"Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appears that their imprisonment is a state of darkness. "Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness? to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever." This darkness is probably a contrast to the light enjoyed by glorified saints. They are doubtless let into the purposes of heaven—to them the mystery of divine providence ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... other beauty. He was sick of fair faces, and fat arms, and free necks. Madame Goesler's eyes sparkled as other eyes did not sparkle, and there was something of the vagueness of mystery in the very blackness and gloss and abundance of her hair,—as though her beauty was the beauty of some world which he had not yet known. And there was a quickness and yet a grace of motion about her which was quite new ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... take much individual blackness of heart to work up a fine promising slander. A surmise made in jest is repeated in earnest, and all the other tale-bearers think they are telling simple facts. Depend upon it, the story did not get off from the Osborns by any means as it came ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... may be accounted in some sort a degree of comparison, by which the signification is diminished below the positive, as black, blackish, or tending to blackness; salt, saltish, or having a little taste of salt; they therefore admit no comparison. This termination is seldom added but to words expressing sensible qualities, nor often to words of above one syllable, and is scarcely used in the solemn ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide; and though we may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... twenty feet above the floor, which serves as window, door, and chimney, and which is reached by a round log with holes in it, that stands perpendicularly in the centre. The beams, rafters, and logs which compose the yurt are all of a glossy blackness, from the smoke in which they are constantly enveloped. A wooden platform, raised about a foot from the earth, extends out from the walls on three sides to a width of six feet, leaving an open spot eight or ten feet ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the punishment of the Big Man on Twm Cwm, persons, because Twm speeched against the capel. Was he not put in the coffin in his farm trowsis and jacket? And do you know, the Big Man cast a brightness on his buttons for him to be known in the blackness of hell." ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great book, I say ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... profuse, His vineyard grows; part, wide extended, basks In the sun's beams; the arid level glows; In part they gather, and in part they tread The wine-press, while, before the eye, the grapes Here put their blossoms forth, there gather fast Their blackness. On the garden's verge extreme Flowers of all hues[040] smile all the year, arranged With neatest art judicious, and amid The lovely scene two fountains welling forth, One visits, into every part diffused, The garden-ground, the other soft beneath The threshold steals ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... building in which he was confined, lay a world that was not Earth, circling a sun that was not Sol, and that the ship had gone and would never come back. He was alone, abandoned. He thought of the ship, a silver streak now in the implacable blackness of space, threading its way homeward through the stars to Sol, to Earth. The utter desolation which swept over him at the impact of his aloneness was more than he could endure, and he forced himself to think of ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... over and bury fortress and valley, and one spear-like gleam of bleak sunshine lighting up a few of its windows and a few square yards of its western wall. Of course I had never been guilty of such a madness as to think of approaching the place by anything but wile and stratagem; and its bulk and blackness and the thickness of its walls had nothing in the world to do with the success or failure of my enterprise, and yet I could not resist a feeling of discouragement which almost amounted to a sense ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... I excuse it? There are things done which are holy as the heavens,—which are clear before God as the light of the sun, which leave no stain on the conscience, and which yet the malignity of man can invest with the very blackness of hell! I shall know why I pay this L500. Because she who of all the world is the nearest and the dearest to me,"—she looked up into his face with amazement, as he stood stretching out both his arms in his energy,—"has in her impetuous folly committed a grievous blunder, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... to Kate presently, as she ran, that the wind was a friend, trying to help her. The driving rain on her face cleared her brain. Even the lightning was a friend, for without it she could not have seen a foot of her way ahead in the blackness. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... cooking-fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day—in the mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you prepare for ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... dismal, protracted, nerve-racking. Nor was that all, for they could now discern the pat-pat, pat-pat of footsteps—long, soft, loping footsteps, as of huge furry paws or naked human feet. However, they could see nothing—nothing but blackness, intensified by the feeble flickering ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... washed and decked for our coming. Birds were singing, rainbows glancing, in quivering, water-laden trees; flowers were shimmering in the sunshine; the young growth was springing up glorious from the blackness of desolating winter fires. Such tender tones of pink and gray! such fiery-hearted reds and browns and olive-greens! such misty vagueness in the shadows! such brilliance in the sunlight that melted through the openings of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Fish in, is to take Butter and Salet Oyl, first well clarified together. This hath not the unsavoury taste of Oyl alone, nor the blackness of Butter alone. It fryeth Fish crisp, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... whether she was thinking of her apron of moss-rosebuds or of her opportunity for moral sublimity. Before reaching the door she turned away and stood gazing at an old picture, indistinguishable with blackness, over an altar. At last they passed out into the court. Glancing at her in the open air, Rowland was startled; he imagined he saw the traces of hastily suppressed tears. They had lost time, she said, and they must hurry; she sent Assunta to look for a fiacre. She ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... which they sat, was lost in the dusk, and a wind, heavy with damp, came moaning out of the vast wilderness. Thunder rumbled on the horizon, then cracked directly overhead, and flashes of lightning cut the blackness. ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by cords dropped a shadow like a huge spider on the pale patch of lighted ground below. The night was warm and rather dark; no one was about at that hour; the only sound was the gurgle of the fountain in the corner, where the water-jets gleamed out of the blackness like rods of twisted crystal. He entered the narrow street, or rather alley, leading to the bridge. In the state of blank misery he was in his eye seized upon the smallest objects as if to distract his mind, and he observed—as he might not have done had he been happy—that in ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... black with people all gesticulating and pointing excitedly out toward a great shape which, looming grayly against the lifting blackness of the sky, staggered and swayed like a drunken thing in the grip of the ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... spoke she looked into the water, and my father looked too; and they both trembled. Deep down in the blackness of the sea was it that they saw—yet it quickly came nearer and nearer, like unto a great flame of white fire. It was a tanlfa. Like flashes of lightning did my father dash his paddle into the water and urge the canoe to the land, for he ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... little English army, John of Hainault seized the bridle of King Philip's horse and led him away, led him away from the danger and tumult of the battle-field. Out into the quiet country they rode in silence, with five horsemen only following them. On they journeyed through the blackness of the night and on until they reached Amiens. But of their flight or journey or destination, not one of the victors thought or cared, for the battle-field had become the seat of ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... than I can that the considerable differences between female and male house-sparrow, or much greater brightness of male Parus caeruleus (both of which build under cover) than of female Parus, are related to protection. I even misdoubt much whether the less blackness of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... utterly alone and miserable. But in spite of his resolution his eyes soon closed again. He was awakened, this time by his horse stumbling over some unseen obstacle. He could see nothing in any direction. The blackness and rain shut him in like a fog. He turned at right angles to find the trees which lined the road, but there were no trees. He swung his horse around and went in the other direction, but he found no trees—only an impenetrable darkness which pressed in upon him with a heaviness ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... injustice of their treatment that weighed upon them like a burden that human nature could not bear. They had come to lift such a burden from the backs of another nation, and they had been treated like dogs all the way over! Like the low rumbling of oncoming thunder was the blackness of their countenances as they marched up, up, and up into Brest. The sun grew hot, and their knees wobbled under them from sheer weakness; strong men when they started, who were fine and fit, now faint like babies, yet with spirits unbroken, and great vengeance in their hearts. They would ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... reached the canyon gates. In the blackness of the gorge, with only the light of a narrow strip of stars overhead, he was forced to ride more slowly. But his confidence that he would find her at the Ranger Station had increased as he approached the scenes of her girlhood home. To ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... fancied the others were gazing expectantly towards the shadowy blurr of the bluff, which rose a trifle clearer now against the skyline. He felt, with instinctive shrinking, that their search would be rewarded there in the blackness beneath the trees. The pace grew faster. Men glanced at their neighbours now and then as well as ahead, and Breckenridge felt the silence grow oppressive as the bluff rose higher. The snow dulled the beat of hoofs, and the flitting figures that rode with him passed on almost as noiselessly as the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... the wide window near my bed and gazed out upon the yet luminous City of Occupation. The picture was of surprising strangeness and beauty. Far off, until melting into the encroaching edges of an outer blackness, the City extended its folds and surfaces of light. The streets were empty, the music of the Chorus Halls stilled. Here and there, a spirit was moving slowly through the streets, a half-made Martian; a breeze soft and salubrious stirred the thickly leaved ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... disposition of its members and in such things as are necessary for an animal's life. Secondly, a thing is said to be perfect relatively: and this perfection regards something connected with the thing externally, such as whiteness or blackness or something of the kind. Now the Christian life consists chiefly in charity whereby the soul is united to God; wherefore it is written (1 John 3:14): "He that loveth not abideth in death." Hence the perfection of the Christian life consists simply in charity, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... her range of vision was much circumscribed. The sea was covered with light waves, which, as they rose and fell, scarcely had any effect in giving motion to the vessel. The hue of the ocean was, in some places, almost of an inky blackness; in others it was lighted up with phosphorescent flashes, which, seen amid the surrounding darkness, seemed as brilliant as if composed of real fire—their reflection being caught by the light foam which ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... early, tramping back over the dusty road, convinced that the downpour for which they all yearned was at hand. There was no moonlight that night, only a hot blackness, illumined now and then by a brilliant dart of lightning that shocked the senses and left behind a void indescribable, a darkness that could be felt. There was something savage in the atmosphere, something primitive and passionate that ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... I ain't." Mr. Beale was confused by the two desires which make it difficult to confess anything truthfully—the desire to tell the worst of oneself and the desire to do full justice to oneself at the same time. It is so very hard not to blacken the blackness, or whiten the whiteness, when one comes to trying to tell the truth about oneself. "But I been a beast all the same," said ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... down again: down into a dim deep pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. But his body had never been more alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... not answer him, for I was at the moment straining my eyes into the blackness on the weather-bow, where I fancied I had caught, a second or two before, a deeper shadow. There were moments when I thought I saw it again, but so profound was the darkness that it really seemed absurd ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... but the sitting-room in the Albany looked quite different to Bertie as he entered it. Was it only a few hours before, he wondered, that he had stood there by the window in the act of taking that life which had become too great a burden to bear? And in the blackness of his despair, when he saw no glimmer of hope, the clouds had rolled away. He glanced at the pistol, harmlessly resting on a shelf, and a rush of gratitude filled his heart and brought tears to his eyes. He clasped his friend's hand and tried ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the sea over the face of a dizzy cliff. A falcon, on their approach, started with rustle of wings from its ledge and then swayed crazily over the abyss. Watching this bird, the bishop felt a sudden voice in his stomach. A sensation of blackness came before his eyes—sky and sea were merged together—his feet were treading on air. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... scarlet and green drawing-room, whose apparel made so vivid a setting for their unaccustomed costumes, each tried nervously to find a seat, desirous of hiding the emphatic blackness of his trousers. There seemed a sort of indecency in that blackness and in the colour of their gloves—a sort of exaggeration of the feelings; and many cast shocked looks of secret envy at 'the Buccaneer,' who had no gloves, and was wearing grey trousers. A subdued hum of conversation ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray; three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the rays of the sun like a holy picture, rested our Stephen, sleeping. Mother sat beside the bed. There was a humming in my ears and blackness before my eyes, and if father had not jumped and caught me I would have fallen over. It was long before they brought ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... awake a full three hours after the dark had come, and he rose only twice from his reclining position, each time merely to replenish the fire which remained a red core in the circling blackness. Always he was listening and always he heard nothing but the usual sounds of the forest and the night. The darkness grew denser and heavier, but after a while it began to thin and lighten. The sky became clear, and the great stars swam in the dusky blue. Then ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the heavens of late a new star, that burst upon astonished astronomers in a void spot; but its brilliancy, though far transcending that of our sun, soon began to wane, and before long, apparently, there will be blackness again where there was blackness before. So all lights but His are temporary as well as derived, and men 'willing for a season to rejoice' in the fleeting splendours, and to listen to the teacher of a day, lose the illumination ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... otherwise than shameful. Adopt it, and you will cover the country with dishonor. Adopt it, and you will fix a stigma upon the very name of republic. As to the imagination, there are mountains of light, so are there mountains of darkness; and this is one of them. It is the very Koh-i-noor of blackness. Adopt this proposition, and you will be little better than the foul Harpies who defiled the feast that was spread. The Constitution is the feast spread for our country, and you are now hurrying to drop ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... often been abroad alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be her foes also. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness,—then suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... In the blackness of the November night, the chauffeur, mistaking the entrance to a house, had run up a back lane and ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... idea. Persuasion would have been as effectual in moving yonder blackened corpse into healthy life, as in moving to a sense of duty to themselves, men who could see nothing but the deadness around them, and whose minds saw only, under all, the blackness of immediate destruction. Those who were victors, until now, literally rushed from the fort. The reinforcements of the British soon arrived, but the explosion had again given the defenders heart, and they too, having received reinforcements, after some ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... (the blackness of this man's heart revolted me). "There is no seductive shape that the tempter does not assume, my child. Wit in itself is not to be condemned, although the Church shuns it as far as she is concerned, looking upon ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... European waiters. The maids, under Mrs. Jordan, were also East Indian women, and they were very picturesque in their saris, or head coverings, of gay colors, with brilliant teeth gleaming out of their swarthy faces, and eyes like beads for blackness. Even the boys who answered bell-calls and polished the brasses and the shoes, were from Soudan or Bombay, and the stokers down in the engine-room were Seedees, black as the coals they kept flinging into those yawning red mouths, which made one ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... swiftly across the heavens now and again eclipsed the bright face of Goro, the moon, and forewarned the ape-man of impending storm. In the depth of the jungle the cloud shadows produced a thick blackness that might almost be felt—a blackness that to you and me might have proven terrifying with its accompaniment of rustling leaves and cracking twigs, and its even more suggestive intervals of utter silence in which the crudest of imaginations might have conjured crouching beasts ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fell during the hours of darkness. Only the lightning came, as soon as the sun was down, blazing, flaring, and flashing round the horizon and high overhead; disturbing the darkness as the patter of a tattoo disturbs silence; punctuating the night into periods of sombre, awful blackness by moments of dazzling, blinding white fury, that made the eyes tingle through the succeeding moments of dark, and the ears shrink and tremble, anticipating the rending thunder-crash which never came. And always was the air hot and dry, and the wind, when it blew, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... respiration of the ardent Mr. Stobell, coupled with a word or two which had filtered through the window, that the ingenious Mr. Chalk was using him as a stalking-horse. From the fact that Mr. Stobell made no denial it was none the less evident, despite the growing blackness of his appearance, that he was a party to the arrangement. The captain ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... beyond all things that men know. And he came to the dark country where there was no sunshine nor spring, but it was always dreary winter; where mountains were piled up like blocks of ice, and where great caverns yawned hungrily in blackness. And this was Jotunheim, the land ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... reflecting the light so that the block-house and the encumbered enclosure, with its piles of boxes and rough furniture, with here and there a tent, rapidly grew lighter and lighter, but with shadows of intense blackness marked out where the light ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... flooded the country with its glare, and after sailing nearly in front of the house it shrank into a scarlet cross not larger than a man's hand. Then in a shower of sparks it ceased, its absence making the blackness almost corporeal. Instinctively the hands of the two indulged in a long pressure, and Mila quickly adjusted the lamp. But Gerald still stood at the window a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... conscious that he had given his last aid and must stand aside. Gladys knelt by the bed with folded hands, her golden head bowed in deep and bitter silence. She saw her last friend drifting towards the mystic sea, and felt as if the blackness of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted. And immediately from a dismantled stall in the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... he, since now no flight availed to 'scape that peril's hold, Pours from his mouth a mighty smoke, O wondrous to be told! Enwrapping all the house about with blinding misty shroud, Snatching the sight from eyes of men, and rolling on the cloud, A reeking night with heart of fire and utter blackness blent. Alcides' spirit bore it nought; his body swift he sent With headlong leap amid the fire where thickest rolled the wave Of smoke, and with its pitchy mist was flooding all the cave; Cacus he catcheth ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... like the day of Judgment shinin' through the darkness of men's lives and bringin' out the hidden things. Way out in the distance where nothin' could be seen but blackness and shadows, the beam would fall and a island would stand out plain before us, houses with men and wimmen on the piazzas, a boat house, a boat with men and wimmen and children in it. You could see for one dazzlin' ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... was that there, on the Clyde, John's mother and I came out of the blackness of our first grief. We began to be able to talk to one another. And every day we talked of John. We have never ceased to do that, his mother and I. We never shall. We may not have him with us bodily, but ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... you can say such a thing, Scribe, still I ask you to say it if you can. As to why I fear, it is because I seem to feel the near shadow of some woman lying cold upon me and building a wall of blackness ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... hand, gave him my parting message home, and then crouched and pushed the boat into and down the stream. As I lifted my hand from her and she glided into the blackness, I felt in my heart that the last link with the old life was broken. Then, as I rose to my feet, a hand was placed on my arm, and I tingled in every fibre at this sweet ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the dash and desperation of a steeple-chase. The skipper of each craft is at his own helm, roaring out orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors. With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck. One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Oh, it drives one back to God in an agony of mingled longing and despair to see this mighty multitude that will not come and be saved, drifting along in darkness and wretchedness through this life to the blackness of darkness beyond! And this is intensified by the thought of the children now quite numerous in our Chinese communities. We know to what the daughters are destined. We know what it is that gives them, in this country, a special money value; and as to the sons, one can scarcely conceive circumstances ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and fell upon our ears through the wild yelling of the hurricane as if it had been but a gentle summer breeze; while the billows burst upon the weather side of the island until we ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... annual interest is the dark. Having fallen asleep all the summer by daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulus of fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows. There is a frolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with the ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... sitting before the campfire, in the chill blackness just beginning to turn gray. Then swift hands and lean strong arms went at beds and packs, horses and saddles. When dawn broke the hunters were on their way, far up ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... his in a way which at dawn my eyes have gazed into the morning star rising near to me over the little wood at the Chateau de Grez. I did not for many days know whether those eyes were gray or blue or purple, for when I regarded them I forgot to decide, and also they were so deep and shadowed by the blackness of their lashes and brows that such a decision was difficult. At this time I only knew that in them lay the fire of the lightning over Old Harpeth when the storm breaks, the laugh of the very small boy who splashes bare feet in the water with glee, and also a coldness ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... fourth, while in the intervals Fairchild's eyes sought out the sulky, sullen form of Maurice Rodaine, flattened against the wall, eyes evil, mouth a straight line, and the blackness of hate discoloring his face. It was as so much wine to Fairchild; he felt himself really young for the first time in his life. And as the music started again, he once more ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... century before. At the farther end was a tower with an open belfry, choked in a tangle of vines and bushes, within which the bell was dimly visible through a crust of spiders' webs and birds' nests. Patches of moss and vegetable mold relieved the blackness of the stones, and a venerable ivy plant clung like a rotten fish-net to the wall. It was a weird, yet fascinating picture; for the house, like a rocky cliff, looked as if it had grown where it stood. Parts of the building were crumbling, and decay had laid its hand more ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... the dry leaves from the trees. Kemp, exiled, as it were, from the Pavilion, sat in the big car and watched the gathering blackness. Finally he got out and put up the curtains. Everything would be ready when Dalton came. He knew better, however, than to warn his master. George was apt to be sharp when his ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... all through his watch of four hours. Their next watch began in the middle of the night, and Mark Twain tells how surprised and disgusted he was to learn that pilots must get up in the night to run their boats, and his amazement to find Mr. Bixby plunging into the blackness ahead as if it had been daylight. Very likely this is mainly fiction, but hardly ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... away and walked with exaggerated carelessness in the direction of the door. He even went outside and peeped through the crack, but the sleepers did not stir. He glanced into the blackness behind, and then came ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... a further example: confirmation that the crow is white. May its blackness not be said to be only a shading which is not the real fact? Its feathers are white inside, its body, too; and these are the stuff of which the bird is made. As its blackness is a shading, the crow turns white as it grows old—some such have been seen. What is black ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... not always to be had pure, even in the neighbourhood of Blenheim. This spaniel may he distinguished by the length and silkiness of the coat, the deep fringe about the ear, the arch and deep-feathering of the tail, the full and moist eye, and the blackness ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State. Mr. Underwood, of Virginia, dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... was superbly dressed. A rich robe of velvet, embroidered with gold, fell in heavy, glistening folds around her graceful figure; a diadem of brilliants sparkled like a constellation upon the blackness of her luxuriant hair, and her exquisite neck and arms were covered with costly gems. She had just completed her toilet for a dinner given by the Princess Karl Liechtenstein, when Podstadsky had met her with the alarming intelligence ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... window of the orchard room, but saw only the reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes. ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... terminating in a large Tudor oriel or flat bay window looking east. In this oriel they had sat for some time watching the flashes, and the wintry landscape revealed for an instant and then plunged into outer blackness. The gallery itself was not illuminated, and the effect of the lightning was ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... rattled overhead; and the wind swept down so that the whole earth trembled. A horror of wrath and darkness has overwhelmed the world; and what of the patient choristers now? No longer are their voices heard amid the appalling fury of the hurricane; the sudden lightning-flash reveals nothing in the blackness; the powers of evil have overcome; and the universe has lost its hope. But now there comes a lull; and suddenly—far away, and faint, and triumphant—rises the song of reliance and joy. The demons of the night mutter and moan; ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... will yer?" said the master to his guest. H'yer, you Axylone," he continued to his eldest born, " fo'd up yer han's while Bre'er 'Liab ax de blessin'. You, too, Capting," shaking his finger at a roll of animated blackness on the end of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a genuine native African, and a most original and interesting specimen of his race. His thin, close-cut lips, straight nose and European features contrasted strangely with a skin of ebon blackness, and the quiet, simple dignity of his manner betokened superior intelligence. His story was a strange one. When a boy, he was with his mother, kidnapped by a hostile tribe, and sold to the traders at Cape Lopez, on the western coast of Africa. There, in the slave-pen, the mother ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... strange story," said Chobei who had listened with indignation. "This Banzayemon, before I knew the blackness of his heart, was once under my protection. But after he murdered Sanza, hard by here, he was pursued by these two apprentices of mine, and since that day he has been ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... gusts or violent storms of wind and rain, which are more or less feared, but which may always be known from other storms on their approach, by the blackness of the clouds above, with the segment of a circle of lighter cloud just beneath the ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... the pause to interrupt him somewhat petulantly. "And if we succeed?" I said, in a questioning voice, for I was in that happy age of youth and that sanguinity of temperament which makes it hard to realize that failure can associate its grayness or its blackness with one's own bright colors ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... come, Felix trembled." To him the prisoner of that memorable day spoke as the representative of outraged deity. In his voice the hardened Consul heard the echo of his own disregarded conscience, and was reminded of his "more perfect knowledge of that way" which would one day make all the deeper the blackness of his condemnation. The joints of ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... Jones, the greatest architect in the land, joined Ben Jonson in making his plays splendid by inventing scenery for them. This scenery was beautiful and elaborate, and was sometimes changed two or three times during the play. One of these plays called The Masque of Blackness was acted by the Queen and her ladies in 1605, and when we read the description of the scenery it makes us wonder and smile too at the remembrance of Wall and the Man in the Moon of which Shakespeare made such ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... The darkness and blackness of the place were uncanny. We all sat looking into the fire. Somebody said, "Injuns would not have such ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... table adjoining. However, the brave advance of the lobster, the porterhouse, and the champagne bucket diverted him, and he tucked a napkin under his flabby chin with a genial smile. Then the smile shrivelled; waiters, porterhouse, lobster, champagne, winked out in utter blackness, and Chuck O'Rourke ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... chief carries an old head on young shoulders," at last he said approvingly. "He speaks truly when he says that the air is thick with danger. When the blackness of night comes, then will come, also, those who make war from behind the trees of the forest. In the darkness, how is the young white and his friends to tell enemies from friends? The jackals will wriggle through and over the wall of trees ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... touched his arm, they saw an arch of blackness before them. They had walked straight to a door—not a very inviting one, for it opened upon an utterly dark passage. Where there was only one door, however, there was no difficulty about choosing. Richard walked straight through it; and ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... a half-length figure appearing at a window,—the blackness of the background, and the light upon the face, cause it to appear like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the flame of an ordinary spirit-lamp coloured by common salt be held in front of the instrument, so that the ray of direct solar light passes through the flame before entering the spectroscope. The observer sees at once the two lines known as D flash out with a greatly increased blackness and vividness, while there is no other perceptible effect on the spectrum. A few trials show that this intensification of the D lines is due to the vapour of sodium arising from the salt burning in the lamp through which ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall, a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture, framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to him. (Nevertheless, for a moment he thought of her as the daughter of Sir Thomas More.) She was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... while the lime contained in cups absorbed the carbon dioxide as fast as they exhaled it. They had darkened those windows through which the sun was actually pouring, for, on account of the emptiness of the surrounding ether and consequent absence of diffusion of light, nothing but the inky blackness of space and the bright stars looked in at the rest. On raising the shades they got an idea of their speed. A small crescent, smaller than the familiar moon, accompanied by one still tinier, was all that could be seen of the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and then, so far as with his poor human lips he may declare it, far beyond all these, he proclaims that "heaven is bright." But Gaspar, and such other landscapists, painting all Nature's flowery ground as one barrenness, and all her fair foliage as one blackness, and all her exquisite forms as one bluntness; when, in this sluggard gloom and sullen treachery of heart, they mutter their miserable attestation to what others had long ago discerned for them,—the sky's brightness,—we ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... so, not so, unless we weep for joy. The cloud that has so long hung over us in blackness is beginning to break. We have experienced more of gladness this day than has been ours since the last report that the Messiah ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... I could find to say. His long steps rapidly carried him away and he disappeared in the misty blackness. ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this there is nothing wonderful, nothing ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... so dense that I could not see the sparse houses I chanced to pass, nor did I know where I was any more. I urged forward blindly, walking towards the light, which was all that broke the blackness before me; its faint illumination seemed to me somehow to be kindly, inviting, irresistible. At last I came to a halt in front of a building I had never before seen, although I thought myself well acquainted with that part of the city. It ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the more difficult. There is no difficulty, however, in the first comparison, "I am black as the tents of Kedar," but only in the last. For Kedar, which is interpreted to mean "darkness" or "gloom," may be compared with blackness justly enough; but the curtains of Solomon are not so easily likened to beauty. Moreover, who does not see that "tents" fit harmoniously with the comparison? For what is the meaning of "tents" except our bodies, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... boiling. He sat down on the parapet, thick blackness all about him. Whatever had been his father's shortcomings, they had always clung together—and now they were separated by words which had cut like a knife. It was useless to tell himself that his father was not responsible. Out of the heart ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... had taken life in her; and, as if this were not enough, the scarlet letter, at a climax of the dark story, lightens forth over the whole heavens as a symbol of what cannot be hid even in the intensest blackness of night. The continual presence of the letter seems to have burnt into Hawthorne's own mind, till at the end of the narrative he says he would gladly erase its deep print from the brain where long meditation ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... through the utter blackness of the brackish water until his head broke surface again. Then he went on along the great conduits that were above the level of ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... speaking to absolute blackness now, for it was darker immediately following the revolver flash than before. But he felt a man's hand thrust about his arm, and he knew ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... through this weird region most fascinating and mysterious. At night it appears as a vast plain gleaming with lights and studded with dark objects, half seen and suggesting primitive machinery of uncouth proportions. Huge lengths of pipes creep from the shadows on one hand into the far-off regions of blackness ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... flashlight. Suddenly, he stumbled; was falling over something soft, like an animal or a man. Cursing low and involuntarily, he managed to roll over so that he fell on his back. He saw the form, a patch of irregular blackness in the darkness around him and knew it for a body. He got to his feet glancing around, not knowing what this meant. He bent over the form, keeping the furnace beam's muzzle only a few inches from it, but too far back to be grabbed suddenly. He couldn't see the man's clothing very ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying to outplay ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was That one should think of disobedience, Poor OLIVE heard, with looks of agony Fixed on the speaker's face—that Northern face, Wild in its power and in its beauty weird. The starry halo of that tintless crown, The midnight blackness of her plentiful hair, Set off the splendor of the countenance On which the maiden bent her pale regard. A jealous terror urged ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... straight to the ruins of the old trading-post. The spot looked more forlorn than ever, for the storms of the summer had washed some mud over part of the ground, and grass and weeds flourished amid the blackness. ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... opened noiselessly, sending a broad beam of gray, full of shadows and misty lights, through the even blackness of the night, the deer stood revealed—a beautiful creature, shrinking back into the forest's shadow, yet ever drawn forward by the sudden ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... garden behind: both ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that little was half-swallowed by the general brownness. A tall eight-day clock stood in one corner, up to which, whoever would learn from it the time, had to advance confidentially, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... in the least. I don't even care who she was. Permit me to wish you much joy with her. Why don't you go on?" irritably, forgetting that it was she who delayed progress. His smile was invisible in the blackness above the lantern. There were no words spoken until after they had reached the little door in ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... out her hands and Shann saw now, lying on a slowly closing palm, a disk such as the one Thorvald had shown him. The Terran had only one moment of fear and then came blackness, more absolute than the dark of any night ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... upon his exertions, until Sampson clasps him in his arms, and a "God bless you!" is upon the lips of every man, save the captain, who, having received a slight wound from a harpoon, and irritated by their bad luck, utters a curse which vies in blackness with ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... out with the crowd, swept through the chute to the ferryboat, swept aboard. He followed the crowd forward and stood in the bow. Black as ink the Bay of San Francisco stretched before him. Like fireflies the lights of vessels scurried through the blackness. Beyond the black water blinked the countless eyes of San Francisco, above these the rosy glow which had beckoned ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... of the blackness of many burnt bodies, which we may find to be nothing else but this; that the heat of the fire agitating and rarifying the waterish, transparent, and volatile water that is contain'd in them, by the continuation of that action, does ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... darker, with a strange white smother, instead of the natural blackness of night. It was a night of storm and death superadded to the night of nature. The mountains were all hidden, wrapped about, overawed, and tumultuously overborne by it, but in the midst of it waited, quite unconquered, this little, unswerving, living ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... came back thickly across the roaring torrent. The circles grew smaller. Tommy knew that he was being sucked nearer and nearer to the edge of some terrific whirlpool in that inky blackness. Now he could no longer hear Dodd's shouts, and the shell was tipping so that he could feel the water rushing along the edge of it. But for the exercise of centrifugal force he would have been flung from his perilous ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... at the mouth, and finally tore up the benches in order to attack the judges with the fragments. He was sent first to the castle of Edinburgh and afterwards to the Bass, 'for a change of air' as the record quaintly says. Finally, he was despatched to Blackness Castle, where he remained close in hold till the revolution. Not till June 5, 1689, were his prison doors thrown open, but even then Alexander Gordon would not go till he had obtained signed documents from the governor and officials of the prison to the effect that he had never altered ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... said. "I haven't seen one for a week. Coming out of the blackness it gives a man ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was riding hard and fast on his gloomy errand. Nine days and nights he rode through valleys so deep and dark that he could not see his horse. Stillness and blackness and solitude were his only companions until he came to the golden bridge which crosses the river Gjol. The good horse Sleipner, who had carried Odin on so many strange journeys, had never traveled such a road before, and his hoofs ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of mist; gauzy below, fringed with white tufts and streamers, deepening above into the blackness of utter night. Below it a long gulf of soft yellow haze in which, as in a bath of gold, lie delicate bars of far-off western cloud; and the faint glimmer of the western sea, above long knotted spurs of hill, in deepest shades, like a bunch of purple ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Island, one great branch stretching upward, bare and moveless, from the side, like an arm raised to heaven in wonder or in menace towards the house; the lake, in part swept by the icy splendour of the moon, trembling with a dazzling glimmer, and farther off lost in blackness; the Fells rising from a base of gloom, into ribs and peaks white with snow, and looking against the pale sky, thin and transparent as a haze. Right across to the storied woods of Cloostedd, and the old domains of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heat-lightning; over our heads in the light-blue frosty sky twinkled the little stars; on all sides gleamed the ruddy flames of the smoking watch-fires; near us, the white tents stood out in contrast to the frowning blackness of our earth-works. The light from the nearest watch-fire, around which our servants, engaged in quiet conversation, were warming themselves, occasionally flashed on the brass of our heavy guns, and fell on the form of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the old volcano was a pit of blackness in the midst of gray ash and the red-yellow of cinders. Beside it were other flecks of color: red, moving bodies; metal, that twinkled brightly under the desert sun—and in an instant they were gone. Nor did Smithy, throwing the thundering plane close over ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... an interminable ride even at the speed which we were making. Twelve miles in the blackness of a country night can seem ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve |
