"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intuitions or the ready reading of character. Violet speaks quietly and resents nothing, therefore she is quite sure the young wife's conscience will not allow her to. Conscience is a great factor in the make-up of other people, but her own seems of a gossamer quality. Indeed, she feels rather aggrieved that her coup de main has wrought so little disaster. "But it will make her more careful how she goes on with Eugene," she comments to herself. Only Eugene seems not to have the slightest desire to go on with her, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... conscious of my hands, and we entered the drawing-room. Unaccustomed to gayeties of any kind, I was quite dazzled by the sudden and brilliant blaze of light, the few guests already assembled, and by Miss Merton's beauty enveloped in soft floating folds of gossamer, looking as though the mist itself had woven her a garment. No time, however, was given in which I could relapse into self-consciousness. Miss Darry occupied me with various statuettes and engravings, until Mr. Lang rejoined us, accompanied by a gentleman whom he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... propounder of the golden mean he never would have come to greatness. No man realized more clearly the importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that: he looked into the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend, by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble, miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... was just rising above the pines, filling the little bottom between the cabins with a sort of rosy light, and making the dewy bushes and weeds sparkle with jewel-strung gossamer webs, when Little Darby, with his musket in his hand, stepped for the last time out of the low door. He had been the first soldier in the district to enlist, he must be on time. He paused just long enough to give one swift glance around the little clearing, and then set ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... throat. Her pale hair, where it showed beneath her hood, was fine as silk and as glossy; her eyes had the colour of an Italian sky at noon, and her cheeks the delicate tinge of a carnation. The many laces and ribbons, knotted about her dress in a manner most mysterious to Wogan, added to her gossamer appearance; and, in a word, she seemed to him something too flowerlike for ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... from his vision. The song was gone, and he heard only the wind softly moving the leaves. It had been vague and shadowy as gossamer, light as the substance of a dream, but it was real to him, nevertheless, and the deep glow of certain triumph permeated his being, body and mind. It was not strange that he had in his nature something ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... passing just within the verge of the lamplight! One blast struggles for her umbrella, and turns it wrong side outward; another whisks the cape of her cloak across her eyes; while a third takes most unwarrantable liberties with the lower part of her attire. Happily, the good dame is no gossamer, but a figure of rotundity and fleshly substance; else would these aerial tormentors whirl her aloft, like a witch upon a broomstick, and set her down, doubtless, in ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are the lode-stones which would draw one even through these gossamer walls of lace and chiffons, of draperies as light as the sunshine and perfumes as sweet ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... making, weavers gone blind from the intricacies of their queen's coronation robe, can kneel at her hem to kiss the cloth of gold that cursed them. A peasant can look on at a poet with no thought to barter his black bread and lentils for a single gossamer fancy. Backstair slaveys vie with each other whose master is more mighty. And this is the story of Millie Moores who, with no anarchy in her heart and no feud with the human democracy, could design for women to whom befell the wine and pearl dog-collars of life, frocks as sheer as ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... a soft and a delicate thing; Ah! the heart is a lute with a thrilling string; A spirit that floats on a gossamer's wing!" ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... of experience to my lips. The great world of which I was once part disappeared out of memory like a mist that recedes into a faint cloud and lies faint and far on the boundaries of the day; my own personal life, to which I had been bound by such a multitude of gossamer threads that when I tried to unloose one I seemed to weave a hundred in its place, seemed to sink below the surface of consciousness. I ceased to think, to feel; I was conscious only of the vast and glorious world of tree and sky which surrounded me. I felt ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... water's edge—a London of theatres, music-halls, wine-shops, public-houses—the walls painted various colours, nailed over with huge gold lettering; the pale air woven with delicate wire, a gossamer web underneath which the crowd moved like lazy flies, one half watching the perforated spire of St. Mary's, and all the City spires behind it now growing cold in the east, the other half seeing the spire of ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... epistolary productions. He talks about the weather, past, present, and to come. He serves up, with piquant sauce, occurrences which he would not have thought worthy of mention at his own breakfast-table. He spins out his two or three facts or ideas into the finest and flimsiest gossamer; or tucks them into a postscript, which alone, with the formula, should have been forwarded. He writes in a large hand, and resorts to every kind of device to fill up his sheet, instead of taking the manly course ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... scribble of doom on the dark, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, again? Mystery—is it a scrap of remembrance, a spark Burning still in the fog of a blind world's brain? Elf of the gossamer tangles of shadow and light, Wild electrical webs and the battle that rolls League upon perishing league thro' the ravenous night, Breaker on perishing breaker ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... never be restored, and you and I shall not meet or understand each other again. It is so of all the poor links whereby we try to bridge the impassable gulf between soul and soul. Oh! we spin something, I know, but it is very gossamer, thin and strained, and even if it does not snap time will at ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... they did not include the reason why she had. Dick Hazlewood was well aware of it. He had learnt it only the afternoon before when he was with her on the river. But he thought it a reason too delicate, of too fine a gossamer to be offered to the prosaic mind of his Aunt Margaret. With what ridicule and disbelief she would rend it into tatters! Reasons so exquisite were not for her. She could ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... at one of those whispering bees (your reporter, who was there, swears it really happened) that, during the playing of a gossamer pianissimo passage, a subscriber informed her neighbor ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... a whole fortnight she had, with a courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman, delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief crossed on her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... comparing rates. The good men all wanted Joe, for he was a rising young man, and could, if the Spirit moved him, make handsome subscriptions to good purposes. So, in their zeal, they soon regarded each other with jealous eyes, and reduced their respective creeds to gossamer thinness. They agreed about grace being free, and Joe accepted that much promptly, as he did anything which could be had without price. But Joe was a practical man, and though he found fault with none of the doctrines ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... notice in the chapter is the purchase of his body for its "weight in gold." Swindling angels held it up in the scales; it did not weigh so much as a web of gossamer. "Had such excellent odor, too, and came for a mere nothing of gold," says Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... mile away. Above the edge of a low cutbank, that formed the wall of a shallow coulee a thin curl of smoke rose and was immediately dispersed. So fleeting was the glimpse that he was not sure his eyes had not played him false. Long and intently he stared at the spot—yes, there it was again,—a gossamer wraith, so illusive as to be scarcely distinguishable from the blue haze of early dawn. Easing his horse from the ridge, he worked him toward the spot, being careful to keep within the shelter of a coulee that slanted diagonally ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... soul was stilled to that {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished, when my body might almost have been abandoned by the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... it was owing to the Costumer's art, or their own adaptation to the characters they had chosen, it was wonderful how lifelike their representations were. Those little fairies in their short skirts of silken gauze, in which golden sparkles appeared as they moved, with their little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked like real fairies. It did not seem possible, when they floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by their filmy, purple wings, their delicate bodies ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... of the oats, lifting the heavy corn in either hand, carrying it, as it hung heavily against her, to the cleared space, where she set the two sheaves sharply down, bringing them together with a faint, keen clash. Her two bulks stood leaning together. He was coming, walking shadowily with the gossamer dusk, carrying his two sheaves. She waited near-by. He set his sheaves with a keen, faint clash, next to her sheaves. They rode unsteadily. He tangled the tresses of corn. It hissed like a fountain. He looked up ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... nor more desirable. She was dressed all in white, with arms and shoulders bare, her fair hair dressed in the quaint mode of the moment with a high comb and a multiplicity of curls. She had a bunch of white roses in her belt and carried a shawl of gossamer lace that encircled her shoulders, like a diaphanous cobweb, through which gleamed the shimmering ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... so natural a supposition, that Miss Thusa's iron features relaxed a little, and she glanced round the enclosure, more in condescension than hope, surveying the boughs of the lilacs, drooping with their weight of purple blossoms, and peering at the gossamer's web. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... The Fairy Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody. The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been published. The Indian ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... the chairs were pushed back, and Peter, with this fairy-like creature in a dinner-gown of most fetching pink gossamer clinging to his arm, took to the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... craft, the power, and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... whether it leaps high in air, trying to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's or pours its triple cascade over the Pauline granite; whether it spouts out of a great barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as Arachne's web in a green garden way where the lizards run, or in a crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;—in all its shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging melody all through ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... threads through all the other music, could be heard the fine trills of the field sparrows; the swinging chant of the creeping warblers and the loud rattle of the Tennessee warblers ran high up in the scale, furnishing a gossamer tenor; that golden optimist, the Baltimore oriole, piped his cheery recitative in the tops of the trees; chickadees supplied the minor strains and tufted titmice the alto; four or five turtle doves soothed the ear with their meditative cooing; while the calls and songs of numerous ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... evening dress trimmed with silver, that to Stonor's unaccustomed eyes seemed like gossamer and moonshine. He was entranced by her throat and by the appealing loveliness of her thin arms. "How could I ever have thought a fat woman beautiful!" he asked himself. She talked with her arms and her delightfully restless shoulders. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... hat on the landing outside the door. ''Tain't a wery good 'un to look at,' said Sam, 'but it's an astonishin' 'un to wear; and afore the brim went, it was a wery handsome tile. Hows'ever it's lighter without it, that's one thing, and every hole lets in some air, that's another—wentilation gossamer I calls it.' On the delivery of this sentiment, Mr. Weller smiled agreeably ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... at his window, he watched the pitiless, grey light break over Rome. The magic city of the moonlit night, the creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and mortar. The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure love and lying friendship. In the chaos substituted for his accustomed world he recognised ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles beside the tone of a flute. I love his note and ways better ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... visage, upturned in the lamplight, was smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer; his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, as ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... cyclamen in the shadowy places, and the stars of the white narcissus lying like snow-flakes over the grass, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand, and overhead the gossamer floats from the branches like thin, tremulous threads of gold,—the scene is so perfect for its motive, for surely here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life might be revealed to one's youth—the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but from the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... coal-black with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty miles away the serrated range of the interior stretched across the horizon, its outlines and shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and the openings of the estuary appeared, shining white, like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped clean and sharp out of the body ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... were very simple. She had on what is called a gossamer, which covered her from neck to toe, and on her head a hat wrapped all about ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... the earliest rays of the sun; and in their virgin light the aeroplane was transformed into a thing of gossamer gold. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... threads formed by broods of small spiders are sometimes very numerous, and cover everything: they are especially noticeable in hedges, and are one of the causes of what is called in the country 'Gossamer.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... illumines this garden of Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... butterflies, and the woodpeckers, and the outlook over the plain as it were over a sea! O for the good, fleshly stupidity of the woods, the body conscious of itself all over and the mind forgotten, the clean air nestling next your skin as though your clothes were gossamer, the eye filled and content, the whole MAN HAPPY! Whereas here it takes a pull to hold yourself together; it needs both hands, and a book of stoical maxims, and a sort of bitterness at the heart by way of ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... less. Her little waist and little black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but slightly veiled by the long lashes. Her expression was of sweetness and happiness; it belonged by right to any face that sheltered in ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... strong enough to sweep off the tops of the billows when it caught them well abeam, carrying the spindrift away to leeward and scattering the surge with its blast as it transformed it into fairy-like foam bubbles and wreaths of gossamer spray. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Komar, Delphine's mother, he played one evening the portraits of the two daughters of the house. When it came to Delphine's he gently drew her light shawl from her shoulders, spread it over the keyboard, and then played through it, his fingers, with every tone they produced, coming in touch with the gossamer-like fabric, still warm and hallowed for him from its ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... as they walked, the little space between them was hung with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter, binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There he stopped abruptly; at which ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... August now; the summer was past, yet the weather was fit for the height of summer. Warm, spicy, dry air, showing misty in the distance like a gossamer veil, and near by a still glow over everything. The two young people wandered over the bridge and slowly mounted the bank among the oaks and beeches, keeping in the shade as much as might be. There was a glorious play of shadow and sunlight all over the woodland; ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... post in the ante-room. There she stood thinking, or dreaming. She was startled back to actual life by a voice close to her. One of the dancing young ladies had met with a misfortune. Her dress, of some gossamer material, had been looped up by nosegays of flowers, and one of these had fallen off in the dance, leaving her gown to trail. To repair this, she had begged her partner to bring her to the room where the assistants should have been. None were there ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and buried themselves in her feathers. In a moment she became very restless, and went picking about with her beak. All at once she spread out her wings, with a sound like a whirlwind, and flew off to bathe in the sea; and then the spiders began to drop from her in all directions on their gossamer wings. The children had to hold fast to keep the wind of the eagle's flight from blowing them off. As soon as it was over, they looked into the nest, and there lay the giant's heart—an awful ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... stage was in Paris, 1690, at the Opera. Bovine writes of her: "This airy, fairy thing danced into our hearts; her movements are those of a gossamer gadfly—she is the embodiment of spring, summer, autumn and winter." By this one can clearly see that in a trice she had Paris at her feet—and what feet! Pierre Dugaz, the celebrated chiropodist, describes them for us. "They were ordinary flesh colour," he tells us, "with ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... unostentatious their kindness was: the delicate, scentless air that hung about them: the fresh flowers always near. "Eating with iron forks, an' not a word,—my silver being packed; their under-clothes like gossamer, outside plainer than mine. Bah! I know the real stuff, when I see it, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... up, and go quickly in; and it seemed as if her dear presence was there to greet me, just on that one morning. But I had to go quickly, and immediately I wakened; just as you must go out early to catch the rosy glow of sunrise on the fleeting clouds; or to see the gossamer webs on the gorse, outlined in diamonds, by the sparkling summer dew. But, somehow, Margery found out about it; and the third year there was a sheet of writing-paper firmly stuck to the pincushion ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... of Aspen wood; and since that hour Through all its race the pale tree hath sent down A thrilling consciousness, a secret awe Making them tremulous, when not a breeze Disturbs the airy Thistle-down, or shakes The light lines from the shining gossamer." ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... the things to be expelled from earth by the perfected man of the future, then a great charm and element of interest will be lost to nature. Though loving them, I cannot, of course, feel the same degree of affection towards all the members of so various a family. The fairy gossamer, scarce seen, a creature of wind and sunshine; the gem-like Epeira in the centre of its Starry web; even the terrestrial Salticus, with its puma-like strategy, certainly appeal more to our aesthetic feelings than does the slow heavy Mygale, looking at a distance of twenty yards away, as ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... pocket, and fell upon my knees in the customary manner; perceiving which, the beautiful being motioned for me to rise, and with the most unassuming grace received my burden. As she unfolded the lace from its silken cover a cry of delight escaped her, and shaking out its gossamer folds she threw it over her head. With all the care I could use I had laid bare the block of ice, which shone like silver in the moonbeams, and now with a sudden blow of my dagger I cleft the ice, and lifted ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... knew little regarding these things, and had a sad want of respect for the splendours around her. "I only know they cost a precious deal of money, Major," she said to her guest, "and that I don't advise you to try one of them gossamer gilt chairs: I came down on one the night we gave our second dinner-party. Why didn't you come and see us before? We'd have asked you ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stuffed with cotton, is all that announces the neighbourhood of the giant cataract. A fly is speedily obtained, and off I start for the hotel on the Canadian side. Our drive took us along the eastern bank till we reached the suspension-bridge which spans the cliffs of the river. Across this gossamer causeway, vehicles are required to walk, under a heavy penalty for any breach of this rule. The vibration when walking is not very great; but, going at a quick pace, it would undoubtedly be considerable, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... me! far more naturally than any spider. You know how they capture the creatures on which they live; (7) by weaving webs of gossamer, is it not? and woe betide the fly that tumbles into their toils! ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... gazed from this spot into the distance at every hour of the day and season of the year. But the fairest time of all on the Steiger was at sunset, on clear autumn days, when the scene close at hand, where the threads of gossamer were floating, was steeped in golden light, the distance in such exquisite tints-from crimson to the deepest violet blue, edged with a line of light-the Saale glimmered with a silvery lustre amid its fringe of alders, and the sun flashed on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of pure merino-wool. It is of varying thickness, and many ladies, both young and old, are adopting it for combinations; these and one petticoat forming the whole of the clothing. Of course, the thickness of these garments is to be suited to the season, and the gossamer clothing manufactured for the warm season leaves nothing to be desired in its lightness ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... decidedly wintry aspect of the Sierras, the low temperature of the Rockies farther east is unknown; and although there is snow to the right, snow to the left, snow all around, and ice under foot, I travel all through the gloomy sheds in my shirt-sleeves, with but a gossamer rubber coat thrown over my shoulders to keep off the snow- water which is constantly melting and dripping through the roof, making it almost like going through a shower of rain. Often, when it is warm and balmy outside, it is cold ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... "Esterel's amethyst ranges Of gossamer shapes"—and the rest. Good gracious, how scenery changes! They too have a cold on their chest. At "delicate lungs," dear, and so on No more for this climate I'll play, But homeward in ecstasy go ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... sympathy and a gossamer veil, he accepted the veil gratefully, but waved the sympathy aside, saying it was "all in the good cause." Nothing was ever a hardship ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... to keep clear of crinoline vortices; gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses,—how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... an extremely pleasant place, full of warm currents that took you gently forward without entailing the slightest exertion. But Michael's grave and expectant face—that Michael who had been so eagerly kind about meeting his debts for him—warned him that, however gossamer-like his own emotions were, he must attempt to ballast ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a chance. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... dawn have scarcely lifted their gossamer veils from the dreaming sea, when the pinnacled rocks of Rum and Aye, the outposts of the Banda group, pierce the swathing vapours. The creamy cliffs of Swangi (the Ghost Island), traditionally haunted by the spirits of the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the solitude of the forests there is a perpetual music from their soothing and melodious hum, which frequently swells to a startling sound as the cicada trills his sonorous drum on the sunny bark of some tall tree. At morning the dew hangs in diamond drops on the threads and gossamer which the spiders suspend across every pathway; and above the pool dragon flies, of more than metallic lustre, flash in the early sunbeams. The earth teems with countless ants, which emerge from beneath its surface, or make their devious highways to ascend to their nests in the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that unnatural light which shines as it were from the tomb. No man could have looked upon them without pity; so attractive, so young, yet so evidently past ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... summer was glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded sunshine flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's breast, was imitating ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... before parting with the bird Carlos had plucked from its shoulders the long gossamer-like feathers that distinguish the heron species. These he was tying ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... gossamer dresses, floating lightly around them as they glide silently along, give them a resemblance to sylphs, or wood-nymphs, all the more as ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... old lady went to a chest of drawers, and took out a large handkerchief of gossamer-like cambric, which she tied ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... knelt in such utter desolation, and where now was lying a bit of blackened paper, which the housemaid's broom had not found when, early in the day, the room was swept and dusted. So Ethelyn's white satin brushed against the gossamer thing, which floated upward for a moment, and then settled back upon the heavy, shining folds. It was Richard who saw it first, and Richard's hand which brushed away the skeleton of Frank's letter from the skirts of his bride, leaving a soiled, yellowish stain, which Susie Granger ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... The white gossamer threads blew over the big plain, where the fields full of stubble were already being prepared again for the new seed, and hung around the young girl's face. Rosa had put her prettiest dress on, a light blue summer dress. ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... bottle there was a deep circular cell in the alcove, about fifteen inches in diameter; fitted in it was a metal ring, to which were attached golden strings, fine as gossamer threads: behind the first ring was a second, and further in still others, all stringed like the first, so that looking into the cell it appeared filled with ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... my love, with perfect faith— Am I not as the floating gossamer, Steering through ether on thy guiding breath? Am I not as the clay within thy hand, Taking the shape and image of thy thought? Heed not these idle tongues, that launch their doubts In erring love against thy watchful care. That which thou doest I accept with joy; I wait for thee as waits ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... at so unseemly an interruption, but both being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... no more is necessary for our action or our dealing with things. The invisible rays of the spectrum are potent, but they are beyond the ken of our senses. There are sounds or sound vibrations that we do not hear; our sense of touch cannot recognize a gossamer, or ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... they met a young man coming away from it, holding a handkerchief to his face. He stopped to tell Jane Nettles how he had been stung, and the children wandered off unheeded to look at the nest. It was all grey and gossamer, like cobwebs laid in layers. Beth was an Indian scout inspecting it from behind a neighbouring tree; and then she shelled it with sticks, but did not wait to see ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... they were dry, with here and there a waterhole, flowers and chaparral growing in them, and, at intervals, pecans. The pecan-trees grew thickly along the borders of the creeks, while the mesquites cloaked with gossamer wide portions of the flats; and here and there in the valleys and on the sides of the hills the sombre, self-enwrapped live-oaks stood about, like philosophers musing amid the general lightness. Spanish-dagger, bear-grass, and persimmon-bushes freckled the sides of the rocky ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... mark. Observe her in a ballroom that is overheated in the corners and draughty near the windows, as all ballrooms are. Her neck and her throat, her bosom and arms are bare. Her frock is of the filmiest gossamer stuff; her slippers are paper thin, her stockings the sheerest of textures, yet she doesn't sniff and her nose doesn't turn red and the skin upon her exposed shoulders refuses to goose-flesh. She is the marvel ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... magic in gossamer strings Over a wind-harp's Delphian hollow; Then called to the idle breeze that swings All day in the pine-tops, and clings, and sings 'Mid the musical leaves, and said, 'Oh, follow The will of those tears that deepen my words, And fly to my ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and mysterious soul, more fragile than gossamer and yet so strong that she may stand in the Presence of God and ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... screaming grey object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Mrs. Dean Falconer was an altered person—her unseemly morning costume and well-worn shawl being cast aside, she appeared in bloom-coloured gossamer gauze, and primrose ribbons, a would-be young lady. Nothing of that curmudgeon look, or old fairy cast of face and figure, to which he had that morning been introduced, but in their place smiles, and all the false brilliancy which rouge can give to the eyes, proclaimed ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... 1769, Display their Banner of Mahomet, all in paroxysm of Fanaticism risen to the burning point: 'Under pain of death, No Giaour of you appear on the streets, nor even look out, of window, this day!' Austrian Ambassador's Wife, a beautiful gossamer creature, venturing to transgress on that point, was torn from her carriage by the Populace, and with difficulty saved from destruction: Brother of the Sun and Moon, apologizing afterwards down to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... much more adhesiveness than is commonly imagined. The diversity and complexity of its interests form a network that will be found, like the web of the spider, to possess a power of resistance far exceeding its gossamer appearance—one strong enough to hold all that it was ever intended to enclose. The slave interest is now making its final effort for supremacy, and men are deceived by the throes of a departing power. The institution of domestic slavery cannot last. It is opposed to the spirit of the age; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... give a very dextrous turn of the hand and the finest of these threads are used in some of the fabrics which they weave. I often wondered how they could prepare these delicate, strong, linen-like threads that are as fine as gossamer. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... seated himself by the heiress. Poor Polly's eyes kept wandering towards them, and (I suppose, because I had heard so much about her) so did mine. It was only a quiet dinner-party, and Miss Chislett had brought out her needlework, some gossamer lace affair, and Leo leant over the sofa where she sat, playing with the contents of her workbox. Polly's eyes and mine were not the only ones turned towards them. Ours was not the only interest in the future ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... turned to grope; and I retiring brushed Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face, And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed; He should to antenatal night retrace, 70 And hide his elements in that large womb Beyond the reach ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... and umbrella on his arm, climbed the hill slowly and with frequent pauses to turn and admire the landscape. It was the freshest of spring mornings: the short turf was beaded with dew, the furze-bushes on either hand festooned with gossamer and strung with mimic diamonds. As he looked harbourwards, the radiance of sky mingling with the glitter of water dazzled and bewildered his sight: below, and at the foot of the steep woods opposite, the river lay cool and shadowy, or vanished for a space beneath a cliff, where the red ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... who are influenced by this? Puff. O Lud, yes, sir! the number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. Sneer. Well, sir, the puff preliminary. Puff. O, that, sir, does well in the form of a caution. In a matter of gallantry now—Sir Flimsy Gossamer wishes to be well with Lady Fanny Fete—he applies to me—I open trenches for him with a paragraph in the Morning Post.—"It is recommended to the beautiful and accomplished Lady F four stars F dash E to be on her guard against that dangerous character, ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road for me ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... domains of their mountain relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among the tall ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... me, you're a painter, are you not? I saw you looking at that dealer's show, The croutes he has for sale, a shabby lot— What do I know of Art? What do I know . . . Well, look! That David Strong so well displayed, "White Sorcery" it's called, all gossamer, And pale moon-magic and a dancing maid (You like the little elfin face of her?)— That's good; but still, the picture as a whole, The values,—Pah! He never painted worse; Perhaps because his fire was lacking coal, His cupboard bare, no money in his purse. Perhaps . . . they say he labored hard ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... devil, by the way, right out of the midst of his intoxication. One of the great flies now came flying past Count Hamilcar with softly buzzing wings. He went "brrr" with his lips and smiled a really cheerful smile as he watched how this queer bundle of gauzy wings and golden gossamer floated deliriously through the sunshine. "Mad with life," he thought, "if all this only has some object. At any rate there is more chance for meaning than for the lack of it, although—if I am a digit in the great ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... wave of an enchanter's wand, as it must have arisen also. The library is by far the finest room I ever saw. Its windows and arches and doorways are all of a fine carved Gothic open work as light as gossamer. One door which he lately added cost a thousand pounds, the door alone, not the doorway, so you can judge of the exquisite workmanship. Here Lady Breadalbane joined us, whom I had never before met. . ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... them. In what direction could they have been driven? I at last observed beyond a line of reefs what I took to be a group of cocoa-nut trees rising out of a low islet faintly traced against the blue sky like gossamer webs. Yes, there were trees, but among them, after keeping my glass steady for a minute or more, I made out the masts and yards of a ship. That she was either the "Eagle" or the "Lady Alice" I felt certain, but how she had escaped the reefs ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... gossamer came rattling down the long stay and the jaws of the booms ratched, fore and main, as they swung over. From astern came the voices of the men in boat and dory, warning each other to hang on when they felt her jibing. Some of them must have come near to being ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... the disappearance of water, the form of Fire displays itself. When this disappears, the form that becomes perceivable is that of Wind as effulgent as a well-tempered weapon of high polish. Gradually, the form displayed by Wind becomes like that of the thinnest gossamer. Then having acquired whiteness, and also, the subtlety of air, the Brahman's soul is said to attain the supreme whiteness and subtlety of Ether. Listen to me as I tell thee the consequences of these diverse conditions when they ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... been acquainted. The avenue by which it was approached was decorated alternately with statues of representative Americans, and a peculiar flowering tree, whose green leaves and yellow blossoms, of gossamer texture, resembled the fine mist of a summer morning. Terminating, this avenue was the main entrance, surmounted by the grand dome of the edifice. In the rear of this rotunda, extending on either side, appeared the main building, rising, turret on turret, like a stupendous mountain ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... line of the limbs and of the light draperies suggesting motion and glee. How did he know that some of these were men, and some were women? He had never seen such dresses as they wore, which seemed to be composed of tunics and gossamer veils of blue and red. Yet he did know quite distinctly which were men and which were women, and he knew that it was a marriage scene. The bride wore a wreath of flowers; the bridegroom carried a sheaf or garland of fruit or grain, which seemed to be a part of the ceremony. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... again; often again and again till all is crossed and muddled. If Life were to be very much longer than is the usual lot of men, one would try very hard to reform this lax habit, and clear away such a system of gossamer association: even as it is, I try to turn all wandering fancy out of doors, and listen attentively to Whately's Logic, and old Spinoza still! I find some of Spinoza's Letters very good, and so far useful as that they try to clear up some of his abstrusities at the earnest ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... friend, Miss Scrumpkins, ran home to tell all about it. And, as everybody knew the Scrumpkinses, a shining gossamer of news was soon woven from one end of the street ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... in the east had died, but the tops of the larches were bathed in a gentle radiance; and the peaks ahead were like amber. Everywhere were threads of water, threads of snow, and little threads of dewy green, glistening like gossamer. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... your curls, and ask me why I don't build castles in the sky; You smile, and you are thinking too, He's nothing else on earth to do. It needs, my dear, romantic ware To raise such fabrics in the air— Ethereal bricks, and rainbow beams, The gossamer of Fancy's dreams: And much the architect may lack Who labours in the zodiac To rear what I, from chime to chime, Attempted once ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... cellar may seem a most curious place to choose to live in; but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home, household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... had great difficulty to keep from bursting out laughing at the flight of the cross old prime minister; and the Queen pretended to arrange her bodice, made of the gossamer wing of the katydid, to hide a smile; but now, reclining on her throne, and gracefully fanning herself with her right wing, she indulged in a pleasant chat ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... own crest and coronet. In it was the portrait of my wife, taken in her bridal dress, as she looked when she married me. I took it to the light and stared at the features dubiously. This was she—this slim, fairy-like creature clad in gossamer white, with the marriage veil thrown back from her clustering hair and child-like face—this was the THING for which two men's lives had been sacrificed! With a movement of disgust I replaced the frame in its former position; I had scarcely done so when the door ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary's exclamations of delight and longing ranged from every possible dress to every impossible one, and then Mrs. Makebelieve reviewed all the dresses ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor—and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... water are the greenness of the grass, the size of the trees, the nature of the plants, reeds, rushes, brambles, willows, poplars, &c. Some discover water by putting out dry wool under a bowl at night. So too, if you see at sunrise a cloud [or gossamer, 'spissitudinem'] of very small flies. A mist rising like a column shows water as deep below as the ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... November sun had not yet drawn the moisture from the heather. On the moor the few trees were bare, but the golden autumn leaves still clothed the woods in the sheltered valley that stretched below. Masses of gossamer covered with dew-drops lay among the bracken, like fairies' washing hung out to dry. There was a hint of hoarfrost under the bushes. The air had that delicious invigorating quality when every breath sets the body dancing. It was too late in the year for flowers, though here and ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... herself here and there to give them character—an embroidered dressing-case on the bureau, an attractive travelling work-box on the table by her bed, a photograph, a lace-bordered handkerchief, a gossamer scarf on a chair-back ready for use if she should need it for a stroll in the moonlight with the Skeptic. The closet door, ajar, gave a glimpse of summer frocks, hanging in order on padded hangers brought in a trunk; beneath, ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... exercise would have rendered it a most efficient instrument in the preservation of the Union, But, sir, if the fact were otherwise— if all the teachings of experience were reversed—better, far better, a rope of sand, aye, the flimsiest gossamer that ever glistened in the morning dew, than chains of iron and shackles of steel; better the wildest anarchy, with the hope, the chance, of one hour's inspiration of the glorious breath of freedom, than ages of the hopeless bondage and oppression to which our enemies ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... saw no more, and while he was spinning out his gossamer phrases, given over to despair, she heard the song over and over in her mind, as the last image ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the relativity of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of it all! Then on again through a patch of woodland which looked as though a huge gossamer veil had been laid over it. If ever pastelle colors were displayed to perfection Nature here held her exhibition. Soft pinks, pale blues, silver grays, the tenderest greens with here and there a touch of the maple buds' rich mahogany reds, and above and about the maddest melody of bird songs ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... she had ever experienced. Her whole being thrilled responsive to the glow. It was as though a door had been opened somewhere above her and she were being drawn upwards by some invisible means, upwards and upwards, light as gossamer and strangely transcendentally happy, towards the warmth and brightness and wonder that ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... for many a day—and that kind and gentle heart is laid at rest beneath bright flowers, planted there by loving hands, in the humble church-yard. But this day is so lovely—is it not? With that soft and shadowy mist hanging like a gossamer veil over Nature's face, through which the glorious god of day looks with a quiet smile, as though he loved to dwell upon a scene so replete with home-breathing beauty! And that smile! how lovingly it rests upon the lawn and the meadow and the brook! How it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... gasped Mrs. Van Stuyler, helping herself shakingly to sugar, while Miss Zaidie folded a gossamer slice of bread and butter and began to eat it; "I think, Lord Redgrave, that if you knew all the circumstances, you would say that you were ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... with a fairy play acted by the juniors. They looked very pretty in their gauzy garments, and little Desiree, in a gossamer robe of elfin green, made an attractive queen, so dainty and ethereal that the audience almost expected to see through her. "What a sweet child!" was the general comment, as she tripped back in response to a storm of clapping, to give an encore to ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... its closes were,— As if the hand of Music through The sombre robe of Silence drew A thread of golden gossamer: So sweet a flute the fairy blew. Like beggared princes of the wood, In silver rags the birches stood; The hemlocks, lordly counsellors, Were dumb; the sturdy servitors, In beechen jackets patched and gray, Seemed waiting spellbound all the day That low entrancing note to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... took a walk, and the momentous subject was not mentioned: nevertheless, it pressed upon Nick's thoughts. As he talked, the "nighty" that was not, and must be, weighed upon his mind as heavily as though it were a coat of mail instead of the gossamer ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part. He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequered waistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats light as autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with a diamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers there were as many gems ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... in awe of the calm with which you subject to your analysis the infirmities of reason and the tumults of passion. And all those laws of the social state which seem to me so fixed and immovable you treat with so quiet a scorn, as if they were but the gossamer threads which a touch of your slight woman's hand could brush away. But I cannot venture to discuss such subjects with you. It is only the skilled enchanter who can stand safely in the magic circle, and compel the spirits that he summons, even ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tenderly, bravely, heroically even, contradictory. In speaking she invited the shattering of a dream of personal election to happiness—a late blossoming happiness and hence the more entrancing, the more pathetic. That any hope of the dream's fulfilment was fragile as glass, lighter than gossamer, the veriest shadow of a shade, her natural diffidence and sane sense, alike, convinced her. For this very cause, the dream being of the sweetest and most intimate, how gladly would she have cherished the enchanting foolishness of it a trifle longer!—Her act of heroism would ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... either side, and on the east side the brook, which is a river in earliest spring, flows with broken gurgles over a stony bed, and slackened her pace, thinking she would walk leisurely there, for the young willows screened the sun like green veils of gossamer, and the wind did not press her back so hard, and then she heard the trot, trot of a ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two of his contemporaries, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Or, with most sullen and regardless hate, Refuses stern her heaven-born embrace. On one side of this jagged and shapeless hill There is a cave, from which there eddies up A pale mist, like aereal gossamer, 20 Whose breath destroys all life—awhile it veils The rock—then, scattered by the wind, it flies Along the stream, or lingers on the clefts, Killing the sleepy worms, if aught bide there. Upon the beetling edge of that dark ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... hands. The life of the place, the constant necessity of masking his aversion to the Spragues, his detestation of Dick, the simple merry-making and intimate amenities of such close quarters, tasked his small art of dissimulation beyond even the most practiced powers. The garment of duplicity was gossamer, he felt, after all, in such atmosphere of loyalty and trust ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... none of the wonderful adventures which they had anticipated. Mr Mildmay confessed that he had been dreadfully disappointed; he had expected everywhere to see bevies of graceful nymphs, dressed in gossamer robes, their glossy hair decked with wreaths of bright flowers, and their necks and arms adorned with coral and precious stones; instead of which, he declared that he had seen only a set of dowdy women with brown skins and without a particle ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he grew into glorious manhood he was generally acknowledged to be the handsomest man in the Province of Ontario, but to-day—his first day in these strange, new surroundings—he was but a wee, brown, lovable bundle, whose tiny gossamer hands cuddled into his father's palm, while his little velvet cheek lay rich and russet against the pearly whiteness ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... (whatever it may be)—and beyond that, the universe is nothing to them. The slightest toy countervails the empire of the world; they will not forego the smallest inclination they feel, for any object that can be proposed to them, or any reasons that can be urged for it. You might as well ask of the gossamer not to wanton in the idle summer air, or of the moth not to play with the flame that scorches it, as ask of these persons to put off any enjoyment for a single instant, or to gird themselves up to any enterprise of pith or moment. They have been so used to a studied succession of agreeable ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... further opened one day when a large and fashionable crowd had gathered at Lady Dalton's garden-party. Philippa was, as heretofore, the belle, looking more than usually lovely in a light gossamer dress of white and pink. She was surrounded by admirers. Lord Arleigh stood with a group of gentlemen under ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... tapering; contraction &c. 195. V. be narrow &c. adj.; narrow, taper, contract &c. 195; render narrow &c. adj; waste away. Adj. narrow, close; slender, thin, fine; thread-like &c. (filament) 205; finespun[obs3], gossamer; paper-thin; taper, slim, slight-made; scant, scanty; spare, delicate, incapacious[obs3]; contracted &c. 195; unexpanded &c. (expand &c. 194)[obs3]; slender as a thread. [in reference to people or animals] emaciated, lean, meager, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... with gladness, and gilded her mouse hair with gold, and lit up her eyes, and wove scarves about her with gossamer threads, and beneath her feet tall bluebells offered their ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles through the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Marguerite and saw her not. I was up and running through the rooms of the cottage. I reached the outer door and saw her in the garden, robed in a gown of gossamer white, her hair streaming loose about her shoulders and gleaming golden brown in the quivering light. She was holding out her hands to the East, where o'er the far-flung mountain craigs the God of Day beamed down ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... the valley lay a still blue lake with a great white peak shining ethereally at its northern end. Dark pines rolled about it, growing smaller and smaller up the hillside until they dwindled with spires clean cut against the azure into a gossamer filigree. Between them and the water stupendous forest shrouded all the valley, save where an oblong of pale verdure ran back from the fringe of boulders and was traversed by the frothing streak of a river whose roar came up hoarsely across ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... white encircled by a great halo of translucent green, swung high above the duskily purple mountains. Below in the valleys its progress was followed by an opalescent gossamer presence that was like the overflowing fulness, the surplusage, of light rather than mist. The shadows of the great trees were interlaced with dazzling silver gleams. The night was almost as bright as the day, but cool and dank, full of sylvan fragrance and restful ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... your gossamer and rubbers, please," when Gertrude was unreasonably provoked she had a habit of snapping out her words even more clear-cut than usual. An instant later she swept forth into the rain only to stop short and hurry in again before the door had swung ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... of guns and pistols. But all this was over by the time I was up and dressed, and seated at breakfast in my partitioned room. It was a perfect October day; the dew not yet off the blades of grass, glistening on the delicate gossamer webs, which stretched from flower to flower in the garden, lying in the morning shadow of the house. But beyond the garden, on the sunny hill-side, men, women, and children were clambering up the vineyards like ants,—busy, irregular in movement, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... previously led him. It was, for all who heard it or came to know it, a revelation of the possibilities of tonal effect—this dim and wavering and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... longing for, the winning, That is not moved by currents of surprise; Who never breaks the silken thread in spinning, Shows a bare spindle when the daylight dies; The constant blood will yet flow full and tender; The thread will mended be though gossamer-slender; ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... didn't come over from England all alone?" asked the curious young customer, neglecting the blouse for her interest in the girl who spread out its gossamer body ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... of gossamer fineness with absorbed interest. Then she folded the sheet carefully and handed it back ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... Roman Hagiography cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P——, true to his youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who has the "charity which believeth all, things," though certainly not ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the most intolerable was the abovementioned flying-bug. Saucy crickets, too, swarm, and spring up at one's face, whilst mosquitos maintain a constant guerilla warfare, trying to the patience no less than to the nerves. Thick webs of the gossamer spider float across the river during the heat of the day, as coarse as fine thread, and being inhaled keep tickling the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, Ulysses put on his shirt and cloak, while the goddess wore a dress of a light gossamer fabric, very fine and graceful, with a beautiful golden girdle about her waist and a veil to cover her head. She at once set herself to think how she could speed Ulysses on his way. So she gave him a great ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... to the same conclusion herself, and has sometimes forgotten her high destination, in the meridian of her glory. We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as a mere Rosy Melindi—who are always fishing for pretty complements —who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language, but poor and barren in sentiment. Beset, as she has been, by the intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... complexion and imperial proportions. It is Juno and Arachne. The divine orbs of the goddess turned haughtily upon me, but did not see me,—looked through and beyond me, as if I had been nothing but gossamer, feathers, air; and the little black, bead-like eyes of the insect pierced me maliciously an instant, as the barouche dashed past, and disappeared in the Rue de Rivoli. I was humiliated; I felt that I was recognized,—known as the rash youth who had just called ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... resolved to explore the distant, unknown region. He could not sleep a wink all night for eager expectation, and at the dawn of the day the next morning started on his journey, without saying a word to either father or mother. It was a hot day in June, the air close and sultry, with gossamer mists hanging thick over the stagnant pools and lakes. The little fellow set out without food on his long trip, fearful of being retained by his watchful parents. Onward he trotted, mile after mile, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... beneath his chariot wheels their mountainous and howling ridges into one level plain of foaming water. Our chainplates, strong fastenings, and clenched bolts, drew like pliant wires, shrouds and stays were torn away like the summer gossamer, and our masts and spars, crackling before his fury like dry reeds in autumn, were blown clean out of the ship, over her bows, into ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... expelled. Her person was of the smallest size that is believed to comport with beauty, and which poets and artists have chosen as the beau ideal of feminine loveliness. Her dress was of a dark and glossy silk, and fluttered like gossamer around her form. Long, flowing, and curling tresses of hair, still blacker and more shining than her robe, fell at times about her shoulders, completely enveloping the whole of her delicate bust in their ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... depend upon introspection for its results. Further, the very conception of the nature of the "self" is different; it is not now considered an entity, as of old; but rather a compound thing, a product, a complex, composed of a variety of elements. Instead of being considered a single gossamer thread, it is now thought to be rather a rope, composed of innumerable, interwoven elements—and these, in turn, of still finer threads, until the subdivision seems endless. The mind, in other words, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Youantee, and the peerless Chaoukeun, seated in a massive car of gossamer richly studded with the eyes of live humming-birds, drawn by twelve beautiful blue load-stars, presented by the heavenly bodies to the brother of ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... close at hand, yet Neuhaus, shut off by peaceful fields, was hidden from the passer-by, and here began the great intrigue, as it was called then. Of a truth the plot, as it was conceived, was no mighty thing; it was designed, as many another gossamer web of court gallantry and petty pecuniary gain, for obscure individuals; but great it became through the potent will ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. Yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! Believe that the American climate is unmanning, or that one American whom you know is severely taxed by Lilliput labors. The last hot summer enfeebled me till ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the insincere man he ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer |
