"Starless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reward indeed. At first the space was clear and white, but in the course of a hundred minutes there came suddenly into view the minutest conceivable specks. I can only compare the coming of these to the growth of the stars in a starless space upon the eye of an intense watcher in a summer twilight. You knew but a few minutes since a star was not visible there, and now there is no mistaking its pale beauty. It was so with these inexpressibly minute sporules; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... fainter,—it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... That the spellbound souls of all those on his red-handed ancestor's roll were fain to keep watch and ward over their once treasures, by night and noon, white-sheeted and faint in the glare of the sun, wan in the moon, blacker shadows in the starless dark, found belief. And there were those who had seen his seraglio;—but few, indeed, had seen him,—a lonely man, in fact, who lived aloof and apart, shunned and shunning, tainted by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the crack; but the breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was black as pitch. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her husband's door—where she stopped again to listen to his breathing—to the top of the stairs. There she paused a moment, and assured herself ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... out, he was standing beside my verandah steps, head on one side, eyes shut, hands folded as if in prayer. "Well, Yosepu, what is it?" "Amma! the light of your eyes revives me!" "Well, tell me the trouble." "All yesterday I saw you not; it was a starless night to me!" This is merely the preface. "But, Yosepu, what is wrong?" "Tingalu, that golden child with a voice like a bird, she lies on her mat. I am concerned about the babe," (Tingalu, turned four, is as hardy as a gipsy), "I fear for ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... solitary. Even the small silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she realized, with a feeling of terror, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Gazing all rapt on woman's eloquent face, Nature's most witching and most treacherous page; Or high in mirth with those whose senseful wit Outflashed the rosy wines that warmed its flow, I've held my vigils till the brow of Night Grew pale and starless, and her solemn pomp, Out-glared by day, faded in hueless space. I do repent me of my worship. Night Was given for rest: who breaks this natural law Wrongs body and soul alike. One vigorous hour Of sober day-light thought is worth a night's ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the log house by the Spring Waiontha, lantern in hand and my packet tucked beneath my arm, it was twilight, and the starless skies threatened rain. Road and field and forest were foggy and silent; and I thought of the first time I had ever set eyes on Lois, in the late afternoon stillness which heralded ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... look, I own, was much brighter and brisker, 20 But then he is sadly deficient in whisker; And wore but a starless blue coat, and in kersey- mere breeches whisked round, in a waltz with the Jersey,[61] Who, lovely as ever, seemed just as delighted With Majesty's presence ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... ever-increasing distance: Vorongil's face bent over his, only a blurred crimson blob that flashed away like a vanishing star in the viewport. It flamed out into green darkness, vanished, and Bart fell through what seemed to be a bottomless chasm of starless night. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... halls of justice, to the senate chamber, to the presidential chair. Take them with you thru the streets, along the highways, and over the unbeaten paths of your life. Take them with you down the rivers, and out into the storm driven sea. Chain them to the wheel of your ship, sail on thru the starless night alone. Trust them, for they are the initiative ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... well defined. For a few paces he followed it, then slipped and rolled back as the fatal paralysis deadened all power of movement in his limbs. He lay where he fell, moaning out his grief with his wide-staring eyes turned straight up into the cold gray of the starless sky. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... most part empty, and so down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an unseen torrent. Before him towered the shadowy hills up into the starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction he felt in the whole effect. At the same instant he was once more aware ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... to the first line he was put on sentry duty. It was one of those silent, windless, starless nights, when under ordinary circumstances a solemn hush prevails. Even the trenches were silent that night. On both sides the guns had ceased booming; it seemed as though a truce had been agreed upon, and yet the air ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... 1719. The trees were powdered with hoar frost, and it was at this time impossible to glide quietly along in the little boat, for the lake was covered with ice. And yet, in this biting cold, in this dark, starless night, a cavalier ventured alone into the open country, and along a cross-road which led to Clisson. He threw the reins on the neck of his horse, which proceeded at a slow and ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... of a leeward shore" they were doomed to experience during a moonless and starless night. They reduced their sails to a few yards of canvass, and lowered their yards on deck. The waves, that rolled the vessel with irresistible force, threatened to swallow them up; a tremendous sea carried away the boat which was hoisted up at the stern, and broke in all the bulkheads ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... straight to the course. His whole inquiry and demonstration lie in the line of [15] Truth; hence he suffers no shipwreck in a starless night on the shoals of vainglory. His medicine is Mind— the omnipotent and ever-present good. His "help is from the Lord," who heals body and mind, head and heart; changing the affections, enlightening the mis- [20] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... succeeds this era joyous, bright? Is it a cloudless eve or starless night? To those who're busied in life's brilliant dawn With gathering flowers that bloom when spring is gone, And, ere their morning sun begins to wane, Add many a link to fond affection's chain, To Heaven's supreme behest have meekly bowed— ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... that it had disappeared. Her heart now for the first time sank within her. She listened, but no sound, save the ominous moan in the air, came to her ear. The solemn, still, black night was all about her. She looked up, and a cold, starless, dim blank was all over her; and all around, standing thick, were cold, dark, silent trees. She stood and tried to think back: where was she, and how came she there? She knew she had once turned back, from something to somewhere—to ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... wastes, When next the sunshine makes them beautiful, Gay troops of butterflies shall light to drink At the replenished hollows of the rock. Now slowly falls the dull blank night, and still, All through the starless hours, the mighty Rain Smites with perpetual sound the forest-leaves, And beats the matted grass, and still the earth Drinks the unstinted bounty of the clouds— Drinks for her cottage wells, her woodland brooks— Drinks for the springing trout, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... "Shouldst thou find no place of resting, I will banish thee still farther, To the Northland's distant borders, To the broad expanse of Lapland, To the ever-lifeless deserts, To the unproductive prairies, Sunless, moonless, starless, lifeless, In the dark abyss of Northland; This for thee, a place befitting, Pitch thy tents and feast forever On the dead plains of Pohyola. "Shouldst thou find no means of living, I will banish thee still farther, To the cataract of Rutya, To the fire-emitting whirlpool, Where ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... at the sky. It was not the sky of the City, distant, and marbled with streaks of smoke. It was close and clear; starless, too; and no moon hung upon it. Yet though it was night there was ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... so cunningly. He lifted his nimble cudgel in the air and waved it conceitedly to and fro in time to the song that rose beyond the window. "Fau'ow er Wur'!—Fau'ow er Wur'!" he cried delightedly again and again in my ear, eager apparently for my approval. So we stood, then, beneath the starless sky, listening to the rich choragium of the "World's End." They sang in unison, sang with a kind of forlorn heat and enthusiasm. And when the song was ended, and the roar of applause over, Night, like a darkened water whelmed silently ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... It was a starless night, muffled overhead as the day had been, but without rain or mist. He had a lantern hanging at his saddle bow, ready to light. In the open lands we rode side by side, but through growths along the Fox first one and then the other ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... starless gloom descends, Nor can the pale moonshine Break through the clouds whose veil extends In boundless form, and darkly blends With the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... fact consist with the hypothesis that nebulae are remote galaxies? If there were but one nebula, it would be a curious coincidence were this one nebula so placed in the distant regions of space, as to agree in direction with a starless spot in our own sidereal system. If there were but two nebulae, and both were so placed, the coincidence would be excessively strange. What, then, shall we say on finding that there are thousands of nebulae so placed? Shall we believe that in thousands of cases these far-removed galaxies happen ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... and quite decided that she would neither quit the cave, nor entrust herself to the anchorite, till she had once more seen and spoken to Polykarp. He no doubt knew where to seek her, and certainly, she thought, he would by this time have returned, if the storm and the starless night had not rendered it an impossibility to come up the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... swill it in a brown john. He will not believe that the flavour is more delicate in the smaller dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening of the temperate walker! He has nothing left of man but a physical need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be savourless and ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wings a slow and watchful flight, His neck is bare, his eyes are bright, His plumage fits the starless night. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the Druid's spell At moonrise by his holy oak! No more along the shadowy glen Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men; No more the unquiet churchyard dead Glimpse upward from their turfy bed, Startling the traveller, late and lone; As, on some night of starless weather, They silently commune together, Each sitting on his own head-stone The roofless house, decayed, deserted, Its living tenants all departed, No longer rings with midnight revel Of witch, or ghost, or goblin ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of sunny palm, Broke on my startled vision suddenly; When as but quickly parted, sweet and calm, That long forgot yet ever haunting psalm Floated from lips that flew to greet me home. A meteor flamed; I woke in rude alarm; Above me orbed the temple's sullen dome; Around me swam the early morning's starless gloom. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... broad wall, hearing the sea-pulses lazily fall at its foot. The wave crept away after it fell, and returned to fall again like a weary hound. There was hardly any life in the sea. How mournful it was to lie out there, the wintry night, beneath an all but starless heaven, with the wind vexing it when ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... upon earth. So, though we know, and therefore dare say, little about that future, I do beseech you to take this to heart, that he who there can stand before God, and say, 'Behold! I and the children whom God hath given me' will wear a crown brighter than the starless ones of those who saved themselves, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... being, in fact, only a simple continuation over it of the general ground of the Galaxy. The conclusion can hardly be avoided that, in looking at it, we see through and beyond the Milky Way, far out into space, through a starless region, disconnecting it altogether from our system. It is not easy for language to convey a full impression of the beauty and sublimity of the spectacle which this nebula offers as it enters the field of view of a telescope, fixed in right ascension, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... I thank you for the drinks. Go to your homes and on soft beds may you sleep well; I'll go out and sleep on yonder bench in the night wind. A few more drinks, a few more drunkard's dreams, and I'll go out into the moonless, starless ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... I knew darkness then, And saw the stars that hung so still; but when I lay abed the old starless dark came back again. ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... the Revenger's Tragedy. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the whole play, which is very unskilfully constructed, is by Tourneur, or perhaps by the author[281] of the Second Maiden's Tragedy. All the figures are shrouded in a blank starless gloom; to read the play is to watch the riot of devils. Here is an extract from the scene where Orlando, returning from the wars, hears that Charlemagne, his uncle, has married Ganelon's niece, and that his own hopes of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... the solemn Miracle of Life; As one who, wandering in a starless night, Feels momently the jar of unseen waves, And hears the thunder of an unknown sea ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... nature as a resting wheel. The Kine are couch'd upon the dewy grass; The Horse alone, seen dimly as I pass, Is up, and cropping yet his later meal: Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky. Now, in this blank of things, a harmony Home-felt, and home-created seems to heal That grief for which the senses still supply Fresh food; for only then, when memory Is hush'd, am I at rest. My Friends, restrain Those busy cares that ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... more black than any known night had been before. One's voice lost itself in there without resonance, as if on a plain; the smoke of our blaze drove aslant, scintillating with red sparks, and went trailing afar, as if under the clouds of a starless sky. Ultimately, it must have escaped through some imperceptible crevices in the roof of rock. In one place, only, the light of the fire illuminated a small part of the rugged wall, where the shadows of our bodies would surge up, repeating our movements, and suddenly be gone ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... at last, black as the brow of a Congo nigger, and starless as a company of travelling actors. I could not remain under the tree all night, that was certain; and so I left it, although I could scarcely see my hand before me. That hand, by the way, still tenaciously ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... elongation of Venus is 47 degrees, while the Zodiacal light has been traced for 70 degrees, and probably farther. It is very possible that the earth is occasionally involved in it, and that from it we derive that diffused light which, though faint, is very serviceable to us on a starless evening, and of which no other account has as yet been given. The light we receive in this way is often as powerful as that which we should receive from the stars if they were not hidden ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... For here the air is horrid with men's groans, The priests who call upon Thy name are slain, Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain From those whose children lie upon the stones? Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom Curtains the land, and through the starless night Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see! If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might Lest Mahomet be crowned instead ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... him from scolding me. He carried me back to my dungeon, laid me tenderly on the bed, gave me some medicine, and asked me if there was any thing more he could do. Then he went away, and I was left with my own thoughts—starless as the midnight ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... dramatists act firmly on the view that their duty is to write plays interesting when rendered by a good, starless company, they will only produce as a rule bravura pieces of little artistic value. By all means let them write strongly emotional parts, if they can; but they are not worthy of their royalties if their characters ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "I am nothingness," is the reason of existence of all that is. I said just now that the sun was declining to the horizon. Now the last glimmer of twilight has disappeared; night has closed in—a dark and starless night. Yes, Sirs, but there is never on the earth a night so dark as to warrant us in despairing of the return of the dawn. If the modern mind is such as it is described to us, it has lost all the rays of light; but the sun ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the starless sky, not a breath of wind was stirring, the air felt oppressively close and sultry even at the hour of midnight. A single torch was all the light which the grave-diggers dared to employ while engaged on their ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... aunt, and myself, seated at a comfortable fire on a December evening. The night was dark, starless, and rainy, while the drops pattered upon the windows, and the wind howled at intervals along the house-tops. In a word, it was as gloomy a night as one would wish to see in this, the most dismal season of the year. Strictly speaking, I should have been at home, for it was Sunday; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... clumps of touselled and wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' guidance. These posts show out white against a starless night, and dark against the snow which sometimes covers the heath with ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in such unimagined wise, How may joy dawn? In what undreamed-of hour, May the light break with splendor of surprise, Disclosing all the mercy and the power? A baseless hope, yet vivid, keen, and bright, As the wild lightning in the starless night. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... under an obscure and starless heaven, we had left far behind us the plantations of the valley, and were mounting a certain canyon in the hills, narrow, encumbered with great rocks, and echoing with the roar of a tumultuous torrent. Cascade after cascade thundered and hung up its flag of whiteness in the night, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... sacrificed to that estate. Maiden she was, his eyes caressed the sign Black o'er the topaz beauty of her breast. The stranger spoke. "Malua am I called; I hold for title Tui Tua Kau. Over the violent seas, beneath the frown, Cold and untoward, of a starless sky, The waves of chance have borne me; thro' the night Around me and above the pitiless trades Were blind with darkness, blown like maiden's hair Across my face. As palm trees beaten by wind, The tortured breakers tossed their streaming crests, And all the light of ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... multiform restraints. As in "Hamlet" the stage on which the whole is acted is really the heart of Hamlet, so he makes his visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead, and Hades open beneath his feet. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than they can comprehend the comedies. It needs acquaintance with society and social ways ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... my child, how sound you sleep! Though your mother's care is deep, You can lie with heart at rest In the narrow brass-bound chest; In the starless night and drear You can sleep, and never hear Billows breaking, and the cry Of the night-wind wandering by; In soft purple mantle sleeping With your little face on mine, Hearing not your mother weeping And the breaking of ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... pleasant impression produced upon the mind of the lonely woman who now owned it, and who hoped to spend here in seclusion and peace the residue of a life whose radiant dawn had been suddenly swallowed by drab clouds and starless gloom. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... death, if in that starless deep, I lose your eyes, I'll haunt familiar places. I'll not keep Tryst in the skies. I'll haunt the whispering elms that found us true, The old grass-grown lane. Look for me there, lest I should look for you, And ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... sleep); Shaken translucency illumes The hyaline of drifting glooms; The strange soft-handed depth subdues Drowned colour there, but black to hues, As death to living, decomposes — Red darkness of the heart of roses, Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, And gold that lies behind the eyes, The unknown unnameable sightless white That is the essential flame of night, Lustreless purple, hooded green, The myriad hues that lie between Darkness ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... the land where I dwell, Lest to future times the tale I tell, When slow expires in smoldering fires The goodly heritage of your sires,— How Freedom's light rose clear and bright O'er fair Columbia's beacon-hight, Till ye quenched the flame in a starless night. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... just as he could have foretold. The fire-lit room was filled with the busy weaving of the web that ruddy gleams and russet shadows never got finished, swiftly as they glanced, and overhead the black spaces between the rafters gloomed down like inlets of a starless sky. There sat his great-grandmother smoking her dudeen in her nook by the hearth, and her big cloak—a very little of wizened old woman to a great many heavy, dark-blue folds. There, too, knitted her grey-haired daughter ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the rain along the smoking trail; twilight by day, depthless darkness by night, where we lay panting in starless obscurity, listening to the giant winds of the wilderness—vast, resistless, illimitable winds flowing steadily through the unseen and naked crests of forests, colder and ever colder they blew, heralding the trampling blasts of winter, charging us ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Finally, the speech ended in a lofty, splendid, and impressive peroration. When tracing the progress of the cause for the last seven years, Mr. Morley spoke with the fine poetic diction in which he stands supreme, of "starless skies" and a "tragic hour"—meaning the Parnell crisis—and then he used the words which more than any other thrilled the House. "We have," he cried, "an indomitable and unfaltering captain," and cheer on cheer rose, while the Old Man sat, white, silent, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed—a star in an else starless firmament, which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest tracked as a guide or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... marked circumstance which is remarkably difficult of explanation by means of the grindstone theory. This is the existence of vacant spaces—holes, so to speak, in the groundwork of the Milky Way. For instance, there is a cleft running for a good distance along its length, and there is also a starless gap in its southern portion. It seems rather improbable that such a great number of stars could have arranged themselves so conveniently, as to give us a clear view right out into empty space through such a system in its greatest thickness; as if, in fact, holes had been bored, and clefts made, from ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... on, and Wilhelmine woke with a start as a more than usually violent jolt flung her against the door. She peered out into the darkness but could see nothing, for the night was absolutely starless. The road was so steep that at moments the heavy carriage threatened to run backwards down the hill, in spite of the straining of the wretched horses that struggled onwards, slipping and floundering on the dripping road. At the top of the hill the driver pulled ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... separates you. It will be very hard for me to part from you, but it has to be, and you must make up your mind to it.' Then she drew her golden comb gently through Elsa's hair, and bade her go to bed; but little sleep had the poor girl! Life seemed to stretch before her like a dark starless night. ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... shoved off from the Shawnee, whose lofty spars and drooping canvas towered darkly up in the starless night. At the last moment Gerald Rodman had hoisted a light on the mizzen-rigging as a guide to the four absent boats. As the mutineers pulled quickly away its rays shone dimly over the barque's ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Emeline turned restlessly on her straw bed, and counted the dim rafters while Roxy slept. Finally she could not lie still, and slipped cautiously out of bed, feeling dire need to be abroad, running or riding with all her might. She leaned out of a gable window, courting the moist chill of the starless night. While the hidden landscape seemed strangely dear to her, she was full of unspeakable homesickness and longing for she knew not what—a life she had not known and could not imagine, some perfect friend who called her silently through ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... his den, Scared by the blithesome footsteps of the Dawn, 5 Whose blushing smile floods all the Orient; And now bright Lucifer grows less and less, Into the heaven's blue quiet deep-withdrawn. Sunless and starless all, the desert sky Arches above me, empty as this heart 10 For ages hath been empty of all joy, Except to brood upon its silent hope, As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now. All night have I heard voices: ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the fisher's hand the keys of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... lost and be found again; but that when he stays lost, and is neither dead nor mad, it is because he wants to be lost. So where was to be the gain in finding 'Thanase alive? Oh, much, indeed, to Bonaventure! The star of a new hope shot up into his starless sky when that thought came, and in that star trembled that which he had not all these weary months of search dared see even with fancy's eye,—the image of Zosephine! This—this! that he had never set out to achieve—this! if he could but stand face to face with evidence ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... merely a species of vanity in her that wanted to hold and save this helpless man who, it seemed, could not live for a day without her. And she got no answer to the question—the black water rushed past, chill and pitiless: the rain-swept sky was starless, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... clear and distinct—and everything was mournfully sleeping, standing out in strange huddled masses in the dull clear air. The flush of sunset—a hectic flush—had not yet gone, and would not be gone till morning from the white starless sky; it was reflected on the silken surface of the Neva, while faintly gurgling and faintly moving, the cold blue ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... windows, and there still hung a pale glimmer outside owing to the refraction of light from the white stones of the terrace. Beyond on the left there sloped away a high black wall of impenetrable darkness where the yew hedge stood; over that was the starless sky. Sir Nicholas' study was bright with candlelight, and the lace and jewels of Lady Maxwell (for her sister wore none) added a vague pleasant sense of beauty to Mr. Stewart's mind; for he was one ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... sail for our American home, some reflections naturally occur to us. To visit Cuba is not merely to pass over a few degrees of latitude; it is to take a step from the nineteenth century back into the dark ages. In a climate of tropical luxuriance and endless summer, we are in a land of starless political darkness. Lying under the lee of a Republic, where every man is a sovereign, is a realm where the lives, liberties, and fortunes of all are held at the will of a single individual, who acknowledges no responsibility ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... military achievement. But he did not weaken. He telegraphed Grant to "hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible,"[983] and then, in the silence of early morning, with Raymond's starless letter on the table before him, he showed how coolly and magnanimously a determined patriot could face political overthrow. "This morning, as for some days past," he wrote, "it seems exceedingly probable ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Countess Louis heard Young light sing in the lark. Ere eve it was that other bird, Which brings the starless dark. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but not my friends! Strange allies to his cause! Well, dusk was long My portion; now all gathering storms of hate Are less than naught to me. Six months ago, When here I stood that memorable night, My gloom was starless; now one fiery star Pierces it. And this broken frame of mine Cannot annul that much of victory— The solace born of passion to destroy That shall survive me if indeed I die. Alone my life was lived; if now I go, It is alone into a quiet grave Above whose mound ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... grasped no sceptre save the sharp tulwar, made Of steel that fell from heaven,—for 'twas Indra forged that blade! And many a starless midnight the shout of "Soorj Dehu" Broke up with spear and ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... starless midnight hour, When winter rules with boundless power: As the storms the forests tear, And thunders rend the howling air, Listening to the doubling roar, Surging on the rocky shore, All I can—I weep and pray, For ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... in the starless night; Alas, for him no cheerful morning's dawn! I wear the ransomed spirit's robe of white, Yet still I hear him moaning, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... drive, 200 Nor e'en might Palinurus self the day from night-tide sift, Nor have a deeming of the road atwixt the watery drift. Still on for three uncertain suns, that blind mists overlay, And e'en so many starless nights, across the sea we stray; But on the fourth day at the last afar upon us broke The mountains of another land, mid curling wreaths of smoke. Then fall the sails, we rise on oars, no sloth hath any place, ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... cruised north along the coast, the passenger desiring to put in at Panama in the hope that word might reach him there of quieter times at home. But somewhere off Ecuador on a dark and starless night the merchant of Lima vanished overboard—"and what could you expect," asked Captain Sampson in effect, "when a lubber like him would stay on deck in a gale?" Strange to say, the merchant's body-servant met the fate of the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... At the starless, midnight hour When Winter rules with boundless power, As the storms the forests tear, And thunders rend the howling air, Listening to the doubling roar, Surging on the rocky shore, All I can—I weep and pray For his weal that's far away, On the seas and far away, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... coast of Mexico in due time. Nothing of special interest occurred at Acapulco—only some of the Mexican ladies are very beautiful. They all have brilliant black hair—hair "black as starless night"—if I may quote from the "Family Herald". It don't curl.—A Mexican lady's hair never curls—it is straight as an Indian's. Some people's hair won't curl under any circumstances.—My hair won't curl under two shillings. (Artemus always wore his hair ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... sway them, chartless captains. Multitudes ply Trimly enough from bank to bank of Thames Like shallow wherries, while tall galleons, Out of their very beauty driven to dare The uncompassed sea, founder in starless nights, And all that we can ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... honest artificer. Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangled condition was so great a miracle, that, spite of my poor shipmates having perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky was starless, I could not but consider that God's hand was very visible ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... you to repine in this way; you who have suffered and endured so much must not despond when, after a long, starless night, the day begins ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the Southron, "even as the starless night—but yet—if this contrivance of thine should endanger thy safety, fair and no less kind than fair damsel, it were utterly unworthy of me to accept ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... to her throbbing brain, striving to clear away the mists. "Sartor" had effectually blindfolded her, and she threw herself down to sleep with a shivering dread, as of a young child separated from its mother, and wailing in some starless desert. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... that, in spite of the prognostications of physicians, he recovered from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of assassins conspired in vain against his life, that the open skiff to which he trusted himself on a starless night, on a raging ocean, and near a treacherous shore, brought him safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle, the cannon balls passed him by to right and left. The ardour and perseverance with which he devoted himself to his mission have scarcely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the stimulus of the sun's rays was withdrawn. As it ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things. It changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or since. I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a coppery red light that mingled with all the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... went by; then four. The afternoon was waning. The thick, woolly gray that surrounded them assumed a more somber shade. Night was coming, pitchy and starless, doubly so for the two lost boys, adrift ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... again one or another of them, choked with the dust, went to get a draft of lukewarm water from the scuttlebutt. But no one stayed over long on these excursions. The breeze had blown up into a gale. The night overhead-was starless and moonless, but every minute the black heaven was split by spurts of lightning, which showed the laboring, dishevelled ship set among great mountains of ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... has come. The air of the April night just lifts the leaves of the sleeping flowers. The moon is queen in the cloudless and starless sky. The stillness of the midnight hour is abroad, over land ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... flight! For shadows gather round, and should we part, A dreary starless night May fill my heart,— Then pause and linger ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... Dante begs Virgil to interpret, and learns they are about to descend into Hades. Having visited this place before, Virgil boldly leads Dante through this portal into an ante-hell region, where sighs, lamentations, and groans pulse through the starless air. Shuddering with horror, Dante inquires what it all means, only to be told that the souls "who lived without praise or blame," as well as the angels who remained neutral during the war in heaven, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... paralysed, I brought Pup into view on the south, and supposedly Victorian, bank, opposite where I had landed. By the time I had induced him to take the water and rejoin me, the short twilight was gone, and night had set in, dark, starless, hot, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... profound. As the wind in great blasts swept over the tops of the trees, its voice was raised to piercing shrieks that gradually died away into low moans. We thought of the vast wilderness lying all about us under the pall of a moonless and starless night. Where had all the people in the world ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... quick, my breath heaves short, My limbs deny their slight support. Cold dews my pallid face o'erspread, With deadly languor droops my head. My ears with tingling echoes ring, And life itself is on the wing; My eyes refuse the cheering light, Their orbs are veil'd in starless night: Such pangs my nature sinks beneath, ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... through the pine woods that separated Aldercliffe from Pine Lea darkness had fallen, and he was compelled to move cautiously along the narrow, curving trail. How black the night was! A storm must be brewing, thought he, as he glanced up into the starless heavens. Stumbling over the rough and slippery ground on he went. Then suddenly he rounded a turn in the path and stood ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... blank an eye! 30 And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 35 In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... truth may be told of Bosambo, and all his movements may be explained by this revelation of his benevolence. In the silence of his hut had he planned his schemes. In the dark aisles of the forests, under starless skies when his fellow-huntsmen lay deep in the sleep which the innocent and the barbarian alone enjoy; in drowsy moments when he sat dispensing justice, what time litigants had droned monotonously he had ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... game. From crippling fashions free, her well-knit frame At fifteen summers was mature and strong. She pitched the tipi,[2] dug the tipsin[3] roots, Gathered wild rice and store of savage fruits. Fearless and self-reliant, she could go Across the prairie on a starless night; She speared the fish while in his wildest flight, And almost like a warrior drew the bow. Yet she was not all hardness: the keen glance, Lighting the darkness of her eyes, perchance Betrayed no softness, but her voice, that rose O'er the weird circle of the midnight ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... a boy with lantern light And he was linen-pale with fright; It was not hard to guess my task, Although I raised the sash to ask— 'Oh, Father,' cried the boy, 'Oh, come! Quickly with the viaticum! The sailor-man is going to die!' The thirsty silence drank his cry. A starless stillness damped the air, While his shrill voice kept piping there, 'The sailor-man is going to die'— The huge ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... suffering in silence the keenest pangs of affliction. Around him the votaries of fashion and wealth were flushed with gayety. Paris was in the ecstasy of Christmastide. But the depths of his soul were starless and chill, and in the midst of all this mirth one heart was tuned to melancholy. He writes ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... the afternoon, casting back many regretful glances at the three giant sentinels of the plain, looming preternaturally large in the rapidly fading light of a starless evening. At that hour we felt we could understand and sympathise with the poor untutored peasant's fear and avoidance of these lonely ruins, for superstition is often as much the result of chance environment ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... redoubled peals the roaring thunder flies. Cast from our course, we wander in the dark. No stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... of a cafe hard at hand; the reflection slept amidst the shadows on the dark pavement, and save a solitary lamp swung at distance in the vista over the centre of the narrow street, no ray broke the gloom. The night was clouded and starless, the wind moaned in gusts, and the rain fell heavily; but the gloom and the loneliness did not appall the eye, and the wind did not chill the heart, and the rain fell unheeded on the head of the woman at her post. At times ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. And I would rather that every God would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, that that just one soul should suffer eternal agony. I have made up my mind that if there is a God, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That he will forgive the forgiving. Upon that rock I stand. That every man should be true to himself, and that ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... dark and starless, and the wind blew raw and bleak as the baronet dashed down the avenue and out into the high-road. He almost wondered at himself for complying with the dying woman's desire, but some inward impulse beyond his control seemed ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: 'Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,' says he; 'shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.' To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the earth on which ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... more than sixpence; how could she return with only that humble amount to face Mother Mawks and her vituperative fury? Her throat ached; she was very tired, and, as the night darkened from pale to deep and starless shadows, she strolled mechanically from the Strand to the Embankment, and after walking some little distance she sat down in a corner close to Cleopatra's Needle—that mocking obelisk that has looked upon the decay ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... tempests rave, I cannot rest at home, For then the billows deck his grave With flowers of snow-white foam; And here I pray till break of day Beneath night's starless dome." ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... to smile back at her. Then he went out of the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace. A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy. The moon this night, afloat in a luminous gray void, somehow reminded Florian of a glistening and ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman's quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the window, and ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... lead us! According to them, Jesus Christ, instead of shining as the light of the world, extinguished the torches which his own prophets had kindled, and plunged mankind into the palpable darkness of a starless midnight! O Savior, in pity to thy suffering people, let thy temple be no longer used as a "den ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... nights—even the starless night before dissolution—must wear away. About six o'clock, the hour which called up the household, I went out to the court, and washed my face in its cold, fresh well-water. Entering by the carre, a piece of mirror- glass, set ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte |
