"Rayless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night and troubled thoughts by day Disturb the prince and banish quiet sleep. He dreamed that darkness, visible and dense, Shrouded the heavens and brooded o'er the earth, Whose rayless, formless, vacant nothingness Curdled his blood and made his eyeballs ache; When suddenly from out this empty void A cloud, shining with golden light, was borne By gentle winds, loaded with sweet perfumes, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... ascribes events to chance, To help to solve this wonderful enigma! First, tell me, ye proud haughty reasoners, Where the vast strength this creature late possessed Has fled to? how the bright sparkling fire, Which flashed but now from those dim rayless eyes Has been extinguished? Oh—he's dead you say. I know it well:—but how, and by what means? Was it the arm of chance that struck him down, In height of vigor, and in pride of strength, To stiffen in the blast? Come, come, tell me: Nay shake not thus the ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... well from my frequent inspection of war maps, and the friendly north star gave me my bearings. The rope-ladder had either become broken or disarranged, but it afforded me a short hold at the top; so I balanced myself, trusted to fortune, and fell into Rat Hell, which was a rayless pit of darkness, swarming with squealing rats, several of which I must have killed in my fall. I felt a troop of them, run over my face and hands before I could regain my feet. Several times I put my hand on them, ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... figures seized by a corpse and shrinking away from its touch, Holbein's groups are instinct with life, character, and emotion. In particular is this true of the figure of Death, although it is a mere skeleton,—the face without a muscle, and for the eye but a rayless cavern. Death is not one whom "a limner would love to paint or a lady to look upon"; but Holbein has given a strange and fascinating interest to the figure, which in all other hands is merely repulsive. The grim monarch sat to a painter who not only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... are both few in number and weak in strength, and evidence of cultivation is seldom to be found at any distance in the interior; so that all beyond a certain extent of clearing, continued along the banks of the lakes and rivers, is thick, impervious, rayless forest, the limits of which have never yet been explored, perhaps, by ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the rosy sea, congregate about these rocks. They sound a loud but melodious chorus from their sea-shells, and a faint and distant chorus soon answers from the island. The mermaidens immediately repeat their salutations, and are greeted with a nearer and a louder answer. As the red and rayless sun drops into the glowing waters, the choruses simultaneously join; and rushing from the woods, and down the mountain steeps to the nearest shore, crowds of human beings, at the same moment, ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... there came in a drowsy amble an old white bob-tail horse, his polished coat shining like silver when he crossed an expanse of sunlight, fading into spectral paleness when he passed under the rayless trees; his foretop floating like a snowy plume in the light wind, his unshod feet, half-covered by the fetlocks, stepping noiselessly over the loamy earth; the rims of his nostrils expanding like flexible ebony; and in his eyes that look ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... Words came not at my call—no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end! I started up on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of it on my head; then a rayless darkness—the darkness of the blind—then God's mercy at last—the mercy ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins |
