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More "Sunbeam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cascades of silvery-gleaming China silk, the shimmering brocade pricked into luminous beads by a slanting sunbeam; while portraits of every epoch smiled through their yellowed varnish from frames more ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... in spring, just as the last of a hail-shower was passing away, and a sickly sunbeam was struggling out, the schoolroom-door opened, and in came Andrew Truffey, with a smile on his worn face, which shone in touching harmony with the watery gleam of the sun between the two hail-storms—for another was close at hand. He swung himself in on the new pivot of his ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... being, with his unleaping recognition of her inspiring greatness. It seemed to him that he had never looked upon a woman before. Lily, of course, had been an angel. "I thought I should just strike lunch," she said, as she came like a sunbeam into the dim, low-ceiled, threadbare, comfortable room where the meal was ready. "I'm as hungry ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... like lightning; and secondly, in addition to and across the Presence, innumerable sparkles of the intensest mixture of white and red, darting to and fro through the whole extent of the crucifix. The movement was like that of motes in a sunbeam. And as a sweet dinning arises from the multitudinous touching of harps and viols, before the ear distinguishes the notes, there issued in like manner from the whole glittering ferment a harmony indistinct ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... shall be said, This dog watched beside a bed Day and night unweary,— Watched within a curtained room Where no sunbeam brake the gloom, ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... tenement, showing them horrors they had never dreamed; giving them now and again a glimmer of light when he told of a curtained window with fifteen minutes of sun every morning, where a little cripple sat to watch for her sunbeam, and push her pot of geraniums along the sill that it might have the entire benefit of its brief shining. He put the audience into peals of laughter over the wit of some poor creatures in certain trying situations, showing that a sense of humor is not lacking ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fortune once more. I felt quite sure that the day would bring us luck. The weather was still beautiful, and we were thoroughly enjoying the sunshine. It was such an unusual thing that Nordahl, when he was working among the coals in the hold in the afternoon, mistook a sunbeam falling through the hatch on the coal dust for a plank, and leaned hard on it. He was not a little surprised when he fell right through it on ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Now trari-trara resounded, Echo's voice her plaudits sending From the bosom of the forest. Fair it was o'er hill and valley, But fair also to behold him, As he in the deep snow standing Lightly on his horse was leaning; Now and then a golden sunbeam Glory shed on man and trumpet, In the background gloomy fir-trees, Farther down among the meadows Rang his tunes out not unheeded! There was walking then the worthy Pastor of the neighbouring village, Who the snow-drifts was ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lense effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... the worst, it often happens that some unexpected success breaks on his path like a bright sunbeam. Alas! it often happens, also, that when his hopes are high and his prospects brightest, a dark cloud overspreads him like a funeral pall. We might learn a lesson from this—the lesson of dependence on that Saviour who careth for us, and of trust in that blessed assurance that "all things ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to MARY then, and while Ye cease to mourn for summer skies, Bask in the sunbeam of her smile, And the sweet heaven ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... about to set the bloodhounds upon this little sunbeam! 'Tis long since these grim walls have echoed strains so sweet as hers. (Croons.) "Woa, LUCINDY," &c. "Dey tried him by a jury, way down in ole Missouri, an' dey hung him to a possum-dip tree!" (Goes to couch, and gazes on the little sleeper.) How peacefully she slumbers! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... store as a clerk, an' I got work as a porter at the quays; an' though his work was more gentlemanly than mine, I made very near as much as him, so we lived comfortable, and laid by a little. That winter little Emma was born. She just come to poor Tom and his wife like a great sunbeam. Arter that we went a year to the diggin's, and then I got to weary to see my old missus, so I left 'em with a promise to return. I com'd home, saw my wife, and then went out again to jine the Grahams for another spell at the diggin's; ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... did arrive—sprang into the house like a rather loud sunbeam—loud for a sunbeam, not for a young woman of sixteen. She was small, and bright, and gay, with large black eyes which sparkled like little ones as well as gleamed like great ones, and a miniature Greek face, containing a ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... was over. Mr. Mullen had read the service in his melodious voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as though he saw a vision in the sunbeam above Judy's head. On that solitary occasion his soul, which revolted from what he described in secret as the "Methodistical low church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple word with the facial solemnity ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... literature professedly false, and which paints in fascinating colors the various phases of unrepented vice and crime, without the redeeming shadows of honor and Christian morality, our little volume must fall a welcome sunbeam. The strange career of our heroine constitutes a sensational biography charming and beautiful ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the laird, fervently; "for she is like a sunbeam in the house. No, we have only got the loan of her, on very strict conditions too, from her mother, who is a somewhat timid lady of an anxious temperament. I've done my best to fulfil the conditions, but they are ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... presence in the most glorious manner by decking the sun and the moon in hues of unaccustomed splendor and beauty. The blue color in the sky under ordinary circumstances is due to particles in the air, and when the ordinary motes of the sunbeam were reinforced by the introduction of the myriads of motes produced by Krakatoa even the sun itself sometimes showed a blue tint. Thus the progress of the great dust-cloud was traced out by the extraordinary sky effects it produced, and from the progress of the dust-cloud we inferred the movements ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... morning, among the leaves of my passion vine. Painted Beauties swayed along my flowered walks, and in September a Viceroy reigned in state on every chrysanthemum, and a Monarch was enthroned on every sunbeam. No luck was too good for me, no butterfly or moth too rare, except forever and always the coveted Cecropia, and by this time I had learned to my disgust that it was one of the commonest ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... house Ralph's laughter came like the embodied spirit of Youth. It searched out the hidden corners, illuminated the shadows, stirred the silences to music. A sunbeam danced on the stair, where, according to Doctor Dexter's recollection, no sunbeam had ever dared to dance before. Ah, it, was good to have ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... edition is by far the best and most attractive hitherto published. The illustrations are artistic in the highest degree, as everybody will understand when he knows they are by the artist of Lady Brassey's 'Sunbeam.' Most of them are from sketches made on the spot by Mr. Pritchett, with Darwin's book ...
— Mr. Murray's List of New and Recent Publications July, 1890 • John Murray
... casement there came on the rising wind of the storm, in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth, begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... pardon if I misapprehended the matter, but this appears to me the only imperfect passage in the poem. The comparison of the sunbeam is fine. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... south to north, across the church, and just touching the chapel of the Holy Sacrament—the Pope emerges. The white figure, high above the crowd, sways from side to side; the hand upraised gives the benediction. Fragile, spiritual as is the apparition, the sunbeam refines, subtilises, spiritualises it still more. It hovers like a dream above the vast multitudes—surely no living man!—but thought, history, faith, taking shape; the passion of many hearts revealed. Up rushes the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mrs. Clayton. "But a legendary sentiment of this kind often hides a deeper meaning. For those who are devoted to the Blessed Virgin, there is never a day so dark but that the love of Our Lady shines through the gloom like a sunbeam, changing to the rosy and golden tints of hope the leaden clouds that shadowed their happiness; and blessing the closing day of life, which, to look back upon, seems but as the ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... break when he thought of her; so many recollections passed through his soul. He saw her a lively, laughing, petulant child; many a loving word, which she had said to him in the fullness of her heart, shot like a sunbeam through his breast and soon all there ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... please," said Howard, "and of course, dearest child, there are hundreds of things you can do for me. I am the feeblest of managers; I live from hand to mouth; but I am not going to submerge you either. If you won't be the girl-bride, you are not to be the professional sunbeam either. You are to be just yourself, the one real, sweet, and perfect thing in the world for me. Chaire kecharitoenae—do you know what that means? It was the angel's opinion long ago of a very simple mortal. ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... irrelevant frisking; their feet struck the ground for every note of the fiddle, pat as its echo, their faces shone, their hearts leaped, and their poor frozen natures came out, and warmed themselves at the glowing melody; a great sunbeam had come into their abode, and these human motes danced in it. The elder ones recovered their gravity first, they sat down breathless, and put their hands to their hearts; they looked at one another, and then at the goddess ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... bombing helped forward another use of naval aircraft: torpedo attack. This is likely to develop in the future into one of the most important uses of aircraft in naval operations, but during the war it was never given an objective by the German fleet. In May, 1915, two Sunbeam Short machines were embarked in the "Ben-my-Chree" for operations at Gallipoli, and it was in this theatre that for the first time in history ships were sunk by torpedoes released from aircraft. I shall never forget the night when we steamed silently up ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... likewise, and the hostile forces clashed together on the mat, and for a brief space things were mixed and chaotic and Arthurian. The silvery sound of the luncheon-bell restored an instant peace, even in the teeth of clenched antagonisms like ours. The Holy Grail itself, "sliding athwart a sunbeam," never so effectually stilled a riot of warring passions into sweet ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... people, or for any other time. Many laws are to be found there which are unnecessary and superfluous if applied elsewhere. Many actions, innocent in themselves, are prohibited. All the mala prohibita are not mala in se. But one thing is as clear as a sunbeam, and that is a very important light to the student of Ethics; if God was the author of these laws, nothing morally wrong was commanded or allowed by them. When it was said of the Jews through the prophet, "I gave them statutes which were not ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... had struck him—on that morning which now seemed so remote—when he had risen weakly from his cot at the detention hospital and made ready for exile at Fairview. Less than a year ago! How many things had assumed new values since then! Now, he could exploit every sunbeam to its minutest warmth, he could wring sustenance from a handful of crumbs, he knew what a cup of cold water meant. He was on speaking terms with hunger, he had been comrade to madness, he had looked upon sudden death, he was an outcast and, in a sense, a criminal. He felt ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... tell me all," said Maxine, as they sat in the chintz-hung sitting room before a bright fire of logs. They had finished their private affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams had ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... throne with a burning zone, And the moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch, through which I march, With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-colored bow; The sphere-fire ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... mail from home, but, next to it, I judge, comes writing to your family. Anyhow, the boy shined up like new money, and there was from one to four million pages in his hurried note. I don't mean to say that he was grouchy at any time. No, sir! He was the nickel-plated sunbeam of the whole creek. Why, I've knowed him to do the cooking for two weeks at a stretch, and never kick—and wash the dishes, too,—which last, as anybody knows, is crucifyin'er than that smelter test of the three Jews in the Scripture. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... of the cares of the world. There is, however, the vitality which informs the physical frame; that must be equally an object of incessant care. Then he whose physical frame is perfect and whose vitality remains in its original purity—he is one with God. Man passes through this sublunary life as a sunbeam passes through a crack; here one moment, and gone the next. Neither are there any not equally subject to the ingress and egress of mortality. One modification brings life; then comes another, and there is death. Living ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... Columbus must have felt when he was moving over strange waters. Then occurred the most notable event of my life. In the twinkling of an eye I was caught away from the Earth and, without any effort of my own, I was darting through space faster than a sunbeam. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... depths of the Cove—the tops of the leafless trees, and, glimpsed through the interlacing boughs, the rush of a mountain rill, and a white flash as a sunbeam slanted ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... I gaze Upon the mist that wreathes yon mountain's brow, The sunbeam touches it, and it becomes A crown of glory on his hoary head; O! is not this a presage of the dawn Of freedom o'er the world? Hear me, then, bright And beaming Heaven! while kneeling thus, I vow To live for Freedom, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the belles of the county; her hair was as bright as a sunbeam, her eyes as blue as a summer sky, her full lips were red, her cheeks had the bloom of the peach upon them. Mildred was a well-grown girl, with a largely and ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... here take Notice under the Head of the Machines, that Uriel's gliding down to the Earth upon a Sunbeam, with the Poets Device to make him descend, as well in his return to the Sun, as in his coming from it, is a Prettiness that might have been admired in a little fanciful Poet, but seems below the Genius of Milton. The Description of the Host ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... grass mourns in the sunbeam, In gums weep the trees And in dye; And if mourn meadow and stream— Inanimate ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... felt,—"and God bless Amelie! Think you she would care to see me to-day, Le Gardeur?" Philibert's thoughts flew far and fast, and his desire to know more of Amelie was a rack of suspense to him. She might, indeed, recollect the youth Pierre Philibert, thought he, as she did a sunbeam that gladdened long-past summers; but how could he expect her to regard him—the full-grown man—as the same? Nay, was he not nursing a fatal fancy in his breast that would sting him to death? for among the gay and gallant throng ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... on, and still Preston's eyes were not "ready." Winter came, then spring, and Milly paid another visit to Laurel Grove. She was one of those quiet, happy little girls, who make hardly any more noise than a sunbeam; but everybody likes to see a sunbeam, and everybody was glad ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... Those who remained were lingering over their coffee, and were smoking; their voices were lowered to a polite monotone; the rush of the waiters had ceased, and the previous chatter had sunk to a subdued murmur. Into this, the quivering sigh of Edouard's violin penetrated like a sunbeam feeling its way into a darkened room, and, at the sound, the voices, one by one, detached themselves from the general chorus, until, lacking support, it ceased altogether. Some were silent, that they ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... the Providence which saved a million souls from death, forgetting that every harvest is a repetition of the same miracle, that each morsel of food we eat is a gift of Heaven conveyed to us by a sunbeam. Food is simply sunshine captured by the chlorophyll of plants and served up to us in tiny bundles called molecules, which, when torn apart in our bodies by the processes of digestion and assimilation release the captured energy which warms us with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... bearing, seraph tall, Of indolent imperturbable regard, Stood in the Tavern door to drink. As the first Lifted his glass to let the warm light melt In the slow bubbles of the wine, a sunbeam, Red and broad as smouldering autumn, smote Down through its mystery; and a single fleck, The tiniest sun-mote settling through the air, Fell on the ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... door, he would take a bag of gold coin, or a gold cup as big as a washbowl, or a heavy golden bar, or a peck measure of gold dust, and bring them from the obscure corners of the room into the one bright and narrow sunbeam that fell from the dungeonlike window. He valued the sunbeam for no other reason but that his treasure would not shine without ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... "drew a good bow at the battle of Hastings, and never shot at such a mark in his life—and neither will I. I might as well shoot at the edge of our parson's whittle, or at a wheat straw, or at a sunbeam, as at a twinkling white streak which I ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... tears while the smile was still on her lips. That was Ruth's way; her smiles and tears were even closer together than most women's are; she was nearly always quiveringly poised between gayety and sadness; like a living sunbeam ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... And the outline of the whole Grandly fronts for once thy soul. And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam Of yet another morning breaks, And, like the hand which ends a dream, Death, with the might of his sunbeam, Touches the flesh, and the soul ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sinks forever, although it may be into a bed of glory! And if the setting of the sun leave all here lustreless and dark and gloomy, although that must arise again to-morrow, what must the setting do of one who shall arise no more for ever; whose light of life was to one heart, what the sunbeam was to the streamlet, but which, unlike that sunbeam, shall never shine on the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... sunbeam in a cloud," he said poetically as she tied it over her brown head. "Oh, ho!" turning to the blackboard, "you do make handsome figures. Got them all right, ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... superstition and fanaticism. "Dry light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has looked too steadily on the lumen siccum of the reason; and then imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason. Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind into a posture of child-like assent to the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... questions with sufficient accuracy. (1.) Two short radical nouns are apt to unite in a permanent compound, when the former, taking the sole accent, expresses the main purpose or chief characteristic of the thing named by the latter; as, teacup, sunbeam, daystar, horseman, sheepfold, houndfish, hourglass. (2.) Temporary compounds of a like nature may be formed with the hyphen, when there remain two accented syllables; as, castle-wall, bosom-friend, fellow-servant, horse-chestnut, goat-marjoram, marsh-marigold. (3.) ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the track of it sat a handsome well-dressed man, busily eating. In front of him was a roast chicken, a cut-glass dish of celery and a ruby mound of jelly; a crusty loaf of new bread lay broken at his right; at his left, winking in the sunbeam, stood a decanter half filled with a topaz liquor. He was daintily poising a bit of jelly on some bread, the mouthful was in the air, when his eyes fell on Caroline, an amazed and cobwebbed statue in front ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... yellow man. "Why, I'm the Last Sunbeam, of course. I thought you knew that. My job, you know, is to shut up the show when the sunset is over. And it's pretty hard work, I can tell you, because I've got to keep on doing it all round the earth every few minutes or so. And it gets very tiresome ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... misarrangement) on the roof Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees And shrubs of fairy land. The crystal drops That trickle down the branches, fast congealed, Shoot into pillars of pellucid length And prop the pile they but adorned before. Here grotto within grotto safe defies The sunbeam. There imbossed and fretted wild, The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain The likeness of some object seen before. Thus nature works as if to mock at art, And in defiance ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and the others when they tried to rouse him, "for you can't hate." No, the cold in his mind was like the night- frost; it melted at the first sunbeam. When he looked back there were redeeming ties that held the whole together in spite of all the evil; and now the old librarian had brought him close up to the good in the other side of the cleft too. He had settled ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... little girl's modest blushes, the compliments she stammered out, dispelled, as by a sunbeam, the kind of mist which had gathered round my mind; my thoughts suddenly changed from the leaden tints of evening to the brightest colors of dawn. I made Paulette sit down, and questioned her with ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... dewdrops hang on the bending grass, A dragon-fly cuts a sunbeam through. The moaning cypress trees lift somber arms Up to skies of cloudless blue. A humming-bird sips from a golden cup, In the hedge a hidden bird sings, And a butterfly among the flowers Tells me that the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... trembles as a flower! Strain, O stork, thy pinion well,— From thy nest 'neath old church-bell, Mount to yon tall citadel, And its tallest donjon tower! To your mountain, eagle old, Mount, whose brow so white and cold, Kisses the last ray of even! And, O thou that lov'st to mark Morn's first sunbeam pierce the dark, Mount, O mount, thou joyous lark— Joyous lark, O mount to heaven! And now say, from topmost bough, Towering shaft, and peak of snow, And heaven's arch—O, can you see One white plume that like a star, Streams along the plain afar, And a steed ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... her beauty that hauds me, A glitterin' chain winna lang bind; 'Tis her heavenly seraph-like sweetness, An' the graces adornin' her mind; She 's dear to my soul as the sunbeam Is dear to the summer's morn, An' she says, though her father forbade it, She 'll ne'er break the vows ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the dreary winter's gone, The mantle of old age has time withdrawn. The sunbeam glitters in the morning dew, O'er hill and vale youth's ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... just yet. He saw Terry, jauntily, even saucily dressed, as she came out of the store and jumped into her car, marked how the bright sunlight winked from her high boots, how it flamed upon her gay red scarf, how it glinted from a burnished steel buckle in her hat band. As bright as a sunbeam herself, loving gay colors about her, across the distance she fairly shone ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... masterpiece of art. You approach, regretting the neglected state of the lateral towers, and enter through the large and completely opened center doors, the nave of the abbey. It was toward sunset when we made our first entrance. The evening was beautiful; and the variegated tints of sunbeam, admitted through the stained glass of the window, just noticed, were perfectly enchanting. The window itself, as you look upward, or rather as you fix your eye upon the center of it, from the remote end of the abbey, or the Lady's Chapel, was a perfect blaze of dazzling light; and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... impressive desolation, uplifting their stony peaks around us like the walls and turrets of a gigantic fortress, and rising so abruptly and so impenetrably encompassing the black stretch of water below, that it seemed impossible for a sunbeam to force its shining entrance into such a circle of dense gloom. Yet there was a shower of golden light pouring aslant down one of the highest of the hills, brightening to vivid crimson stray clumps of heather, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... mirror of the basin. For one moment a ray of sunshine turned the upper part of the spray into a rainbow, and never to my eyes had the bow of promise looked so heavenly as when it spanned the black, solemn, tree-shadowed abyss, whose deep, still waters only catch a sunbeam on five days of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... your youth, believing that the smile of God, who gave you the power of being happy, is on your happiness; and that your heavenly Father no more grudges harmless pleasure to you, than He grudges it to the gnat which dances in the sunbeam, or the bird which sings upon the bough. For He is The Father,—and what greater delight to a father than to see his children happy, if only, while they are happy, they ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... hanging-lamp, which was evidently the worse for having been up all night, and bore a singular resemblance to a faded reveller of Angel's, who even then sputtered and flickered in HIS socket in an arm-chair below it,—a resemblance so plain that when the first level sunbeam pierced the window-pane, the barkeeper, moved by a sentiment of consistency and compassion, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... parish magazine, offered to stay while Drury went to fetch an aunt from Winterbourne Stoke. When Drury drove up in a borrowed farm cart, Isabel without expecting or receiving many thanks dragged her bicycle to the top of the glen and pelted off across the moor. Her Sunbeam was worn and old, so old that it had a fixed wheel, but what was that to Isabel? She put her feet up and rattled down the hill, first on the turf and then on the road, in a happy reliance ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... See, maiden see! The rich enamel sunbeam-kist! Happy, oh happy, shalt thou be, Let them but clasp that slender wrist; These bracelets are a mighty charm, They keep a lover ever true, And widowhood avert, and harm, Buy them, and thou shalt never rue. ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... every dungeon comes a ray Of God's interminable day. On every heart a sunbeam falls To cheer its lonely ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... refracted when passing through a lens. Newton determined to analyze the prismatic hues. He made a hole in a window-shutter, and darkening the room, let in a portion of light, which he passed through a prism. The white sunbeam formed a circular image on the opposite wall, but the prismatic colors formed an image five times as long as it was broad. He was curious to know how this came to pass. Satisfied that the length of the image in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... inattention or lack of respect. In the long deserted halls a sonorous silence reigned which vibrated at the solitary noise of my steps; on all sides the closed doors, shutting in rooms full of pupils; a sunbeam—a free beam—played with the dust which had been raised during recess and which had not yet had time to settle; all of it was mysterious, interesting, full of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... repeated Ruby firmly, "because I won't let yon. I don't think I need say to you that I am innocent," he added, with a look in which truth evidently shone forth like a sunbeam, "but now that they have put these irons on me I will not consent that they shall be taken off except by the law which ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... because I have never seen Him;—the Universe is certainly very majestic, and somewhat startling to me in its exact mathematical proportions; but I have no more to do with it than has a grain of sand;—my lot is no more important than that of the midge in the sunbeam;—I live,—I breed— I die;—and it matters to no one but myself how I do these three things, provided I satisfy my nature.' This is the Philosophy of the Beast, and it is just now very fashionable. It is 'la haute mode' ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... preaching just now, and piloting, you know." The Pilot's smile was like a sunbeam on a rainy day, for there were tears in his eyes and voice. "And we have just got to be faithful. You see what he says: 'Well done, good and FAITHFUL ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... like motes in the sunbeam for a moment, and then are illumined no more. Legend takes some of them, and they become pictures; and the rest, it would ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... a few steps nearer the gate, near enough now for him to see her rosy face framed in a blue hood, and to catch the brightness of her eyes under their lovely lashes. Ordinarily they were cool and limpid and grave, Waitstill's eyes; now a sunbeam danced in each of them. And her lips, almost always tightly closed, as if she were holding back her natural speech,—her lips were red and parted, and the soul of her, free at last, shone through her face, making it ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... over the marble man catch up all the sunbeams so the shadows have it their way— the shadows swallow him up like a blue shark. When you scoop a sunbeam up on your palm and offer it to the marble man, he does not notice... he looks into his stone beard. ... When you do something great people give you a stone face, so you do not care any more when the sun throws gold on you through leaf-holes ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... obelisk is a rough stone, rising to a great height, shaped like a pillar in the stadium; and it tapers upwards in imitation of a sunbeam, keeping its quadrilateral shape, till it rises almost to a point, being made smooth by the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the edge of the rock to cast himself down, the Neck rose at the same moment, and sitting upon a wave, began to play. And the strain was in praise of immortality. And the melody went straight to the heart of the hermit as a sunbeam goes into a dark cave, and it dispelled his gloom, and he thought all to be as well with him as before it had seemed ill. And he called to the Neck and said, "What is that which thou ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... and wither'd at the sight; Long had he aim'd the sunbeam to control, For light was hateful to his soul: "Go on!" cried the hellish one, yellow with spite, "Go on!" cried the hellish one, yellow with spleen, "Thy toils of the morning, like Ithaca's queen, I'll toil ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... on Salisbury Crags and over the Firth of Forth, then descended to dark old Holyrood, where the memory of lovely Mary lingers like a stray sunbeam in her cold halls, and the fair, boyish face of Rizzio looks down from the canvass on the armor of his murderer. We threaded the Canongate and climbed to the Castle; and finally, after a day and a half's sojourn, buckled on our knapsacks and marched out of the Northern ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Mistress Jocelyn Percy came into the great room, like a sunbeam strayed back to earth. Her skirt was of flowered satin, her bodice of rich taffeta; between the gossamer walls of her French ruff rose the whitest neck to meet the fairest face. Upon her dark hair sat, as lightly as a kiss, a little pearl-bordered cap. A color was in her cheeks and a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... the sky, from the sky to the hills, and the sea; to every blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between the fir-trees, and particles rise and fall within, and cross it while ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... kneeling there By the child's side, in humble prayer, While the same sunbeam shines upon The guilty and the guiltless one, And hymns of joy proclaim through Heaven 110 The triumph of ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... of day rose triumphant in a perfectly clear sky. It was a strange group that he peeped in upon, where the old family portraits seemed looking down with haughty contempt upon the slumbering invaders of their dignified solitude. The soubrette was the first to awake, starting up as a warm sunbeam shone caressingly full upon her face. She sprang to her feet, shook out her skirts, as a bird does its plumage, passed the palms of her hands lightly over her glossy bands of jet-black hair, and then seeing that the baron was quietly observing her, with eyes that showed no trace of drowsiness, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... and hoary, O'er us breaks the mighty day, And the sunbeam, cold and gory, Lights us on our fearful way. In the womb of coming hours, Destinies of empires lie, Now the scale ascends, now lowers, Now is thrown the noble die. Brothers, the hour with warning is rife; Faithful in death as you're faithful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... at the tale with pity glow. But ye, blest eyes, which dealt me the sore blow, 'Gainst which nor helm nor shield avail'd to spare Within, without, behold me poor and bare, Though never in laments is breathed my woe. But since on me your bright glance ever shines, E'en as a sunbeam through transparent glass, Suffice then the desire without the lines. Faith Peter bless'd and Mary, but, alas! It proves an enemy to me alone, Whose spirit save by you to none ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Hamilton, of New York, in reply, as my honorable friend the Chairman of the Committee will remember, to the Tory farmer of Westchester: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or dusty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." In the next year, Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, summed up the political faith of our fathers in the Great Declaration. Its words vibrate through the history ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... it was very foolish in me to cry. Thank Heaven, Ishmael didn't see me," said Bee, wiping her eyes, and smiling through her wet eyelashes, like a sunbeam through ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... perfect afternoon. Little white clouds drifted here and there over the tops of the wooded hills, but they only made the sky more deeply and intensely blue. There was just enough breeze to ripple the water so that it caught every sunbeam, and set it dancing on the tremulous surface. Below her a fish-hawk poised and dipped, seeking his dinner; far out, two black specks showed where her friends were at their "sport." Margaret drew a long ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... Mother threw herself into his arms. "Don't cry, don't cry, my dear Emily," said he, the tears rolling down his rich ruddy cheek, "we shall find them again. We will go in search of them. Remember, I too am a sufferer. Have I not lost my right hand, the sunbeam of my house, my sweet, little, mischievous, pretty, fidgety Gatty," and he raised his eyes reverently to heaven, as if to invoke a blessing on his lost child; and this was Gatty's Father, who had left his court, and had come down purposely with Sir Walter Mayton to consult ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... fell. Within, from thousand lamps the lustre strays. Reflected back from gems about the wall; And from twelve dolphin shapes a fountain plays, Just in the centre of a spacious hall; But whether in the sunbeam formed to sport, These shapes once lived in supleness and pride, And then, to decorate this wonderous court, Were stolen from the waves and petrified; Or, moulded by some imitative gnome, And scaled all o'er with gems, they were but stone, Casting their showers ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... fixing on those most sweet words Alice had brought to her memory: "Fear not; only believe." When Miss Fortune returned Ellen was quietly asleep again in her rocking-chair, with her face very pale, but calm as an evening sunbeam. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... birthday it was the habit of the scholars to present him with flowers, and I had worked a beaded watch-chain, and enclosed it in a sparkling shell-box, with his initials graved on the lid. He entered that day in a mood that made him as good as a sunbeam, and each pupil presented her bouquet, till he was hidden at his desk behind a pile of flowers. I waited. Then he demanded thrice, in tragic tones: "Is that all?" The effect was ludicrous, and the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... accordingly, never previously been found possible to measure it in detail—that is, ray by ray. But it is only from the diffraction, or normal spectrum that any true idea can be gained as to the real distribution of energy among the various constituents, visible and invisible, of a sunbeam. The effect of passage through a prism is to crowd together the red rays very much more than the blue. To this prismatic distortion was owing the establishment of a pseudo-maximum of heat in the infra-red, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... nature, which required abundant and invigorating food, was slow of development; the lighter side flourished in the silent, dull house, where nothing else courted the sunbeam. In her childhood and girlhood, Leslie had gone out to school, and although always somewhat marked and individual in character, she had companions, friends, sufficient sympathy and intercourse for an independent, buoyant nature at the most plastic period of ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... beautiful infant, that is cradled so lovingly in my father's arms. Oh! whose do you think that smiling cherub is, with such dark, velvet eyes, and pearly skin, and mouth of heavenly sweetness? It is mine, it is my own darling Rosalie, my pearl, my sunbeam, my flower, my every sweet and ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... well and so cheerful. She is a sunbeam in the family, but the failure of the Confederacy and the triumph of the 'Yankees' is hard to bear,—the wrong having crushed ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... of its species; and its great flat head, protruding sockets, and sparkling eyes, added to the hideousness of its appearance. Every now and then, as it advanced, it threw out its forked tongue, which, moist with poisonous saliva, flashed under the sunbeam like jets of fire. It was crawling directly for the tree on which hung the nest.' The birds seemed to think he meant to climb to their nest, and descended in rage and terror to the lower branches. 'The snake, seeing them approach almost within range of his hideous ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... SUNBEAM.—Do not on any account do so dangerous a thing as to put paraffin oil on your hair. Besides, the very bad smell of the oil would be most offensive to ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... base did move Lights, scintillating, as they met and pass'd. Thus oft are seen, with ever-changeful glance, Straight or athwart, now rapid and now slow, The atomies of bodies, long or short, To move along the sunbeam, whose slant line Checkers the shadow, interpos'd by art Against the noontide heat. And as the chime Of minstrel music, dulcimer, and help With many strings, a pleasant dining makes To him, who heareth not distinct the note; So from the lights, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... forefingers of each hand, fly with unerring aim across the theatre at the lecturer's head, the slumbering student, or any other object worth aiming at—an amusing way of beguiling the hour's lecture, and only excelled by the sport produced, if he has the good luck to sit in a sunbeam, from making a tournament of "Jack-o'-lanthorns" on the ceiling. His locker in the lobby of the dissecting-room has long since been devoid of apron, sleeves, scalpels, or forceps; but still it is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... thee it shall be said, 'This dog watched beside a bed Day and night unweary,— Watched within a curtained room Where no sunbeam broke the gloom ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... that five engines are installed in the ship; these are all of the same type and horsepower, namely, 250 horse-power Sunbeam. R.33 was constructed by Messrs Armstrong, Whitworth, Ltd.; while her sister ship R.34 was built by Messrs Beardmore ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... was a breath of love, a blessing and prayer of Life; every rustling movement was a whisper of love, a promised word of Life; every touch of the breeze was a caress of love, a passionate kiss of Life; every sunbeam was a smile of love, warm with the tender triumph ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... interesting persons I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness, that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Cheswick, that the translatress of the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the authoress of the Essay on Mind, was old enough ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... however small, and however light, buoyant, and ethereal they may seem, are subject to this force: the tiniest speck in a sunbeam and the most volatile vapour, equally with the heaviest metal and the hugest block, the particles of bodies as well as the bodies themselves. The rising of a balloon in the air may seem an exception to this law; but it is not so; for the balloon rises, not because the particles ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... Guest's barn, and quietly unlatching the gate came nearer to examine it. It was worth examining. There was a ground of great shadows and billowy hay; a pile of crimson apples struck out by the light through a crack; two children and a kitten asleep together in a sunbeam; a girl on the floor with a baby crawling over her; a girl in a chocolate-colored dress with yellow leaves in her hair,—her hair upon her shoulders, and ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the goad of animal instinct and started along the beach in mad pursuit of a squealing pig. Carmen dashed after him. As Jose watched her lithe, active little body bobbing over the shales behind the flying animals, she seemed to him like an animated sunbeam sporting ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the courage to sail in their gilded galleys from the Lucrine Lake to their elegant villas on the sea-coast of Puteoli and Cargeta, they compare these expeditions to the marches of Caesar and Alexander. Yet, should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament, in affected language, that they were not born in the regions of eternal darkness. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction they express an exquisite sensibility for any personal ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... away, and two passed away. The frozen lake lay hard and stiff, looking like a sheet of lead, and damp icy mists lay brooding over the land; the great black crows flew about in long rows, but silently; and it seemed as if nature slept. Then a sunbeam glided along over the lake, and made it shine like burnished tin. The snowy covering on the field and on the hill did not glitter as it had done; but the white form, Winter himself, still sat there, his gaze fixed unswervingly ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... human microbes it is!—as far as heaven from earth! If we could really obey the call of that music we should rise on wings and fly to such wonderful worlds!—as it is, we can only hop round and round like motes in a sunbeam and imagine we are enjoying ourselves for an hour or two! But the music means so much more!" She paused, enrapt;—then in a lighter tone went on—"And you think I would marry? I would not marry an emperor if there were one worth having—which there isn't!—and as for Roger Seaton, I certainly ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... she was! When she ran along, singing, her fair golden locks rippling back from her pure brow and rosy cheeks, I thought a sunbeam came and went with her. The secret of Redbud's universal popularity—for everybody loved her—was, undoubtedly, that love which she felt for every one around her. There was so much tenderness and kindness in her heart, that ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... in the poet. Here every reader is at liberty to gratify his own taste, to design for himself just what sort of "summer's day" he likes best; to choose his own scenery, dispose his lights and shades as he pleases, to solace himself with a rivulet or a horse-pond, a shower or a sunbeam, a grove or a kitchen-garden, according to his fancy. How much more considerate this than if the poet had, from an affected accuracy of description, thrown us into an unmannerly perspiration by the heat of the atmosphere, forced us into a landscape of his own planning, with perhaps a paltry ...
— English Satires • Various
... ornament in the fashion of a single letter of the alphabet that was embroidered in gold and in scarlet over her heart. Visible at some distance was a little girl, like a bright-apparelled vision, in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct, now like a real child, now like a child's spirit, as the splendor came and went. With violets and anemones and ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... and strawberries,—"only just out;" Fresh strawberries sold under all the house-eaves, And young ladies on sale for the strawberry-leaves: When cards, invitations, and three-cornered notes Fly about like white butterflies—gay little motes In the sunbeam of Fashion; and even Blue Books Take a heavy-wing'd flight, and grow busy as rooks; And the postman (that Genius, indifferent and stern, Who shakes out even-handed to all, from his urn, Those lots which so often decide ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... shall be free, and fly in a sweet sky, and feed on flowers with its faithful mate. Ah me! I am once more happy with my boy. There was no misery but thy absence, sweet! Methinks this dungeon is our bright kiosk! Is that the sunbeam, or thy smile, my love, that ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... enter, and flow forth in airy song. And you, forests, under whose symmetrical shields of dark green the colors of the fawns move, like the waters of the river under its spears,—its cimeters of flag, where, in gleaming circles of steel, the breasts of the wood-pigeons flash in the playful sunbeam, and many sounds, many notes of no earthly music, come over the well-relieved glades,—should not your depth pass into that poet's heart,—in your depths should ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... lives. From it arises a marvelous harmony that resounds deliciously in the very depths of my heart. I live in all that surrounds me. I recognize myself in every manifestation of Nature, in the various forms of the beings about me, as a sunbeam that sparkles in the million dew-drops that reflect it.... Within me Nature is flesh, nerves, muscles; without, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... though a sunbeam had touched it. She needed not to reply in words. A few minutes later, and we were walking together through the wood, and had quickly reached the church, where the chiming of the bell told us that we should not be disappointed ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... fitting that you should present yourself to Madonna Romola with a rusty chin and a tangled zazzera. Nothing that is not dainty ought to approach the Florentine lily; though I see her constantly going about like a sunbeam amongst the rags that line our corners—if indeed she is not more like a moonbeam now, for I thought yesterday, when I met her, that she looked as pale and worn as that fainting Madonna of Fra Giovanni's. You must see to it, my bel erudito: she keeps too many ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... because thou lovedst mirkness here, for aye to be in sin, there shalt thou feel such thick mirkness that thou canst grip it; and because here thou didst rest thyself in sin against GOD'S will, there shalt thou shed more tears than there are motes in a sunbeam. Thou shalt suffer pain ever after pain, ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... these things? Well, my Polly had them all, and, besides, a saucy freckled nose, a crown of fluffy, reddish-yellow hair, and a shower of coaxing little pitfalls called dimples round her pretty mouth. She made you think of a sunbeam, a morning songbird, a dancing butterfly, or an impetuous little crocus just out after the first spring shower. Dislike her? You couldn't. Approve of her? You wouldn't always. Love her? Of course; you couldn't help ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... heat, quivers to the sound of lutes: Half shaded, half sunlit, a great bowl of fruits Glistens purple and golden: the flasks of wine Cool in their panniers of snow: silks muffle and shine: Dim velvet, where through the leaves a sunbeam shoots, Rifts in a pane of scarlet: fingers tapping the roots Keep languid time to the ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... firefly dance (Along an island's shadowy brink Where rippling waters, restless waters, Sing their low, unchanging song Upon the pebbles all night long). Thou art a flower whose smile hath made A sunbeam pierce the forest shade; Thou art a rose that fragrant grows To beautify the darksome glade And sweeten every breeze that blows. Anpetusapa! wilt thou give The promise that shall make me live As I have never lived ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... thought, this idol, be brought To nearer and closer inspection— Alas! 'tis a dream! 'tis a straying sunbeam, Of far ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... is the one who held your hand and called you a sunbeam. Gerald's mother, you know. Hat can't abide her; says she's a pussy-cat. Of course Mr. Gooch will be here ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... no easy task for her to stem the tide of difficulties and oppositions from without, for from first to last of her diligent life she had many trials to endure. Both sunbeam and shadow crossed her pathway; but her errors were not uncommon to humankind; moreover, she was very patient under misconception. "It is always fair," said Henry Ward Beecher, "to credit a man at his best,—let his enemies tell of his worst." Another writer remarks: "To get a ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... earth, is compound. The air you breathe, simple as it seems, is composed of three gases, and is besides full of what Huxley calls "a stirabout" of millions of seeds of animalculae and motes of dust visible in the sunbeam. That hydrant water you are about to swallow is a rich aquarium full of all manner of monsters, which the oxy-hydrogen microscope will exhibit to your terrified gaze, devouring each other alive. Should you get rid of them by evaporating your ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... animals, birds, insects, and flowers which are, apparently without rhyme or reason, placed in one great disarray in the Stuart pictures is said to have been heraldic and symbolic. The sunbeam coming from a cloud, the white falchion, and the chained hart are heraldic devices belonging to ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... Narvaez and his two companions saw that they were foiled, and, striking fiercely at Claude, who fell beneath their united blows, they turned to flee. But they had lost a second too much. That last blow was their ruin. Charles was upon them like a whirlwind. His sword flashed like a destroying sunbeam, and two others fell lifeless on the road, while their steeds galloped wildly away. De Narvaez turned to face his foe; and his dark face blanched beneath the fierce eye of the French giant. It was but a moment. Charles crossed swords with him; ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... is her heavy silken hair, Which she binds with scarlet blossoms—with strings of wampum rare; And the crimson hue that flushes her soft though dusky cheek Is like the sunbeam's parting blush upon the mountain peak. O, never since Niagara first thundered down in pride Had the Spirit of its ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe, and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much dwelt on in the middle ages:—the monastic path, going towards heaven straight as a sunbeam; the secular, twining its way through a tortuous difficult course—the 'broad way,' tending downward to the abyss. To his terrified apprehension, he had abandoned the direct and narrow path for the fatal road, and there might at any moment be captured, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the part of a base runner or a dancing sunbeam that gets into a fielder's eyes at some critical time in the play may cost a game; indeed, it has on more than one occasion, and yet to the man who simply judges the game by the reports that may read in the papers the thing has apparently a "fishy" ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... the sun, he bored a tiny hole in the wall, and a thin sunbeam gleamed through. Then, taking a few grains of sand he blew them through the hole and in the sunbeam they ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... one window infinitely so. A single sunbeam shone coldly in through the latter and lit up the well-scrubbed bare floor. There was nothing but the plainest of "fixings" in the apartment, but they had been set in position by the deft hand of a woman of taste. The bed on which ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... to walk aside, and cool yourself in them there green arbours, and I will be with you as quick as directly, with a glass of lemonade or cherry brandy?' So says you to me, dropping a curtsey a la mode, 'With ineffable pleasure, sir;' and away you trip into the shade like a sunbeam. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... The gloom of this eternal cell, which never Knew sunbeam, and the sallow sullen glare Of the familiar's torch, which seems akin[bl] To darkness more than light, by lending to The dungeon vapours its bituminous smoke, Which cloud whate'er we gaze on, even thine eyes— No, not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... was not quite so easy to feel genial. She entered the shop. The apprentice sate there at work, busily trimming a fine rice straw bonnet for the lodger within. She looked up joyously at Emilie's approach. She thought how often that kind German face had been to her like a sunbeam on a dull path; how often her musical voice had spoken words of counsel, and comfort, and sympathy, to her in her hard life. How she had pressed her hand when she (the apprentice) came home one night and told her, "My poor mother is dead," and ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... perhaps be said, and said here, as to my share in its composition. It is now twelve years ago since my friend—then Mrs. Brassey—asked my advice and assistance in arranging the Diary she had kept during the eleven months' cruise of the 'Sunbeam.' This assistance I gladly gave, and she and I worked together, chiefly at reducing the mass of information gathered during the voyage. I often felt it hard to have to do away with interesting and amusing matter in order to reduce the book even to the size in which it appeared. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... with a burst of energy that surprised me—"she did not die! She left me many, many months ago, it seems like years now. My Edie went out one afternoon to walk, like a beautiful sunbeam as she always was, and—and—she never ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... for a few weeks in the summer, to the unspeakable rejoicing of the whole family; but it was a break of light in a cloudy day; the clouds closed again. Only now and then a stray sunbeam of a letter found ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... spirit!—as if it mattered to Walden whether she was angry or not! He saw her well enough,—he noted her face 'red as a rose,' with its mobile play of expression, set in its frame of golden-brown hair,—it flitted, sunbeam-like between his eyes and the 'Book of Common Prayer'—and, when he ceased reading, while the village choir, rendered slightly nervous by the presence of 'the quality,' chanted the 'O come let us sing unto the Lord,' he was conscious of a sudden lassitude, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... give the little diagram originally drawn by Newton, to explain the experiment by which he first learned the composition of light. A sunbeam is admitted into a darkened room through an opening, H, in a shutter. This beam when not interfered with will travel in a straight line to the screen, and there reproduce a bright spot of the same shape as the hole in the shutter. If, however, a prism of glass, A B C, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... woodlands. Soon they stood Where sea and river met, and trod a path Wet with salt spray, and drank the clement breeze, And saw the quivering of the green gold wave, And, far beyond, that fierce aggressor's bourn, Fair haunt for savage race, a purple ridge By rainy sunbeam gemmed from glen to glen, Dim waste of wandering lights. The sun, half risen, Lay half sea-couched. A neighbouring height sent forth Welcome of baying hounds; and, close at hand, They reached ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... though the group of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart. Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about me, and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... their dazzling maze of frosty filaments shines a painted window in palpitation; its pulses of color interwoven in motion, intermittent in fire,—emerald and ruby and pale purple and violet melting into a blue that is not of the sky, but of the sunbeam;—purer than the crystal, softer than the rainbow, and brighter ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... soul was as clear as this September day, and she knew that Rodd was as clear.... Of all that she had left she did not even think, so worthless was it. A career, money, power, influence? With love, the smile of a happy child, a sunbeam dancing into a dark room, a bunch of hedge-row flowers are treasures of more worth than all these, joys that give moments of perfection wherein all is revealed and nothing ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... on Birdalone's outstretched arms the raiment she had brought with her, and it was as if the sunbeam had thrust through the close leafage of the oak, and made its shadow nought a space about Birdalone, so gleamed and glowed in shifty brightness the broidery of the gown; and Birdalone let it fall to earth, and passed over her hands and arms the fine smock sewed in yellow and white silk, so ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... I grew surly and having made an end of my rough surgery, I went and cast myself upon my bed of straw and, lying there, watching the sunbeam creep upon the wall, I fell to pondering this problem, viz: How came I thus striving to soothe the woes of this man I had hunted all these years to his destruction; why must I pity his hurts ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... in fairies, which forms so large a part of the folklore of Western Europe, is found among the American races. The Ojibbeways see thousands of fairies dancing in a sunbeam; during a rain myriads of them bide in the flowers. When disturbed they disappear underground. They have their dances, like the Irish fairies; and, like them, they kill the domestic animals of those who offend them. The Dakotas also ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... the beating storm, But fled like a sunbeam, white and frail, To the sea, to the air, somewhere, somewhere — I have not ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Color soft and rich as the downy side of a peach, bloomed upon her cheek, which rested against the palm of one plump little hand. Her chin was dimpled, and around her pretty mouth lay a soft smile that just parted its redness, as the too ardent sunbeam ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Christ is soon coming into his kingdom. Then the thief will be remembered, be raised from the dead, and be with Christ in that paradise into which he will then introduce all his people. Thus all is as clear as a sunbeam, when the text is freed from the ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... without wind, without character—one of the days on which Nature seems to take no interest in herself and creates no interest in others. The sky was overcrowded with low, ragged clouds, without discernible order or direction. Nowhere a yellow sunbeam glinting on any object, but vast jets of misty radiance shot downward in far-diverging lines toward the world: as though above the clouds were piled the waters of light and ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... dress, 5 I clink the gilded chains of politesse, Nor ask thy boon what time I scheme Unholy Pleasure's frail and feverish dream; Nor yet my view life's dazzle blinds— Pomp!—Grandeur! Power!—I give you to the winds! 10 Let the little bosom cold Melt only at the sunbeam ray of gold— My pale cheeks glow—the big drops start— The rebel Feeling riots at my heart! And if in lonely durance pent, 15 Thy poor mite mourn a brief imprisonment— That mite at Sorrow's faintest sound Leaps from its scrip with an elastic bound! But oh! if ever song thine ear Might soothe, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... visits was to Alfred like losing a sunbeam, and his spirit felt very dreary after he had heard this sentence. Ellen knew her well enough to suspect that she was very sorry, but that she could not help herself; and Mrs. King caught the brother and sister making such grumbling speeches to each other about the old lady's ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... influence, even by the expression of his countenance, though he may speak no word. Where can we find a circle that is not shadowed, as by a cloud, if one countenance appears within it darkened by sullenness, ill-humor, or discontent? Where one that is not warmed and cheered, as by a sunbeam, if one enters it whose features glow with good-humor, contentment, and satisfaction? Then does not the command to love our neighbor make us even responsible for the expressions our faces wear? In relation to the plea for recreation and amusement, it can ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... rejoiced to see Mehetabel again in the house. He made her sit beside him. He took her hand in his, and patted it. A pleasant smile, like a sunbeam, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... a graceful "picture" hat of black velvet, adorned with one drooping pale grey plume. A small knot of roses nestled among the delicate lace on her bodice, and the diamond dove-pendant Lord Blythe had given her sparkled like a frozen sunbeam against the ivory whiteness of her throat. She glanced at herself in the mirror with a smile,—wondering if "he" would be pleased with her appearance,—"he" had been what is called "difficult" of late, finding fault with some of the very points of her special ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... necessary—to work in a laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly come by without a Christian effort, of "Sunbeam." But, oh! I have a large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working day, all over the "civilized," world to keep people "civilized." The labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons and thread manufactured ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Young ladies, and strawberries,—"only just out;" Fresh strawberries sold under all the house-eaves, And young ladies on sale for the strawberry-leaves: When cards, invitations, and three-cornered notes Fly about like white butterflies—gay little motes In the sunbeam of Fashion; and even Blue Books Take a heavy-wing'd flight, and grow busy as rooks; And the postman (that Genius, indifferent and stern, Who shakes out even-handed to all, from his urn, Those lots which so often decide if our day Shall ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... seraph tall, Of indolent imperturbable regard, Stood in the Tavern door to drink. As the first Lifted his glass to let the warm light melt In the slow bubbles of the wine, a sunbeam, Red and broad as smouldering autumn, smote Down through its mystery; and a single fleck, The tiniest sun-mote settling through the air, Fell on the grape-dark surface and ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the aery dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... a most impulsive creature, however, quick and variable in her moods, unselfish in her character. Suddenly it dawned upon her that it was not fair to the rest of the party that she should be so dull. She had always been considered the sunbeam at home; why should she not try to become the ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... by the storm stricken low, A sunbeam thou seest through the shade Where Order and Peace are throned 'neath the smile Of a royal sisterly Maid:— For hope in the breast of the girl has her nest, Ever trusting, and ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... A sunbeam shooting between the branches just glinted on the case, the polished metal of which lighted up like a looking-glass. The monkey, with the frivolity peculiar to his species, instantly had his attention distracted. His ideas, if such ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... Could she confess to him? It seemed as if his heart would break when he thought of her; so many recollections passed through his soul. He saw her a lively, laughing, petulant child; many a loving word, which she had said to him in the fullness of her heart, shot like a sunbeam through his breast and soon all ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... and myself had cast To stop him as he outward pass'd; But, lighter than the whirlwind's blast, He vanish'd from our eyes, Like sunbeam on the billow cast ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... tumbled cascades of silvery-gleaming China silk, the shimmering brocade pricked into luminous beads by a slanting sunbeam; while portraits of every epoch smiled through their yellowed varnish from frames ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the setting of the sun leave all here lustreless and dark and gloomy, although that must arise again to-morrow, what must the setting do of one who shall arise no more for ever; whose light of life was to one heart, what the sunbeam was to the streamlet, but which, unlike that sunbeam, shall never shine on the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... difficulty in persuading a friend that Miss Barrett was old enough to be introduced into society." Miss Mitford added that she was "certainly one of the most interesting persons" she had ever seen; "of a slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam." ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... conceivable degree; yet a single vertebra is the pattern and representation of the framework of them all, from eels to elephants. The identity reaches still further,—across a mighty gulf of being,—but bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the die of the same primitive conception, and differ ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... upheaval of mountains, and, with mineralogy, the laws of crystallization. With chemistry, it analyzes, decomposes, and compounds the elements. If, like Canute, it cannot arrest the tidal wave, it is subjecting it to laws and formulas. Taking the sunbeam for its pencil, it pictures man's own image, and the scenery of the earth and the heavens. Has science any limits or horizon? Can it ever penetrate the soul of man, and reveal the mystery of his existence and destiny? It is certainly exploring ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and her face became quite still. I held my breath for a long time to listen to hers. Then I breathed hard, as though I could give her my breath, but when I looked at her more closely I saw that she had breathed her last. Her eyes were wide open, and seemed to be looking at a sunbeam which was coming towards her like a long arrow. Swallows flew past the window and flew back again, chirruping like little girls, and my ears were filled with sounds which I had never heard before. I looked up to the windows of the dormitories, hoping that somebody would hear what ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... too late. Stop a moment; does not that sunbeam yonder, just by the side of the town, glitter on ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the day, Behold, I pace amidst the gloom: Darkness is ever round my way, With little space for sunbeam room. ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... at me! It is my quarrel." He threw himself from his saddle, and his blade flashed forth like a sunbeam. ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... centres in his use, and is complete. If for him there is not a future, why were the instincts of his nature given? Why the power to learn so much? To trace in the planetary system divine wisdom, and divine power; to see and know the same in the mite which floats in the sunbeam? If this is all he is ever to know, does this complete a destiny for use? if so, for what? Can it be, simply to propagate his species, and perish? and was all this grand creation of the earth, and all things therein, made to ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... illustrate that the world was all alike, nothing but trees, trees and trees—great trees rising as high as an arrow shot to the sky, lifting their crowns intertwining their branches, pressing and crowding one against the other, until neither the sunbeam nor shaft of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... ignorance. Mr. Winthrop don't regard me of enough importance to be intrusted with the merest trifles of everyday life, I thought, sorrowfully; but just then my eye fell on the ring, when it flashed into my gloomy heart a ray of light brighter than any sunbeam. ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... elbow, and laid a quiet hand on her mistress's arm. "Sure we would all like it, Mam!" she said in her soothing, even tones. "'T would be like a sunbeam in the house, so it would. You'd better let the ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... with dazed, smiling eyes on the sunbeam. His hair was cropped close like a convict's, which accentuated the leanness of his face and the taut, rigid lines about his mouth. Under his discolored uniform, the body was spare almost to the point of emaciation. Through ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... man's love" had been very precious to her,—but it had not fulfilled all her heart's longing, though she considered herself an entirely commonplace woman. And what sort of a man would it be that could hold Morgana? As well try to control a sunbeam or a lightning flash as the restless vital and intellectual spirit that had, for the time being, entered into feminine form, showing itself nevertheless as something utterly different and superior to women as ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... in the dining-room grate; the golden light was dancing a jig all over the walls, hiding behind the curtains, coquetting with the silver, and touching the primroses on the plates to a perfect sunbeam; for father and mother were coming. Tom and Gypsy and Winnie were all three running to the windows and the door every two minutes and dressed in their very "Sunday-go-to-meeting best;" for father and mother were coming. Tom ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of her uncle's horses. She had too many distressing matters to think of for so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind. He danced there like the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below. What would be his opinion of Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... field and hill, Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes; As if the music of a god's good-will Had taken on material attributes In blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam, That runs its silvery scales from stream to stream; In sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly, A golden note, vibrates then flutters on— Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of Pan, That have assumed a visible entity, And drugged the air with beauty so, a Faun, Behold, I seem, and am ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... said, after her mother had kissed her, "Why has papa don away? I 'ove my papa ever so much, and I asked him, before he went away, if he 'oved oo and Eddie and Allie, and he taid he did, and that he 'oved me, his 'ittle sunbeam, too, and ett he has don and left us all. I am so sorry papa ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... with her bannered hosts in cloth of gold, and moonrise with her innumerable helmets and shields and swords and ensigns of silver, the morning and the night being the two buttresses from which are swung a bridge of cloud suspended on strands of sunbeam, all the glories of the sky passing to and fro with airy ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... into me to-day—I feel cross, without the least bit of reason for so feeling. I guess I'm not well, for I'm sure I've felt like one great long sunbeam, I don't know how many months, and it doesn't ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... read the inscription; A veil hath enveloped my sight, What though through the painted windows Glows brightly the sunbeam's light. Thus gleams, O hall of my fathers, Thy image so bright in my mind, From the earth now vanished, the ploughshare Leaves ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... a dismal place, a low, wet valley, densely shaded and overgrown by trees, whose thick foliage scarcely admitted a single sunbeam to penetrate to the earth beneath. This gloomy passage was about half a mile in extent, and at its dark center the villains had posted themselves. Their plans were all fully matured, even down to the minute details. ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... reached the village. It was surrounded by high stone walls, which every now and then the dark spiral forms of a cypress or a cedar would overtop, and in the more distant and elevated part rose a tall palm tree, bending its graceful and languid head, on which the sunbeam glittered. It was the first palm that Tancred had ever seen, and his heart throbbed as he beheld ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... "Diana" among women, cold, passionless, correct, and strong-minded. Amoret is the "Venus," but without the licentiousness of that goddess, warm, loving, motherly, and wifely. Belphoebe was a lily; Amoret a rose. Belphoebe a moonbeam, light without heat; Amoret a sunbeam, bright and warm and life-giving. Belphoebe would go to the battle-field, and make a most admirable nurse or lady-conductor of an ambulance; but Amoret would prefer to look after her husband and family, whose comfort would be her first care, and whose love she would seek ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... It was a strange group that he peeped in upon, where the old family portraits seemed looking down with haughty contempt upon the slumbering invaders of their dignified solitude. The soubrette was the first to awake, starting up as a warm sunbeam shone caressingly full upon her face. She sprang to her feet, shook out her skirts, as a bird does its plumage, passed the palms of her hands lightly over her glossy bands of jet-black hair, and then seeing that the baron was quietly observing her, with eyes ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... church-bell, Mount to yon tall citadel, And its tallest donjon tower! To your mountain, eagle old, Mount, whose brow so white and cold, Kisses the last ray of even! And, O thou that lov'st to mark Morn's first sunbeam pierce the dark, Mount, O mount, thou joyous lark— Joyous lark, O mount to heaven! And now say, from topmost bough, Towering shaft, and peak of snow, And heaven's arch—O, can you see One white plume that like a star, Streams along the plain ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... transitory, so evanescent, as that of a great advocate. The very wand that enchants us is magical. Its effects can be felt; it influences our actions; it controls and possesses us; but to define it, or tell what it is, or how it produces these effects, is as far beyond our power as to imprison the sunbeam. In the presence of such majestic power we can only ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... desired a contrast to Sarah, there was Shirley. Shirley who sat in the wastebasket and beamed upon an approving world. Six year old Shirley was a born sunbeam and her brief fits of temper only seemed to intensify the normal sunshine of her disposition. She smiled and she coaxed answering smiles from the severest mortal; she dimpled and laughter bubbled up to meet her chuckling ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... as he pronounced these words, and for the first time he now perceived what it was that made his manner so irresistible. It was the smile, that changing and varying smile, which yet never entirely left the noble features. It seemed to mingle in all he said, like a warm and soothing sunbeam; and as the chaplain constrained himself to alter his opinion under its influence, he felt that the muscles of his mouth involuntarily assumed ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... arid sands of Egypt, you would have more chance of melting her. The winged words might fly uninterruptedly from your lips for a whole Olympiad; you could not move my resolution in the slightest. A heart of brass dwells in this marble breast of mine. Die or kill! When the sunbeam which has passed through the curtains shall touch the foot of this table let your choice have been ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... hours he spends upon a fragrant fir; His merry 'chink,' his happy 'Kiss me, dear,' Each moment sounded, keeps the copse astir. Loudly he challenges his rivals near, Anon aslant down to the ground he springs, Like to a sunbeam ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... her delicate eyebrows. She was wearing no hat, as it was more comfortable to recline against the cushions with uncovered head, but a fluffy white parasol belonging to her hostess was placed by her side, in case an obtrusive sunbeam penetrated the branches overhead. "I never know where the sun is going to move next. Men always do, don't they? I think it is so clever of them!" Madame had declared in her charming, inconsequent fashion as she fluttered away. Elma did not need the parasol as a shade, but it came in very ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... himself there was not a soul in his bedroom. The morning sun was streaming in at the window through the lower blind, and a quivering sunbeam, bright and keen as the sword's edge, was flashing on the glass bottle. He heard the rattle of wheels— so there was no snow now in the street. The lieutenant looked at the ray, at the familiar furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was to laugh. His chest and stomach heaved with ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... a princess who had such a beautiful head of hair, streaming down in curls to her feet, and brilliant as a sunbeam, that she was universally called the Fair One with Golden Locks. A neighbouring king, having heard a great deal of her beauty, fell in love with her upon hearsay, and sent an ambassador with a magnificent suite to ask her in marriage, bidding ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... the sun or blackened by the clay? It is good for you and for me to see them here, and to realize how soon all men are forgotten, how quickly their bones, mingling with others, give no more clue to the individual life to which they once belonged than a particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does to the matter ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... here. At morn I see Along the roofs the eldest sunbeam peep,— I live in daylight, limitless and free, While you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... sat still, pondering. The other men went out by and by and the room was quiet except for the rumble of traffic in the street and the rattle of an electric fan. A waiter pulled down a blind to shut out a bright sunbeam and Thorn found the shade and softened noises from ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... carried on frames attached to the car. Sunbeam engines originally supplied the motive power, but at a later date a 220 horse-power Renault was fitted aft and a 100 horse-power, Berliet forward. With the greater engine power the ship's capabilities ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... must have been born a sunbeam, I am so fine! It seems to me as if the sunbeams were always looking under the water for me. Ah, I am so fine that my own mother cannot find me! If I had my old eye which broke off, I believe I could weep; but I can't—it is not ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... oneself; and that everything has a cause? Truths of that kind we all acknowledge because they accord with all our reason. But that God appeared on Mount Sinai to Moses, or that Buddha flew up on a sunbeam, or that Mahomet went up into the sky, and that Christ flew there also—on matters of that kind we are ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... he was, the warriors were quicker, and the darkened slit became light with the noiseless speed of a twinkling sunbeam. The Indians needed no second ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... extended, to burst into rollicking melody. "I think it's a splendid book and you're a nangel to give it to me when you meant it for someone else. But it ought to have a name. Just dairy sounds so milky and barnlike; and I don't like 'sunbeam book' real well, either. What ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... corries,—supremely grand in their impressive desolation, uplifting their stony peaks around us like the walls and turrets of a gigantic fortress, and rising so abruptly and so impenetrably encompassing the black stretch of water below, that it seemed impossible for a sunbeam to force its shining entrance into such a circle of dense gloom. Yet there was a shower of golden light pouring aslant down one of the highest of the hills, brightening to vivid crimson stray clumps of heather, touching into pale green some patches of moss and lichen, and giving the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... ENTIRELY, is the grand principle of life, to be written upon the sacred standard of all temperance movements, and under which the contending host may be as sure of victory as if, like Constantine, they saw inscribed with a sunbeam upon the cloud, In hoc signo vinces.[F] But such being the eminent importance of total abstinence, it deserves to be presented in detail. We begin, therefore, with ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... herself into his arms. "Don't cry, don't cry, my dear Emily," said he, the tears rolling down his rich ruddy cheek, "we shall find them again. We will go in search of them. Remember, I too am a sufferer. Have I not lost my right hand, the sunbeam of my house, my sweet, little, mischievous, pretty, fidgety Gatty," and he raised his eyes reverently to heaven, as if to invoke a blessing on his lost child; and this was Gatty's Father, who had left his court, and had come down purposely with Sir Walter ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... through the sky, Like the zephyr's softest sigh. Ah, then, who'd dream that aught so fair, Was fleeting as the Summer air? Yet in that hour Disease, so deceitful, stole upon thee, As blight upon a flower; And thou art dead! And thy spirit's past away. Like a dew-drop from the spray, Like a sunbeam from the mountain, Like a bubble from the fountain; And thou art now at rest, In thy damp, narrow cell, With the clod heap'd o'er thy breast; ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... opinion was the young and impetuous Alexander Hamilton. "The sacred rights of mankind," he exclaimed, "are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human destiny by the hand of divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... age, together with a lady who seemed to claim relationship to both, and to have the little one especially under her charge. Tom had often caught glimpses of this little girl, for she was one of those busy, tripping creatures, that can be no more contained in one place than a sunbeam or a summer breeze; nor was she one that, once seen, could be easily forgotten. Her form was the perfection of childish beauty, without its usual ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... France. I trembled lest Eugenia should receive the tale, and flew in person to prevent her terrors. It was evening when I reached the hills of Languedoc, and looked impatiently towards my cheerful home beneath. I looked—the last sunbeam glared redly upon smoking ruins! Oh! oh! the blood now chills and curdles round my heart—the wolves of war had rushed by night upon my slumbering fold—fire and sword had desolated all. I called upon my wife and my infant. I trembled on their ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.—MILTON: The Doctrine and Discipline ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... of business hours. In the office, for the sake of discipline, I frequently adopt a querulous manner, finding it necessary in dealing with office-boys, but the moment I leave shop behind me I become a different individual entirely, and have been called a moteless sunbeam by those who have seen only that side of my character. This, by-the-way, must be regarded as a confidential communication, since I am at present engaged in preparing a vest-pocket edition of the philosophical ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... HERALD for May presents us with a highly interesting account of Robert Louis Stevenson's career as an amateur journalist, together with a facsimile reproduction of the cover of "The Sunbeam Magazine", Stevenson's hand-written periodical. The column of reminiscences, containing letters from various old-time amateurs, is extremely inspiring to the younger members, showing how persistently the amateur spirit adheres to all who have truly acquired it. "Nita at the Passing Show" is a ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... wast Peleus' son, and next Menander; Then thine own self; next, a sunbeam shalt be; And nine score annual ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... a very creditable style, and manifests a desire to learn to do other kinds of work. She is neat and orderly in her habits, and ever acts in a ladylike manner, while in disposition she is cheerful as a sunbeam, and as playful as a kitten. For about one year, at irregular intervals, a young minister of the name of J. B. Howell, devoted one hour each week to her instruction, and she made some advancement, novel as his method was; but in June last he went to Brazil as a missionary, since which ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... in the sunbeam, In gums weep the trees And in dye; And if mourn meadow and stream— ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... not gainless is the loss; A glorious sunbeam gilds thy sternest frown, And while his country staggers neath the Cross, ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... hero left the shade, Again the deer before him strayed. With surer hope and stronger will The hunter longed his prey to kill. Then as his soul impatient grew, An arrow from his side he drew, Resplendent at the sunbeam's glow, The crusher of the smitten foe. With skillful heed the mighty lord Fixed well shaft and strained the cord. Upon the deer his eyes he bent, And like a fiery serpent went The arrow Brahma's self had framed, Alive with sparks that hissed and flamed, Like Indra's flashing ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... burn upon the hearth and the candle sink to its socket,—in short, go to sleep again in spite of pressing work. He can curse the expectant boots which stand holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears. He can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous summons of the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place, saying: "Yes, I was in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day. Yesterday was ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... terrible and sinful that Damie should talk so lightly—here, where she felt as if she were in church, or even in eternity—quite out of the world, and yet in the very midst of it. She herself opened the inside door; the room was dark as a grave, for the shutters were closed. A single sunbeam, shining through a crack in the wall, fell on the angel's head on the tile stove in such a way that the angel seemed to be laughing. Amrei crouched down in terror. When she looked up again, her uncle had opened one of the shutters, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... when he would draw her near To his eager heart's content, As a sunbeam slips from the finger-tips She slipped from his ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... the fogs were drawn upwards. Nepenthe became tangible—an authentic island. It gleamed with golden rocks and emerald patches of culture. A cluster of white houses, some town or village, lay perched on the middle heights where a playful sunbeam had struck a pathway through the vapours. The curtain was lifted. Half lifted; for the volcanic peaks and ravines overhead were still ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... voice of the tea-kettle died down to a plaintive simmer, simmer, and I heard Sunbeam say, "He's asleep." She always thinks I'm asleep ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... admit that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognise a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... intellect at all, and yet they were implied, as it were, behind the others. Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam or cast the shadow. Took into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and see the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its details of the natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the human. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... even greater than her beauty. She talked well and gracefully—the play of her features, the movement of her lips, were something not to be forgotten; and her smile seemed to break like a sunbeam over her whole face—it ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... road—if road it could be called—wound for the first five miles through the heart of an immense forest, and being, in every sense of the word, a by-path, was completely overshadowed by projecting branches of trees, so closely interwoven, as to prevent a single sunbeam from making its way, even at noon, within the arch. We continued to move on, therefore, long after the sun had risen, without being sensible that there was not a cloud in the sky to screen us from his influence; whilst a heavy moisture continually emitted from the grass and weeds on both sides ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... was falling, in all forests there was a rumour, and among the rocks where I lay I caught a flutter of wings. The east grew rosy; out of the mysterious sea rose a golden ghost hidden in glory, till suddenly across the world a sunbeam fell. It touched the mountains one by one; higher and higher crept the tremulous joy of light, confident and ever more confident, opening like a flower, filling the world with gladness and light. It was ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... helped him to strike before he himself could be hurt. Once he was made blind, but as he wandered by the seashore the music of the singing waves which were his father's home gave him comfort and led him to a friend who guided him to Apollo. One bright sunbeam from Apollo's crown touched Orion's eyes and they saw more clearly than ever before. Nearly everything was Orion's friend, for with his great strength he was always ready to help those who could not ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... a rough stone, rising to a great height, shaped like a pillar in the stadium; and it tapers upwards in imitation of a sunbeam, keeping its quadrilateral shape, till it rises almost to a point, being made smooth by ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... angels rejoice in;—now, Maud, we must go. But to Benny: "I'm thinking to-night I may come And bring my friend with me, to see your new home." "O, if you will!" says the child with delight Rippling over his face like a sunbeam—and quite As joyously, Jenny: "O, madam, please do, For we've something at home that we ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... you foolhardy sunbeam caught With a single splash from my ewer! You that would mock the best pursuer, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... young English reader may benefit as much by the perusal of this work as Master Lucien, otherwise "Sunbeam," did by his journey through the Cordilleras of Mexico, and that they may enjoy the information herein imparted upon the wonderful works of the Creator, is the sincere ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... cried Gerard lustily. "I shall win to Rome yet. Holy St. Bavon, what a sunbeam of innocence hath shot across our bloodthirsty road! Forget thee, little Jeanneton? not likely, amidst all this slobbering, and gibbeting, and decanting. Come on, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... agitation in what seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal business intelligently. So might a mote in a sunbeam feel itself ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... end of May there penetrated into the largest of the workrooms that rarest of visitants, a stray sunbeam. Only if the sun happened to shine at given moments could any of its light fall directly into the room I speak of; this afternoon, however, all circumstances were favourable, and behold the floor chequered with uncertain gleam. The workers were ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who the speed of bird and wind And sunbeam's glance will lend to me, That, soaring upward, I may find My resting-place and home in Thee? Thou, whom my soul, midst doubt and gloom, Adoreth with a fervent flame,— Mysterious spirit! unto whom Pertain ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... have emerged,—from which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... meanness, wish yourself away from their fretful cries and noisy sports? Then think that to-morrow may ripen the wicked wish; tomorrow death may lay his hand upon a little fluttering heart and it will be stilled forever. 'Tis then you will miss the sunbeam and the sweet little flower that reflected heaven on the soul. Then cherish the little ones! Be tender with the babes! Make your homes beautiful! All that remains to us of paradise lost, clings about the home. Its purity, its innocence, its virtue, are there, untainted ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... at a little distance, a group of boys were playing, their bare legs and white tunics flashing hither and thither as they ran. One of them, a tall slim lad, whose aureole of ruddy hair seemed to catch every wandering sunbeam, was evidently directing the game, for all seemed to look to him for orders. "A leader of men," smiled the Patriarch to himself, as a vigorous wave of the boy's hand brought all ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... arose,—yes, 't was many years ago, when, by the door of a rough, rude, but serviceable dwelling, a little boy sat on an old man's knee. He was a bright youth, with soft blue eyes, from which his soul looked out and smiled, and hair so beautiful that it seemed to be a dancing sunbeam rather ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... find the nest. He is the most shy, the most elusive of birds, living in the tops of the tallest trees, and flitting from one to another like a sunbeam, showing only a glint of a golden breast as he goes. One is maddened by the medley of calls and scraps of song, the trills and tremolos in the sweetest and most enticing tones, while not able to catch so much as a glimpse of the bonny bird who utters them. His love-song is utterly captivating, ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... sick girl would reply, with a faint, heartbroken smile, which illumined her sorrowful face and showed all the ravages that had been wrought upon it, as a sunbeam, stealing into a poor man's lodging, instead of brightening it, brings out more clearly ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows; 175 I make the netted sunbeam ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... rather than beautiful, but an artist would have revelled in the delicate strength of the softly rounded chin, and the quick bright play of her expression. Her hair, of a deep rich brown, with a bronze shimmer where a sunbeam lay athwart it, swept back in those thick luxuriant coils which are the unfailing index of a strong womanly nature. Her deep blue eyes danced with life and light, while her slightly retrousse nose and her sensitive ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abroad. And indeed it is diffused but not effused. For that diffusion of it is a [-rJo-tc] or an extension. For therefore are the beams of it called [i-m'] from the word [KTEIVEO-Oa,,] to be stretched out and extended. Now what a sunbeam is, thou mayest know if thou observe the light of the sun, when through some narrow hole it pierceth into some room that is dark. For it is always in a direct line. And as by any solid body, that it meets ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... branches, which then, however, spread out at right angles to the stem, making the trees appear like gigantic umbrellas, and covering the whole morass with an impenetrable roof, through which not even a sunbeam could find a passage. On looking behind us, we saw the daylight at the entrance of the swamp, as at the mouth of a vast cavern. The further we went the thicker became the air; and at last the effluvia was so stifling and pestilential, that the torches burnt pale and dim, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... lonely house Ralph's laughter came like the embodied spirit of Youth. It searched out the hidden corners, illuminated the shadows, stirred the silences to music. A sunbeam danced on the stair, where, according to Doctor Dexter's recollection, no sunbeam had ever dared to dance before. Ah, it, was good to ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... like blood that wandered through. Rarely upon that cheek was shed, By health or by youth, one tinge of red, And never closest look could descry, In shine or shade, the hue of her eye, But, as it were made of light, it changed With every sunbeam ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
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