"Lambent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... get the note to his mind, falling constantly into thought that led nowhither, and at last threw himself back in his chair, wearied with the emotions of the day. Under the soothing influence of the heat and the lambent motions of the flames, he fell into a condition which was not sleep, and as little was waking. His childhood crept back to him, with all the delights of the sacred time when home was the universe, and father and mother ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... concern. The Chief seized her by the shoulder and shook her roughly, ordering her to come with him. She did not understand his language, but his meaning was obvious. She looked up and stared straight into his one open eye. In her own eyes shifted the dangerous, lambent flame of a beast at bay, and for a moment she was on the point of darting ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... his hat. Through the confusion clouding his thoughts, he both foreglimpsed humiliation and was dimly aware of a personality of force and charm: of a well-poised figure cloaked in a light pongee travelling-wrap; of a face that seemed to consist chiefly in dark eyes glowing lambent in the shadow of a wide-brimmed, flopsy hat. He was sensitive to a hint of breeding and reserve in the woman's attitude; as though (he thought) the contretemps diverted and engaged her more than he did who was ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... door opened softly. Brisk footsteps tripped into the room; a lithe little figure advanced to the bed-side. Was it a dream again? No! There he was in his own evergreen reality, with the copious flow of language pouring smoothly from his lips; with the lambent dash of humor twinkling in his party-colored eyes—there he was, more audacious, more persuasive, more respectable than ever, in a suit of glossy black, with a speckless white cravat, and a rampant shirt frill—the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... he has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart, burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in;" but all is consecrated, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... she obliged with another, and still another. Then Mr. Abercrombie was prevailed upon to read one of his own outpourings of genius, a poem called "The Tigress," in which someone, presumably the author, described the torments involved in his adoration of a feminine person with "jetty brows and lambent eyes," whose kiss was like "a viper's sting" and who had, so to speak, raised the very dickens with his feelings. He read it with passionate fervor, and Captain Dan, listening, decided that the Tigress must ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of America's first successful man of letters. For, strangely enough, he had succeeded in making a good living with his pen. More than that, his natural and lambent humor, his charm and grace of style, and a literary power at once broad and genuine, had won him a place, if not among the crowned heads, at least mong the princes of literature, side by side with Goldsmith and Addison. Thackeray called him "the first ambassador ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... it requires vigorous motion, such as takes place when an oar is dipped, a stone thrown, or paddle-wheels dashed into the water; but at other times, the mere motion of the ocean swell, even in calm weather, is sufficient to stir up the lambent light and cause the crest of every undulation to glitter as if tipped with burnished silver. In such circumstances we have seen the ends of the oars of a boat silvered with it when lifted out of the wave, and the drops which fell from them before being ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... thousand bolt-heads on lofty vessels, raised on mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories. Duff had grown superstitious; he came out of the inn door sidewise, that he might always see that moon over his ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... immanent force. He writes much and publishes little; he is an intellectual aristocrat. He has the fastidiousness which was the main characteristic of the temperament of Thomas Gray; and he has as well Gray's hatred of publicity and much of Gray's lambent humour, more salty than satiric. His work is decidedly caviare to the general, not because it is obscure, which it is not, but because it presupposes much background. Lovers of nature and lovers of books ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... its innumerable host. Alive all heaven seems! with wondrous glow Tenfold refulgent every star appears, As if some wide, celestial gale did blow, And thrice illume the ever-kindled spheres. Orbs, with glad orbs rejoicing, burning, beam, Ray-crown'd, with lambent lustre in their zones, Till o'er the blue, bespangled spaces seem Angels and great archangels on their thrones; A host divine, whose eyes are sparkling gems, And forms more bright ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... fleeting life Gladdened the unsuspecting days; And all the dusky imps of strife Paled in her wisdom's lambent rays. Her laugh to one was as a knife: But she ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... they fell into a silence, partly the effect of the strangely enervating air. The fog had completely risen from the landscape, and hung high in mid-air, through which an intense sun, shorn of its fierceness, diffused a lambent warmth, and a yellowish, unctuous light, as if it had passed through amber. The bay gleamed clearly and distinctly; not a shadow flecked its surface to the gray impenetrable rampart of fog that stretched like a granite wall before its entrance. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... the enchanted boy now welcomed by the waiting train outside! They pressed lovingly around him; they played with his golden curls; they fanned him with their delicate wings; they looked down into the lambent depths of his clear blue eyes, and saw his pure spirit within so free from guile; they touched with their tender fingers his poor little thin white neck and breast, and felt his heart beating fast and faster ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... are who never smile; Their foreheads still unsmooth'd the while, Some lambent flame of mirth will play, That wins the easy heart away; Such only choose in prose or rhyme A bristling pomp,—they call sublime! I blush not to like Harlequin, Would he but talk,—and all his kin. Yes, there are times, and there are places, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... proximity of Basildene, and Peter Sanghurst's hateful suit, so long had been the time since she had seen him last, until the sound of his voice, breaking in upon a happy reverie, brought all the old disgust and horror back again, and she turned to face him with eyes that flashed with lambent fire. ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... I wanted to marry her, when I saw her. I love her passionately," and he threw a pebble in the water farther than he had yet; "but she is so pure, so delicate, that when I approach her, in spite of my besottedness, my love grows lambent. That's not like me, you know," with great vehemence. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength. Rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibers of a perennial endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or, rather let me say, rising, to repose, finishes the infallible luster of its crystalline ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... deep-bosomed, long-limbed, with the fine hands and feet of the true mountaineer. The thick dusk hair rose up around her brow in a massive, sculptural line; her dark eyes—the large, heavily fringed eyes of a dryad—glowed with the fires of youth, and with a certain lambent shining which was all their own; the stain on her cheeks was deep, answering to the ripe red of the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... seemed to be practically uninjured, then there darted from it and alighted upon one of the foremost ships, a dazzling lightning stroke a mile in length, at whose touch the metallic sides of the car curled and withered and, licked for a moment by what seemed lambent flames, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... to reappear. Glowing in fantastic forms they seemed alive with lambent fire. As the boys gazed at each other they could see that their features were tinted with the weird fires ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the first portion of the heavy inflammable air, resulting from the passage of steam over heated charcoal was loaded with fixed air (CO2), but that in the course of the process this disappeared, the remaining air (CO) burning with a lambent flame. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... to comfort the grey hairs, and to succour the infirmities of your aged parent." While the breast of Arthur was animated with such sentiments, and dictated a conduct like this, the priests were employed in the mournful preparations. The altar was made ready; the lambent fire ascended from its surface; the air was perfumed with the smoke of the incense; the fillets were brought forth; and the sacred knife glittered in the hand of the chief of the Druids. The bards had strung their harps, and began the song ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... natural force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to the fire-ball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless. This is St. Elmo's fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon this lambent ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... coming, we are coming! not as comes the tempest's wrath, When the frown of desolation sits brooding o'er its path; But with mercy, such as leaves his holy signet-light upon The air in lambent beauty, when the darkened storm is gone. We will vote for Birney, We will vote for Birney, We're for Morris and for Birney, And for Freedom through ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... more phosphorescent than usual, so that every little fish left a track of light behind him, greatly disproportionate to his size. As the night wore on, the sea grew brighter and brighter, until by midnight we appeared to be sailing on an ocean of lambent flames. Every little wave that broke against the ship's side sent up a shower of diamond-like spray, wonderfully beautiful to see, while a passing school of porpoises fairly set the sea blazing as they leaped and gambolled in its glowing waters. Looking ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,— So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace When the drear soul desires thee. Of that face What shall be said,—which, like a governing star, Gathers and garners from all things that are Their silent ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... destructive, gleam, Alike o'er all his lightnings fly; Thy lambent glories only beam Around the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... as he listened into the darkness, a tiny elfish glimmer flickered in the void below, flickered and was gone, and he rubbed his eyes for playing him tricks. But the next wave broke slowly round the wide curve of the bay in a crescent of lambent flame, and a flood of soft, blue-green fire ran swelling up the beach and then with a sigh drew slowly back, and all was dark again. Again and again—each wave was a miracle of mystic beauty, and he stood there entranced long after his pipe had ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... soul and yearning burns my sprite, * And tears betray love's secresy which I would lief contain: I weet no way, I know no case that can make light my load, * Or heal my wasting body or cast out from me this bane. A hell of fire is in my heart upflames with lambent tongue * And Laza's furnace-fires within my liver place have ta'en. O thou, exaggerating blame for what befel, enough * I bear with patience whatsoe'er hath writ for me the Pen! I swear, by Allah, ne'er ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... pass, he has armed himself "to the death," and is resolved to make his escape, and seek revenge of his enemies. It is evening. Dark festoons of clouds hang over the city, lambent lightning plays along the heavens in the south. Now it flashes across the city, the dull panorama lights up, the tall, gaunt steeples gleam out, and the surface of the Bay flashes out in a phosphoric blaze. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... seek his life-blood. Then there came a thought to stay All his angry, murderous impulse, caused the knife to shuddering fall: "He's her father; love your en'mies; 'tis 'our God' reigns over all." At midnight, lambent, lurid flames light up the sky with fiercest beams, Wild cries, "Fire! fire!" ring through the air, and red like blood each flame now seems; They faster grow, they higher throw weird, direful arms which ever lean About the gray stone mansion ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... betray'd. Conscious awhile with throbbing heart he strove, Spread his wide arms, and barter'd life for love!— Now rocks on rocks, in savage grandeur roll'd, Steep above steep, the blasted plains infold; The incumbent crags eternal tempest shrouds, And livid light'nings cleave the lambent clouds; 50 Round the firm base loud-howling whirlwinds blow, And sands in ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... representing white foxes were on display at the Tokyo exhibition of 1890. Phosphorescent foxes often appear in the old coloured prints, now so rare and precious, made by artists whose names have become world-famous. Occasionally foxes are represented wandering about at night, with lambent tongues of dim fire—kitsune-bi—above their heads. The end of the fox's tail, both in sculpture and drawing, is ordinarily decorated with the symbolic jewel (tama) of old Buddhist art. I have in my possession one kakemono ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... international code is one of the inventions for which we must look to the future. It is something, meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom, the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an end. The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, France and Italy have been within a few generations absorbed into three masses—so many police districts which have proved tolerably effective in keeping the peace within ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... calm, cool nights how often have I stood on the deck of a ship watching with wonder and awe the stars overhead, and the sea-fire below, especially in the foaming, silvery wake of the vessel, where often suddenly appear globes of soft and lambent light, given out perhaps from the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... thine eyes, (Oh still, celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... there was a disturbance some little distance down, as if something had suddenly passed along, and caused all the phosphorescent creatures to flash and sparkle, and mingle their lights into a pale lambent blaze, which soon passed away, leaving all still and calm as before, with the tiny stars gliding softly ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... appears burning on the edge of the water. The eastern sky blooms into vivid pink from the reflection of this fiery incandescence, which fades only to give place to the leaping brightness of phosphorescent waves, and the nightly pageant of tropical skies ablaze with lambent flames of summer lightning. Morning reveals the dark forests of mysterious Borneo, rolling back to the misty blue of a mountain background. The pathless jungles of teak and iron wood, inextricably tangled by ropes of liana or ladders ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... bandages were twisted all about his limbs, giving him a strange strength. His sinking legs straightened. His powerless arms were braced. Astonished, he glanced round for an instant, and beheld Zonela, with a world of love burning in her large lambent eyes, wreathing her round white arms about his humped shoulders. Then the poet knew the great sustaining power of love. Solon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... nothing less than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and massive, at the first treacherous touch of the man's determined hand. His strength was so different from hers—quick, muscular, lambent. But hers was deep and heaving, like the strange heaving of an earthquake, or the heave of a bull as it rises from earth. And by sheer non-human power, electric and paralysing, she could overcome ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... door was flung wide, and a tall, gaunt man was hustled across the threshold by two soldiers. His head was bare, and his hair wet and dishevelled. His doublet was torn and his shoulder bleeding, whilst his empty scabbard hung like a lambent tail behind him. ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale, lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in our lovely native fable talk, we call the "Fairy's ring," but yet more visible because marked in phosphorescent light. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote, although he wrote chiefly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... stillness, to be alone in a vast space, either crushes one with loneliness or gives him an unbounded exhilaration. To-night Bob felt the latter sensation. It seemed instead of being a small, lost atom in a swirling world, he was a part of all this lambent starlight; this whispering air ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... silver mist. Around, on all sides, flickered the fire-flies, who had come to see if our fire was not a big relation of their own, and they were the sole representatives, with ourselves, of animal life. When the moon had gone, the sky, still lit by the stars, seeming indeed to be in itself lambent, was very lovely, but it shared none of its light with us, and we sat round our fire surrounded by an utter darkness. Cold, clammy drifts of almost tangible mist encircled us; ever and again came cold faint puffs of wandering wind, weird and grim ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a lambent flame with power to make clean and ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career, from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into a hero for the nonce, however stolid his brain, however tough his heart, however unexcitable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... is true to say that no reader who wishes to realize once for all the great qualities of French prose could do better than turn straight to the Lettres Provinciales. Here he will find the lightness and the strength, the exquisite polish and the delicious wit, the lambent irony and the ordered movement, which no other language spoken by man has ever quite been able to produce. The Lettres are a work of controversy; their actual subject-matter—the ethical system of the Jesuits of the time—is remote from modern interests; yet ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... glance at Zarah, and read that in her eye which embarrassed him. "He did not know," he said; "he had indeed engaged this unrivalled performer to take the proposed part in the mask; and she was to have come forth in the midst of a shower of lambent fire, very artificially prepared with perfumes, to overcome the smell of the powder; but he knew not why—excepting that she was wilful and capricious, like all great geniuses—she had certainly spoiled the concert by cramming in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... again," she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... vantage. Then it was that the true nature of their calamity was revealed, for no land was visible, nothing was to be seen around them but a hell of raging foam, which, in the almost total darkness of the night, leaped and glimmered as if with phosphoric light. Beyond this circle of, as it were, wild lambent flame, all was black, like a wall of ebony, from out of which continually there rushed into view coiling, curling, hoary-headed monsters, in the shape of roaring billows, which burst upon and over them, deluging the ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... put away the self-reliant manner of the trail, and in its stead presented the lambent gaze, the tremulous lips of the bride. As he looked at her thus transfigured his heart cast out its hesitancy and he entered upon his new adventure without further question ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... degrees of rarefaction, were exceedingly beautiful. The glow came over the positive ball, and gradually increased in brightness, until it was at last very luminous; and it also stood up like a low flame, half an inch or more in height. On touching the sides of the glass jar this lambent flame was affected, assumed a ring form, like a crown on the top of the ball, appeared flexible, and revolved with a comparatively slow motion, i.e. about four or five times in a second. This ring-shape and revolution are beautifully connected ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... and leading him to a sheltered nest of bark and sawdust. It was warm and odorous. Nevertheless, they both deemed it necessary to enwrap themselves in the single blanket. The eye beamed fitfully upon them, occasionally a wave of lambent tremulousness passed across it; its weirdness was an excuse for their drawing nearer each other in ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... preferred Jenny; she saw that Jenny went out with him. And because she always wanted to do what Jenny did, and always wanted what Jenny had got, Em wanted to be taken out by Alf. Jenny, with the cruel unerringness of an exasperated woman, was piercing to Emmy's heart with fierce lambent flashes of insight. And if Alf had taken Em once or twice, and Jenny once or twice, not wanting either one or the other, or not wanting one of them more than the other, Em would have been satisfied. It would have gone no further. It would still have been ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... toucheth the apple of Mine eye.' So the subjects of that Messiah may be sure that a wall of fire is round about them, which to foes without is terror and destruction, and to dwellers within its circuit glows with lambent light, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... on the mantel-piece. The library was a room apart from the festivities. A soft, rose-colored darkness pervaded the room. Presently a darker shadow tiptoed over the threshold. He turned, and the shadow approached. Madame's gray eyes, full of lambent fires, looked into ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... There were occasions when in looking at him she was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, 'Alas, poor Yorick!' After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully cheerful, and would say, 'You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful to find;' and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr. Bounderby bore up as he ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... Mrs. O'Reilly! She came to me this morning, and sat in my kitchen, and cried so bitterly, and talked in her strong Corkonian brogue, and rocked herself backwards and forwards, and shook abroad the great lambent banners of her cap-border,—a grotesque old woman, but sacred in her tender motherhood and her great grief. Her first coming was to peddle blackberries in the summer. I asked her if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... morning now broke; and, in a few minutes, the prison shook, and the Genius appeared. He was visible by a lambent light that played around him; and HAMET starting from the ground, turned to the vision with reverence and wonder: but as the Omnipotent was ever present to his mind, to whom all beings in all worlds are obedient, and on whom alone he relied for protection, he was ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... and in the misty starlight I caught frequent sudden glimpses of indeterminate forms gliding ghost-like toward the water, which was evidently the recognised drinking place for most of the game in the neighbourhood. And at length, when I had been standing there for about twenty minutes, two pairs of lambent orbs loomed up through the long grass, and Thunder and Juno came wriggling apologetically to my feet, having apparently made their way back to the spot where they had deserted me, and tracked me ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Tring added that he, Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously he resented that this old man should take advantage ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the matter must be low, to avoid being abject, and despicable, you must borrow some light from the Expression; not such as is dazling, but pure, and lambent, such as may shine thro the whole matter, but never flash, and blind. {58} The words of such a Stile we are usually taught in our Nurses armes, but 'tis to be perfected and polished by length of time, frequent use, study, and ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the fantastic tricks played at times upon some body of worshippers, where light to the church is admitted through stained glass windows? A lambent red flame lighting up the hair of a man's head, while at the same moment his beard is blue and luminous. Over the shoulders of another, the purple mantle of royalty seems about falling, investing him for a moment with regal splendors, while perhaps the cadaverous hue of his next neighbor's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Work, riches, art, music, architecture, the vast industrialism of an age, all this thing called progress—all, all were for this alone, this thing of love! The atmosphere about him thrilled, vibrant with this message of the universe. The interspaces of all things seemed lambent, and therein fixed centrally was this ineffaceable and ineffable picture. He gazed, and as he gazed there came to him but one thought: ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... preserving: an observation of still reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith, as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing us from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it would suit ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the other side, looking to the tapestry, he saw the wild forms, and the melee, little less fantastic, of human and brute features in a chase—a boar-chase in front, and a stag-chase on his left hand. These, as they rose fitfully in bright masses of color and of savage expression under the lambent flashing of the fire, continued to excite his irritable state of feeling; and it was not for some time that he felt this uneasy condition give way to exhaustion. He was at length on the very point of falling asleep, or perhaps had already fallen into its very lightest and earliest ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... trumpet and drum, but in silence, they came— Their paths were illumed by their torches' mild flame, Whose soft lambent streams by love's glory were lit; And where fairy knights and bright elves used to flit Across the wan world when the lights quivered dim, These watched at the grave, and were ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... they rang gently, like melody heard through water and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... region of His universe, gather themselves together, as the diffused lights of some nebulae concentrate themselves into a sun. That sun, like the star that led the wise men from the East, and finally stood over one poor house in an obscure village, will shine lambent above, and will pass into, the humblest heart that opens for it. They who can say, as we all can if we will, 'My God,' can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... surroundings that lingers in my memory. No one ever heard anything sweeter than her voice; in and nobody ever looked into a lovelier face, even if there were little hollows in the cheeks and shy, fanlike wrinkles lurking about the corners of her lambent brown eyes. Nor did her gray hair mar her beauty. It was not old, dry, and withered—a wispy gray. (That is not the way it happened.) It was a new, all-of-a-sudden gray, and in less than a week—so Margaret once told ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... so eloquently bright, Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night, While half the world is lapp'd in downy dreams, And round the lattice creep your midnight beams, How sweet to gaze upon your placid eyes, In lambent beauty looking from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... June atmosphere, under the great arc-lamps which seemed suspended in the mild lambent air, the branches of the trees lining the Boulevards showed brightly, delicately green; and the tints of the dresses worn by the women walking up and down outside the cafes and still brilliantly lighted shops mingled luminously, ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... A lambent rosy flame seemed to envelop for an instant the beautiful Hortensia, disappearing instantly, yet leaving its scarlet traces on ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... a profanation, breaking across the deep, stirless silence which wrapped them round. Away to their right the golden disc of the sun was sinking royally westward, bathing the mountains in a flood of lambent light, and piercing the darkening blue of the sky with quivering shafts of scarlet and orange and saffron. Across the snow-fields shimmered a translucent rosy glow, so that they seemed no longer bleak and desolate, but lay spread like an unfurled banner of glory betwixt ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... place, he saw prints of feet and of a shod horse in the trail heading the other way. That was his own horse, and the feet were Lolita's and Luis's—the record and the memory of yesterday afternoon. He looked up from the trail to the hills, now lambent with violet and shifting orange, and their shapes as they moved out into his approaching view were the shapes of yesterday afternoon. He came soon to the forking of the trails, one for Tucson and the other leading down into the lumpy country, and here again were the prints ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... hands could be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range of the Rockies. Far to the north, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale lambent nimbus round ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... turmoil that last passionate utterance of the man played like a lambent flame. Tense, violent, spontaneous, it had come from the heart. What harsh lot he had lived and sufferings borne she could not even guess; but no man spoke with such unconscious bitterness who had not undergone pain and travail of spirit. His head was now turned a little towards her as they walked: ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor fly,—Green or otherwise—nor particle of solid opaque matter floating in it. 'Tis, indeed, pure optic illusion on the Widow's part, illusion born, perchance, partly of fear, partly of pique. There is nothing, my dear paternal Uncle, but one lambent, feverish fire, deliciously attractive, even in its angry heat, fascinating even whilst phlogistic, shooting out from every part of it, in all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time. They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use in France, dwelling upon ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, seem'd like a thin Veil not to hide, but to heighten the Beauty which it cover'd; her Night-gown hanging loose, discover'd her charming Bosom, which cou'd bear no ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... with shuttlings of lambent flame. From nadir to zenith the mystic light shivered and sheeted. Never had Lanigan beheld a more vivid display of the phenomenon of the aurora borealis. He seemed to be waiting for something. He sighed and ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... Flora's smile was lambent. "Yes," she said, "that sweet Anna she's very intric-ate." Hilary flamed and caught his breath, but she met his eyes with the placidity of the sky ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... whose veins the blood dances, and to whom life is in all its glory and freshness, are tempted to think of it as all. It does us good to have this vision of the eternal realities blazing in upon us, even if it seems to glare at us, rather than to shine with lambent light. The seen is but a thin veil of the unseen. Earth, which we are too apt to make a workshop, or a mere garden of pleasure, is a Bethel,—a house of God. Everywhere the ladder stands; everywhere the angels go up and down; everywhere the Face looks from the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Amelia firmly. Her eyes were suffused, and yet lambent. The light in them seemed to be drinking up their tears. Her steps, she knew, were set within a shining way. At the door only she paused and fixed him with a glance. "Enoch," said she threateningly, "whose cows were them ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... books, her father's life, she read: And to be read herself she need not fear; Each test, and every light, her Muse will bear, Though Epictetus with his lamp were there. Even love (for love sometimes her Muse express'd) Was but a lambent flame which play'd about her breast: Light as the vapours of a morning dream, So cold herself, whilst she such warmth express'd, 'Twas Cupid ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... framed the imperial tent of their great Queen 465 Of woven exhalations, underlaid With lambent lightning-fire, as may be seen A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid With crimson silk—cressets from the serene Hung there, and on the water for her tread 470 A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn, Dyed in the beams of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... horrible and weird, suggestive to the Baggara—chiefs and Mullahs—of magic in its most awful guise. For as they stood spellbound there by the strange light which played about as if some hissing, fiery dragon were flickering its lambent tongue in and out of its glistening jaws, not only were the faces and busy hands of the Hakim and his assistants seen moving rapidly, but directly after there, in a faint glare, was the bare torso ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... rearing from the hurtling shape that lunged from the trail above, tore the rope from his hand and crashed down the hillside, snorting. Something was threshing about the trail and coughing horribly. Pete would have run if he had known which way to run. He had seen two lambent green dots glowing above him and had fired with that quick instinct of placing his shot—the result of long practice. The flopping and coughing ceased. Pete, with cocked gun poked ahead of him, struck a match. In its pale flare he saw the long gray shape of a mountain ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... was hot again. The new-born brimstone butterflies were upon the wing, a flutter of lambent green. They were of the time, and young. They must live all winter and waken every sunny day till next spring—the ambassadors of this ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... to hurt, yet quick to search out forgivable weakness. The laughter of her mind played like lambent flame over all about her, and from all about her arose answering laughter. Yet she was never the centre of things. This she would not permit. The large house, and all of which it was significant, was her father's; and through it, to the last, moved his heroic figure—host, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... gentlemanly course of gradually warming and more devoted attentions, with all the forms and observances, so far as the disadvantages of her surroundings would permit. It was some time in the last summer, that he had made up a definite judgment in the premises under which he commenced his lambent action. During the autumn he often met King at her father's, and the young men occasionally made up small parties with Julia and Nell or some other young ladies for rides and excursions. Towards winter, King was less at Newbury; and as ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... Hillebrant, and Philip directed their eyes to the quarter pointed out, and thought they could perceive something like a vessel. Gradually the gloom seemed to clear away, and a lambent pale blaze to light up that part of the horizon. Not a breath of wind was on the water—the sea was like a mirror—more and more distinct did the vessel appear, till her hull, masts and yards were clearly visible. ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... switch which shut off light from the one unshaded electric bulb hanging like a lambent pear over her head. Then, palm-leaf fan in hand, she sat down in the blue summer darkness to await the coming of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... wooden. He has, moreover, no poetic imagination. Aetna, not the poet, provides the fire. Even the beautiful story of the Catanian brothers, which forms by far the best portion of the poem, never rises to the level of pure poetry. It is illumined neither by the fire of rhetoric nor by the lambent light of sensuous diction and rich imagination. A few lines may be quoted to show its ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... many leagues on their starboard hand. The only incident of the voyage was a sudden severe hurricane, a brief summer tempest which raged throughout one night and terrified a good many of the voyagers, whose superstitious fears were only allayed when they saw the lambent flames of the light of Saint Elmo playing about the rigging of the Admiral's ship. It was just the Admiral's luck that this phenomenon should be observed over his ship and over none of the others; it added to his prestige as a person peculiarly favoured by the divine protection, and ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... followed a movement on the part of the midshipman, and Murray saw the calm sea agitated, and faint flashes of phosphorescent light appear, while directly after it was as if something made a rush; the depths grew ablaze with pale lambent cold fire, and Roberts gave vent to an ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... along on its wings like the birds that beat their wings past her upon the gale. The lightning, which till now had shaken quivering lances of flame across the black water, a flash, then darkness, then again a flash, now became continuous, playing in lambent flames amid the blackness, lighting up the wild turmoil of wind and wave and cloud. The thunder rolled without pause,—overhead, around, beneath them. Crash! boom! crash! And all the while the water hissed past them; all the while the wind ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... roaring tone, Like one rebuking half in jest— Yet ah! I wish there could be shewn The wisdom that it hath exprest— Or sinking to a lambent glow, Its arched and silent cavern seems A magic glass whereon to shew, And shape ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... joyous jangling of bells; the sun stoops to the sea, glaring lividly through whirls of snow, and the vessel roars through the water; black billows rush on until their crests topple into ruin, and then the boiling white water shines fitfully like some strange lambent flame; the breeze sings hoarsely among the cordage; the whole surface flood plunges on as if some immense cataract must soon appear after the rapids are passed. Every sea that the vessel shatters sends up a flying waterspout; and the frost acts ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... car—and so was another Oman, like none ever before seen. Six feet four; shoulders that would just barely go through a door; muscled like Atlas and Hercules combined; skin a gleaming, satiny bronze; hair a rippling mass of lambent flame. Temple came to a full ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... and Tyler). "Mr. Fessenden at that time," said Mr. Davis, "was not only a young man of eminent ability and attainments, but he was warm-hearted, frank, honorable, eminently conscientious. His health was then good, and he was always bright and genial: sometimes he showed the lambent play of passion and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... away from the man, and looked through the window, with the lambent glare of a wild animal in his eyes. He instantly saw the three motionless figures, Brett, ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... winds, which are apt to have an easterly sharpness in them. On this piazza sat Sibyl and Graham Marr, and the two listeners above caught fragments of their poetical conversation. "I say, Bessie, do you know what a 'lambent waif' is?" whispered Hugh. "What a calf that Marr is! How can Sibyl listen to him? ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... his eyes was plunging into the ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny cheerfulness caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith; and never was there a Christian's victory over death more grandly evidenced than in that last scene lighted with its lambent humour. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... hands, and, as they stood together, she looked intently at her friend. Some new charm transfigured her face; for her dark, gazelle eyes were not more lambent than her cheeks, though in a different way; while her black hair in its picturesquely arranged disorder seemed instinct with life, and hardly to be restrained. She was constantly pushing it back, caressing or arranging it; and her white, ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... affections of this proud beauty. I have just carried unpoliteness far enough to make her afraid of me; and to shew her, that I am no whiner. Every instance of politeness, now, will give me double credit with her. My next point will be to make her acknowledge a lambent flame, a preference of me to all other men, at least: and then my happy hour is not far off. An acknowledged reciprocality in love sanctifies every little freedom: and little freedoms beget greater. And if she ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... his eyes a faint tremor passed through her body. The long lashes fell to the hot cheeks and curtained lambent windows of light. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... of metal. No known vehicle could climb that smooth, hard, forbidding slope of steel; no known projectile could mar that armor; no known craft could even approach the Hill without detection. Could not approach it at all, in fact, for it was constantly inclosed in a vast hemisphere of lambent violet flame through which neither material substance nor ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... to his side, and held the thing that he might see where the pieces matched, the line of the cheek flowing into the lovely curve of the chin, the flickering sweetness of the lovely mouth, the lambent glance of the lovely eye. "It is my mother, you see," I said. "And it needs no ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... raised myself a little on my elbow so that I might see out clearly; and what I saw was so unearthly strange, and in a way so awe-compelling, that in another moment I was on my feet and staring with all my eyes. Over the whole deck of the galleon a soft lambent light was playing, and this went along her bulwarks and up over her high fore-castle so that all the lines of her structure were defined sharply by it; and pale through the mist against the blackness, out over her low waist, I could catch glimpses of the other tall old ships lying near her all ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... art and science. Those beaming eyes and roseate lips beneath me proclaim a bevy of undeveloped Aspasias, of embryo Cleopatras, destined by Nature, and only restrained by man's injustice, from ruling the world by their beauty's eloquence. Those massive and beetling brows, gleaming with the lambent flames of patriotic ardour—what is needed to unfold them into a race of Shakspeares and of Gracchi, ready to proclaim with sword and lyre the divine harmonies of liberty, equality, and fraternity, before a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... howling, the thunder is roaring; With flame blue and lambent the cloud-masses glow O'er the fathomless ocean; it catches the lightnings, And quenches them deep in ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... squatted on the very summit of the pile, was such a creature as no words could depict—of a ghastly color, bulky and malformed, furnished with three burning eyes that turned now green, now red with lambent flame, and great shapeless limbs, which it uplifted one after the other, striking awkward, pawing blows at the bell! It seemed to the horrified onlookers to be the very demon of greed defending its spoil. Blank ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... was cut off prematurely, it was sufficiently prolonged to disprove this estimate of his powers. The extreme vividness of his look, manner, and speech gave a wonderful impression of latent vitality and power; perhaps some of this lambent, flashing brightness may have been but the result of the morbid physical conditions of his existence, like the flush on his cheek and the fire in his eye; the over stimulated and excited intellectual activity, the offspring of disease, mistaken by us for ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... The reader is probably acquainted with Thorwaldsen's three-fold analogy,—the clay model, the Life; the plaster cast, the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection,—and it seemed to be made good by the spirit that was kindling up these imperfect features, like a lambent flame. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at the place where had been their meeting on the morning of the lad's first adventuring into the world. Memories flooded them, as they looked across the valley to the bleak cliffs of Stone Mountain, which rose in aged, rugged grandeur, softened in this hour by the veils of haze, warmed with the lambent ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... he broke the black surface of coal, a flame shot up, red, lambent, a serpent's tongue. It had a voice; it tempted. He took the packet of letters ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... guests can really say How she looked when she vanished away. Some declare that she carried sail On a flying fish with a lambent tail; And some are sure she went out of the room Riding her stilts like a witch a broom, While a phosphorent odor followed her track: Be this as it may, she never came back. Since then, her friends of the gold-fish fry Are in a state of unpleasant suspense, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... instantly swallowed up as in a gulf of flame, which raged, and roared, and shot up in a hundred lambent points, as if exulting in ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... gaze was set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent light played. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... began to introduce novelties into the church service with caution, Erasmus saw these innovations with alarm. Especially the fanaticism of Farel, whom he hated bitterly. It was these men who retarded what he still desired and thought possible: a compromise. His lambent spirit, which never fully decided in favour of a definite opinion, had, with regard to most of the disputed points, gradually fixed on a half-conservative midway standpoint, by means of which, without denying ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... all his being Was the polar power of contrast, For his thought, to music wakened By the touch of Northern Saga, Vibrated melodious longing, Toward the South forever tending. In his eye the lambent fire, Of his thought the glint, showed kinship With the free improvisator In the land of warmth and vineyards. And his swiftly changing feeling And his all-consuming ardor, That could toil the livelong winter Till caprice the fruit discarded,— That immeasurable richness ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson |
