"Brassy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all is not gold in the El Dorado of the West. Many schemes and laws have its lustre; but they have the brassy sound of the neo-pagan state-monopoly ideal. This thought of the supremacy of State in matters of education permeates Dr. Foght's report from cover to cover. In general, legislation is looked upon in our new Provinces as the universal panacea for all ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... R. Sporangium orbicular, much depressed, the base umbilicate, stipitate, cernuous; the greater part of the wall thin and delicate, with a scanty covering of yellow granules of lime, becoming naked and then brassy and iridescent, after maturity soon disappearing; the lower basal portion thicker and more persistent, with a layer of small yellow scales of lime. Stipe long, flexuous, bent at the apex, plicate, pale brown to yellow-brown, darker toward the base. Capillitium of slender tubules, forming a dense ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... to appear likewise. As a matter of fact, I wanted to win. Not because of the possible prize, I cared little for that, but for the pleasure of winning against him. We drove from the ninth tee, each got a long brassy shot which put us on the edge of the green, and then strolled up ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with the sound of fiddles and pianos in the big dance hall whose roof covered all the vices which thrive best in the dark. Later a trombone and cornet joined the original musical din, lifting their brassy notes on the vexed night air. Bands of horsemen came galloping in, yelping the short, coyote cries of the cattle lands. Sometimes one of them let off his pistol as he wheeled his horse up to the hitching rack, ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... charade which was both novel and appropriate. She arranged her father to look like the Boston statue of Franklin—and the resemblance was a very striking one—and then came in with another gentleman in a travelling dress, and surveyed and criticized him. When she said, "He seems to have rather a brassy expression," Mr. Alcott could scarcely hold his face. This was the first part: the second consisted of the scene from the "Two Buzzards" already mentioned, and for the third a witty dialogue about Mr. Sanborn's school. As more than half of the audience ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... rich man—banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... stepping over to the table, he drew back the sheet reverently and even tenderly from the dead woman's face, and looked down at it with grave pity. It was a comely face, white as marble, serene and peaceful in expression, with half-closed eyes, and framed with a mass of brassy, yellow hair; but its beauty was marred by a long linear wound, half cut, half bruise, running down the right cheek from the eye to ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... staple, another the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... brother not only one little thing, but two or three that should be a buckler to him in time of need; and his brother thanked him, and so authoritative was the platform manner of Merle that he nearly said "Yes, sir." After which Patricia played a brassy shot, and they all went to find Merle's ball among the oaks. After that they went on to Wilbur's ball, which—still without a trace of form—he dropped on the green with a mashie, in spite of Merle's warning that he would need ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... masculine, regular and well formed. His skin is coarse, unwrinkled and weather-beaten, his eyes possess a natural and unaffected fierceness, the most extraordinary I ever beheld: they are full, bright, and of a brassy colour. He looked directly at me, and his stare is by far the most intense I ever beheld. This time, however, curiosity made me a match, for I vanquished him. It is when he regards you, that you mark the singular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... was driven back. An hour after, when she lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled red film groped through. It was another day coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life out;—what else ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... up to the road and laid her upon a motor robe that some kindly spectator had spread in the deep dust. AH about he heard the quick, horrified breathing and muttering of the shocked and sympathetic neighbours who had gathered, but to him there was a brassy light in the world and a hideous taste of inky bitterness in the very air he breathed, and ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... voice, soft echoing o'er the years. They haunt me in the stillness and the glare Of desert noontide when the horizon's line Swims faintly throbbing, and my shadow hides Skulking beneath me from the brassy sky. And when night comes to soothe with breath of balm And pomp of stars the worn and weary world, Her eyes rise in my soul and make its day. And even into the battle comes my love, Snatching the duty that I offer ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... schooner, sah," said Caesar sharply; and he had hardly spoken when the heavy but sharp brassy sound of a big gun came from quite another direction. "And dat Massa Huggin oder schooner, sah. Dat um ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... but was soon overcast. The clouds became lowery, and from them, black and ominous, as they soon appeared, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and a little rain fell. Toward nine o'clock, the clouds became thinner, and assumed a brassy or coppery appearance, and earth, rocks, trees, buildings, water, and persons were changed by this strange, unearthly light. A few minutes later, a heavy black cloud spread over the entire sky except a narrow rim at the horizon, and it was ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... the person who carries an unsuspicious, self-respectful, open face, into any presence, such people as these seem unworthy of the race to which they belong. It is not the bold, brassy, self-asserting man who is their superior, because his sort of offensive forwardness originates in even a worse state of mind and heart than the habit of shying. When a man shies, he only suspects that he is inferior to ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... mixtures as a Jacobinical sneer at the pretentious appellation of silver given it by its maker. After the introduction of nickel from the mines in Saxony, the words "German silver" became truthfully appropriate as applied to that metal, but so habituated have the trade and the public become to brassy mixtures that German silver must always be understood as of that ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... described by every traveller with displeasure, by all with truth. The ill look of the very few and very unhealthy inhabitants confirms their descriptions; and beside the pale and swelled faces which shock one's sight, here is a brassy scent in the air as of verdigris, which offends one's smell; the running water is of an odd colour too, like that in which copper has been steeped. These are sad desolated scenes indeed, though this is not the season for mal' aria neither, which, it is said, begins in May, and ends with ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "Decameron." It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are passages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Daemmerung," shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of Summer shines from out a brassy sky, And has parched and browned the meadows, and the creek's run dry, O sweet it is to wander there and hear the water sing It's rippling song of gladness ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... it was far less so than a young man's performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless, passed down the room with his brazen creature in his arms, Mr Enoch Peake ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... made the wheels and axles. The body was then spiked to them, and the howitzer lifted up and set on the carriage. By way of testing it, we then charged the piece with half a pint of powder, and fired it. The sharp, brassy report was reverberated from the dark mountains on the starboard side in a wonderfully distinct echo. Hundreds of seals dropped off the ice-cakes into the sea all about,—a fact I observed with some mortification. As the guns would ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Then there arrived Mr. Brassy, her father's solicitor, from Cator Hill. He had been often in the house, a short fat man with a purple face, clothes of a horsy cut, and large, red, swollen fingers. He took now possession of the house with much self-importance. "Well, Miss Maggie" (he ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... groves and bushy fields, where his bright song may be heard all through the long summer day. I hear it in the dry and parched August when most birds are silent, sometimes delivered on the wing and sometimes from the perch. Indeed, with me its song is as much a midsummer sound as is the brassy crescendo of the cicada. The memory of its note calls to mind the flame-like quiver of the heated atmosphere and the bright glare of the meridian sun. Its color is much more intense than that of the common bluebird, as summer skies are deeper than ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Head brassy brown; thorax brownish yellow, glossy; elytra with more than the basal half deep blue, with regular deeply pitted punctures, close to each other, an elevated knob at the base in the middle, the apical portion smooth purplish black, the smooth place ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... upon it as it contracted, until they came together in the centre, and a row of pools of quicksilver had taken the place of the solid metal. Two smaller electrodes were plunged into the mercury, which gradually curdled and solidified, until it had resumed the solid form, with a yellowish brassy shimmer. ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the residence of a young lawyer of my friends, after performing in whose honour, through the medium of a very brassy band, a Secession Schottische or Palmetto Polka, it clamorously demanded his presence. After a very brief interval he appeared, and altho' he is in private life an agreeable and moderately sensible young man, he succeeded, to my mind at any rate, in making most successfully, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... large as a man's thumb, but the feature of the collection was one about the shape and size of a full-grown potato. This nugget was said to be worth $250. Those who have seen the Alaska gold say it is very bright, and brassy in color, but not as fine in quality as ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... it happened. "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge of the freeway. Then, and only then, she ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... a dozen different voices, and every now and then I could hear Moriway as I pelted on—that brassy, cruel bellow of his that made ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... Captain Shad. "Did you ever hear such brassy talk in your life! I wish to thunder I'd been here. There'd have been one mighty sick patient ready for the doctor and he wouldn't have been a South Harniss native either. But Mary-'Gusta didn't take none of his sauce, I tell you; that girl ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... makes me laugh, white folks! De idea of my lossin' my sight a lookin' 'round for a third husband! You sho' is agreeable. Ain't been so tickled since de secon' time I was a widow. You know my secon' husband was bad after blind tiger liquor, and harlot eyed, brassy, hussy women. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... left him a year later. With womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was associated with ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... khaki struts the limelit boards: With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter; And over the brassy blare and drumming din She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin Spirtle of sniggering ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... breathless, dead calm of the desert there was no sound or movement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning inferno of dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam the huge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Grackle with the sun shining on him was truly beautiful. His head and neck, his throat and upper breast, were a shining blue-black, while his back was a rich, shining brassy-green. His wings and tail were much like his head and neck. As Peter watched it seemed as if the colors were constantly changing. This changing of colors is called iridescence. One other thing Peter noticed and this was that Creaker's ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... the cultured hearer can at once detect any variation from this character. Further, he knows how the tones of a badly-played instrument would sound if the instrument were correctly handled. An unskilled trumpeter in an orchestra, for example, may draw from his instrument tones that are too brassy, blatant, or harsh. An observant hearer knows exactly what these tones would be if the ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... (Eriodendron samauma); and on the inner sides lined with of the tips of palm-fronds. They are long and purseshaped. The young when first hatched have very much shorter bills than their parents. The only species of Trochilinae which I found at Caripi were the little brassy-green Polytmus viridissimus, the sapphire and emerald (Thalurania furcata), and the large falcate-winged ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... attic was Life. From one corner of the room deep, regular breathing marked the unvarying time of healthy physical life asleep. Nearby a clock beat loud automatic time, with a brassy resonance—healthy mechanical life awake. Man and machine, side by side, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... days, His face is not a face o'er brassy; Her mither sits to praise the claes; Holds him her box; to win the lassie He taks a pinch, and greets wi' granny, And helps his chair up nearer Jenny, And vows he loves her muir than any. She thinks her mither seldom wrong, And "Loggan braes" ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... delivered over into the hands of the owners of the two fastest polo-ponies that ever shot down the Ghezireh ground. The three had dismounted and led their beasts under the welcome shade. In the brassy, yellow glare every branch above threw so black and solid a shadow that the men involuntarily raised their feet to step ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... consider what tin foil was thirty years ago, we do not wonder that so many operators failed to make tight, good-wearing fillings. As it came from the manufacturer it looked fairly bright, but after being exposed to the air for a short time it assumed a light brassy color, and lost what small amount of integrity it originally possessed. This tin was not properly refined before beating, or something was put on the foil while beating, so that it did not have the clean, bright surface and cohesive quality which our best foil now ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... names. Shall one not enjoy a symphony without precise knowledge of the instrument that gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its function in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I bestow loosely a general approbation; yet ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... advanced across the room. Someone gave a choking cough and then a brassy voice fairly shouted, 'Why, man, they're dead! My Lord! What ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... could not catch. They half halted and made a brave attempt to pose as Germans, to judge by their guttural talk and brassy front. ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... friend's alarm to the uttermost. His nose changed from the natural copper hue which it had acquired from many a comfortable cup of claret or sack, into a palish brassy tint, and his teeth chattered with apprehension at the unveiled audacity of my proposal, which seemed to place the barefaced plunderer before him in full atrocity. As he faltered for an answer, I relieved him in some degree by a question ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... their wheels purring like pleased lionesses. The sun's disc came in sight at a quarter past eleven, and at noon his lower limb just touched the horizon. The sky was of a splendid saffron hue, which changed into a burning brassy yellow. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... blowing dull and hollow from south-west; the clouds are rolling faster and faster up from the Atlantic; the sky to westward is brassy green; the glass is falling fast; and there will be wind and rain enough to-night to sweep even Aberalva clean for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... on the floor close by Issa's stool, kept handing up one article after another for closer examination. The stuff seemed worthless enough to Constans—trumpery pieces of quartz crystal set in copper and debased silver, rings and bangles of a hue unmistakably brassy, hair ribbons, parti-colored dress goods, pins, needles, and a miscellaneous assortment of useless trinkets. Constans was genuinely astonished that Issa, who had been hitherto something of a good-fellow, should seem interested in such rubbish; but then women were all alike ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... clarionet. "No doubt the trombone is a little cracked and brassy, so to speak, because of a hinfluenza as has wonted him for some weeks; but there's good stuff in 'im, sir, and plenty o' lungs. The key-bugle is a noo 'and, but 'e's capital, 'ticklerly in the 'igh notes an' flats; besides, bein' young, 'e'll improve. As to the French 'orn, there ain't ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... M'Foozle enters blushing, With a brassy and an iron in his hand . . . This blow, so unexpected and so crushing, Is more than I ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... corner of that, and by the time we had groped our way after him he was sitting in the old black panther's cage with the brute's head in his lap, stroking and twisting its ears as if it were a kitten. The cage door was wide open, and the day was already growing hot and brassy in the east. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... another for a space of three or four breaths. Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles, was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy yell. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... smiled over Batouch's opulent descriptions of the marvels of Ain-Amara, which they suspected to be very far away from the reality, and yet, nevertheless, when they saw the minarets soaring above the sands to the brassy heaven, it seemed to them both as if, perhaps, they might be true. The place looked intensely barbaric. The approach to ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... had never seen a nugget in its native state, was excitedly searching for pieces of gold. Ellen smiled to see her, with Loll at her heels, running hither and thither, expecting any moment to come upon large, brassy-looking lumps resting like ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... up some courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... in this case Pretensions rather brassy; For talents, to deserve a place, Are qualifications saucy. So their worships of the Faculty, Quite sick of merit's rudeness, Chose one who should owe it all, d'ye see, To ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... pat from the lips of the doctor, and there was no misunderstanding them, and Brassy did not, for ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... certainly did not like this aspersion on his native district. He gazed in silence at Mr. Bryany's brassy and yet simple face, and did not like ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... going to have a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the wild reflections upon ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... cars, Rabbis with their patriarchal beards, slim saleswomen who wore masses of marcelled curls and real Irish lace, she watched them all. She drank in the music of the Park concerts, she dreamed in the libraries, she eagerly caught the first brassy mutter of the ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... silence as if it knew What, any moment, might look through A chance gap in that fortress massy:— Through its fissures you got hints Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints, Now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow, Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow, All a-simmer with intense strain To let her through,—then blank again, At the hope of her appearance failing. Just by the chapel, a break in the railing Shows a narrow ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... feelings, I turned once more to talk with the professor of niblicks and approach shots and holes done in three without a brassy. We were a merry party at lunch—a lunch fortunately in Mrs. Beale's best vein, consisting of a roast chicken and sweets. Chicken had figured somewhat frequently of late on ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... acquainted with the circumstances?" asked Turlington, retorting Launce's question on him, with a harsh ring of defiance in his brassy voice. ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... the morning peal is flung From yon tall belfry with the brazen tongue, Its wide vibrations, wafted by the gale, To each far listener tell a different tale. The sexton, stooping to the quivering floor Till the great caldron spills its brassy roar, Whirls the hot axle, counting, one by one, Each dull concussion, till his task is done. Toil's patient daughter, when the welcome note Clangs through the silence from the steeple's throat, Streams, a white unit, to the checkered ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... interrogatively, as he settled the flower in his gray coat, and let the paper ribband of the "ticker" run through his other hand, with its tale of the tide of stocks. Yellow Mr. Screw shot a lurid glance from his brassy little eyes. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... life he had dreamed of. No Martian whiskey, no drugs, no night spots, no bigtime gamblers slapping him on the back and calling him "pal," no brassy blondes giving him the eye. Still, it was better than the life he had actually lived, much better. It would do, ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... like so many before it; the sun was low on the horizon, and its yellow beams were throwing a brassy tint over the sea and sky; the sailors were engaged, some fishing with patient assiduity, others, grouped into small knots, listening to prosy yarns; while a few were prostrated round the decks in attitudes of perfect abandonment ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of metal, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... characterized by its hardness, greenish color, occurrence, and action of acid. Iron pyrites is always known by its brassy metallic aspect and great hardness. Copper pyrites, by its aspect from the other minerals, and from iron pyrites by its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... his "Historic Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Colonel, and the party shuffled on down the line of the wall with their faces up and their big hats thrown backwards. The sun behind them struck the old grey masonry with a brassy glare, and carried on to it the strange black shadows of the tourists, mixing them up with the grim, high-nosed, square-shouldered warriors, and the grotesque, rigid deities who lined it. The broad shadow of the Reverend John Stuart, ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her. From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... with me. Stomach-turned at the fat niggers dressed up like Turks and Algerians and made to lend an "air" to the haunt of the nocturnal belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened at the stupid lewdities of the Rue Biot, disgusted at the brassy harlotries of the Lapin Agil', come with me into that auberge of the Avenue Trudaine where are banned catch-coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, that little refuge whose wall gives forth the tableau of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Prairie—and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... woman-mystery can give, The strange simplicity that will endure The pangs of death, most resolute to live. This God of riddles that shaped a thing so frail For his worst torment hid mysterious powers Within her breast who can like lilies prevail Through rains of doom that conquer brassy towers. Her heart lies broken; when some trivial chord Of sweetness chimes reveille through the sense,— A rose, a song, a smile, a courtly word. She wakes, and sighs, and softly passes thence Back to the masquers, though her soul's ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... exclaimed Colonel Clive, who had been watching this movement. "They must be Frenchmen sent from Brassy—unless they are some of those that ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... hand, her chin, her brows, and her beautiful figure. And—as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a connoisseur—Natalie's pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice, that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the Casa-Reales were collaterally descended. These indications were those of violent ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and stones. Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface, not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered with the same ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... at a table in a perfectly charming restaurant, the most restful place to eat in that I ever saw. I can't imagine even a fiend being ill-tempered in it for long; and it was deliciously cool, as if we had come into a shadowy green wood after the blazing, brassy glare ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... rapidity, but flies away when molested. It is about half an inch in length. "It is of a flattish, oblong form, and of a shining, greenish black color, each of its wing cases having three raised lines, the outer two interrupted by two impressed transverse spots of brassy color dividing each wing cover into three nearly equal portions. The under side of the body and legs shine like burnished copper; the feet are shining green." This beetle appears in June and July, and does not confine its work to the base of the tree, but attacks the trunk in any part, and sometimes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... minstrelsy, and then again Backward it swept like a great tidal wave Of anguish, all Hell's anarchy of grief Set to a sounding fugue. Grim-throated rose The awful hymn, and mingling with the wail Of voices, pealed the cymbals' brassy clang; The thunderous organs bellowed through the gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought their ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... from his unwritten plays while ladling his soup, and who staggered and fell across chairs in illustration of highly emotional lines and, what was worse, he was of those who regard every unescorted woman as fair game. Bold of glance and brassy of smile, he began to make eyes at his ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... is a fierce cannibalistic fly. Fully an inch in length and bulky in proportion, it somewhat resembles a house-fly on a gigantic scale, but is lustrous grey in colour, with blond eyes, fawn legs, and transparent, iridescent wings, with a brassy glint in them. The broad, comparatively short wings carry a body possessing a muscular system of the highest development, for the note flight produces indicates the extraordinary rapidity of the wing vibrations. Some swift-flying insects are ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... with his feet on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his face, bent into the horn of a young moon—Julien, and yet unearthly and impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn. She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... - 74 70 67 24 En route to Nuwaybi', along Sinai shore. Morning grey; light clouds everywhere. Dull brassy sunrise. Water dark. Wind south, felt very damp. Sinai hills clouded over: cirri strata high up; nimbi ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... the third wagon was suffering from exhaustion. The days and days of walking over the rolling prairie, under a brassy sun, the hard food of the train, and the short hours of rest, had put too severe a trial upon his delicate frame. Now, as he lay against the sacks and boxes that had been drawn up to form a sort of couch for him, his breath came in short gasps, and his face was very ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less satisfactory; it ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... which is of the brassy brow and insensate nerves; but I love the courage of the strong heart, the fervour of the generous blood; I loved with passion the light of Frances Evans' clear hazel eye when it did not fear to look straight ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... wandered a crowd of white-robed Arabs, with red or blue turbans. Occasionally one saw a khaki uniform. It was intensely hot and damp. A haze lay over the further reaches of the river, and the sky had a brassy look unlike the intense turquoise clarity of the Egyptian sky. The palm fronds seemed metallic. As far as the eye could see along the right bank lay a confused mass of low white buildings, tents, huts of yellow matting ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... fancy she almost saw the brassy glint in her husband's eyes. He raised one enormous lean ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of motorcars, as to what really constitutes a garage. He usually does not even know what the word means. Any roofed-over shed or shack, with doors or not, is what one generally has to put up with to-day, for housing his resplendent brassy ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the young heart flew, And caught many lustres, till some one said (Or was it the thought into hearing grew?), NOT THOU AS COMMONER MEN! Thy stature puffed and it swayed, It stiffened to royal-erect; A brassy trumpet brayed; A whirling seized thy head; The vision of beauty was flecked. Note well the how and the when, The thing that prompted and sped. Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing, Fixed eye, and the world was prey. No simple world of thy greenblade Spring, Nor world of thy flowerful prime ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be written in the terms of peace, And evermore on brassy tablets graven, That England shall demand no right nor lease Of frontier nor of town, nor armoured haven, But cede with unreluctant paw To Germans and to German law The whole of this egregious SHAW, And only ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... what any of them was worth being a relative matter depending largely upon circumstances. Speaking generally, liberty in the abstract, apart from particular and known conditions, was only a phrase, a brassy tinkle in Mr. Hutchinson's ear, meaning nothing unless it meant mere absence of all constraint. The liberty which Mr. Hutchinson prized was not the same as freedom from constraint. Not liberty in this sense, or in any sense, but the welfare of a people neatly ordered ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... had closed her lips, quite forcibly, but as Arethusa was not present, it could not do much good. Arethusa did not forget a single creature at the Farm. Beginning with Miss Asenath, every living thing had a gift. Miss Johnson had a collar of wonderfully shiny, brassy beauty; old Baldy, the horse, had a new blanket; and there was even a catnip ball for the grey cat that slept in front of Mandy's stove. There were so many cats at the Farm that it was quite impossible to remember ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort—such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, dirty area. The air, made blistering ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... in the world a little before they talked of marrying," continued Mr. Mornington; but you ask me as coolly as possible to give you enough to enable you and your wife to travel, before you go into business at all, which I think is pretty brassy. I wonder what my father would have thought if I had made such a request. I honestly believe he would have thrashed me. But as I said, things are different now-a-days." Harry grew very red during this harangue, ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... both loaded. Having eaten he lit a cheroot and was jotting down in his notebook the information that he had gathered that morning, when a shrill trumpet from the invisible Badshah made him grasp his rifle. Skilled in the knowledge of the various sounds that elephants make he knew by the brassy note of this that the animal was in deadly fear. He sprang up to go to his assistance, when Badshah burst through the trees and came towards him at his fastest pace, his drooping ears and tail and outstretched trunk showing ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... unearthly light died out of the dim prairie, the veil swept across into place again; and he managed to check his wild flight, and look about him. His empty lips were gibbering without a sound escaping them, and his very heart shivered with cold, for all the brassy heat of the day. But the breeze was wandering on again; under the great sun the prairie spread dim to the southwest, and tawny to the northeast; only between his own loose knees the horse trembled in every limb, and mumbled the bit with dry mouth. All was as before in earth ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... The herald, with his brassy voice, again went the rounds, announcing the day's event and the tardy fulfillment of the boy's commission. Then came the bustle of preparation. The out-door toilet of the people was performed with ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... touch'd with human gentleness and love, Forgive a moiety of the principal; Glancing an eye of pity on his losses, That have of late so huddled on his back, Enow to press a royal merchant down And pluck commiseration of his state From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint, From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd To offices of tender courtesy. We all expect ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... senoras were smoky looking with snakish eyes, and the dresses under their heavy-fringed black mantillas were more frowsy than those of their daughters. They certainly were not imposing; and if they wore jewelry at all it looked brassy ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... a man's actual clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
