"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dappled through the tired foliage on to these benches which have rested many vagrants. Darkness has ceased to be the lawful cloak of the unhappy; but Mother Night was soft and moonless, and man had not despoiled her of her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... past that old stone where in days gone by at the place of Thor the wild Saxons worshiped their war-god. Nigel looked at it with a wary eye and spurred Pommers onward as he passed it, for still it was said that wild fires danced round it on the moonless nights, and they who had ears for such things could hear the scream and sob of those whose lives had been ripped from them that the fiend might be honored. Thor's stone, Thor's jumps, Thor's punch-bowl—the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not been for the moonless dark of it, you might have seen the same laborer who had been so concerned with tape-measures and distances near the Treasury Building, a long shallow basket stoutly woven of willow on his arm, making secretly for the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... overcast: nothing could be distinctly seen. The canal beneath the window looked like a black gulf; the opposite houses were barely visible as a row of shadows, dimly relieved against the starless and moonless sky. At long intervals, the warning cry of a belated gondolier was just audible, as he turned the corner of a distant canal, and called to invisible boats which might be approaching him in the darkness. Now and ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... this would only be making bad worse. As soon as the service was over, he would set out towards the preserves, and, when it was well dark, make for the statues. He hoped that on such a great day the rangers might be many of them in Sunch'ston; if there were any about, he must trust the moonless night and his own quick eyes and ears to get ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... old Laertes or the Queen. And now, all stretch'd their hands toward the feast Reeking before them, and when hunger none Felt more or thirst, Mesaulius clear'd the board. Then, fed to full satiety, in haste Each sought his couch. Black came a moonless night, And Jove all night descended fast in show'rs, With howlings of the ever wat'ry West. 560 Ulysses, at that sound, for trial sake Of his good host, if putting off his cloak He would accommodate him, or require That service ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... intellectual manly beauty. The forehead was high and broad and smooth, the eyebrows dark and firm but finely arched, the nose somewhat prominently aquiline, but well shaped, and with delicate, sensitive nostrils. The eyes were deep-set, large and soft, and dark as the sky of a moonless night, yet shining in the firelight with a strange magnetic glint that seemed to fasten Tremayne's gaze and ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... through the moonless night, Jean's sharp eyes were trained on the weird, shadowy outlines into which darkness turns the most commonplace objects. His nimble brain, however, was busily sorting out the scant details that had been ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... was a moonless night, that shut down on the world of waters and blotted out even the clouds and the waves that been company for the solitary vessel. The little ship became a speck of light in a gulf of darkness, an atom of life floating ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... bellowing of the bull-voiced mimes, Terrible; firs bowed down as briars or palms Even at the breathless blast as of a breeze Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And raiment of ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the land of the Indians lay under the shroud of this moonless night, and while the Faithful were harried on every side, and the champions of ungodliness prospered, the very air reeking with the smell of bloody sacrifices, a certain mall of the royal household, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. 'None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... will now try our telescope on a nebula, selecting the great nebula in the Sword. The place of this object is indicated in Plate 2. There can be no difficulty in finding it since it is clearly visible to the naked eye on a moonless night—the only sort of night on which an observer would care to look at nebulae. A low power ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... severe heat, the glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night for a lover, a lady, and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... is what He gives. And this is all the light and life we ever have. Men make botany. God makes flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... silent as death. "I can't go to bed and not know where she is," he reflected. "I wonder what she meant when she talked to me so strangely—what she had in her mind! I must know, I must know!" He opened the door, and went out into the night. The sky was moonless, but for a wonder it was resplendent with stars. All the factory fires were low, and the air was no longer smoke-sodden. The wind came from the sea, and he breathed deeply. It seemed as though a great healing power passed over his heart. He went into the little ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... harbor, opposite the fort, under the trees which overshadowed the strand, some distance back from high-water mark. Singly or in groups of two or three, the men had gone across in boats after sunset, successfully eluding observation, for the night was moonless ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... years a new consecration, a fresh outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... less than ten feet long. There, on the face of that precipice, one hundred miles from the nearest settlement, all through the lonely watches of the night, the strong-hearted wife, with tear-dimmed eyes, hung over the sufferer. Many a silent prayer in the weary hours of that moonless night did she send up to the Father of mercies. Many a plan for bringing succor or for alleviating pain on the morrow did ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... a warm dusk, moonless, windless. The sounds of the village street came in—laughter, a touch at a piano, a chiming clock. Bights starred and quickened in the blurred houses. Footsteps echoed on the board walks. The gate opened. The gloom yielded ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... We were very close together now—my leg touched her horse. Already, overhead in a moonless sky, the stars shone brightly. In the growing gloom her face was ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... It was a moonless night, and a haze of cloud obscured the stars. We passed silently under the vine-covered arbour, across the garden, to the gateway. Into the heavy lock Dona Orosia slipped a great key; it turned easily, ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... To each and every scout from Homeport the unusual was a warning, a signal to alert mind and body. The runners in the night—that furred monkey race of hunters who combed the moonless dark of Astra when most of the higher fauna were asleep—were very distantly related to Sssuri's species, though the gap between them was that between highly civilized man and the jungle ape. The runners were harmless and shy, but they were noted also for clinging stubbornly to one particular ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... runes I wrote At the bottom of the note, (Wrote and freely Gave to Greeley) In the middle of the night, In the mellow, moonless night, When the stars were out of sight, When my pulses, like a knell, (Israfel!) Danced with dim and dying fays O'er the ruins of my days, O'er the dimeless, timeless days, When the fifty, drawn at thirty, Seeming ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... which I first looked, and the sands which were marked by my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of those ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no recollection more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky. But of L——, the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade myself that every line and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot I have since beheld, even though borne in upon the heart by the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... seemed to actuate him, he rose from his seat on the log and stumbled across the clearing, floundering among the fallen logs with a desperate energy that cost him many more bruises than were necessary, even in the profound darkness of the, as yet, moonless night. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... They cross Wyatt's Buildings and cross this house. It was a moonless night or we should have seen it at once! I watched him, saw him drop to this roof—and brought the men around to ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him. And he is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... night with its moonless weather, I know you will reason beyond a doubt That the rain and the wind and the leaves together Are making the sounds you will hear about: The wintry rustle of dead leaves falling, The whispering wind through the matted ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... when all slept and her going and coming would not be observed. She left her home at a moonless midnight, took candle and matches, dressed in her stoutest clothes and walked over North Hill towards Bridport. But at the eastern shoulder of the downs she descended through a field and struck the road again just at the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... spell of foul weather were very dark and moonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning into her last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled up the face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But we made shift ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and one dark moonless night in September a long procession of boats floated silently down the river. In one of the boats sat Wolfe, and as they drifted slowly along in the starlight in a low voice he repeated Gray's poem called an Elegy in ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... deaf with age; A garden of moonless trees Would answer not though she should cry ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... friends with Nature. I had no great variety even in her, but the better did I understand what I had. The next Summer I began to hunt for glow-worms, and carry them carefully to my hollow, that in the warm, soft, moonless nights they might illumine it with a strange light. When I had been very successful, I would call my uncle and aunt to see. My aunt tried me by always having something to do first. My uncle, on the other hand, would lay down his book at once, and follow ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the wind had gone down the sea was rough, with a heavy swell rolling in from the westward, the well-known sign of an Atlantic storm that might break on the Spanish coast before many hours. The flickering signals of the British fleet seemed to come nearer as the darkness of the moonless autumn night deepened, and about nine a shadowy mass of sails was seen not far off. It was the "Euryalus" that had closed in with every light shaded to have a near ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... swift through the jungle trees We swung in our airy flights, Or breathed the balms of the fronded palms In the hush of the moonless nights. And oh, what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each; When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would keep it steaming ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pleasure was in war; Triumphs and hatred followed: I myself Bore, men imagined, no inglorious part: The gods thought otherwise, by whose decree Deprived of life, and more, of death deprived, I still hear shrieking through the moonless night Their discontented and deserted shades. Observe these horrid walls, this rueful waste! Here some refresh the vigour of the mind With contemplation and cold penitence: Nor wonder while thou hearest that the soul Thus purified hereafter may ascend Surmounting all ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... suddenly visioned—and Sherston was a man given to vivid visions—where he would have been now, at this moment, had his marriage indeed taken place this morning. He saw himself, on this beautiful starlit, moonless night, standing, along with his dear love, on the platform of a medieval tower, which, together with the picturesque farmhouse which had been tacked on to the tower about a hundred years ago, rose, close to the seashore, on a lonely stretch ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... this moonless, starless, sky-beclouded night, you shall soon be driven. May it faintly prefigure the unending blackness of that eternal night you have chosen as your future portion. As you have willfully, voluntarily, and most wickedly called it down ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... matter of serious concern to the farmer. But every such neighborhood has its coon-dog, and the boys and young men dearly love the sport. The party sets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moonless night, and stealthily approaches the cornfield. The dog knows his business, and when he is put into a patch of corn and told to "hunt them up" he makes a thorough search, and will not be misled by any other scent. You hear him rattling through ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... beginning of her voyage, rude Boreas kindly retired, and spicy breezes from Africa rippled the sea with just sufficient force to intensify its heavenly blue, and fill out the great square-sail so that there was no occasion to ply the oars. One dark, starlight but moonless night, a time of quiet talk prevailed from stem to stern of the vessel as the grizzled mariners spun long yarns of their prowess and experiences on the deep, for the benefit of awe-stricken and youthful shipmates ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... critical. Sailing just before dark, I headed northwest, apparently into the heart of the Caribbean Sea. This information, I have no doubt, was promptly communicated to Admiral Cervera. But as soon as the darkness of a moonless night had thoroughly set in, I changed the course to due south; and ran below Barbadoes and thence far to the eastward before I took the Oregon to the northward. We thus passed far to sea east of Martinique, and eventually turned into the north Atlantic beyond St. Thomas. ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... reddening the shafts of the shovels. Every now and again one or another of them, choked with the dust, went to get a draft of lukewarm water from the scuttlebutt. But no one stayed over long on these excursions. The breeze had blown up into a gale. The night overhead-was starless and moonless, but every minute the black heaven was split by spurts of lightning, which showed the laboring, dishevelled ship set among ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of vision," but upon the real object to be viewed-to wit: upon the moon. It has been easily calculated that, when the light proceeding from a star becomes so diffused as to be as weak as the natural light proceeding from the whole of the stars, in a clear and moonless night, then the star is no longer visible for ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... admiration of the neighborhood. But the owner had not occupied his country-home a whole summer before he determined to make a still more attractive home of it by lighting it with a new-fashioned gas of domestic manufacture. He succeeded in lighting not only his house but the whole country-side, for one moonless night his mansion was burned to the ground. Nothing was left of the house but the foundations, and on these the owner felt no desire to build again. He departed from the Lethbury neighborhood ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... "My days were sunless and my nights were moonless, Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, If you loved me not!" And I who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, Who am mad to lay my ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... honey-seeking bill into the white blossoms of a little bush beside my window, I should have thought it no such bad thing to be a bird, even if one next became a bat, like the colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy." Was this weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far primeval time? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at nightfall, that he is one still? I wonder whether he can enjoy the winged brotherhood into which he has thrust himself,—victim, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... marques despatched secretly a veteran soldier who was highly in his confidence. His name was Ortega de Prado, a man of great activity, shrewdness, and valor, and captain of escaladors (soldiers employed to scale the walls of fortresses in time of attack). Ortega approached Alhama one moonless night, and paced along its walls with noiseless step, laying his ear occasionally to the ground or to the wall. Every time he distinguished the measured tread of a sentinel, and now and then the challenge of the night-watch ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... into crystalline brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... full-armed, and that no hostile power on earth would dare to touch the water. To her any miracle seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she did. She had neither fear nor hesitation. She would slip out of her room unheard, and speed over the dark country on moonless nights on his errands; she would seek for weapons and bring them in and distribute them; she would take his messages to those on whom he could rely, and rouse to his cause the hesitating and half-hearted by repetition of his words. Her whole ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or sails, or smoke, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... all persons conversant with morality and duty, of him, O bull of Bharata's race, who knows the Past, the Future, and the Present. After that tiger among kings shall have, in consequences of his own achievements, ascended to heaven, the earth, O son of Pritha, will look like a moonless night. Therefore, O Yudhishthira, submissively approaching Ganga's son, viz., Bhishma of terrible prowess, question him about what thou mayst desire to learn. O lord of the earth, enquire of him about the four branches of knowledge ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... moonless but strewn with stars. A tonic north-east wind hummed over the high moors, and seemed to prick old Dapple, prescient of his own straw and rack, to his very best trot. It was a penetrating wind, too; but Doctor Unonius, wrapped in his frieze coat, with the famous ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; the other sat upright, keeping ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... night was dark and moonless, there was an inconveniently brilliant gas-lamp close to the Major's door, and that strategist, carrying his round roll of diaries, much the shape of a bottle, under his coat, went about half-past nine that evening to look at the rain-gutter ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... in the scrub was lighted brightly in the midst of the 'close', solid blackness of that moonless December night, when the sky and stars were smothered and ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... remarkably uncomfortable. One lay against its sloping side, scrambling to get a foothold and peering over the edge into the dim regions beyond. It was a moonless night, but clear and brilliant ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... A moonless, cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs floating lazily in a luminous mist, the only visible manifestation ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... were out of doors: the cool, calm night revived me somewhat. It was moonless, but the reflex from the many glowing windows lit the court brightly, and even the alleys—dimly. Heaven was cloudless, and grand with the quiver of its living fires. How soft are the nights of the Continent! How bland, balmy, safe! No sea-fog; no chilling ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... to more ponderable matters. If we look [Page 81] into our western sky soon after sunset, on a clear, moonless night in March or April, we shall see a dim, soft light, somewhat like the milky-way, often reaching, well defined, to the Pleiades. It is wedge-shaped, inclined to the south, and the smallest star ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... seat, from which the sky could be seen completely swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... now after dusk, and the hour had already deepened into the darkness of a calm, moonless, summer night; the hearth, therefore, in a short time, became surrounded by a circle, consisting of every person in the house; the door was closed and securely bolted;—a struggle for the safest seat took place; and to Bartley's shame be it spoken, he lodged himself on the hob within the jamb, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... said to the younger: "Do what we may, our father will not condescend to follow our words of counsel, and nothing now remains but to bring him to a knowledge of the truth by the sacrifice of one of our own lives. To-night is fortunately moonless; and if I put on white garments and go to the neighborhood of the bay, he will take me for a stork and shoot me dead. Do you continue to live and tend our father with all the services of filial piety." Thus she spake, her eyes dimmed with the rolling tears. But the younger sister, with ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... it himself) in his charming book, A Naturalist's Rambles in the China Seas. Our friend described the appearance as that of a sea of shining snow rather than of milk, heaving gently beneath a starlit but moonless sky. A bucket of water, when taken up, was filled with the same half-luminous whiteness, which stuck to its sides when the water was drained off. The captain of the Indiaman was well enough aware of the rarity of the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... off her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals when she ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... situated. There was no sign of death or sickness about the place. The lights from the tap-room and the garden, along one side of which the alley for four-corners was erected, gleamed in the darkness of a moonless summer night between the trees; and even farther than the streaming light, pierced the loud oaths and louder laughter, the shouts of triumph, and the yells of defeat, mixed with the dull heavy blows of the large wooden bowl, from the drunken gamesters ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... and of small magnitude, whilst in other parts of the heavens, and especially in the vicinity of the Milky Way, they are present in great numbers and form groups and aggregations of striking appearance and conspicuous brilliancy. On taking a casual glance at the midnight sky on a clear moonless night, one is struck with the apparent countless multitude of the stars; yet this impression of their vast number is deceptive, for not more than two thousand stars are usually visible at ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespassers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the gap were to ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... faintly hear the sound of his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the crest of a hill ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... you knew where you were, you were a three-legged toad or a dew-pond or something. So you had to be civil. As for their custom—well, it wasn't worth having. They wouldn't look at bacon, unless you'd guarantee that the pig had been killed on a moonless Friday with the wind in the North, and as for pulled figs, if you couldn't swear that the box had been crossed by a one-eyed man whose father had committed arson in a pair of brown boots, you could go and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... behind him. Oh, world-enchanting Benares! what happy man could have quitted thee on such an autumn night with satiated eyes? It is a moonless night. From the Ganges stream, in whatever direction you look you will see the sky studded with stars—from endless ages ever-burning stars, resting never. Below, a second sky reflected in the deep blue water; on shore, flights of steps, and tall houses showing ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships of the line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was under easy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black with haze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres over the sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-east the dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain, consisting ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... will also tend to brighten and enlarge the zodial light; and, in this last cause, we have an explanation not only of ancient obscurations of the solar light, but, also, of those phosphorescent mists, such as occurred in 1743 and 1831, rendering moonless nights so light that the smallest print could be read ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... in close bonds to-night. After a while, as it darkened, he rose from the fallen log upon which he had been sitting, and began to follow the little stream, still wrapped in far-away thoughts. The twilight had settled into a night that was moonless, but had that luminosity often seen on clear nights in late autumn. He could see all about him, even in the wood. As he reached another somewhat open space, coming upon it silently from behind a thick growth ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... any longer, but planned flight at once. Since it was impossible for him to go out by day without being detected, he undertook to escape by night, but failed to secure secrecy, being betrayed by the moon, which was at its full. The Romans accordingly waited for moonless nights, and then starting out in darkness and a foreign land that was likewise hostile, they scattered in tremendous fear. Some were caught when it became day and lost their lives: others got safely away to Syria in the company of Cassius Longinus, the quaestor. ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... not even a denser shadow in the moonless dark. Framtree joined them, and they waited expectantly for Jaffier's index of light to pick up the mystery. Ten minutes passed before the gunboat, following doggedly, and whipping her light over sea, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to reach the heart of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... woman awoke it was to find herself in the depths of a moonless and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloud stretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a distant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible against the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by its great contrast with the circumscribing ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... brings our friends up from the under world, and the last falls on that which sinks with all we love below the verge.' Even at night there is no cessation to this coming and going; only, a red light or a white, and the distant strokes of a paddle-wheel in the hush of the moonless void are then the sole signs of all this motion. What hopes and fears contend in unseen hearts under those moving stars! Is it nothing to have the opportunity to watch them from the ivied porch of the 'Outlook,' and to welcome the thoughts they arouse ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... better, Wulf's counsel was carried out. Supper was cooked and eaten in the forest, and after two hours for rest, for the march had been a very fatiguing one, they started. The night was moonless, and in the shadow of the trees the darkness was intense. The housecarls kept together, moving as closely as possible to each other. The levies were ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... we filled the still, deserted street, A column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That turned from ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... took place so interesting in astronomical history, that we have to look back to the memorable discovery of Uranus in 1781 before we can find a parallel to it in importance. Mars had always been looked upon as one of the moonless planets, though grounds were not wanting for the surmise that probably moons to Mars really existed. It was under the influence of this belief that an attempt was made by Professor Asaph Hall at Washington to make ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... In the moonless gloom of midnight I ask her, 'Maiden, what is your quest, holding the lamp near your heart? My house is all dark and lonesome—lend me your light.' She stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in the dark. 'I have brought my light,' she said, 'to join ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... no use starting until the twilight had darkened into a cloudy, moonless night; so, after our seven o'clock supper, we adjourned into the verandah to watch F—— make a large round ball, such as children play with, out of the scraps of worsted with which I had furnished him. Instead of cutting the wool into lengths, however, it was left in ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... the first night after the new moon in the month of Pharmuthi, the sanctuary in bygone years was always adorned with flowers. As soon as the darkness of this moonless night passed away, the high festival of the spring equinox and the harvest ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I might wait!" she said; "But the moon sinks in the tide; Thou seest it not; I see it fade, Like one that may not bide. Alas! I go out in the moonless shade; Ah, kind! ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... the moonless night —Muffled oars on blue Loch Leven!— Took her hand, a flake of white —Beauty slides the bolts of heaven.— Little white hand, like a flake of snow, When they saw it, his Highland crew Swung together and murmured low, "Douglas, wilt thou die then, too?" And the pine ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... failed to batter a way into the city. As a subaltern he had idolised Wolfe, and here on the ground of Wolfe's triumphant stroke he still dreamed of rivalling it. In Quebec a cautious phlegmatic British General sat and waited, keeping, as the moonless nights drew on, his officers ready against surprise. For a week they had slept in their clothes and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of years my brother, since that moonless August night when the Doomsmen came to Croye and I went back with them, tied to Mad Scarlett's saddle-bow. Twenty years of silence in the City of Silence, and I but a slim, brown-faced maid who might be found one day playing at polo and lamenting her lack ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... made A mystical impression on my mind; For clouds lay o'er the ocean of my thoughts In vague and broken masses, strangely wild; And grim imagination wander'd on 'Mid gloomy yew-trees in a churchyard old, And mouldering shielings of the eyeless hills, And snow-clad pathless moors on moonless nights, And icebergs drifting from the sunless Pole, And prostrate Indian villages, when spent The rage of the hurricane has pass'd away, Leaving a landscape desolate with death; And as I turn'd me to my vanish'd dream, Clothed in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... sun for a hundred and forty-two days, and the darkness was nearly as deep at noonday as an ordinary moonless night in England. On the 2nd of March the sun shone brightly, and the sledging was arranged for. The theatrical season had ended on the 24th of February. Many favourite farces were played, and the burlesque written by the chaplain met ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... You don't know. They," said Psmith, indicating the rest with a wave of the hand, "don't know. Nobody knows. His locality is as hard to ascertain as that of a black cat in a coal-cellar on a moonless night. Shortly before I joined this journal, Mr. Wilberfloss, by his doctor's orders, started out on a holiday, leaving no address. No letters were to be forwarded. He was to enjoy complete rest. Where is he now? Who shall say? ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... covered and abetted her flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky, moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp—the only living thing in sight. It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in front of her, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... midnight sent alone To drift upon the moonless sea; A lute whose leading chord is gone; A wounded bird that hath but one Imperfect wing to soar upon, Are like me Oh ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... stood to gaze his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman's quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the window, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Mall Drake was smitten by a sudden impulse. The fog had cleared from the streets; he looked up at the sky. The night was moonless but starlit, and very clear. He lifted the trap, spoke to the cabman, and in a few minutes was ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... his arrival, he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a fisherman. It might ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... were around him, whipped by icy blasts— Gigantic chestnuts, without leaf or bird, And, like himself, grown old in that same place. Through the dark network of their undergrowth, Pallid his aspect; and the earth was brown. Starless and moonless, a rough winter's night Was letting down her lappets o'er the mist. This—nothing more: old Faun, dull sky, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... was clear but moonless, and the sea calm; and a more beautiful sight can hardly be imagined than that presented from the deck of the ship as she drifted, hour after hour, through this shoal of miniature pillars of fire gleaming out of the dark sea, with an ever-waning, ever brightening, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... still night in July—moonless but not dark. There is no night there in the summer—only a long ethereal twilight. He walked through the sleeping town so full of memories, all quiet in his mind now—quiet as the air that ever broods over the house where a friend has dwelt. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... to propitiate local devils than an endeavour to frighten them away by sheer terror. It was unquestionably a horribly uncanny performance, what with the white streaked faces and limbs, and the clang of the metal dresses; the surroundings, too, added to the weird, unearthly effect, the dark moonless night, the dim masses of forest closing in on the garden, and the uncertain flare of the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... o'er the moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And nought is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow canon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly to the horses to find their way. It ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... quick succession as to be almost of nightly occurrence during the favouring moonless nights. Later, the conditions were reversed, and the attacks by aeroplane were all made in bright moonlight. But ever the defence became more strenuous. Then aeroplanes began to play the role of "hornets", as Mr. Winston Churchill, ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... may be when the midnight Is heavy upon the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed: Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark room, For it ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... food. During the short summer night both kept awake. All the while the darkness lasted things moved about them, things they never saw by day. For some nights the hyaenas did not come, and then one moonless night near a dozen came and fought for what was left of the lion. The night was a tumult of growling, and Ugh-lomi and Eudena could hear the bones snap in their teeth. But they knew the hyaena dare not attack any creature ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells |
