near the breaking when the Stranger ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Eiffel Tower that breezy afternoon saw a sight that never a man saw before. Out of the haze a yellow shape loomed larger each minute until its outlines could be distinctly seen. It was a big cigar-shaped balloon, and under it, swung by what seemed gossamer threads, was a basket in which was a man. The air-ship was going against the wind, and the man in the basket evidently had full control, for the amazed people on the tower saw the air-ship turn right and left as her navigator pulled the rudder-cords, and she rose and fell as her ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... he explains to the kindergartner what he is inventing, and for what purpose; he weaves gossamer threads of fancy about the objects constructed, or describes the forms of beauty and knowledge he has built ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the club; has to keep clear of crinoline vortices; gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses,—how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... much more adhesiveness than is commonly imagined. The diversity and complexity of its interests form a network that will be found, like the web of the spider, to possess a power of resistance far exceeding its gossamer appearance—one strong enough to hold all that it was ever intended to enclose. The slave interest is now making its final effort for supremacy, and men are deceived by the throes of a departing power. The institution of domestic slavery cannot last. It ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... room, or suggestively bobbing around against wall or ceiling; and that occasional audible episode of the stifled, expiring buzz of a fly, which is too plainly in the toils of Arachne up yonder! For in one corner of my room I boast of a prize dusty "cobweb," as yet spared from the household broom, a gossamer arena of two years' standing, which makes a dense span of a length of about two feet from a clump of dried hydrangea blossoms to the sill of a transom-window, and which, of course, somewhere in its dusty spread, tapers off into a dark tunnel, where lurks the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... seem different in the transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in the history ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... intelligent and intellectual cast of countenance. He wore his hair, which was light and curly, cut very close, and incipient whiskers adorned the outline of his lower jaw. He was dressed in a gray tweed wrapper, with trousers of the Brougham pattern, and he sported a hat—black, but whether beaver or gossamer we are uninformed—high in the crown, but very narrow in the brim, bearing altogether no very remote resemblance to an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... that what seems a bell-pull has often, owing to former violence and broken wires, no connection with the bell. Here a chimney smokes, there the flue is blocked with birds' nests. In certain country inns, the flimsy gossamer of spiders makes an undesirable fretwork over the greenish knobs of the ill-puttied panes. Mice, rats, and "such small deer" scamper uncannily the live-long night along the worn waxcloths and unspeakable carpets. As he undresses by the light of a three-inch ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the custom to begin collecting linen for a girl's trousseau as soon as she is born, but the American bride cares nothing for dozens upon dozens of stout linen articles. She much prefers gossamer texture lavishly embellished with equally perishable lace. Everything must be bought for beauty; utility is not considered at all. No stout hand-woven underwear trimmed with solidly stitched needlework! Modern Miss Millions demands handkerchief linen and Valenciennes ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... The white gossamer threads blew over the big plain, where the fields full of stubble were already being prepared again for the new seed, and hung around the young girl's face. Rosa had put her prettiest dress on, a light blue summer dress. ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... woods and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road for me ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the cool term of morning, and the stir Of odorous breaths from wood and meadow walks, The bobwhite's liquid yodel, and the whir Of sudden flight; and, where the milkmaid talks Across the bars, on tilted barley-stalks The dewdrops' glint in webs of gossamer. ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... they walked, the little space between them was hung with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter, binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Prime Minister, "the idea of his presuming to tell your Gossamer Majesty that he can hear the bark of the ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... as she remembered sundry gossamer fabrics which were dignified by the title of party dresses, and which, with many tears, she had folded away as something she should never need in the country, she exclaimed aloud, "Why, can't I have a party here as well as at home? The house is a great deal larger than the long narrow ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... ceremonial veil embroidered with stars, also of silver, and above it, set upon her dark hair, a little circlet of gold, in which shone a single gem that looked like a ruby. Thus attired, although her stature is small, her appearance was very dignified and beautiful, especially as the gossamer veil added ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... and stately, in characteristic elegance of attire and manner both. Her white morning dress floated off in soft edges of lace from her white arms; a shawl of precious texture was gathered loosely about them; on her head, a gossamer web of some fancy manufacture fell off on either side, a mock covering for it. She came up to Daisy and kissed her, and then examined into her various arrangements, to see that she was in all respects well and ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... elegancies of French toilet,—our houses filled with a thousand knick-knacks of which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young American bride is often ushered into her new home,—her wardrobe all gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a museum of elegant and costly gewgaws, and, amid the whole collection of elegancies and fragilities, she, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... alone lost in thought in the darkening shrine. Then sleep fell on me and in my sleep I dreamed a dream, or saw a vision. For suddenly there stood before me a woman beauteous as myself clad in nothing save a golden girdle and a veil of gossamer. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another, as a curiosity, gossamer threads of the Virgin hanging from bushes, holes full of water in the middle of stones, a squirrel on the branches, the way in which two butterflies kept flying after them; or else, at twenty paces from them, under the trees, a hind strode on peacefully, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... addressed to various individuals of the other sex, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that Johnny's affectations are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. Take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... down, there came a clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb circled and drew ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... able to proceed thus far. I can scarcely believe the testimony of my memory that assures me of this. My task is almost executed; but whence shall I obtain strength enough to finish it? What I have told is light as gossamer, compared with the insupportable and crushing horrors of that which is to come. Heaven, in token of its vengeance, will enable me to proceed. It is fitting that ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... book is a fantasy, an absurdity, a dream charged with purpose; it has wit and humour, and some deep feeling covered with the gossamer of irresponsibility; it is an act of rebellion, an edged complaint, a protest touched with flame.... There are epigrams and sentences that read like a sob or a ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... stopped for a moment, and he looked down at her, as with flushed face she stood smiling and waving her gossamer fan, each motion stirring the frail leaves of the roses he had ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... very dextrous turn of the hand and the finest of these threads are used in some of the fabrics which they weave. I often wondered how they could prepare these delicate, strong, linen-like threads that are as fine as gossamer. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... of it all! Then on again through a patch of woodland which looked as though a huge gossamer veil had been laid over it. If ever pastelle colors were displayed to perfection Nature here held her exhibition. Soft pinks, pale blues, silver grays, the tenderest greens with here and there a touch of the maple buds' rich mahogany reds, and above and about ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... she had knelt in such utter desolation, and where now was lying a bit of blackened paper, which the housemaid's broom had not found when, early in the day, the room was swept and dusted. So Ethelyn's white satin brushed against the gossamer thing, which floated upward for a moment, and then settled back upon the heavy, shining folds. It was Richard who saw it first, and Richard's hand which brushed away the skeleton of Frank's letter from the skirts of his bride, leaving a soiled, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... white gauze or tarlatan, or any light material she could lay her hands on, when she was past eighty, and she vainly imagined that, with an affectation of youth in her gait, and with the aid of the rouge-pot, she could conceal her age. She would trip into the room like a young girl, with her light gossamer dress floating around her as if she were some sylph in a ballet. She was a wonderful woman for her age, and, no doubt, had been so accustomed to the remarks that were continually made upon her agility and appearance, that she had at ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... hymenophore and the gills are continuous. The gills are attached to the stem, frequently notched, membranaceous, persistent, changing color, dry, powdery, with rusty-yellow spores which drop slowly. The veil and gills are the chief marks of distinction. The former is gossamer-like and separate from the cuticle, and the latter are always powdered. It is always essential to note the color of the gills in the young plant, since color is variable and sometimes shows only the slightest trace on the stem, colored ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... the Beagle has been within the mouth of the Plata, the rigging has been coated with the web of the Gossamer Spider. One day (November 1st, 1832) I paid particular attention to this subject. The weather had been fine and clear, and in the morning the air was full of patches of the flocculent web, as on an ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... on the relativity of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the yellowish folds of her hair. Her small, warm, unwrinkled hands were without rings, being too delicately beautiful. In one she held a tiny fan, white and soft like the wing of a moth; on her lap lay a handkerchief as light as smoke or a web of gossamer. ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... the lazy air glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles through the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the earth-life! On pearly wings of gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our heaven-heart; that the beautiful and the true in this weary ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor—and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... saw-tooth stems took shape before my eyes and the distance receded farther, I saw that we were near the edge of a steep bank. Perhaps twelve feet below us lay the water, as a mirror on which some one has breathed. A mist hung over it—and in that gossamer shroud a little island floated whereon my Sylvia dwelt—where now ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... primarily, a chair, within a suspended framework of steely bars, themselves the foundation for a network of fine-drawn colored wires. Shimmering, like the gossamer threads of a spider's spinning, they wove upward, around and over the chair, so that he who sat there would be completely surrounded ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... far more naturally than any spider. You know how they capture the creatures on which they live; (7) by weaving webs of gossamer, is it not? and woe betide the fly that tumbles into their ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but slightly veiled by the long lashes. Her expression was of sweetness and happiness; it belonged by right to any face that sheltered in ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... state bedroom, where there was simply everything to be done; Georgiana followed her, after having made up the fires, and, while helping to unpack boxes, offered gossamer hints—fluffy, scarcely palpable, elusive things—to her mistress that her real ambition had always been to be a lady's-maid, and to be served at meals by the third, or possibly the fourth, house-maid. And the hall of Wilbraham ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... complications, simplicity. Being out in all weathers, and rolling about so, how can they stand upon trifles? Solid stays, and stanchions, and strong bulwarks are their need, and not a dance of gnats in gossamer; hating all fogs, they blow not up with their own breath misty mysteries, and gazing mainly at the sky and sea, believe purely in God and the devil. In a word, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet a coronal (an "ancestral coronal," p. 74) if you like, as you might call a hat a "swart sombrero," "a glossy four-and-nine," "a silken helm, to storm impermeable, and lightsome as the breezy gossamer;" but, in the long run, it's as well to call it a hat. It IS a hat; and that name is quite as poetticle as another. I think it's Playto, or els Harrystottle, who observes that what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Confess, ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sermon, with my head tumbling sleepily now and then against my father's shoulder. Slowly the scene comes back, in every least detail, the smallest sights and sounds of that morning all here, but all thin and faint and frail, spun of the gossamer web of memory. Can I hold them till they are set down? I shall have to eat another precious ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... like a cherry, though somewhat elongated and having in its upper end a small umbilicus. But mark with what ingenuity the package has been constructed! The outer wrapping is a thin, gossamer-like skin which encloses a soft pulp, sweetish to the taste, but of a mucilaginous consistency. This pulp in turn is wrapped about the inner-seal—called the parchment, because of its tough texture. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... tide from the desolate floors of the sea, and the white-winged bird flying from the black tempest screams aloud in their shadowy halls. There, from the high terraces, when the moon is at its full, we see the children of Coradine gathered together, arrayed like no others, in shining garments of gossamer threads, when, like thistle-down chased by eddying winds, now whirling in a cloud, now scattering far apart, they dance their moonlight dances on the wide alabaster floors; and coming and going they pass away, and seem to melt into the moonlight, yet ever to return again with changeful ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... retarding as though about to stop. A gray unbroken forest was here. The time was about 12,000 A.D. Tina saw it first through the little telescopic-barrel; then it showed on the mirror-grid—a faint, ghostly-barred shape, thin as gossamer. We even saw it presently through the window. It held its steady position, level with us, hanging solid amid the melting, changing gray outlines of the forest trees. They blurred it ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... presses on us with a weight of fifteen pounds on every square inch of the surface of our bodies—in other words, we are at all times sustaining a load of between seventy and one hundred tons of it on our persons—yet we do not feel it! Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the lightest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and, at times, scarcely stirs the most delicate flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings round the world, and crushes the most refractory substances ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the shifting veil A magical bark, by the sunbeams lit, Flits like a dream,—or seems to flit,— With a golden prow and a gossamer sail, And the waves ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... day of roses and rose-colors. Roses banked the mantelpieces, wreathed the cradle, crowned the table at which Hilda sat in state in her high chair, a fairy form in gossamer laces, with dark eyes— Grace's eyes—that danced with the unrestrained delight of ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... invitations to parties given in honor of me at their princely mansions on the Fifth Avenue. Barnum, too, considering me a remarkable curiosity, sent two tickets to his great show house, which the vulgar called a museum. And the Misses Whalebone & Gossamer sent to say that their assortment of baby clothes was of the choicest description, and that they would be much pleased if Mrs. Major Potter would ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P——, true to his youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... might, Actaeon-like, surprise the bare soul. A curiously wrought net of gold caught her dark hair in its meshes, and pearls were in her ears, and around the white column of her throat rising between the ruff's gossamer walls. She fingered the racket, idly listening the while for a foot-fall beyond her round of trees. Hearing it at last, and taking it for her brother's, she looked up with a proud and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... and then I have to read over again; often again and again till all is crossed and muddled. If Life were to be very much longer than is the usual lot of men, one would try very hard to reform this lax habit, and clear away such a system of gossamer association: even as it is, I try to turn all wandering fancy out of doors, and listen attentively to Whately's Logic, and old Spinoza still! I find some of Spinoza's Letters very good, and so far useful as that they try to clear up some ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Dana's dress was, probably, an holan batista, which he calls "Bolan";—it was, in other words, a figured linen cambric. But you have bought those cambrics by the piece, and also pinas, thin, gossamer fabrics, of all degrees of color and beauty, sometimes with pattern flounces,—do you hear? And you have bought Spanish table-cloths with red or blue edges, with bull-fights on them, and balloon-ascensions, and platoons of soldiery in review, and with bull-fighting and ballooning napkins to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... seed, it is seldom done except for strictly scientific purposes. The seeds are, however, largely disseminated by Nature, and, having found a suitable home, they germinate and produce an underground growth which at a hasty glance resembles mildew. It really consists of white gossamer-like films, which increase in number and distinctness as they develop, until they push their way towards the surface, and give rise to the growth above ground of the Mushroom. It follows that if we do not begin the cultivation with seeds or spores, we must resort to the white films or ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... would now be called cream. Everybody knitted socks. Ladies, negro women, girls, and even little boys, learned to knit. Each tried to get ahead as to number and quality. Ladies' stockings were also knitted of all grades from stout and thick to gossamer or open-work, etc. Homespun dresses were proudly worn, and it became a matter of constant experiment and great pride to improve the quality and vary colors. Warp and woof were finely spun, and beautiful combinations ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... employed in that manner; she herself, could not have told why perhaps, except that she did not want it. All of her feelings were so carefully hidden, and herself so wrapped in a cloak of reserve, that the surface was as delicately sensitive, as gossamer, and at every touch that left its impress, she retired farther within herself, and left less room for touch of any kind. Now, when she caught a glimpse of Jean's face, she shut the door sharper than was necessary, and going over to the window, sat down and ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... Mrs. Lessing went straight at the foundations of Bob's make up, and began to look over boxes of little gossamer shirts and tiny union suits of a fabric so delicately fine that Burns handled a fold of ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... Thorne entered. She was clad in some filmy, gossamer-like morning gown with her radiant hair caught up on her white neck. At sight of Mr. Grimm the blue-gray eyes opened as if in surprise, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs." They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along their sides like ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... told that they could get up lace so cheap that the people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry bushes with it to keep off the insects. Spider-webbing is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric. Sixteen square yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce! If the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island plantations could have been shut into that dressing-room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at 120 degrees, they would have rolled up ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... it, as it hung heavily against her, to the cleared space, where she set the two sheaves sharply down, bringing them together with a faint, keen clash. Her two bulks stood leaning together. He was coming, walking shadowily with the gossamer dusk, carrying his two sheaves. She waited near-by. He set his sheaves with a keen, faint clash, next to her sheaves. They rode unsteadily. He tangled the tresses of corn. It hissed like a fountain. He looked ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a dark night, did purchase from A goldsmith on the Ponte Vecchio. Small was his shop, and hoar of visage he. I did bemark that from the ceiling's beams Spiders had spun their webs for many a year, The which hung erst like swathes of gossamer Seen in the shadows of a fairy glade, But now most woefully were weighted o'er With gather'd dust. Look well now at the ring! Touch'd here, behold, it opes a cavity Capacious of three drops of yon fell stuff. Dost heed? Whoso then puts ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... emerald green, the glass bauble, what mean they to thee? Or the fire of the ruby? Except that pure chastity shine From the depth of the jewels: in garments of woven wind clad Our brides might as well take their stand, their game naked to stalk, As seek it in gossamer ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... beauties unaware and oil the tousled heads of half a dozen brothers and sisters. Homeliness is neither Italian word nor virtue; but just as it describes Bellaroba, so an inkling of its charm thrilled the young lord who saw her. Could one cage such a gossamer thing? Fate had done it, why not he? At least he could not lose sight of her. He tracked her to the house under the wall, saw the door scrupulously shut upon her, wandered up and down the street for half an hour, returned a laggard to his palace—and yet had her full in vision. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... be said to maintain the power which can engrave a seal, and crush a mass of obdurate metal like wax before it; draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air; to embroider muslin, forge anchors, cut steel into ribands, and impel itself against the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... friend, Miss Scrumpkins, ran home to tell all about it. And, as everybody knew the Scrumpkinses, a shining gossamer of news was soon woven from one end of the street to ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... spider-webs filled the sunshine with a delicate dancing glister. It was the month of voyaging spiders. Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... set down what the seed of love is? Has it anywhere been set down in how many ways this seed may be sown? In what various vessels of gossamer it can float across wide spaces? Or upon what different soils it can fall, and live unknown, and bide its time ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... dressed as Queen of the Fairies. You shall lie on a bed of rose-leaves, and have gossamer, cloudy sort of drapery all around you. Never fear, Nora, you will look lovely—leave it ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... people may be cool in this roasting climate. And they are cool, and stay so. And while I think of it—the men wear hats and have very dark complexions, but the women wear no headgear but a flimsy veil like a gossamer's web, and yet are exceedingly fair as a general thing. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... obtaining aid for the raising of the second. One man carried a sack suspended by his teeth, and another, taking one in his arms, turned repeated somersaults as he held it, apparently with as much ease as if his weight of flesh had been only so much gossamer ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... rose-hung quarters looking as if a lady lived in them, and had but dropped a dainty reminder of herself here and there to give them character—an embroidered dressing-case on the bureau, an attractive travelling work-box on the table by her bed, a photograph, a lace-bordered handkerchief, a gossamer scarf on a chair-back ready for use if she should need it for a stroll in the moonlight with the Skeptic. The closet door, ajar, gave a glimpse of summer frocks, hanging in order on padded hangers ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... my breath, for the boon of being alive to-night; thanks from my heart for these! Hear, east and west, oh, hear. It is the eternal God. This silence murmuring in my ears is the blood of all Nature seething; it is God weaving through the world and me. I see a glistening gossamer thread in the light of my fire; I hear a boat rowing across the harbour; the northern lights flare over the heavens to the north. By my immortal soul, I am full of thanks that it is I ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... words sounded to the listening ear like a part of the music to which they kept time. They saw a multitude of people, and exchanged the compliments of the evening, yet these people made no more impression upon their thoughts than gossamer would have ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... only one three-thousandth of a volt of electricity at each beat. It would take thousands of hearts to light one electric light, hundreds of thousands to run one trolley car. Yet just that slight little current from the heart is enough to sway a gossamer strand of quartz fibre in what I may call my 'heart station' here. This current, as I have told you, passes from each of you over a wire and vibrates a fine quartz fibre in unison with it, one of the most delicate bits of mechanism ever made, recording the result on a photographic ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... flashed and softened when she saw him out of countenance, and a little twist came in her lips where a smile would like to have broken through. She was still in crape, and wore the delicate gossamer of her widow's cap, with long, wing-like streamers falling away at her back; and while she sat at work on a cumbersome knitted shawl she listened with an air of docility to Justina's conversation, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... dancers had already changed into ordinary dress; but most of them wore their skirts of gossamer gauze; and all had thought it the right thing to put on a special face for the occasion: all, that is, except little Jammes, whose fifteen summers—happy age!—seemed already to have forgotten the ghost and the death of Joseph Buquet. She never ceased to laugh and chatter, ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... results. Further, the very conception of the nature of the "self" is different; it is not now considered an entity, as of old; but rather a compound thing, a product, a complex, composed of a variety of elements. Instead of being considered a single gossamer thread, it is now thought to be rather a rope, composed of innumerable, interwoven elements—and these, in turn, of still finer threads, until the subdivision seems endless. The mind, in other words, is thought to be compounded of innumerable separate elements; but held together, or compounded ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... attempt to intrude on the domains of their mountain relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among the ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... than Taghut;[FN230] and his cheeks shone like the dawn rosy-red and his eyelashes stormed the keen-edged blade: the whiteness of his brow resembled the moon shining bright, and the blackness of his locks was as the murky night; and his waist was more slender than the gossamer[FN231] and his back parts than two sand heaps bulkier, making a Babel of the heart with their softness; but his waist complained of the weight of his hips and loins; and his charms ravished all mankind, even as one of the poets saith in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... her intently for some moments. She seemed, as she stood there before him, like a thing of gossamer and sunshine that had drifted into his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... conclusions injurious to the character, and irreconcilable both with the generous conduct and noble features, of the Master of Ravenswood. And in this belief Lucy reposed her hope, and went on weaving her enchanted web of fairy tissue, as beautiful and transient as the film of the gossamer when it is pearled with the morning dew and glimmering to ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... every department of the Impossible, and expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress; and anatomy counts ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in gossamer gowns of pink and blue flitted to and fro attending to the wants of their guests. Mrs. Hart, gorgeous in a black satin affair, all folds and lace and drapery, made desperate efforts to appear cool and collected—and failed miserably. Papa Hart spent ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... clean room of eight beds. Two babies had arrived. Six mothers were expectant. In charge of the room was a red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, a Flemish girl, motherly with the babies. Hilda dressed "Pervyse" in a long, white, immaculate dress, and a gossamer shawl, and pinned upon him a gold pin. She set the table in the convent—the cake in the center of the table, with one candle, and snowy ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... but a look of unspeakable sadness alternated with her smile that expressed great suffering of some kind. She spoke of having been ill once, when her friends called her the White Lady of Avenel; and that is just her picture now. Her dress made her fairness so apparent,—the gossamer tissue, the bright scarlet, and raven hair and dark eyes and lashes. The tones of her voice were very airy and distant, so that I could scarcely catch her words; and this I have observed in several English ladies. "Where could Zenobia ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... imported from China, hence its name "Blonde." Some of the finest specimens are in this colour. Afterwards, when the art of bleaching the silk was discovered, it was made in a peculiarly silvery colour, the loosely woven silk being worked in patterns on what appears a ground of gossamer. Black Blonde was afterwards manufactured, the lace being very different to that of nineteenth-century manufacture, the mesh being large and open. This was a favourite lace with the Spaniards for mantillas, and much prosperity resulted to the little town of Chantilly. As with ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... my man, don't you know that to me all rules are but gossamer threads that I break at my will? I'm off to buy sausages. I haven't had anything worth eating ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... go my way," remarked Mr. Carlyon, and Elizabeth nodded; and then Dinah fetched her a light gossamer scarf, which she tied over ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a delicate curl of the raven-black hair, escaping from the mob-cap of rose-red silk, lay about the small ear or wandered down to the shapely white neck; he could almost, despite the music, fancy he heard her breathe, as the black gossamer and scarlet flowers of an Indian shawl stirred over the shining satin dress. Her fan and ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... on her face with a strangely yearning expression of repentance—her sweet face, which had turned as white as ashes. He wore mourning still for his brother, and was the most distinguished-looking man in the chateau that day. Anne was in a trailing lilac silk, with a white gossamer-bonnet. That the heart of each went out to the other, as it had perhaps never gone out before, it may be no sin to say. Sin or no sin, it was the truth. The real value of a thing, as you know, is never felt until it is ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... gaiety and happiness. The high wide dining-room windows were open and looked, over sloping lawns, down to the Pol and up again to the woods beyond. The trees were faintly purple in the spring sun, daffodils were nodding on the lawn and little gossamer clouds of pale orange floated like feathers across the sky. The large dining-room table was cleared for action, and Gladys Sampson, very serious and important, stood at the far end of the room under a very bad oil-painting of her father, directing operations. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... first part of our voyage we had most beautiful weather; the deep blue sea upon which the foam-crested waves chased each other as if at play, and the bright heavens where thin and transparent clouds were floating like veils of gossamer, filled the heart with gladness and disposed it to profitable musings. Light winds filled the sails that swelled beautifully on their masts and drove the ship, that under a cloud of white canvass looked like a stately queen, onward. Sometimes she would lie motionless on the waves for ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... seek, to interest him occasionally through his profounder affections, I enjoy a privilege of neglecting harsher logic, and connecting the separate sections of these sketches, not by ropes and cables, but by threads of aerial gossamer. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... perfected man of the future, then a great charm and element of interest will be lost to nature. Though loving them, I cannot, of course, feel the same degree of affection towards all the members of so various a family. The fairy gossamer, scarce seen, a creature of wind and sunshine; the gem-like Epeira in the centre of its Starry web; even the terrestrial Salticus, with its puma-like strategy, certainly appeal more to our aesthetic feelings ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand—and the milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers, and he was ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... columns, and banks, extended almost beyond eye-reach. Between the flyers and the sun stretched isolated towers of cumulus, cast up as if erupted by the chaos below. The sunlight, filtering through this or that gossamer bulk, was scattered into every conceivable shade and monotone. And around the margins of the heaving billows the sun's rays played unhampered, unrestricted, outlining all with edgings of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... have met ten thousand others crossing and recrossing our path, every one of whom was as safe and comfortable as ourselves, every one of whom knew the hour and the minute at which he would reach his destination. To an observer above the clouds our pathways would appear more frail than the finest gossamer; and the most daring engineer that ever lived, seeing for the first time our mode of travel, would stake his reputation that we were rushing to inevitable destruction. Yet every foot of our way has been so guarded that ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner |
