"Windless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lay the station of Mockery Dale. It was tremendously hot, for the afternoon sun was raking the valley from stem to stern, and since what little breeze there was blew from the south-east, the fitful puffs passed over the dip in the moorland and left it windless. This suited the butterflies admirably. Indeed, from all the insects an unmistakable hum of approval of the atmosphere rose steadily. Anthony could not hear it, any more than he could hear the lark which was singing merrily at a vast height above the shining rails, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Night windless, except few occasional gusts. Stars veiled. Grand zodiacal light (now the regular thing). Cool ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... smooth and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes, beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our feet. A little way down, where the lake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... weather was cold but windless. The two men went out betimes in another effort to beat down the road, with no great hope of success; but long before they left, and indeed long before daylight, Maria began to recite her Aves. Awakening very early, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the Brooksites seeking safety in the State House and the Baxterites in the Antony. The feet of General White's troops fought bravely. Three hours later it was announced that they had made the fifty miles to Pine Bluff without a break, windless, but happy. Each faction was deficient in arms to equip their adherents. A company of cadets from St. John's College had been placed at ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... moon had now soared high above the mountain, and a spectacle, wonderfully and wildly beautiful, was revealed. Kellson walked into the garden and gazed on it. The mist, no longer smooth and clinging, but drawn and curled into fantastic wreaths, was rising slowly into the windless sky. The tired-out man took one lingering look, and then walked quickly into the house. He locked the front door and went into ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... former flowers that kissed your feet Remains a poppy, pallid from the heat, A wild poppy that the wild winds have sown. Alas! the rose forgets your hands of rose; The lilies slumber in the lily bed; 'Tis only poppies in the dreamy close, The changeless, windless garden of the dead, You tend, with buds soft as your kiss that lies In over happy dreams, ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... came down the deserted street, treading on air. It was a bland summer night, windless, moon-washed, odorous with garden-scents; the moon, nearing its full, was a silver egg set on end—("Leda-hatched," he termed it; "one may look for the advent of Queen Heleine ere dawn"); and the sky he likened to blue velvet studded with the gilt nail-heads of a seraphic upholsterer. ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Achilles and Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus—a mountain in Thessaly in the Iliad; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in Odyssey, V. 41-47. [Footnote: Ibid., ii. 396.] Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with the variations which ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... western gate Where whining halt and leper wait, And came at last To the blue desert, where the deep Great seas of twilight lay asleep, Windless and vast. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... windless nightfall the rich, throbbing organ-tones of the Indian Ocean surf toll all the darkling glades. I wonder do the green, flame-winged loories today call hoarsely through the aisles of greenery, and the bushbucks bark their angry challenges from the deep and tangled hollows. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... how far affairs had gone with Mr. Henry, I will give some words of his, uttered (as I have cause not to forget) upon the 26th of February 1757. It was unseasonable weather, a cast back into winter: windless, bitter cold, the world all white with rime, the sky low and grey: the sea black and silent like a quarry-hole. Mr. Henry sat close by the fire, and debated (as was now common with him) whether "a man" should "do ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as it were away from under the keel, left us borne upon the waters of the bay, which were as still as the windless night itself. The pushing off of that boat was like a launching into space, as a bird opens its wings on the brow of a cliff, and remains poised in the air. A sense of freedom came to me, the unreasonable feeling of exultation—as if I had been really a bird essaying its flight for ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and Aether. The Orphic poet styles Chaos (Greek text omitted), "the monstrous gulph," or "gap". This term curiously reminds one of Ginnunga-gap in the Scandinavian cosmogonic legends. "Ginnunga-gap was light as windless air," and therein the blast of heat met the cold rime, whence Ymir was generated, the Purusha of Northern fable.(3) These ideas correspond well with the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... in coming and sullen of aspect, a reluctant dawn succeeded the night. A wet mist clung everywhere in the windless atmosphere, muffling sound as well as light. There was not even a servant stirring in the Rose house, when Gerard descended the dark stairs and went out into the ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... leaves unsodden Where the infant frost has trodden With his morning-winged feet Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines Piercing with their trellised lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness; The dun and bladed grass no less, Pointing from this hoary tower In the windless air; the flower Glimmering at my feet; the line Of the olive-sandall'd Apennine In the south dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; And of living things each one; And ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... plains, forest-clothed hills, and broad rivers. It is one of the first places Spring stops at on her way up from Italy; and Autumn, coming down from the north sunburnt, fruit-laden, and blest, goes slowly when she reaches it, lingering there with her serenity and ripeness, her calm skies and her windless days long after the Saxons and Prussians have lit their stoves and got out their furs. There figs can be eaten off the trees in one's garden, and vineyards glow on the hillsides. There the people are Catholics, and the Protestant pastor casts no shadow ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... later it missed them and began a search. Presently it lit the little boat, and it did something more—it revealed a thickening of the atmosphere. They were running into a sea fog, one of those thin white fogs that come down in the Mediterranean on windless days. The blinding ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... closing the skylights that had been opened for the milder part of the day; another Italian replaced the covers on hot-beds that might have contained violets. From the high furnace chimney a plume of yellow-brown smoke floated heavily on the windless air. The place looked ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... night that promised well for the enterprise—nearly windless, and what little breeze stirred came from a point or so west of north; a sky of lead-blue, faintly star-dotted, and no moon; a still sea for the small craft, the motor-launches and the coastal motor-boats, whose work is done close in shore. From the destroyer which served the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... The winter night was windless and mild. Sir Roger's asthmatic and rheumatic afflictions were quite safe in the warm atmosphere. Moonlight flooded everything with its misty glory, stars spangled the sky, music came softened by distance from the ball-room—all ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... from Houten early next morning and by breakfast time was ready to get down to business with Barry. The day dawned muggy and windless; one of the native seamen in a commandeered canoe paddled up from his observation point near the river mouth to report and get his relief. There was no sign of Leyden's schooner, nor did the day promise a wind that could possibly bring ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... windless—helplessly prostrate before the arrowed glances of the infuriated Dragon. A number of city folk sought coolness on the float, as the buffet at the steamboat-landing was called in Skorodozh. It was less oppressive under the canvas roof of the float, where at intervals ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... through the rest of the night it was kedge and tow again, the Shannon and the Guerriere hanging on doggedly, confident of taking their quarry. Another day dawned, hot and windless, and the situation was unchanged. Other British ships had crawled or drifted nearer, but the Constitution was always just beyond range of their heavy guns. We may imagine Isaac Hull striding across the ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... rain came—out of season, but no less violent because of that. It rained three days and nights on end—three windless days and starless nights, during which we had to linger alongshore close to the papyrus. In order to keep mosquitoes out we had to light a smudge in the sand-box below. The smudge added to the heat, and the heat drove men to the open air ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... when Tom returned 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
... windless, the house silent as the grave. He walked about the hills during the afternoon, practicing his Hebrew "Names" and "Words" like a schoolboy learning a lesson. And all about him the slopes of mountain watched him, listening. So did the ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... bright and fair, with a keen, windless frost that made the snow crisp and pleasant to ride over, hindering one in no way. And there was the sun shining over all in a way that made the cold seem nought to me, so that I had known nothing more pleasant than this English winter, having seen as yet ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and when the breeze came screaming through the fog or rain they sprang to ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... on in its delectable way in the Valley of the Moon. The last Mariposa lily vanished from the burnt grasses as the California Indian summer dreamed itself out in purple mists on the windless air. Soft rain- showers first broke the spell. Snow fell on the summit of Sonoma Mountain. At the ranch house the morning air was crisp and brittle, yet mid-day made the shade welcome, and in the open, under the winter ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... we linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The clouds have broken and the heavens burn To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light The churning of the waves ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... stretched the Bush, an ocean of tree-tops, as level as the windless sea, and over this green expanse shadows of fleecy clouds chased each other. Presently Jim discovered a brown space in the distance, and detected a thin column of smoke rising on occasions between the vagrant winds. He called Burton's ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the air; the hills of silver and emerald sloping down to the valley miles away, where the village clustered about the great old parish church; the smoke from a hundred chimneys, in purple spirals, rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... December Benton sent out a big boom of logs with a hired stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves before the break ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... she'll think when she sees that jug don't go down any? Wonder—oh, hell! She'd never care anything about me. If she did—" His thoughts went hazy with vague speculation, then clarified suddenly into one hard fact, like a rock thrusting up through the lazy sweep of a windless tide. "If she did care, I couldn't do anything. ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... a picnic so much! It was a perfect autumn evening, windless and frosty, with a dead black sky and a tiny rim of new moon like a thumb-nail paring. We had our eggs and bacon, washed down with tea and condensed milk, and followed by bread and jam. The little fire burned blue and cozy, and we sat on each side of ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... toss, the passage across should not be attempted during or immediately after a blow from the northwest or southeast. So make a note of that! Old salts at Annapolis told us that the water of the Bay "gets up" suddenly, but also quiets down soon, and that after a windless night one might be reasonably certain ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... often went up and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea. And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think that the romantic surroundings ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... The sun was still high—the air lulled and windless. Then through the shafts and down the hill there glided in that clear waking daylight, a grisly shape like that which I have heard our maidens say the witch-hags, sometimes seen in the forest, assume; yet in truth, it seemed ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... willing to be the odd unit, strolled very contentedly out along the path that led to the river. The moon had not long risen and shone very large and low in the east, burning dimly and red through the heat haze and vapours from the Thames. The air was very windless, and the river lay like a sheet of grey steel at her feet, save where a little spreading feather of black ripple showed the course of some water-rat. Bats wheeled and dipped like some company of nocturnal swallows, pursuing their ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... while each inconsequent turn of the narrow twisting road revealed a sudden glimpse of distant purple hills, or a small friendly cottage built of cob and crowned with yellow thatch, or high-hedged fields of standing corn, deepening to gold and quiveringly still as the sea on a windless afternoon. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... patient with you? You! My sun and moon! My basketful of flowers! My money-bag of shining dreams! My hours, Windless and still, of afternoon! You are my world and I your citizen. What ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... And windless; yea, think as I might, I could not say, Even to within years' measure, when One would be at my side who ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... cheerfully enough, and for three hours or more paddled easily up the glassy and windless reaches, between two green flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and insects; while down from the branches which overhung the stream long trailers hung to the water's edge, and seemed admiring in the clear mirror the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... They were three in number; sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the forest protecting these windless sheets of water; perhaps it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred the imagination. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... yet I feel around my heart the flush Of that calm, windless morning, glorified With summer sunshine brilliant and intense! A tiny boy, scarcely ten summers old, Along blue Esk, under the whispering trees, And by the crumbling banks, daisy-o'ergrown, A cloudless, livelong day I trode with one Whose soul was in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... was! How windless. There came to him the memory of the wind as it soothed him that day of Celia's home coming. He had not hated the wind. He had loved it. There came also the memory of the wind as it soughed around the dugout on those lonely nights, when he and Cyclona had planned the beautiful ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... since the night of the rally. It was an evening in late May—late, but it was May, and the fairies' month still. There was a pleasant, shivery chill in the air. A far sprinkling of stars made the dark of the still, windless night look darker and warmer and safer to whisper in. The big horse-chestnut tree at the corner of the syringa hedge was only a darker blot against the surrounding dark, and the slope of faintly lit street on the other side of the hedge looked far away, with the dark sweep of lawn between. ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... in his new state. And while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain top. Heaven ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... out of a windless sky, and spattering up from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in another world—where one did have interviews. How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead; without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung disconsolately on Vera's shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near the men's hats or on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of freedom ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to the water-side, and when she was standing knee- deep in the little sandy bight aforesaid, she looked over to Green Eyot, and was minded to swim over thither, as oft she did. And it was a windless dawn after a hot night, and a light mist lay upon the face of the water, and above it rose the greenery of ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... where the dry Gray shocks stand peaked and withering, half concealed In the rough earth, the orange pumpkins lie, Full-ribbed; and in the windless pasture-field The sleek red horses o'er the sun-warmed ground Stand pensively about in companies, While all around them from the motionless trees The long clean shadows ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... the mountains in the windless autumn Frost-clear, blue-nooned, apple-ripening days; Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze; Fair-bound cattle Plod with lowing up ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,—all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... them; for, as the beach was not large in extent, they lay at anchor with prows projecting 191 towards the sea in an order which was eight ships deep. For that night they lay thus; but at early dawn, after clear sky and windless calm, the sea began to be violently agitated and a great storm fell upon them with a strong East 192 Wind, that wind which they who dwell about those parts call Hellespontias. Now as many of them as perceived that the wind was rising and who were so moored ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... her announcing her own and her husband's final secession, at the same time as they tempted her to point the moral of all vain reverberations. The double door of the house stood open to an effect of hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful, windless, waiting, golden hour, under the influence of which Adam Verver met his genial friend as she came to drop into the post-box with her own hand a thick sheaf of letters. They presently thereafter left the house together and drew out ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... who is temperate in food and amusements, who duly exerts himself temperately in all his works, and who is temperate in sleep and vigils. When one's heart, properly restrained, is fixed on one's own self, then, indifferent to all objects of desire, he is one called a devotee.[195] As a lamp in a windless spot doth not flicker, even that is the resemblance declared of a devotee whose heart hath been restrained and who applieth his self to abstraction. That (condition) in which the mind, restrained by practice of abstraction, taketh rest, in which beholding self by self, one is gratified ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... hill blazed out with lines of light, and elms and apple-trees bore red and golden lanterns, like glorified fruit. The clerk of the weather was evidently interested in this novel entertainment, for the evening was windless, dark, and cool, so the arch of light that spanned the shadowy river shone splendidly. Fireworks soared up from the hill-top beyond, fireflies lent their dancing sparks to illuminate the meadows, and the three bridges ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... spell of moodiness that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below—never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely bear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of the fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with windless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these contrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops spilt from wine-casks which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... as he slowed down to leeward of the island and watched the shadows melt away. It was Sunday, a day of heavenly calm, fresh yet windless, with a sea so smooth that the barrier reefs for once were silent, and one could hear, far across the hushed and shining water, the coo of pigeons in the forest. Under bare steerage way, with the leadsman droning in the fore chains, the ship hugged the shore and steamed ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... clamor the great siren whistle at the shops boomed out the fire alarm, and almost at the the same instant a red glow, capped by a rolling nimbus of sooty oil smoke, rose to beacon the destruction already begun in the shop yards. And while the roar of the siren was still jarring upon the windless night air, the electric-light circuits were cut out, leaving the yards and the Crow's Nest in darkness, and the frantic battle for the trains to be lighted only by the moon and the lurid glow of destruction spreading slowly under ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... recounting which with this Tallies as footprint with the foot of man? Four hundred years ago—that self-same day - Connor, the son of Nessa, Ulster's King, Sat throned, and judged his people. As he sat, Under clear skies, behold, o'er all the earth Swept a great shadow from the windless east; And darkness hung upon the air three hours; Dead fell the birds, and beasts astonied fled. Then to his Chief of Druids, Connor spake Whispering; and he, his oracles explored, Shivering made answer, 'From ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... windless and no leaf moved on any tree. There must be some animal among the shrubs that covered the embankment, some large animal, since its movements caused so much commotion; for, as she watched, first one bush and then another stirred and bent and was shaken as if by ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... soul of each with greater strength than before. Of this only the Slav nature, a broad, powerful nature, which is to others what the sea is to small rivulets, is capable. In stormy times it roars and thunders, raging, and raising such waves as weak rivers cannot throw up; but when it is windless and quiet, it spreads its boundless glassy surface, clearer than any river, a ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a woodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about the hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender haze of old pledges and vows ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... might Of victory, chanting now the Blessed Gods, Now their own valour, and Epeius' work Ever renowned. Their song soared up to heaven, Like multitudinous cries of daws, when breaks A day of sunny calm and windless air After a ruining storm: from their glad hearts So rose the joyful clamour, till the Gods Heard and rejoiced in heaven, all who had helped With willing hands the war-fain Argive men. But chafed those others which had aided Troy, Beholding Priam's ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... that like a windless lake Shines in the glow of heaven, a cherub boy Is bounding, playful as a breeze new-born, Light as the beam that dances by his side. Phantom of beauty! with his trepid locks Gleaming like water-wreaths,—a flower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... that Berneck, a little town twelve miles from Baireuth on the Hof road, will do; and that Friday, probably early, will be the day. Wilhelmina, accordingly, is on the road that morning, early enough; Husband with her, and ceremonial attendants, in honor of such a Brother; morning is of sultry windless sort; day hotter and hotter;—at Berneck is no Crown-Prince, in the House appointed for him; hour after hour, Wilhelmina waits there in vain. The truth is, one of the smallest accidents has happened: the Generals "lost a wheel ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the year 17—, ten men sat together in the parlour of "The Haunted Man." Without, upon the desolate moorland, a windless stricture of frost had bound the air as though in boards, but within, the tongues were loosened, and the talk flowed merrily, and the clink of steaming tumblers filled the room. Dr. DEADEYE sat with the rest at the long deal table, puffing mightily at the brown ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... and closer to the shore, and Henry searched the forest with straining eyes. Nothing moved there. The night was windless, and the branches did not stir. Nor did he hear any of the slight sounds which a numerous party, despite ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... now the duty of the author to make some examination of the music of this first lyric drama. But here we unfortunately find ourselves adrift upon a windless ocean. We are driven to the necessity of deducing our information from the results of analogical reconstruction. Nothing indeed can be more fascinating than the attempt to arrive at a comprehension of the music of Poliziano's "Orfeo." All record of it appears to be lost and ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... a warm dusk, moonless, windless. The sounds of the village street came in—laughter, a touch at a piano, a chiming clock. Bights starred and quickened in the blurred houses. Footsteps echoed on the board walks. The gate opened. The gloom ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... bottle of old wine carefully uncorked by the hand of the Dictator himself. As it began to grow dark a lamp was set upon the table and a couple of candles on the sideboard; for the night was perfectly pure, starry, and windless. Light overflowed besides from the door and window in the verandah, so that the garden was fairly illuminated and the leaves twinkled in ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the horizon's verge; To leeward, stormy shadows, violet-black, And the wide sea between A vast unfurrowed field of windless green; The stormy shadows flicker on the track Of phantom sails ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... near horizon ran a chain of those sharp, low summits, irregularly jagged against the pale blue. From several of the summits rose streamers of murky vapor; and one of these, darker and more abundant than the others, spread abroad at the top on the windless air till it took the shape of a colossal pine-tree. To the girl the sight was portentous. It filled her with apprehension, and she would have liked to avoid this unfamiliar-looking region. But, seeing that Grom was filled with interest at the novel phenomena ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... hear The rustling of the summer grove, And view those angel features near, Which first awoke the heart to love. How sweet it is, in pensive mood, At windless midnight to recline, And fill the mental solitude With spectres ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern, stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red underwing had never come back, though Jacob had ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... locked. She remembered that this was "make-up day" at the weekly which took most of her father's work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a beaming, windless afternoon. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the nature of that quest I make no facile assumption. I do not pretend that what I have called the growth of the soul from within is a smooth and easy process, a quiet unfolding of leafy green in a bright and windless air. If I recognize the delight of expansion, I recognize also the pain of repression—the thwarted desire, the unfulfilled hope, the passion vain and abortive. I do not say even whether or no, in this dim travail of the spirit, pleasure prevails over pain, evil over good. The most ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... peculiarly Shakespearian word: see M. for M. iii. 1. 124, "To be imprisoned in the viewless winds." The word is obsolete, but poets use great liberty in the formation of adjectives in -less: comp. Shelley's Sensitive Plant, 'windless clouds.' See note, l. 574. charming-rod: see note, l. 52: also l. 653. rout, a disorderly crowd. The word is also used in the sense of 'defeat,' and is cognate with route, rote, and rut. All come from Lat. ruptus, broken: a 'rout' is the breaking up of a crowd, or a crowd broken up; ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... interstice between it and its next neighbor. Commonly the sharper one edge is, the softer is the other, and the clouds look flat, and as if they slipped over each other like the scales of a fish. When both edges are soft, as is always the case when the sky is clear and windless, the cloud looks solid, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... a heavy blow on his inflated chest: and, throwing out horizontally a big arm that remained steady, extended in the air like the limb of a tree on a windless day— ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... swell some vast refrain beyond the sun, The very weed breathed music from its sod; And night and day in ceaseless antiphon Rolled off through windless arches in the broad Abyss.—Thou saw'st I, too, Would in my place have blent accord as true, And justified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... before we reached the railhead we would probably hear the sound of the guns. The phrase is used to barrenness, even to ridicule, but the reality when first heard rings a new emotion in your breast. The night was windless and warm, and about ten o'clock as we stood in a wayside station the Ulsterman came up to me and said, 'Listen, you can hear them now.' And away to the east could be heard a deep shaking sound rising and fading away in the still air—the sound of British artillery fighting ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... country of the Syrians. Then he sends away his retinue, and stays alone in a grove, hidden from human eyes. Here is a lofty tree, blossoming bright above all other trees, and on this tree the Phoenix builds his nest, on a windless day, when the holy jewel of heaven shines clear. For he is fain by the activity of his mind to convert old age into life, and thus renew his youth. He gathers from far and near the sweetest and most delightsome plants and leaves, ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... orb now reduced to less than half its full dimensions—stole ghostlike above the horizon; and by her wan light we saw that a host of soft, fleecy clouds—shaped like the smoke belched from the mouth of a cannon upon a windless day—were mustering their squadrons in the eastern quarter; and we knew them for the welcome trade-cloud, the sure indication that the breeze we now had would ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... warmth of each other's bodies in the hot windless nights; they loved their smooth, clean coolness washed by the night wind. Nothing, not even the sweet, haunting ghost of Maisie, came between. They would fall asleep in each other's arms and lie there till ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... to it stood wide open, for the day was hot and windless. Archie went softly in. He fell on his knees by his dying wife, he folded her to his heart, he whispered into her fast-closing ears the despairing words of love, reawakened, when all repentance was too late. He called her back from the very shoal of time to listen to him. With heart-broken ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the trees in the windless air. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... blue of the sky and the brown of the wood, there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but these ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight—more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... was clear, with a great moon,—and windless, and very warm. Shinzaburo sought the coolness of his veranda. Clad only in a light summer-robe, he sat there thinking, dreaming, sorrowing; —sometimes fanning himself; sometimes making a little smoke to drive the mosquitoes away. Everything was quiet. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... spring following the fire, and one ever memorable for its wonderful grass and flowers, its gentle rains and windless, sunny days,—Sassy continued to exasperate the family, winning only censure. But when the depleted flock could not furnish half the eggs the family needed, she took it upon herself to lay one daily, and was ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from autumn into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill. In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play of the pioneer held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost had crusted the deep snow. On the crust men and wolves could travel with ease, but the ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... as death, if death Be visited by stealthy dreams; A vagrant note from soundless themes That ring the comet-paths of space, Seemed vibrant in the windless air That trembled with its presence there. Out beyond the nameless place Where neither fields nor clouds exist, Grey from the background of the mist, I saw three vague forms drawing near. My sense recoiled acute with fear; I could not stir. ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... Penhallow walked to where on the Crest the eighteen guns were drawn up. The sky was clear as yet, a windless, hot day. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... January to March or April (Zimmerman). Christalier makes haramata, 'Spanish harmatan, an Arabic word.'] weather. We begrudged the voyage this lovely season, which should have been kept for the journey. After the damp warmth of Madeira the still and windless air felt dry, but not too dry; cold, but not too cold; decidedly fresh in early morning, and never warm except at 3 P.M. The sun was pale and shorn, as in England, seldom showing a fiery face before 10 A.M. or after 5 P.M. The sea at night appeared slightly milky, like the white waters ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... reach; and after driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shilling in the sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... her by night. Her hour is the fulness of the sun's flood-tide: she comes in the dead hush and white flame of windless noons,—when colors appear to take a very unearthliness of intensity,—when even the flash of some colibri, bosomed with living fire, shooting hither and thither among the grenadilla blossoms, seemeth a spectral ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... lie beyond it. Sets your star, O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night, Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar, Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light, Returning, shall give back the golden hours, Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places, And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers, The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-faces O heart, in ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... vanished as she talked with him, her radiances thinning into the neutral colors of smoke, and thence dwindling a little by a little into the vaulting spiral of a windless and a burnt-out fire, until nothing remained of her save her voice; and that was like the moving of dead leaves ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... The night was almost windless; sweet, nameless odors poured up from the heated summer soil; the shadows of the grasses were outlined like Japanese pictures on the white roadway. Except for the child and the cat, no living being moved, as far as the eye could see; only ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of the Homestead's ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... summer months there was a great tranquillity and hushed joy in this hard life. A tender magic breathed in the colour and music of the forest, in its long pauses of windless day-dreaming, in its breezy frolic with the sunshine. The trees and boulders were kindly; and the turf reminded her of her mother's bosom. About her refuge the wild flowers grew in plenty—primrose and blue gentian, ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... soft snow beneath the tread, All sunless, windless, tranced, the morning lay; All noiseless, trackless, new, the well-known way. The silence weighed upon the sense; in dread, "Alone, I am alone," I shuddering said, "And wander in a region where no ray Has ever shone, and as ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... a momentary cessation of the ceaseless tap tap, he listened. Silence was never profounder than in this forest on that windless night. Earth and air seemed, to his strained ear, emptied of all sound. The clatter of his own steady, unhastened heart-beat was all that broke upon the stillness. He might be alone in the Universe for all token of ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,—each life complete in itself: why not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it. Knowles—that old skeptic—believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was it he said? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... slopes by successions of diked terraces which look like enormous green flights of steps. Above them are shadowing sombre forests of cedar and pine; and above these wooded summits loom indigo shapes of farther hills overtopped by peaked silhouettes of vapoury grey. The air is lukewarm and windless; and distances are gauzed by delicate mists; and in this tenderest of blue skies, this Japanese sky which always seems to me loftier than any other sky which I ever saw, there are only, day after day, some few filmy, spectral, diaphanous white wandering things: like ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the horses' hoofs, and every wayside ditch and runlet was a street of ice. Over the long undulating landscape the red brick houses peeped out warmly against the spotless background, and the lines of grey smoke streamed straight up into the windless air. The sky was of the lightest palest blue, and the morning sun, shining through the distant fog-wreaths of Birmingham, struck a subdued glow from the broad-spread snow fields which might have gladdened ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the windless night the clipper rolled In a great swell with oily gradual heaves, Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled, Clang, and the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... ghosts on the windless road, Spake each to one another, "Whence came that blood upon thy hand No other hand may cover?" "From breaking of a woman's ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... the falls, the lighter and shriller raging of the rapids, had at last died out behind the thick masses of the forest, as Barnes worked his way down the valley. The heat in the windless underbrush, alive with insects, was stifling. He decided to make once more for the bank of the stream, in the hope that its character might by this time have changed, so as to afford him an easier and more open path. Pressing aside to his left, he presently ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Every one had long since gone to bed, and not a sound was to be heard. The night was almost windless too, and not even the murmur of the waves in the Bay of St. Ia, which could be faintly heard outside, reached him. He felt himself alone ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the windless days are here, Quiet of autumn, when the year Halts and looks backward and draws breath Before it plunges into death. Silver of mist and gossamers, Through-shine of noonday's glassy gold, Pale blue ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the vaporous day, Dull on the windless waters falls the pallid ray. So slumb'ringly the glassy river goes, The water-lily dips not as it flows; The swallow, haunter of the charmed spot, Skims through the silence, and awakes it not; Perch'd as in sleep, the gray kingfisher ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... forging business so very early, and was (apart from this failing) such an imposing and magnificently respectable character. The scene of the error and the detection of Onomacritus presents itself always to me in a kind of pictorial vision. It is night, the clear, windless night of Athens; not of the Athens whose ruins remain, but of the ancient city that sank in ashes during the invasion of Xerxes. The time is the time of Pisistratus the successful tyrant; the scene is the ancient temple, the stately house of Athene, the fane where the sacred serpent ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... that Muller would surely come, and many and many a time he thought over the problem how to deal with him. But the new, windless day passed and there was no sign of the forester. John himself went forth, breaking paths here and there through the snow, but he discovered nothing. He began to believe that Muller had been forced to take shelter at the start of ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... hope of more of the same caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless, sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter's end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an impression, was "good," good enough—for him; its very sounds were faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far beyond ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... incarnate and palpable; of stark, sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded by vast plains eroded to the dead level of a windless sea. Every lofty object cast a sharply outlined shade of impenetrable blackness, beside which the weak light of the sun became a dazzling glare. The ground was either a brilliant white or an intense ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... sick king with the sacred spear and becomes himself the high priest of the Grail. It had seemed to Evelyn that she had been carried beyond the limits of earthly things. The thrill and shiver of the dead man's genius haunted the liquid ripple of the river; the moment was ecstatic; the deep, windless night was full of the haunting ripple of the Rhine. And she remembered how she had clasped her hands ... her very ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... made him shout a windless "HI!" In a second three rats had projected themselves from the dark tangle of the creeper towards Cossar. For three seconds Cossar stood unaware of them, and then he had become the most active thing in the world. He didn't fire his gun. Apparently ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells |
