"Sightless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that had the anguish of a farewell in them, the colour suddenly flushed all over her blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great shivering sigh ran through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what its sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... seemed to come back to those sightless eyes, and with a purr, as if it understood, the great cat leaped lightly on to the table and sat before De Mouchy, whilst the latter put one finger on ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... that hang low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... of another dead man will be found eddying and floating around the rolling piers near the Battery, his face a pulp, and no longer recognizable. The sun shines down on the plashing water, but the eyes are sightless, and never another sun can dim their brilliancy or splendor. It is only another missing man without watch, pocket-book, or ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... touch of feverishness. He no longer felt the cold. He put down the tongs and walked towards the bedstead as if about to go to bed, but turned back and pressed his forehead to a window-pane, looking out into the night with sightless eyes. Could he be ill? Why did he feel such languor in all his limbs, why did his blood burn in every vein? On two occasions, while at the seminary, he had experienced similar attacks—a sort of physical discomfort ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... to an upright position and his sightless eyes were fixed upon his child. "Wouldst thou desecrate the holy of holies, the altars ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... where creeps the muddy crowd detached from the factory. The west wind sets quivering their overalls, blue or black or khaki, excites the woolly tails that flutter from muffled necks, scatters some evil odors, attacks the sightless faces ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... beauty of the baroness. Mademoiselle Zephirine, being deprived of sight, was not aware of the changes which eighty years had wrought in her features. Her pale, hollow face, to which the fixedness of the white and sightless eyes gave almost the appearance of death, and three or four solitary and projecting teeth made menacing, was framed by a little hood of brown printed cotton, quilted like a petticoat, trimmed with a cotton ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... who, living many years With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun, Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune To ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... lies upon the death-crowned hill, With sightless eyes, gray lips that may not speak. His dead hand holds his shot-torn banner still— Its proud folds pressed against ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... gray-haired father was an object of the fondest and most reverential affection, beheld with horror the gradual advances of the disease which was about to render the remaining years of life a burden to the sightless man. With the fractiousness of advancing age and growing infirmity, old Philipp obstinately refused to seek the assistance of any learned leech of the country round. Brannau and Burchhausen boasted each of a chirurgic wonder, but Stroer misdoubted or defied their skill. "His frail body," ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... who was led up and down through the long tumult by a woman holding a little saucer to receive contributions. This old man sang, or rather chanted, certain words in a peculiarly long-drawn, guttural manner, throwing back his head, and turning up his sightless eyeballs to the sky. His chant was a lamentation upon his infirmity; and at the time it produced the same effect upon me, that my first reading of Milton's Invocation to the Sun did, years afterward. I can ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... my mind, my inspiration, broke loose. I rose to my super-self. And now if a horrible thing had stood grey at my elbow, unmoved, I would have looked it unflinchingly in the sightless visage.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... easy generalities about the intuition of children! As a matter of fact, the little ones are not above judging quite as superficially and falsely as their elders. The child looked at her protector's sightless eye, then turned away and sidled over to McWha with one hand coaxingly outstretched. McWha's mouth twisted sourly. Without appearing to see the tiny hand, he deftly evaded it. Stooping over the dead man, he picked him up, straightened him out ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... broke out upon Grim's brow, and his great breast labored. Slowly he stooped down, drew the dead body out of the water, and tenderly laid it across his knees. He stared into the sightless eyes, and murmuring a blessing, closed them. There was a large discolored spot on the forehead, as of a bruise. Grim laid his hand softly upon it, and stroked away the yellow ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ideal community one John Buckhurst, a stranger, quiet, suave, deadly pale, a finely moulded man, with delicately fashioned hands and feet, and two eyes so colorless that in some lights they appeared to be almost sightless. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... song taught him; how the breath Too frail for life may be more strong than death; And this poor flash of sense in life, that gleams As a ghost's glory in dreams, More stabile than the world's own heart's root seems, By that strong faith of lordliest love which gives To death's own sightless-seeming eyes a light Clearer, to death's bare bones a verier might, Than shines or strikes from any man that lives. How he that loves life overmuch shall die The dog's death, utterly: And he that much less loves it than he hates All wrongdoing that is done Anywhere ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Italy in the spring of 1638. In 1637, the affection which, in the preceding year, deprived Galileo of the use of his right eye, attacked the left also, which began to grow dim, and in the course of a few months became sightless; so that, although Milton has not alluded to this calamity, Galileo had become totally blind at the time of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... that so long as he should protest she was submissive, helpless. What he wanted, in this light, flamed before him and challenged all his manhood, tossing his determination to a height from which not only Doctor Tarrant, and Mr. Filer, and Olive, over there, in her sightless, soundless shame, but the great expectant hall as well, and the mighty multitude, in suspense, keeping quiet from minute to minute and holding the breath of its anger—from which all these things looked small, surmountable, and of the moment only. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with pestilence—filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying and the dead—saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new-made graves, and remained as pitiless ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the sightless eyeballs of the singer had been turned up towards the rafters of the cottage—a sign surely that the germ of light, "the sunny seed," as Henry Vaughan calls it, must be in him, else why should he lift his eyes ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, as heaven's cherubim Hors'd upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind."—Shak., Macbeth, Act i, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to end my days sightless, Mary, I knew I could not come to you again; but Heaven has willed it otherwise. It has been a long, long waiting, hopeless till within the last month, and it was only within the past few days that the ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... wind from the mountains the chill knowledge of death wailed through the window, and over the heads of the crowd. All the figures were upright now in the little room. Then those outside saw Laura Sloly lean over and close the sightless eyes. This done, she came to the door and opened it, and motioned for the Healer to leave. He hesitated, hearing the harsh murmur from the outskirts of the crowd. Once again she motioned, and he came. With a face deadly pale she surveyed the people before her silently for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... years the life of this man was a pitiful tragedy, his filmy eyes sightless, his thin white fingers ever eager and nervous, his hours full of deep thought and silent immobility. To him, what was the benefit of that beautiful Perthshire castle which he had purchased from Lord Strathavon a year before his compulsory retirement? What was the use of the old ancestral ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... as by a sudden impulse from the wall against which she had leaned: she threw herself at the feet of Stratonice; she embraced her knees, and looking up at her with those sightless but touching eyes: ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... neighboring swamp, and promised to be of as little use to his master. He was of the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made,—coal-black, with protruding heels, the ape-jaw, blubber-lips constantly open, the sightless eyes closed, and the head thrown far back on the shoulders, lying on the back, in fact, a habit which he still retains, and which adds to the imbecile character of the face. Until he was seven years of age, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... effect of darkness on danger. "Let Ajax perish in the face of day." Who has not shuddered over the description of that Arkansas duel, fought by two naked combatants, with pistol and bowie-knife, in a dark room? One thrills to think of those first few moments of breathless, sightless, hopeless, hushed expectation, —then the confused encounter, the slippery floor, the invisible, ghastly terrors of that horrible chamber. Many a man would shrink from that, who would march coolly up to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... blind man, scared by his threats, started to walk away in the slow, halting way of the sightless, and attracted Great Night Moth's attention. He picked up his new gun and while all were petrified with fear of being the target, he shot the blind man so that his body fell into the oven in which the pig had been baked. The people could only laugh loudly, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but pour its golden flood on the sightless eyeball, and all language would fail to tell the impression upon the paralyzed soul. Thus, in a minor degree, the emigrant from the southern seas who has been for years amongst the cabins on the outskirts of uncultivated plains, where cities were built of huts, where ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... it. Bones and skulls of droves of cattle on all the strand above the tide mark for many score yards. Their ribs stuck out from the snow everywhere, and the sightless eye sockets grinned at me as I stumbled over them. But I had no time to wonder how they came there, for I must get to the summit before Evan and his men reached it by their way along the cliff. I ate handfuls of the snow and quenched my thirst that was growing on ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... that grovelled in the earth—that figure towering there in the sunlight with venerable white beard and hair, erect, symbolic of some strange, mystic power that awed them, his head turned slightly in a curious listening attitude, the sightless eyes closed, upon the face a great calm ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... interrupted by an extraordinary cry. He turned to see his father standing, one hand pressed back on the chair, his face white, his eyes black and empty, like sightless eyes. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... ash-tree touched and bound all the worlds together in its wonderful circle of life. One root it sent deep down into the sightless depths of Hel, where the dead lived; another it fastened firmly in Joetunheim, the dreary home of the giants; and with the third it grasped Midgard, the dwelling place of men. Serpents and all kinds of worms gnawed continually at its roots, but were never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... interstices were from thirty to fifty yards. In these intervals, we received a tremendous fire of musketry from the ramparts above us. Here we lost some brave men, when powerless to return the salutes we received, as the enemy was covered by his impregnable defences. They were even sightless to us, we could see nothing but the blaze from the muzzles ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... better. Indeed, she got worse. In addition to the lassitude of which she had complained she suffered also from great heat and great cold, and, furthermore, sharp pains darted so swiftly through her brows that at times she was both dizzy and sightless. A twirling movement in her head prevented her from standing up. Her center of gravity seemed destroyed, for when she did stand and attempted to walk she had a strange bearing away on one side, so that on striving to ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... grey, sightless head from side to side, as if feeling for the faces below him—and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... it in a troubled fashion, the little trembling hands moving nervously from side to side. It is a very, sad sight, the sadder for, the mournful change that crosses the face of the sleeping girl. The lips take a melancholy curve: the long lashes droop over the sightless eyes, a ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... holding an object aloft, a horrible thing, a naked body, scorched and charred. And above it a head lopped awkwardly. The hair was sandy; half of it had been burned to the scalp in a withering flame. Below, staring from sightless eyes, was the face of the man who had once ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... sightless white eye of his took possession of my imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Then his sightless eyes rested upon Zetes and Calais, the sons of Boreas, the North Wind. A change came into his face as it turned upon them. One would think that he saw the wonder that these two were endowed with—the wings that grew upon their ankles. It was ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... mother is dying she knows full well, and how she longs for one loving glance, for one word of affection, to carry with her in the lonely years to come. But no look of recognition comes to the sightless eyes and no word escapes the lips save that never ceasing cry of "Richard, Richard, Richard." A white-capped nurse flits softly about, but Jane pays no heed to her. The doctor enters and hold whispered consultation with the nurse. Jane does not ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... every step. His clothes were tatter'd and his rent skin showed, Harrowed with thorns. His face was pale as putty, Thrown far back; clots of drooping spittle foamed On his moustache, and his hair hung in tails, Mired with sweat; and sightless in their sockets His eyeballs turned up white, as dull as pebbles. Evenly and doggedly he trotted, And as he went he moaned. Then out of sight Round a corner he ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... I, and worn out, a useless Man; Kindly have you protected me to-night, And no return have I to make but prayers; May you in age be blest with such a daughter!— When from the Holy Land I had returned Sightless, and from my heritage was driven, A wretched Outcast—but this strain of thought Would lead me ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... of Father Feral while I was going, but it was nothing to what I saw when I entered his room. The poor old man, blind and bald, was sitting in an arm-chair behind the stove, his head bowed upon his breast, and his sightless eyes open, and staring as if he saw his three sons stretched at his feet. He did not speak, but great drops of sweat rolled down his forehead on his long, thin cheeks, while his face was pale as that ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... put in the place of highest power, with full right to exercise that power at will. And when the crucified Jesus went up that Olivet day, before the astonished eyes of the disciples, into the sightless blue, on the cloud, He was received in the upper world by the Father. And He was lifted up into the place of highest honour and greatest power. He sat down at the right hand of ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... slowly, a shiver shook him as if caused by ague, and his eyes, that appeared almost sightless, now looked with a strange glance of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... innocence; her arms drooping— her face wistfully turned to his—and a half smile upon the lips, that made still more touching the tears not yet dried upon her cheeks. While thin, frail, shadowy, with white hair and furrowed cheeks, the old man fixed his sightless orbs on space; and his face, usually only animated from the lethargy of advancing dotage by a certain querulous cynicism, now grew suddenly earnest, and even thoughtful, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Child, the sightless Boy, It is the triumph of his joy! The bravest Traveller in balloon, Mounting as if to reach the moon, Was never ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... height, but gaunt and massive, and Tom recognized the framework of the long arms and grand shoulders and chest which he had so often admired in the son. His right leg was quite stiff from an old wound on the knee cap; the left eye was sightless, and the scar of a cutlass travelled down the drooping lid and on to the weather-beaten cheek below. His head was high and broad, his hair and whiskers silver white, while the shaggy eyebrows were scarcely grizzled. His face was deeply lined, and the long, clean-cut lower ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... she retreated backwards to a distant part of the room, hearing herself repeat "You mustn't, you mustn't" as if it were somebody else screaming. She came to a chair and flung herself into it. Thereupon the somebody else ceased screaming and she lolled, exhausted, sightless, in a silent room, as if indifferent to everything and without a single thought ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... worn, but still graceful woman, who, with her sightless eyes cast down, clung to her sole stay—her devoted child—Mrs. Gwynne seemed deeply moved. There was even a sort of deprecatory hesitation in her manner, but it soon passed.—She clasped the widow's hands, and ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Greece; the Adelsberg caverns in Carniola, and the Mammoth in Kentucky. The latter is the largest in the world, the windings of which extend forty miles and through which is a subterranean river. In the river are eyeless fish, and fish with eyes, but sightless. Others are the Luray, in Virginia; the Wyandotte, in Indiana; Weir's, in Virginia; the Big Saltpeter, in Missouri, and Ball's, in New York. Of seashore caverns, the most famous and remarkable is Fingal's, on the coast of Scotland. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... orders for the boat to be sunk by gunfire, but somehow the memory of that stark figure at the helm persisted. Try as he would, he failed to banish from his mind the staring, sightless eyes ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... her face and whined; The arms of Toil were paralyzed; The wise were of divided mind, And those who counselled and advised Were sightless ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... camp-stool sat a savage-looking man, dressed in a dark corduroy suit, with a blackened clay pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. His weather-beaten mahogany face was plentifully covered with small-pox marks, and one of his eyes was sightless and white from the effects of the same disease. He rose now, and interposed himself between her and ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to be looking into his inmost soul—the eyes of the man he had slain. With a yell of terror and of insane fury he rushed upon the ghost and thrust a knife into its breast. The frenzy passed. It was no ghost that lay on the earth before him, staring up with sightless eyes. It was his fellow-murderer—his own brother. That night the assassin's body hung from a tree at ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the curling fold of the pale green garment that ran around her, embracing her with clinging clasp like a winding wisp of emerald foam fondly wrapping the yielding waist of Wishnu's sea-born wife. And she was very tall, and shaped like Shri, and she stood with her head a little bent, and her sightless eyes fixed as it were on empty space, just as though she were listening for some expected sound. And as he continued to gaze at her, a wonder that was almost horror crept into his mind. For her face was not like that of an image, ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... treatment?" asked Quincy, as he looked at the beautiful blue but sightless eyes that ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... lamentation, some even more. Among the massacred, still stretched in their gore, one stoops over a sister; another sees his child; a wife weeps by the side of her husband, her hot tears mingling with his yet warm blood; while brother bends down to gaze into the eyes of brother, which, glassy and sightless, cannot reciprocate ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, 645 Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of that unmoving man, His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, As ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... said Mr. Trumbull, "which is all-powerful to command the obedience of the citizen but has no power to afford him protection." "Tell it not, sir," said he, "to the father whose son was starved at Andersonville, or the widow whose husband was slain at Mission Ridge, or the little boy who leads his sightless father through the streets of your city, of the thousand other mangled heroes to be seen on every side of us to-day, that this Government, in defense of which the son and the husband fell, the father lost his sight and the others were maimed and crippled, had the right to call those persons ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... room-fellows, seeding in his heart Envy, which biting inwards did corrode His mettle, and his ill blood plied the goad Upon his brain, until the wretch made mad Went muttering his wrongs, ill-trimmed, ill-clad, Sightless and careless, with slack mouth awry, And working tongue, and danger in the eye; And oft would stare at Heaven and laugh his scorn: "O fools, think not to trick me!" then forlorn Would gaze about ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... this ulterior consciousness. It must in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the original ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... chanting rose to the lofty ceiling. No sooner had it commenced than the eyes of all were fixed in terror upon the dying man. Novikoff, standing nearest to him, thought that Semenoff's eye-lids moved slightly, as if the sightless eyeballs had been turned in the direction of the chanting. To the others, however, Semenoff appeared as ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... my torture, ochone, how the pain, Sore, and sharp, as at first, smites again and again, Sightless dear eyes, voiceless lips, and the breath Sweet as honey, now lost ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... so musical a voice as hers! Every tone of it goes direct to the heart, and its intonations soothe and charm the ear. Her countenance, too, is peculiarly expressive. Even when her eyes, in the role she enacted last night, were fixed, and supposed to be sightless, her countenance was still beautiful. There is a harmony in its various expressions that accords perfectly with her clear, soft, and liquid voice; and the united effect of both ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Thus he spake; and towards him the aged sire opened his sightless eyes, and lifted them up and replied ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Her child was sightless. On a fine bright day She saw her lay her needlework aside, And, as on such occasions mothers will, For leaving off her work began ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... discontented with everything, with strident voice; and later, blind, tearful, with unkempt grey beard; he remembered how one day after drinking a glass too much at dinner, and spilling the gravy over his napkin, he began to relate his conquests, growing red in the face, and winking with his sightless eyes; he remember Varvara Pavlovna,—and involuntarily shuddered, as a man shudders from a sudden internal pain, and shook his head. Then his! thoughts came to a ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... erected in Massachusetts, the committee decided to save expense by not having any windows. They reasoned that, as the patients could not see, there was no need of any light. It was built without windows, but ventilation was well provided for, and the poor sightless patients were domiciled in the house. But things did not go well: one after another began to sicken, and great languor fell upon them; they felt distressed and restless, craving something, they hardly knew what. After ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... and boiling waters, Into everlasting torment. Then the hero, Lemminkainen, Sang the foemen with their broadswords? Sang the heroes with their weapons, Sang the eldest, sang the youngest, Sang the middle-aged, enchanted; Only one he left his senses, He a poor, defenseless shepherd, Old and sightless, halt and wretched, And the old man's name was Nasshut. Spake the miserable shepherd: "Thou hast old and young enchanted, Thou hast banished all our heroes, Why hast spared this wretched shepherd?" This is Lemminkainen's answer: "Therefore have I not bewitched thee: Thou art old, and blind, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... darkness of life. It is not well for us who in the beginning came forth with the wonder-light about us, that it should have turned in us to darkness, the song of life be dumb. We close our eyes from the many-coloured mirage of day, and are alone soundless and sightless in the unillumined cell of the brain. But there are thoughts that shine, impulses born of fire. Still there are moments when the prison world reels away a distant shadow, and the inner chamber of clay fills full with fiery ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... heed to it, thinking it merely a fake performance to gain sympathy from the public. I told this to Captain Towse, and he replied kindly that I should soon learn much greater things about the blind. At St. Dunstan's, he said, there were about three hundred men, all more or less sightless, making baskets, mats, hammocks, nets, bags, and dozens of other useful articles, mending boots, doing carpentry, learning the poultry business, fitting themselves for massage work, and, what seemed to me most incredible, taking up stenography as ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... badly hit, Jimmy?" gasped an honest Irish lad, as he strove to raise him from the ground. But deathly pallor and staring, sightless eyes were the sole reply. "My God, lieutenant, he's killed outright. There's no use staying," cried another trooper. "Mount, sir, mount for God's sake! They'll be on us in a minute." But tugging still at the limp and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Street. She found old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a cravat, he was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking with his sightless eyes. ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in the full moonlight he saw a figure. It was Phyl, fully dressed, standing with outstretched hands. Her eyes wide open, fixed, and sightless, told their tale. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... between his arms, eyes staring and sightless, The Pilgrim groped out and found the ropes. Once more at the end of the toll he lifted himself—lifted himself by the strength of his shoulders to his legs that tottered beneath him, and then stepped free of ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... you to help me home, then. I'll make it worth your while. You see.' The sightless eyes turned ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... to his savage disposition. He was void of fear, shame, and pity, and on that account Domitian often used him as a tool for the destruction of the best men in the State, just as though he were a dart urging on its blind and sightless course. All at table were speaking of this man's villainy and bloody counsels, when the Emperor himself said: "I wonder what his fate would be if he were alive to-day," to which Mauricus replied, "He would be dining with us." I have ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... stiffened grasp of the dead man and helped her to her feet; then the three hurried from the fatal spot, so lately filled by a cheerful crowd of merrymakers and now tenanted only by the corpse that lay with sightless eyes staring up at the blue sky. They made for the shelter of jungle-clad hills that rose a ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... old Jules of the sightless gaze, Who begged in the streets for bread. Each day he had come for a year of days, And groped his ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... and a mightless, And the strong men laughed and roared: "Is our father Odin sightless That bade him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... coming, coming, the brothers you never knew, But, sightless, my ears would know them, so steady and firm and true Is the tramp of men whose fathers trod where the wind blows free, Over the heights of Queenston, ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... June grass, and around to the back door. On a bench beside the pump an old woman sat shelling peas. Her form was thin but erect and her hair snowy white. She moved with alertness, and as the girl dismounted and approached her she raised her head and turned a pleasant face with deep-set, sightless gray eyes ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... question was a refusal; they had said: 'Master, we will that Thou wouldst do whatever we should desire'; and He said: 'What is it that ye desire? Let Me know that first.' But when blind Bartimaeus cried, Jesus smiled down upon him—though his sightless eyeballs could not see the smile, there would be a smile in the cadence of His words—and He said: 'What wouldst thou that I should do for thee?' To this suppliant that question was a promise—'I will do what you want.' He puts the key of the royal treasure-house into the hand ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and fast, With chain of summer, winter, spring and fall, Is bounden to the dim receding past; Time o'er my life has spread a somber pall, With sightless eyes I grope and clutch the air, My lot is now the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... time the hideous uproar was heard: and a crash, as of some mighty ruin. Captain Walladmor groaned as he gazed upon the beautiful figure and the sweet countenance before him, both petrified into marble, speechless, breathless, sightless,—giving no sign of life but by spasmodic startings, that shot momentarily over her bosom and lovely mouth: for his sake was she tortured thus—for his sake, that in a minute—oh! how brief a minute—must part from her, must see that form—that ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... not yet returned from the night's fishing, and some were asleep in their beds after it. Not a chimney smoked. But Malcolm seemed to have in his own single being life and joy enough for a world; such an intense consciousness of bliss burned within him, that, in the sightless, motionless village, he seemed to himself to stand like an altar blazing in the midst of desert Carnac. But he was not the only one awake: on the threshold of Peter's cottage sat his little Phemy, trying to polish a bit of serpentine ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... her ears in two curls like frayed strands of rope. Her forehead was rather high than broad, her nose large but well-shaped, and her eyes full but so singularly light in color as to seem almost sightless. The short upper lip of her large mouth displayed her teeth in an habitual smile, which was in turn so flatly contradicted by every other line of her careworn face that it seemed gratuitously artificial. Her figure was hidden by a shapeless ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... that I alone possessed that faculty, Prince Koltsoff, if I were you." She leaned forward, her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully seaward. "I also am not sightless." ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... platform, and it was as much as Angus could do to hold him back. Poor Sholto; he was a faithful beast, and they were taking his beloved mistress away from him. Myra sat back in the carriage, and furtively wiped away a tear from her poor sightless eyes. ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... of flaming sulphur, flesh of tow, Bones of dry wood, a soul without a guide To curb the fiery will, the ruffling pride Of fierce desires that from the passions flow; A sightless mind that weak and lame doth go Mid snares and pitfalls scattered far and wide;— What wonder if the first chance brand applied To fuel massed like this should make it glow? Add beauteous art, which, brought with us from ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... windows, vacant and forlorn, stared, sightless, from their marble walls; the whole sad city taking on the semblance of scattered mounds of dead men's sun-bleached skulls—the casements having the appearance of eyeless ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... noiselessly down the street, which was now very dark. The village houses seemed rather awful with their dark windows like sightless eyes. When they reached Annie's house Alice gave her a ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in the valley. In its centre was a solitary lake, black and bottomless, and haunted by a giant white water-snake, sluggish, blind and very old. Stray prospectors swore they had seen it, just at dusk, and its sightless, staring eyes were too terrible ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... their proper might, All motionless and silent seem to moan The unseemly negligence of nature's hand, That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine, O mistress of the passions; artist fine! Who dost our souls against our sense command, Plucking the horror from a sightless face, Lending to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... eyes. She is called 'Welsh Ann' because she is from Wales. My friend told her I had been in Wales. She seemed so glad to shake hands with one who had been in her own country, and her voice choked with tears as she thanked me and took my gift. But she brushed the tears away from her poor sightless eyes while my friend repeated to her the Twenty-third Psalm, and then at her request knelt and prayed. The apron which I gave her has quite a history. A girl who earns her own living, hearing I was making these aprons, sent me this one which she bought. It was worked across the bottom, and ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... of my faith, Thou, solemn Priest, hast heard; And, though upon my bed of death, I call not back a word. Point not to thy Madonna, Priest,— Thy sightless saint of stone; She cannot, from this burning breast, Wring ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... in health, and the agreeable sensations that accompany health prompt it at intervals to melody, but no person, not even the dullest ruffian among the baser sort of bird-fanciers would maintain for a moment that the happiness of the little sightless captive, whether vocal or silent, is at all comparable in degree to that of the chaffinch singing in April "on the orchard bough," vividly seeing the wide sunlit world, blue above and green below, possessing the will and the power, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... time Carlyle took Milburn, the blind preacher, out on to Chelsea embankment and showed the sightless man where Franklin plunged into the Thames and swam to Blackfriars Bridge. "He might have stayed here," said Thomas Carlyle, "and become a swimming-teacher, but God had other work for him!" Franklin had many opportunities to stop and become a victim of arrested ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... protectress, and as she had a strong practical sense of religion, chiefly manifested in a willing acceptance of the decrees of Providence, I think she did us both good. I wish I could draw you a picture of her coming in at that door, with her all but sightless eyes, the broad borders of her white cap waving, and her hands stretched out before her; for she was more apprehensive than if she had been quite blind, because she could see things without knowing what, or even in what position ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... bright, exultant eye, Where fierce revenge flashed wild and high, Accusers gathered fast; From prison-keep and living grave Came forth the mutilated slave, With faltering step aghast; And sightless men with silver hair, The record of their dungeon air, Who for long years had sought to die, And wrestled with their agony Till thought grew wild and intellect grew dim, The clanking fetters' mark on ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... concentration of my views upon one object, gradually brought back my old passion, which at length became as firmly established as it was before. The elasticity of my original feelings being thus restored, I ventured, alone and sightless, upon my dangerous and novel course; and I cannot look back upon the scenes through which I have passed, the great variety of circumstances by which I have been surrounded, and the strange experiences with which I have become familiar, without an intense ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... by a lad to the organ, which, as leader, he played. One day, while conducting his oratorio of "Samson," the old man turned pale and trembled with emotion, as the bass sung the blind giant's lament: "Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!" As the audience saw the sightless eyes turned towards them, ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... steps advanced,—the sudden pause Attention quickly drew, Rolled sightless orbs to learn the cause, But, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... the palmer, "not all the money that is in this country could pay a just price for these wares of mine. This nail," he continued, pulling off his hat and turning up his sightless orbs, "is one of those wherewith man's salvation was secured. I had it, together with this piece of the true rood, from the five-and-twentieth descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who still lives in Jerusalem alive and well, though latterly ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... receiving something in his hands borne by the silence. Then he picked up his staff and his can. He turned round and faced me for a moment before resuming his journey. There was a smile on his lips and a strange radiance in his sightless eyes, and I wished that I, too, might ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in fetters of steel. In all his after life he was not to forget the picture of that hideous figure, sitting there in the tomb-like grey. The face was bloated and soft and flabby, beardless and putty-like; the lips thick and colourless; the eyes wide, sightless and glassy. The black hair was matted and plastered close to the skull, as if it had just come from the water. The clothes that covered the corpse were wet, slimy and reeking with the odour of stagnant water. Huge, stiff, puffy hands extended ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... cruelty; make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night! And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heav'n peep through the blanket of the dark, To ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... a right to do what he pleased with his daughter. It was a relief to him when Verena got up from her chair, with a movement which made Tarrant drop into the background as if his part were now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and sightless; then, after a short further delay, she ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... meeting ranks Slope their strong bayonets, with short firm shanks Protruded from their tubes; each bristling van, Steel fronting steel, and man encountering man, In dreadful silence tread. As, wrapt from sight, The nightly ambush moves to secret fight; So rush the raging files, and sightless close In plunging thrust with fierce conflicting foes. They reach, they strike, they stagger o'er the slain, Deal doubtful blows, or closing clench their man, Intwine their twisting limbs, the gun forgo, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my look still held that beggar's face within the field of vision, I saw the sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw. He did most certainly smile; ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... received a tremendous fire of musketry from the ramparts above us. Here we lost some brave men, when powerless to return the salutes we received, for the enemy was covered by his impregnable defences....They were even sightless to us; we could see nothing but the blaze from the muzzles of the muskets....We proceeded rapidly, exposed to the long line of fire from the garrison, for now we were unprotected by any buildings. The fire had slackened in ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... her basket again upon her arm, turned to give one last look of fiendish satisfaction at the corpse, which lay like a dead angel slain in God's battle. The bright lamps were glaring full upon her still beautiful but sightless eyes, which, wide open, looked, even in death, reproachfully ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... braille books, turning his sightless face toward her as he studied, trying to concentrate through the pain ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... he went to the door in summer time and sat down, to the chimney-corner in winter time, and, after that, never stirred till night. He made no gesture, no movement; only his eyelids, quivering from some nervous affection, fell down sometimes over his white sightless orbs. Had he any intellect, any thinking faculty, any consciousness of his own existence? Nobody cared to inquire as to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant |
