"Formless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... born John Cranceford, who years later won applause as commander of one of the most stubborn batteries of the Confederate Army. The house was originally built of cypress logs, but as time passed additions of boards and brick were made, resulting in a formless but comfortable habitation, with broad passage ways and odd lolling places set to entrap cool breezes. The plantation comprised about one thousand acres. The land for the most part was level, but here and there a hill arose, like ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to his own mind. To him X is a known quantity all along. In any picture that he paints he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hand a pair of prism binoculars. He took a casual look around. Then he put the glasses to his eyes and scanned the Gulf with a slow, searching sweep. At first sight it seemed empty. Then far eastward toward Vancouver his glass picked up two formless dots which alternately showed ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... just eaten a man. Both figures are so realistic that the intention of the weaver is apparent. In B, D, E, and F, the animal is still realistic, but the man disappears, and in his place is a formless object or straight lines which are identified ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... bright essence increate! Or hear'st thou, rather, pure Eternal Stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God as with a mantle didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite!" ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... headlong, over our prostrate bodies. I and the General picking ourselves up, bolted out together, without looking round once till we got across the road. Then, clinging to each other, we beheld the house change suddenly into a heap of formless rubbish behind the back of a man, who staggered towards us bearing the form of a woman clasped in his arms. Her long black hair hung nearly to his feet. He laid her down reverently on the heaving earth, and the moonlight shone on her ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... tellers before the public and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying data—chapter and verse—in support of the assertions I have made. They do it abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, and smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a considerable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of things heard and seen—data and memoranda which I designed to use in the already projected book which is now in your ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... slowly back to equilibrium. We picked ourselves up, tossed rugs, coats, instruments, promiscuously overboard, and mounted again. The chine of the tall hill, our stumbling-block, fell back and was lost, and we swept forward into formless shadow. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faces that have been my sunshine in this life, let me sleep on. Rather than that the doctrine of endless punishment should be tried, I would like to see the fabric of our civilization crumble and fall to unmeaning chaos and to formless dust, where oblivion broods and where even memory forgets. I would rather a Samson of some unprisoned force, released by chance, should so wreck and strain the mighty world that man in stress and strain of want and fear should shudderingly crawl back ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the Peaceful Hart ranch lay broodily quiet under its rock-rimmed bluff. Down in the stable the saddle-horses were but formless blots upon the rumpled bedding in their stalls—except Huckleberry, the friendly little pinto with the white eyelashes and the blue eyes, and the great, liver-colored patches upon his sides, and the appetite which demanded food at unseasonable hours, ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and formless world. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... as that, at that time when it becomes evident that the little light we have had all day is about to leave us, a lonely watcher was standing by the angry swelling river in the most desolate part of the pass, at a place where a vast confusion of formless rocks crosses the stream, torturing it into a hundred boiling pools ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... like a statue of an old man guarding the honour of his house. Linda removed her trembling hand from his arm, firm and steady like an arm of stone, and, without a word, entered the blackness of the shade. She saw a stir of formless shapes on the ground, and stopped short. A murmur of despair and tears grew ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, Him contains, Even to the ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... hour, I think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the direction of his inn; but the hope of a little more light tempted him forward to reconnoitre. The lane ended in a terrace with a bartizan wall, which gave an outlook between high houses, as out of an embrasure, into the valley lying dark and formless several hundred feet below. Denis looked down, and could discern a few tree-tops waving and a single speck of brightness where the river ran across a weir. The weather was clearing up, and the sky had lightened, so as to show the outline of the heavier clouds and the dark margin of the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... the laugh of a woman, of an honest woman, a dry crackling laugh, which she thought innocent perhaps, but which caressed her whole being, a burst of laughter, which, made up of formless instinctive cries, was almost fleshy. She stopped and turned, silent again. And the speaker, sure of his effect, continued in a calm voice to hurl upon these people the ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... it was," I went on. "A formless apparition, not exactly white or black, and huge and unknown of likeness. The Indians were frightened by a manner of unearthliness about the thing, and the brother-in-law fell on his knees and began to pray. 'It is the devil,' he murmured to Rafael. ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... spirit and adequate ideal began to appear, but from about the beginning of the nineties we date the first appearance of an intelligent purpose in the revolutionary movement and the beginning of its development from a mere formless revolt against intolerable conditions into a logical and self-conscious evolution ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... a silver note, and instantly this vain fantasy vanished; what was the use of regarding the two wine-filled cups when he knew that Nina was far and far away? He sprang to his feet and went to the window, and gazed out into the black and formless ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... visions—a welter of sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phaedra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia, and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; "If ever we win to life, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... must be a master of Human Words. The message from God which we carry is to become a message to men, and therefore we must know how to introduce it successfully to their notice. Strong as our own conviction may be, yet it may be crude and formless; and, before it can become the conviction of others, it must take a shape which will arouse their attention. It may belong to a region of thought with which they are unfamiliar, and it has to be brought near, until it enters the circle of their ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Formless and gross did tragedy arise, A simple chorus, rather mad than wise; For fruitful vintages the dancing throng Roar'd to the god of grapes a drunken song: Wild mirth and wine sustain'd the frantic note, And the best singer had ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... house, Liubka proved to be less than mediocre. True, she could cook fat stews, so thick that the spoon stood upright in them; prepare enormous, unwieldy, formless cutlets; and under the guidance of Lichonin familiarized herself pretty rapidly with the great art of brewing tea (at seventy-five kopecks a pound); but further than that she did not go, probably because for each ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of them. The one standing close in front of it, as though disdainful of the risk he ran, was Torrance; the other, who now and then moved lithely, and once rested a rifle on the sill, was Clavering; another, the man who had fired the last shot; but the rest were blurred, formless objects, a little darker than the cedar panelling. Now and then the streak of radiance widened behind the box, and the cold grew numbing as the icy wind ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... impressive understanding of the ears in the valley (if not indeed under the water and worse still), strengthens me in my higher endeavors,—and you, dear friend, will have to bear some of the responsibility if I go on writing more such "confused," "formless," and, for the every-day critic, quite ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... scene began to change, and the white formless world about her began to assume definite shape. She had seen it all before, the bare trees pointing their naked branches upward, the fringe of willows, the smooth, glassy sheet of water that was partly frozen and partly undulating toward the southern ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... rushing sound, and looking for it, saw in the opposite direction a formless object, as much darker than the gray of the void as the flame was brighter, and it too was growing larger, and coming. And it seemed to him that this light and darkness were the good and evil of his life, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... when she aroused herself and went upstairs. The room in which she had formerly slept still remained much as she had left it, and the recollection that this forced upon her of her own greatly changed and infinitely worsened situation again set on her face the undetermined and formless misery which it had worn on her first arrival. She peeped into her grandfather's room, through which the fresh autumn air was blowing from the open window. Her eye was arrested by what was a familiar sight enough, though it broke upon her now with ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... morning, far withdrawn Beyond the darkness and the cataract, God made himself an awful rose of dawn, [3] Unheeded: and detaching, fold by fold, From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near, A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold, Came floating on for many a month and year, Unheeded: and I thought I would have spoken, And warn'd that madman ere it grew too late: But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken, When that cold vapour touch'd the palace-gate, And ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... the consideration that, "The faculty of speech is the medium of social bliss for superior intelligences in an eternal world;" [51] and who, when he has exhausted censure in condemning the practical instruction of others, thus lavishes praise, in both his grammars, upon that formless, void, and incomprehensible theory of his own: "This application of words," says he, "in their endless use, by one plain rule, to all things which nouns can name, instead of being the fit subject of blind cavil, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... that golden art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of escape—into a formless and nameless infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the business of life as no better than a trifling ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off sea-ward with an expression of ineffably mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters to create a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... the still, small hours, sees moving in the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large portions of the room with some formless presence of unutterable malignity ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... common circumstances of existence. Sometimes her straying mind would become astonishingly active—embroidering bright and decorative things that she could say to Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of passive acquiescence, into a radiant, formless, golden joy. She was aware of people—her aunt, her father, her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors—moving about outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is aware of the dim audience beyond the ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... followed Jennie pondered over the difficulties of her position and wondered what she should do. Money she had, it was true; but no friends, no experience, no place to go. She had always lived with her family. She began to feel unaccountable sinkings of spirit, nameless and formless fears seemed to surround and haunt her. Once when she arose in the morning she felt an uncontrollable desire to cry, and frequently thereafter this feeling would seize upon her at the most inopportune times. Mrs. Gerhardt began to note her ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... nuclei in the middle of the field of view the spears shoot with magical rapidity in all directions. The film of water on a window-pane on a frosty morning exhibits effects quite as wonderful as these. Latent in these formless solutions, latent in every drop of water, lies this marvellous structural power, which only requires the withdrawal of opposing forces ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... an allusion to the seven activities or changes which water goes through to produce form; Water being the formative power which Fire, itself formless and the moving ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... the main west portal of the Palace of Machinery. It is by Daniel Chester French, who is generally considered the dean of American sculptors. The Genius of Creation is portrayed as a huge winged figure, enthroned over the formless mass of earth, with head bowed and arms outstretched, calling human life into being. At the two sides a man and a woman, fine strong figures both, stand looking forth, the man courageously, the woman ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... decasyllabic length. "My Grandmother's Garden", by Ida Cochran Haughton, is a truly delightful bit of reminiscent description which deserves more than one reading. "A Little Girl's Three Wishes", by Mrs. R. M. Moody, is entertaining in quality and correct in metre. It is a relief to behold amidst the formless cacophony of modern poetry such a regular, old-fashioned specimen of the octosyllabic couplet. "Two Little Waterwheels", by Dora M. Hepner, is an exquisite idyllic sketch. In the second paragraph we read of a ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... illusion! The illusion of the great sun; the illusion of the shadow-casting hills; the illusion of waters, formless and multiform; the illusion of—Nay, nay I what impious fancy! Accursed girl! yet, yet! why should he curse her? Had she ever done aught to merit the malediction of an ascetic? Never, never! Only her form, the memory of her, the beautiful ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... where he lay for centuries, nor hot nor cold, neither waking nor sleeping, not in joy and not in sorrow. Then the stopped pendulum swung again, and the dreams came fast and faster. At times his brain turned from its mad clash with gigantic, formless, elemental things to rest in the beaten ways. They that listened heard the adventurer speak, heard the courtier and the poet and the lover, but never once the traitor. Of the fortress of Nueva Cordoba and of what had happened therein, of a Spaniard, noble but in name, of an English ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... vital function of the interplanetary being. It is composed of substance termed matter, which substance is the aggregation of countless atoms, which science has not, and never can, resolve into their individual selves. These atoms are rings of the atomless ether, which, thus differentiated from the formless ether, become centers of force, the center of such force being a vacuum within the atomic ring—a center so small that a microscope with lens one thousand times as powerful as the most perfect modern instrument would fail to reveal it. These atoms form systems, under the control ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... we find that some of Kabr's finest poems have as their subjects the commonplaces of Hindu philosophy and religion: the Ll or Sport of God, the Ocean of Bliss, the Bird of the Soul, My, the Hundred- petalled Lotus, and the "Formless Form." Many, again, are soaked in Sf imagery and feeling. Others use as their material the ordinary surroundings and incidents of Indian life: the temple bells, the ceremony of the lamps, marriage, suttee, ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... died down to a faint ruddiness, just seen through the thin tops of the firs. The fire—whether it had been the barn or the house—had burned itself out. Whatever had happened, it was over. As she stood shuddering, unable to think, not daring to think, her eyes rested upon the bear, huge and formless in the gloom, staring at her, not ten feet away. She answered the stare fixedly, no longer aware of fearing him. Then she saw him turn his head suddenly, as if he had heard something. And the next moment he had faded away swiftly and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... starlight is the face of the lover when the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance (which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... their steps as they neared the last compartment. They found, as expected, that it was another stairwell. Van Emmon turned the light upon every corner of the place before going any further; but except for a formless heap of rubbish in one corner, which they did not investigate, the place was as bare as ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... was unworthy of a strong man of affairs; yes, for not having revealed to him the mysteries of railroad practice from the beginning. But frankness was not an ingredient of the Honourable Hilary's nature, and Austen was not the kind of man who would accept a hint and a wink. Hilary Vane had formless forebodings, and found himself for once in his life powerless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pleasant ripple of waves, the sound of music and light voices, the yellow midsummer moon again rose over Greyport. It looked upon formless masses of rock and shrubbery, wide spaces of lawn and beach, and a shimmering expanse of water. It singled out particular objects,—a white sail in shore, a crystal globe upon the lawn, and flashed upon something held between the teeth of a crouching figure scaling ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... placed it beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely and unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily's power of obtaining it. And in her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... that I could reproduce five of them in my mind's eye. Of my dearest and most intimate friends, I could name eight whom I have seen and talked with four days ago, but when I try to call them before me they are formless shadows. Jean has been absent, this past eight or ten days, in the country, and I wish I could reproduce her in the mirror of my mind, but I ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and supernormal experiences. Holding Pearl, who still clung to him frantically, cowering and trembling against him, he leaned upon the rough, projecting walls of his cabin and gazed with awed and still unbelieving eyes into this new and formless world, yet ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... of whose disappointments she had soothed, with the sweet airs and concords of her own spirit. Who could say what tender influences might not be stealing over him, borne on the fair sounds? for even the formless and the void was roused into life and joy by the wind that roamed over the face of its deep. No humanity jarred with hers. In the presence of the most degraded, she felt God there. A face, even if besotted, was a face, only in virtue of being in the image of God. That ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to be that Kneph represents the absolute Being as Spirit, the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters,—a moving spirit pervading the formless chaos of matter. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... fancied her very destiny was in some way connected with the Queen's visit to Segovia—that some mysterious influences were connecting her, insignificant as she was, with Isabella's will. She strove with the baseless vision; but it would gain ground, folding up her whole mind in its formless imaginings. The sight of her husband, conversing eagerly with the sovereign, in some degree startled her back to the present scene. His cheek was flushed with exercise and excitement; his large dark eyes glittering, and a sunny smile robbing his mouth of ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... affected and there is difficulty in the pronunciation of sounds in which the lips are concerned, viz. u, o, p, b, and m. Eventually articulate speech becomes impossible, and the only expression remaining to the patient is laryngeal phonation, slightly modulated and broken into the rhythm of formless syllables. ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... young woman, more feminine, easier to explain, but also thwarted, restlessly demanding an outlet. These women do not want to furl their sex, they seek lovers to whom they may surrender themselves, but they suffer from a formless discontent that rots into every love and prevents them finding satisfaction. Eternally they are unsatisfied, ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... our old camping-ground after a ride of three hours and thirty minutes ( nine miles), we crossed two short divides, and descended the Wady el-Kusayb, which gives a name to "Sharp Peak." Here a few formless stone-heaps and straggling bushes represented the ruins, the gardens of palms, and the bullrushes of the Bedawi shepherd lads.[EN20] Our tents had been pitched in the rond-point of the Wady Surr, which ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace, vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its politics. ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... king's attachment to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood, or the era when the earth was formless and void. It is mere futility to talk of cause and effect in connection with a string of arbitrarily chosen incidents of this sort. Cause and effect, in Turgot's sense of history, describe a relation between certain ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... rose to her ordinarily pale cheeks, corresponding with a formless gladness permeating his own being. She wore ruffled lavender with a clear lace pelerine caught at her breast by a knot of straw-coloured ribbon and sprig of rose geranium. "Mr. Penny," she said, with a little gasp of surprise; but her ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he found himself in the society of Shame, the oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him, formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew the secret of the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the shell of the poor hawk ready to receive from your skill and judgment, the size, the shape, the features, and expression it bad ere death and your dissecting hand brought it to its present still and formless state. The cold hand of death stamps deep its mark upon the prostrate victim. When the heart ceases to beat and the blood no longer courses through the veins, the features collapse, and the whole frame seems to shrink within itself. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... understanding of what the drama is about, nor what the issues of the battle are, can be grasped. Good lawyers are good thinkers and usually plain talkers. The present-day revolt against the confused pleadings may go to the opposite extreme and abolish them all, leaving the case to be presented as formless and loose. The vexed question of the proper form of a pleading may delay justice until it is determined on appeal from the City Court to the Supreme Court, then to the Appellate Division, then to the Court of Appeals. In the meanwhile the clients may die, the money in suit may be ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... must once have been eminently handsome—above all, the air of almost ferocious authority, with which she was speaking, struck him as strangely out of place in that solitary spot. Beyond this, he felt a vague impression, impalpable and formless, of some connection between that woman and former events of his own life. It might have been her dress so foreign to the place, or her humble mode of life. The Madras kerchief, folded in a turban over the black hair falling down each side of her face in the heaviest waves ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... regulate this mass of incoherence and confusion. As for following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French national language during these three centuries, and marking how it issued from this formless and vulgar chaos, there are not facts and documents enough for our guidance throughout that long travail; but when the thirteenth century begins, when Villehardouin tells the tale of the crusade, which put, for seventy years, Constantinople and the Greek empire of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a long time with these girls' letters before him, and lost himself in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young man thinks about young girls; his soul is suffused with a sense of their sweetness and brightness, and unless he is distinctly in love there is no intention in his thoughts of them; even then there is often ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... was the end. With a shudder the body collapsed in a formless heap, and the tailor-man was gone to tell of the work he had done for his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was a good Christian, and those heathen images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,—sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... vague and blurred his senses now became preternaturally acute. His surroundings were no longer dim and formless, rather everything grew inhumanly sharp and vivid. To the end of his life he would preserve an extraordinarily faithful recollection of the room into which Cheniston presently ushered him—the usual hotel bedroom in India, with high green walls, mosquito curtains, and an entire absence ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... brother's face looking out from among the trees as I passed. I saw the features as distinctly as if the meridian sun had beamed upon them... It was by degrees that the features showed themselves thus out of what had been a formless shadow. I gazed upon it intently. Presently it faded away by as insensible degrees as those by which it had become agonisingly clear. After a short time ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... are not dry treatises, based on Blue books and the gathering together of information and statistics from a formless and largely worthless collection of earlier sources. He has approached this question of man in relation to the State in the same generous spirit displayed in his works of fiction; and it is only by using the word "sociology" in its fuller sense as conceived by Comte, rather than ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... before I slept. I had gone thus but a few yards, my gaze now on the difficult path before me, now upon the sea, when, chancing to look towards the bluff I have mentioned, I stopped to stare amazed, for in this little distance, this formless headland, seen from this angle, had suddenly taken a new shape and there before me, plain and manifest, was the rough semblance of a lion's head; and I knew that betwixt it and the high cliff whereon I stood must be Adam's excellent secure haven. This sudden discovery ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an unseen torrent. Before him towered the shadowy hills up into the starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction he felt in the whole effect. At the same instant he was once more aware of that delicate pressure, that weight so lightly, sweetly borne upon his arm. It startled ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... to be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes? Such things are less than the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... emotion, save in dreams, ah—dreams! The high Truth has but flickered in my soul— Even at such times, in wide blue midnight hours, When, dawning sudden on my inner world, New stars came forth, revealing unknown depths, New heights of silence, quelling all my sea, And for a moment I saw formless fact, And knew myself a living lonely thought, Isled in the hyaline of Truth alway! I have not reaped earth's harvest, O my God; Have gathered but a few poor wayside flowers, Harebells, red poppies, daisies, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... a passage of mad triumph and terror. The Barrier was broken through. Out of the breach issued the One whom she had invited to her silver lamps; colossal, formless, whose approach froze blood and spirit. Eyes of unspeakable meaning glared across the dark, whispers unbearable to humanity beat upon her intelligence ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that "No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... no connection with any recognised religious community, but the members of it had belonged to many—to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came—by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the looseness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were a grain of truth in his suspicions, formless though in a measure they remained, he had not ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... soundlessness, a curious cooing and gurgling, a sort of fluty chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone, a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us, seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as my heart swelled in me, a flock ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... looking at them and at the house which he had now fully decided to take for his home, Mr. Melcombe saw this haze dissolve itself and retreat; there was light enough to make the paleness whiter, and to show the distinct brown trunk of each pear-tree, with the cushions of green moss at its roots. Formless whiteness and visible dusk had divided themselves into light and shade, then came a shaft of sunshine, the boughs laden with dewy blossom sparkled like snow, and in one instant the oppression of their solemnity was over, and they appeared to smile ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of foregoing a pleasure. For if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at least perceptible entity. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself, a hundred times a day, against a wall of glass, always mistaking it for water. Do you realise that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... least done him this service, that the formless misery of the past weeks, the monstrous, wordless sense of desolation, now resolved itself into a grief for which inner words, however comfortless, sprang into being. Below him Verona, proud sentinel between the North and Rome, offered herself to the embrace of the wild, ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... and insincere essays in dry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate the whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of a younger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again make their dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and the Formless will spin rhythmic patterns on the loom of space. We shall seek and find a new language of symbols to express the joy of the soul, freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism, and fronting the unimaginable splendors ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... he saw—nothing. He must be turned around. No; the view of the opposite direction was equally blank. Then, for an instant, he caught a glimpse of shadowy tree-tops just dissolving into formless mist. The blessed fog had folded its protecting arms about him, and he ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... was going to change, and that to-morrow some still more bewildering joy would befall her? Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen one, I think the words would have been too hard for her; how then could she find a shape for her expectations? They were as formless as the sweet languid odours of the garden at the Chase, which had floated past her as she walked ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... are known masters of English. We shall have, again, to consult candid friends. But my point is, that all this is abundantly worth our while. A neat, straight, well-worded sentence is not a mere literary luxury. It is a practical power. It is far easier to listen to than a careless, formless sentence is, and it is far easier to remember. The truth which it conveys is much more likely, therefore, to find its way securely into the mind, and to lie there ready for the vivifying touch of the ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... well as in the lowest. And till such purpose is understood, the life of the man is to beholders what the flower is to the eye when looked at through a microscope,—an expanse of mere tissue, rough, formless, confusing; but such purpose once understood, the soul is transformed to the beholder as if made of glass, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... glittering lens—but a black bottomless hole form in the metal circle at the front of the camera. And—an experience I am familiar with now—I seemed to rush into the bottomless darkness of that hole and back again, at the rate of thousands of times a second, arriving at some formless destination and each time feeling it take ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... profitable to Riemer and myself, and has given a most admirable opportunity for discussions on linguistics and philosophy. I am by no means averse to the literature of India, but I am afraid of it; for it draws my imaginative power towards the formless and the deformed, against which I am forced to guard myself more than ever; but if it comes over the signature of a valued friend, it will always be welcome, for it gives me the desired opportunity to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with wireless alone! And that is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used—and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown—as unknown as God!—and almost ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... that could strike from very far off with lightning and thunder, he had made up his mind at once to withdraw to some remoter range. Nevertheless, he had lingered for some days, sullenly expecting he knew not what. These formless expectations were most unpleasantly fulfilled when he came upon a man in a canoe paddling close in by the steep shore of the lake. He had hurled himself blindly down the bank, raging for vengeance, but ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... both the fugitives—a groan, or rather howl, of rage, and despair, and agony, appalled even the hardest on whose ear it came. Morton sprang to his feet and looked below. He saw on the rugged stones far down, a dark, formless, motionless mass—the strong man of passion and levity—the giant who had played with life and soul, as an infant with the baubles that it prizes and breaks—was what the Caesar and the leper alike are, when the clay ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so. This being, if being it could be called, was like a block of wood roughly hewn into the mere outlines of a man; and hardly so, for it had but head, body, legs, and arms—the head without a face, and the limbs utterly formless. I had hewn off one of its legs, but the two portions moved on as best they could, quite independent of each other; so that I had done no good. I ran after it, and clove it in twain from the head downwards; but it could not be convinced that its vocation was not to walk over people; ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... young in civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were already grey with 1500 years, you have got another step which impresses you with a doubled amount of vastness. Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment when the present aspect of this world was called, by creation, out of the formless void ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... part of Mr. Spencer's essay is devoted to a consideration of the hypothetical action of the environment on the lower organisms which consist of simple cells or formless masses of protoplasm; and he shows with great elaboration that the outer and inner parts of these are necessarily subject to different conditions; and that the outer actions of air or water lead to the formation of integuments, and sometimes ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... unemployment. Grumblings of dissatisfaction soon gave way to parades and informal meetings at which imported Chinese labor and the rich "nobs," the supposed dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language. The agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader appeared in Dennis Kearney, a native of Cork County, Ireland. For fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... so," she said, which had certainly never been true, for her old formless dreams were no intention—nothing but a mush of discontent. "I hope I can do something that's nice before I quit," she said. Nor was this hope now independently true, but only this surprising longing to appear interesting in his eyes. To dance before ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... took in such details as the despair in Mrs. Eveleth's face, the folds of crape on her gown, the Watteau picture on the panel of moss-green and gold that formed the background, all the realities of life seemed to be dissolving into chaos, as the glories of the sunset sink into a black and formless mass. When Mrs. Eveleth spoke again, her voice sounded as though it ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... below, a strong judgment is uttered with becoming non-modesty, and precisely in regard to the Ninth Symphony. It is said, for instance, that this symphony "is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, and music especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime" (p. 428). It is true that a critic as severe as Gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happened to confirm one of his doctrines; but Strauss is "far from going to these problematic productions" in search of the merits of his Beethoven. "It is a pity," cries our ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... incomprehensible forces were locked within that formless mass? By what manner of race as yet unborn had its elements been brought together—no, no—would they be brought together? How assume a comfortable mental attitude toward this creation whose present existence so long antedated its ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... reflection in a glass. In his rain-bedraggled attire he might pass for one of the Sydney Ducks himself. His boots were splashed with mud, his scrape wrinkled and formless. He pulled the dripping hat into a disheveled slouch, low down on his forehead. McTurpin had not seen him with a beard, had failed to recognize him at the polling station. Benito decided to ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... cathedrals, and unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that contains the formless image—a clumsy stone woman lying on her back—which purports to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... them that arrested him and caused him to mumble absurdly of 'doing best,' when in fact he was her bondman, rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word? and when she, for some reason that he was sure she had stated, though he could recollect no more than the formless hideousness of it, was debarred from returning ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... flagellant, or the self-dramatization of a neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... qualities, and fashion, to assimilate either with worn-out or ill-fitting garments. Some of the shops presented mountains of old shoes, some trodden down at heel, others twisted, torn, split, and in holes, presenting a mass of nameless, formless, colorless objects, among which were grimly visible some species of fossil soles, about an inch thick, studded with thick nails, like a prison door, and hard as a horseshoe, the actual skeletons of shoes whose other component parts had long since been devoured by Time. Yet all ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... at first, from the window of the cage, nothing more than an area of gray blur. I stared, and it appeared to be shifting, crawling, slowly tossing and rolling. It was a formless vista of Nothingness, yet it seemed a pregnant Nothingness. Things I could sense were happening out there; things ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... she prayed on in some formless way till the clock struck half-past eleven, and a rapping came upon the other side of the wall, and with it ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... the early morn of Time, Called from the formless clod, Came Man, to start the weary climb From wild beast up ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Juan touched his hat and went sidling off like a crab and then once more the black devil came back to plague him, hissing Money, Money, MONEY! He looked up the street and a plan, long formless, took sudden shape in his brain. There was yet McBain, the horse-leech of a lawyer who had beaten him out of his claim. More than once, in black moments, he had threatened to kill him; but now he was glad he had not. Men even raised ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... considered in itself, is common to many; but when received in matter, the form is determined to this one particular thing. Now matter is perfected by the form by which it is made finite; therefore infinite as attributed to matter, has the nature of something imperfect; for it is as it were formless matter. On the other hand, form is not made perfect by matter, but rather is contracted by matter; and hence the infinite, regarded on the part of the form not determined by matter, has the nature of something perfect. Now being is the most formal of all things, as appears from what is shown ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... ceaseless change, they can not justify any title whatever. It alone can be styled "this" or "that" (tode or touto); they rise no higher than "of such kind" or "of what kind or quality" (toiouton or opoionoun ti).[593] It is not earth, or air, or fire, or water, but "an invisible species and formless universal receiver, which, in the most obscure way, receives the immanence of the intelligible."[594] And in relation to the other two principles (i.e., ideas and objects of sense), "it is the mother" to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... evolved out of "one primary undifferentiated form of matter." And this evidence is startlingly suggestive of some underlying truth in the Buddhist doctrine of emanation and illusion,—the evolution of all forms from the Formless, of all material phenomena from immaterial Unity,—and the ultimate return of all into "that state which is empty of lusts, of malice, of dullness,—that state in which the excitements of individuality are known no more, and which is therefore ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... at the tumbler, watching little bubbles, revelling in what remained of his exquisite faculty of minute sight—with a feeling of great peace; and thought prayerfully; lost himself in a kind of formless prayer without words—lost himself completely. It was as if the wished-for dissolution were coming of its own accord; Nirvana—an ecstasy of conscious annihilation—the blessed end, the end of all! as though ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... apparent that in the face of such a wind all the pigmy appliances that the populace could bring to act upon such a mass of combustion would be unavailing. As much as could burn that night was burnt, while some of that which would not burn crumbled and fell as a formless heap, whence new flames towered up, and inclined to the north-east so far as to singe the trees of the park. The thicker walls of Norman date remained unmoved, partly because of their thickness, and partly because in them ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... looking at him in a distressed fashion and restlessly fingering Lady Richard's invitation. She was no less troubled than he and almost as puzzled; for the feeling that held her back even while she wanted to go forward was vague, formless, empty of anything definite enough to lay hold of and bring forward as the plea ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... a shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... towards the rough and still formless model out of which there was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound which was scampering at full speed with a rush ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance, imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of his native wilderness, a message from the sombre solitudes of the Squatook. He did not know that the lonely peak of Sugar ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... obtrude—scenes in which figured the wonderful woman with whom he had thrown in his lot, in which she stood in the glare of the footlights with a dense packed theatre applauding to madness; scenes not outlined clear and projected in space, but which were to him shapeless silhouettes and dazzling formless patches of light flitting across the extreme ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... sister. The child was more beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the Rose of Long Whindale had undergone much transformation. The puffed sleeves, the aesthetic skirts, the naive adornments of bead and shell, the formless hat, which it pleased her to imagine 'after Gainsborough,' had all disappeared. She was clad in some soft fawn-coloured garment, cut very much in the fashion; her hair was closely rolled and twisted about ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. Our consciousness of the beyond is, I say, the raw material of all religion. But, being itself formless, it cannot be brought directly into relation with the forms of our thought. Accordingly, it has to express itself by symbols, which are as it were the flesh and bones of ideas. It is the tendency of all symbols to petrify or evaporate, and either process is ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... nuisance. And how, when the day, with all its secret sighs and sobs, was over, and he and I retired to the same bed, I prayed to our Father in heaven (muffling my very thoughts in the bed-clothes lest he should hear them) to keep my earthly father safe for me from all the formless dangers of the darkness; and how, when at the first gray streak of dawn the spectre shook me, and I awoke, I held my heart and my breathing still, to listen for his breathing, and thanked God when he groaned in his sleep; and how, when his shaving-water ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... against their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... hold of some dried fruit-chips, and as a desperate experiment tried to make a fruit pudding, wrapping the fruit in a jacket of dough and baking it in fat in our pot. The result, seen in the dark, was a formless black mass, very doughy and fatty; but with oases of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... My strange, formless fears for Berna were soon set at rest. She was awaiting me. She looked better than I had ever seen her, and she welcomed me with an eager delight that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... I saw Severus: but his eye With anger blazed; his port was proud and high, No suppliant he—no feeble, formless shade, With dim, averted eye; no sword had made My hero lifeless ghost. Nor wound, nor scar Marked death his only conqueror in war. Nor spoil of death, nor memory's child was he, His mien triumphant, full of majesty! So might victorious Caesar near his home To claim the ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... of fear fell on Donald, a fear formless at the first; then, swiftly, taking malignant, fatal shape. Out of memory leaped tales of terror, unbelieved, yet hideous. Now was born a new credulity, begotten of dread. His face whitened a little, and his eyes widened as he regarded the half-breed with growing alarm. His voice ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... leaning forward suddenly, put her hand on Florrie's arm; the gesture, quick and spontaneous, meant nothing to Florrie, nothing to Galloway, and a very great deal to Virginia Page. For it was essentially protective; it served to emphasize in her own mind a fear which until now had been a mere formless mist, a fear for her frivolous little friend. Galloway's whole being was so expressive of conscious power, Florrie's of vacillating impulsiveness, that it required no considerable burden laid upon the imagination to picture the girl coming if he called . . . if he called with the look in his eyes ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... ordinary acceptation of the term. He does not draw the multitude about him. He is no Boanerges of the Temple; but he is a giant as regards a firm grasp of doctrinal truth. He never evolves new shapes or fantastic theories, "won from the vague and formless infinite;" but he "proves all things," and "holds fast that which is good." If he is not an essentially popular preacher—and this is a merit which even his most partial admirers would scarcely venture to claim for him—he is edifying ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... reflect a kind of Platonic agnosticism; they offer no solution of the formless mystery; but they seem rather to indicate the hope that, in the multiplying of human relationship, in devotion to all we hold dear, in the enkindling of the soul by all that is generous and noble and unselfish, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... tables of stone the Bible is written on both sides; or it has a letter which is its exterior and an interior spirit or meaning. The history which constitutes its letter illustrates those principles which constitute its meaning. The formless must be put into form to be apprehended. Mistaking the form for that substance which has been brought to the level of human apprehension by its means, is the error which constitutes the basis of dogmatic theology. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a phantom, A shape of the sea-mist, A shape of the brumal Rain, and the darkness Fearful and formless; Day dawns ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, whose usually erect form, yielding to the soporific influences of the environment, showed a tendency gradually to sag into an attitude, relaxed and formless, which suggested sleep. This, to the lady behind him, partook of the nature of an affront to her minister. Consequently she considered it her duty to arouse the snoozing McFettridge with a vigorous poke in the small of ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... nearest shore, and far away in the wood he heard a fox bark. 'On the trail of some rabbit,' he thought, and again he admired the great gold moon rising heavily through the dusky sky, and the lake formless and spectral beneath it. ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... lay dumb, not daring to move or breathe, roused from the deep sleep of youth and health by this nameless, formless terror. Maren, while she strives to hold the door at which Louis rattles again and again, calls to her in anguish, "Anethe, Anethe! Get out of the window! run! hide!" The poor girl, almost paralyzed with fear, tries to obey, puts her ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... third, he made the same reply. Action, first, last, and all the time, is the great principle of life and progress. Without it the most perfect engine, gigantic in proportions and costly in equipment, is a dead thing, valueless as the formless mass of ore it once was. But that marvelous product of man's hand and brain, plus steam, becomes ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... A formless wrack of clouds streams across the awful sky, and the rain sweeps almost parallel with the horizon. Beyond, the heath stretches off into endless blackness, in the extreme of which either fancy or art has conjured up some undefinable shapes that seem riding into space. At the base ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... side of something vast and black heaped up in the adjacent chair. He had the look on his pink and naturally pleasant face of one who has abandoned hope. On seeing Mr. Twist a ray of interest lit him up, and he half rose. The formless mass in the next chair which Mr. Twist had taken for inanimate matter, probably cushions and wraps, and now perceived was one of the higher mammals, put out a hand and said something,—at least, it ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... the knife, to contrive that it should serve its one purpose. He was a shattered, bewildered, lonely old man; yet he desired to live: he waited for something of which he had no distinct vision—something dim, formless—that startled him, and made strong pulsations within him, like that unknown thing which we look for when we start from sleep, though no voice or touch has waked us. Baldassarre desired to live; and therefore he crept out in the grey light, and seated himself in the long grass, and watched ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... gray, wrinkled, hairless hides, the huge ragged "flappers" which cover their ears, and with which they fan themselves ceaselessly, the small, mean eyes, the hideous proboscis which coils itself snakishly round everything; the formless legs, so like trunks of trees; the piggish back, with the steep slope down to the mean, bare tail, and the general unlikeness to all familiar and friendly beasts. I can hardly write, for a little wah-wah, the most delightful of apes, is hanging with one long, lean arm round my throat, while with ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but "the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland—formless grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... very sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge of that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds. No countryside is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but on studying such a map one understands the ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... settlement of the Northwest was fairly begun, on a system hitherto untried. The fates and the careers of all the mighty states which yet lay formless in the forest were in great measure determined by what was at this time done. The nation had decreed that they should all have equal rights with the older States and with one another, and yet that they should remain forever inseparable ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... not anything separate enough to be worried about what comes to me. I am only a part of greatness which cannot fail of reaching its end." She thought this all vaguely. She had no language for it, for she was very young; it was formless as music, but ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... rain-clouds sweep and harry, Down the long haggard hills, formless and low, Far in the west the shell-tints meet and marry, Piled gray and tender blue and roseate snow; East—like a fiend, the bolt-breasted, streaming Storm strikes the world with lightning and with hail; West—like the thought of a seraph that is dreaming, Venus leads the young ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... figures of the girl and boy. He saw her snatch up the child and toss him to the safety of the ledge, saw her ineffectual efforts to follow . . . then the dancing crest broke and Jean became but a formless dark object tossed like a drift-log on the foaming waters that spouted against the foot ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... formless cluster of lower stars, and presently those stars begin to revolve about us as though the wind really had got the sky loose. The Celestine is turning her head for the sea. The stars then speed by our masts and funnel till the last is ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... had left her. Indeed, they had all but gone when on Sunday morning, after a night which had been one of formless dreams where she had not known whether she slept or waked or where she was, a frowsy maid had called her from the bed where she lay beneath a blanket, fully dressed, and told her it was time she was getting back ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... spiritual experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested for an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy of her calling, he felt a pang of compunction. It was a formless reproach, too vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest to defining itself in the idea that he had gone too far—he who had not left his seat. When the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand said, "The meeting is now open for ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... to forget his troubles for the moment in frank admiration, since just looking at Meta was enough to put a golden edge on this gloom-filled day. Standing there, head back searching the sky, she managed to be beautiful even in the formless Pyrran coverall. Jason put his arms around her waist and exacted a great deal of pleasure from kissing the golden ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey |
