"Shimmer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rose; yet how he draws the rose! The brazen arrogance of pomp, the pearl on a woman's neck, the shimmer of a breaking bubble, the wrinkles in a baby's foot, the beauty of life, the pathos of life, the irony and the lust of life,—he has painted them all, as he saw them all, in the phantasmagoric Procession of Being betwixt garret ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... material universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as a whole; and he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in a picture of all the good impulses of the human heart, that should ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... to the mouth of the ravine, and there the voices of the people woke him. And Rold knew nothing that he had done in his sleep, and looked in amazement at the sword in his hand and said: 'What art thou, thou beautiful thing? Lights shimmer in thee, thou art restless. It is the sword of Welleran, the curved sword ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... but for Sir Tom's intervention would have been standing by the fire awaiting her visitor. The Dowager was downstairs before her, looking grave enough, and Jock, slim and dark, supporting a corner of the mantelpiece, like a young Caryatides in black. Lucy's brightness, her pretty shimmer of blue, the flower in her hair, relieved these depressing influences. She stood in the firelight with the ruddy irregular glare playing on her, a pretty youthful figure; and her husband's assiduities, and the entire cessation of any apparent consciousness on his part that any question had ever ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... terraces of the amir, all glowing in the sunlight, with all its countless houses and cavern-openings and arching trees and pointing pyramids. Above was the canopy of heaven, no longer black, no longer studded with stars or glistening with the fitful shimmer of the aurora, but all radiant with the glorious sunlight, and disclosing all the splendors of the infinite blue. At that sight a thrill of joy passed through me. The long, long night at last was over; the darkness had passed away like some hideous dream; the day was here—the ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... my jewel, in my glance! Oh, shimmer on my lips in prayer! Light my love's eyes to read my soul, Which, wrapt ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... riffles. But invariably those Indians twisted the canoe into a new course ten feet before we reached one of the obstructions, whose existence our dazzled vision could not attest until they were actually below us. They saw those rocks, through the shimmer of ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of day is over And the dew is on the clover, And the night-hawk whirls in circles overhead; When the cow-bells melt and mingle In a softened, silver jingle, And the old hen calls the chickens in to bed; When the marshy meadows glimmer With a misty, purple shimmer, And the twilight flush is changing into shade; When the firefly lamps are burning And the dusk to dark is turning,— Then the bullfrogs ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... purely be born, And the Child shall smile in the West, and the West to the East give morn, And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn, Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer the dream ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... you say these things, my friend, when you know that they are useless?" she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light, the shimmer of which was like the last vibrations of an ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... halo, glory, nimbus, aureola. spark, scintilla; facula; sparkling &c. v.; emication|, scintillation, flash, blaze, coruscation, fulguration[obs3]; flame &c. (fire) 382; lightning, levin[obs3], ignis fatuus[Lat], &c. (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion[Brit], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor[obs3], fulgidity[obs3]; dazzlement[obs3], resplendence, transplendency[obs3]; luminousness &c. adj.; luminosity; lucidity; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... night is ruined... Its smelly corpse burdens my back. But above me I feel the rushing, Cool heaven. Behold—I am in front of a Streaming church. Large and quiet it takes me in. Here I shall stay for a while. Immersed in its dreams. Dreams out of gray Silk that does not shimmer. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... graceful, with the long soft curves of budding womanhood. Her face was sweet rather than beautiful, but an artist would have revelled in the delicate strength of the softly rounded chin, and the quick bright play of her expression. Her hair, of a deep rich brown, with a bronze shimmer where a sunbeam lay athwart it, swept back in those thick luxuriant coils which are the unfailing index of a strong womanly nature. Her deep blue eyes danced with life and light, while her slightly retrousse nose and her sensitive smiling mouth all spoke of gentle good humour. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden. Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, was ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level distance the hazy shimmer ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the Hotel Cosmopolis is a decorous place. The lighting is artistically dim, and the genuine old tapestries on the walls seem, with their mediaeval calm, to discourage any essay in the riotous. Soft-footed waiters shimmer to and fro over thick, expensive carpets to the music of an orchestra which abstains wholly from the noisy modernity of jazz. To Archie, who during the past few days had been privileged to hear Miss Huskisson rehearsing, the place had a sort ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea—alone as I thought at first, in the twilight—I became aware that the garden had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting, with her reticule lying by ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... bright relief from a background of mossy tree-trunks and rocks. After an hour's walking, made laborious by the spongy character of the ground,—a mixture of loose soil and decaying vegetation, in which one sank knee-deep,—the gleam of the ice began to shimmer through the trees; and issuing from the wood, the party found themselves in front of a glacier wall, stretching across the whole valley and broken into deep rifts, caves, and crevasses of dark blue ice. The glacier was actually about a mile wide; but as the central portion was pressed forward ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... counting the coins on the table, some of them gold—for Jessica's quick eyes caught the shimmer of it—and he looked up half fiercely, half contemptuously as ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... tops, miles of it, wrinkling and billowing gently as here and there the conformation of the country changed. At some distance it dropped over an edge. Beyond that, very dimly, he realized the brown shimmer rising from the plain. Far to the right was a tenuous smoke, a suggestion of thinning in the forest, a flash of blue water. This, Bob knew, must be the mill ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... not pass as quickly as before for Billy Boyle, nor did raking the range with his riders bring quite as keen a satisfaction with life. Always, when he rode apart in the soft haze and watched the sky-line shimmer and dance toward him and then retreat like a teasing maid, his thoughts wandered from the range and the cattle and the men who rode at his bidding and rested with one slim young woman who puzzled and tantalized him and ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... charming maid of honor, Billy, the stalwart, handsome best man, Bertram, to say nothing of the delicately beautiful bride, who looked like some fairy visitor from another world in the floating shimmer of her gossamer silk and tulle. There was, too, not quite unnoticed, the bridegroom; tall, of distinguished bearing, and with features that were clear cut ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together." My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory—I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... the faintest idea why I told you all this," said Lloyd at last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so highly. It was what lifted me out of my dungeon ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of life; but Jethro had had enough to do with the church on hot summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... wonderfully concrete and woefully incongruous—hunting scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the glittering of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a fleeting shimmer of glistening test-tubes, long rows of book-lined shelves, the throb of machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment of forgotten song, faces of dear women and old chums, a lonely watercourse amid upstanding peaks, a shattered boat on a pebbly strand, quiet moonlit fields, fat ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... plentiful supper. Then Philip—there were no police in those days, and scarcely an old watchman in that primitive little town—would go round on the shady sides of streets, and, quickly glancing about him, cross the bridge, looking on the quiet, rippling stream, the gray shimmer foretelling the coming dawn over the sea, the black masts and rigging of the still vessels against the sky; he could see with his wistful, eager eyes the shape of the windows—the window of the very room in which his wife and child slept, unheeding of him, the hungry, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... her eyes again. A vision of Solomon in all his glory swept across her. Even to Walton had spread rumors of the immense fortunes acquired in the China and India trade, and the gold of Cathay seemed to shimmer over the form before her, so strong, so able to contend with, and compel, if need ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... by their mere presence that, unless you're watched, you'll do something desperate in the wild desire to break the monotony. Well, I drank deep of that life," Constance looked dreamily over the stretch of meadow and pine-edged woods, all dazzling with a shimmer of icy ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... there was a flash of something white amidst the pale green shimmer of the flood. Ida rose, but her companion beckoned her to sit ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... is, that his music made the pianoforte what it is. For he was the first composer who appreciated the genius of the instrument, discovered its latent tone colors and developed its resources to their full capacity for artistic beauty and expression. Chopin was the first to make the pianoforte both shimmer and sing. Rubinstein said that the art of music could go no further than Chopin and called him the pianoforte bard, rhapsodist, mind and soul. "How he wrote for it I do not know, but only an entire passing over of one into the other could call such music into life." George Sand (Mme. Dudevant) ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... pink roses had lost a petal another box was brought to Miss Sterling's door. Her fingers quivered with hope as she untied the ribbon. The address was in the same firm, open hand. A shimmer of gold met her first glance, but the scrap of white she had longed for was missing. Without doubt the pilferer had thwarted her again. She put the yellow beauties into water with half-hearted pleasure. Why ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... of the delights of this mellow afternoon. On either side of our trail lie yellow harvest fields, narrow, like those of eastern Canada, and set in frames of green poplar bluffs that rustle and shimmer under the softly going wind. Then on through scrub we go, bumping over roots and pitching through holes, till we suddenly push out from the scrub, and before us lie the Marshes. There they sweep for miles away, with their different grasses waving and whispering under the steady blowing ...
— Beyond the Marshes • Ralph Connor
... the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly nodded ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... yellow now; a rose-light quivered behind the forest like the shimmer of a hidden fire; then a blinding shaft of light ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the rugged and stony summits, as it dispersed gradually in the increasing ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... where it willed. The mother-of-pearl shimmer of evening was turning the headlands to mist, and the air smelled of cedar and pine. Tiny waves lapped complainingly on the sides of our rocking canoe. I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... unseizable sea, The circumambient grace of Deity, Where live and move Unnumbered presences of power and love, Slips through our finest net: We draw it up all wet, A-shimmer with the dew-drops of that deep. And yet For all their toil the fishers may not keep The instant living freshness of the wave; Its passing benediction cannot give The mystic meat they crave That ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... grew plainer to us, and the home ranch, hitherto merely a brown shimmer in the distance, began to take on definition as the group of buildings, windmills, and corrals we knew. Miniature horsemen could be seen galloping forward to the open white plain where the herd would be held. Then the mesquite ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... hillside was far from sheer-one could have walked down with a little care-but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote gleam of white water gave it an extraordinary depth and space. There was a shimmer left from the day's heat, which invested bracken and rock and scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost have believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness. I have a bad head, and instinctively ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... ANNE'S GATE says, "peculiarly well up in patronage.") This done, returns to Commons; disappears behind Chair; SERGEANT-AT-ARMS counts twenty-three; presto! door re-opens; SPEAKER re-appears in butterfly-trim, with full-bottomed wig, silk gown, and shoon on which shimmer the sheen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... was a warm, cloudy day—I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I turned—I don't know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its depths— through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and deepening ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... new-born one is met that is pure blue crystal throughout, freshly broken from the fountain or recently exposed to the air by turning over. But in all of them, old and new, there are azure caves and rifts of ineffable beauty, in which the purest tones of light pulse and shimmer, lovely and untainted as anything on earth or ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... and simper, she showed no pretty reluctance, no graceful displeasure. She thanked him, but coldly, and the two climbed the ridge above the lake, whence the whole glen may be seen winding beneath. It was still, hot July weather, and the far hills seemed to blink and shimmer in the haze; but at their feet was always coolness in the blue depth of the loch, the heath-fringed shores, the dark pines, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... and slopes of fairest green, and in the middle of the island the Blue Flower was growing, wondrous tall and dazzling, brighter than the sapphire of the sea. Then the call of the distant trumpet came floating across the water, and while it was sounding a shimmer of fog swept over the island and I could ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... have nowhere seen explained. Very soon after the sample from the pan is placed upon glass for observation, the surface becomes cooled and somewhat hardened. As the cooling proceeds below the surface, contraction ensues, and consequently a wrinkling of the surface, causing a shimmer of the light in a very attractive manner. This, too, is likely to attract more attention than the delicate, thin cloud of crystals, and may be even confounded with the reflection and refraction of light, by which alone the minute crystals are determined. The practical operator learns ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... sitting within the front window to watch the shimmer of a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the city roofs below, perceived that his wife had walked three times to that garden wall which looked down along the drop of Broadway to the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the directions were transmitted into the ivory mouth-piece beside her. At the moment when the day was most threatened it had shown a new and most promising development. Over the grey dress Mrs. Grove wore a cloak with a subdued gold shimmer, her hat was hardly more than the spread wing of a bird across the pallor of her face, and the deep folds of the gloves on her wrists emphasized the slender charm of her arms. No young—younger woman, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... should do justice to the loveliness which was so modest that it was apt to forget itself in admiring others what girls call a "ravishing" dress, such as she could imagine and easily procure by the magic of the Fortunatus' purse in her pocket. She had planned it all, the shimmer of pale silk through lace like woven frostwork, ornaments of some classic pattern, and all the dainty accessories as perfect as time, taste, ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... triumphant malignity and hate the Devil himself might have envied. But the man he looked at slept heavily on. And then—God! I feel the agony I felt in my dream then now!—then I saw the great yellow hand, with the great evil eye upon it, lifted murderously, and the bright steel it held shimmer as the assassin turned again and bent his yellow face down closer to that other face hidden from me in the shadow—the girl's face, that I ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... resting upon her left hand, the pen in her right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills 5 The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... impostor was standing upon the floor of a gigantic amphitheatre in Palestine. The whole air was refulgent with the light of a summer morning, and through the loopholes of the structure, the eye caught the blue shimmer of the Mediterranean. Banners, emblazoned with the ciphers of Rome, fluttered from the walls of the amphitheatre. Its internal circumference was thronged with a vast concourse of citizens; and, immediately about the Rosicrucian, groups of foreign traders, habited as if for some unusual ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... which was to be his journey's end. In those moments—with the waters of the Bay beneath him, and beyond the beautiful view of the distant islands like shapeless sea monsters guarding the approach, with the mountains capped by Vesuvius, and the towns gleaming white under the shimmer of the lazy smoke wreaths—he felt the reality of life. But it was not his own life spent in a vain chase after glory, a struggle for something he could not have defined, now that he knew it was to end in nothing; no, it was the power of a life such as was ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... a vane. Great stones arranged as seats around the beacon, and in the foreground. Farther back the outer fjord is seen, with islands and outstanding headlands. The open sea is not visible. It is a summer's evening, and twilight. A golden-red shimmer is in the air and over the mountain-tops in the far distance. A quartette is faintly heard singing below in the background. Young townsfolk, ladies and gentlemen, come up in pairs, from the right, and, talking familiarly, pass out beyond the beacon. ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... as he had seen her in the inspector's office. He recalled vividly the slim, golden beauty of her, the wonderful gray of her eyes, and the shimmer of her hair as she stood in the light of the window—and then he saw Shan Tung, effeminate, with his sly, creeping hands and his narrowed eyes, and the thing which McDowell had suggested rose up ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... the pine woods, finding wild-flowers in the spring, arbutus, flushing to beauty in its hidden bed, blood-root, hepatica, wind-flowers, violets in a purple glory; finding in the summer wild roses, dewberries, blackberries, bees and butterflies, the cool shade of the little groves, the shine and shimmer of the streams; finding in the fall a golden stillness and the redness of Virginia Creeper. They had ridden on horseback over the clay roads, they had roamed the stubble with a pack of wiry hounds at their heels, they had gathered Christmas greens, they had sung carols, they had watched the Old ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o'clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said. "I am feverish: I hear the wind blowing: I will go out of doors ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging moon! In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light a lover's smile; but the reality of the moon is cold and bleak. There was nothing to show my prying eyes where the intrepid Grantline ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... uttering these words in a tone of perfect respect, Farrell committed an astonishing offense against the laws that separate servitor and employer. He caught the shimmer of a wink upon Harry's eye, and he had the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was even less when the moon was unveiled, the shifting shimmer of the clouds falling away from the great sphere of pearl, gemming the night with an incomparable splendor. It had grown almost as light as day, and the sheriff ordered the pace quickened. Along a definite cattle-trail they went at ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... blurred; and he had a dreadful apprehension of losing contact with normality. But normality, too—what was it? Normality was being natural! He came toward her; she rose and recoiled; but he caught hold of her arms above the elbows, and held her fast when she swayed back from him with a long shimmer ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green and golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about Grez ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spinner of silk weaves his sunbeams of gold, Blending sunset and dawn in its silvery fold, So she wove in the woof of her wonderful words The soft shimmer of sunshine and music of birds. With the radiance of moonlight and perfume of flowers, She lent charm to the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... interesting and fascinating than ever. Still she had those thousand pretty movements, those nameless graces of manner, those wavering shades of expression, that irresistibly enchained the eye and the imagination,—true Frenchwoman as she was, always in one rainbow shimmer of fancy and feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April days which give you flowers and rain, sun and shadow, and snatches of bird-singing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... print of a small heel where she had made a long step from the last stone. He began to hurry again, clambering recklessly over boulders, or through the underbrush where the sides of the stream were steep. When the upper cascade came in sight his heart leaped, for there he caught the fleeting shimmer of a skirt and the gleam of a ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... closed against trespassers; among the copses below anyone might freely wander. In places it was scarcely possible to make a way for fern, bramble, and underwood, but elsewhere mossy tracks led one among hazels or under arches of foliage which made of the mid-day sky a cool, golden shimmer. One such track, abruptly turning round a great rock over the face of which drooped the boughs of an ash, came upon a little sloping lawn, which started from a high hazel-covered bank. The bank itself was so shaped as to afford an easy seat, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the despair in his smile! For him, too—for Gilles the Mummer—as for Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is not inconsistent with ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... tow, and at the gate she grasped the second bead in her fingers, repeating the charm. This time the pale yellow of the daffodils seemed to have woven itself into a cloth of gold for her adorning. It was like a shimmer of moonbeams, and her hair held the diamond flashings ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... warmth of her island home she sat amid the trees, and it was allowed to fall away in rippling waves—to what then am I to liken it? It was transcendently beautiful. I think that I can feel its appearance. It must have looked like the sun's shimmer on the sea-foam from which rose Aphrodite; or like the glint from Cupid's golden arrow-heads as, later, sitting by the side of Aphrodite, he floated along the shores of queenly Hellas, in gleeful mischief shooting landward and piercing ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... apparently unshaken. Their front was now nearly five miles long, and composed of great masses of men joined together by thinner lines. Behind and near to the flanks were large reserves. From the ridge they looked dark blurs and streaks, relieved and diversified with an odd-looking shimmer of light from the spear-points. At about ten minutes to six it was evident that the masses were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about and before their ranks. Scouts and patrols scattered themselves all over the front. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a thousand ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... on, saying nothing to his men, writing his intensely practical diary, and trusting as a soldier should to the Deus ex machina who finally allows discipline to triumph. He looked down into the valley, piercing the shimmer of its hazes with his gentle blue eyes, looking to his chief, who had said, "In three ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... again to the castle in her dress of tow, and at the gate she grasped the second bead in her fingers, repeating the charm. This time the pale yellow of the daffodils seemed to have woven itself into a cloth of gold for her adorning. It was like a shimmer of moon-beams, and her hair held the diamond flashings of ...
— The Legend of the Bleeding-heart • Annie Fellows Johnston
... begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Hideous sounds tortured the air—crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when, on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers, and the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery, showered them, drowned them in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is the light coin of "small talk" that breaks with chink and shimmer the heavy bills of large denomination, that else would overwhelm social ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... herself,—something of her faculty of putting on different aspects under different lights. John and his wife had studied their picture at all hours of the day: they had seen how it looked when the morning sun came aslant the scarlet maples and made a golden shimmer over the blue mountains, how it looked toned down in the cool shadows of afternoon, and how it warmed up in the sunset and died off mysteriously into the twilight; and now, when larger parlors were to be furnished, the picture was still the tower ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... after hour, there had been the shimmer of the spangles, the light chatter of coming balls and weddings, the merry voices of care-free girls—the youth, ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... himself, he looked up, and through some thin and withered trees a little way off upon a slope he saw the shimmer of light, as if a chapel was lit up. He went towards it, and he saw a high wall that was broken down in many places, and an old grey chapel beyond, and the windows were shimmering with a ghostly light. As he came through the ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... the air in his sharp, whistling flight. The last white shimmer of daylight faded from the surface of the lake. The lovers floated on, gently, joyously, into their ocean of ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... he; it is but his pitiful phantom that comes wandering hither—a ghost without a heart, made out of the moonlight. It is nothing. I am nothing. I am lost. Everything is an empty dream of loss. I know it, and there is no waking. If there were, surely the sight of him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a thicker dream, and this is truer because more shadowy." And, the form still standing by her, she felt it was ages away; she was divided from it by a gulf of very nothingness. Her only life was, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Out of the mercury shimmer of glass Over these daguerreotypes The balloon-like spread of a skirt of silk emerges With its little figure of flowers. And the enameled glair of parted hair Lies over the oval brow, From under which eyes of fiery blackness Look through you. And the only repose of spirit shown ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... the answer from 'Volaterrae.' They could see the shimmer of bronze armour in the beech crotch, and the friendly flash of the great ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... moths also, but I smiled inwardly as I noticed her check the horse several times and scan a wayside bush, or stretch of snake fence. We were approaching the limits of town, and had found nothing; a slow rain was falling, and the shimmer on bushes and fences made it difficult to see objects plainly. Several times I had asked her to stop the horse, or drive close the fields when I was sure of a moth or caterpillar, though it was very late, being close the end of August; but ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... matters of art and little social luxuries were wanting, such as I had all my life been accustomed to, and such as filled Mme. Ricard's own rooms. However, this first evening I could hardly see how the rooms looked, for the lining of humanity which ran round all the walls. There was a shimmer as of every colour in the rainbow; and a buzz that could only come from a hive full. I, who had lived all my life where people spoke softly, and where many never spoke together, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of Life we sat together, Hand in hand in the golden days Of the beautiful early summer weather, When skies were purple and breath was praise, When the heart kept tune to the carol of birds And the birds kept tune to the songs which ran Through shimmer of flowers on grassy swards, And trees with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... able to range afar over this great sea, it was because a peculiar light brought to view every detail of it. It was not the light of the sun, with his dazzling shafts of brightness and the splendour of his rays; nor was it the pale and uncertain shimmer of the moonbeams, the dim reflection of a nobler body of light. No; the illuminating power of this light, its trembling diffusiveness, its bright, clear whiteness, and its low temperature, showed that it must be of electric origin. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... cleaning out their nets, of the girls sickling the grass under the olives, Amor—amor—amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... The world around them, in the soft shimmer of the crescent moon, became an enchanted region, the land that never was on earth or sea, the land of love, in which all that dwell therein move in the glamour of the sacred Fire ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... stood temptingly half open; no creature was to be seen—no sound to be heard. Rose's heart throbbed fast; the mysterious stillness of the night, the ghostly shimmer of the moonlight, the mystery and romance of her adventure, set every pulse tingling, but she did not hesitate. Her slippered feet crossed the hall lightly; she was beside the green door. Then there was another pause—a moment's breathless listening, but the dead stillness of ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... side there would not be heard, on such nights, the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to shimmer toward ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... limp, for his stiff boots galled his feet. His senses were blunted by the hot sand which filled his eyes and ears and nostrils, and there was a shimmer over all the broad landscape. When he shook his hair from his forehead, the dust floated slowly down and settled in a scorching ring ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... near her asked. An unceremonious address, certainly; frankly put; but the voice was not unkindly or uncivil, and Dolly was not sensitive on the point of personal dignity. She brought her eyes down for a moment far enough to see the shimmer of gold lace on a midshipman's cap, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... see how this would be in a country where there was never a house or a tree and scarcely anything that grew more than knee-high to a man. The long sand-swells, and the shimmer of heat-waves in the air looked even more like the sea now that they were level with it. Off to the right what seemed a vast sheet of water spread out like quicksilver on the plain; it moved with a crawling motion, and a coyote that trotted across ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... ecstasies over everything, drawing each other's attention to the sky, the trees, the water. And, indeed, of a sunshiny morning it was heartening to sit by the pond and watch the wavering sheet of beaten gold water, reflecting all shades of green in a restless shimmer against the shadowed grass around. Madame Valiere always had a bit of dry bread to feed the pigeons withal—it gave a cheerful sense of superfluity, and her manner of sprinkling the crumbs revived Madame Depine's ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... novel and bewitching. The North and South Mountains, Round Top, the jagged peaks bounding the Plattekill Clove, the narrow cleft of the Stony Clove, and the terraced slope of Clum's Hill swept across the horizon bathed in a soft September shimmer. A few birds were still piping, golden rods and purple asters lighted up the wayside, and luscious blackberries, large as Lawtons, hung in great clusters, from which no mortal hand had as yet plucked a single berry. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Sir Wilfrid, seeing that it was a fine night with mild breezes abroad, refused a hansom, and set out to walk home to his rooms in Duke Street, St. James's. He was so much in love with the mere streets, the mere clatter of the omnibuses and shimmer of the lamps, after his long absence, that every step was pleasure. At the top of Grosvenor Place he stood still awhile only to snuff up the soft, rainy air, or to delight his eye now with the shining pools which some showers of the afternoon had ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with the box and placed it on the divan near her. She sat cross-legged, leaning back on her arms, in the blue shimmer of her embroidered robe and with the tawny halo of her unruly hair about her face which she raised to mine with ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... from a butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
