"Sunless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dusk was the sky. The high houses which shut in the strip of garden on all sides reflected not a ray of light. A chill struck through me, as I passed along the marble pavement; a saloon-dampness, empty, vault-like, hung about the fireless, sunless place; and the plashing of the fountain which dripped into the marble basin beyond—dropping, dropping, incessantly—struck upon my ear like water trickling down the side of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... or gap opening upon darkness. There was something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... alone have the key to the West, and we must bravely unlock the portals; we can buy no lamp that will banish the night. We have always kept our time by the sun. When we pass through the gates of this dying day, we shall pass into a sunless land, and for us there shall be no more time, a forever-land of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... sunless day was fast closing, and the portentous heaven gave promise of a stormy night. Thick, black layers of shapeless cloud hung over the whole firmament, save at the western point; and here lay a streak of pale, yellow light, enclosed on all sides ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... back a prisoner. Those fat years were over. It was a time of scarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good things they had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of needy children, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up again and again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the little hungry creatures went prowling after scattered ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... they shook their heads and clung together. A chill wind from space seemed to be blowing through the room, whispering of time's vagaries, and how space had different clocks, and how the affairs of men were swept by time and chance down to a sunless sea. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... dark, in Fifty-four, To welcome Fifty-five. 'God knows,' said he, 'if another year I'll any better thrive. I was born for light, I live in the sun, Yet in, darkness, and sunless, I'm passing on, And the world?—Hurrah! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... had a fungous smell out of doors, all being sunless and stagnant overhead and around. The various species of trees had begun to assume the more distinctive colours of their decline, and where there had been one pervasive green were now twenty greenish yellows, the air in the vistas between them being half opaque with blue exhalation. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... rather more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be in that sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. It had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere disfigured ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... captured machine-gun which they tested in a sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition; long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown sunless walls. One understood after a while the nightmare that lays hold of trench-stale men, when the dreamer wanders for ever in those blind mazes till, after centuries of agonizing flight, he finds himself stumbling out again into the white blaze ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... in her large and fearless eyes. Animal spirits played through Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent. Her haggard composure, confronting Rosamund's pure sparkle, suggested the comparison of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a tangle of sun-rays. Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled. He realized, too, that she really was beautiful. For Rosamund ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... inexpressibly lonely place, as Mrs. Sharpe saw it. A long stretch of bleak, desolate, windy road, a desolate, salty marsh, ghostly woods, and the wide, dreary sea. Over all, this afternoon, a sunless sky, threatening rain, and a grim old pile of buildings fronting the ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... visited the narrow, dirty streets where the poor live, and I grow hot and indignant to think that good people should be content to live in fine houses and become strong and beautiful, while others are condemned to live in hideous, sunless tenements and grow ugly, withered and cringing. The children who crowd these grimy alleys, half-clad and underfed, shrink away from your outstretched hand as if from a blow. Dear little creatures, they crouch in my heart and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... we, "when our feet draw near The river dark with mortal fear, And the night cometh, chill with dew, O Father, let Thy light break through! So let the hills of doubt divide— So bridge with faith the sunless tide— So let the eyes that fail on earth On Thine eternal hills look forth; And, in Thy beckoning angels, know The dear ones whom we ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink, Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald,—wake, O, wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... and both the background of the Old Testament and the foreground of the New become dull, sunless, colourless. Reinstate that central Figure, and book after book, roll after roll, volume after volume, becomes bright, ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... drooping sail and pennant That never a wind may reach, They float in sunless waters Beside a sunless beach. Their mighty masts and funnels Are white as driven snow, And with a pallid radiance Their ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise ... in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... exception of dragging themselves and their children now and then to the parks on holidays or hot summer evenings. The majority, especially the inhabitants of the East of London, never get away from the sunless alleys and grimy streets in which they exist from year to year. It is true that a few here and there of the adult population, and a good many of the children, have a sort of annual charity excursion to Epping Forest, Hampton Court, or perhaps to the sea. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... revealed and starved by the drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, figworts, and persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. Insect life did not abundantly manifest itself, for the day was sunless; but now and again, with crisp rattle of his gauze wings, a dragon-fly flashed along the river. Through these scenes the Teign rolled drowsily and with feeble pulses. Upon one bank rose the confines of Whiddon; on the other, abrupt and interspersed with gulleys of shattered shale, ascended huge slopes ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... and changeless. He thought he knew its effects by heart, but it had always new ones in reserve to surprise and delight him. He declared it at last to be inexhaustible. It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the least particle. He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which shine with the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... should be so warped and twisted by the pressure of the years out of semblance to themselves; that circumstances should so wall in their lives with insurmountable cliffs of granite facts, compelling them to tread the sunless gorge; that the coldness of death alone could open the door ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... warm, and its subdued brilliance clashed oddly with the faded lemon of her dress. Her face was small, the features regular, but her complexion was more than sallow, it was yellow, the yellow of dying grass and sunless places. A spot of rouge glared on either cheek, and, with her eyes, which were black and brilliant, gave her face the look of fever. Her dark hair, just visible under the shawl, deepened the hectic quality of her features, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wake. That is the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girded round; And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... That sunless day no living shadow swept Across the hills, fleet shadow chasing light, Twin of the sailing cloud: but, mists wool white, Slow-stealing mists, on those heaved shoulders crept, And wrought about the strong hills while they slept In witches' wise, ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... forebodings were only too fully realized. Never was a more miserably monotonous journey. After riding for weeks, through sodden, sunless forests and trackless wastes we had to abandon our mules and take to our feet, spend weeks on nameless rivers, poling and paddling our canoe in the terrible heat, and tormented almost to madness by countless insects. Then ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... her father, kindling her Fearlessly front to front to meet in fight Fleetfoot Achilles. And she heard the voice, And all her heart exulted, for she weened That she should on that dawning day achieve A mighty deed in battle's deadly toil Ah, fool, who trusted for her sorrow a dream Out of the sunless land, such as beguiles Full oft the travail-burdened tribes of men, Whispering mocking lies in sleeping ears, And to the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Although his eyes were constantly on the alert, Rod could see no way in which a descent could be made into the chasm from the ridge they were on. This was a little disappointing, for he had made up his mind to explore the gloomy, sunless gulch at his first opportunity. He had no doubt that Wabi would join in the adventure. Or he might take his own time, and explore it alone. He was reasonably sure that from somewhere on the opposite ridge a descent ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A dark sunless morning opened the eventful day of this fearful battle. Gloom and melancholy breathed a sad spirit over the town and adjacent country. A sullen breeze was abroad, and black clouds drifted slowly along the heavy sky. The Dead Boxer again had recourse to his ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... his first visit to the palace; and as he climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses rocked against the sunless sky, like living creatures in pain. He had to traverse a long subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... pleasant to think of. One gets so many inhuman letters, ovine, bovine, porcine, etc., etc.: I wish you would write a little oftener; when the beneficent Daimon suggests, fail not to lend ear to him.' Another, who has since followed him 'from sunshine to the sunless land,' and to whom he wrote of domestic affairs, said, 'The striking feature in his correspondence with me is the exquisite tenderness of feeling which it exhibits in regard to all family matters; the letters might have been written by a mother or a sister.' He ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... was ANNA; dear as gold That fills the miser's sunless coffers; As to the spinster, growing old, The thought—the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... there was to come a change. No longer need the carefully sponged and darned black alpaca gowns flaunt their wearers' poverty to the world, and no longer would they force these same wearers to seek dark corners and sunless rooms, lest the full extent of that poverty become known. It had taken forty years of the most rigid economy to save the necessary money; but it was saved now, and the dresses were to be bought. Long ago there ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... Heaven-fostered haunt, Earth's fairest home, Gleaming Colonos, where the nightingale In cool green covert warbleth ever clear, True to the clustering ivy and the dear Divine, impenetrable shade, From wildered boughs and myriad fruitage made, Sunless at noon, stormless in every gale. Wood-roving Bacchus there, with mazy round, And his nymph nurses range the ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... was in difficulties. What those difficulties were it was not hard to guess. In the previous autumn it had become known that, after a long season of sunless wet, the potatoes had everywhere been attacked by an obscure disease. The failure of this crop meant an Irish famine. The steps suggested to meet this impending calamity were strange enough. The head of the English peerage recommended the poor to rely on curry-powder ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat; it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off headlands ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where we all went together every Sunday morning, assembling first at school for that purpose. The earthy smell, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black and white arched galleries and aisles, are wings that take me back and hold me hovering above those days in a half-sleeping and half-waking ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... the cypress-tree, Thy sister sees those eyes o'erflow, And fondly waits for thee; That still she hears the young birds sing, And sees the chaplet wave, Which every morn thy light hands bring, To dress her early grave; And in a brighter, purer sphere, Beyond the sunless tomb, Those virtues that have charmed us here In fadeless ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... they were sitting. And then he followed Keith up into that land of ice and snow and gibbering Eskimos, and from that moment he was no longer Keith but spoke with the lips of Conniston. He described the sunless weeks and months of madness until the girl's eyes seemed to catch fire, and when at last he came to the little cabin in which Conniston had died, he was again John Keith. He could not have talked about ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... Oft, in the sunless April day, Thy early smile has stayed my walk; But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, I passed ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... snows, Where the mossy mountains rise Wild and bleak—and the rose And pink of morning fill the skies With a color that is singing, And the lights Of polar nights Utter cries As they sweep from star to star, Swinging, ringing, Where the sunless ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... butterflies of Brazil with those of Europe, is even more startling in the world of Mind. A particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain convolutions, are indispensable to produce Columbus, Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace, or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces the cretin—draw your own conclusions. Why such differences, due to the more or less ample diffusion of light to men? The masses of suffering humanity, more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are a difficulty to be accounted ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... swiftly were the changes wrought, that before the mind had grasped their import the storm was on them, roaring down from every side, swooping out of the boiling sky, a raging blast from the voids of sunless space. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... what Mr. Wogan's fine project had come to. He remembered another morning when the light had welled over the hills, sunless and clear and cold, on the road to Bologna,—the morning of the day when he had first conceived the rescue of Clementina. And the rescue had been effected, and here was Clementina safe out of Austria, and Wogan sure of a deathless renown, of the accomplishment ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... of course a matter of chance whether those who opened any one of them, were the friends of the unfortunates who were its inmates. But for a melancholy reason this was a matter of indifference. So ghastly a travesty on their former hale and robust selves, had sickness and sunless confinement made almost all the prisoners, that not even brothers recognized their brothers, and the corridor echoed with poignant voices, calling to the ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent—the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. Leam, however—interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and saw what it brought—always ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... pictures selected by each; portieres in the doorways and costly rugs upon the polished floor. Up two flights of stairs, on the same floor with the servants, the brother was domiciled in a low-browed, sunless back-room, overlooking kitchen-yards and roofs. A dingy ingrain carpet was worn thin in numerous places; no two pieces of furniture were even remotely related to one another in style or age. The wall-paper hung here and there in strips; the windows ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... region of shapes called Life, with shadows behind and before— Shadows voiceless as Death, and dark as the sunless tomb,— Shapes whose anguish and strife seem a glimpse of Hell's grim shore— Shadows that gave them life and shadows that hail them home. Great is the hour, O Soul, and great is the wonder to see! Thou art alone with God as he writes on the future's page Two words in letters of fire—(one ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with strong practical energy, to the benevolent ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes, dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti's, but so artfully ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... gloom quickened and quivered: the sunless place Thrilled, and the silence deeper than time or space Seemed now not all everlasting. Hope grew strong, And love took comfort, given of the sweet ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... crushed under the heavy scattered mould, for it seemed to his foreboding mind that they were like the delicate thoughts and fancies of the girl he loved being covered by the soiling mud of the world's cruelty and slander, and killed in the cold and darkness of a sunless solitude. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... until, after two hours' walk, and at a distance of four and a half miles from the entrance to the cave, I paused upon the muddy banks of the "Styx," and, stooping, dipped up in my hands a draught from its cold, sunless waters. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... frets and ails, And moans in many a sunless fall; And, o'er the melancholy, trails The black crow's ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... hearing they heard not. But, like to the forms of dreams, for a long time they used to huddle together all things at random, and naught knew they about brick-built[35] and sun-ward houses, nor carpentry; but they dwelt in the excavated earth like tiny emmets in the sunless depths of caverns. And they had no sure sign either of winter, or of flowery spring, or of fruitful summer; but they used to do every thing without judgment, until indeed I showed to them the risings of the stars and their settings,[36] hard to ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every clambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,— Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... In the ancient world the Greeks, with all their far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure, clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... maple-tree in front of my window in fifty-six places; and when the day was sunny, and the sap oozed out, he spent most of his time there. He knew the good sap-days, and was on hand promptly for his tipple; cold and cloudy days he did not appear. He knew which side of the tree to tap, too, and avoided the sunless northern exposure. When one series of well-holes failed to supply him, he would sink another, drilling through the bark with great ease and quickness. Then, when the day was warm, and the sap ran freely, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... to Stinking Lake and sleep.... And wake with the faint stench of sulphur in his throat.... And see the worm-like leeches unfolding in the shallows, and the big, reddish water-lizards, livid as skinned eels, wriggling convulsively toward their sunless lairs.... ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... water was a dull gray, and the heavens clouded. The far shore of Dobb's Ferry and Tarrytown was already gaily tinted with the hues of the autumn, and to south the bleak gray lines of the Palisades below Sneedon's Landing lay sombre and stern under a sunless sky. One of my men was a good sailor, and I was thus enabled to spend most of the ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... in nests in trees like birds or in the ground like moles and worms, these tiny germs, less than one twenty-five thousandth of an inch long, make their homes on the roots of legumes. Nestling snugly together, they live, grow, and multiply in their sunless homes. Through their activity the soil is enriched by the addition of much nitrogen from the air. They are the good fairies of the farmer, and no magician's wand ever blessed a land so much as these invisible folk bless the land that ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... glaucous green of this silent, majestic wood; nor was there any treacherous bramble to crackle beneath his feet. For upon this chill, grey carpet no flood of sunshine ever came to coax tiny sprays out of the ground; and the layers of fine needles, or tufts of dank, sunless moss were soft and noiseless as down under his tread. The stately trees grew far enough apart to allow him to move with considerable speed, and after he had satisfied himself that he was beyond the sight of his pursuers, he changed ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... the great principles involved? How long will the controversy continue? What will be its ending? Will this earth sink, as some scientists tell us, into the depths of a sunless, frozen, eternal night? or is there a better future before it, radiant with the light of life, warm with ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... to do so, though it was none of his business, asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her. She assented by relinquishing her pail ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... and dismal region. In the country of the Minnatarees it was lighted up only by the rays of the sun which strayed through the fissures of the rock and the crevices in the roof of the cavern, while in that of the Mengwe all was dark and sunless. The life of the Indians was a life of misery compared with that they now enjoy, and it was endured only because they were ignorant of a fairer or richer world, or a better or happier ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother From sunshine to the sunless land. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the deep the Spaniard saw, along each southern shire, Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire; The fisher left his skiff to rock on Tamar's glittering waves, The rugged miners poured to war from Mendip's sunless caves. O'er Longleat's towers, o'er Cranbourne's oaks, the fiery herald flew; He roused the shepherds of Stonehenge, the rangers of Beaulieu. Right sharp and quick the bells all night rang out from Bristol town, And ere the day three hundred horse had met on ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... native hills again, Broad, round and green, that in the summer sky, With garniture of waving grass and grain, Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie; While deep the sunless glens are scooped between, Where brawl o'er ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... influence the health, the comfort, the morals, the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all consideration for the occupants, so rambling and hap-hazard in the disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous, generous, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... employment; perhaps the stimulus it communicated to her mind counterbalanced the inaction it imposed on her body. She changed, indeed, changed obviously and rapidly; but it was for the better. When I first saw her, her countenance was sunless, her complexion colourless; she looked like one who had no source of enjoyment, no store of bliss anywhere in the world; now the cloud had passed from her mien, leaving space for the dawn of hope and interest, and those feelings rose like a clear morning, animating what ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... away; and when he came forth into the air, its breath, which, though sunless, was hot and arid, smote witheringly upon him. His frame, not yet restored from the effects of the deadly draught, shrank and trembled. The ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... form'd t' illume a sunless world forlorn, As o'er the chill and dusky brow of Night, In Finland's wintry skies the Mimic Morn[86:2] Electric pours a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of what was hardly a voice answered. He went in. There sat Arthur, muffled in an old rug, before a wretched fire, in the dirtiest, rustiest grate he had ever seen. He held out a pallid hand, and greeted him with a sunless smile, but ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... drive into Bevisham!—without the storm behind,' he said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her hair in sunless light. 'There are flowers that grow only in certain valleys, and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for Italy. You colour the whole region for me. When you were absent, you were here. I called here six times, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hearts were bleak and bare, That not a germ had ever flourished there, Unless perchance the night-shade of despair, Which blooms amid the sunless wilderness. ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... generations.... You are like someone who awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountains—in a sunless universe. You are not alone in it. You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and purposes.... They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws suddenly out of the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... will The arm divine! God from His holy seat, in calm of unarmed power, Brings forth the deed, at its appointed hour! Let Him look down on mortal wantonness! Lo! how the youthful stock of Belus' line Craves for me, uncontrolled— With greed and madness bold— Urged on by passion's sunless stress— And, cheated, learns too late the prey has 'scaped their hold! Ah, listen, listen to my grievous tale, My sorrow's words, my shrill and tearful cries! Ah woe, ah woe! Loud with lament the accents use, And from my ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... story tells— The bright unearthly nymph, who dwells 'Mid sunless gold and jewels hid, The lady ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rocks that are dark with moisture, green with moss, and snowy with white bubbles. Each spray of dripping feather-moss exudes a tiny torrent of its own, or braided with some tiny neighbor, above the little water-fonts which sleep sunless in ever-verdant caves. Sometimes along these emerald canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, as if some anxious housekeeper upon the hill above were afraid that things were not stirring fast enough,—and then again the waving and sinuous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... wild fig-trees were covered with the small green fruit, while the downy leaves were just beginning to peep from their sheaths. It was one of those quiet gray days that give a mystic tone to a landscape. The cloudy sky was in harmony with the dim Campagna, that looked under the sunless smoky light unutterably sad and forlorn. Wreaths of mist lingered in the hollows like the shadowy forms of the past; the lark was silent in the sky; and on the desolate bluffs and headlands, where once stood populous cities, were a few hoary tombs ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... were silent in a sunless church, Whose mildewed walls, uneven paving-stones, And wasted carvings passed antique research; And nothing ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs. Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts. Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling down ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... the sunless day went down Over the waste of waters; like a veil Which, if withdrawn, would but disclose the frown Of one whose hate is masked but to assail; Thus to their hopeless eyes the night was shown, And grimly darkled o'er their faces pale, And the dim desolate ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... human which are strange and wild This is perchance the wildest and most strange, And showeth man most utterly beguiled, To those who haunt that sunless City's range; That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating 5 How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting, How naught is constant on the ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... his question and he had turned to marshal me down the hall towards a door I could dimly see standing open in the twilight of an absolutely sunless interior, I noticed that his step was not without some vigour, despite the feeble bend of his withered body and the incessant swaying of his head, which seemed to be ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... answered; standing in a green recess, she had never appeared more beautiful to him than in that moment of peril. Green and red things flashed behind her—tiny feathered creatures that shone like jewels. The dewdrops from the branches in sunless places were glistening brilliants in the gold of her hair. But he had no time to gaze. The figures were ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... was pounding her for all she was worth in an honest effort to make up the hour that Shanley had lost in the snowdrifts of Marshall Pass. Presently she heard the muffled roar of the train on a trestle, and a moment later saw the Salt Lake Limited swallowed by the Black Canon, in whose sunless gorges many a driver died before the scenery settled after having been disturbed by the builders ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... loves, of weary, spent souls floating aimlessly on chill, unfathomable sorrow. He swam on, and heard at last the splash of the waves on the shore. His feet touched bottom. He slipped and slid among large slimy stones, worn incredibly smooth by their age-long washing in this sunless place. He struggled forward breast-deep, waist-deep, knee-deep, in the black water. He reached dry ground, crawled upwards till he felt the boulders no longer damp, and knew that he lay above the reach of the tide. He unbound the bundle from his head, clothed himself, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... had attempted the desperate expedient of running past them, they had her safe in the mouth of the Bristol Channel. Slowly and wearily broke the dawn, on such a day as often follows heavy thunder; a sunless, drizzly day, roofed with low dingy cloud, barred and netted, and festooned with black, a sign that the storm is only taking breath awhile before it bursts again; while all the narrow horizon is dim and spongy with vapor drifting before a chilly breeze. As the day went on, the breeze died down, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... groves. No meadows thrown between, the giddy steeps Tower, bare or sylvan, from the narrow deeps. 80 —To towns, whose shades of no rude noise [19] complain, From ringing team apart [20] and grating wain— To flat-roofed towns, that touch the water's bound, Or lurk in woody sunless glens profound, Or, from the bending rocks, obtrusive cling, 85 And o'er the whitened wave their shadows fling— The pathway leads, as round the steeps it twines; [21] And Silence loves its purple roof of vines. The loitering traveller [22] hence, at evening, sees From rock-hewn steps the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... a year or two after, in the hurry of departure they forgot her until too late. They promised to return. But they never came, and she sleeps there still, on the lonely knoll between the sunless forest ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... the manners and sentiments of these people and ourselves. Some of our sages endeavoured to account for it upon philosophical principles, and attributed much to the climate of those dark, watery, and sunless regions in which they were bred and born: 'for,'said they, 'how can men living surrounded by water, and who never feel the warmth of the sun, be like those who are never a day without enjoying the full effulgence of its rays, and do not even know ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; their oars the sailors ply; ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Hill there runs a certain narrow avenue, part street, part by-road. The head of it faces the doors of the prison; its tail descends into the sunless slums of the Low Calton. On one hand it is overhung by the crags of the hill, on the other by an old graveyard. Between these two the roadway runs in a trench, sparsely lighted at night, sparsely frequented by day, and bordered, when it was cleared the place ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old, with the women as well as with the men, with the little children as well as with those who are stricken in years. The merchants grind us down, and we must needs do their bidding. The priest rides by and tells his beads, and no man has care of us. Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning, and Shame sits with us at night. But what are these things to thee? Thou art not one of us. Thy face is too happy.' And he turned ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... day for desert travelling—a grey, sunless sky, a gentle breeze. Another weary stretch brings one to El-Hamma, a small oasis fed by hot springs which the Romans long ago utilized, and where I had hoped to refresh myself with a Turkish bath. Alas! the hammam is only a shallow tank covered with palm-thatching; there were ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... on the hill-tops high and fair I dwell, or in the sunless valleys, where The shadows lie, what ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... everything, even to ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by what gate or from what quarter we enter. On every side the scene is much the same. ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey |
