"Dim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ardent wish, yet, my dear, dearest Lamballe, I leave it to yourself to act as your feelings dictate. Many about us profess to see the future as clear as the sun at noon-day. But, I confess, my vision is still dim. I cannot look into events with the security of others—who confound logic with their wishes. The King, Elizabeth, and all of us, are anxious for your return. But it would grieve us sorely for you to come back to such scenes as you have already witnessed. Judge and act from your own impressions. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The hum of the old town came to her ear softened by distance and mingled with the patter of the fountain and the music of birds singing in the trees overhead. Agnes tried to busy herself with her spinning; but her mind constantly wandered away, and stirred and undulated with a thousand dim and unshaped thoughts and emotions, of which she vaguely questioned in her own mind. Why did Father Francesco warn her so solemnly against an earthly love? Did he not know her vocation? But still he was wisest and must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... sometimes called the Stone of Scone, on which they were crowned, was brought; had long passed away before Flora tenanted its chambers. But the associations which it presented were not likely to dim the ardour of her loyalty to the last of that race who had once held their sway over the proud castle of Dunstaffnage; nor would the roofless chapel, of exquisite architectural beauty, near Dunstaffnage, where many of the Scottish ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... stood in the dim corridor awaiting orders, she could not help overhearing a conversation between Dr. Adair and the agitated lady who stood with her hand on the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... twenty-four hours' blizzard, the sky was overcast, with the usual dim light filtering through a mist of snow. We set off to scale the mountain, taking the dip-circle with us. The horizon was so obscured that it was useless to take a round of angles. Fifteen miles south of Mount Barr-Smith, and a ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... stunted appearance of military works. But a nearer view gave rather the illusion of the life in a busy factory at night-time. The gateway opened on a courtyard, with furnace fires shining here and there. Shadowy forms passed backwards and forwards, enlivening the dim scene with the bustle of a hive. Men came out by fives or sixes, laden with different kinds of burdens, and disappeared into the darkness, making for mysterious goals. In front of the open gate ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... One dim, early morning, when she thought I had gone, after my night's watch, I returned softly to the half-opened door with a forgotten injunction about the medicines. All night Clem had babbled languidly of many things, of "a hunded thousan' hatchin' aigs," and "a thousan' brillion dollahs," of "Mahstah ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... reasoning precisely similar to this every day in our lives. How Mr. Burroughs will explain Glen's action by the instinctive theory is beyond me. In wildest fantasy, even, my brain refuses to follow Mr. Burroughs into the primeval forest where Glen's dim ancestors, to the tooting of automobile horns, were fixing into the heredity of the breed the particular instinct that would enable Glen, a few thousand years later, capably to ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of her down the long dim avenue, making no response to his question. The cherries that swung from her hat-brim stirred not a hair's-breadth, but the commotion their stillness caused in Quin's heart ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... the room, he commonly sat a few minutes in silence, as if waiting the stimulating effect of the tobacco to wind up his conversational powers, or perhaps he was bringing out defined images from the dim reminiscences which floated in his sensorium. If a stranger were near, he commonly addressed him with an old soldier's freedom, on some familiar topic which little needed the formalities of a set introduction; but soon changed the subject, and commenced fighting "his battles o'er again." He ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... what did he fight with there But sidelong and spitting and helpless shadows of the dim air? And what did he carry away but ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mind across the bridge of time, for we are about to visit a tragic scene—a scene which might be depicted by a poet—so much of beauty, of truth, and of goodness, all blasted by the perjuries of the priest. Yonder, in the dim library of an ancestral mansion, embowered amid the woods of the south, close by the gurgling waters which beat an echo to the stormy breezes—those breezes which will never more fan his cheek—that water where he has often bathed his limbs ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... and Peleg, taking a little bucket, stepped to the brook to secure some running water. The fire which had been kept alive throughout the night was burning low. When Peleg returned to the camp he was startled when he discovered by the dim light that the water in his bucket was muddy. There could be but one explanation, and the young ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... whether the beautiful young woman was revolving round him. His looks, his wealth, his taste, his reputation, invested him with a certain sun-like quality; but his age, the recession of his locks, and the advancement of his waist were beginning to dim his lustre, so that whether he was moth or candle was becoming a moot point. It was moot to me, watching him and Miss Sabine Monroy at Charleston throughout the month of March. The casual observer would have ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... bench in the porchway and did on his boots. The light was very dim here, and his fingers trembled, so that he took a long time threading the laces through the eyelet-holes. He became aware that his nerves were shaken. At the best of times, with his hurt leg, he found this operation of lacing his boots one of the worst of the day's jobs. It cost him almost as much ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... harshest or saddest meditations, with looks that defy calamity; relaxing muscles made rigid with pain; hovering o'er the couch of sickness, with sunshine and laughter in their beneficent faces; softening the austerity of thoughts whose awful shadows dim and darken the brain,—loosening the gripe of Misery as it tugs at the heart-strings! Let us court the society of these gamesome, and genial, and sportive, and sparkling beings,—whom Genius has left to us as ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the Duke? I am glad to say that he was alive and (but for the cold he had caught last night) well. Indeed, his mind had never worked more clearly than in this swift dim underworld. His mantle, the cords of it having come untied, had drifted off him, leaving his arms free. With breath well-pent, he steadily swam, scarcely less amused than annoyed that the gods had, after all, dictated the exact time at which ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... immemorial the Indians have been noted for the number of their feasts. Some of these—as the New Moon and the First-Fruits of the corn, celebrated, by a part of the tribes—were generally innocent, seeming to point to some Jewish origin in the dim past; others—such as the feast of the dogs when the poor animals were wantonly torn to pieces—were loathsome ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... before; but then it had been a girl's hope, and now it was a woman's certainty. At the first note, the past came back to me like yesterday. I saw the moorland gables in the rain, I heard the swirl of the tempest, I saw the elfin face in the hood which had cheered the traveller on his way. In that dim light I could not see the singer, but I needed no vision. The strangeness of the thing clutched at my heart, for here was the voice which had never been out of my ears singing again in a land far from the wet heather and the driving ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... rapidly after another, and Ida, with slightly flushed face and eyes that were dim with unshed tears—for the exquisite music thrilled her to the core—leant back, with her hands tightly clasped in her lap, her thoughts flying back to Herondale and those summer evenings which, in some strange way, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... got down to water at midnight, the time of moonrise, filled my canteen and started on the return trip. Slowly I reascended the steep mesa, and when I reached the summit I sat down on a rock in a thicket of junipers. The moon had now risen above the trees and cast its dim light over an enchanting scene. The sense of utter loneliness, a homesickness, a feeling of premonition, stole over me, and weirdly I sensed the presence of I knew not what. From the shadows spoke an owl, sadly, anxiously, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... ALKANET (dim. from Span. alcana, Arab. al-hena henna, Egyptian privet, or Lawsonia inermis), a plant, Alkanna or Anchusa tinctoria, of the order Boraginaceae, also known as orchanet, dyer's bugloss, Spanish ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the darkness. He found the porch of Can Mallorqui full of young men standing about, or seated on the benches, waiting while the family finished supper in the kitchen. Febrer detected them in the dim light by the odor of hemp emanating from their new sandals, and from the coarse wool of their mantles and Arabian capes. The red sparks of cigarettes at the lower end of the porch indicated other ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... above the distant tree-tops, her full orb magnified to three or four times its usual dimensions and painted a glorious ruddy orange by the haze which began to rise from the bosom of the river. Under the magic effect of the moonlight the noble river, with its background of trees and bush rising dim and ghostly above the wreathing mist and its swift-flowing waters shimmering in the golden radiance, presented a picture the dream-like beauty of which words are wholly inadequate to describe. But I ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... will be found to require no less power than the creation of matter. Nay, possibly, if we would emancipate ourselves from vulgar notions, and raise our thoughts, as far as they would reach, to a closer contemplation of things, we might be able to aim at some dim and seeming conception how MATTER might at first be made, and begin to exist, by the power of that eternal first Being: but to give beginning and being to a SPIRIT would be found a more inconceivable effect of omnipotent power. But this being what would perhaps lead us too far from the notions ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... utterly disqualified the lad from giving one. Luckily, at this moment the principal door of the house opened, and the coarse features of Benjamin were thrust over the threshold, with a candle elevated above them, shedding its dim rays around in such a manner as to exhibit the lights and shadows of his countenance. Richard threw his bridle to the black, and, bidding him look to the horse, he entered the hall. What is the meaning of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... If the dim revelations concerned a plan about forging the Annals, then "something worth reading" Bracciolini certainly did produce; for the Annals is,—taking the circumstances under which it was composed into consideration— about one of the most wonderful literary creations that we ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Linnaeus even believed, on ancient authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided, while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one foot, and grasp a fish with the other." But that educated eye is now dim, and those talons are nerveless. Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... could not rest. The steady rapidity of motion,—the terrible power of this force that man has made his own, and yet not so wholly his own but that it may at any moment break from his control, asserting itself master,—the dim light and motionless figures about her,—all these things wrought upon her fancy, until, through the gray mist of morning, great round hills stood up at either hand with deep valleys between, from whose nestling hamlets lights began to twinkle out as if great swarms ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... rang out again above the confusion and the fun. She was still at it. Moll was finding vengeance and money, indeed, though she dwelt upon her accumulating possessions through eyelashes dim with tears. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... Jehu, drove her horses furiously. Every possible kind of disappointment, vexation, and difficulty; every conceivable shape of things, past and present, rushed through my brain; and all pale, fierce, disastrous, and melancholy. I was beckoned along dim shades by shapeless phantoms; I was trampled in battle; I was brought before a tribunal; I was on board a ship which blew up, and was flung strangling down an infinite depth in a midnight ocean. But this exceeded the privilege even of dreams. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... protection to the pupils. (42) Naturally the sight is indistinct and purblind. (43) Along with which, although asleep, for the most part it does not enjoy visual repose. (44) Again, its very fleetness of foot contributes largely towards dim-sightedness. It can only take a rapid glance at things in passing, and then off before perceiving what the ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... a rage intense, "Oh, who can cope with their magic tricks?" But the Lord High Swank skipped nimbly hence, And hid him safe behind the fence Of Regulation VI. And under Section Four Eight 0 The Swanks, the Swanks, dim forms of Swanks, The swarms of Swanks lay low— These most tenacious, perspicacious, ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing. I wanted to keep them also in that dim and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... the thread of my affairs go for six days, and on the seventh evening takes it up for a moment. The so-called special providences are no exception to the rule—they are common to all men at all moments. But it is a fact that God's care is more evident in some instances of it than in others to the dim and often bewildered vision of humanity. Upon such instances men seize and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... attack made us stand to guns before daylight, and it was well we did so, as at 5.45 a.m. a party of Boers tried to rush the station and were repulsed with slight loss on both sides; they managed to clear off in the dim light. The attacking commando became afterwards known as the "Ice Cream Brigade," being largely ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... vociferously angry. Beating our chests, bristling, and gnashing our teeth, we gathered together in our rage. We felt the prod of gregarious instinct, the drawing together as though for united action, the impulse toward cooperation. In dim ways this need for united action was impressed upon us. But there was no way to achieve it because there was no way to express it. We did not turn to, all of us, and destroy Red-Eye, because we lacked a vocabulary. We were vaguely thinking thoughts for which there were ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... common movement, without orders this time. We moved more slowly, firing heavily at every shadow along the sides of the road. Here it seemed more black than ever, for the spluttering torches, which cast a dim light on the raised road itself, left the neighbouring houses in an impenetrable gloom. Whole battalions of Boxers could have lurked there unmarked by us; perhaps they were only waiting until they could safely cut us off. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... artillery, some of them of heavy calibre; our infantry using that never-failing weapon, the bayonet, whenever the enemy stood. Night only saved them from worse disaster; for this stout conflict was maintained during an hour and a half ot dim starlight, amidst a cloud of dust from the sandy plain, which yet more obscured every object." This victory, however, was dearly purchased: amongst those who fell was Sir Robert Sale, the hero of Jellalabad, and Sir John M'Caskill. After remaining encamped for two days, Sir ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... counted on getting two or three each time they went to the ponds. But they got an unpleasant surprise in December, on going to the beaver grounds, to find all the traps empty and unmistakable signs that some man had been there and had gone off with the catch. They followed the dim trail of his snowshoes, half hidden by a recent wind, but night came on with more snow, and all signs ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception recurs. It is the central and informing thought of his life as a philosophical thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming the slave of a theory. He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence if not rest. Its precise character he ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... women, and an occasional grisette in luck, could satisfy their curiosity as to each other. In its catholicity it was highly correct as a resort; not many other restaurants in the centre could have successfully fought against the rival attractions of the Bois and the dim groves of the Champs Elysees on a night in August. The complicated richness of the dresses, the yards and yards of fine stitchery, the endless ruching, the hints, more or less incautious, of nether treasures of embroidered ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... and holding it to her nose, she went up to that picture. In the dim light, she could just see the outline of the face and the eyes gazing at her. The scent of the blossom penetrated her nerves; in her heart, something faintly stirred, as a leaf turns over, as a wing flutters. And, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hinds would say, Her lover perish'd; and from that dread hour, Bereft of reason's mind ennobling ray, Poor Mary droop'd: Llanellian's fairest flower! Why gazeth she thus lone; can those soft eyes Interpret aught in each dim cloud above? Yes, there's more joy in her wild phantasies Than reasons in its sober power could prove. List to her wild laugh now; she smiles and cries, It is my William's form; he beckons from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... faith of which Mahomet was at once the prophet and the founder, seems to have taken for its basis the traditionary religion then prevalent amongst the Arab tribes. These traditions were probably compounded of dim remnants of the Truth which had been revealed to Abraham and handed down through his son Ishmael, and of a very corrupt form of Sabaeanism, which included the worship of the heavenly bodies, as well ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... modes of sight between each vast extreme, The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam; Of smell the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... tenderly nursed shrubs, and then at the pile of red brick with its many windows under gay-striped awnings, and its surmounting white cupola, which he had often admired from afar. He glowed with rectitude. True, he suffered a brother lost to all sense of decent human values, but this could not dim the lustre of his own virtue or his pleasant suspicion that it was somehow going to be suitably rewarded. Was he not being driven by a grand-mannered lady up a beautiful roadway past millions of flowers and toward a wonderful house? It paid ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... was in listening, at last there crept into my consciousness the fact that the sand in the upper bulb was not diminishing as fast as it should. This knowledge was fully in my mind for some time before I realised its fearful significance. Suddenly the dim knowledge took on actuality. I sprang from the ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... first the sun feels rather hot, Or even rather warm, From some dim, hibernating spot Rolls ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... maddening, there in the dim darkness under the stairs, with glimmering points of distant earthly light from Lancilly on the opposite hill. One of them might be Helene's window, where she sat and watched ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... "renegade," which, echoing from the dim recesses of the church, makes the prose version end on a note of perplexing irony, may be theatrically effective, but it can hardly be called logical. Gert has been disposed of. His sudden return out of the clutches of the soldiers is inexplicable and unwarranted. Worse still, he has only ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Spain show traces of Arabic influence in their national music. In Venetian airs it is only a dim memory, manifesting itself by the frequent repetition of single notes, whereas the Spanish melodies are often so Moorish in construction and sentiment that it is easy to fancy in them tones like the call of the muezzin. Thus, too, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... dim light of the breaking day he could discern a greenish-yellow cloud rolling across from the Boche trenches ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... entered the temple it was sunset, and the gathering shadows rendered objects indistinct. From the character of the windows and the colonnades outside I suppose a 'dim religious light' prevails there at all times. The temple contains several idols or representations of Chinese deities in figures larger than life, dressed with great skill and literally gotten up regardless of expense. Their garments were of the finest silk, and profusely ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... twenty farmhouses along the way, and at each of them the horseman must pause and deliver his message; so that it is just midnight as he comes in sight of the outskirts of the humble village. There is a dim light burning in the window of yonder hip-roofed cottage beside the green; Adams and Hancock must be anticipating news; Adams, indeed, has the name of being a man who sleeps little and thinks much. The night-rider's summons is responded to at once; and then, at the open door, there is a brief conference, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... burst-up against all manner of Chimeras,—I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of awakened nations; starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;—yes, since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial!—Hollowness, insincerity has to cease;—sincerity of some sort has ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... would get temporary relief by thinking I was getting the best of the Brooklyn element, I would suffer a heart-throb because of news that some flame left behind in Chicago was burning brighter. When that would dim or become extinguished, depressing news would reach me from West Point, where Miss Wilson visited her cousin, ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... whom you lately saw." From these dumb dogs we chanced to turn to a large church open at the top, with a prodigious number of sandals {23} at the gate, by which I knew that it was the temple of the Turks; these people had only a dim and motley colored spectacle glass, which they called the Koran, yet through this they were always gazing up to the top of the church for their prophet, who, according to the promise which he gave them, ought to have returned to them long ago, but has not yet made his appearance. ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... Grammer for girles, I gard[64] first to write, And beat them with a bales but if they would learn; Of all kindes craftes I contrived tooles, Of carpentry, of carvers, and compassed masons, And learned them level and line, though I look dim; And Theology hath tened[65] me seven score times; The more I muse therein, the mistier it seemeth, And the deeper I divine, the darker ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... used or not, at recurring intervals, of subjecting the debtor class to such pressure as the creditor may think necessary, in order to force the debtor to surrender his property to the creditor at the creditor's price, is a wonder beside which Aladdin's lamp burns dim. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... private seance with the boys one afternoon, on which occasion "the spirits" ventured upon an extra "manifestation." All took seats at one side of a long, high table—the position of the mediums being midway of the row. This time, a little, dim, ghostly gaslight was allowed in the room. What seemed to be a hand soon appeared, partly above the edge of the vacant side of the table, and opposite the "mediums." One excited spiritualist present said he could see ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... led us out of the house. There was one more thing she wished to show us. The sunset light was still in the tree-tops, but her eyes were dim; she thought that night had already gathered. Holding her lamp above her head, she pointed to a statue in a niche above the doorway. It had been placed there by order of the King of France after Joan was dead. But it wasn't so much the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... in anxiety and trouble; inspired me with a feeling of emulation, and bade me look forward with hope. Many is the hour when, after a hard day's work, or an exciting scene of peril or suffering, by the dim light of a tallow candle, or a lamp manufactured by my own hands, while others were lamenting their hard fate, or pouring out their indignation in unavailing grumblings, I have, while poring over a book, lost all sense ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... and even in the dim light of the corridor Blount could see that he was white-faced and trembling. In the silent faring to the stair which wound down in a spiral around the freight elevator Blount ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... loved her even unto death; he had loved her even while he was living with another woman. As she sat thinking, her novel on her knees, she could see that other woman sitting by his death-bed. Two candles were burning in the vast studio, and by their dim light she saw the shadow of the profile on the pillow. She thought of him as a man yearning for an ideal which he could never attain, and dying of his yearning in the end! And that so beautiful and so holy an aspiration should proceed from the common concubinage of a studio! ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... was won when she saw that Madame d'Ache and her daughter stayed at Colmar. But what she had more at heart than either my friendship or Madame d'Urfe's was the jewel-casket; but she dared not ask for it, and her hopes of seeing it again were growing dim. By her pleasantries at table which made Madame d'Urfe laugh she succeeded in giving me a few amorous twinges; but still I did not allow my feelings to relax my severity, and she continued ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... window into the courtyard behind, which was now getting low-toned and dim with the earliest films of night. A crooked file of men was approaching the back door. The whole string of trailing individuals advanced in the completest balance of intention, like the remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpae, which, distinctly organized in other respects, have one will ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... any atmosphere to dim or otherwise mar the view, the brilliancy of the lighted portion of the disc was absolutely dazzling, whilst the extreme delicacy of its varied tints and the subtle nuances of colour, which we now saw to perfection, were most charming and delightful ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... gray-haired old monk with a fine antique head, genuine Italian face, strong-marked features, and long snow-white beard. On being introduced to Father Cyrillus he asked him innumerable questions about the secrets of monastic life, especially about those things of which "we profane have only dim guesses, no clear conceptions." They got into a poetic and exalted frame of mind, and rose just as it was getting dusk to inspect the chapel and crypt, and other objects of interest. In the crypt Hoffmann was powerfully agitated: he reverently doffed his hat, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... "swans" in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness: there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan, its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the Swan ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... see any connection between our so-called practical, everyday life, and the spiritual life. They look upon the spiritual life as something remote; something in the dim and ever and ever distant future. The spiritual life is supposed to be so negative that we postpone living it, as long as we possibly can; and whereas the human family has prayed and prayed, for Lo! these many ages: "Thy kingdom come upon earth," they apparently have not had ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Rousseau, prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the hill-top,—as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country that has ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... goodness, as Butler remarks, whatever it may be, which led God to make a difference between men and angels, may be the same which induces him to make a difference between one portion of the human family and another—to leave one portion for a season to the dim twilight of nature, while upon another he pours out the light of revelation. The same principle, it may also be, which gives rise to the endless diversity of natural gifts among the different individuals of the same ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... fleet in the Persian Gulf, and has written an interesting account of his disastrous command and travels back to Constantinople from India, calls the Island Kais, or "the old Hormuz." This shows that the traditions of the origin of the island of Hormuz had grown dim. Kish had preceded Hormuz as the most prominent port of Indian trade, but old Hormuz, as we have seen (Bk. I. ch. xix.), was quite another place. (J. As. ser. i, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... beginning of "Our Mutual Friend," ruffled up into the night-dresses; and some of the crochet was beautiful with the rhymed pathos of "Enoch Arden," and some with the poetry of the "Wayside Inn;" and there were places where stitches had had to be picked out and done over, when the eye grew dim and the hand trembled while the great war news ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... this direction, while others went to Italy to acquire the necessary knowledge—the result has been to show the perishable nature of the means used, in this climate at least, since the pictures on the walls of the Houses of Parliament have become but dim, fast-fading shadows of the original representations. In the early days of the movement the Prince, in order the better to test and encourage a new development of art in this country, gave orders for a series of fresco paintings from Milton's ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... shudder. He knew his mother's rigid principles, her worship of honor, her loyalty, her faith in nobility, and he foresaw a scene. He went up to the assault with his heart beating and his face rather pale. In the dim light which filtered through the blinds he saw his mother dressed in black, and with an air of solemnity in ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... There must ever be such an idea on the part of those who do not have enough to eat in regard to their betters, who have more than plenty. It cannot be but that want should engender such feeling. But now the dread of the new aristocracy was becoming worse than that of the old. In the dull, dim minds of these poor people there arose, gradually indeed but quickly, a conviction that the new aristocracy might be worse even than the old; and that law, as administered by Government, might be less ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, O'er Heaven's clear azure sheds her silver light; pure spreads sacred As still in air the trembling lustre stood, And o'er its golden border shoots a flood; When no loose gale disturbs the deep serene, not a breath And no dim cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene; not a Around her silver throne the planets glow, And stars unnumbered trembling beams bestow; Around her throne the vivid planets roll, And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole: Clear gleams of light o'er the dark trees are seen, o'er the dark trees a yellow ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Miss Ruston eyed them with satisfaction, uneven though they were. She set the lad at work oiling them, demonstrating to him with her own hands, carefully gloved, the way to do it. Every window she flung wide, and Mrs. Kelsey was presently scrubbing away at the dim, small panes, trying her best to make them shine to please the young lady who from time to time stopped as she flew by to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... stepped over the snow that lay upon the broad steps, and entering the door saw the dim figure of their sister, already in the large and faintly-lighted hall. One candle in the hand of her scared maid, and one burning on the table, leaving the distant parts of that great apartment in total darkness, touched the figures with the odd sharp lights in which Schalken delights; ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... for our country to die; when ranks are contending, Bright is the wreath of our fame; glory awaits us for aye: Glory, that never is dim, shining on with a light never ending, Glory, that never shall fade, never, O ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pleasant talk and pleasanter anticipation of coming events, we left our restaurant and walked together through the silent streets to the Place de la Concorde. The great windy square was almost deserted. The monuments to the lost provinces bulked large in the dim lamplight. Two disabled soldiers hobbled across the bridge and disappeared in the deep shade of the avenue. Their service had been rendered, their sacrifices made, months ago. They could look about them now with a peculiar sense of isolation, and with, perhaps, a feeling of the futility of the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... had rolled from his grasp, and lurched forward round the angle that hid the chancel from his view. There, huddled before the main altar like a flock of scared and stupid sheep, he beheld the conventuals—some two score of them perhaps and in the dim light of the heavy altar lamp above them he could make out the black and white habit of the order ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... in the morning light, But he built his nest with the birds of night; But he lie in dust, and the stone is rolled Over the sepulcher dim and cold; He has canceled the ill he has done or said, And gone to the dear and holy dead. Let us forget the path he trod, And leave him ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... awful figures! Resting on nothing; poised in the night air of the tower, with their draped and hooded heads merged in the dim roof; motionless and shadowy. Shadowy and dark, although he saw them by some light belonging to themselves—none else was there—each with its muffled hand ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... Filling the room with a mysterious haze, Which rolls and writhes along the shadowy air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let me clutch that limb— Oh, devil! It breaks to ashes in my grasp! What ghost is that which beckons through the mist? The ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... on the other side of the trenches were looked upon with dim and gloomy eyes as through a veil, and, according to news received by me later, it was not clear whether England had sent an answer. Whether it was dispatched and held up on the way, or what became of it I never knew. It is said never to have ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... too far away to shoot by that dim light, so I left my birch-tree and crawled along toward the edge of the bay. A breath of wind must have blown across me to him, for he lifted his head, sniffed, grunted, came out of the water, and began to trot slowly along the trail which led past me. I knelt on one knee and tried to take ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... he touched a window, damp with vapor and very cold. On the other side he felt a coarse curtain, and where the semaphore stood, appeared a perpendicular bar of dim light. A vibratory sound somewhere near made him think that the owls and frogs had begun snoring. He heard horrible hissings and the distant clangor of a bell; and then all the platform heaved and quaked under him as if it were being dragged off into the woods. He sprang upward, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... of the mountain ranges loomed shadowy and dim on both sides. The moonlight played strange tricks with the mesquit and the giant cactus, a grove of which gave to the place an awesome aspect of some ghostly burial ground ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... man, with bitterness of soul and tremulousness of speech, when replying to the refusal of his request for a missionary for his people, said: "My eyes have grown dim with long watching, and my hair has grown grey while longing for a missionary." These importunate appeals, transmitted year after year to the missionary authorities, at length, in a measure, so aroused the Churches that more help ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... front of the circus-marquee was now vacant. Inside, in the dim and stifling rotunda, the ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... superior laws, quite above the plane of material things. But the work of revelation is not, therefore, infallible or outside the sphere of Evolution. On the contrary, one of the most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expression. But from age to age it gains in clearness and elevation. In religion, as in secular matters,—it is the lesson of the ages, that "the thoughts of men are widened with ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, and his relations to the under-world of life; while that which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, becomes a vast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences, for all who are acquainted with the recent progress of ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... his pulse anxiously and exchanging looks of intelligence. At the foot of the bed stands a woman about fifty years of age, her hands clasped, her eyes raised to heaven, in an attitude of resigned grief: this woman is the queen, No tears dim her eyes: her sunken cheek has that waxen yellow tinge that one sees on the bodies of saints preserved by miracle. In her look is that mingling of calm and suffering that points to a soul at once tried by sorrow and imbued with religion. After the lapse of an hour, while no movement had disturbed ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... interrogated Santa Anna, as the Hussar officer, no longer in a glitter of gold lace, but dim with sweat and dust, was ushered ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... breeze, All Nature charm, and gay was every hour:— But ah! not Music's self, nor fragrant bower Can glad the trembling sense of wan Disease. Now that the frequent pangs my frame assail, 5 Now that my sleepless eyes are sunk and dim, And seas of Pain seem waving through each limb— Ah what can all Life's gilded scenes avail? I view the crowd, whom Youth and Health inspire, Hear the loud laugh, and catch the sportive lay, 10 Then sigh and think—I too could ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with us to dwell, For our life's lamp burns dim; But He who doeth all things well, Will draw us up to Him. Come closer, wife, let us not part, We have not long to wait; A something whispers to my heart, "Claude's waiting ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... me a few paces aside. My gaze was soon arrested by a heartrending spectacle. There on the ground lay the two lifeless forms of my brave and faithful adjutants, Jacobus Nel and L. Jordaan. As I bent over their prostrate bodies my eyes grew dim with the sad tears of my great bereavement. Major Orr stood uncovered by my side, touched by my deep emotion and paying homage to the brave dead. "These men were heroes," I said to him with broken voice. "They followed me because they loved me, and they fearlessly risked their lives for ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... and inaccurate acceptance of the words, we remove the idea of His presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know: and gradually, from the close realization of a living God, who "maketh the clouds His chariot," we define and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive God inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws of Nature. All errors of this kind—and in the present day we are in constant and grievous danger of falling into them—arise ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... knew, by this, that her husband must have read the letters. "I wonder what he has done with them?" came the mental thought, shadowing forth a dim wish that she ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... answered, and there was something so very like sincerity in his tone, that it did convey a dim impression of what was almost a genuine feeling; "it was the walk in ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... most magnificent views in all earthly scenery. Within a single sweep of vision were seven snow-peaks, the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helen's, with the dim suggestion of an eighth colossal mass, which might be Rainier. All these rose along an arc of not quite half the horizon, measured between ten and eighteen thousand feet in height, were nearly conical, and absolutely covered with snow from base to pinnacle. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... untamed, a heart running over with passions of every kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ... an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing and managing ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... smell a rat How quickly he'd come out and catch him, And with what gusto he'd despatch him! Sir Rat, against the picket-fence Leaned the machine, then hurried hence, And hid himself with glee, And waited breathlessly To see what that Cantankerous cat Would say, when in the twilight dim He saw ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... Lombardy poplars—an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh the heart glad to the adult. Here at the roots of the poplars there was a bed or carpet of round leaves which we knew well, and putting the clusters apart with our hands, lo! there were the violets already open—the dim, purple-blue, hidden violets, the earliest, sweetest, of all flowers the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... accept current maxims and sentiments with which he has no personal sympathy, and weave from all these a whole system of excellent and orthodox moral teaching. And if one may be a good moralist and a bad man, why a fortiori may one not be a good artist and a bad man? If vice does not necessarily dim the eye to ethical beauty, why should it blind it to aesthetic beauty? In order to get at a solution we must fix somewhat more definitely the notion of fine ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... muttered curses of the drivers, the shrieking and roaring of the animals, as the circus train moved up the distant hill. "The show has got to go on," he repeated as he crossed to his study table and seated himself for work in the dim light of the old-fashioned lamp. He put out one hand to draw the sheets of his interrupted sermon toward him, but instead it fell upon a small sailor hat. He twisted the hat absently in his fingers, not yet realising the new order of things ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... Jerusalem to his home we lose even the dim sight of him which our imagination has supplied. During the silent years that follow we have two thoughts of him,—as a fisherman of Galilee, and as one waiting for the coming of the Messiah. His ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... a moment as if afraid to take the next step. If it was fear, she shook it aside resolutely and crept into the corridor. She carried something shining in her hands—something that gleamed in the dim, uncertain light from the big window. She stood just for an instant with a feeling that somebody was climbing up the ivy outside the house. She felt her way along until she came to the alcove containing ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... been right about the lock. I discovered it at last when the door yielded. I looked in through a narrow crack. On the far side of the bare, dim room was my mistress on her knees, her clasped hands resting on the floor in front of her. She had not heard me and she seemed to be writhing as if in pain. Her skin was as pale as death. The whole picture gave a body the feeling that she had been thrown forward by ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... turned the matter over in my mind, I half unconsciously scrutinized my visitor—somewhat to his embarrassment—and I liked his appearance as little as I liked his mission. He kept his station near the door, where the light was dim—for the illumination was concentrated on the table and the patient's chair—but I could see that he had a somewhat sly, unprepossessing face and a greasy, red moustache that seemed out of character with his rather perfunctory livery; though this ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Three parts of my picture consisted entirely of different shades of dirty brown and black; the fourth being composed of a ray of yellow light falling upon the wrinkled face of a treacle-colored old man. A dim glimpse of a hand, and a faint suggestion of something like a brass washhand basin, completed the job, which gave great satisfaction to Mr. Pickup, and which was described in ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... now so dim I had to hold the paper close to my eyes in order to read the lines. They ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... bring hither, Tho' rebels and traitors look grim; May the wreaths it has won never wither, Nor the stars of its glory grow dim! May the service united ne'er sever, But they to their colors prove true! The Army and Navy forever, Three cheers for the Red, ...
— The Good Old Songs We Used to Sing, '61 to '65 • Osbourne H. Oldroyd
... he seems very weary of seeking into the mysteries of the world, and that the great sadness that is born of wisdom has cast a shadow on him. But now what availeth him his wisdom or his arts? His eyes, that saw once so clear, are dim and glazed with coming death, and his white and delicate hands that wrought of old such works of marvel, hang listlessly. Vivien, a tall, lithe woman, beautiful and subtle to look on, like a snake, stands in front of him, reading the fatal spell from the enchanted book; ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... romantic characters is no other than the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain— not, of course, the contemporary and normal French soldier and minister, of 1707-1778, who bore the same name. I have found the name, with dim allusions, in the unpublished letters and MSS. of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and have not always been certain whether the reference was to the man of action or to the man of mystery. On the secret of the ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... the clerk's desk until the Belle Julie reached Cairo. Such, however, was the pregnant fact; and to this purely accidental delay Griswold owed his first sight of the chief city of Missouri lying dim and shadowy under its mantle ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... which old writers afford, enable us to picture to ourselves what kind of person he was, and to see him engaged in his manifold occupations within the same walls which we know so well. When the daylight is dying, musing within the dim mysterious aisle, we can see him folding up the vestments, bearing the books into their place of safe keeping in the vestry, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities we saw in ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... should also be in total darkness, except for the light given by the Jack-o'-lanterns, until the guests are seated, when they should unmask. The supper could be served in this dim light or the lights turned up and the room made brilliant. After the supper is over and while the guests are still seated a splendid idea would be to extinguish all the lights and to have one or more of the party tell ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... up to the first floor, and entered a bedroom. Fortunately the light here was very dim, or the nurse who sat by the child's bed must have wondered at the eccentricity with which her patient's father attired himself. Bending over the little sufferer, Reardon felt for the first time since Willie's birth a strong fatherly emotion; tears rushed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... as the window, beaded with drops, would allow her, and saw only the lamps, which had just been lit, blinking in the wet atmosphere, and rows of hideous zinc chimney-pipes in dim relief against the sky. She writhed uneasily, as when a thought is swelling in the mind which must cause much pain at its deliverance in words. Elfride had known no more about the stings of evil report than the native wild-fowl knew of the effects of Crusoe's first ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... ten feet of that open clearing in the midst of the granite walls which we described on our first visit to the grotto of Ceyzeriat. Roland clung closely to the wall, and moved forward almost imperceptibly. In the dim half-light he looked ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... locusts came through the windows. Her household were all engaged elsewhere. She shut the doors of the little room, and kneeling on the table touched the spring. The panel came back and disclosed the cupboard. There lay the will. She took it up and opened it. Her eyes went dim on the instant, and she leaned her forehead against the wall sick ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... known directly and with out a telescope his body, his soul, his chief, his priest, his country, his condition, been obliged to see himself as in a mirror, and without recognizing himself, under the fantastic image of God? Where is the necessity of this hallucination? What is this dim and ambiguous consciousness which, after a certain time, becomes purified, rectified, and, instead of taking itself for another, definitively apprehends itself as such? Why on the part of man this transcendental confession ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... nervousness. She did not understand at all, and that made her afraid. She began to have a dim fear lest Alfred might have gone crazy. His next move strengthened this suspicion. He walked away ten feet and raised his hand over his head, palm forward. She watched him so intently that for a moment she saw nothing else. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... two farm-houses, could be seen a plow drawn by a horse, and driven along by a man. They moved on very gently, the horse, the plow, and the laborer, under the dim ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... from the sound of groaning which assails their ears, from the long fastings which destroy their taste, from the heavy weights which weary their hands, from the endless darkness which makes their eyes grow dim—let the prison now be filled with emptiness. Never is it so popular as when it is ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... already dim with fog, now entered only through the little window, and feebly lighted the room and the two seats; the fire, however, gave out a ruddy glow. Galope-Chopine refilled the beakers, but his guests ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... was enveloped in a dim obscurity; hardly deep enough to be counted as darkness, but oppressive enough to slow the pulses of both. There was, however, at one end of the booth a large disc projected on the obscurity: a pale, empty, weirdly-lighted circle, which ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... tolerably well with the whole of them;—and that no 'theory,' by what Professor soever, can be of any use to me in comparison. I wish you had Sprigge's complete Plan of the Battle: but you have it not; you have only that foolish Parson's {128} very dim copy of it, and must help ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... passaged; the old longing quivered in all his eager limbs, the old fire wakened in all his dauntless blood; like the charger at sound of the trumpet-call, he lived in his past victories, and was athirst for more. But yet—between him and the sunny morning there seemed a dim, hazy screen; on his delicate ear the familiar clangor smote with something dulled and strange; there seemed a numbness stealing down his frame; he shook his head in an unusual and irritated impatience; he did not know what ailed him. The hand he loved so ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... in the nick of opportunity. He crossed the bridge, and, going up to a window, knocked six or seven heavy blows in a particular cadence, and, as he did so, smiled. Presently a wicket was opened in the gate, and a man's head appeared in the dim starlight. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Burgs of wood and stone they built in different parts, what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man counted; their life, read in Dryasdust's newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities) is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting: one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order several times round the Globe.... But always some preaching, by zealous monks, accompanies the chivalrous fighting. And colonists come in from Germany; trickling ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... often he had gazed round the watery circle with the same anxious look only to meet with disappointment! The hills of the coral island were visible like a blue cloud on the horizon, but Jarwin's eyes were too dim and worn out ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Lord thankfulness for your return home with Nancy, your child, William, in the first moments of your arrival. Come!" commanded Uncle Cradd, and he led us into a huge room as low ceilinged and dark-toned as the hall. In it there was only the firelight and another dim candle placed on a small table beside a huge old book. With the surety of long habit father walked straight to a large chair that was drawn close to the hearth on the side opposite the table, behind which was another large ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... closet, as it was called, was in reality a long enclosed passage, leading from the Blue Room, where Miss Sophronia slept, to one of the spare chambers beyond. It was a dim place, lighted only by a transom above the door. Here were kept various ancient family relics which would not bear the light of day; a few rusty pictures, some ancient hats, and, notably, a bust of some deceased Montfort, which ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... god asserted himself, and the watcher passed off into a deep slumber. His last recollection was a dim consciousness of hearing the tread of something near the camp-fire. But his stupor was so great that he had not the inclination to arouse himself, and with his face buried in the leaves of his bushy couch, he quickly lost cognizance of all things, and floated off into ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... not quite lost consciousness, but all was hazy and dim. She felt herself supported in those strong arms, caressed and borne up on the other side by Bessie, and thus upheld she half walked, and was half carried along the smooth gravel-path to the house, whence sounds of music came faintly on her ear. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... started, unable at first to collect her thoughts, and looked up frightened. The dim flicker of the night light lit her pale face and golden hair, and fell also on the grim, emaciated face of the old princess, whose eyes glittered feverishly under ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... is incapacitated by nature from acquiring the high intelligence of the Caucasian. His sensibilities are extremely dull, his perceptive faculties dim, and the entire organization of his brain forbids and rejects the cultivation necessary to the elimination of mind. With a feeble moral organization, and entirely devoid of the higher attributes of mind and soul ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... all her enchantment, then slowly on the heels of their boots, they would beat out the dying embers from the bowls of their pipes, take a glance down the end of the orchard to Ah Sing's shack—where a dim light, suggestive of nothing else but Orientalism, seemed ever to be burning—nod to each other and smile, then turn in without a word and ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... had said, the fire burned briskly after he had used the toe of his boot to give it new life; and sure enough, Step Hen could see the outlines of a long, dim figure that seemed to be hugging the ground. He could even catch the odd gleam of the wicked yellow eyes that were ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... and turned to him. Beyond them the lane opened into a field and a clear lake of crocus sky cast a dim light into the shadow where they stood. Above it was a new moon, like a gleaming silver scimitar. Sara saw it was over her left shoulder, and she saw Lige's face above her, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... even suffering grave doubts about marriage. She said having to make her own way after she lost her husband had made her relish her independence too much to think of ever giving it up again lightly. Of course she wouldn't say that possibly at some time in the dim future a congenial mate that thought as she did on vital topics—and so forth—just enough to give Homer a feeling of security that was wholly unwarranted. Wasn't ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... much; historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary, we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what they were about. The domain of reality—actually seen, or capable of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray the stain on the poor wife's cheek, she herself, for the first time, voluntarily ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ravine, and, rounding a sharp side-spur of the interrupted cliff, came upon a log hut built upon a small level shelf of earth. At one end of this structure was a pent-roof. Philip tied his horse thereunder, and, noting a kind of dim glow through the oiled paper that filled the cabin's single window, gave two double knocks followed by a single one, upon the plank door. This was soon opened, and Philip admitted to the presence of the single occupant, an uncouth fellow, fisherman ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens |
