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More "Darkling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one. Omen? omen? —the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint. —Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold —I shiver! ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... they saw rocks. Darkling and indistinct they loomed up out of the white opaque light. As the children approached they almost bumped against them. They rose up like walls and were quite perpendicular so that scarcely a flake of snow could settle ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... alarm, else I would have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May I trouble you for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the people as a God rever'd: Him, as he fled before him, from behind Eurypylus, Euaemon's noble son, Smote with the sword; and from the shoulder-point The brawny arm he sever'd; to the ground Down fell the gory hand; the darkling shades Of death, and rig'rous ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... the Rushy Moors are spread: Soon will the Sun withdraw her chearful Ray: Darkling and tir'd we shall the Marshes tread, No Lay unsung to cheat the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... hours; but the sun at last Went down to his lodge in the west, and fast The wings of the spirits of night were spread O'er the darkling woods and Wiwst's head. Then, slyly she slipped from her snug retreat, And guiding her course by Wazya's star, [62] That shone through the shadowy forms afar, She northward hurried with silent feet; And long ere the sky ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... through the city—the same mighty fatherly river that washed the walls of his native town up north. In the river Christophe could recover the memory of his childish dreams.... But in his sorrow they took on, like the Rhine itself, a darkling hue. In the dying day he would lean against the parapet of the embankment and look down at the rushing river, the fused and fusing, heavy, opaque, and hurrying mass, which was always like a dream of the past, wherein ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... with dark hedges of Norway spruce drawn about it like a funeral scarf. The panelled wooden shutters of the front windows were never opened, and a stranger passing by would have thought the house uninhabited; but all Elmerton knew that behind those darkling hedges and close shutters, somewhere in the depths of the tall many-chimneyed house, lived—"if you can call it living!" Mrs. Tree said—Miss Virginia Dane. Miss Dane was a contemporary of Mrs. Tree's,—indeed, ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... gazed elate With hope set higher than fear or fate, Or doubt of darkling days in wait; And when her thankful praise waxed great And craved of him the sword again, He would not give it. "Nay, for mine It is till force may make it thine." A smile that shone as death may shine Spake toward him bale ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the lights in the farm-house. He heard the two Wrinkles, with cracked voices, singing a hymn as they sat in their rocking-chairs on the porch. The very stars seemed to hang lower from the darkling mystery overhead; he felt light enough, in his boundless content, to rise to them and drink at their twinkling founts. His soul seemed to swell to the point of bursting. "Oh, God, I thank Thee!" he said, deep within ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence. He who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow-beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... were now on me thou shouldst indeed see wondrous things * That would efface all sorrows and disperse all sores of sprite:' Then deigned our Caliph's Bride to cry, 'Where is that dress of thine?' * And I replied, 'In house of him kept darkling as the night.' So down upon it pounced Masrr and brought it unto her, * And when 'twas there each feather cast a ray of beaming light: Therewith I took it from his hand and opened it straightway * And saw its plumd bosom ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... was ready, and our rude meal in that darkling place was a merry one. Elspeth sat enthroned on a couch of pine branches—I can see her yet shielding her face from the blaze with one little hand, and dividing her cakes with the other. Then we lit our pipes, and fell to the long ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... visible to us for a moment, when their orbit passes into the lighted heavens, and then they disappear in the shadow of the earth. But astronomers tell us that they are always there though to us they seem to blaze but for a moment. We cannot see them, but they move on their darkling path and have a sun round which they circle. So be sure that in many heathen lands there are believing souls, seen by us but for an instant and then lost, who yet fill their unseen place, and move obedient round the Sun of Righteousness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... their boughs, and clove them on the sward, And bound the logs behind their steeds to draw, And drave them homeward; and the snorting steeds Went straining through the crackling brushwood down, And by the darkling forest-paths the Gods Follow'd, and on their shoulders carried boughs. And they came out upon the plain, and pass'd Asgard, and led their horses to the beach, And loosed them of their loads on the seashore, And ranged the wood in stacks by Balder's ship; And every ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... padre pointed to the sea. The hopeless aspect of its moonlit and darkling calm struck me so forcibly that I did not even ask how he proposed to get us out there. I only made a gesture of discouragement. Outside the Casa, my life was not worth ten minutes' purchase. And how could I risk her there? How could I propose ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... this order they made the circuit of the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar. The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart. Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal, military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison catch. The little girls were timid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Like darkling birds her eyelashes Upon her cheek lay fluttering light. Her kirtle's swinging cadences Displayed her ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... was so dense that the majority of us could not see the singer, which enhanced the mystery of her melody and the charm of her young voice. Presently other voices joined in, all in the same meditative, somewhat doleful rhythm. Gayer strains would have sounded sacrilegiously out of tune with the darkling glint of the river, with the mysterious splash of its waves against the bobbing bulkheads of the pier, with the starry enchantment of the passing ferry-boats, with the love-enraptured ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... heartless, cold expression All my being terrifies— Though my darkling fear is lessened By thy frank ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... at Doune?— Like bloodhounds now they search me out,— Hark, to the whistle and the shout!— If farther through the wilds I go, I only fall upon the foe: I'll couch me here till evening gray, Then darkling try my dangerous way.' ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them—ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems—in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... criminal, dangerous, and fatal; and if it be possible to devise means of freeing ourselves from it, we ought at once to set about the employing of those means. It would be the most wretched and imbecile fatuity, to shut our eyes to the impending dangers and horrors, and "drive darkling down the current of our fate," till we are overwhelmed in the final destruction. If we are tyrants, cruel, unjust, oppressive, let us humble ourselves and repent in the sight of heaven, that the foul stain may be cleansed, and we enabled to stand erect as having common ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the huge man stood looking down darkling upon the girl. He would have given his soul if he could have clasped that slender form in his arms! A sudden impulse assailed him, and bade him fall upon his knees before her, and ask her forgiveness and guidance. She stood ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the West. The night falls darkling over the ocean. They are gone: but their hearts are at home yet a while. In silence, with a heart inexpressibly soft and tender, how each man thinks of those he has left! What a chorus of pitiful prayer rises up to the Father, at sea and on shore, on that parting night at home by the vacant bedside, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Though the fountain cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb of the faith ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... his darkling, shabby old third-floor room and threw himself into the arm-chair before the fire to think. It was a room without beauty, merely walls, repapered once every twenty years, and furniture of the mid-Victorian era. The mantelshelf ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and grew vague; it was recalled that he had done dread things; he became a tradition, a legend, and a warning to the young; a Richard in the bush to frighten colts. He was preached at boys caught playing marbles "for keeps": "Do you want to grow up like Joe Louden?" The very name became a darkling threat, and children of the town would have run had one called suddenly, "HERE COMES JOE LOUDEN!" Thus does the evil men do live after them, and the ill-fame of the unrighteous increase ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... dear name my lips should pass, My blushes would our love declare; No, no! I'll say my longing was To see the moon appear O'er yonder darkling hill; Yet 'tis on thee mine eyes ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... o'er moving worlds presides, Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides, On darkling man in pure effulgence shine, And cheer his clouded mind ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! He whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... "My wine has run Indeed out of my cup, and there is none To gather up the bread of my repast Scattered and trampled,—yet I find some good In earth's green herbs, and streams that bubble up, Clear from the darkling ground,—content until I sit with angels before better food. Dear Christ! when thy new vintage fills my cup, This hand shall shake no more, nor ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... when darkness fills The dismal days with darkling ills, Rest in the calm the promise gives, That Christ, thy ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... in hasty visits come! As swiftly follow'd by the fleeting gloom. O Night! thy smiles are short, and short thy shade; Thou art a freakish friend, and all unstay'd: Yet from thy varied changes who are free? Full many an honest friend resembles thee. Then let my doubtful footsteps darkling stray, Thy next fair beam will set me on my way: E'en take thy freedom, whether rough or kind, I came not forth to quarrel ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... regions it divides And borders with its furrowed sides. The seaward valley laughs with light Till the round sun o'erhangs this height; But then the shadow of the crest No more the plains that lengthen west Enshrouds, yet slowly, surely creeps Eastward, until the coolness steeps A darkling league of tilth and wold, And chills the flocks that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... in the room, Phipps yawned. The failing was infectious, and the gathering having, as you can easily understand, talked itself weary, dispersed on trivial pretences. But not to sleep immediately. Directly Dangle was alone he began, with infinite disgust, to scrutinise his darkling eye, for he was a neat-minded little man in spite of his energy. The whole business—so near a capture—was horribly vexatious. Phipps sat on his bed for some time examining, with equal disgust, a collar he would have thought incredible ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... secret, and smite us with the music of the spheres. Suddenly, unheralded, up over the summit of Mount Moriah came the full moan, a silver disc, a lucent, steady orb, globular and grand, filling the valleys with light, touching all things into a hushed and darkling splendor. To us, standing alone, far from sight of human face or sound of human voice, it seemed the censer of God, swung out to receive the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... could stand it no longer. The game was up, the cosmic game for which I had laboured so long and strenuously, and with one despairing yell of "Ulla! Ulla!" I unfastened the chain, and, leaping over the limp and prostrate form of the unhappy Tibbles, fled darkling down the deserted street. ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... It matters little what may come to me Of outward circumstance, as hunger, thirst, Social condition, yea, or love or hate; But what shall I be, fifty summers hence? My life, my being, all that meaneth me, Goes darkling forward into something—what? O God, thou knowest. It is not my care. If thou wert less than truth, or less than love, It were a fearful thing to be and grow We know not what. My God, take care of me; Pardon and swathe me in an infinite love, Pervading and inspiring me, thy child. And ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... they scattered now? To them was linked the long forgotten quiver Of nights of youth, those evening hours in which Vague fear with monstrous, sultry happiness Was mingled, and the perfume of young locks With darkling breezes wafted from ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the infamy of the situation. The Impostor had been secretly watching us. He had envied us our happiness. Into his degenerate mind had stolen the darkling and criminal thought that he—Audacious Scoundrel—might impose upon me by pretending he was not merely "a robin" but "The Robin"—Tweetie himself and that he might supplant him in my affections. But he had been confounded and cast into outer darkness ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Note-Books, Vol. I.] how the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association, even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in Boston. Some of the letters ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... stars, and rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning from the innumerable boughs 20 The strange deep harmonies that haunt his breast: Pleasant shall be thy way, where meekly bows The shutting flower and darkling waters pass, And where the ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... who 'mid the leafy bower Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night With her sweet brood; impatient to descry Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, In the fond ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... her sitting there, the breeze blowing tendrils of bright hair about her face, her strong, lithe hands clasped youthfully about her knees, her beautiful eyes darkling or brightening with the thoughts that passed, could not have connected her with the mere passivity of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... is the peculiar property of California's foothill valleys in the late afternoon; the world seemed very distant and not at all desirable, and to Kay there came a sudden, keen realization of how this man beside her must love this darkling valley with the hills above presenting their flower-clad breasts to the long spears of light from the dying ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... became conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went up to the hut, Dick was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and Dick looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, Dick found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They were standing by the hearth ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... stealthy, shuffling, weighty, sounded again. It was never the echo of her own deft, light step! A distinct, sibilant whisper suddenly hissed with warning throughout the place, and as she turned with the instinct of flight she caught a glimpse in the darkling mirror across the dining-room of a fugitive speeding figure, then another, and still another, all frantically, noiselessly fleeing—why or whom, she could not descry, she did not ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... brethren, in that most weirdly wonderful of all Mr. Kipling's inventions—the one that carries us back, not as his other stories do, to the India of the cities and the bazaars, of the supercilious tourist and the sleek Babu, but to the older India of unbroken jungle, darkling at noonday through its green mist of tangled leaves, and haunted by memories of the world's long infancy when man and brute crouched close together on the earthy breast of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the roads are sweet with fern. All day the windless heaven pavilions the sea-blue, Then twilight comes and drenches the sultry dells with dew. The lone white star of evening comes out among the hills, And in the darkling forest begin the whip-poor-wills. The fireflies that wander, the hawks that flit and scream, And all the wilding vagrants of summer dusk and dream, Have all their will, and reck not of any after thing, Inheriting ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... Troy the capture till that prize obtain'd. "Where then the mighty Ajax? Where the boasts "Of this brave hero? Why this risk evade? "Why dar'd Ulysses through the watchful guards "Steal 'mid the darkling night? and find his way, "Not merely past the Trojan walls, but high "Through raging swords their loftiest turrets scale; "Bear off the goddess from her sacred fane, "And with the prize again repass the foe? "This deed not done, Ajax had bore in vain "On his huge arm the sevenfold oxen ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Darkling, deliberate, what sings This wonderful one, alone, at peace? What wilder things than song, what things Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece, Dearer than Italy, untold Delight, and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... wakes of turbulent keels, swift-sent or laboring, boiled their swirling splendor against the black water. Mysterious, couchant, straining, the bulwarked city rode the waves; a mighty ship, her funnels the great buildings beyond, where sullen streamers of smoke trailed motionless and darkling; the indescribable, multitudinous hum of the city's blended voices for purring of monster engines, deep in her hold; bold and high, her restless prow swung seaward in majestic curve, impatient to beat ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... gaunt pines imprison her sad gaze, All still the sky and darkling drearily; She feels the chilly breath of dear, dead days Come sifting ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... upsprung the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas By each was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... "my heart was in my mouth. As I comed along to you, I saw Mun, coachey, pop along from the back-door to the stables. He was within a hop, step, and jump of me. But he had a lanthorn in his hand, and he did not see me, being as I was darkling." Saying this, he assisted Miss Melville to mount. He troubled her little during the route; on the contrary, he was remarkably silent and contemplative, a circumstance by no means disagreeable to Emily, to whom his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... I reserved to take an early opportunity of reading, but replaced for the present, and, having come at last upon one hopeful-looking key, I made haste to return before my candle, which was already flickering in the socket, should go out altogether, and leave me darkling. When I reached the kitchen, however, I found the grey dawn already breaking. I retired once more to my chamber, and was soon ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... are tamed by Dione her doom. Or behear ye the sheep, to the husbanding rams how they bleat to the shade! Or behear ye the birds, at the Goddess' command how they sing unafraid!— Be it harsh as the swannery's clamour that shatters the hush of the lake; Be it dulcet as where Philomela holds darkling the poplar awake, So melting her soul into music, you'd vow 'twas her passion, her own, She chanteth—her sister forgot, with the Daulian crime long-agone. Hush! Hark! Draw around to the circle . . . Ah, loitering Summer, say when For me shall be broken the charm, that I ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gripped it and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the darkling populous about them with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... into the outer rooms, and very hard in Mr. Chopper's face; but there were not any explanations. It was remarked that Mr. Osborne was particularly quiet and gentle all day, to the surprise of those who had augured ill from his darkling demeanour. He called no man names that day, and was not heard to swear once. He left business early; and before going away, summoned his chief clerk once more, and having given him general instructions, asked him, after ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... And there it lies darkling; Now smoking and frothing Its tumult and wrath in, Till, in this rapid race On which it is bent, It reaches the place ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... waste-paper basket she had bought for him, and found him sitting at the little toilet table at which he was to "write." The outlook was, for a London outlook, spacious, down a long slope of roofs towards the Junction, a huge sky of blue passing upward to the darkling zenith and downward into a hazy bristling mystery of roofs and chimneys, from which emerged signal lights and steam puffs, gliding chains of lit window carriages and the vague vistas of streets. She showed him the basket and put it beside him, and then her eye caught the ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... I stood On a white cliff, topped by a darkling wood. Below me, placid, bright and sparkling, lay The equal waters of a lovely bay. White cliffs surrounded it—and calm and fair It lay asleep, ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... what tower of darkling chance Or dungeon of a narrow doom, Dream'st thou of battle-axe and lance That for the cross make crashing room? Come! with strained eyes the battle waits In the wild van thy mace's swing; While doubters parley with their fates, Make thou thine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... echo of the boatman's horn had melted among the darkling hills, he turned as instinctively as a sun-worshipper faces the east and drank in another musical refrain. The Angelus was pealing faintly from the bell of the little log chapel far up the river, hidden among the trees. The faith which it betokened ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... speak to me, and felt again the old breath on my brow. The sun died away across the old swaying woods; the rattling hone upon the scythe; the measured sweep; the mellow music—all were gone away. The day was done, and the long twilight came—twilight, which mixes the crimson of the darkling west, the yellow moonlight in the azure east, and the red glimmering starlight overhead, into one magic light. And so we went home merrily, with pleasant thoughts and talk; such pleasant thoughts I wish to all. Thus wrote one who ever delighted in ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came nearer he ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Grewgious, but does not explain why Grewgious was on the spot. I venture to think it not inconceivable that Mr. Grewgious having come down to Cloisterham by a late train, on Christmas Eve, to keep his Christmas appointment with Rosa, paid a darkling visit to the tomb of his lost love, Rosa's mother. Grewgious was very sentimental, but too secretive to pay such a visit by daylight. "A night of memories and sighs" he might "consecrate" to his lost lady love, as Landor did to Rose Aylmer. Grewgious was to have helped ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... if my brother died, 'Twas but a fatal chance; For darkling was the battle tried, And fortune sped ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and the song of the birds, driven to a distance by our voices, seemed to quicken the darkness into life. 'Darkling, we listened'—how long I know not, for the subliminal world was awake, and the measure of time was lost. Snarley was the first to speak, taking up his parable from the very point where he had left it, as though he were unconscious that a long interval ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... screws awoke and moved, bearing me toward the Outer Basin, I saw her stand darkling, lonely, on the Quai through heart-rending murk and drizzly inclemency: and oh my God, the gloomy under-look of those red eyes, and the piteous out-push of that little lip, and the hurried burying of that face! My heart broke, for I had not given her ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... destruction. And now the dreadful day was at hand; the rites were being ordered for me, the salted corn, and the chaplets to wreathe my temples. I broke away, I confess it, from death; I burst my bonds, and lurked all night darkling in the sedge of the marshy pool, till they might set their sails, if haply they should set them. Nor have I any hope more of seeing my old home nor my sweet children and the father whom I desire. Of them will they ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... that hath birth matches the worth Of Love, in God's own Heaven and Earth, For through His power divine Love opes the golden eye of day, Love guides the pale moon's lonely way, Love lights the glow-worm's glimmering ray Amid the darkling bine. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... you I might have advantage of the occasion to express my friendship and declare how high I hold you as a journalist and a man. Or I might speak of those years at Washington when in the gallery we worked shoulder to shoulder; I might recall to you the wit of Hannum, or remind you of the darkling Barrett, the mighty Decker, the excellent Cohen, the vivid Brown, the imaginative Miller, the volatile Angus, the epigrammatic Merrick, the quietly satirical Splain, Rouzer the earnest, Boynton the energetic, Carson the eminent, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare himself ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... soft as farthest skies That hold horizon rain; Or when, steel-darkling, stoic-wise, They ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... drank and smiled on Grimhild above the beaker's rim, And she looked and laughed at his laughter; and the soul was changed in him. Men gazed and their hearts sank in them, and they knew not why it was, Why the fair-lit hall was darkling, nor what had come to pass: For they saw the sorrow of Sigurd, who had seen but his deeds erewhile, And the face of the mighty darkened, who had known but ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... glowed like sheets of gold, darkling here and there with shadow; long ledges of rock, bearded with deep-water growth, sparkled rarely in the light; stretches of sodden sand, colored with salts of the waters, and littered with curious ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... with its headlong gulfs Had lost all memory of the world below; For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain A burning sun, and every sun the lord Of its own darkling planets,—all those lights Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth, Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns, Trembling and indistinguishable from stars, In those black gulfs around the mountain's feet. Then, into the ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... Arches above him! Loveliest weather, Born of blue ether, Break from the sky! O that the darkling Clouds had departed! Starlight is sparkling, Tranquiller-hearted Suns are on high. Heaven's own children In beauty bewildering, Waveringly bending, Pass as they hover; Longing unending Follows them over. They, with their glowing Garments, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... wind and wave and wood —Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters Betraying the close kisses of the wind— And win him unto me: and few there be So gross of heart who have not felt and known A higher than they see: They with dim eyes Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee To understand my presence, and to feel My fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with power. I have rais'd thee higher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from Th' illimitable years. I am ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... these things made the foundation on which their affection rested. When two hearts have thus by mutual gift bestowed themselves the one upon the other and become fused and molten into one, is it possible ever to sever the connection? But the kiss they had exchanged the day before, among the darkling shadows of the forest, was replete with the joy of their new-found safety and the hope that their escape awakened in their bosom, while this was the kiss of parting, full of anguish and doubt unutterable. Would they meet again some day? and how, under what circumstances ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... had been precipitated into the Seine so unexpectedly and with such violence he kept control of his wits: he did not utter a cry as he fell head foremost into the darkling river. He was an excellent swimmer: all aching as he was, he let himself go with the current and presently reached the sheltering arch of the Pont Neuf. There he took breath for ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... glance what was wanted, guided them through a white-washed corridor to a living-room where a crucifix hung on the wall and the table had a red cloth; by this into a dim and stony sacristy, whence they emerged into the back of a darkling little church, with shadowy candlesticks and kneeling-benches, the whole full of a cold, complex odor of old incense and old humanity and, one could ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... light of day declineth, And a swift angel through the sky Kindleth God's tapers clear, With ashen staff the lamplighter Passeth along the darkling streets To light our ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... stars rise and fall, The rounding seasons come and go, The tided oceans ebb and flow; The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, O'erlap and move the universe; The workings of the law whence springs The rhythmic harmony of things, Which shapes in earth the darkling spar, And orbs in heaven the morning star. Of all I see, in earth and sky,— Star, flower, beast, bird,—what part have I? This conscious life,—is it the same Which thrills the universal frame, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... bit does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... office, I sought to engage myself with the papers of an approaching suit, but it was impossible to ignore the darkling cloud of disaster which impended. I returned ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... wall with her hands behind her and looked up at him triumphantly. To her confusion, no answering gleam illumined the young man's darkling eyes. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... been lulled in the long calm of the respite, and when roused again, even by this sudden sorrow, she woke to her old trust and hope. And when she listened to the expressive though calm rehearsal of that solemn sunrise-greeting to the weary darkling fishers on the shore of the mountain lake, it was to her as if the form so long hidden from her by mists of her own raising, once more shone forth, smoothing the vexed waters of her soul, and she could say with a new thrill of recognition, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... glass through which he sees darkly and often with a darkling mind, the all-pervasive Presence; it is the veil—the veil that covers the face ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the Wina-waves were flowing. There she sees, on the horizon, Something darkle in the sunlight, Something blue upon the billows, Speaks these words in wonder guessing: What is this upon the surges, What this blue upon the waters, What this darkling in the sunlight? 'Tis perhaps a flock of wild-geese, Or perchance the blue-duck flying; Then upon thy wings arising, Fly away to highest heaven. "Art thou then a shoal of sea-trout, Or perchance a school of salmon? Dive then ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... a good mile behind me. The sun had already sunk over the crest of the cliffs, and I could just see the mounted savages through the darkling gloom—still fallowing as fast as their horses could gallop. In five minutes after, I had entered the gorge. The twilight continued no longer: in the canon it was night. I followed the stream upwards, keeping along near the bank. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... to Odin's eyes as he looked out there at the ruins and remembered the splendor that had been. As he thought of all who had died there, his hands were begging for the feel of Grim Hagen's throat. Darkling he stood there on that narrow ledge and thought how strange he and Gunnar must seem. Like two trolls peering out ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... bound No other tree could live. But gallantly The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung In crimson clusters all the boughs among, Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee; And oft at nights the garden overflows With one sweet song that seems to have no close, Sung darkling from our ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... quickly, gazing earnestly at the Honourable John Ruffin, who folded his arms and wore his best darkling air. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... with dignity and went to the window, gazing out a moment into the darkling night where unknown myriads of mosquitoes lurked all unconscious of the doom ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... welcome, the auspicious day, When from the mountain where he darkling lay, The Polish sun into the firmament Sprung all the brighter for his late ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... period of inertia to the fact that he is one of the Tenebrionidae, or Darkling Beetles? By no means, for here in the same group is Pimelia bipunctata, who turns a somersault on his round back and finds his feet the moment he has turned over; here is a Cellar-beetle (Blaps ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... ire; Throughout his vast divinity the deeps Concurrent thrilled with action, and away, As sweeps a thunder-cloud across the sky In harvest-time, preluded by dull blasts; Or some black-visaged whirlwind, whose wide folds Rush, wrestling on with all 'twixt heaven and earth, Darkling he hurried, and his distant voice, Not softened by delay, was heard in tones Distinctly terrible, still following up Its rapid utterance of tremendous wrath With hoarse reverberations; like the roar Of lions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... crabs are climbing, Crabs from the great sea, Sea that is darkling. Black crabs and gray crabs 5 Scuttle o'er the reef-plate. Billows are tumbling and lashing, Beating and surging nigh. Seashells are crawling up; And lurking in holes 10 Are the eels o-u and o-i. But taste the moss akahakaha, Kahiki! how the sea rages! The wild sea of Kane! The pit-god has come ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... caught old Lanciotto's reins, Bent in a weary huddle on his steed, In darkling haste along the blindfold lanes, Making a clattering halt in all that speed:— 'Fool! fool!' he cried, 'O dotard fool, indeed, So ho! they wanton while the old man rides,' And on the night flashed pictures of the deed. 'Come!'—and he dug ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad, curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger was still in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the singing of some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... raised his eyes to those of Megabyzus, he saw them filled with a strange fire—eyes like those of an evil spirit, gleaming behind the living windows of darkling hue. It was but for a moment, and the priest ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Marveling at all things—windmills gaily turning, Apples for the cider-press, ruby-hued and gold; Tails of rabbits twinkling, scarlet berries burning, Wedge of geese high-flying in the sky's clear cold, Light in little windows, field and furrow darkling; Home again returning, hungry as a hawk; Whistling up the garden, ruddy-cheeked and sparkling, Oh, but I am happy as I ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... caves and moaning dales To piercing screes of purple gloom, Where gurgling sighs and rasping moans,— Each bloody vampyre's home of loam As life-tides drip to scarlet vales,— Unshadowed haunts of darkling Doom! Add terror to the rasping groans That roaring surfs of rubic blood Fling to each afrite's acrid crypt. And mildewed skulls and ashen bones That lie before each pillared mount, Speak tidings of a leprous flood. And where giants' carcants flare and sit, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... Smile! As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam: What time, in sickly mood, at parting day 5 I lay me down and think of happier years; Of joys, that glimmer'd in Hope's twilight ray, Then left me darkling in a vale of tears. O pleasant days of Hope—for ever gone! Could I recall you!—But that thought is vain. 10 Availeth not Persuasion's sweetest tone To lure the fleet-wing'd Travellers back again: Yet fair, though faint, their images shall gleam Like the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Is sought and understood After the narrow mode the mighty Heavens prefer? She, as a little breeze Following still Night, Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas Into delight; But, in a while, The immeasurable smile Is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent With darkling discontent; And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay, And all the heaving ocean heaves one way, 'Tward the void sky-line and an unguess'd weal; Until the vanward billows feel The agitating shallows, and divine the goal, And to foam ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... it goes, stands the bridge all sparkling; And his mind bewilder'd grows, and his eye swims darkling. Wakening, giddying, then comes in, with a deadly fright, Memory of all his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps the just, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, and drives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, golden borders gets; And for him the bridge, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to the husbanding rams how they bleat to the shade! Or behear ye the birds, at the Goddess' command how they sing unafraid!— Be it harsh as the swannery's clamour that shatters the hush of the lake; Be it dulcet as where Philomela holds darkling the poplar awake, So melting her soul into music, you'd vow 'twas her passion, her own, She chanteth—her sister forgot, with the Daulian crime long-agone. Hush! Hark! Draw around to the circle . . . Ah, loitering Summer, say when For me shall be broken the charm, that I chirp with the swallow ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lukewarm and conforming souls Mrs. Nitschkan cast a darkling eye. It was the recalcitrant, the defiant, the professing sinner upon whom she ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... her appreciation of his identity. The more picturesque and decorative phases of his character had been presented to her, doubtless, by the docile and transparent Bertie—by letter, possibly. The less approved side (concerning which Bertie's own conception was in all likelihood darkling enough still) had probably come to her—also by letter—from Bertie's ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... to the social circle. But what profession affords such scope for varied incident as that of the soldier? Change of clime, danger, vicissitude, love, war, privation one day, profusion the next, darkling dangers, and sparkling joys! Zounds! there's nothing like the life of a soldier! and, by the powers! I'll give you a song ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... country to where the ship rocked at the pier of Leith. They must have got down to some dark spot on the northern slopes, where there would be no city watchman or late passer-by to give the alarm, and all would be clear and still before them to the water's edge—though a long, weary, and darkling way. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... recompense Heaven hath in store for those who pursue the paths of real virtue; those paths from which I myself have been fatally misled by a faithless vapour, which hath seduced my steps, and left me darkling in the abyss of wretchedness. Such as you describe this happy fair, was once my Serafina, rich in every grace of mind and body which nature could bestow. Had it pleased Heaven to bless her with a lover like Renaldo! but no more, the irrevocable ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... a fire upon my grave When I am dead. 'Twill softly shed its beaming rays, To guide the soul its darkling ways; And ever, as the day's full light Goes down and leaves the world in night, These kindly gleams, with warmth possest, Shall show my spirit where to rest When I ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... his figure loom; And naught aroused me save his weeping voice of tender tone * And whispered I, 'Fair fall thy foot and welcome and well come!' His cheek I kissed a thousand times, and yet a thousand more; * Then clipt and clung about his breast enveiled in darkling room. And cried, 'Now verily I've won the aim of every wish * So praise and prayers to Allah for this grace now best become.' Then slept we even as we would the goodliest of nights * Till morning came to end our night and light up earth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... o'er the earth a darkling cloud appears, And grows in blackness till the scathing shaft Comes forth with swelling thunder, so the cloud, Black unto bursting with the wrath divine, Hung o'er the head of Israel's erring King. The light of heavenly faith from him was gone, And life was full of dreary, dark despair. Outstretched ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... rough mountain where I stood, Homesick for happiness, Only a narrow valley and a darkling wood To cross, and then the long distress Of solitude would be forever past,— I should be home at last. But not too soon! oh, let me linger here And feed my eyes, hungry with sorrow, On all this loveliness, so near, And ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a sarcastic smile still on her lips. In the lower hall stood Mr. Edwards, the valet, disconsolately gazing at the threatening prospect. He turned around, and his dull eyes lighted up at sight of this darkling vision of beauty—for Mr. Parmalee was by no means the only gentleman with the good taste ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... will blame him if his thought recurred, At such a time, to England and the maid Beloved, to whom he gave his plighted word Ere parting? Who will wonder at the shade Of sorrow darkling on his troubled brow, As he reflects on ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... classes went, grilling him with eyes. Newcomers received the story of the crime in darkling whispers; and the outcast sat and sat and sat, and squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. (He did one or two things with his spine which a professional contortionist would have observed with real interest.) And all this while of freezing suspense was but the criminal's detention ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... good-naturedly; and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... These I reserved to take an early opportunity of reading, but replaced for the present, and, having come at last upon one hopeful-looking key, I made haste to return before my candle, which was already flickering in the socket, should go out altogether, and leave me darkling. When I reached the kitchen, however, I found the grey dawn already breaking. I retired once more to my chamber, and was ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... what is more, I do not want to,' Andrea retorted stubbornly, enveloping her in a darkling look in which burned the fever of his desire. 'All I know is that you were mine once—wholly and without reserve, and I know that body and soul I shall ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... heardest her, but nigh; Nigh, 'twixt the waste's edge and the darkling sky. Turn back again, too soon it ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border. Then there was the peacock-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface—floating, sinking, rising—where the sun caught ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... movement, gave his hand To each in turn, and said, "You must not stand Longer, young ladies, in this open door. The air is heavy with a cold damp chill. We shall have rain to-morrow, or before. Good night." He vanished in the darkling shade; And so the dreaded evening found an end, That saw me grasp the conscience-whetted blade, And strike a blow for ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... called upon his child: No voice replied. Trembling and anxiously He searched their couch of straw; with headlong haste Trod round his stinted limits, and, low bent, Groped darkling on the earth:—no child was there. Again he called: again, at farthest stretch Of his accursed fetters, till the blood Seemed bursting from his ears, and from his eyes Fire flashed, he strained with arm extended far, And fingers widely spread, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 'neath each blossom a fay lies dreaming? Or is it on yonder silver lake Where the fish in green and gold are sparkling? Or is it among those ancient trees Where the tremulous shadows move soft and darkling? Oh, no! said the moon, with a playful smile, The best of my beams are for ever dwelling In the exquisite eyes, so deeply blue, And the eloquent ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... should danger come? We are at peace with all. Our former foe Is now our dearest friend; the Prince Asander, Though of a hasty spirit and high temper, Dwells in such close, concordant harmony With his loved wife that he is wholly ours; And yet though thus at peace, rumours of war And darkling plots beset us. Is it not thus? Have ye ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... bird, who midst the leafy bower Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night, With her sweet brood, impatient to descry Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, In the fond quest unconscious of her toil: She, of the time prevenient, on the spray, That overhangs their couch, with wakeful gaze Expects the sun; nor ever, till ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... they made the circuit of the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar. The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down- looking old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart. Two others, who bore the burthen of the chaunt, were stout, brutal, military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with some lustiness, and trolled forth 'Ave Mary' like a garrison catch. The little ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... snatched up by servers, who distributed them in smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and whose wings were ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... valleys the great road ran, straightaway for league upon league, turning aside for no obstacle, invincible as its builders, ancient and enduring. It crossed rivers, it clove through darkling woods, it traversed wide and lonely wastes, and led past walled towns, worn by the feet of marching legions, scored with the grooves of wheels. And even as across the world all roads led to Rome, so here did all roads lead to Londinium, and ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Around us far the Rushy Moors are spread: Soon will the Sun withdraw her chearful Ray: Darkling and tir'd we shall the Marshes tread, No Lay unsung to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... ascended, to a daffodil tinge; this afterward heightened to orange, deepening at one extremity into red, and fading at the other into a pure, ethereal hue to which it would be difficult to assign a special name. Higher up the sky was violet, and this changed by insensible degrees into the darkling blue of the zenith, which had to thank the light of moon and stars alone for its existence. We wound steadily for a time through valleys of ice, climbed white and slippery slopes, crossed a number of crevasses, and after some time found ourselves beside a chasm of great depth and width, which ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning, and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at; and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments of his eternal quest, the curtain of his mind would rise on that unforgettable scene—the cliffs, the rocks, the darkling outline of Flint House, with a feeble beam of light slanting down from the upstairs window at the back which looked out on the sea. Then the gush of light from the open door, and her shape stealing forth into the darkness, followed by another—Thalassa's. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... blithe eagerness of the morning are over, the solid hours of sturdy progress are gone, the heat of the day is past, and only the gentle descent among the shadows remains, with cool airs blowing from darkling thickets, laden with woodland scents, and the rich fragrance of rushy dingles. Ere the night falls the wayfarer will push the familiar gate open, and see the lamplit windows of home, with the dark chimneys and gables outlined against the green sky. Those that love him are awaiting him, listening ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... awaking, yet left him half enveloped in dreams—so to me, in the strict embrace of the Shadow came that light which alone might have had power to startle—the light of enduring Love. Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp earth. Upon my mouldering bones there descended the coffin ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of things to which it is directed. The great planet that moves on the outmost circle of our system was discovered because that next it wavered in its course in a fashion which was inexplicable, unless some unknown mass was attracting it from across millions of miles of darkling space. And there are 'perturbations' in our spirits which cannot be understood, unless from them we may divine that far-off and unseen world, that has power from afar to sway in their orbits the little lives of mortal men. It draws us to itself—but, alas! the attraction may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I dare not tell him all The evil that my boding heart predicts! Who's there? The door ne'er opens, but I look For tidings of mishap. Suspicion lurks With darkling treachery in every nook. Even to our inmost rooms they force their way, These myrmidons of power; and soon we'll need To fasten bolts and bars upon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... found somewhere and used for a counterpane was a magnificent combination of white and crimson between the gleaming surfaces of dark wood; and the whole room had an air of splendour with marble consoles, gilt carvings, long mirrors and a sumptuous Venetian lustre depending from the ceiling: a darkling mass of icy pendants catching a spark here and there from the candles of an eight-branched candelabra standing on a little table near the head of a sofa which had been dragged round to face the fireplace. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... and dark about the lighthouse rings and glares the night; Glares with foam-lit gloom and darkling fire of storm and spray, Rings with roar of winds in chase and rage of waves in flight, Howls and hisses as with mouths of snakes and wolves at bay. Scarce the cliffs of the islets, scarce the walls of Joyous Gard, Flash to sight between the deadlier lightnings of the sea: Storm is lord and master ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the night, up sprang the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the selfsame seas By each ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... above my lair, till I was feart that folk wid see them, and come peering down and get me. But a herrin' skiff took me away from that place in the dark of the night, and I drifted to the warm South Seas and the darkling women and the white glistening houses; but she came with me, she that had died. I would be seeing her rising before the bows o' the ship, rising from the sea, and waving on me to follow, and the weather was worse and worse at her every coming. An' there was a man o' the Western Isles in ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... not speak. A stone could have been no colder as she stood in the light of the fire, her face still and strong, the eyes darkling, luminous. There was on her the dignity of the fearless, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... us, Lord, as the daylight comes When the darkling night has gone, And the quickened East is tremulous With the thrill of ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... of the Sun (Bright cynosure of every darkling sign, Wherein all numbers consummate in One,) Poised on the bolt of an Un-finite line, As one whose spirit's state, Is unafraid but desperate, Through far unfathomed fears, Through Time to timeless years, I soar, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... hillward the roads are sweet with fern. All day the windless heaven pavilions the sea-blue, Then twilight comes and drenches the sultry dells with dew. The lone white star of evening comes out among the hills, And in the darkling forest begin the whip-poor-wills. The fireflies that wander, the hawks that flit and scream, And all the wilding vagrants of summer dusk and dream, Have all their will, and reck not of any after thing, Inheriting no sorrow and ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... medicine more strong than his," they said, "Stole in last night and gave the fatal wound." The warriors scoured the country miles around, Seeking for sign or trail, but naught they found: The murderer left behind no clue or trace More than a vampire's flight through darkling space. ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... world. Looming giants by moonlight are reduced to very ordinary obstacles by daylight; and the set of desponding thoughts which had weighed upon the young man as he contemplated the inky river and darkling country, seemed now to belong to another phase of being. Despondent! with the wide free world to work in, and its best prizes lying beside the goal, ready for capture by the steady heart and active hand. Robert felt almost as if that shadowy home in the forest were already built, already peopled ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Darkling, he fixed Malua with his eyes, Noting each shadow of his changing thoughts, When the dear dreams centred on Taka, dreams Dimming his sight. Holding his lips apart, He slowly rose, Uhila following, For in the dark the music of her face Smote on the boy till he could bear no more The feasting ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... tea being over, she folds her arms, (an attitude which becomes her mightily,) and, still sitting on the door-step, gossips away the evening in comfortable idleness, while her father and I indulge in the fragrant pipe, and watch the lights shining out, one by one, in different quarters of the darkling bay: at these moments she is as pretty, as cheerful, as careless as it becomes a sensible woman to be. What a pride the Captain takes in his daughter! And she, in return, how perfect is her devotion to the old man! He is proud of her grace, of her tact, of her good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... more; methought I saw that flood, Which now so dull and darkling steals, Thick, here and there, with human blood, 35 To turn the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... you had a burglar alarm, else I would have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May I trouble you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and wood —Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters Betraying the close kisses of the wind— And win him unto me: and few there be So gross of heart who have not felt and known A higher than they see: They with dim eyes Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee To understand my presence, and to feel My fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with power. I have rais'd thee higher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Toward sundown she wheeled her big bony roan into a cow path which twisted through alders for a mile or two, emerging at length on a vast stretch of rolling country, where rounded hills glimmered golden in the rays of the declining sun. Tall underbrush flanked the slopes; little streams ran darkling through the thickets; the ground was moist, even on the ridges; and she could not hope to cover the deep imprint of her ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... The darkling day that gave its bloodred birth To Milton's white republic undefiled That might endure so few fleet years on earth Bore in him likewise as divine a child; But born not less for crowns of love and mirth, Of palm and myrtle passionate and mild, The leaf that girds about ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... beautiful!—thou shalt feel Their eloquent music from thee steal Those darkling thoughts, that should mournfully twine With the light, the life, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! 30 He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... believe, he knows, sees all is well; How God had stayed his will and shaped his way, To bring the light to those that darkling dwell With gains that ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... kinds of poverty which may be nobly accepted and gaily borne; but Vinet, devoured by ambition, and feeling himself guilty towards his wife, was full of darkling rage; his conscience grew elastic; and he finally came to think any means of success permissible. His young face changed. Persons about the courts were sometimes frightened as they looked at his viperish, flat head, his slit mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... sun at last Went down to his lodge in the west, and fast The wings of the spirits of night were spread O'er the darkling woods and Wiwaste's head. Then, slyly she slipped from her snug retreat, And guiding her course by Waziya's star, [62] That shone through the shadowy forms afar, She northward hurried with silent feet; And long ere the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... now he seeks a last retreat Deep in the darkling dell, Where stands, amidst embowering oaks, A hermit's ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... electric light whose intensity can be gradually lessened by means of a sliding resistance. Here, as much as in the natural phenomenon, our reason finds it difficult to acknowledge that the surface gleaming in a whitish sheen should be the one which ordinarily appears as darkling blue, and that the one disappearing into darkness should be the surface which normally presents itself as ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... rounding seasons come and go, The tided oceans ebb and flow; The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, O'erlap and move the universe; The workings of the law whence springs The rhythmic harmony of things, Which shapes in earth the darkling spar, And orbs in heaven the morning star. Of all I see, in earth and sky,— Star, flower, beast, bird,—what part have I? This conscious life,—is it the same Which thrills the universal frame, Whereby the caverned crystal shoots, And mounts ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... now; when the time comes when we get a glimmer that all life is emairgency and tremblin' peril, that every turn may be the wrong turn—when we can see that our petty system of suns and all is nobbut a wee darkling cockle-boat, driftin' and tossed abune the waves in the outmost seas of an onrushing universe—hap-chance we'll no loom so grandlike in our own een; and we'll tak' hands for comfort in the dark. 'Tis good theology, yon wise saying of the silly street: 'We are all in the same boat. Don't ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... flashes gathered darkling, thick and high, Lines of cranes like gleams of laughter ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... dull ages boast Aught to compare? tho' now no more beguile— Chain'd in their darkling depths th' infernal host— Who would not brave a fiend to ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... cloud reclined, Wake, O soft and sacred Wind! Soft and sacred will we name thee, Whosoe'er the sire that claim thee— Whether old Auster's dusky child, Or the loud son of Eurus wild; Or his who o'er the darkling deeps, From the bleak North, in tempest sweeps; Still shalt thou seem as dear to us As flowery-crowned Zephyrus, When, through twilight's starry dew, Trembling, he hastes ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... conscious of having passed a swift current, indeed, but quite unthinking of the price paid for their safety. Looking back on the darkling river, they saw nothing of the ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... far away is gliding The pleasant Oxus's stream, I see the green glades darkling, I see the clear pools gleam. I hear the bulbuls calling From blooming tree to tree. Wave, bird, and tree are singing, 'Away! ah, come ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... her window. The market-place of Paimpol, hedged in on all sides by the old-fashioned houses, became sadder and sadder with the darkling; everywhere reigned silence. Above the housetops the still brilliant space of the heavens seemed to grow more hollow, to raise itself up and finally separate itself from all terrestrial things: these, in the last hour of day, were entirely ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... does the water come down at Lodore? Here it comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling; Here smoking and frothing, Its tumult and wrath in, 5 It hastens along, conflicting and strong; Now striking and raging, As if a war waging, Its caverns and rocks among. Rising and leaping, 10 Sinking and creeping, Swelling and flinging, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... thought toward passion moved with dread, Like one who, hurrying to be wed, Steps, darkling, on ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn From Sun and Light to gaze At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot The ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... page with difficulty in an hour, and usually forced to thrust the stuff away in despair, and go unhappily to bed, conscious that after all his labor he had done nothing. And these were moments when the accustomed vision of the land alarmed him, and the wild domed hills and darkling woods seemed symbols of some terrible secret in the inner life of that stranger—himself. Sometimes when he was deep in his books and papers, sometimes on a lonely walk, sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen "society," he would thrill with a sudden sense of awful hidden things, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... was not so darkling but Westover could understand that Whitwell attributed Jeff's scholarship to the help of Cynthia, but he would not press him to an open assertion of the fact. There was something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... found a shaky voice, after an interval of gulping, though she was unable to lift her eyes, and the darkling lids continued to veil them. She spoke hurriedly, like an ungifted child reciting something committed to memory, but her sincerity was none the ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Flaccilla, to you, my father and mother, Here I commend this child, once my delight and my pet, So may the darkling shades and deep-mouthed baying of hellhound Touch not with horror of dread little Erotion dear. Now was her sixth year ending, and melting the snows of the winter, Only a brief six days lacked to the tale of the years. Young, amid dull old age, let her wanton ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... living on together through countless Existences, Periods, and Spheres, we shall progress from majesty to ever-growing majesty! Oh, for the day when you and I, messengers from the Seat of Power, shall sail high above these darkling worlds, and, seeing into each other's souls, shall ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... a shadow, cast a gloom, throw a shadow, spread a shadow, cast gloom, throw gloom, spread gloom. extinguish; put out, blow out, snuff out; doubt. turn out the lights, douse the lights, dim the lights, turn off the lights, switch off the lights. Adj. dark, darksome^, darkling; obscure, tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... amphitheatre. Accordingly, two by two, the bishop leading the way with the sainted woman Anna, they walked to the gates. Here a guard of soldiers was waiting to receive them, and under their escort they threaded the narrow, darkling streets till they came to that door of the amphitheatre which was used by those who were to take part in the games. Now, at a word from the bishop, they began to chant a solemn hymn, and singing thus, were ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... she sees, on the horizon, Something darkle in the sunlight, Something blue upon the billows, Speaks these words in wonder guessing: What is this upon the surges, What this blue upon the waters, What this darkling in the sunlight? 'Tis perhaps a flock of wild-geese, Or perchance the blue-duck flying; Then upon thy wings arising, Fly away to highest heaven. "Art thou then a shoal of sea-trout, Or perchance a school of salmon? Dive then to the deep sea-bottom, In the waters swim and frolic. "Art ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... shone brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad—white, or less white, or even darkling,—the first ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden without ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... more! His bones now whiten an accursed shore!— Retire,—for hark! the seagull shrieking soars, The lurid atmosphere portentous lours; Night's sullen spirit groans in every gale, And o'er the waters draws the darkling veil, Sighs in thy hair, and chills thy throbbing breast— Go wretched mourner!—weep thy griefs to rest! "Yet, though through life is lost each fond delight, Though set thy earthly sun in dreary night, Oh! raise thy thoughts to yonder starry plain, And own thy sorrow selfish, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... alarming and painful to me; a fair—strae death out of the maintop, or off the weather—yard arm, would to my imagination have been an easy exit comparatively; but to be choked in this abominable hole, and drowned darkling like a blind puppy—the very thought made me frantic, and I shouted and tumbled about, until I missed my footing and fell backwards down the ladder, from the bottom of which I scuttled away to the lee—side of the cabin, quiet, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... would read Michelet's Louis Quatorze et la Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged tragedies of Madame and of Moliere, as they look, darkling and sombre, out of their niches in the great gingerbread facade of the Grand Age, go ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... green peaks across which hung a bluish haze showed themselves between the hills. The latter were more precipitous; and the brush had now given way to pines of better size and quality than those seen lower down. The river foamed over rapids or ran darkling in pools and stretches. Along the roadside, rarely, we came upon rough-looking log cabins, or shacks of canvas, or tents. The owners were not at home. We thought them miners; but in the light of subsequent knowledge I believe that unlikely—the ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... sudden he checked. It was exactly as though he had run his head into a noose on the end of a snare line made fast to one of the darkling trees which skirted his path on the right-hand side. Here the scent which he followed left the trail almost at right angles, ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... embers of the day are red Beyond the murky hill. The kitchen smokes: the bed In the darkling house is spread: The great sky darkens overhead, And the great woods are shrill. So far have I been led, Lord, by Thy will: So far I have followed, Lord, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... judge. The great barn-like doors were flung wide open, and there was a group of men half within the shelter and half without; the shoeing-stool, a broken plough, an empty keg, a log, and a rickety chair sufficed to seat the company. The moonlight falling into the door showed the great slouching, darkling figures, the anvil, the fire of the forge (a dim ashy coal), and the shadowy hood merging indistinguishably into the deep duskiness of the interior. In contrast, the scene glimpsed through the low window at the back of the shop had a certain vivid illuminated ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... love when the shy dawn unfoldeth The enchanted radiance of the morning sun— Recall our love when darkling night beholdeth Veiled trains of silvery stars pass one by one, When wild thy bosom palpitates with pleasure, Or when the shades of night lull thee in dreamy measure; Then lend a willing ear To murmurings far and ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... some pest of water, Hither drifted by the sea-waves, 370 Let the pest return to water, Journey back amid the sea-waves, To the walls of muddy castles, To the crests of waves like mountains, There amid the waves to welter, Rocking on the darkling billows. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... crests, the undulating, barren plains no longer spoke of a boundless freedom and the elemental battle. These things had become something to forget in the absorbing claim of a life to come, wherein the harshness of battle had no place. The darkling woods, scarce trodden by the foot of man, no longer possessed the mystic charm of childhood's fancy. The trackless wastes held only threat, upon which watchful eyes would now gladly close. The stirring glacial fields of summer, monsters of the ages, boomed out ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... Sparkling and darkling, dust of the milky way, Shifting and drifting, firefly legions at play; Fading and glowing, lights of a starry maze, Coming and going, drift ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... world I should foreknow Up into which I was about to rise— Its rains, its radiance, airs, and warmth, and skies, How it would greet me, how its wind would blow— As little, it may be, I do know the good Which I for years half darkling have pursued— The second birth for which my ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... where Phrygian Ilus lies. Now, in their sunset home on Libya's heel, Phoenicia's sons unwonted chillness feel: Now, with his targe of willow at his breast, The Syracusan bears his spear in rest, Amongst these Hiero arms him for the war, Eager to fight as warriors fought of yore; The plumes float darkling o'er his helmed brow. O Zeus, the sire most glorious; and O thou, Empress Athene; and thou, damsel fair, Who with thy mother wast decreed to bear Rule o'er rich Corinth, o'er that city of pride Beside whose walls Anapus' waters glide:— May ill winds waft across ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... they reached the little town, but the west was blood-red above the ridge, with the moor all darkling purple. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... had the beams of the sun vanished from the broad horizon, than a small, gentle rain began to fall, and the light as well as brightness of the day became obscured by darkling clouds. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... equall'd with them in renown, Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace; Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old: Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... saw her sitting there, the breeze blowing tendrils of bright hair about her face, her strong, lithe hands clasped youthfully about her knees, her beautiful eyes darkling or brightening with the thoughts that passed, could not have connected her with the mere ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... To Molus as a hospitable pledge; He gave it to Meriones his son, And now it guarded shrewd Ulysses' brows. 320 Both clad in arms terrific, forth they sped, Leaving their fellow Chiefs, and as they went A heron, by command of Pallas, flew Close on the right beside them; darkling they Discern'd him not, but heard his clanging plumes.[11] 325 Ulysses in the favorable sign Exulted, and Minerva thus invoked.[12] Oh hear me, daughter of Jove AEgis-arm'd! My present helper in all straits, whose eye Marks all my ways, oh with peculiar care 330 Now guard me, Pallas! grant ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... said he, "my heart was in my mouth. As I comed along to you, I saw Mun, coachey, pop along from the back-door to the stables. He was within a hop, step, and jump of me. But he had a lanthorn in his hand, and he did not see me, being as I was darkling." Saying this, he assisted Miss Melville to mount. He troubled her little during the route; on the contrary, he was remarkably silent and contemplative, a circumstance by no means disagreeable to Emily, to whom his conversation ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... of men broke into the courtyard, Brian fired the remaining three cannon as fast as he could touch linstock to powder. The bullet-hail tore the front ranks to shreds, but through the darkling smoke-cloud he saw other men come leaping, and knew that the game ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... that heartless, cold expression All my being terrifies— Though my darkling fear is lessened By thy frank ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... been precipitated into the Seine so unexpectedly and with such violence he kept control of his wits: he did not utter a cry as he fell head foremost into the darkling river. He was an excellent swimmer: all aching as he was, he let himself go with the current and presently reached the sheltering arch of the Pont Neuf. There he took ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... represent the story of Adonis and Erys but do not take the duty of historian very seriously. Both are lovely, with a mellow sunset lighting the scene. Here and there in the glorious landscape occurs a nymph, the naked flesh of whom burns with the reflected fire; here and there are lovers, and among the darkling trees beholders of the old romance. The picture remains in the vision much ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him. But the rogue ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... DEAR friends, left darkling in the long eclipse That veils the noonday,—you whose finger-tips A meaning in these ridgy leaves can find Where ours go stumbling, senseless, helpless, blind. This wreath of verse how dare I offer you To whom the garden's choicest gifts are due? The hues of all its glowing beds are ours, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association, even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in Boston. Some of the letters which his sisters ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... The silver of the eastern sky changed to gold, deeper and deeper, till the yellow merged into a roseate sheen which shone down upon the cloud mists, and tinged them with the hue of blood. Light was over the darkling forests, and as it brightened the voice of the forest legions died away in the distance, and the battleground was deserted of all but the author ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... three-pronged spear He holds, the sceptre of his fear, And with the other shakes the reins Of his steeds, with foamy, flowing manes, And coures o'er the brine; And when he lifts his trident mace, Broad Ocean crisps his darkling face, And mutters wrath divine; The big waves rush with hissing crest, And beat the shore with ample breast, And ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... or later, far out in the night, The stars shall over me wing their flight; Sooner or later my darkling dews Catch the white spark in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... did in its numberless changing moods. What unutterable loneliness spoke to the soul in those unknown leagues of tossing sea! how far the eye wandered unchecked, searching vainly for aught to rest upon other than glistening surge or darkling hollow! The mystery of the ages lay unexpressed in those tossing billows, sweeping in out of the black east, making low moan to the unsympathetic and unheeding sky. Deeper and deeper the spirit of unrest, of doubt, of brooding discontent, ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself beside her. His weight brought down the mattress and rocked her against his ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... now peers Out of darkling clouds. The sad, Sleepless waterfalls forever Roar into ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... good old Sandwich town! Abode of silence and sweet summer dreams— Let speculation pass, nor progress touch Thy silvan homes with hard, unhallowed hand! The light wind whispers, and the air is rich With vapours which exhale into the night; And, round me here, this village in the leaves Darkling doth slumber. How those giant pears Loom with uplifted and high-ancient heads, Like forest trees! A hundred years ago They, like their owner, had their roots in France— In fruitful Normandy—but here refuse Unlike, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... shadow which she knew was the reflection of a homeward-bound hawk in the skies higher yet. Leaves floated in a still, deep pool, were caught in a maddening eddy, and hurried frantically away, unwilling, frenzied, helpless, unknowing whither, never to return,—allegory of many a life outside those darkling solemn mountain woods, and of some, perhaps, in the midst of them. The reflection of the cliffs in the never still current, of the pines on their summits, of the changing sky growing deeper and deeper, till its amber tint, erstwhile ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... we were running in. Being toward noon, the wind was fast leaving us, and, by the time the breakers were roaring on either hand, little more than steerage-way was left. But on we glided—smoothly and deftly; avoiding the green, darkling objects here and there strewn in our path; Jermin occasionally looking down in the water, and then about him, with the utmost calmness, and not a word spoken. Just fanned along thus, it was not many minutes ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... good seed of liberty and Christian civilization. Afterward, when tyranny threatened liberty, these worthies in defending their institutions gave life itself. Dying, they bequeathed their treasures to after generations. At length an enemy, darkling, lifted weapons for destroying. Would these who had received institutions nourished with blood, give life-blood in return? The uprising of 1861 is the answer. Then the people rose as one man, the plow stood in the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad—white, or less white, or even darkling,—the first windy sky ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... fit to be stript, and have hidden it so deep. But he did though, and the inference is that everybody does. As for the lady, that is not so hard of belief. It very seldom is—with women. They sit so much at windows, that pretty soon their eyes become windows themselves—out of which the soul looks darkling, but preening; out of which it sometimes launches itself into the deep, wooed thereto or not by aubade or serena. But a man, with his vanity haunting him, pulls the blinds down or shuts the shutters, to have it decently to himself, and his looking-glass; ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... of bands at Doune? 705 Like bloodhounds now they search me out— Hark, to the whistle and the shout!— If further through the wilds I go, I only fall upon the foe. I'll couch me here till evening gray, 710 Then darkling try my ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... wooden pipe with a fingertip that wasn't as calloused as he could have wished, philosophically sucked in strangling fumes of rankest shag and, ignoring his company in the carriage as became a British-made manservant, returned jaded, gentle eyes to those darkling vistas of autumnal landscape that were forever radiating away from the window like ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the canon is guarded; but like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the sun ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... on your pillows, Dream'd ye ought o' our puir fellows, Darkling as they faced the billows, A' to fill the woven willows. Buy my caller herrin', New ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sweet summer dreams— Let speculation pass, nor progress touch Thy silvan homes with hard, unhallowed hand! The light wind whispers, and the air is rich With vapours which exhale into the night; And, round me here, this village in the leaves Darkling doth slumber. How those giant pears Loom with uplifted and high-ancient heads, Like forest trees! A hundred years ago They, like their owner, had their roots in France— In fruitful Normandy—but here refuse Unlike, to multiply, as if their ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... go. No doubt he felt unusually irritable. "By the holy smoke!" he exclaimed. "I wish there wasn't a baby under the Canopy!"—and while I was trying to puzzle out and piece together all these darkling hints and inferences, the Old Squire came up stairs and after a word with Addison and Gram, told me that I would have to rig up, get on old Sol's back and take my first turn riding for Dr. Cummings. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... fallen upon the land that atmosphere of serenity, of peace, that is the peculiar property of California's foothill valleys in the late afternoon; the world seemed very distant and not at all desirable, and to Kay there came a sudden, keen realization of how this man beside her must love this darkling valley with the hills above presenting their flower-clad breasts to the long spears of light from the ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... laboring, boiled their swirling splendor against the black water. Mysterious, couchant, straining, the bulwarked city rode the waves; a mighty ship, her funnels the great buildings beyond, where sullen streamers of smoke trailed motionless and darkling; the indescribable, multitudinous hum of the city's blended voices for purring of monster engines, deep in her hold; bold and high, her restless prow swung seaward in majestic curve, impatient ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... "Telemachus" won't suit us. He can send the letter on to his fair correspondent. But however soft the answer, I question whether the wrath will be turned away. Will there not be a coolness between him and the lady? and is it not possible that henceforth her fine eyes will look with darkling glances upon the pretty orange cover of ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the eastern sky changed to gold, deeper and deeper, till the yellow merged into a roseate sheen which shone down upon the cloud mists, and tinged them with the hue of blood. Light was over the darkling forests, and as it brightened the voice of the forest legions died away in the distance, and the battleground was deserted of all but the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the woods,—food, food, food; and it is the cry of civilization as well. There is no dingle dell, where the harebell and the anemone grow, where the pine and the spruce stand darkling and sweet peace seems to fold her wings and sit brooding, but danger is there. Danger that crawls and creeps and runs with great bounds. Danger upon velvety paws, that fall on the mosses of the forest carpet as lightly as an autumn leaf; danger that slinks ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... passing breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming, dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by little slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this darkling middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. Then he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... of Sulaco. Far away to the south groves of palm trees edged the curve of the harbour shore. The distant peaks of the Cordillera had lost their identity of clearcut shapes in the steadily deepening blue of the eastern sky. The doctor walked briskly. A darkling shadow seemed to fall upon him from the zenith. The sun had set. For a time the snows of Higuerota continued to glow with the reflected glory of the west. The doctor, holding a straight course for the Custom House, appeared ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... headlong gulfs Had lost all memory of the world below; For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain A burning sun, and every sun the lord Of its own darkling planets,—all those lights Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth, Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns, Trembling and indistinguishable from stars, In those black gulfs around the mountain's feet. Then, into the glimmering dome, with bated breath, We entered, and, above us, in the gloom ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... queen it in a court, Madonna; and at Piacenza you shall be hailed and honoured as its queen." And so he rambled on with his rough and trivial flattery, his foully pimpled face within a foot of hers, and she shrinking before him, very white and mute and frightened. Her father looked on with darkling brows, and Giuliana began to gnaw her lip and look less lazy, whilst in the courtly background there was a respectful murmuring babble, supplying a sycophantic chorus to ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... looked up again the woman was old. And the woman was old and hoary with years, and her body had shrunk with age, and she had very little life left. But when I looked up the sky was darkling toward night, yes dark like night, and the woman was without hair. I looked to her and knew her not and knew not the sky, and when I looked toward the woman she ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... new one, Trix," says her father good-naturedly, and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning, and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at; and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace in his nurse's ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the auspicious day, When from the mountain where he darkling lay, The Polish sun into the firmament Sprung all the brighter for his late ascent, ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind? Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise, No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?— Enquirer, cease; petitions yet remain, Which Heaven may hear; nor deem religion vain. Still raise for good the supplicating voice, But leave to Heaven ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... and wave and wood —Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters Betraying the close kisses of the wind— And win him unto me: and few there be So gross of heart who have not felt and known A higher than they see: They with dim eyes Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee To understand my presence, and to feel My fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with power. I have rais'd thee higher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... yard to yard, from group to group, from gate to gate, and reached the furthermost confines. Runners shouted it as they sped by; boys panted it, breathless; women with loosened hair stumbled into darkling chambers and faltered it out to new-wakened sleepers; pale girls clutching wraps at their throats whispered it across fences; the sick, tossing on their hard beds, heard it. The bell clamored it far and near; it spread over the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... and were snatched up by servers, who distributed them in smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and whose wings ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! He whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... plaster bulk of the Presbyterian Church, the drug store and dwelling of Dr. Pelliter, and was on the outskirts of the village. The shadow of the western range had now slipped across the valley and nearly climbed the opposite wall; lavender scarfs of mist veiled the far, jumbled peaks in the darkling rift; slim, swaying columns of smoke from the clustered chimneys of Greenstream towered dizzily through the shaded air to where, high above, they were transformed to gold by the last, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... panels, dusky pale; No mirror'd walls the wandering glance invite, No gauzy curtains drop the misty veil. And there the vista leads of lessening doors, And there the summer sunset's golden gleam Along the line of darkling portrait pours, And warms the polish'd oak ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... could live. But gallantly The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung In crimson clusters all the boughs among, Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee; And oft at nights the garden overflows With one sweet song that seems to have no close, Sung darkling from our tree, while ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... the old breath on my brow. The sun died away across the old swaying woods; the rattling hone upon the scythe; the measured sweep; the mellow music—all were gone away. The day was done, and the long twilight came—twilight, which mixes the crimson of the darkling west, the yellow moonlight in the azure east, and the red glimmering starlight overhead, into one magic light. And so we went home merrily, with pleasant thoughts and talk; such pleasant thoughts I wish to all. Thus wrote one who ever delighted ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... transfigured and assimilated by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... grey as soft as farthest skies That hold horizon rain; Or when, steel-darkling, stoic-wise, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... waste. After the manner of impassioned women she would not see, clung to hope, had days, after a letter or a message from Mayer, when she had almost ascended to the top of the golden moment again. Then there was silence, a note of hers unanswered, and she fell, sinking into darkling depths. Once or twice, waking in the night or waiting for his knock, she had sudden flashes of clear sight. These left her in a frozen stillness, staring with wide ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form. She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... liberals. Patience, ob- servation, intellectual culture, reading, writing, exten- sive travel, and twenty years in the pulpit, have equipped him as a critic who knows whereof he speaks. His allu- sion to Christian Science in the following paragraph, [15] glows in the shadow of darkling criticism like a mid- night sun. Its manly honesty follows like a benediction after prayer, and closes the task of talking to deaf ears and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... meditated breaking out of the enchanted circle at a different point of the compass. But the spell of the calm is a strong magic. The following day still saw them scattered within sight of each other and heading different ways; but when, at last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth, and a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was heading the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... his elevation of spirit, it seemed something of epic quality, full of a strange, unreal grandeur. Faint red lights here and there revealed nothing of the tunnel; they but lent mystery to dimly seen arches and darkling bastions, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... across a purple valley whose sides are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... O Night! thy smiles are short, and short thy shade; Thou art a freakish friend, and all unstay'd: Yet from thy varied changes who are free? Full many an honest friend resembles thee. Then let my doubtful footsteps darkling stray, Thy next fair beam will set me on my way: E'en take thy freedom, whether rough or kind, I came not forth ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... And, gentle Eustace, take good heed Thou dost not rouse these drowsy slaves; I would not, that the prating knaves Had cause for saying, o'er their ale, That I could credit such a tale." Then softly down the steps they slid; Eustace the stable door undid, And darkling, Marmion's steed arrayed, While, whispering, thus the baron ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... lengthened, darkling, over the land; street-lights flashed up in long, radiant ranks. Across the promenade hotels and shops were lighted up; people began to gather round the tables beneath the awnings of an open-air cafe. In the distance, somewhere, a band ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Alice's cloak as their hurried travelling would permit; sometimes one of Alice's hands was loosened for a moment to be passed round Ellen's shoulders, and a word of courage or comfort in the clear calm tone cheered her to renewed exertion. The night fell fast; it was very darkling by the time they reached the bottom of the hill, and the road did not yet allow them to turn their faces towards Mrs. Van Brunt's. A wearisome piece of the way this was, leading them from the place they wished ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... those wax tapers first used in Saturn's temple of old lit up the street like magic and the last game of all began, for every man and woman and child strove to put out another's candle, and the long, laughing cry, 'No taper! No taper! Senza moccolo!' went ringing up to the darkling sky. Long canes with cloths or damp sponges or extinguishers fixed to them started up from nowhere, down from everywhere, from window and balcony to the street below, and from the street to the low balconies above. Put out at every instant, the little candles were instantly ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... she went to seek mankind; Here were the darkling coverts that she beat To find the Hider she was sent to find; Here the distracted footprints of her feet Whereby her soul's Desire she came ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... the darkling street. He fell again into reverie, gigantically brooded over by shapes only imagination dimly conceived of: the remote alleys of his mind astir with a shadowy and ceaseless traffic which it wasn't at least THIS life's business to hearken after, or regard. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... grey overhead; the dock like a sheet of darkling glass crowded with upside-down reflections of warehouses, of hulls and masts of silent ships. Rare figures moved here and there on the distant quays. A knot of men stood alongside with clothes-bags and wooden chests at their feet. Others were coming ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... afterward declined to make his wife. Minola did not care to meet any of the joyous couples or their friends, and even already the twitter of voices and the titter of feminine laughter were beginning to make themselves heard among the darkling paths and across the broad green lanes of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... a-morn she comes, * And I her mischiefs with the cloud compare: Saying, "Thou veilest morn with night!" "Ah, no!" * Quoth she, "I shroud full moon with darkling air!" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... hand swept aloft. Through the darkling night, faintly visible in the feeble starlight—there was no moon—were driving shapes, a full score of them ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... beneath the silent night Where'er they went, to lead their darkling way, The cloud of glory lent its guiding ray And shone more splendid ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... rapid river—bluffs of wild majesty worn into varied outlines, as though a mighty torrent had once surged between them, forcing the very rocks to crumble before its headlong career. But now only a gentle stream wandered through the broad bed, here shallow over the sand, there darkling in a still pool, now making a green willow-shaded island, and now a deep rock-bordered channel, doing its best with the various graceful devices of a happy little stream to compensate for the absence of the river, to whose former existence the cliffs bore silent witness and the pines testified in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... on the highest and most solitary part of the by-road. On the left, a row of fieldside trees beshaded it; on the right, it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his eyes returned to the cabman's face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John's communication, with the air of one ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him if his thought recurred, At such a time, to England and the maid Beloved, to whom he gave his plighted word Ere parting? Who will wonder at the shade Of sorrow darkling on his troubled brow, As he reflects on what ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... knows, sees all is well; How God had stayed his will and shaped his way, To bring the light to those that darkling dwell With gains that ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Molus as a hospitable pledge; He gave it to Meriones his son, And now it guarded shrewd Ulysses' brows. 320 Both clad in arms terrific, forth they sped, Leaving their fellow Chiefs, and as they went A heron, by command of Pallas, flew Close on the right beside them; darkling they Discern'd him not, but heard his clanging plumes.[11] 325 Ulysses in the favorable sign Exulted, and Minerva thus invoked.[12] Oh hear me, daughter of Jove AEgis-arm'd! My present helper in all straits, whose eye Marks all ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... share in it was forever being re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments of his eternal quest, the curtain of his mind would rise on that unforgettable scene—the cliffs, the rocks, the darkling outline of Flint House, with a feeble beam of light slanting down from the upstairs window at the back which looked out on the sea. Then the gush of light from the open door, and her shape stealing forth into the darkness, followed ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the first line of men broke into the courtyard, Brian fired the remaining three cannon as fast as he could touch linstock to powder. The bullet-hail tore the front ranks to shreds, but through the darkling smoke-cloud he saw other men come leaping, and knew ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... on my Love's endangered state, Wrought by keen anguish mad, I struck at fate, Prostrating mockingly in sport or hate The aspirations, darkling, we Cherish ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... the open sea, white with the sails of four thousand ships; the green fields of the Chersonese smiled invitingly a little further on; while, between him and the opposite shore, the long lines of his bridges lay darkling upon the sea, like a yoke placed upon the neck of a captive. Having seen all, the king gave his special attention to the fleet, which he now perhaps beheld in all its magnitude for the first time. Desirous of knowing which of his subjects were the best sailors, he gave orders for a sailing-match, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... what saying was this of thine, God, that thy power has breathed into my lips? 280 For from no sunlit shrine darkling ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and effort, viz.: the lash, when another, viz.: money, might be added with good effect. Fear, and the other low and bad qualities of the slave, are appealed to, but never the good. The relation, therefore, between capital and labor, which ought to be generous and confiding, is darkling, suspicious, unkindly, full of reproachful threats, and without concord or peace. This condition of things renders the interests of society a prey to politicians. Politics cease to ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... the boatman's horn had melted among the darkling hills, he turned as instinctively as a sun-worshipper faces the east and drank in another musical refrain. The Angelus was pealing faintly from the bell of the little log chapel far up the river, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Shenandoah crossed the road. The ford was waist-deep, but the tall Virginians, plunging without hesitation into the strong current, gained the opposite shore with little loss of time. The guns and waggons followed in long succession through the darkling waters, and still the heavy tramp of the toiling column passed eastward through the quiet fields. The Blue Ridge was crossed at Ashby's Gap; and at two o'clock in the morning, near the little village of Paris, the First ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... by a wild and splendid group of pines, through which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... The streams, more stretch their udders, and give back A subtle taste of saltness in the milk. Many there be who from their mothers keep The new-born kids, and straightway bind their mouths With iron-tipped muzzles. What they milk at dawn, Or in the daylight hours, at night they press; What darkling or at sunset, this ere morn They bear away in baskets- for to town The shepherd hies him- or with dash of salt Just sprinkle, and lay by for winter use. Nor be thy dogs last cared for; but alike Swift Spartan hounds and fierce Molossian feed On fattening whey. ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... through the identical inspiration, endowed the world with his everlasting legacy of organized beneficence; because it impelled Francis Xavier with yearning heart and eager footsteps through thousands of miles of peril, to proclaim to the darkling millions of India what he had experienced to be tidings of great joy to himself; because Matthew Hale, a lawyer, and of first prominence in a pursuit which materializes the mind and nips its native candour and tenderness, escaped unblighted, through the saving ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... The cold, steely, darkling sweep of desert had been transformed. It was now a world of red earth and gold rocks and purple sage, with everywhere the endless straggling green cedars. A breeze whipped in, making the fire roar softly. The sun felt warm on his cheek. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... secret, In corners of the churches; And it is believed the height of piety To strip your sweet children. Bring out your treasures, Which by evil arts of persuasion You have heaped up and hold, Which you shut up in darkling cave. Public utility demands this, The privy purse demands it, the treasury demands it, That the soldiers may be paid for their services, And the commander may benefit thereby. This is your dogma, then: Give every man his own. Now Caesar recognises his own Image, stamped on the coin. ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... soft and slow, From darkling earth and darkened sky Wide wings of gloom waved to and fro, And ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... yet without The pang, the agony, the doubt, Which rends my heart with ceaseless sigh, While day and night roll darkling by. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... voice, after an interval of gulping, though she was unable to lift her eyes, and the darkling lids continued to veil them. She spoke hurriedly, like an ungifted child reciting something committed to memory, but her sincerity was none the less evident ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... uplifted eye, And heart attun'd to the sad, lulling sound They made descending. Far below my feet, Near where yon little, ruin'd cottage lies, Oft, at the pensive hour of even-tide I saw young Osborne bearing on his harp, And, trusting to an aged mother's care, His darkling steps: Beneath that falling beech, Whose wide-spread branches touch the water's edge, He lov'd to sit, and feel the freshen'd ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... enchantment, so suddenly and so strangely did the fires shoot forth. As the beacon flame increased, it lighted up the whole of the extensive table-land on the summit of Pendle Hill; and a long lurid streak fell on the darkling moss-pool near which the wizard had stood. But when it attained its utmost height, it revealed the depths of the forest below, and a red reflection, here and there, marked the course of Pendle Water. The excitement of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... guards to see, singly or in pairs smiled up to Hilary's smile. Among them was Sam Gibbs, secretly bearing home the battery's colors wrapped round him next his scarred and cross-scarred body. And so, farewell Mobile. Hour by hour through the beautiful blue day, island after island, darkling green or glistering white, rose into view, drifted by between the steamer and the blue Gulf and sunk into the deep; Petit Bois, Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island. Now past Round Island, up Lake Borgne and through the Rigolets they ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... raggedly up above and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came nearer he saw that it ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... out in the night, The stars shall over me wing their flight; Sooner or later my darkling dews Catch the white spark in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... As he sat darkling here the ghostly outlines of former shapes taken by his Love came round their sister the unconscious corpse, confronting him from the wall in sad array, like the pictured Trojan women beheld by AEneas on the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... thy thought; nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze, At darkling cloisters paved with tombs, where rot the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... from the floor, and moved toward the door. She passed the looking-glass on the dressing-table as she went, and cast a darkling glance into it. A haggard ghost seemed to stare back at her, with crazy eyes. A braid of brown, silky hair had become loosened, and was creeping ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... For ever sacred to the hero's fame, These foaming straits shall bear his deathless name. Through these dread jaws of rock he presses on Another ocean's breast, immense, unknown, Beneath the south's cold wings, unmeasur'd, wide, Received his vessels, through the dreary tide, In darkling shades, where never man before Heard the waves howl, ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... away is gliding The pleasant Oxus's stream, I see the green glades darkling, I see the clear pools gleam. I hear the bulbuls calling From blooming tree to tree. Wave, bird, and tree are singing, 'Away! ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... where Thou lovest most to be softly gleaming? Is it on some rich bank of flowers Where 'neath each blossom a fay lies dreaming? Or is it on yonder silver lake Where the fish in green and gold are sparkling? Or is it among those ancient trees Where the tremulous shadows move soft and darkling? Oh, no! said the moon, with a playful smile, The best of my beams are for ever dwelling In the exquisite eyes, so deeply blue, And the eloquent glance of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and—the germ of Byron! Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs. Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character. So too Byron's gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni. This is so obvious that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note, parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour." ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... endurable. The wind-swept crests, the undulating, barren plains no longer spoke of a boundless freedom and the elemental battle. These things had become something to forget in the absorbing claim of a life to come, wherein the harshness of battle had no place. The darkling woods, scarce trodden by the foot of man, no longer possessed the mystic charm of childhood's fancy. The trackless wastes held only threat, upon which watchful eyes would now gladly close. The stirring glacial fields of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... scenes that followed. Darkling, I passed again through the station called Sybaris, and on and on by the sea-shore, the sound of breakers often audible. From time to time I discerned black mountain masses against a patch of grey sky, or caught a glimpse of blanching ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... while to their tops the Gods Made fast the woven ropes, and haled them down, And lopp'd their boughs, and clove them on the sward, And bound the logs behind their steeds to draw, And drave them homeward; and the snorting steeds Went straining through the crackling brushwood down, And by the darkling forest-paths the Gods Follow'd, and on their shoulders carried boughs. And they came out upon the plain, and pass'd Asgard, and led their horses to the beach, And loosed them of their loads on the seashore, And ranged ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Love, half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,— Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory—to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— This is the same voice: can thy soul know change Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! Never may I commence my song, my due To God ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... to Dorothy and told her what had passed. Dorothy kissed him, and cried over him, and made a wail against their darkling fate. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... heed to the east; where, down the darkling, lamp-studded canyon of a cross-town street, stark against a sky pulsing with the faintest foreboding of daybreak, the gaunt, steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood—in its harshly angular immensity as majestic as ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the insect, Season's twilight ray Sheds on the darkling mind a doubtful day, Plain is the steady light her Instincts yield, To point the road o'er life's unvaried field; If few these instincts, to the destined goal, With surer coarse, their straiten'd ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... thy soul Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, In low pursuit; Know, prudent, cautious self-control Is ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... himself to his foe. The wind now acting on the sails of the Serapis forced her, heel and point, her entire length, cheek by jowl, alongside the Richard. The projecting cannon scraped; the yards interlocked; but the hulls did not touch. A long lane of darkling water lay wedged between, like that narrow canal in Venice which dozes between two shadowy piles, and high in air is secretly crossed by the Bridge of Sighs. But where the six yard-arms reciprocally arched overhead, three bridges of sighs were both seen and heard, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... And he drank and smiled on Grimhild above the beaker's rim, And she looked and laughed at his laughter; and the soul was changed in him. Men gazed and their hearts sank in them, and they knew not why it was, Why the fair-lit hall was darkling, nor what had come to pass: For they saw the sorrow of Sigurd, who had seen but his deeds erewhile, And the face of the mighty darkened, who had known but the light ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone: Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower. Stars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the starbright air Made the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of the sea, ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the fountain cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb of the faith ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... seized her, before may again return;—no, I will not, to save being thought a fool, neglect the course she points out. Many of her class set out by being impostors, and end by becoming enthusiasts, or hold a kind of darkling conduct between both lines, unconscious almost when they are cheating themselves, or when imposing on others.—Well, my course is a plain one at any rate; and if my efforts are fruitless, it shall not be owing to over-jealousy of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Mountain rill, that darkling, sparkling, Winds and wanders down the hill, 'Mid the rushes, whispering, murmuring, Oh that I were like ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... therefore can be expected, for offering to the public a short sketch of the life of John Hodgkinson—a man, who, though dropped, at his birth, a darkling, into the world, contrived by the exercise of his personal endowments, without aid, friend, influence, or advantage, save those which nature in her bounty vouchsafed him, to mount to the highest rank ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Jeff in the gloom where he seemed to be darkling. He fancied doing that very thing with Bessie Lynde, and the wild joy she would snatch from an experience so unique, so impossible. Then the gleam faded. "And what if I didn't want ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ships of the Greeks. But the woman went with them reluctantly, whilst Achilles, weeping,[45] immediately sat down, removed apart from his companions, upon the shore of the hoary sea, gazing on the darkling main; and much he be sought his dear mother, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... not tell him all The evil that my boding heart predicts! Who's there? The door ne'er opens, but I look For tidings of mishap. Suspicion lurks With darkling treachery in every nook. Even to our inmost rooms they force their way, These myrmidons of power; and soon we'll need To fasten bolts and bars upon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... sky, and were reflected in chance glints of horror from the spume of the charging seas. Cold, cold it was all round; cold where the lowering black cloud hung in the east; cold where the west glowed with dull coppery patches; cold everywhere; and ah! how cold in the dead men's graves down in the darkling ooze! Ferrier was just thinking, "And the smacksmen go through this all the winter long!" ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... the winter day closed in so fast, Scarce for his task would dreary daylight last; And in all weathers—driving sleet and snow— Home by that bare, bleak moor-track must he go, Darkling and lonely. Oh! the blessed sight (His pole-star) of that little twinkling light From one small window, thro' the leafless trees, Glimmering so fitfully; no eye but his Had spied it so far off. And sure was he, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... dusk when they reached the outlying Cruisers, and nearly dark when the first ship in the Battle Fleet hailed them. Then hail answered hail as one Battleship after another rose towering above them into the darkling sky, and one by one passed ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly. Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather-grown headland to watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region begins a little darkling of the sky,—no cloud, no wind, just a smokiness such as spirits ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... or unconscious. The phenomena have never ceased, imposture has always been detected or asserted, but that hypothesis rarely covers the whole field, and so, if we walk in Cock Lane at all, we wander darkling, in good and bad company, among diviners, philosophers, saints, witches, charlatans, hypnotists. Many a heart has been broken, like that of Mr. Dale Owen, by the late discovery of life-long delusion, for we meet in Cock Lane, as Porphyry says, [Greek]. Yet this ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George's Hill ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Wildish peas, wilder asparagus—the field asparagus which seems to have disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his manifestations of frugality—and strawberries much less than half-way from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost—these are all Italian things of savage savour and simplicity. The most cultivated of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but something better, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... in the darkling Coconino Forest she interviewed the cowboy, that valiant belted knight of modern western chivalry, and in the chaparral she cheered ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... Hardy's reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... smooth swift wings Round the rocks beyond foot's reach, past eyesight's counting, Up the cleft where iron wind of winter rings Round a God fast clenched in iron jaws of fetters, Him who culled for man the fruitful flower of fire, Bared the darkling scriptures writ in dazzling letters, Taught the truth of dreams deceiving men's desire, Gave their water-wandering chariot-seats of ocean Wings, and bade the rage of war-steeds champ the rein, ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in despair, and go unhappily to bed, conscious that after all his labor he had done nothing. And these were moments when the accustomed vision of the land alarmed him, and the wild domed hills and darkling woods seemed symbols of some terrible secret in the inner life of that stranger—himself. Sometimes when he was deep in his books and papers, sometimes on a lonely walk, sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen "society," he would thrill with a sudden sense of awful hidden things, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... still waters, bright with stars, and rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning from the innumerable boughs 20 The strange deep harmonies that haunt his breast: Pleasant shall be thy way, where meekly bows The shutting flower and darkling waters pass, And where the o'ershadowing ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... music" of its myriad gray, red and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... voluntarily left the house at the Colonel's dictation he had made progress in her favour. He was sure that he had come closer to her—that she had begun not only to suffer his company, but to suffer it willingly. And here, as she passed through the darkling garden under the solid blackness of the yews, was an opportunity of making a further advance. She would have to grope her way, a reason for taking her hand might offer, and—his head ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Stukely, as he sprang off the thwart and resumed his task of baling with renewed zest. "Nevertheless," he continued, "it will be well to keep her afloat as long as we may, since she affords a bigger mark to steer for than would the heads of us two afloat upon the darkling water." ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... she, "stay you here and pursue your education. I will go in your place. For Marcella Cuciniera must be relieved." She rose, and moved towards the darkling front of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... with sudden movement, gave his hand To each in turn, and said, "You must not stand Longer, young ladies, in this open door. The air is heavy with a cold damp chill. We shall have rain to-morrow, or before. Good night." He vanished in the darkling shade; And so the dreaded evening found an end, That saw me grasp the conscience-whetted blade, And strike a blow for honor ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... wings wherewith to fly Over the boundless ocean and the earth; Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie, The comrade of their banquet and their mirth. Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound Upon the silver flute's melodious breath; And when thou goest darkling underground Down to the lamentable house of death, Oh yet not then from honour shalt thou cease But wander, an imperishable name, Kurnus, about the seas and shores of Greece, Crossing from isle to isle ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... upon my grave When I am dead. 'Twill softly shed its beaming rays, To guide the soul its darkling ways; And ever, as the day's full light Goes down and leaves the world in night, These kindly gleams, with warmth possest, Shall show my spirit where to rest When I ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... that embody the essence of the thing he has to say. The halo with which the Byzantine mosaicists surrounded the faces of their saints, the glory of golden light that gleams about the figure of Christ in heaven in Tintoretto's decorations, the blank bright walls of the Doge's palace undermined by darkling and shadowy arcades, the refrain of a Provencal song, the sharp shadow under the visor of Verrocchio's equestrian statue, the thought-provoking chiaroscuro of Rembrandt's figure paintings—these expedients are all designed to attract attention to the essential elements of a whole of many parts. By ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... ye show, Why, lads, so silent here to me, Your watchmate of times long ago? Once, for all the darkling sea, You your voices raised how clearly, Striking in when tempest sung; Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly, Life is storm—let storm! you rung. Taking things as fated merely, Childlike though the world ye spanned; Nor holding unto life too dearly, Ye who held ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... all I look'd to see? The mass of crumbling coffins—some belike (The undermost) with their contents crush'd in, Flatten'd, and shapeless. Even in this damp vault, With more completeness could the old Destroyer Have done his darkling work? Yet lo! I look'd Into a small square chamber, swept and clean, Except that on one side, against the wall, Lay a few fragments of dark rotten wood, And a small heap of fine, rich, reddish earth Was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... moving worlds presides, Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides, On darkling man in pure effulgence shine, And cheer the clouded mind with light divine. 'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast, With silent confidence and holy rest; From thee, great God! we spring, to thee we tend, Path, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... as if there never had been such a day. I look at the sky as we drive along to the station. Call it sapphire, turquoise—indeed! What dull stone that ever lived darkling in a mine is fit to be named even in metaphor with this pale yet brilliant arch that so softly leans above us? It seems to me as if all the people we meet were handsome and well-featured—as if the Elbe were the noblest river that ever ran, carrying the sunlight in flakes of gold and diamond on ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... he, "my heart was in my mouth. As I comed along to you, I saw Mun, coachey, pop along from the back-door to the stables. He was within a hop, step, and jump of me. But he had a lanthorn in his hand, and he did not see me, being as I was darkling." Saying this, he assisted Miss Melville to mount. He troubled her little during the route; on the contrary, he was remarkably silent and contemplative, a circumstance by no means disagreeable to Emily, to whom his conversation had never ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... "Salah-ed-din! Salah-ed-din!" on they surged, with flashing spears and scimitars. The overthrown table was in front of them, and one leapt upon its edge, but as he leapt, the old knight, all his years and sickness forgotten now, sprang forward and struck downwards, so heavy a blow that in the darkling mouth of the passage the sparks streamed out, and where the Saracen's head had been, appeared his heels. Back Sir Andrew stepped again to win space for his sword-play, while round the ends of the table broke two fierce-faced men. At one of them ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... bound her; a dizziness overcame her. Soon they were by a great pool of gloomy water—Wroxham Broad—where hern, wild duck, and the mast of the darkling boat brooded among bulrush; and now in three minutes more the brougham was sweeping over the lawn of a lonely building, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... equalled with me in fate, So were I equalled with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old: Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead and ever-during dark Surrounds me, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... into the mountains. Big green peaks across which hung a bluish haze showed themselves between the hills. The latter were more precipitous; and the brush had now given way to pines of better size and quality than those seen lower down. The river foamed over rapids or ran darkling in pools and stretches. Along the roadside, rarely, we came upon rough-looking log cabins, or shacks of canvas, or tents. The owners were not at home. We thought them miners; but in the light of subsequent knowledge I believe that unlikely—the ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... its numberless changing moods. What unutterable loneliness spoke to the soul in those unknown leagues of tossing sea! how far the eye wandered unchecked, searching vainly for aught to rest upon other than glistening surge or darkling hollow! The mystery of the ages lay unexpressed in those tossing billows, sweeping in out of the black east, making low moan to the unsympathetic and unheeding sky. Deeper and deeper the spirit of unrest, of doubt, of brooding discontent, weighed down upon me as I gazed; ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... singing "Ave Mary" as they went. In this order they made the circuit of the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar. The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart. Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal, military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will not mention it where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May I trouble ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... cerulean hue O'er bounding billows of green and blue; And in one hand a three-pronged spear He holds, the sceptre of his fear, And with the other shakes the reins Of his steeds, with foamy, flowing manes, And coures o'er the brine; And when he lifts his trident mace, Broad Ocean crisps his darkling face, And mutters wrath divine; The big waves rush with hissing crest, And beat the shore with ample breast, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... a flower of wondrous worth, A rare, sweet flower of heaven that ne'er should die, Altho' the vase in which it grew should lie Most rudely rent amid the darkling dearth. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... imperious sibyl, Sea, Thou mayest learn if thou wilt hearken well, When God's white star-fires beacon home the ships; The solemn secrets of infinity, Unto the inner sense translatable, Hang trembling ever on her darkling lips. ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... Whoever would with success try this spell must strictly observe these directions. Steal out all alone to the kiln, and darkling, throw into the pot, a clue of blue yarn: wind it in a new clue off the old one; and towards the latter end, something will hold the thread: demand, wha hauds? i.e., who holds? and answer will be returned from the kiln-pot, by ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... deep midnight of the sky where the other worlds wandered. Then the yellow moon came from her palace, wrapping herself at first with a mantle of golden mist, as if—Godiva-like—she shrank from loosening her garments; but the need of the darkling earth pressed upon her, and she dropped her covering and rode forth ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the buffets of his unkind fate. And yet, pressing the young horse to overtake him, Absalom could find naught but the fleecy mists drifting down the bridle-path as the wind might will, or lurking in the darkling nooks of the laurel when ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... taken to her began to sink like water in sand. The two were still on their feet, near the window—Mary, in her bonnet, with her back to it, and Hesper, in evening attire, with her face to the sunset, so that the one was like a darkling worshiper, the other like the radiant goddess. But the truth was, that Hesper was a mere earthly woman, and Mary a heavenly messenger to her. Neither of them knew it, but so it was; for the angels are essentially humble, and ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... methought I saw that flood, Which now so dull and darkling steals, Thick, here and there, with human blood, 35 To ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and through valleys the great road ran, straightaway for league upon league, turning aside for no obstacle, invincible as its builders, ancient and enduring. It crossed rivers, it clove through darkling woods, it traversed wide and lonely wastes, and led past walled towns, worn by the feet of marching legions, scored with the grooves of wheels. And even as across the world all roads led to Rome, so here did all roads lead ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
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