"Lambent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is not that of either Shaw or Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand—the unity of a number of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour—that is precisely the unity of Getting Married. A jumble of ideas, prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous fusion or confusion, so ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... came a fierce, long screech. I glanced, jerkily, in its direction—Something, luminous and ghostly, encircled it, and grew upon my vision. It resolved into a glowing hand, transparent, with a lambent, greenish flame flickering over it. The cat gave a last, awful caterwaul, and I saw it smoke and blaze. My breath came with a gasp, and I leant against the wall. Over that part of the window there spread a smudge, green and fantastic. It hid the thing from me, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... notice the fantastic tricks played at times upon some body of worshippers, where light to the church is admitted through stained glass windows? A lambent red flame lighting up the hair of a man's head, while at the same moment his beard is blue and luminous. Over the shoulders of another, the purple mantle of royalty seems about falling, investing him for a moment with regal splendors, while perhaps the cadaverous hue of his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gentlemanly course of gradually warming and more devoted attentions, with all the forms and observances, so far as the disadvantages of her surroundings would permit. It was some time in the last summer, that he had made up a definite judgment in the premises under which he commenced his lambent action. During the autumn he often met King at her father's, and the young men occasionally made up small parties with Julia and Nell or some other young ladies for rides and excursions. Towards winter, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... skull stood out; the ribs of the skeleton. Two tiny, fiery eyes glimmered at the base of the antennae—two minute jewelled sparks of glowing, lambent fire. They seemed to ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... The eastern sky blooms into vivid pink from the reflection of this fiery incandescence, which fades only to give place to the leaping brightness of phosphorescent waves, and the nightly pageant of tropical skies ablaze with lambent flames of summer lightning. Morning reveals the dark forests of mysterious Borneo, rolling back to the misty blue of a mountain background. The pathless jungles of teak and iron wood, inextricably tangled ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... which hung in the lambent heavens above all, pictures itself to my memory as far fairer and more luminous than is the best of nowaday moons. Alas! my old eyes read no romance in the silvery beams now, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... see where he stands! His groping ghost is lodged upon a tower, Nor can it find the road. Mount, mount, my soul; I'll wrap thy shivering spirit in lambent flames; and so we'll sail.— But see! we're landed on the happy coast; And all the golden strands are covered o'er With glorious gods, that come to try our cause. Jove, Jove, whose majesty now sinks me down, He, who himself burns in unlawful ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale lambent nimbus round her head. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Sometimes I feel inclined to think that ill-tempered people have more sense of justice and of the strict rights and wrongs of things—at least if they are not very bad," I interpolated, thinking of Mr. Rampant—"than people who can smile and look pleasant at everything and everybody like Lucy Lambent, who goes on calling me darling when I know I'm scowling like a horned-owl. Nurse says she's the 'sweetest tempered young lady she ever did know!' Aunt Isobel, ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... than usual, so that every little fish left a track of light behind him, greatly disproportionate to his size. As the night wore on, the sea grew brighter and brighter, until by midnight we appeared to be sailing on an ocean of lambent flames. Every little wave that broke against the ship's side sent up a shower of diamond-like spray, wonderfully beautiful to see, while a passing school of porpoises fairly set the sea blazing as they leaped and gambolled in its glowing waters. Looking up from sea ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... into the silent night, The winking stars soft peeping in his room, While at his hand the dreamy, lambent light Just lit his book and left all else in gloom. His study walls evanished, and in mist He saw the maid whose dead lips ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... guests can really say How she looked when she vanished away. Some declare that she carried sail On a flying fish with a lambent tail; And some are sure she went out of the room Riding her stilts like a witch a broom, While a phosphorent odor followed her track: Be this as it may, she never came back. Since then, her friends ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the eastern plain a white mist stretched like a lake. But where the distant peak of Zagros serrated the western horizon the sky was clear. Jupiter and Saturn rolled together like drops of lambent flame about to blend ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... stepped out this time with a honeyed smile, but with a new-born light in his hazel eyes—a demoniac light, lambent and almost playful. Master Randall, caressed by them, read the danger signal a thought too late. A swift and apparently reckless feint drew another of his slogging strokes, and in a flash the enemy was under his guard. Even so, for the fraction of a second, victory ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... O'Reilly! She came to me this morning, and sat in my kitchen, and cried so bitterly, and talked in her strong Corkonian brogue, and rocked herself backwards and forwards, and shook abroad the great lambent banners of her cap-border,—a grotesque old woman, but sacred in her tender motherhood and her great grief. Her first coming was to peddle blackberries in the summer. I asked her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Bible's influence was what infidelity says it is, made the funeral pyre for Polycarp, the populace bringing fuel for the fire, and while the flames made a glory of their lambent glare, he cried out: "Six and eighty years have I served him and he has done me nothing but good, and how could I curse him, my Lord and Savior. If you would know what I am, I tell you frankly, I am a Christian." He did his own thinking, and was brave enough to avow his opinion, for which ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... no foe can stand, The thunderbolt of Indra's hand; And Siva's trident, sharp and dread, And that dire weapon Brahma's Head. And two fair clubs, O royal child, One Charmer and one Pointed styled With flame of lambent fire aglow, On thee, O Chieftain, I bestow. And Fate's dread net and Justice' noose That none may conquer, for thy use: And the great cord, renowned of old, Which Varun ever loves to hold. Take these two thunderbolts, which I Have got for thee, the Moist and Dry. Here Siva's dart to thee I yield, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... when in looking at him she was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, 'Alas, poor Yorick!' After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully cheerful, and would say, 'You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful to find;' and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr. Bounderby bore up as he did. One idiosyncrasy for which she ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... completely and exclusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral's exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career, from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into a hero for the nonce, however stolid his brain, however ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... angels would have given her all she wished, she was so charming. The touch of phantasy and flame in her nature illumined her face, and no one could look at her without feeling that a fervent and transparent soul gazed from eyes, so lambent with soft spiritual fire. This impression was enhanced by her childlike gown of white crape over soft white silk; it suggested her sweet fretless life, and also something unknown and ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength. Rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibers of a perennial endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or, rather let me say, rising, to repose, finishes the infallible luster of its crystalline beauty, under harmonies of law ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... the ratcatcher, as he pointed to the frescoed wall, at the same time vehemently snapping his fingers. Phosphoric sparks hissed and crackled forth, and coalesced into a blue lambent flame, which concentrated itself upon a depicted figure, whose precise attitude the ratcatcher assumed as he dropped upon his knees. The Pope shrieked with amazement, for, although the splendid Pontifical vestments had become ragged fur, in every ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... of nitrate of copper in spirits of wine. Light the solution, and it will burn with a beautiful emerald green flame. Pieces of sponge soaked in this spirit, lighted and suspended by fine wires over the stage, produces the lambent green flames now so common in incantation scenes; strips of flannel saturated with it, and applied round copper swords, tridents, &c., produce, when lighted, the flaming swords and fire forks brandished by the demons in such scenes; indeed, the chief consumption ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... of sunset, brightening the gold of autumn; for gold twice refined, as it were, gilds the splendid landscape. Only think of that picture, shining through the mellow haze of Indian Summer, and flashing with the lambent glimmer of a myriad glassy leaves. You can not see them moving, yet they twinkle incessantly, and the warm air trembles about them while you hang bewildered from a toppling parapet, four thousand feet above them; birds swing under you in ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... jurisprudence, juxtaposition, kaleidoscopic, labyrinth, lacerate, lackadaisical, lacrimal, laity, lambent, lampoon, largess, lascivious, laudable, laudation, lavation, legionary, lethargic, licentious, lineal, lingual, literati, litigious, loquacity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd. At his right hand our young Ascanius sate, Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state. His brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace, And lambent dulness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Swore by his sire a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true dulness would maintain; And, in his father's right, and realm's defence, Ne'er ...
— English Satires • Various
... knows no wingles here! I know that it seems incredible to any one that has never been in warmer climes, but the word beauty has a new meaning here. The glow which is lambent upon the faces of the sons and daughters of this section of sunny Italy, is something that I never saw elsewhere, and that cannot be described. It is a solemn truth, that nine tenths of all the ladies of Turin and Milan are perfect beauties; and I need not say less for the full round forms of the ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... mists, silk of copper hair streaming wide, unearthly eyes lambent, floated up behind them—Norhala. For an instant she was hidden behind their bulk; suddenly was upon them; drifted over them like some spirit of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... wondering, if she could, without screaming or scratching, seem aware of Diva's presence. Then she soared, lambent as flame. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories. Duff had grown superstitious; he came out of the inn door sidewise, that he might always see that moon over his right shoulder for ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... coming! not as comes the tempest's wrath, When the frown of desolation sits brooding o'er its path; But with mercy, such as leaves his holy signet-light upon The air in lambent beauty, when the darkened storm is gone. We will vote for Birney, We will vote for Birney, We're for Morris and for Birney, And ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... is needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time. They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use in France, dwelling upon those villages and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... proportioned, deep-bosomed, long-limbed, with the fine hands and feet of the true mountaineer. The thick dusk hair rose up around her brow in a massive, sculptural line; her dark eyes—the large, heavily fringed eyes of a dryad—glowed with the fires of youth, and with a certain lambent shining which was all their own; the stain on her cheeks was deep, answering to the ripe red ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... hull shone like a pool of molten gold in which strange shapes moved and the shadows of living things were to be seen. Now licking the quivering masts, now blown aside in tongue-shaped jets, the lambent flame spurted from every crack and crevice, leaped up from every port-hole of that splendid steamer. I saw that her minutes were numbered, and I said that before the dawn broke she would sink, a mass of embers, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... which, as already noticed, seemed to be practically uninjured, then there darted from it and alighted upon one of the foremost ships, a dazzling lightning stroke a mile in length, at whose touch the metallic sides of the car curled and withered and, licked for a moment by what seemed lambent flames, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... judgment. The drowned Egyptians were strange examples of gentle leading. But God's redemptive acts are like the guiding pillar of fire, in that they have a side that reveals wrath and evokes terror, and a side that radiates lambent love and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth, which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The Chief seized her by the shoulder and shook her roughly, ordering her to come with him. She did not understand his language, but his meaning was obvious. She looked up and stared straight into his one open eye. In her own eyes shifted the dangerous, lambent flame of a beast at bay, and for a moment she was on the point of darting at ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... glitter in the sun; her copper-colored hair seemed luminous, and her cheeks flushed, arbutus-like. The soft, white stuff that gowned her had the look of foam; against the gray sky she seemed a freakish spirit in the act of vanishing. For sky and water were all one lambent gray by this. In the west was a thin smear of orange; but, for the rest, the world was of a uniform and gleaming gray. She and Charteris stood in the heart ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... was the hedge a grim barricade of stiff, dark sticks. Each stalk had turned into a tall, straight flame of lambent rose. From a dead thing of dreary ugliness it had become a thing ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... up. And as the three tall white figures sped, with soundless tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled; and they shouted as with one voice, "The Star! the Star! ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of some sins which I had not before. I would not have imagined I was in the least inclined to idolatry, and covetousness, and want of practical subjection to the will of God.... Again, the furnace of affliction which now seems so hot and terrible to nature, had nothing more than a lambent flame, which was not designed to consume us, but only to purge away our dross, to purify and prepare the mind for its abode among those blessed ones that passed through the same trials before us into the celestial paradise.... How shall we then adore and praise what we cannot ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... Zarah, and read that in her eye which embarrassed him. "He did not know," he said; "he had indeed engaged this unrivalled performer to take the proposed part in the mask; and she was to have come forth in the midst of a shower of lambent fire, very artificially prepared with perfumes, to overcome the smell of the powder; but he knew not why—excepting that she was wilful and capricious, like all great geniuses—she had certainly spoiled the concert by cramming in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... descending than the others, which obscured the firmament, spread over the zenith, and based itself upon the horizon to leeward. Oswald's eye had been fixed upon it but a few seconds, when he beheld a small lambent gleam of lightning pierce through the most opaque part; then another, and more vivid. Of a sudden the wind lulled, and the Circassian righted from her careen. Again the wind howled, and again the vessel was pressed down to her bearings ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... all other rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... fantastic, of human and brute features in a chase—a boar-chase in front, and a stag-chase on his left hand. These, as they rose fitfully in bright masses of color and of savage expression under the lambent flashing of the fire, continued to excite his irritable state of feeling; and it was not for some time that he felt this uneasy condition give way to exhaustion. He was at length on the very point of falling asleep, or perhaps had already ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... some Titanic bloom, The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core, Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or, Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor, By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore, A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb, The stranded driftwood ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... prayed to the Samothracian gods, and played on his harp, whereupon the storm ceased and stars appeared on the heads of the brothers. From this incident, Castor and Pollux came afterwards to be considered the patron deities of seamen and voyagers, and the lambent flames, which in certain states of the atmosphere play round the sails and masts of vessels, were ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... as he clung to the pony's bridle. Not nearly so bright as the lambent phosphorescence from the fireflies which flickered across our path, the puny light of the match was sufficient for the guide to pick up the ribbon-like path, and once more we were on ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... object to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it would ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... back a curtain of skins and disclosed an aperture of considerable size; this he entered and disappeared for a moment, but quickly returned, bearing in his hand a metallic circlet which glittered in the light of the lambent flame that arose from the altar; as he approached me I saw that it was a rudely fashioned collar of silver, its surface covered with engraved lines and strange cabalistic characters; this he speedily fastened around my neck in such a way that I could not displace it, and again ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... gleam, Alike o'er all his lightnings fly; Thy lambent glories only beam Around the fav'rites ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... loaded with rings, he seemed to be looking into his own mouth. Nodding to a fellow who stood near, with a crimson sash around his waist, he inclined his eye toward the shore, blew out a thin wreath of smoke from his lungs—all the while his vigilant organ shining like a burning spark of lambent jet through ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... its way. Work, riches, art, music, architecture, the vast industrialism of an age, all this thing called progress—all, all were for this alone, this thing of love! The atmosphere about him thrilled, vibrant with this message of the universe. The interspaces of all things seemed lambent, and therein fixed centrally was this ineffaceable and ineffable picture. He gazed, and as he gazed there came to him ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... once for all the great qualities of French prose could do better than turn straight to the Lettres Provinciales. Here he will find the lightness and the strength, the exquisite polish and the delicious wit, the lambent irony and the ordered movement, which no other language spoken by man has ever quite been able to produce. The Lettres are a work of controversy; their actual subject-matter—the ethical system ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the enchanted boy now welcomed by the waiting train outside! They pressed lovingly around him; they played with his golden curls; they fanned him with their delicate wings; they looked down into the lambent depths of his clear blue eyes, and saw his pure spirit within so free from guile; they touched with their tender fingers his poor little thin white neck and breast, and felt his heart beating fast and faster ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... the career of America's first successful man of letters. For, strangely enough, he had succeeded in making a good living with his pen. More than that, his natural and lambent humor, his charm and grace of style, and a literary power at once broad and genuine, had won him a place, if not among the crowned heads, at least mong the princes of literature, side by side with Goldsmith and Addison. Thackeray called him "the first ambassador whom the New World of letters ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... again," she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... which defied time and space, come silently to me, breathing inspiration that may not be spoken, healing the madness of despair and leaving to me in the midst of anxiety a peace which was wholly unaccountable! In the lambent flame of the rough stone fireplace, in the darkness between Hamilton's hut and mine, through which I often stole, dreading what I might find—everywhere, I felt and saw, or seemed to see, those gray eyes with the look of a startled soul opening its virgin ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... other; that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he did ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... actuated by eternal power, and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of impetuous line, which glides over the rocks and writhes in the wind, overwhelming the one and piercing the other with the form, fury, and swiftness of lambent fire." ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... had curved their slender bodies forward, resting one elbow on a knee. At the end of each of these feline arches was a pair of fixed and glowing eyes. No doubt there were faces also, but he was only vaguely aware of three white disks from which flowed forth lambent streams of concentrated light. They looked like three little sea-monsters, slim, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... The Rolls for what few cattle remained on the lower range, the cowmen turned their eyes to the river and to the canyons and towering cliffs beyond, for the sheep; until at last as they sat by the evening fire Creede pointed silently to the lambent flame of a camp fire, glowing like a torch against the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... artist looking up suddenly, "perhaps to you, too, Nature has opened her sky picture page by page! Have you seen the lambent flame of dawn leaping across the livid east; the red-stained, sulphurous islets floating in the lake of fire in the west; the ragged clouds at midnight, black as a raven's wing, blotting out ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... all, the fruit of his work: ready-money. Truly a man of incredible facility; facile action, facile elocution, facile thought: how, in mild suasion, philosophic depth sparkles up from him, as mere wit and lambent sprightliness; and in her Majesty's Soirees, with the weight of a world lying on him, he is the delight of men and women! By what magic does he accomplish miracles? By the only true magic, that of genius. Men name him 'the Minister;' as indeed, when ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... voices murmured: "A spirit hand"; but Sam Sleeny whispered to Maud: "Them are Bott's knuckles, for coin." The hand was withdrawn and a horrible face took its place—a pallid corpse-like mask, with lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones. It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, "That's the way Bott ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... yellow on the lower edges. A few moments more and grey bloom, such as one sees on purple fruit, was on these vast hangings of cloud that grouped themselves more largely, and gold flames burned on their fringes. Behind them there were great empty reaches of lambent blue, and on the sharp edge of the shadowed hills there ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... will know not what they mean, And you may never know, And we may never tell you:— These sudden flashes in your soul, Like lambent lightning on snowy clouds At midnight when the moon is full. They come in solitude, or perhaps You sit with your friend, and all at once A silence falls on speech, and his eyes Without a flicker glow ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... Alive all heaven seems! with wondrous glow Tenfold refulgent every star appears, As if some wide, celestial gale did blow, And thrice illume the ever-kindled spheres. Orbs, with glad orbs rejoicing, burning, beam, Ray-crown'd, with lambent lustre in their zones, Till o'er the blue, bespangled spaces seem Angels and great archangels on their thrones; A host divine, whose eyes are sparkling gems, And forms more ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... lambent glow leaped again into Moira's eyes. He had noticed her—particularly. "Do you like my hair done that way?" ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... towards it through the underbrush around the new camp. The fascinated deer stares into the blaze of the jack-light while the hunter's canoe creeps through the lily-pads. But the charm that masters them is one of dread, not of love. It is the witchcraft of the serpent's lambent look. When they know what it means, when the heat of the fire touches them, or even when its smell comes clearly to their most delicate sense, they recognize it as their enemy, the Wild Huntsman whose red hounds can follow, follow for days without wearying, growing stronger ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... said Amelia firmly. Her eyes were suffused, and yet lambent. The light in them seemed to be drinking up their tears. Her steps, she knew, were set within a shining way. At the door only she paused and fixed him with a glance. "Enoch," said she threateningly, "whose cows were ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... in demure tones, though lambent mirth still flickered, golden, in the depths of the brown eyes. "If you persist, I can only suggest that you come back when Judge Ackroyd is here. You won't find him particularly amenable to humor, particularly when perpetrated by a ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... on the rug before the fire where I had left it. At first I thought it was dead, but when I looked closer I saw a lambent fire in its amber eyes. The straight white shadow it cast across the floor wavered as ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... and passive as she could wish, whilst her freedom raised no other emotion but those of a strange, and, till then, unfelt pleasure. Every part of me was open and exposed to the licentious courses of her hands, which, like a lambent fire, ran over my whole body, and thawed all coldness ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... fed, What in the best of books, her father's life, she read: And to be read herself she need not fear; Each test, and every light, her Muse will bear, Though Epictetus with his lamp were there. Even love (for love sometimes her Muse express'd) Was but a lambent flame which play'd about her breast: Light as the vapours of a morning dream, So cold herself, whilst she such warmth express'd, 'Twas Cupid bathing in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... thoughts, he both foreglimpsed humiliation and was dimly aware of a personality of force and charm: of a well-poised figure cloaked in a light pongee travelling-wrap; of a face that seemed to consist chiefly in dark eyes glowing lambent in the shadow of a wide-brimmed, flopsy hat. He was sensitive to a hint of breeding and reserve in the woman's attitude; as though (he thought) the contretemps diverted and engaged her more than he did who ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... of commanding presence and sternly handsome, entered the room. She wore robes—robes; not clothes—ample and fluent. In her eye could be perceived the lambent flame of genius and soul. In her hand was a green bag of the capacity of a bushel, and an umbrella that also seemed to wear a robe, ample and fluent. She ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Eve! the friend of Care, Come, Cynthia, lovely queen of night! Refresh me with a cooling breeze, And cheer me with a lambent light. ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... was the son of a bondwoman, who had been taken at the sacking of a town belonging to the Latins, and was born whilst his mother was a slave. While yet an infant in his cradle, a lambent flame[1] is said to have played round his head, which Tan'aquil converted into an omen ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... emotion. His mind went back over the past years. He had not been made soft by the nemesis that laid him by the heels. He had been terribly hardened in some ways, so calloused that it sometimes seemed to him he had not the actual nerve surface for feeling anything. The lambent glow of beauty might fall upon him unheeded; even its lightnings might not penetrate his shell. But that had been better than the dry-rot of an ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... who sends him a book, or to a minister who has found fault with his diplomacy, there is in all alike the same constant and remarkable play of a bright and penetrating intellectual light, coloured by a humour that is now and then a little sardonic, but more often is genial and lambent. There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and bouquet of some of the fortifying and stimulating wines of Burgundy, from which time and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... began to reappear. Glowing in fantastic forms they seemed alive with lambent fire. As the boys gazed at each other they could see that their features were tinted with the weird fires of the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... life-blood. Then there came a thought to stay All his angry, murderous impulse, caused the knife to shuddering fall: "He's her father; love your en'mies; 'tis 'our God' reigns over all." At midnight, lambent, lurid flames light up the sky with fiercest beams, Wild cries, "Fire! fire!" ring through the air, and red like blood each flame now seems; They faster grow, they higher throw weird, direful arms which ever lean About ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... since she had seen him last, until the sound of his voice, breaking in upon a happy reverie, brought all the old disgust and horror back again, and she turned to face him with eyes that flashed with lambent fire. ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... two soft eyes of heavenly blue are dying in their sunken sockets—to me! to me! the pure and lambent flame which once lightened and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Rissler aine. There are close analogies also between the best of Balzac's fiction and the sombre realism of the Evangeliste, based on tragic facts that had come under Daudet's personal notice. Of the two realisms Daudet's is certainly the more genuine, with its lambent humour that glints on even the saddest ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart, burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... thoughts are free,—and mine have found at last Their apt solution; and from out the Past There seems to shine as 'twere a beacon-fire: And all the land is lit with large desire Of lambent glory; all the quivering sea Is big with waves that wait the Morn's decree As I, thy vassal, wait thy beckoning smile Athwart the splendors ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent light played. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... there, for Mistress Annapla was in truth not the stuff for amorous intrigues. She had doubtless been handsome enough in her day, but that was long distant; now there were but the relics of her good looks, with only her eyes, dark, lambent, piercing, to tell of passions unconsumed. She had eyes only for her master; Count Victor had no existence for her, and he was all the freer to watch how she received the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... she will make you break your oath. She is your wife. She will make you forsake me, or—she will do me a fatal mischief. Oh, I shiver whenever she comes near me. Ah, if you had seen her eyes as I saw them through her mask to-night. They were lambent flames! How they glared on ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... on Mrs Toots the necessity of caution, when Mr Feeder, B.A., offered her his arm, and led her down to the carriages that were waiting to go to church. Doctor Blimber escorted Mrs Toots. Mr Toots escorted the fair bride, around whose lambent spectacles two gauzy little bridesmaids fluttered like moths. Mr Feeder's brother, Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., had already gone on, in advance, to assume his ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in the moonlight steered ominous black triangles, circling us, leading us, sheering across bow and flashing wake, all phosphorescent with lambent sea-fire—the ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote, although he wrote ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... morning now broke; and, in a few minutes, the prison shook, and the Genius appeared. He was visible by a lambent light that played around him; and HAMET starting from the ground, turned to the vision with reverence and wonder: but as the Omnipotent was ever present to his mind, to whom all beings in all worlds are obedient, and on whom alone he relied for protection, he was neither confused nor ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... Venetian gondolier, a swaggering brigand of Macedonia—could be astonishingly beautiful. And, being astonishingly beautiful, that was the beginning and end of him. But behind this merely physical attractiveness of his guest glowed a lambent intelligence, quick as lightning. There was humorous challenge in those ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... indeterminate forms gliding ghost-like toward the water, which was evidently the recognised drinking place for most of the game in the neighbourhood. And at length, when I had been standing there for about twenty minutes, two pairs of lambent orbs loomed up through the long grass, and Thunder and Juno came wriggling apologetically to my feet, having apparently made their way back to the spot where they had deserted me, and tracked ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... loveliest. There was no gorgeous red, no blazing gold, but tints as exquisite as those seen in the heart of an abalone shell—still lakes of sea-green feathered about by a fleecy white just touched with the yellow of the daisy; lambent wings of gray, kissed into a roseate hue as they spread outward and upward toward the zenith; and the expectant waters on the lake trembling ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... automata in the box again, closing its lid. The Moor had made his salaam, the Doctor his obeisance, disappearing behind the screen from which they had so mysteriously come forth. But at their departure a train of fire followed upon their track, and a lambent flame played curiously upon the wooden crockets for a few ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the sun was hot again. The new-born brimstone butterflies were upon the wing, a flutter of lambent green. They were of the time, and young. They must live all winter and waken every sunny day till next spring—the ambassadors of ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... literary use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... I said—just affectionate, lambent, helpful criticism, with a little Tarragon in it. Yet next day when I met her on the staircase she said she didn't want to talk to me any more. So I heaved her over the balustrade and she had a forty-foot drop on to the marble below. I am too impulsive—I have always ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... of flame was round her waist; every limb was bathed in lambent light; all the multitudinous life of the autumn sea, stirred by her approach, had ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... twitched, slow colour mounted in his face, the light in his eyes was lambent. He found himself looking deep into other eyes that were like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge and resurge of feeling for which there was no name. Aware that they revealed more than he ought to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... they rang gently, like melody heard through water and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... stars! so eloquently bright, Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night, While half the world is lapp'd in downy dreams, And round the lattice creep your midnight beams, How sweet to gaze upon your placid eyes, In lambent beauty ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... went on. Twenty at a time the women, kneeling, ranged themselves at the rail; rising to give room to others when they had partaken, and so returning to their seats. For a full half hour those pale lambent figures were moving ghost-like about the church, while the white-veiled throng before the altar gradually diminished until at last it disappeared: fading from sight a little at a time, softly—as dream-visions ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... maid Moty were standing beside the Hilton's car—and so was another Oman, like none ever before seen. Six feet four; shoulders that would just barely go through a door; muscled like Atlas and Hercules combined; skin a gleaming, satiny bronze; hair a rippling mass of lambent flame. Temple came to a full stop and caught ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... besides, glorified every detail of the setting: the rich fabric of the dress, the creamy feathers of the fan, even the roses of the breast-knot. The pearls and diamonds he had amused himself with making larger than they were, and filled these with a winking fire, those with a lambent luster. But Gerald had no mind when he indulged in satire to be gross. The whole was dainty, as shimmering as a soap-bubble, and of a fineness that rightly commended it to lovers ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... needed stirring. As he broke the black surface of coal, a flame shot up, red, lambent, a serpent's tongue. It had a voice; it tempted. He took the packet of letters ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... with ripping, roaring storms, flurries of ice, snow and sleet, shot through and through by balls of lambent flames in unguessable numbers. Eery lights which struck the surface of the Earth, bounded away and, half a mile or so from the surface again, burst into flaming pin-wheels, like skyrockets of ancient times. Strange lights, causing weird effects, but producing no damage at all, save to lessen to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... but very lightly on this grand hymn. What does it show us of the singer? We see him, like other shepherds on the same hills, long after "keeping watch over his flocks by night," and overwhelmed by all the magnificence of an eastern sky, with its lambent lights. So bright, so changeless, so far,—how great they are, how small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are they gods, as all but his own nation believed? No,—"the work of Thy fingers," "which Thou hast ordained." The consciousness of God as their Maker delivers from the temptation ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... theosophical theory to bring forward, which, I must add, never seemed to me to mean, or, at least, to reveal, anything. He was a great reader of mystical books, and yet the man's nature seemed cold. It was sunshiny, but not sunny. His intellect was rather a lambent flame than a genial warmth. He could make things, but he could not grow anything. And when I came to see that he had had more than any one else to do with the education of Miss Oldcastle, I understood her a ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... writes much and publishes little; he is an intellectual aristocrat. He has the fastidiousness which was the main characteristic of the temperament of Thomas Gray; and he has as well Gray's hatred of publicity and much of Gray's lambent humour, more salty than satiric. His work is decidedly caviare to the general, not because it is obscure, which it is not, but because it presupposes much background. Lovers of nature and lovers of books will love these verses, and reread them ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... heavy inflammable air, resulting from the passage of steam over heated charcoal was loaded with fixed air (CO2), but that in the course of the process this disappeared, the remaining air (CO) burning with a lambent flame. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... that though a long-lived one, she was still a woman, whereon her face assumed a calm but terrifying smile, and she answered—"Art so sure, my Holly? Tell me, do your women wear such jewels as that set upon my brow?" and she pointed to the faint but lambent light which glowed about ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,— So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace When the drear soul desires thee. Of that face What shall be said,—which, like a governing star, Gathers and garners from all things that are Their silent ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... undeveloped Aspasias, of embryo Cleopatras, destined by Nature, and only restrained by man's injustice, from ruling the world by their beauty's eloquence. Those massive and beetling brows, gleaming with the lambent flames of patriotic ardour—what is needed to unfold them into a race of Shakspeares and of Gracchi, ready to proclaim with sword and lyre the divine harmonies of liberty, equality, and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... eyes," he smiled down. "Some are merely lenses to see with and some are stars. Of the star kind, a few are lustrous and miraculous, and control destinies. I think yours are like that. One can flash lambent fire and the other can soften like the petals of a black pansy—it has just that touch of inky purple—and in their range are ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... crown. The same Apostle, who has thus the honour of ringing out to the world the good news that God is Love, declares that 'this is the message' which he has to tell, that 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.' So the light of righteousness, as well as the lambent flame of love, burn together on that central fire of the universe. We must not so conceive of the love of God, as to darken the radiance of His righteousness, or to obscure the brilliancy of that pure light which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a bird flying forth and coming home. But the root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast. When I go forth from my own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world which is beyond me, outside me, then I go forth from wide open windows, through which shows the full and living lambent darkness of my present inward self. I go forth, and I leave the lovely open darkness of my sensient self revealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision to dwell upon the beloved, or upon the wonder of the world, I go from the center of the glad breast, through the eyes, and who ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... wanted to marry her, when I saw her. I love her passionately," and he threw a pebble in the water farther than he had yet; "but she is so pure, so delicate, that when I approach her, in spite of my besottedness, my love grows lambent. That's not like me, you know," with great vehemence. "Will she ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Ecstasy sore maltreats my soul and yearning burns my sprite, * And tears betray love's secresy which I would lief contain: I weet no way, I know no case that can make light my load, * Or heal my wasting body or cast out from me this bane. A hell of fire is in my heart upflames with lambent tongue * And Laza's furnace-fires within my liver place have ta'en. O thou, exaggerating blame for what befel, enough * I bear with patience whatsoe'er hath writ for me the Pen! I swear, by Allah, ne'er to find aught comfort ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... acre of plate glass under the Royal arms on Mr. Eglantine's shop-window; and at night, when the gas is lighted, and the washballs are illuminated, and the lambent flame plays fitfully over numberless bottles of vari-coloured perfumes—now flashes on a case of razors, and now lightens up a crystal vase, containing a hundred thousand of his patent tooth-brushes—the effect of the sight may be imagined. You don't suppose that he is a creature ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of thine eyes, (O still, celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... pillar to support his house. Isis sat down weeping; the women of the queen came to her, she stroked their hair, and fragrance passed into it. She was made nurse to the queen's child, fed him with her finger, and in the night-time, by means of a lambent flame, burned away his impurities. She then turned herself into a swallow and flew around the house, bewailing her fate. The queen watched her operations, and being alarmed cried out, and so robbed her child of immortality. Isis then begged the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... you know that?" he demanded, frowning upon her while his eyes still gleamed with that lambent fire that made ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... wit—rarely sharp to hurt, yet quick to search out forgivable weakness. The laughter of her mind played like lambent flame over all about her, and from all about her arose answering laughter. Yet she was never the centre of things. This she would not permit. The large house, and all of which it was significant, was her father's; and ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... round the mournful beauty played Of lambent light and purple shade, Lost on the fixed and dumb despair Of frozen earth and sea ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... wonders of science, for the scene was horrible and weird, suggestive to the Baggara—chiefs and Mullahs—of magic in its most awful guise. For as they stood spellbound there by the strange light which played about as if some hissing, fiery dragon were flickering its lambent tongue in and out of its glistening jaws, not only were the faces and busy hands of the Hakim and his assistants seen moving rapidly, but directly after there, in a faint glare, was the bare torso ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... passages into the outer air; So in this dimmer room which we call life, Thus sits the soul and marks with eye intent That mystic curtain o'er the portal death; Still deeming that behind the arras lies The lambent way that leads to lasting light. Poor fooled and foolish soul! Know now that death Is but a blind, false door that nowhere leads, And gives no hope of exit ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... fold; And it was said, as still they say, 'Twas spread by good Sir Gregory, And that when it was ta'en away, The Ladye Olive thou might'st see, With eyne of blue so softly bright, Like those we feign in fairie dreams, Where love shines like that lambent light That in the opal softly swims. But they could carry maddening fires, As when they inspired Sir Evan's breast, And roused therein those wild desires That stole from Dowielee his rest. And led to that, oh, fatal night! When, less beguiling than beguiled, She fled, and left in her maddened ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... one common stream. Apathies are none. No foe to man Lurks in the serpent now; the mother sees And smiles to see, her infant's playful hand Stretch'd forth to dally with the crested worm, To stroke his azure neck, or to receive The lambent homage of his arrowy tongue. All creatures worship man, and all mankind One Lord, one Father. Error has no place; That creeping pestilence is driven away; The breath of heaven has chased it. In the heart No passion touches a discordant string, But all is harmony and love. ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... MAIDS! YOU round deciduous day, Tressed with soft beams, your glittering bands array; 175 On Earth's cold bosom, as the Sun retires, Confine with folds of air the lingering fires; O'er Eve's pale forms diffuse phosphoric light, And deck with lambent flames the shrine of Night. So, warm'd and kindled by meridian skies, 180 And view'd in darkness with dilated eyes, BOLOGNA'S chalks with faint ignition blaze, BECCARI'S shells emit prismatic rays. So to the sacred Sun in MEMNON's fane, Spontaneous concords quired the matin ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Hood ever wrote? or who has a memory of wounded modesty for anything that he ever read secretly of Hood's? Dr. Johnson says that dirty images were as natural to Swift as sublime ones were to Milton;—we may say that images at once lambent and laughable were those which were natural to Hood. Even when his mirth is broadest, it is decent; and while the merest recollection of his drollery will often convulse the face in defiance of the best-bred ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of victory, he asked, with a lambent smile, and what he intended to be an elegant and condescending composure, "Your name, sir, if I mought ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... reminds me of a story—" He chuckled and chuckled, his lambent eyes suffused with mirth; and slipping his arm through the pivot-sleeve of Lord Alderdene's shooting-jacket, hooking the other in Siward's reluctant elbow, and driving Mortimer ahead of him, he went garrulously away up the stairs, his lordship's ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and shops, and churches to the very ground. The lambent flames still played about the heaps of burning ruins, but the fury of the conflagration had abated through lack of material upon which to feed itself. Victory remained finally with those who had worked so well to keep the foe ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hands could be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... been their meeting on the morning of the lad's first adventuring into the world. Memories flooded them, as they looked across the valley to the bleak cliffs of Stone Mountain, which rose in aged, rugged grandeur, softened in this hour by the veils of haze, warmed with the lambent ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... a fallen sycamore Whitely arches a pathway o'er, And shadows darkle The lambent cool, As, softly a-sparkle. Sunbeams arrow lightnings thro ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... night, and from the doors of the conversation rooms, as they open and close, escape gusts of harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against the sky, which is clear with a crescent moon and the lambent lights of the starry hosts of heaven. Clive does not see pine-robed hills and shining stars, nor think of pleasure in its palace yonder, nor of pain writhing on his own bed within a few feet of him, where poor Belsize was groaning. His eyes are fixed ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he should now go out and bear all the wrath of this fierce old gentleman, whose daughter he had conspired to carry off. Mackenzie was walking up and down the path outside in the cool and silent night. There was not much moon now, but a clear and lambent twilight showed all the familiar features of Loch Roag and the southern hills, and down there in the bay you could vaguely make out the Maighdean-mhara rocking in the tiny waves that washed in on the white shore. Ingram had never looked on this pretty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... calm, cool nights how often have I stood on the deck of a ship watching with wonder and awe the stars overhead, and the sea-fire below, especially in the foaming, silvery wake of the vessel, where often suddenly appear globes of soft and lambent light, given out perhaps from the surface ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... watchful swains along the lawns of night With amorous steps pursue the virgin light; O'er her fair form the electric lustre plays, 50 And cold she moves amid the lambent blaze. So shines the glow-fly, when the sun retires, And gems the night-air with ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... slept on. The stout woman removed a shell comb from her back hair and composed herself for deeper slumber. Jessica presented to my lambent gaze a visage which besought unspoken sympathy, and mutely breathed a protest against travel in general and this phase of it in particular. Jessica in the "still small hours" was never really gay. It was dimly comforting to one of my companionable nature to turn from her to the little old woman ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... aspens were still as if they had been marble; and the whole air was warm and fragrant. Although the sun wanted an hour of setting, yet from the bottom of the vale they could perceive the broad shafts of light which shot from his mild disk through the snowy clouds we have mentioned, like bars of lambent radiance, almost palpable to the touch. Yet, although this delightful silence was so profound, the heart could perceive, beneath its stillest depths, that voiceless harmony of progressing life, which, like the music ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... stooped lower, covered his eyes with his hands, and prayed the wordless prayer of one who hastily commits himself to God; and in the darkness behind his hands there was an illumination, and in the midst of it a sentence in letters each a lambent flame—the Creed of Father Hilarion and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... paced beside her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... And where Friendship's fixt star beams a mellow'd Ray; 50 Where Love a crown of thornless Roses wears; Where soften'd Sorrow smiles within her tears; And Memory, with a Vestal's meek employ, Unceasing feeds the lambent flame of Joy! No more thy Sky Larks less'ning from my sight 55 Shall thrill th' attund Heartstring with delight; No more shall deck thy pensive Pleasures sweet With wreaths of sober hue my evening seat! Yet dear to [My] Fancy's Eye thy varied scene Of Wood, Hill, Dale and sparkling Brook ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... we said, of the azure-gray color; large enough, not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth. Which is an excellent combination; and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy: clear, melodious and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... snowflakes, conflicting with the baffling wind as they descended, "tormented all the air,"—and, to the eye of one looking upwards, seemed to cross—thwart—and mazily interweave with each other as rapidly as a weaver's shuttle, and with the lambent scintillating lustre of fire-flies: and the plashes or shallow pools of water, which were frequent in this part of the heath amongst the excavations from which peats had been dug, now began under the sudden breaking up of the frost to give way beneath their warm covering of snow to the ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... triumphs of the sky, For James his late nocturnal victory; The pledge of his Almighty Patron's love, The fireworks which his angels made above. I saw myself the lambent easy light Gild the brown horror, and dispel the night: The messenger with speed the tidings bore; 660 News, which three labouring nations did restore; But Heaven's own Nuntius ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... by peace No thunder e'er can blast: Th'artillery of the skies Shoots to the earth and dies: And ever green and flourishing 'twill last, Nor dipt in blood, nor widows' tears, nor orphans' cries. About the head crown'd with these bays, Like lambent fire, the lightning plays; Nor, its triumphal cavalcade to grace, Makes up its solemn train with death; It melts the sword of war, yet keeps it in ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift |
