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More "Wordless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wordless horror went up from the wreckers. For a moment they stared at the thing rocking and sidling in their midst, with grotesque motions of life and the face and hands of a terrific death; and then, as one man, they started to splash, beat and plunge their way to the companion-steps. The water was set ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... crowd, Pressing, talked and laughed aloud. Upward with the throng he went; With a heart of discontent, Timed his sullen instrument; Tried to sing of mirth and jest, As the knights around him pressed; But across his heart a pang Struck him wordless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... in tender and illuminating, though wordless, communion with the dead, Katherine did not know. The deepest spiritual experiences, like the most exquisite physical ones, are to be measured by intensity rather than duration. For a space the vision sensibly held her, the so ardently desired presence there incontestibly beside ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... her shaken voice gave him a great start. He faced her. He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time that day. And he grew very pale as he looked. Something wordless passed between them. Now he knew at last what she ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... him a glance of wordless contempt. Beezy ran and tangled herself in the tall young ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... beautiful face was transfigured with joy, aflame with love, radiant with smiles, and her tall figure fleecy white, rimmed in gold. Up the shining path of light she steadily advanced toward his door. Then the Harvester understood, and from his exultant heart burst the wordless petition: ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... they heard his friendly words, and saw the beauty of the fair woman whose hand he held, his face grew so well-beloved to them, that they cried out with so great a voice of cheer, wordless for their very joy, that the timbers of the hall quavered because of it, and it went out into the wild-wood as though it had been the feastful roaring of the ancient gods of ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... quickly checked myself; for Hamilton turned slowly towards me and instead of erect bearing, clear glance, firm mouth, I saw a head that was bowed, eyes that burned like fire, and parched, parted, wordless lips. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... beside Marion Slater, had taken his own wordless rebuke from her. During the train passage, he made the concession of keeping away from Bertram, and grouped himself off in the other double seat. Bertram, sitting with Kate and the engaged couple, spoke but seldom and then languidly. He did not come face to face with Harry Banks again until the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... spirit, and Rodriguez saw the beauty of that far day, framed all about the beauty of one young girl, just as it had been for years in Morano's memory. How shall I tell with words what spirit sang wordless to spirit? We poets may compete with each other in words; but when spirits give up the purest gold of their store, that has shone far down the road of their earthly journey, cheering tired hearts and guiding mortal feet, ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... bid me lift my mean desires From faltering lips and fitful veins To sexless souls, ideal quires, Unwearied voices, wordless strains: My mind with fonder welcome owns One dear dead ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... retreated toward his apartments, the alarming alternative proposed by the merchant repeated itself with a sort of wordless insistence: ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... family at once divided itself into two camps, one on the Colonel's side and one on Kettle's. Anita, of course, sided with her father, and declared he had done perfectly right about Kettle, as he did about everything. Sergeant McGillicuddy was also a faithful adherent of the Colonel's in the wordless warfare that prevailed in the commanding officer's house for the three days in which Kettle enjoyed the hospitality ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... yet warm with a wordless gratitude at the Frenchman's cheer when a figure came lurching toward him and fell into the space Doret had vacated. This man was quite the opposite of the one who had just left; he was old and he was far from robust. He fell face downward and lay motionless. Impulsively Phillips rose and removed ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... as far as Terry's old quarters and passed on to his own house farther down the street. Matak, gloomy and wordless, relieved the Major of his bag at the door. The house was silent, and darkened by drawn pearl-shell shutters. The Major stood a moment at the doorway, half sickened by the unused appearance of the familiar cane chairs, table, desk, and bookcases, then he followed ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... without its grave misgivings, not without its hours of bitter pain, yet happy on the whole. Then Honolulu, all so bright a memory until that hour on the ship—that first horrible premonition of so much misery that was to follow. The San Mateo summer had somehow widened the wordless, mysterious gap between them, and the winter! Julia shuddered as she thought of the winter. Where was her soul while her body danced and dressed and dined and slept through those hot hours? Where was any one's soul in that desperate whirl ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... for a second as if irresolute or uncertain how to treat her. Then, with a wordless sound that needed no interpretation, he pushed back the sleeve from the place whence he had sucked the poison. It showed only a little red now. He bent very low until his lips pressed it again. Then for one burning moment they ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... book for thee; our sweetest honeycomb Of lovesome thought and passion-hearted rhyme, Builded of gold, and kisses, and desire, By that wild poet whom so many a time Our hungering lips have blessed, until a fire Burnt speech up, and the wordless hour had come.' ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... lectured his youths, and treated grown-up men of the world as if they were children. In due course I visited Oxford to give my entertainments—"Humours of Parliament" first; "America in a Hurry" followed a few years afterwards. In the latter I gave a wordless imitation of that eccentric American, Talmage, at the same time carefully pointing out to my audience that I imitated his gestures and voice—not Talmage in the character of a preacher, but as a showman; I was therefore surprised to receive the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... feet. The rough stone on which my toes sank had been covered with metal and I smelled scorching flesh, jerking up my feet with a wordless snarl of rage and fury, hanging in agony by ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away ... O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... he cried. And he saw, perplexed, that Adelaide had risen with a faint wordless cry, and was gazing at him as though she were puzzled and alarmed ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... There was no time to delay. He must go now or never; and the indomitable old warrior stooped over to kiss the child good-bye, though he dare only touch with his lips the golden hair, for fear of waking her. Then in his simple way he breathed a wordless prayer, committing her to God's keeping, and, stealthily letting himself out, made straight for the likeliest part of the headland from which ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... too long and too intimately to disregard them now, uninfluenced by their varying moods. He watched them in sunlight when they were all shining white and violet and soft purple, with great shadows spread over their slopes where the forests stood deepest; and they heartened him, gave him a wordless promise that better times were to come. He saw them swathed with clouds, and felt the chill of their cold aloofness; the world was a gloomy place then, and friendship was all false and love a mockery. He saw them at night—then was he an outcast from everything ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... was gone Mrs. De Peyster lay wordless, limp, all a-shiver. Beside her sat the limp and voiceless Matilda, gasping and staring wildly. How long Mrs. De Peyster lay in that condition she never knew. All her faculties were reeling. These crowding events seemed the wildest series of unrealities; seemed the ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through her mind still whirled wordless outcries of rebellion. Her one brief visit to the city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her. The very conveniences of the compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... to Miss Bruce-Drummond who had met up with them for a week-end at Stirling, "those poor children are so pitifully what Gelett Burgess calls 'the gagged and wordless folk'; it would be so much easier—and safer—for them if they belonged to his 'caste ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... hide around on the outskirts until the killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they deserve—wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once. Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn't all been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they will do it, trusting I suppose to ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... for my presentation had passed. Thereupon he fell, with furious abuse, upon the English, and particularly English women. But I presented the chain to him later, and that day closed for us both with a wordless content, so full ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... watched her hopelessly, for to them the doctor's silence had only one meaning; but the cattleman, standing behind the eldest brother, could not bear the wordless waiting. He felt that if she would rouse and continue to speak, death would be delayed. So he called ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... the grey envelope a full three minutes. Mrs. Brace, wordless, showing no uneasiness as to the outcome, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... leave far below the clanging city; Looking far downward to the glaring street Gaudy with light, yet tired with many feet, In both of us wells up a wordless pity; ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage together. The front door slammed heavily. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to intelligence—secret intelligence, the wordless incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, the cat for the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the eye, and not rather the heart, that identified that shadow in the dusk, among the shoreside lamps? I know not. It was Jim, at least; Jim, come for a last look; and we had but time to wave a valedictory gesture and exchange a wordless cry. This was our second parting, and our capacities were now reversed. It was mine to play the Argonaut, to speed affairs, to plan and to accomplish—if need were, at the price of life; it was his to sit at home, to study the calendar, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... beyond,—such a woman, having deliberately chosen her path, having tested her strength to walk therein, having pronounced that strength all-sufficient, deserved the tribute of confidence, and an even blind respect to her mandates. Besides, compliance with her wishes was a species of voiceless, wordless communication with her; it was sending her a message through some ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... entered the gate of the little house on Bayou Road the next day, there floated out to their ears a wordless song thrilling from the violin, a song that told more than speech or tears or gestures could have done of the utter sorrow and desolation of the little old man. They walked softly up the short red brick walk and tapped at the door. Within, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... her tormentor from her arm. For one moment the wordless young man looked into her eyes; then she staggered toward him. He faced ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... completely guessed and expressed his badly expressed idea. Levin smiled joyfully; he was struck by this transition from the confused, verbose discussion with Pestsov and his brother to this laconic, clear, almost wordless communication of the most ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch." But no such charge can be laid at the door of "Rab and his Friends." The very dumbness of Rab, his mute yearning to help, his brave and loyal ministries in the hospital, doubly affecting because wordless and impotent, lend an appeal to this sketch that few sketches of men and women ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... young lady in appearance, possibly in her early twenties, the boy being at least four years younger. She was not pretty, but as her eyes lighted upon the sisters, she too smiled so pleasantly, they were at once drawn to her, and returned the wordless greeting with more than civility. Then Hope ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... west, without Sancho's knowing it? Suspiciously he watched the two soldiers, the grizzled colonel, the slim lieutenant. They were talking together in low tones, at least the colonel was talking, eagerly, energetically, and with much gesticulation. The junior listened wordless to every word. What had he meant by "the bird had flown?" Why should Nevins "skip?" An unpleasant fear seized upon Sancho. He knew Nevins, at least a Nevins, a captain whom everybody knew, in fact, and ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Fanny had fastened behind her in her mad flight. Mrs. Thornton herself went. And the sound of his well-known and commanding voice, seemed to have been like the taste of blood to the infuriated multitude outside. Hitherto they had been voiceless, wordless, needing all their breath for their hard-labouring efforts to break down the gates. But now, hearing him speak inside, they set up such a fierce unearthly groan, that even Mrs. Thornton was white with fear as she preceded him into the room. He ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... mean that we are finally convinced not by the sort of evidence we are looking for, but by the sort of evidence we are not looking for. We are convinced when we come on a ratification that is almost as abrupt as a refutation. That is the point about the wireless telegraphy or wordless telepathy of the Bedouins. A supernatural trick in a dingy tribe wandering in dry places is not the sort of supernaturalism we should expect to find; it is only the sort that we do find. These rocks of the desert, like the bones ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... loitering herd, grinned a wordless greeting. Andy passed with a casual wave of his hand and took his place on the left flank. From his face Weary guessed that all was well with the claims, and the assurance served to lighten his spirits. Soon he heard Andy singing at the ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... samples and four assayers to every shipment, and buys them, with its allowances for freight, smelting charges and the innumerable expenditures which must be made before money can become money in reality. Fairchild sang louder than ever, a wordless tune, an old tune, engendered in his brain upon a paradoxically happy and unhappy night,—that of the dance when he had held Anita Richmond in his arms, and she had laughed up at him as, by her companionship, she had paid the debt of the Denver ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... tell us from each other; and yet they kept right on, hammering away with what might was left in them. Hammering each other—for we stepped aside and looked on while they rolled, and struggled, and gouged, and pounded, and bit, with the strict and wordless attention to business of so many bulldogs. We looked on without apprehension, for they were fast getting past ability to go for help against us, and the arena was far enough from the public road to be safe ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute moral dignity. But ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... along the landing, and Lotty's steps seemed to go downstairs, and then there seemed to be a brief altercation at the bathroom door—hardly so much an altercation as a chorus of vociferations on one side and wordless determination, Scrap judged, to have a bath ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... a hold the religion of the Ho-don had upon them, for since the time that he had prevented Ta-den and Om-at from quarreling over a religious difference the subject had been utterly taboo among them. He was therefore quick to note the evident though wordless resentment of Ko-tan at the suggestion that he entirely relinquish his throne to his guest. On the whole, however, the effect had been satisfactory as he could see from the renewed evidence of awe upon ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his gaze. "Yogananda, must I bring out into the cold realms of speech the warm sentiments best guarded by the wordless heart?" ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the landscape over to its creator, and, though no word was spoken, there flashed between the eyes of the artist, whose signature gave to a canvas the value of a precious stone and the jeans-clad boy whose destiny was that of the vendetta, a subtle, wordless message. It was the countersign of brothers-in-blood who recognize in each other the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... face she turned toward them, each felt already repaid for any loss of freedom they might experience hereafter, and gave unanimous consent. Upon receipt of which Sylvia felt inclined to dance about the three and bless them audibly, but restrained herself, and beamed upon them in a state of wordless gratitude pleasant to behold. Having given a rash consent, Mark now thought best to offer a few obstacles to enhance its value ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... through that morning. The rose and amber radiance of dawn fell into all the hearts of all the birds; and wordless songs came pulsing up from roots of growing things. The sambhur lifted high his head again and spread the fan of one ear toward the wind, while one breathed twice. Then there fell a sudden rustling on the branches; and swift along the river's brim, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... table I made haste first of all to catch the eye of our waiter, who was also the proprietor of the little inn. I pressed a wordless plea into his hand. "We are eccentric," I murmured in explanation, "and you must look well to ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... beyond all language and all art In thy wild splendour, Canyon marvellous, The secret of thy stillness lies unveiled In wordless worship! This is holy ground; Thou art no grave, no prison, but a shrine. Garden of Temples filled with Silent Praise, If God were blind thy Beauty ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... her rings. The artist, leaning forward in his chair, looked with vague eyes across the room. And no interval of time since his return, no words that had ever passed between them, had been so fraught with significance, so potent in drawing them together as this brief, wordless moment. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... was the result of her loving impulse during the frosty walk down Fifth Avenue. All her sweet, wordless appeals had been in vain. Jack had admired her as he might have admired a marionette; her beauty had meant less to him than her mother's dressmaking; and as she sat alone in her room on that afternoon, having gently ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... high road yesterday, I stopp'd to watch a man near by, ploughing a rough stony field with a yoke of oxen. Usually there is much geeing and hawing, excitement, and continual noise and expletives, about a job of this kind. But I noticed how different, how easy and wordless, yet firm and sufficient, the work of this young ploughman. His name was Walter Dumont, a farmer, and son of a farmer, working for their living. Three years ago, when the steamer "Sunnyside" was wreck'd of a bitter icy night on the west bank here, Walter went out ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... feared in a phosphorescent birch stub, even with the drip of rain from the leaves making stealthy, ghostly footfalls all through the wood and the voice of the east wind in the trees overhead beginning to take up a querulous, wordless complaint that moved back and forth with the footfalls. Foxfire is a common enough phenomenon. It is easy to explain it all as I do now. The strange part of such things is always that, at the time, no ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... doing the same, handed it in his turn to The Bat. Then it was passed on to all the subchiefs, and everyone smoked it in gravity and silence. The smoke circled up in rings against the low roof, and every man sat upon his mat of skins, painted, motionless, and wordless. The young chief, Big Fox, waited. Though his eyes never turned, he saw every detail of the scene, and he was conscious of the tense and breathless silence. He was conscious, too, of the immense dangers that surrounded his comrades and himself, but fear ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... up to the stars. No words came. The cry of her heart was, "O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me." But she was too ignorant to weave it into a prayer. When human hearts look up to God in wordless agony, the Intercessor translates the attitude ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... understand and accept its meaning. She could not play or sing; she looked often in the dog's eyes, wondering if its soul felt as dumb and full as hers; but she could not sing. If she could, what a story she would have told in a wordless way to this man who was coming! All she could do to show that he was welcome was to make crackers. Cooking is a sensual, grovelling utterance of feeling, you think? Yet, considering the drift of most women's lives, one fancies that as pure and deep love syllables itself every day in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... only that his blood showed darkly through the tan. What question had been on her tongue she forgot to ask. Indeed, for the time, I think she forgot the whole English language, and every other—but the strange, wordless language of Keith's ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... happiness from human beings as from Nature, and it was a tie of placid affection that bound her to the McLeans, not of sympathetic union, and her husband was careful never to oppress her with too much of his society. Whether this woman, who had lived a life of such wordless emotion, who had never bestowed a confidence, suddenly blossomed like a rose and took the little new-comer into the gold-dust and fragrance of her heart, or whether there was always between them the thin impalpable division that estranged the past from the present, there was nothing to tell; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... From that world-wide theatre of nodding heads and buzzing whisperers, in which she now beheld herself unpitiably martyred, one door stood open. At any cost, through any stress of suffering, that greasy laughter should be stifled. She closed her eyes, breathed a wordless prayer, and pressed the weapon ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frequent intercourse— some congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of communication—there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank; alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off; the visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicated remembrance, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... brighter in a cloudless sky, as the fishing-smack shot through the water, while the steady dip of the oars seemed to keep time to a wordless tune. In that bright moonlight the sails of the Crow grew whiter and larger with every dip of the oars that were carrying the Pretty Polly so ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... and its units from quarreling. The rest of us found no joy in life, and not too much hope even when Fred's concertina lifted the refrain of missionary hymn-tunes that even the porters knew, and most of us sang, the porters humming wordless melancholy through their noses. (When that happened Lady Saffren Waldon's scorn was something the arch-priests of Babylon would have ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Michael was wordless, he could only kiss her. "That is what made him so delicate—my wretchedness and rushing about," she went on, "and so I was punished because, after three months, God took him back again—my dear little one—just when I was beginning to grow comforted and to love him. He ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... been glad many times since that old John never knew; glad that the frenzied curses that came boiling up out of that inner hell were wordless. I contrived to hold in while Runnels was hurrying me through the station office and past the sleepy sergeant at the desk. But when the cell door had opened and closed for me, and old John's heavy footsteps were no longer echoing ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... she saw Hansie on the scenes once more, the people crowding round her with their questions. Why did she come back? Was she going to stay? Didn't she go to Pretoria yesterday? Who was that with her? etc. Mothers pulled her aside and pointed in wordless grief to their tents, to what lay there in still repose since last night. Children clung to her skirts—"We thought ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... Wordless moans the ancient pine; Lake and mountain give no sign; Vain to trace this ring of stones; Vain the search of crumbling bones Deepest of all mysteries, And the saddest, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... or game or grand scenery, or any adventure by night or day, is the wordless intercourse with rude Nature one has on these expeditions. It is something to press the pulse of our old mother by mountain lakes and streams, and know what health and vigor are in her veins, and how regardless of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear. Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my own ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... the wordless utterance of the prayer for which she had asked, forgetting it had some time before been said; and then her head sunk lower and lower on Arthur's bosom, and there was no sound. Twilight lingered, as loth to disappear, then deepened into night, and the silver lamps within ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... Then there is a wordless shout from Mr. Yardo; a bright dot hurtles across the screen and at the same time I see a streak of blue flame tearing diagonally ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... sentimental, perhaps, who, unconsciously to themselves, draw a kind of inspiration from the noble scene. To such there seems, in those majestic cliffs, sea-swept and forest-crowned, first seen as lighted by the rising sun, a nameless sermon preached, a wordless lesson taught, an everlasting poem sung. And our minds and spirits are calmed, refreshed, and invigorated; while in some dim way we grasp ideas that the silent scene irresistibly conveys to us. Rising within us, as we ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... course,—not his. It was not a simile that was in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,—it was a pang of wordless passion, and then ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... sang all the time she worked, and the gay, pretty, wordless songs floated across the water and across the fields, and woke some old people in their beds as they lay with their windows open, and they turned and crossed themselves, and said, "Dear heart!—this is the eve of the Ascension, and the angels ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends towards wordlessness—that is to say, is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words are crystallized into ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... of slaves scurried out on their missions—evidently their Emir was accustomed to have her orders carried out with promptness—and for long enough Wenlock stood wordless in front of the divan, far more like a criminal than a prospective bridegroom. The lady, with the tube of the water-pipe between her lips, puffed smoke and made no further speech. She had stated her will: the result would follow in ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... it is a caldron of whirling vapors and when the palm-trees bend like coryphees, tossing their arms to the galloping hurricane. But whatever the time of day or the season of the year at which you visit it, the Yumuri will render you wordless with delight, and you will vow that it is the happiest valley men's eyes ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... a comprehensive wave of her muff. And her simplicity thrilled him the more with the knowledge that she shared his feeling. She drew up the fur collar of her cloak, shivered; and, in the wordless harmony that pervaded them, they turned ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of him, externally. She submitted to him, let him take what he wanted and do as he wanted with her. She was like a hawk that sullenly submits to everything. The relation between her and her husband was wordless and unknown, but it was deep, awful, a relation of utter inter-destruction. And he, who triumphed in the world, he became more and more hollow in his vitality, the vitality was bled from within him, as by some haemorrhage. She was hulked like a hawk in a cage, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... days. And listening to these soft, plaintive notes, I bowed my head with eyes brimful of burning tears and heart full of sudden, chilling dread of the future, and glancing furtively towards Diana's beautiful, enraptured face, I clenched my fists and prayed desperate, wordless supplications against any such parting or farewell. And then, in this moment, grief and fear and heart-break were lost, forgotten, swept utterly away as the wailing, tender notes were 'whelmed in the triumphant melody that pealed forth, louder, more sublimely ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... With a harsh, wordless cry of fury Black Jack tore his six-shooter from its resting-place. But Slevin's right hand stirred in unison and it moved like light. Owing to the fact that he carried his gun beneath his left armpit he ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... that morning, but the noise of the train made niceties of statement impossible. She abandoned the argument perforce, and Elsie, left with her retort unanswered, acknowledged its cheapness in her own quick, strong, wordless way. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the trance, but sweet and low The harp breathed out again Its speechless wail, its wordless woe, ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... a garment o'er me; Space all unmeasured, unrecorded time; While seen with inward eye moves on before me Thought's pictured train in wordless pantomime. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... days before there had come a wonderful event in the history of the company's post. A new life was born into the little cabin of Cummins and his wife. After this the silent, wordless worship of their people was filled with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother! She was one of them now, an indissoluble part of their existence—a part of it as truly as the strange lights for ever hovering over the pole, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... muzzle, muffle, suppress, smother, gag, strike dumb, dumfounder; drown the voice, put to silence, stop one's mouth, cut one short. stick in the throat. Adj. aphonous^, dumb, mute; deafmute, deaf and dumb; mum; tongue-tied; breathless, tongueless, voiceless, speechless, wordless; mute as a fish, mute as a stockfish^, mute as a mackerel; silent &c (taciturn) 585; muzzled; inarticulate, inaudible. croaking, raucous, hoarse, husky, dry, hollow, sepulchral, hoarse as a raven; rough. Adv. with bated breath, with the finger on ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... we had issued from under the curtain of twilight that we learned the story of the chase which had brought our salvation. Edmund first obtained it from Ala and Juba, filling out the outlines of their wordless narrative with his ready power of interpretation, and then he told it ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... in his concealment among the shrubberies, heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy, it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses, might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over again, with many breaks, at first, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... complaint I hear the wordless blow Of two high-throned, who rule without restraint Of Pity. Heaven forfend What evil ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... saint of candies, and cried, "Sweets, all sweets, O my lord Israel, sweets, all sweets!" The girl selling clay peered up impudently into Israel's eyes, and the oven-boy, answering the loud knocking of the bodiless female arms thrust out at doors standing ajar, made his wordless call articulate with a mocking ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... dawdling in talk and breathing happily the June-scented air. The stolid man and his placid wife who had sat near the rear had already started for the Colonel's house, following the foot-path across the fields. They walked silently side by side, as if long used to wordless companionship. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... before 'Tonio's coming, and now, in the silence of midnight, as the two sat smoking on the veranda, while Lilian lay in her little white room listening in wordless rapture, in sweet unrest, to the murmurous sound of the deep voice that had enthralled her senses, while Mrs. Archer, wife and mother, slept the sleep of the just and the wearied, the old general turned again to that subject that weighed so heavily ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... quiet milk run out to Saturn would have its brighter side," Frank muttered to Tom when he came back inside the ship. Tom grinned at him in wordless understanding. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... just ten days later, Hilliard did come again. It was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her lunch and gone off on "Nigger Baby" for the day. The ostensible object of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and prolonged absence keenly. She had not—to put it euphemistically—many friends. Her remedy was successful. Impossible, on such a ride, to cherish minor or major pangs. She rode into the smoky dimness of pine-woods ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... After this the silent, wordless worship of Jan and his people was filled with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother. She was one of them now, a part of their indissoluble existence—a part of it as truly as the strange lights forever hovering over the Pole, as surely as the countless stars ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... by the bed and lifted up her heart to the Lord of life in silent, wordless, thoughtless, profoundly quiet aspiration. She did not wish to move or speak, or form a sentence even in her mind. She found her state a strange one, but she did not even wonder at it, so deep was the ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of his coming. Helen was playing dreamily, and humming Some wordless melody of white-souled thought, While Roy and I sat by the open door, Re-living childish incidents of yore. My eyes were glowing, and my cheeks were hot With warm young blood; excitement, joy, or pain Alike would send swift coursing through each vein. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... she climbed she heard the slopping, panting tread of men; her wind was better than theirs; she climbed lithely upward, setting a pace which finally resulted in a violent jerk backward, — a savage, wordless admonition ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... appearing. The shrunken woods expand; the stringent, sparkling wintry stars grow mild and liquid, shining with a tremulous and tender light; the whole world seems larger, happier, more full of untold, untried possibilities. The air vibrates with wordless promises, calls, messages, beckonings; and fairy-tales are told by all the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... people sat and took the sun—cheek by jowl, generals and nursemaids, parsons and the unemployed. Above, in that Spring wind, the elm-tree boughs were swaying, rustling, creaking ever so gently, carrying on the innumerable talk of trees—their sapient, wordless conversation over the affairs of men. It was pleasant, too, to see and hear the myriad movement of the million little separate leaves, each shaped differently, flighting never twice alike, yet all obedient to the single spirit of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... silent for the greater part of the remaining way—silent and pleasant. The colours of sunset faded away, but a cool, fair, clear heaven carried on the beauty and the wordless speech of the earlier evening. At Matilda's gate Mr. Richmond stopped, and holding her hand still, spoke with a ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... sky thickly with stars, and more fell to their appointed places as the moments passed. A bull-frog boomed out his guttural note, and Fido began to whine and gnaw at the rail just below my feet. He was getting hungry, and I acquiesced to his wordless plea to go home. Night had now come, and the air was chilly, so I buttoned my coat close up to my chin, and moved briskly. We were some distance from home, but the lights of the city were reflected in the sky, and besides, it was not dark, because of ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... through with snowy coolness, thrilled with bird song, and the laughing chuckle of a big spring breaking from the foot of the mountain. They had left the road and followed a narrow, screened path by which they came unexpectedly into this opening. They had stood upon it in wordless enchantment, looking down the slope beneath it, across the peace of the valley, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... interposed Cleek, and leant far out into the darkness as though sucking in the air when the sash was raised and the thing which had been only a dim babel of wordless sounds a moment before became now the riotous laughter and the ribald comments of men upon the verses of a comic song which one of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... after minute of this hushed, wordless calm continued, Sylvia was aware that something new was happening to her, that something in her stirred which had never before made its presence known. She felt very queer, a little startled, very much bewildered. What was that half-thought fluttering a dusky wing in the back of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lowered, and as he talked of his boyish days there, and of the sights and festivities of London town, he found in Caleb Parish and his daughter receptive listeners, but in young Doane a stiff-necked monument of wordless resentment. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... off and gazing wordless for a moment at this new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain's uniform with bits of ribbon on the breast of it,—tried to say how proud he was and choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious, embracing arm, the emotion which would ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... make your scriptureless light, which in very deed is darkness (Isa 8:20), the rule of your brother's faith; and how well you will come off for this in the day of God, you might, were you not wedded to your wordless opinion, soon begin ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... filled with our things and Olie sitting there waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and inarticulate way, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a novelty to him. His pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I speak to him. And he studies me ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... moment of time in the Market of Silver-stead, as if the bolt of the Gods had fallen there; and then arose a huge wordless yell from those about the altar, and one of the priests who was left hove up his glaive two-handed to smite the naked slaughter- thralls; but or ever the stroke fell, Bow-may's second shaft was through his throat, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... once the girl, with a wordless cry, sank on her knees beside the vast looming bulk of the tower. She covered her face with both hands, and through her fingers the tears of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine, almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He seemed more than ever an ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... his place Bowed his head a little space And the leaves by soft airs stirred Lapse of wave and cry of bird Left the solemn hush unbroken Of that wordless prayer unspoken While its wish, on earth unsaid, Rose to Heaven interpreted. As in life's best hours we hear By the spirit's finer ear His low voice within us, thus The All-Father heareth us: And his holy ear ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... which the First-Reader Class had welcomed him. Left to his own devices, he had promptly laid his arms upon his desk and his head upon his arms. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Isidore's brilliant head still rested on his folded arms and Teacher felt that she must make some effort to comfort his wordless misery. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... what love was. She closed her eyes and buried her face in her arms in wordless, silent grief for the man to whom she had given all that was best and noblest of her—Hugh! But she could not weep. It seemed as though, long since, the fountains of her misery were dry. For a long while ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... cried, "and there was our poor little top-hamper of intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like a coop of hens washed overboard and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... secrets of the night through eyes and ears. Strange spells were in the weaving, and no two souls are fused to harmony without much subtle questioning of spirit, many delicate, tremulous speculations compounded of wordless joy and wordless fear. ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... household, in obedience, no doubt, to these old customs, he stood sternly awaiting the appearance of his three assistants, ready to scold them in case they were late. These young disciples of Mercury knew nothing more terrible than the wordless assiduity with which the master scrutinized their faces and their movements on Monday in search of evidence or traces of their pranks. But at this moment the old clothier paid no heed to his apprentices; he was absorbed ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... was because of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the ultimatum she could hear the soft, wordless murmur from the other compartments, the undertone of anxiety like a dark thread through it. In every compartment parents and children, brothers and sisters, were seeing one another for ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... Wimereux Plage twinkled gaily to them from its string of lights on esplanade and summer villas; Cap Grisnez flashed its calm white light of guardianship; Calais town sent a message of kindly greeting from the far distance; only the Varne Sands whispered a wordless warning as they swirled the waters above them and sent a flock of shivering wavelets to beat against the smooth hull ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... well-marked road travelled daily, hourly, through long years,—this Prayer way that led his soul to God. Tying up his horse to the nearest tree, Stephen knelt down on the carpet of red-brown pine-needles, and put up a wordless prayer for guidance and help. Then he ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... times—on a few occasions to such an extent as to transcend Tennyson's idea of the law "broadening from precedent to precedent" and to amount to something strongly resembling a juridical revolution, bloodless but not wordless. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... that none of us were really conscious—were under a kind of spell in which our actions and our thoughts were predetermined—inevitable! I knew it, but I could not shake it off, nor put my finger on any reason why I should shake it off and call a halt to the strange, wordless, silent following of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... stop it," Brion said, shrugging off the feeling of gloom. Telt's only answer was a wordless ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... she never forgot that scene. For in that moment a whisper came from somewhere out of the void, "The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms," and she clasped her hands in a wordless prayer. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... nor Gorgo ventured to disturb their wordless devotions, but presently the ship-master rose, drawing his fine, stalwart figure to its full height; then turning his kind, manly, grave face to his wife, who had also risen to her feet, he laid one hand on her still abundant white hair and held out the other which she took in hers. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... uneasy over his son's silence; he would rather have had stormy argument than a wordless acceptance of the situation. Chaffering in these sorts of bargains means that a man can look after his interests. "A man who is ready to pay you anything you ask will pay nothing," old Sechard was saying to himself. While he tried ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... to reassure her after the fashion of a lover, in that wordless language which is ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... each he has caught to his breast, And clasped them, and kissed them with fervent caress; Then wordless and tearless, with hearts running o'er, They part who have never been parted before: He springs to his saddle,—the rein is drawn tight,— And Beechenbrook Cottage ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... promised to add depth and stability to the warmth and uprightness of heart that were already his. Harry Denvil's present need was for a tacit wiping out of the past, an unquestioning trust in regard to the future; and his Captain, after the wordless manner of men, gave him full assurance of both. It is just this power to draw out the best and strongest by the simple habit of taking it for granted that marks the true leader; the man who compels because he never insists; whose influence is less ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... A wordless carol of life and love, Of nature free and wild; And the three monks paused in the evening shade, Looked up at each ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... for some royal martyrdom. There was a bright May sunlight over it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten the weird effect. I am sure that others felt it besides myself, for everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no occasion for silence. There was something of another age about the whole setting, to say ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... shall come, ye spirits girt with light That falls o'er heaven's hills from dawn to be; Ye warders in the planet house of night, Gliding to unguessed doors with prophet key, And out where dim paths stir with minstrelsy Wordless and strange to man until your clear Doubt-shriven strain interprets to the clay. Oh, might I hear ye as the world shall hear, Nearer, a poet's journey, to the ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly lost all sense of direction. After we had ridden in wordless silence a short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head of our descending ravine, our little cavalcade was halted suddenly in a thickset grove of the pines, and Ephraim Yeates appeared at my ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... scream of every beast of the great forests, but never a scream like that which came from Mercer's lips now. It was not the cry of a man. To Kent it was the voice of a fiend, a devil. It did not call for help. It was wordless. And as the horrible sound issued from Mercer's mouth he could see the swelling throat and bulging eyes that accompanied the effort. They made him think of ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... emerged on an open space of roadway, where the pines came abruptly to an end; and the path shelved sheer from its broken railing to the Visp Valley below. Instinctively Quita drew rein and drank in every detail of the vision before her with the wordless satisfaction that is the hall-mark of the true Nature-worshipper. Lenox stood quietly at her side, his gaze riveted on her face. He had seen many mountains, giants among their kind; but never till now had he beheld the glory of them ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... is one of the sad effects or results of the enslaving Old Bailey fashion of defending, or, as we may well call it, apologizing for, Christianity,—introduced by Grotius and followed up by the modern 'Alogi', whose wordless, lifeless, spiritless, scheme of belief it alone suits,—that we dare not ask, whether the passage here referred to must necessarily be understood as asserting a miraculous remembrancing, distinctly sensible by the Apostles; whether the gift had any especial reference to the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... could keep it up now—that is he could hold out for his real reply, could meet the rather marked tension of the rest of their passage as well as she; he should be able somehow or other to make his wordless detachment, the tribute of his ostensibly deep consideration of her request, a retreat in good order. She was, for herself, to the last point of her guileless fatuity, Amy Evans and an asker for "lifts," a conceiver of twaddle both in herself and in ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... bursting with happiness as she clung to him. Here, in the home she had prepared, he had brought her his success, and their love glorified both. Her emotion left her wordless. Another moment, and his eyes swept ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... swift and swifter the notes came 1145 From my touch, that wandered like quick flame, And from my bosom, labouring With some unutterable thing: The awful sound of my own voice made My faint lips tremble; in some mood 1150 Of wordless thought Lionel stood So pale, that even beside his cheek The snowy column from its shade Caught whiteness: yet his countenance, Raised upward, burned with radiance 1155 Of spirit-piercing joy, whose light, Like the moon struggling through the night Of whirlwind-rifted ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Wheezing breath, wordless cries, grunts, strange laughter sounded. And, withal, the major's hands and arms in one of the pits made a dry, slithering slide and click as he kneaded, worked, and stirred the gems, dredged up fistfuls and let them rain ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Ellsworth was a kindly man of fifty-five, with a forceful chin and a drooping, heavy-lidded eye that could either blaze or twinkle. He was fond of Alaire, and his sympathy, like his understanding, was of that wordless yet comprehensive kind which is most satisfying. Judge Ellsworth knew more than any four men in that part of Texas; information had a way of seeking him out, and his head was stored to repletion with facts of every variety. He was a good lawyer, too, and yet his knowledge of the law comprised ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Felix, and the governor swapped looks and nods which indorsed an understanding that was wordless between ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naive remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a wordless song of joy. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... In the wordless years of earliest life, mysteries around the child can receive only partial solution. But the day comes when language gives him a key whereby to unlock the doors, and he begins to ask, "What is it," then "Why," and "Where," and "How." This questioning period commences about the ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... and triumphant foeman. And then in one sudden, awful moment he realized that the Indian was reaching for his knife. Another instant it gleamed aloft in the moonlight, and the poor lad shut his eyes against the swift and deadly blow. Curses changed to one wordless prayer to heaven for pity and help. He never saw the glittering blade go spinning through the air. Vaguely, faintly he heard a stern young voice ordering "Hold there!" then another, a silvery voice, crying something in a strange tongue, and was conscious that an unseen power ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the little Italian produced a bag of tobacco. We sat down on the rocks and smoked together, holding a wordless but perfectly intelligble ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile, see her dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts to greet him on the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been sustained by the thought that ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... I made haste first of all to catch the eye of our waiter, who was also the proprietor of the little inn. I pressed a wordless plea into his hand. "We are eccentric," I murmured in explanation, "and you must look well ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... She panted out a wordless cry. Then she came closer and laid a hand on my arm. She was struggling to subdue sobs. The question ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... question was put in such an unexpectedly mild tone that Cumshaw was left wordless for the nonce, though his face showed in all their fulness the emotions that were stirring within him. Doubt, indecision, fear ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... that morning. The rose and amber radiance of dawn fell into all the hearts of all the birds; and wordless songs came pulsing up from roots of growing things. The sambhur lifted high his head again and spread the fan of one ear toward the wind, while one breathed twice. Then there fell a sudden rustling on the branches; and swift along the river's brim, the sharp, plaintive ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... still to listen. The memories of the perfect summer floated around him again. Something in the music seemed to call to him, to plead with him, to try to console and cheer him with a wonderful, playful tenderness like the pure wordless sympathy of ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... for to them the doctor's silence had only one meaning; but the cattleman, standing behind the eldest brother, could not bear the wordless waiting. He felt that if she would rouse and continue to speak, death would be delayed. So he ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... true that there is nothing strikingly original nor remarkable in the outline of the story. That is impossible in a wordless play. Bernard Shaw, speaking of a pantomime with music, 'A Pierrot's Life,' produced some years ago in London, says, 'I am conscious of the difficulty of making any but the most threadbare themes intelligible to the public, without words.' Reinhardt was wise in selecting a vivid tale, and one easy ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... in.... One day the men of our tiny clearing were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray logs. We said nothing. We just sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless silence. We were the last ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... her husband's fame, Won in the fields of fruitful Italy; And decks with praises Collatine's high name, Made glorious by his manly chivalry With bruised arms and wreaths of victory: Her joy with heaved-up hand she doth express, And, wordless, so greets heaven ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... to watch a man near by, ploughing a rough stony field with a yoke of oxen. Usually there is much geeing and hawing, excitement, and continual noise and expletives, about a job of this kind. But I noticed how different, how easy and wordless, yet firm and sufficient, the work of this young ploughman. His name was Walter Dumont, a farmer, and son of a farmer, working for their living. Three years ago, when the steamer "Sunnyside" was wreck'd of a bitter icy night on the west bank here, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... great journeys, enduring hardship and danger, and practising the absolute poverty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong, extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this power he is careful to nourish. His irreducible minimum is two hours spent in meditation and wordless communication with God at the beginning of each day. He prefers three or four hours when work permits; and a long period of prayer and meditation always precedes his public address. If forced to curtail or hurry these hours ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... rallied. Neither, whether to her shame or credit be it said, did she make any effort to deny his wordless charge. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... understand. You grew up among the trees, and the breezes and the brooks, those wonderful wordless teachers. I envy you, for they give one time to think—to expand. I have known only city life myself. It is stimulating, but one is so easily turned aside from one's direct purpose. Do ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... attention was called to another quarter. The abbe, as pale and as disturbed as the chevalier, came back into the room, carrying in his hands a glass and a pistol, and double-locked the door behind him. Terrified at this spectacle, the marquise half raised herself in her bed, gazing voiceless and wordless. Then the abbe approached her, his lips trembling; his hair bristling and his eyes blazing, and, presenting to her the glass and the pistol, "Madame," said he, after a moment of terrible silence, "choose, whether ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... other, yet they're all different from sech folks as Silver Phil. Boggs, goin' to war, is full of good-humoured grandeur, gala and confident, ready to start or stop like a good hoss. Cherokee Hall is quiet an' wordless; he gets pale, but sharp an' deadly; an' his notion is to fight for a finish. Peets is haughty an' sooperior on the few o'casions when he onbends in battle, an' comports himse'f like a gent who fights downhill; the same, ondoubted, bein' doo to them book advantages of Peets ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... morning after Scotty died he had fought a vague, disquieting sense of her need of him. There had been times when it seemed almost as though she had called to him across the distance; that she wished to see him. To-day he had obeyed the wordless call. He still felt her need of him, but since she was not at the school he hesitated. The schoolhouse was in a measure neutral ground. Riding over to the Douglas ranch was another matter entirely. Too keenly had he felt the cold animosity of Mother Douglas, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... that fence was appalling in a vague, wordless way, Val unconsciously drew closer to her husband when she looked at it, and shivered in spite of ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... fled away, lest, in the turbulent whirl of life, the Curse should craze, and not slay her. For sleep had vanished with wordless moans and frighted aspect from her pillow,—or if it dared, standing afar off, to cast its pallid shadow there, still there was neither rest nor refreshing in the troubled spell. Nor could the thirst that consumed her quench itself with red wine or crystal water, translucent grapes or the crimson ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... my feet. The rough stone on which my toes sank had been covered with metal and I smelled scorching flesh, jerking up my feet with a wordless snarl of rage and fury, hanging in ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... first page—something that had almost never been known to happen before.) Cyril, according to Marie, played "perfectly awful things on his piano every day, now." Aunt Hannah had said "Oh, my grief and conscience!" so many times that it melted now into a wordless groan whenever a new unfriendly criticism of the portrait met ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... from the northern aisle, Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close; And none gave answer for a certain while, For words must shrink from these most wordless woes; At last the pulpit speaker simply said, With humid eyes and thoughtful, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the physical ailments of many of them were aggravated or induced by mental anxieties. Then it was that he imposed himself; as it were, fought the deceiver and his deceit, or the ignorant one and his ignorance; and numbers of people, under his sympathetic, wordless inquiry, poured their troubles into his ears, as the girl-wife upstairs had tried ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... instrument panel received a curt order: the weird voice of the man in red repeated a word that stood out above his curious, wordless tone. "Torg," he said, and again McGuire heard him ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... the silver birches drooping above its shining surface, the lights and shadows rippling across it with every breath of air,—the skimming of swallows to and fro,—the hum of bees among the cowslips, thyme and violets that were pushing fragrantly through the clipped turf,—were all so many wordless invitations to him to go forth into the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Pilate's wife and whom I met at Pilate's the night of my arrival. I shall call her Miriam, for Miriam was the name I loved her by. If it were merely difficult to describe the charm of women, I would describe Miriam. But how describe emotion in words? The charm of woman is wordless. It is different from perception that culminates in reason, for it arises in sensation and culminates in emotion, which, be it admitted, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... cubless tigress in her jungle raging Is dreadful to the shepherd and the flock; The ocean when its yeasty war is waging Is awful to the vessel near the rock; But violent things will sooner bear assuaging, Their fury being spent by its own shock, Than the stern, single, deep, and wordless ire Of a strong human ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... minds of the young? Surely not for the mere charm of novelty? The reason is that he, living amid the same hopes, the same temptations, the same sphere of observation as they, gives utterance and outward form to the very questions which, vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts. And what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems. True, all great poets are by their office democrats; seers of man only as ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... looked up to the stars. No words came. The cry of her heart was, "O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me." But she was too ignorant to weave it into a prayer. When human hearts look up to God in wordless agony, the Intercessor translates the attitude into the words ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... Wordless the night-wind, funereal plumes of the tree-tops swaying— Writhing and nodding anon at the beck of the unseen breeze! Yet its voice ever a murmur resumes, as of multitudes praying: Liturgies lost in ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... froze the blood in his veins. He had heard the scream of every beast of the great forests, but never a scream like that which came from Mercer's lips now. It was not the cry of a man. To Kent it was the voice of a fiend, a devil. It did not call for help. It was wordless. And as the horrible sound issued from Mercer's mouth he could see the swelling throat and bulging eyes that accompanied the effort. They made him think ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... as he came up through the purple gloom of the moorland, the stars' brilliancy silvering her—waiting—yielding in pallid silence to his arms, crushed in them, looking into his eyes, dumb, wordless. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... pluckily ahead, must have sent him headlong back to the comparative safety of his tent, instead of only making his hands close more tightly upon the rifle stock, while his heart, trained for the Wee Kirk, sent a wordless prayer winging its way to heaven. Both tracks, he saw, had undergone a change, and this change, so far as it concerned the footsteps of the man, was in ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... hollow like a garment o'er me; Space all unmeasured, unrecorded time; While seen with inward eye moves on before me Thought's pictured train in wordless pantomime. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in Archelaos' court, And yet esteem the silken company So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown, For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve. Strength amid crowds as late in solitude May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90] ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... groups over the green, dawdling in talk and breathing happily the June-scented air. The stolid man and his placid wife who had sat near the rear had already started for the Colonel's house, following the foot-path across the fields. They walked silently side by side, as if long used to wordless companionship. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... ask 'is it possible' to do a thing when you've done it! That's not logical,—and men do pride themselves on their logic, though I could never find out why. Do you like cowslips?" And she thrust the great bunch she had gathered up against his nose—"There's a wordless poem for you!" ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... days, but in the end I conquered. We passed through Florence on the way, and there beside my mother's grave I put forth the first, the only prayer I ever made,—a wordless yearning towards the Inconceivable, a prayer for strength and ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... starting. In horror he turned his eyes away. Behind him a man grinned at the whiteness of his face and the involuntary trembling of his lips. Again and again he heard the lash fall upon the naked back. From near him there came the sobbing moan of a woman. A subdued movement, a sound as of murmuring wordless voices swept through the throng. A steady glitter filled the eyes of the man who had laughed at him—and he turned again to the stake. The man's back was dripping blood. Great red seams lay upon his shoulders and a single lash had cut his bowed neck. Another ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... him peered at her visitor, and the visitor smiled his most winning smile. He recognized Leslie's ribbon, and noted the wondrous beauty of the small white face, now slowly flushing the faintest pink with excitement. Still clinging she smiled back. Wordless, Douglas reached over to pick up the doll. Then the right ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the tide pouring eastward, he had turned down Broadway before he realized that there had been a half smile of recognition on those rich red Hungarian lips, a wordless message in the dark splendors ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known of ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as if irresolute or uncertain how to treat her. Then, with a wordless sound that needed no interpretation, he pushed back the sleeve from the place whence he had sucked the poison. It showed only a little red now. He bent very low until his lips pressed it again. Then for one burning moment they neither ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... hours together she sat in silence reasoning it all out, while Mowbray's men dipped the shining blades and here and there the voyageurs and Indians who wore no feathers sang snatches of song, now a chanson of the trail and rapid, again a wordless ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... figure?" persisted Miles. Again a wordless message flashed across the tackle-room. This time the Kid, yawning, stretched one hand high ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... dazed, and for the moment entirely wordless. From the very moment the door had opened to him the "glittering woman" had been receding into remote and ever remoter distances, for the Helen Merival before him was as simple, candid, and cordial as his own sister. Her voice had the home inflection; ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... back up the hill toward the corral where he had left his horse, he was filled with a wordless disgust of the town and its people. The night was still and cool, almost frosty. The air so clear and so rare filled his lungs with wholesomely sweet and reanimating breath. His head cleared, and his heart grew regular in its beating. The moon was sailing in mid-ocean, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... hand. Of that desolate night neither he nor Ray could ever be brought to speak thereafter. Blake sat for hours by the bedside of his stricken friend listening in helpless misery and wrath to the occasional changing of the sentries, and watching, as a sorrowing mother might watch, Ray's wordless suffering. Most of the night he lay with his face buried in his arms; but Blake could see by the clinching hand, the shudders that often shook his frame, the constant, nervous tapping of his foot beneath the coverlet, that he was wide awake,—alive to all his sorrows. The doctor had come ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... so gallantly into the flight where all defensive power was denied themselves! He paused long enough to pat the firm gray neck, to feel the answering pressure against his hand. Then he raised his rifle again and took careful aim, as he breathed a wordless prayer that chance might guide his bullet into the man who had scarred his faithful friend. Another Boer dropped; Weldon hoped it was by his own bullet. Then both he and the gray broncho pricked up their ears as, close on their flank, they heard the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... could fly and had seen the sun drawing the scent from flowers. Great ideas filled her soul; new emotions awoke; she was like a baby trying to utter the thing he has no word for; her vocabulary broke down under the strain, and as she walked she gave thanks to Nature in a mere wordless song, like the lark, because she could not put her acknowledgment into language. But the great Mother, to whom Life is all in all, the living individual nothing, looked on at a world wakening from sleep and viewed the loves of the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... for the waters are come into my soul!" That was the wild, wordless prayer of her heart. Her life was wrecked, her heart was desolate; she must go forth a beggar and an outcast, and fight the bitter battle of life alone. And love, and home, and Charley might have been hers. "It might have been!" Is there any anguish in this world ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... days went on, and as their intimacy seemed to grow closer and ever closer, there came across Sylvia a deep wordless wish—and she had never longed for anything so much in her life—to rescue her friend from what he admitted to be his terrible vice of gambling. In this she showed rather a feminine lack of logic, for, while ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the dying Have thought they heard one pray 110 Wordless, urgent; and replying One seem to say him nay: And watchers by the dead have heard A windy swell from miles away, With sobs and screams, but not a word Distinct for them to say: And watchers out at sea have caught Glimpse of a pale gleam here or there, Come and gone ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... yet appearing. The shrunken woods expand; the stringent, sparkling wintry stars grow mild and liquid, shining with a tremulous and tender light; the whole world seems larger, happier, more full of untold, untried possibilities. The air vibrates with wordless promises, calls, messages, beckonings; and fairy-tales are told by all the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name, wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for compensation the exorcising of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and cried, "Sweets, all sweets, O my lord Israel, sweets, all sweets!" The girl selling clay peered up impudently into Israel's eyes, and the oven-boy, answering the loud knocking of the bodiless female arms thrust out at doors standing ajar, made his wordless call articulate with a ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... patter of many feet, leading it the heavy clump of mighty cowhide boots on the cottonwood sidewalk, the jingle of spurs on those same boots at every step, the deep breathing of a cowman intoxicated at last. Down the walk they came, past the darkened doorways of the deserted shops; wordless, menacing, nearer and nearer. Within the tiny storeroom no one had spoken, no one had noticed. The arms of Walt Wagner were not on the showcase now. In the depths of his pockets they were fumbling again, aimlessly, nervously. His face had gone whiter than before. Once he had opened ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... lines over a peg and came back to take the lantern from Charley. As the light flashed on her face he saw that she looked very tired and that her lip was quivering. A wordless surprise swept over Roger. The feeling he had had that Charley was like an interesting boy whom he would wish to keep for a friend was rudely shocked by that quivering lip. Only a girl's lip ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... relieved itself in a long deep sigh of ecstasy!—it was Aselzion himself who bent over me,—Aselzion whose grave blue eyes watched me with earnest and anxious solicitude. I smiled up at him in response to his wordless questioning as to how I felt, and would have risen but that he imperatively signed ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... clung to him silently, her breath coming fast. About them the moon shed a softness of pale silver and old ivory. The silence seemed to carry a wordless hymn of peace and though they stood in shadow there was light enough for lovers' eyes. The driven restlessness that had made Conscience doubt her sanity was slowly yielding to a sense of repose, as the tautened anguish of a mangled body relaxes to the balm of an anesthetic. Slowly the slenderly ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... watching a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear. Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my own horror and self condemnation, and my concern ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... hand and clung to his, wordless for a little while. As it lay softly within his palm he stroked it soothingly and folded it between his hands as if to yield it freedom nevermore. Soon her gust of sorrow passed. She stood beside him, ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to mount, thou wistful moon, Make haste to wake the nightingale: Let silence set the world in tune To harken to that wordless tale Which warbles ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... idolatrous. Then, he brought the landscape over to its creator, and, though no word was spoken, there flashed between the eyes of the artist, whose signature gave to a canvas the value of a precious stone and the jeans-clad boy whose destiny was that of the vendetta, a subtle, wordless message. It was the countersign of brothers-in-blood who recognize in each other the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Ah, here The poetry of war is fully seen, Its prose forgotten; as against the green Of Mother Nature, uniformed in blue, The soldiers pass for Sheridan's review. The motion-music of the moving throng, Is like a silent tune, set to a wordless song. ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... three. He wanted his "Wawa," and no one else. It was really pathetic to see how the little fellow clung to her, hiding his pretty wet eyes in her neck, and lovingly patting her shoulder, as he crooned his wordless reproaches in her ear, and Mrs. Hoffstott, looking on, thought this must indeed be a good sister to win such hearty affection, and felt her own motherly heart warm to the forlorn little orphaned brood. But, as Sara climbed the steep staircase, with the child clasped close, and ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... quarreling. The rest of us found no joy in life, and not too much hope even when Fred's concertina lifted the refrain of missionary hymn-tunes that even the porters knew, and most of us sang, the porters humming wordless melancholy through their noses. (When that happened Lady Saffren Waldon's scorn was something the arch-priests of Babylon ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was wordless rage. He dismounted and made his way up to the lamed horse; Gloria, from where she lay, thought at first that of course he was coming to her. But he kept his back to her as he lifted the horse's fore-leg and felt tenderly at the wrenched muscle. Gloria, without stirring, and without experiencing ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... which the Boy had long aspired; and which promised to add depth and stability to the warmth and uprightness of heart that were already his. Harry Denvil's present need was for a tacit wiping out of the past, an unquestioning trust in regard to the future; and his Captain, after the wordless manner of men, gave him full assurance of both. It is just this power to draw out the best and strongest by the simple habit of taking it for granted that marks the true leader; the man who compels because he never insists; whose ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... interest had also the strongest domestic character in quite another sense from that of the family prayers which Dr Drummond was always enjoying. "Set your own house in order and then your own church" was a wordless working precept in Elgin. Threadbare carpet in the aisles was almost as personal a reproach as a hole under the dining-room table; and self-respect was barely possible to a congregation that sat in faded pews. The minister's gown even was the subject of scrutiny as the years went ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... at the grey envelope a full three minutes. Mrs. Brace, wordless, showing no uneasiness as to the outcome, waited for ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... describe beauty. As well dry a rose in a book and look for bloom and dew. It depends on bright eye and smiling lip and wordless sweetness and the fall of exquisite lashes and the tone of music and—and this poor scribbler lays down his pen and attempts no more to paint where the great artists later owned ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her lunch and gone off on "Nigger Baby" for the day. The ostensible object of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and prolonged absence keenly. She had not—to put it euphemistically—many friends. Her remedy was successful. Impossible, on such a ride, to cherish minor or major pangs. She rode into the smoky dimness of pine-woods where the sunlight burned in flecks and out again across ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... back toward the town. On his way he overtook a boy, a little fellow of eight or nine, driving a milk-cow ahead of him. He found him the shy, wordless child he had expected, but chatted with him none the less, and by the time they had reached the first of the scattered buildings the boy had thawed a little and responded to Conniston's talk. After the brief, somewhat uncomfortable lonesomeness of a moment ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... big wagon-box filled with our things and Olie sitting there waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and inarticulate way, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a novelty to him. His pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I speak to him. And he studies ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... same distinction occurs in the works of Meister Eckhart ({DAGGER} 1327 A.D.) who in many ways approximates to Indian thought, both Buddhist and Vedantist. He makes a distinction between the Godhead and God. The Godhead is the revealer but unrevealed: it is described as "wordless" (Yajnavalkya's neti, neti), "the nameless nothing," "the immoveable rest." But God is the manifestation of the Godhead, the uttered word. "All that is in the Godhead is one. Therefore we can say nothing. He is above all names, above all nature. God works, so doeth not the Godhead. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in other circumstances would have made me exceedingly happy, only added to my misery when, as it appeared, I had only a short time to live. Nature could charm, she could enchant me, and her wordless messages to my soul were to me sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, but she could not take the sting and victory from death, and I had perforce to go elsewhere for consolation. Yet even so, in my ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... It begets a solitude in a vast thronged assemblage for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its passionate answer back. Ah! who can err about ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... substance, was the attempt of this young man to describe what all who have experienced cosmic consciousness unite in saying is indescribable, for the very obvious reason that there are no words in which to express what is wordless, and inexpressible. This authentic account of a young man under twenty years of age, however, serves to prove that there is no special age of physical maturity in which the attainment of this state of consciousness ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... but we may make the positive statement that the constructive imagination has never obtained such a frequently hallucinatory form as in the mystics. Visions, touch-illusions, external voices, inner and "wordless" voices, which we now regard as psycho-motor hallucinations—all that we meet every moment in their works, until they become commonplace. But as to the nature of these psychic states there are only two solutions possible—one, naturalistic, that we shall indicate; ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... leastways," she added in a softer voice. And as the memory of Joan's freely-bestowed kiss fell upon the woman's half-awakened heart like the touch of an angel's finger, a tear trembled on her long black lashes, and a wordless prayer winged its way through the inky darkness of the murky sky—a prayer which in heaven was understood to indicate a struggling soul's yearning after ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... those secret, wordless communications which spring from some barely perceptible smile or movement—from a casual glance between two persons who live as constantly together as do brothers, friends, man and wife, or master and servant—particularly if those two persons do not in all things cultivate ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... a little wordless cry of joy. He caught her two hands in his and held them against his lips. Again that great wave of tenderness swept her, almost engulfing. But when it had ebbed she sank back once more in her chair, and she withdrew her hands ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... my fighting-blood rising, and I swear with a mighty wordless oath that I'll be avenged for that laugh. "The day is young yet. If, before night, I don't wipe both your eyes, and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... appearance, possibly in her early twenties, the boy being at least four years younger. She was not pretty, but as her eyes lighted upon the sisters, she too smiled so pleasantly, they were at once drawn to her, and returned the wordless greeting with more than civility. Then ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sight of the doctor with Joyce in such intimate circumstances—latterly made more so by the frequent drives—had caused Honor's heart to twist with sudden anguish; for it was difficult to forget the day at his bungalow when he had fought for her life and called her the bravest girl he knew. A wordless sympathy had grown up between them since that day. His eyes had held for her a special message. Though he was "not seeking her for a wife" she felt that he had liked her more than a ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... something extraordinary was afoot as all the paraNormals swarmed noisily onto the runway overlooking the floor. They were shouting wordless sounds at each other, floundering about as they did so. Then, with equal suddenness, everything was calm again and, faces more relaxed, they ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... is almost dead, Low-swung and loose the brown clouds flow In an unhasting happy row Out seaward over Beachy Head, Where, far below, the faithful sea Mutters its wordless liturgy; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... Marking—behind all modes, above all spheres, Beyond the burning impulse of each orb— That fixed decree at silent work which wills Evolve the dark to light, the dead to life, To fulness void, to form the yet unformed, Good unto better, better unto best, By wordless edict; having none to bid, None to forbid; for this is past all gods Immutable, unspeakable, supreme, A Power which builds, unbuilds, and builds again, Ruling all things accordant to the rule Of virtue, which is beauty, truth, and use. So that all things do well which serve the Power, And ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... John's arm and with eye and word quietly asks him to find out. John reclining next to Jesus asks the question in undertone. And as quietly Jesus makes reply. Then the last appeal is made to Judas in the last delicate touch of special personal attention. Judas' unchanged spirit makes wordless answer. The hardening of the purpose is a further opening of a downward door and that door is quickly ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... A groan of wordless horror went up from the wreckers. For a moment they stared at the thing rocking and sidling in their midst, with grotesque motions of life and the face and hands of a terrific death; and then, as one man, they started to splash, beat and plunge their way to ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... caused much mischief, still prevents the term "unconscious inferences" from being naturalized in the physiology of the senses and the theory of perception, it would be advisable, since "instinctive" and "intuitive" are still more easily misunderstood, to say "wordless." Wordless ideas, wordless concepts, wordless judgments, wordless inferences, may be inherited. To these belong such as our progenitors often experienced at the beginning of life, such as not only come into existence without the participation of any medium of language whatever, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... from the ruling brain," Denny surmised soberly. "Somewhere, perhaps half a mile down in the earth, Something is able to see us through solid walls, read in our minds our intentions of what we're to do next, and send out wordless commands to these soldiers to ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... and cruel. For there is really in our world to-day the colour and silence of the cushioned divan; and that sense of palace within palace and garden within garden which makes the rich irresponsibility of the East. Have we not already the wordless dance, the wineless banquet, and all that strange unchristian conception of luxury without laughter? Are we not already in an evil Arabian Nights, and walking the nightmare cities of an invisible despot? Does not our hangman ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Crevel alone was exempted from the rule—Crevel, the master of the little "bijou" apartment; and he displayed on his countenance an air of really insolent beatitude, notwithstanding the wordless reproofs administered by Valerie in frowns and meaning grimaces. His triumphant paternity beamed in ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... instead of letting him wander with her through the woods when she went in search of food, she generally left him hidden in a thicket or behind a bush or a fallen tree. There he spent many a long, lonely hour, idly watching the waving branches and the moving shadows, and perhaps thinking dim, formless, wordless baby thoughts, or looking at nothing and thinking of nothing, but just sleeping the quiet sleep of infancy, and living, and growing, and getting ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... length yielded, and a drowsy consciousness returned, memory and reason being still partly in abeyance. His heavy, half-closed eyes rested on darkness. A crooning sound was in his ear,—a nursery lullaby, wordless but soothing. Where was he? Had he been ill? Was he in his cradle at home? Was Salome sitting by to watch him and give him his medicine? Yes, very ill he was, but would be better in the morning; and meanwhile he would be a good boy, and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... in a state of wordless delight. "It's just as well I wasn't for scoldin' Bugsey for cryin' over his suit," she said at length; "for if it wasn't that I'm feart o' spottin' some of these, I'd be for doin' a cry myself. I've got such a glad spot here in me Adam's apple. Reach me yer apron, Ma—it's ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... together has been so happy," wrote Phillips, "so ideal, that the knowledge of its end leaves me stunned, speechless, wordless." ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word, sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever "vanti Libia con sua rena." But that horror is of the myth, not of the creature. There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the scale of being; the links between dead ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... plain face, and about it fell her hair, brown and abundant, in gleaming curls and waves. Her eyes were lovely—large, and a dark, almost a purplish, blue. They were wise beyond the age of their owner, and sad. They told of tears shed, of wordless appeal, but also of patient endurance of little troubles. Her brows had an upward turn at the center which gave her a quaint, questioning look. Her mouth was tucked in at either corner, lending a wistful expression that ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... verses, a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart, "Come unto Me."... The words stole about the room like tears. Then she would ask "all present," she said, to engage for a moment in silent prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street noises surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as Laura brought it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her feet as the others raised their heads, breaking ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... beside her bed. It was natural to her to pray, to throw herself on a sustaining and strengthening power. Such prayer in such a nature is not the specific asking of a definite boon. It is rather a wordless aspiration towards a Will not our own—a passionate longing, in the old phrase, to be 'right with God,' whatever happens, and through all the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... come, ye spirits girt with light That falls o'er heaven's hills from dawn to be; Ye warders in the planet house of night, Gliding to unguessed doors with prophet key, And out where dim paths stir with minstrelsy Wordless and strange to man until your clear Doubt-shriven strain interprets to the clay. Oh, might I hear ye as the world shall hear, Nearer, a poet's journey, to the ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... should drug his anger, this time, to let it ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he come to her and make peace. "Hell!" he crawked; jerked his top-coat from its nail, and left the flat—eleven o'clock ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... think a quiet milk run out to Saturn would have its brighter side," Frank muttered to Tom when he came back inside the ship. Tom grinned at him in wordless understanding. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... fearless ones went through the days and weeks in twofold terror of themselves and each of the other, and the slow, wordless tragedy was acted before eyes that saw but did not understand. Still Gianluca refused to go away, and still Veronica refused to send for the syndic. She would not yield to the Duchessa, who found herself opposed both by her son and her ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... circumstances, and in all of life's movements; help of all sorts, financial, bodily, mental, spiritual—all come from God, and necessitate a constant touch with Him. There needs to be a constant stream of petition going up, many times wordless prayer. And there will be a constant return stream of answer and supply coming down. The door between God and one's own self must be kept ever open. The knob to be turned is on our side. He opened His side long ago, and propped ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... near to soothe her, or withdraw her from this hideous company. With the declining heat of a September night, a whirlwind of storm, thunder, and hail, rattled round the house, and with ghastly harmony sung the dirge of her family. She sat upon the ground absorbed in wordless despair, when through the gusty wind and bickering rain she thought she heard her name called. Whose could that familiar voice be? Not one of her relations, for they lay glaring on her with stony eyes. Again her name was syllabled, and she shuddered as she asked herself, am I becoming mad, or am ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... down the avenue, wondering at his strange silence. It had a curious effect upon me. I would rather have heard threats—even a torrent of anger. There was something curiously ominous in that slow, wordless exit. I watched him uneasily, full ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... slow, waltz-like movement, similar to that with which he had begun his own mad dance; and as they moved, gradually widening their circles until they were strung out all along the face of the motionless regiments, they hummed a low, weird, wordless song that was somehow inexpressibly suggestive of vague, nameless horror. As for Machenga, after watching his assistants for a minute or two, he stalked slowly toward the king and seated himself at His Majesty's ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... admiration, seemed to the casual observer cold and uncompromising. She might speak to the dog, call the fowls to their meals, but she never otherwise spoke unless she was forced to. When he was little, Tunis had found in her arms and against her breast a refuge from all hurt and fear, but it was a wordless comfort Aunt ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... opportunely Cousin Philippe had died. The violation of her childhood by such a marriage rose up that instant a wordless tragedy. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... over and picked up the dog, tucked it under his blue-sleeved arm and went across the room to the door. He did not speak but Miss Beaver received the vivid impression that his visit would be repeated the following night; it was as if her sensitive intuitions could receive and register a wordless message ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... of poetry, of sub-conscious celtic sadness, ran through them all. It was associated with their love of music and was wordless. Only hints of this endowment came out now and again, and to the day of his death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and sweetness, sloth and tremendous energy, slovenliness ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... her mirror had told her that she was beautiful; but up to this moment her emotion had recorded nothing stronger than placid content. Now a supreme gladness filled and tingled her because her beauty was indisputable. When Martha came to help her dress for dinner, she still sang. It was a wordless song, a melody that every human heart contains and which finds ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... does?" The eyes of the son were steady in their wordless accusation. "It's this way, father: If you never married this woman Maria, it ought to be ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... far below the clanging city; Looking far downward to the glaring street Gaudy with light, yet tired with many feet, In both of us wells up a wordless pity; ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... never told, Nay, scarce to himself in the night-tide, for the gain of the ruddy rings, And the fame of the earth unquestioned and the mastery over kings, And he sole King in the world-throne, unequalled, unconstrained; And with wordless wrath he fretted at the bonds that his glory had chained, And the bitter anger stirred him, and at last he spake ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... beautiful influences are quiet; only the destructive agencies, the stormy wind, the heavy rain and hail, are noisy. Love of the deepest sort is wordless, the sunshine steals down silently, the dew falls noiselessly, and the communion of spirit with spirit is calmer and quieter than anything else in the world quiet as the spontaneous turning of the sunflower to the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... meeting in public places have learnt to do so in silence; and a table d'hote is a wordless function unless the inevitable Andalusian—he who takes the place of the Gascon in France—is present with his babble and his laugh, his fine opinion of himself, and his faculty for making a sacrifice of his own dignity at that ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... intelligence—secret intelligence, the wordless incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, the cat ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... forsake him. He derided the poor woman in every way, and tortured her morally, seeking out the most painful spots. She would only keep silent, sigh, weep, and getting down on her knees before him, kiss his hands. And this wordless submission irritated Horizon still more. He drove her away from him. She would not go away. He would push her out into the street; but she, after an hour or two, would come back shivering from cold, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... strange seas they call, Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time.... They startle me with wordless songs To which the Sphinx hath ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes, the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... talk leads to specious boasting and invites subtle praise; one is presently aware of it, and then, with patience and determination, it is in one's power to check and muzzle oneself. But my vice of pride is wordless and underground; it does not come forth. I neither see nor hear it. It wriggles and creeps in without a sound, and clutches me without my having ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... talking, Sanine said no more. Soloveitchik remained silent also. There was great stillness around them, while overhead the stars seemed to maintain a conversation wordless and unending. Then Soloveitchik suddenly whispered something that sounded so weird ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... love, radiant with smiles, and her tall figure fleecy white, rimmed in gold. Up the shining path of light she steadily advanced toward his door. Then the Harvester understood, and from his exultant heart burst the wordless petition: ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... they were no longer his, must be disappointed. He was sorry for Cynthia, and in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been. He felt her magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of being where volition begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go back to Bessie Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the depths of her soul—a wordless invocation. She is close to the jungle now, and the pleasant shade of the foliage cools her ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... risen, he understood the death was necessary to faith in the resurrection, without which Christianity would be an empty husk. The confusion, as has been said, left him without the faculty of decision; he stood helpless—wordless even. Covering his face with his hand, he shook with the conflict between his wish, which was what he would have ordered, and the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... not actually sing these words. The tune he hummed was a wordless one, and, for that matter, not even much of a tune. But he afterwards declared very positively that he sang the sense of them, being challenged by the birds calling in contention louder and louder as the road ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... saw Hansie on the scenes once more, the people crowding round her with their questions. Why did she come back? Was she going to stay? Didn't she go to Pretoria yesterday? Who was that with her? etc. Mothers pulled her aside and pointed in wordless grief to their tents, to what lay there in still repose since last night. Children clung to her skirts—"We thought you had ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... he about? He loved her. What was love? What, in this case, but an early and late sweetness, a wordless gift, a silent form floating soft by his side—something seeking and not saying, hoping and not proving, burning and as yet scarce daring—and so, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the length of the long street, she strode between them, wordless, and then suddenly halted and held ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... was about doing his marketings together, she brought the Maiden to the entry between the two tents and bade her stand there, and then drew the hangings apart to right and left and let the Maiden stand there as in a picture. The Knight looked up and saw it, and stared astonished, and was wordless a while; the chapman scowled, but durst not say aught, for he knew not how the Knight would take it; and as for the Knight, he leaned across to the chapman and spake to him softly, not taking his eyes ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... the girl, with a wordless cry, sank on her knees beside the vast looming bulk of the tower. She covered her face with both hands, and through her fingers the tears ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... which, hanging low over his forehead, he twisted while he read. He kept glancing up at Miss Susan and smiling at her, whenever he could look away from his book and the fire, and she smiled back. At last, after many such wordless messages, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... was our poor little top-hamper of intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like a coop of hens washed overboard and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... knew what love was. She closed her eyes and buried her face in her arms in wordless, silent grief for the man to whom she had given all that was best and noblest of her—Hugh! But she could not weep. It seemed as though, long since, the fountains of her misery were dry. For a long while ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
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