"Shapeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sleep; thoughts raced through his brain, scenes and images forming and reforming with inconceivable rapidity; at last he fell asleep, to awake an hour or two later in an intolerable agony of mind. His heart beat thick and fast, and a shapeless horror seemed to envelop him. He struck a light and tried to read, but a ghastly and poisonous fear of he knew not what, seemed to clutch at his mind. At last he fell into a broken sleep; but when he rose in the morning, he knew that some mysterious evil had befallen him. If he had been older ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Anglicized. And they came in a great straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way, big children and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy children, and diseased children; bright-eyed children and hollow-eyed children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-colored English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads, with pear-shaped ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... from the lamp was filtering in past them, and her eyes were slowly growing accustomed to the gloom. There was something lying on the floor, in the middle of the room, that was bulky and shapeless and unfamiliar. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the grass in the garden, just outside the corral. On hearing their approach, the Chestnut raised his head, and, seeing his master, gave a low whinny of recognition. Close beside him on the grass lay a dark, shapeless object which, on closer inspection, proved to be the remains of Juan Ramon, trampled almost beyond recognition by ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... attitude of one that had crept along the floor on its belly, and it was, so far as could be collected, a human figure. But of the face which was now rising to within a few inches of his own no feature was discernible, only hair. Shapeless as it was, there was about it so horrible an air of menace that as he bounded from his chair and rushed from the room he heard himself moaning with fear: and doubtless he did right to fly. As he dashed into the baize ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... His face was resolute, for both square jaw and steady brown eyes suggested tenacity of purpose. The hands that swung at his sides had been roughened by labor with pick and drill. Yet in spite of the old clay-stained shooting suit and shapeless slouch hat with the grease on the front of it, where a candle had been set, there was a stamp of command, and even refinement, about him. He was a Thurston of Crosbie, one of a family the members of which had long worked their own diminishing lands among the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... erect bracts that give it support; after noon, or as soon as it has been fertilized by the female bees, that are its chief benefactors while collecting its abundant pollen, the lovely petals roll up, never to open again, and quickly wilt into a wet, shapeless mass, which, if we touch it, leaves a sticky blue ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... boom of falling pinnacles of ice upon the broken deck of the great vessel added to the horror.... In a wild ungovernable mob they poured out of the saloons to witness one of the most appalling scenes possible to conceive.... For a hundred feet the bow was a shapeless mass of bent, broken and ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... forgetting all about the messiness of the great wet shapeless-looking mollusc, he used both finger and thumb. ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... came, Pale, sad, dismayed, to warn me in my dream, Alas, how far transformed from the same Whose eyes shone erst like Titan's glorious beam: 'Daughter,' she says, 'fly, fly, behold thy dame Foreshows the treasons of thy wretched eame, Who poison gainst thy harmless life provides:' This said, to shapeless air unseen ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... let Mr. Saunderson hear you," she said. "His orchids are his children. Their very mystery enthrals him—and really it is most fascinating. To look at one of those shapeless bulbs, and to speculate upon what kind of bloom it will produce, is almost as thrilling as reading a sensational novel! He has one growing now—it will bloom some time this week—about which he ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... damage would have been done to the castle but for the frequent quarrels between these two religious houses as to their rights over the various parts of the ruins. When you climb up to the ruined citadel and look out of the windows that are now battered and shapeless, you can easily feel how the heart of the bold Richard must have swelled within him when he saw how his castle dominated an enormous belt of country. But you cannot help wondering whether he ever had misgivings over the unwelcome proximity of the chalky heights that rise so closely above ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... smite on both cheeks him she loved, as well as the woman she despised and had been foiled by. Still she had the consolation that Rose, seeing the vulgar mother, might turn from Evan: a poor distant hope, meagre and shapeless like herself. Her most anxious thoughts concerned the means of getting money to lockup Harry's tongue. She could bear to meet the Countess's wrath, but not Evan's offended look. Hark ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... people yet remained in ruined Arras, who, even as she, lived underground, since every day at irregular intervals the enemy fired into the town haphazard. Only that very morning, she told me, another shell had struck the poor Hotel de Ville, and she pointed to a new, white scar upon the shapeless tower. She also showed me an ugly rent upon a certain wall near by, made by the shell which had killed her husband. Yes, she lived all alone now, she told me, waiting for that good day when the Boches should be driven beyond the Rhine, waiting until the townsfolk should ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... his way caused him to change his mind. One thought of a sleep-walker; uncertainty was stamped upon every gesture and movement; yet he was really drifting towards camp. After a while he struck the well-defined trail, and his gray, shapeless body slowly disappeared up the slope. In five or six minutes I overtook him shuffling along within sight of the big rock upon which rested my blanket and lunch. As I came up to him he depressed his tail, put up ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... most eastern spur of the Rocky Mountains, taking its name from the Peak itself, which rises high above the rest, viz. 14,150 feet above sea level. This eastern sentinel of the vast Rocky Mountain system has its advance-guard directly in front. Cones, peaks, and great shapeless masses of rock, terminating to the south in Cheyenne Mountain, and in the north in a long chain of lower mountains. Twenty-five miles north from base of Pike's Peak, a ridge of hills, 8000 feet high, called the Divide (the water-shed between the ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... form of animal life. The lowest form of this lowest class is that remarkable creature that we have mentioned in previous lessons—the Moneron. This creature lives in water, the natural element in which organic life is believed to have had its beginning. It is a very tiny, shapeless, colorless, slimy, sticky mass—something like a tiny drop of glue—alike all over and in its mass, and without organs or parts of any kind. Some have claimed that below the field of the microscope there may be something like elementary organs in the Moneron, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety. Can wine match that for joy? She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe. Any wish to be enfolded by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her own, the familiar the stranger—an utter stranger, as one who had snared her in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... outside the domain of art all Is shapeless. The ugly is of the domain of art, if art give it form. Is there anything more beautiful than Iago? If he be looked upon merely as a contrast to Othello, then we are in the position of those who looked upon ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... push it back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman poet—the only original poet in the Latin language—did indeed hit out for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent upon observation ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a slab of marble?—yet I looked at it, and my eyes were rooted there and could not look elsewhere. The moon shed a sinister white light upon this thing. I looked long, standing there motionless and without power to move. Then I saw what it was, this shapeless thing: it was the body of Taddeo Marchioni—dead, horribly dead, fallen face downward, stretched out upon the stones, a knife plunged into the back of the throat, and left there. He ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... shock, his bowler hat knocked to one side of his head, a deprecating, apologetic smile on his dear fat face! A man of course now, but very little altered in spite of all the years; a little fatter perhaps, his body seemed rather shapeless—but those same kind eyes, that large mouth and the clear straight look in all his face that spoke him to all the world for what he was. Peter felt exactly as though, after a long and tiring journey, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at the contrast. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... louder and louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her loomed ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. We both saw a large, pale light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attics. I followed the light, and my servant followed me. It entered, to the right of the landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open. I entered in the same instant. The light then collapsed ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... habitually in a distinctive colour, had not been carried into her choice of material for their dressing-gowns. These garments were white; and, as a stern mood of utility had guided their mother's shears, they were short and almost shapeless. The curly hair which was being brushed over them had stopped its growth, as curly hair often does, at the shoulders. In the small whitewashed room the two girls looked as much like choristers in surplices as anything might look, and their sweet oval ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... long, and twenty feet round at the thickest part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing, like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the blow-holes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head measured about twenty-one feet round. Its ears were two small holes, so small ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... the two ranges closed together to what seemed relatively the sharp apex of the triangle, the mere intersection of two lines. This point, this seemingly dimensionless dot, was in reality two score weary miles of sandhills, shapeless, vague, and low; waterless, colorless, and forlorn. Southward the central desert was uninhabitable; opinions differed about ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... either side, she might have been asleep, so motionless she lay; but, whenever Eugene turned a timid glance upon her rigid features, he saw that she seemed ever and ever to be looking away from him, and far out upon the black and shapeless masses of the woods through which ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... which he gets in that deep pit is very hunger of soul, and rage, and vain desires. And the ground which he stands on in that deep is a bottomless quagmire, and doubt, and change, and shapeless dread. And the air which he breathes in that deep is the very fire of God, which burns up everlastingly all the chalk and dross ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... which she supposed Edward to be poring night after night in the cold room upstairs. She had glanced over the papers at Darnell's invitation, and could see but little interest in them; there were one or two sketches, roughly done in pen and ink, of the old house in the west: it looked a shapeless and fantastic place, furnished with strange pillars and stranger ornaments on the projecting porch; and on one side a roof dipped down almost to the earth, and in the centre there was something that might almost be a tower rising above the rest ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... length they wearied out and subdued them. For, in truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful—faces I can hardly call them, but rather—shapeless black collops of flesh, with little points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives grace to adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with characteristic ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... of light, The chariot of the Daemon of the World Descends in silent power: Its shape reposed within: slight as some cloud That catches but the palest tinge of day 60 When evening yields to night, Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue Its transitory robe. Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light 65 Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold Their wings of braided air: The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car Gazed on the slumbering maid. Human eye hath ne'er beheld 70 A shape so wild, so bright, so ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... care and patience to do it nicely. When all the flesh is thus loosened, take the turkey by the neck, give it a pull, and the skeleton will come out entire from the flesh, as easily as you draw your hand out of a glove. The flesh will then be a shapeless mass. With a needle and thread mend or sew up any holes that may be found ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... righteousness of his voice, his contemptible exultation. It was as though he were under some horrid spell which twisted his love and anguish into the expressions of a spiteful prig. Why couldn't he tell her of those deadly, shapeless fears, of his loneliness, his sorrowful jealousies? He was shut up in the iron fastness of his ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... should this cool weather continue a few days longer it is possible hundreds of bodies may yet be recovered from the wreck in such a state of preservation as to render identification possible. Many hundreds of victims, however, will be roasted and charred into such shapeless masses as to preclude a hope of recognition by their ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... same movement his spectacles seemed to get pushed up on his forehead. He welcomed me in his quiet and humorous voice. Only one corner of the vast room, the corner in which stood his writing-desk, was strongly lighted by a shaded reading-lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted into shapeless gloom like a cavern. Narrow shelves filled with dark boxes of uniform shape and colour ran round the walls, not from floor to ceiling, but in a sombre belt about four feet broad. Catacombs of beetles. Wooden tablets were hung above at irregular intervals. The light reached one of them, and the word ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... me that well might claim The love of beings in a sphere above This doubtful twilight world of right and wrong; Something that shows me of the self-same clay That creeps or swims or flies in humblest form. Had I been asked, before I left my bed Of shapeless dust, what clothing I would wear, I would have said, More angel and less worm; But for their sake who are even such as I, Of the same mingled blood, I would not choose To hate that meaner portion of myself Which makes me brother to ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... crooked twig, or rather on an ugly likeness of a twig rested askew a blind, ugly, shapeless, outspread mass of something utterly and inconceivably distorted, a mad leap of wild and bizarre fragments, all feebly and vainly striving to part from one another. And, as if by chance, beneath one of the wildly-rent salients a butterfly was chiseled with divine skill, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... seen to the utmost advantage. There, dressed in the vast, shapeless coat which drapes itself about him as he gesticulates, his neck free from the cravat which puts modern Europeans in the pillory, and allowing himself greater space than at his concerts—there, and there alone, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... "see the wonders of the world abroad" rather than live "dully sluggardiz'd at home," wearing out "youth with shapeless idleness." But all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... and strange. Does the reader wish an instance? An assassin of the deepest dye was given over by the judge to the tender mercies of the crowd. The man was thereupon attacked by the whole population in one mass. He was shot and stabbed, stoned and beaten until he became almost a shapeless heap, and was then hurried away in a mule cart, and, without coffin, priest or mourners, was ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the name of Democritus Junior, was pub. in 1621, and had great popularity. In the words of Warton, "The author's variety of learning, his quotations from rare and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance ... have rendered it a repertory of amusement and information." It has also proved a store-house from which later authors have not scrupled to draw without acknowledgment. It was a favourite book of Dr. Johnson. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... after this bombardment started, the German trenches were covered by a great cloud of smoke and dust and a pall of green lyddite fumes. The first line of German trenches, against which the fire was directed, became great shapeless furrows and craters filled with ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... had followed my impulse, I should have turned and bolted. Everything in me seemed to cry out against it: my heart thumped, my pulses all began, like sledge-hammers, beating against my ears and every sensitive part. It was very dark, as I have said; the old house, with its shapeless tower, loomed a heavy mass through the darkness, which was only not entirely so solid as itself. On the other hand, the great dark cedars of which we were so proud seemed to fill up the night. My ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... rank with shade, a sociable-looking little fellow of some ten hardy well-buffeted years had sat down for the moment without a companion. He had thrown upon the bench beside him his sun-faded, rain-faded, shapeless cap, uncovering much bronzed hair; and as though by this simple act he had cleared the way for business, he thrust one capable-looking hand deep into one of his pockets. The fingers closed upon what they found there, like the meshes of a deep-sea net filled with its ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... child, and a little one—a boy of not more than seven years, with elfish brown locks, and eyelashes which swept the olive tint of his cheek. All curled up in a heap, in clothes which a man might have worn, so big and shapeless were they, with one arm under his head for a pillow, and the other tightly grasping a violin. Far had he wandered in the cold wintry air, until, attracted by the light and warmth of the great church, he had stolen ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with wicked tokens of the Alien murderers: the floor, once bright with polished stones of the mountain, and strewn with sweet-smelling flowers, was now as foul as the den of the man-devouring troll of the heaths. From the fair-carven roof of oak and chestnut-beams hung ugly knots of rags and shapeless images of the sorcery of the Dusky Men. And furthermore, and above all, from the last tie-beam of the roof over the dais dangled four shapes of men-at-arms, whom the older men of the Wolf knew at once for the embalmed bodies of their four great chieftains, who had been slain on ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... one shoulder lower than the other, a straggly brown moustache stained with coffee, and stumpy black teeth, and gnarled hands into which the dirt and grease were ground so deeply that washing them would obviously be a waste of time. His clothes were worn and shapeless, his celluloid collar was cracked and his necktie was almost a rag. You would never have looked at such a man twice on the street—and yet the Candidate saw in him one of those obscure heroes who are making a movement which ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Jim thought that it might be the hound, but it was not that. It looked more like a shapeless bundle of old clothes. Then under the directness of his gaze the thing stirred, a head was slowly lifted, and like the gradual resurrection from the cerements of death a figure half rose, and a gaze from the gray hood that seemed to burn was fixed ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... with their gigantic heads, abortive necks, and the calves of their legs protuberant around their tibias and fibulas, alike before and behind! And then they are all left-handed! Were these the gay gallants and fair dames of the golden age of chivalry? Were these shapeless things the forms and costumes of the princes and princesses of ancient France? Why, the dark-skinned old-clo' men, who hang their cast-off raiment in Brattle Street, would be mobbed, if they paraded such vestments at their doors; and Papanti would break his fiddle-bow over the head of any awkward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a legacy of love to a broken-hearted family! and to us, and all who loved him, how pleasing to observe, that in that bewildering hour, when the horror of that great darkness came down upon that noble spirit, and some hideous, shapeless phantom overpowered it, and took from it even the capacity to discern the right from the wrong, humility, and faith, and affection, still kept their hold;—amid the ruins of the intellect, that tender heart remaining ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... sound. And reach to worlds that must not yet be found: The Southern clime him her sole Lord shall style, Him all the North, even Albion's stubborn isle. My fellow-servant, credit what I tell.' Straight into shapeless air ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face. It was a gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate's, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of gentle kindness and cordiality, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... one of the most beautiful ruins in the kingdom, consist of the choir and transept of the church, and the refectory. The hospitium or guest house was formerly on the right of the lane leading to Helmsley. The great nave of the church is now a shapeless ruin, but from certain indications it may be seen that it was Norman, and probably the work of D'Espec. The lower parts of the transept are Norman, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... curiosity was busy; but more than curiosity. In the incongruous fashion common to such entertainments, a handsome Turkish janissary drew up to a figure draped in dark serge and with her whole person enveloped in a shapeless mantle of the same, which was drawn ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... pockets of his other garments, and from the corner of his washstand drawer. Then he cautiously crept downstairs, seized his gun, and stole out of the still sleeping house. The wind had gone down, the rain had ceased, a few stars shone steadily in the north, and the shapeless bulk of the coach, its lamps extinguished, loomed high and dry above the lessening water, in the twilight. With a swinging tread Jeff strode up the hill and was soon upon the highway and stage road. A half-hour's ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... aspiration. I was moved and governed by my sensations, which continually changed, and passed away—to come again, and deposit vague ideas which ignorantly haunted me. The literal images of all things which I saw were impressed on my shapeless mind, to be reproduced afterward by faculties then latent. But what satisfaction was that? Doubtless the ideal faculty was active in Veronica from the beginning; in me it was developed by the experience of years. No remembrance of any ideal condition comes with the remembrance of ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... and sinewy fathers of families, with streaming black hair, golden earrings, hooded cloaks of wood and sandals bound with leathern thongs. Mothers were there, shapeless bundles of rags, nursing infants at the breast. The girls were draped in gaudy hues, and ablaze with metal charms and ornaments on forehead and arms and ankles. They showed their flashing teeth and smiled from time to time in frank wonder, whereas ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... been so gradual that it was quite impossible to say when it had begun; the only thing certain was that a change was taking place and that a film of thin, transparent vapour was overspreading the entire sky and gradually reducing the sun in its midst to a shapeless blotch of dull yellow, while the wind continued steadily to decrease in strength. Two hours before the time of sunset the great luminary had become so completely obscured that all trace of him was lost; yet nothing ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... component parts—fortresses, convents, and huts. The girdle of wall, while it restricted space, would give a feeling of safety and snugness which in our great modern city—which is really a conglomeration, a sort of pudding-stone, of many towns and villages grown together into one shapeless mass—the citizen can never again experience. The streets would in some degree resemble those of Moscow, where, behind fortress, palace, and church, you come upon rows of mere wooden sheds, scarcely better than the log huts ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... inside the door, which he shut. It was dark, and the boy, coming in out of the bright daylight, could distinguish nothing; what he made out little by little assumed shapeless outlines to his frightened imagination. Voices laughed and growled confusedly in his ears, and hands that seemed to him enormous pulled him about. Terror seized him, and with it came crazy, disconnected recollections of stories of robbery and murder, and he began to scream with ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... white, and a pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are, by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... With one lone, silent star, attendant by Her side, all sparkling in its glorious sheen; And, floating swan-like, stately, and serene, A few light fleecy clouds, the drapery of heav'n, Throw their pale shadows o'er this witching scene, Deep'ning its mystic grandeur—and seem driven Round these all shapeless piles ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... full attention from the report until it had been completed. Then he seized the nearest object, which happened to be his chair, and with all his enormous strength hurled it across the floor, where it lay, a tattered, twisted, shapeless mass of metal. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... face in the silver frame smiled up at her. She stared at the picture for one long minute fixedly, with unchanging expression, and suddenly she swept it from the dresser with a savage sweep of her hand, dashed it on the floor, and stamped it shapeless ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt, unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... his daughter to the bold gaze, coarse remarks, and perhaps insults of such men. Before the end of that trip, I was to learn a lesson in western chivalry, which is not easily explained, or forgotten. As father and daughter were waiting to take their places in a boat, a shapeless, flat-footed woman, wearing moccasins—probably the half-breed wife of some trader in the fort—ran to the water's edge with a parcel of dainties, and kissing the girl on both cheeks, wished her ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... One day the machinery at the mill, being old and rotten, broke; the hands were at work in it, underneath the beams which fell. An hour after, just as Ellen and Joe had put the chairs about the supper-table, and sat waiting for their father and Jim, the door was pushed open, and two heaps, shapeless, and covered closely with a quilt, were brought in upon a door. Whatever was the pain or loss of the widow or Joe, they had no time to indulge it; Ellen needed all their care after that for a year or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... away the sky was faintly yellow; some cold stars like points of ice pierced the higher blue; carelessly, as though with studied indifference, flakes of snow fell, turning grey against the lamp-lit windows, then vanishing utterly. Maggie, going to the window, saw a dark shapeless figure beyond the glass. For an instant she was invaded by the terror of her surprised loneliness, then she remembered her father and the warm kitchen, then realised that this figure in the dark must ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... sky, from age to age Who rul'st the world by reason; at whose word Time issues from Eternity's abyss: To all that moves the source of movement, fixed Thyself and moveless. Thee no cause impelled Extrinsic this proportioned frame to shape From shapeless matter; but, deep-set within Thy inmost being, the form of perfect good, From envy free; and Thou didst mould the whole To that supernal pattern. Beauteous The world in Thee thus imaged, ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... heaved up In the middle of the room. And then I saw That there were shapes of woe all round the room, Like women in long mantles, bent in grief, With long veils hanging low down from their heads, All blacker in the darkness. Not a sound Broke the death-stillness. Then the shapeless thing Began to move. Four horrid muffled figures Had lifted, bore it from the room. We followed, The bending woman-shapes, and I. We left The house in long procession. I was walking Alone beside the coffin—such it was— Now in the glimmering light I saw the thing. And ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... would, he could not expel from his mind the new and painful principle which disturbed it. And thus he went on, sometimes triumphantly defending Mary from all ungenerous suspicion, and again writhing under the vague and shapeless surmises which the singular events of the evening sent crowding to his imagination. His dreams on retiring to seek repose were frightful—several times in the night he saw graceful Phil squinting at him with a nondescript leer of vengeance and derision ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... one giant raised the other. Then calling out something in his native tongue Koku hurled the other from him, clear across the tunnel and up against the opposite rocky wall. The murmuring died to frightened whispers as Lamos fell in a shapeless ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... same perishable kind as the others, and it is certain that it could not have survived exposure to the atmosphere, as its date would imply, for upwards of 200 years. It may even be found that the weather has chipped off the edges of the stones which now appear so jagged, shapeless, and grotesque; but, from recent evidences gathered elsewhere, it is but too probable that these rude pillars have been, and still are, set up as they come from the quarry, without dressing and free from any ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... to her, but at that moment she turned to the door; evidently some one inside had called her. Nekhludoff moved away from the window. The fog was so dense that five steps from the house the windows could not be seen, but the light from the lamp shone red and huge out of a shapeless black mass. And on the river the same strange sounds went on, sobbing and rustling and cracking and tinkling. Somewhere in the fog, not far off, a cock crowed; another answered, and then others, far in the village took up the cry ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... got to the shadowy mass, which, moved like black, wind-blown clouds, vague and shapeless, before Bronson and I were near enough to distinguish one form from another. As for our eyes, his tall figure blended with the waving shadows; two revolver shots exploded with thunderous reverberations. We did not know ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Elegy, is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture?" Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... many of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections. The hours before "turning in" (the very fact of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the end of August. For three weeks there was no flood of sunshine, no blazing of a cloudless blue sky, which is the one condition necessary to the perfection of the beauty of Swiss mountains, valleys and lakes. The Oberland was grey and shapeless, the Lauterbruennen valley chilly and threatening; even the divine Jungfrau herself, when not altogether obliterated by the monotonous, impenetrable cloud, loomed in steely coldness—"a sterile promontory." ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... and looked over. A hundred feet below, on a rough rock, they saw a shapeless and motionless figure, crushed ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... fortnight Arthur returned from Paris with an order from the King for the revision of my sentence. Fresh witnesses were heard. Patience did not appear; but I received a note from him containing these words in a shapeless hand, "You are not guilty, so don't despair." The doctors declared that Mademoiselle de Mauprat might be examined without danger, but that her answers would have no meaning. She was now in better health. She had ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... anywhere by the majority of critics and readers, in these days of adulteration and of rapid manufacture out of shoddy and short-fibred stuffs. We demand a given measure of reading, good or bad, and producers of it are in great part paid for length: so that with much using of thin and shapeless literature, we have forgotten how good is that which is solid and has form. But, having attained this perfection in the short story, Hawthorne thereafter abandoned it ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... forward, but soon halted,—for I saw that it hung in the air, and as I approached, that it began to take a ghastly and spectral form! I discerned the lineaments of a head, and the hideous outlines of a shapeless anatomy. I stood rivetted to the spot; for I thought that I saw behind it, a dark and vast thing, in whose hand it was held forth. In that moment, a voice said,—"It is Winlaw the murderer; his bones often, in the moist summer nights, shine out in this way; it is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... talking, and were waiting in great suspense after I had finished one of such particular horror that I declared it should be the last, when we heard footsteps on the hall stairs. There were lights in the dining-room which shone faintly through the half-closed door, and we saw something white and shapeless come slowly down, and clutched each other's gowns in agony. It was only Kate's dog, who came in and laid his head in her lap and slept peacefully. We thought we could not sleep a wink after this, and I bravely went alone out to the light to see my watch, and, finding it was ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of coarseness—the coarseness of satiety, and shapeless, battered-out appetite—with an almost savage taste for carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their new-born babes. A girl with child was found hanged by her own act ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile, painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Composed His Novels, says, "he founded his work on a theory which is the most singular of mistakes." The "experimental" novel is now a thing as extinct as the dodo, yet what doughty battles were fought for its shapeless thesis. The truth is that Zola invented more than he observed. He was myopic, not a trained scrutiniser, and Huysmans, once a disciple, later an opponent of the "naturalistic" documents, maliciously remarked that Zola went out ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a simple problem out of Legendre (the French Euclid), and M. Laferte would look on with deep interest and admiration, but evidently no comprehension whatever. Then he would take the pen himself, and draw a shapeless figure, with A's and B's and C's and D's stuck all over it in impossible places, and quite ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... grown thick around them; the furniture of the room lost its form, and stood about in shapeless masses. Through the open window was heard the whistle of a distant train; a large fly that had been disturbed buzzed distractingly, undecided where to re-settle for the night. It was sultry ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... world; and embraces, in one stupendous analogy, the growth of a solar system from molecular chaos, the shaping of the earth from the nebulous cub-hood of its youth, through innumerable changes and immeasurable ages, to its present form; and the development of a living being from the shapeless mass of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... witchery; reminding us of the fabled mountain of loadstone which attracted vessels to itself for the iron that was in them, and presently drew the nails from the timbers, so that the whole fabric fell a helpless, shapeless mass into the waves. The votaries of the world attach themselves to the objects of sense, to the things which are seen and temporal. They have the utmost horror of poverty, suffering, and humiliation; these they consider their chief evils to be avoided at any cost; whilst they ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... the silk-lined, London-made overcoat, holding his hat firmly on his head lest the January wind send its expensive perfection into the gutter, paused to ask his way of the man with no overcoat, his hands shoved into his ragged pockets, his shapeless headgear crowded down over his eyes, red and bleary with ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... of the village; and when I came near to it, there were sixteen or seventeen creatures, whether men or women I could not tell, for they make no distinction by their habits, either of body or head; these lay all flat on the ground, round this formidable block of shapeless wood. I saw no motion among them any more than if they had been logs of wood, like their idol; at first I really thought they had been so; but when I came a little nearer, they started up upon their feet, and raised a howling cry, as if it had been so many deep-mouthed ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey, A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare, The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair, Makes haste to clutch the beast. Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day, Till lies the beast, a shapeless carcass there! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... dead before the wind, the latter ship was merely a good sailer; her great superiority commencing only when she brought the breeze forward of the beam. It has been supposed that the stranger, when first seen, was about fifteen miles distant, his canvas appearing both small and shapeless; but some doubts now began to be entertained, equally as to his rig, his size, and his distance. If a large or a lofty vessel, of course he must be materially further off, and if a large or lofty vessel it could not ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... running we had nine hours in the saddle without food. My throat was sore and swollen for a day or two, and I felt so sorry for myself at times that I laughed to think how I must have looked: sitting on a stone, drinking a pan of tea without trimmings, that had got cold, and eating a shapeless lump of brown bread; my one "hank" drawn around my neck, serving as hank and bandage alternately. It is miserable to have to climb up on one's horse with a head like a buzz saw, the sun very hot, and "gargle" ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... How utterly absurd! He had actually positively disliked this beautiful creature all the winter! He was astonished at his own bad taste. Before him stood his wife on the kitchen hearth, her figure rendered shapeless by her advanced state of pregnancy. And he had once thought her prettier ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron; Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, dismembering two cold roasted fowls; Lizzie Binney, as trim and pretty as her mother was shapeless and plain, was filling ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... aid of the Indians, moved the enormous mass which, with the Indian's blow, had slumped down upon its hindquarters. With the greatest difficulty they succeeded in straightening it out. The Indian dog had been squeezed into a shapeless mass, and, ascertaining this, the Indian gave it no further ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... front and rear. The walls are massive, and, if protected from the winter rains, will stand for ages. But if exposed to the storms by the decay of the projecting roofs, or by leaks in the main roof, they will soon crumble, or sink into shapeless heaps of mud. I passed through extensive warehouses and immense rooms, once occupied for the manufacture of woollen blankets and other articles, with the rude machinery still standing in them, but unemployed. Filth and desolation have taken the place of cleanliness ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... upon the outstretched form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,—a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to another case. As she passed the stretcher, the bearers shifted their burden ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was a place of damp desolation. They looked at their dwelling with dismay. It was slimy, dripping; it hummed hollow with the wind, and was strewn with shapeless wreckage like a half-tide cavern in a rocky and exposed coast. Many had lost all they had in the world, but most of the starboard watch had preserved their chests; thin streams of water trickled out of them, however. The beds were soaked; the blankets ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... thought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man's working power is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there—in his arm-chair, at his club let us say—with all power, even all desire to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of geniality, half hidden in the ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... it knowledge of man. Poetry and criticism, and all the fine arts, have generated such living things, which not only will be co-existent with them but will (I fear) survive them. Hence history takes alternately the form of reproval and of panegyric; and science in its pulverized state, in its shapeless and colourless atoms, assumes the name of metaphysics. We find no longer the rich succulence of Herodotus, no longer the strong filament of Thucydides, but thoughts fit only for the slave, and language for the rustic and the robber. These ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... said to have been one of their chief strongholds. The last of the Pasi lords of Ramkot, Raja Santhar, threw off his allegiance to Kanauj and refused to pay tribute. On this Raja Jaichand gave his country to the Banaphar heroes Alha and Udal, and they attacked and destroyed Ramkot, leaving it the shapeless mass of ruins which it now is." Similar traditions prevail in other parts of Oudh. It is also recorded that the Rajpasis, the highest division of the caste, claim descent from Tilokchand, the eponymous hero of the Bais Rajputs. It would appear then that the Pasis ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... arranged in half-rings round it from end to end; and you are told that these are the congeners of the great stony Venus's fan which hangs in seamen's cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones which you see ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Olympia. The temple and walls and gymnasium were all of stone and looked as though they had been there forever. But in the meadow all around the sacred place was a city of winged tents. There were little shapeless ones of skins lying over sticks. There were round huts woven of rushes. There were sheds of poles with green boughs laid upon them. There were tall tents of gaily striped canvas. Farther off were horses tethered. And everywhere were gaily robed men ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... them. I got a good sketch of the group. They appeared to stare at me occasionally with some little astonishment, stretching up their immense heads and looking around; but finding all still (I suppose they considered me a mere rock), they composed themselves to sleep again. They are the most shapeless creatures about the body. I could not help comparing them to an over-grown maggot, and their motion is similar to that insect. The face bears some rude resemblance to the human countenance; the eye is large, black, and expressive; excepting two very small flippers or paws at the shoulder, the ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... fissures of the rock—when the days are already long and bright, under ever-blue and cloudless skies, Gibraltar realised more fully that war was close at hand. Lying in the high road to the East, it saw daily the armed strength of England sweep proudly by. Now a squadron of men-of-war: not the hideous, shapeless ironclad of to-day, but the traditional three-decker, with its tiers of snarling teeth and its beauty of white-bellying canvas and majestic spar. Now a troopship with its consorts, two, or three, or more, tightly packed ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... finding, a really good cup of tea." An hour or so later he received a note from Odette, and at once recognised that florid handwriting, in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its shapeless characters, significant, perhaps, to less intimate eyes than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and decision. Swann had left his cigarette-case at her house. "Why," she wrote, "did you not forget your heart also? I should ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... but also in general matters. France is to be governed by them; by virtue of the Constitution they arrogate to themselves the right, and, by dint of ignorance, attribute to themselves the capacity, to govern it. A torrent of new, shapeless, and disproportionate ideas have taken possession of their brains in the space of a few months. Vast interests about which they have never thought, have to be considered. Government, royalty, the church, creeds, foreign powers, internal and external dangers, what ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not help a little pang when she contrasted her plain black tam and shapeless, tight-sleeved, homemade gray-cloth coat with Diana's jaunty fur cap and smart little jacket. But she remembered in time that she had an imagination and could ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... midsummer, and among that remarkable group of sylvan lakes—nearly a dozen in number—which, commencing on the wild borders of northerly New Hampshire, and shooting off in an irregular line some fifty miles northeasterly into the dark and unbroken forests of Maine, appear on the map, in their strangely shapeless forms and scattered locations, as if they must have been hurled, by the hand of some Borean giant, down from the North Pole in a volley of huge ice-blocks, which fell and melted where they now lie, sparkling, like rough gems, on the shaggy ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... disease, horrid, polluting, is handed down, a certain legacy, making the body loathsome, and likening the divine face of man to a melancholy ape. Oh! the silent sadness, the inexpressible melancholy of those wan, thoughtless, shapeless, boneless, leaden faces! To them no happy daily labour brings rest and appetite; their lot forbids them work, as it forbids all other blessings. No; on their dunghills outside their cabins there they sit in the sun, the mournfullest ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... untried conditions, a smooth brain does not seem such an inferior organ as is often inferred by writers on the subject. I would willingly match a crow against a walrus any day in a test of intelligent behavior.... A crow ... though with horny, shapeless lips, nose, and mouth, looks at us through eyes so expressive, so human, that no wonder man's love has gone out to feathered creatures throughout all his life ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... short and unwieldy jumps, which, as he was a rather stout gentleman, appeared to indicate some very urgent and pressing need for hurry. His face was bathed in perspiration, and his collar had become flaccid and shapeless from the same cause. It appeared to Tom, as he gazed at those rubicund, though anxious, features, that they should be well known to him. That glossy hat, those speckless gaiters, and the long frock-coat, surely they could ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even think a question, much less ask it, Defago was standing upright in front of them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in the true ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... how recently, and with what a strange pity for her own shapeless form that was to be, she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... he saw himself bounding from place to place, always gathering speed, till he lay a shapeless mass among the stones of the valley; and, in spite of himself, he turned his head ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... external feature of the temple is that it is largely covered with gold plate; hence its name. It is a beautiful object to behold; and we are in haste to take off our shoes, which are prohibited in the sacred precincts, and to put on the shapeless holy slippers presented to us! We enjoy perfect freedom in passing through all parts of the temple, while devotees, under the guidance of the priests, sing their songs of praise with devout impartiality to their ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... time the Invader troops came, they found the entire Samas barony empty. Not a single soul opposed their march; there was no voice to object when they leveled their beam projectors and melted the castle and the villages into shapeless ...
— The Destroyers • Gordon Randall Garrett
... time slips by, the clay gets set and there, in front of his eyes, is the figure as his fancy made it—brittle, easily broken into dust, but impossible of being moulded afresh until it shall again go back into the water of oblivion and become the shapeless ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... a shapeless, swollen foot, encased in a monstrous, untended shoe, the dry, raw leather of which showed white on the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... and shapeless mass; nobody pitied me, nobody helped me, so loathsome a spectacle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... a shapeless, bright, and silvery-gray lump which very much resembled silver-ore. I looked at the mass thoughtfully for some time: an idea germinated, and there and then I planned a new amusement which became our most delightful pastime during those last days ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... breaks in. "I regret to admit the fact, but I am a fat, shapeless, freaky-looking old woman. Ordinarily that doesn't worry me in the least. After fifteen years in the tropics one doesn't worry about how one looks. It has been a long time since I've given it a thought. But now—Well, it's different. ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... was only occasionally obtrusive, and as a rule hushed almost to silence by the pleasant good nature which redeemed shapeless features. Mrs. Mortimer had always liked Maudie, who ran in and out of her house continually, and had made of herself a vice-mother ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... corner and turned toward the north, a sudden puff of wind jerked the shapeless straw hat from Luther's head and sent it careening dizzily over the stubs of the hay field at the right. Hats cost money, and Luther pulled up the galloping horses. Hardly waiting to see whether Elizabeth ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... storms and the confluence of shouting seas. A man ran before him whose bratta on the wind roared like fire, and there was a sound of voices calling and acclaiming, and a noontide darkness descended upon him and accompanied him as he went, and all became obscure and shapeless, and all the ways were murk. And the mind of Laeg, too, was disturbed and shaken loose from ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... of a better word. Through the panelled glass he glimpsed the black metal sheathe of the monster out there, the shapeless crouching and malevolent winking lights, and he felt himself going to pieces inside with a sudden shaking crumble; he hated himself for it but he couldn't stop it; his hands clenched until the knuckles ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... the hippopotamus is round and clumsy, and is supported by four short shapeless legs with four hoofed toes on each foot. The singular head is nearly quadrangular, the eyes and ears are small, the snout enormously broad and the nostrils wide (Plate XXIX.). The hairless hide, three-quarters of an inch thick, changes from grey to dark ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... beginning neither force nor form was manifest; and the world was a shapeless mass that floated [116] like a jelly-fish upon water. Then, in some way—we are not told how—earth and heaven became separated; dim gods appeared and disappeared; and at last there came into existence a male and a female deity, who gave birth and shape to things. By this pair, Izanagi and Izanami, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... underfoot, firm enough to hold our weight, with a foot or so of loose, soft snow on its top. The falling flakes whirled around us. The darkness was solid. Our helmeted leather-furred flying suits were soon shapeless with a gathering white shroud. We carried our Essens in our gloved hands. The night was cold, around zero I imagine, though with that biting wind it felt ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... point in single file, came a long line of some thirty canoes, uncouth, shapeless things, each hewed out of a great cypress log. In the end of each an Indian stood erect plying a long pole which sent their clumsy looking crafts forward at surprising speed. Magnificent savages they were, not one less than six feet tall, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... omission by Hayden was explained as soon as I saw the volcano in its changed condition. The loud detonations which resembled the discharges of a gun-boat mortar were no longer heard, and the upper part of the crater and cone had in a great measure disappeared, leaving a shapeless and unsightly hole much larger than the former crater, in which large tree-tops were swaying to and fro in the gurgling mass, forty feet below—the whole appearance bearing testimony to the terrible nature of the convulsion which wrought such destruction. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... mosaic, yellow, green, and red, Viewed from within, a radiant glory shows When through its pictured screen the sunlight flows, And kneeling pilgrims on its storied pane See angels glow in every shapeless stain; So streamed the vision through his sunken eye, Clad in the splendors of his morning sky. All the wild hopes his eager boyhood knew, All the young fancies riper years proved true, The sweet, low-whispered words, the winning glance From queens of song, from Houris ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, Which without passing thro' the judgment, gains The heart, and all its end at once attains. 155 In prospects thus, some objects please our eyes, Which out of nature's common order rise, The shapeless rock, or hanging precipice. Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to faults true Critics dare not mend. 160 But tho' the Ancients thus their rules invade, (As Kings dispense with laws themselves have made) Moderns, beware! or if you must ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope |
