"Unearthly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were roused by a prolonged cry from the floor above, a cry so shrill and unearthly that it froze the blood in their veins. In an instant there followed a loud knocking at the outer door, and forgetful of their own troubles, they crowded together like a flock of frightened crows driven from ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... and stood in the firelight, deadly pale. Somehow one of the bands of her long black hair had fallen down, and half covered her face. She looked so unearthly that, coupling her appearance with the wild, senseless words she had been uttering, Tom had a horrible suspicion that she ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... acid vapour that environed me before I could reach the upper edge. I sat down in a nook, though it was a very hot one, and made a sketch or two of the appearance of the crater. But I feel that it is quite beyond my power either by pen or pencil, to convey an idea of the weird unearthly aspect which the funnel-shaped crater of Vesuvius presented at that time. An eruption of unusual violence had occurred shortly before I saw it. Great rounded blocks of lava had been thrown high into the air again and again, and had fallen back into the terrible focus of volcanic ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... streaming upon the wind, her red cloak which seemed to be set as it were in the solar radiance, and the lower part of her figure, which was strongly relieved upon the tremulous surface of the sea, gave to her a more than usually wild and unearthly appearance. Bertram shuddered as before a fiend; whilst the old woman, by whose side crept a large wolf-dog, said with an air ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... the thing gave just one unearthly, agonizing groan and, I imagined, rolled its eyes back, and gasping for breath, ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... in the broad moonlight, and the pale beams fell on Agatha's beautiful unveiled features, giving them that unearthly, corpse-like whiteness which Alexander had tried to represent in his picture of Korinna. Again the thought that she was risen from the dead sent a chill through his blood—that she would make him follow her, perhaps to the tomb she had quitted. He cared not! If ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ruins of the block. It sounded as if billets of wood were gradually and cautiously displaced, and then a human head was reared slowly, and with marked suspicion, above the shaft of the well. The wild and unearthly air of this seeming spectre, was in keeping with the rest of the scene. A face begrimed with smoke and stained with blood, a head bound in some fragment of a soiled dress, and eyes that were glaring in a species of dull horror, were objects ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... excited, he would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, and when Shelley felt deeply moved they seemed luminous with a wonderful and almost unearthly light. His mouth was finely chiseled, and might ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... once to her sleeping-place, A strange, wild look was upon her face, Her eye flashed over her cheek so white, Like a gravestone seen in the pale moonlight, And she spoke in a low, unearthly tone,— The sound from mine ear hath never gone!— "I had last night the loveliest dream: My own land shone in the summer beam, I saw the fields of the golden grain, I heard the reaper's harvest strain; There stood on the hills the green pine-tree, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... rides through a wide valley, enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,—with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the sun goes down." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century. A vagrant puff of wind shakes a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat; the thud of his pony's feet mingling with the jingle of his spurs is ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... 450; astral body; immaterialism^; spiritualism, spiritualist. V. disembody, spiritualize. Adj. immaterial, immateriate^; incorporeal, incorporal^; incorporate, unfleshly^; supersensible^; asomatous^, unextended^; unembodied^, disembodied; extramundane, unearthly; pneumatoscopic^; spiritual &c (psychical) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... no more, and lay down again, but not to sleep. The wind seemed to be rising, and made a wild, unearthly sound as it surged through the trees which surrounded and imprisoned her, and shut her out from the world in which she was born and in which she ought to live. There was a far-away sound which came to her ears once, twice, thrice, and which might have ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... a cry, coming from no one knew where, which, unearthly in its shrillness and the power it had on the imagination, reverberated through the house and died away in a wail so weird, so thrilling and so prolonged that it gripped not only my own nerveless and weakened heart, but those of the ten strong men congregated below me. The diamond dropped from ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... next morning we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... by the wall, his revolver raised and covering Armitage, who walked slowly and doggedly toward him. The pallor in Armitage's face gave him an unearthly look; he appeared to be trying to force himself to a pace of which his wavering limbs were incapable. At the moment that Claiborne sprang upon the wall behind Chauvenet Armitage swerved and stumbled, then swayed from side to side like a drunken man. His left arm ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... he began to weary of himself. Seeing a deer he drew an arrow and stealing silently to the game was just about to shoot, when despite himself the wild, unearthly sound broke forth like a demon's warble. The deer bounded away, and the young man cursed! And when he reached Old Town, half dead with hanger, he was worth little to make laughter, though the honest Indians at first did not ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... so hoarse, and the pitch alternates so unexpectedly between an "unearthly treble and a preternatural bass" that a boy can usually sing only in monotone, if, with courage proof against the ridicule occasioned by his uncontrollable vocal antics, he tries to join in. In those cases, where the larynx undergoes a slow change in growth, it is often ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... continued to wreak his vengeance on the human race. Such was the history of the man-eating panther of Kahani, as related in the popular traditions of the country, and certainly everything in the career of this extraordinary animal tended to foster the unearthly reputation he had gained. Ranging over a circle, the radius of which may be put at eighteen miles, no one knew when and where he might be found. He seemed to kill for killing's sake, for often his victims—at times three in a single night—would be ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... merrily on in the direction of the church. I soon perceived that it was a marriage-festival. The procession was led by a long orang-outang of a man, in a straw hat and white dimity bobcoat, playing on an asthmatic clarionet, from which he contrived to blow unearthly sounds, ever and anon squeaking off at right angles from his tune, and winding up with a grand flourish on the guttural notes. Behind him, led by his little boy, came the blind fiddler, his honest features glowing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... a remarkable contrast to the lovely violet sky and the grand architectural magnificence above ground, among men who cared little for the things of time and sense, because life itself had not a moment's security, were nevertheless nourished thoughts of ideal beauty and unearthly grandeur, which afterwards yielded such glorious fruit in the Christian art of Italy. The frescoes of the Catacombs are the feeble beginnings of an artistic inspiration which culminated in the "Last Supper" of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... each other through the mangle. There was a haunted air about the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel's son, who, after all, was less unearthly than Mr. Jaffrey himself, and seemed more properly an inhabitant of this globe than the toothless ogre who kept the inn, not to mention the silent Witch of Endor that cooked our meals for us over the ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... unearthly voice was heard inside the hut. Every one trembled, and there ensued a silence so oppressive as to suggest the idea that all present were holding their breath, and afraid to move even ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... but sharpened and made hollow, like a dead man's face. What he would have said, God knows. He seemed to utter words, but they were such as man had never heard. And this was the most fearful circumstance of all, to see him standing there, gabbling in an unearthly tongue. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... grief; For, sick of life's vacuity, She neither sought nor wished relief. And daily from her cheek, the glow Departed, and her virgin brow Was curtained with a mournful gloom,— A shade prophetic, of the tomb; And her clear eyes, so blue and bright, Shot forth a keen, unearthly light, As if the soul that in them lay, Were weary of its garb of clay, And prayed to pass from earth away; Nor was that prayer vain, for ere The frozen monarch of the year, Had blighted, with his icy breath, A single bud in summer's wreath, They shrouded her, and made her grave, ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... tremblingly round. Of a sudden an unearthly yell rent the air, and half a dozen dusky figures leapt from the bushes in the distance. Flourishing curiously-shaped weapons, very like tomahawks, they rushed, yelling and screaming, towards ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... to be objected to, or even wondered at; they are simply to be submitted to and endured. If he were at home, he would die sooner than yield that extra half-dollar; he would leave the house at once in which he was told to get up at an unearthly hour in the morning; but, being in another country, he submits, without even a thought of resistance. In no other way can we account for the strange silence on the part of English writers upon the tyrannical disposition of American social life. A nation everlastingly ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... were brooding O'er the sea, the earth, the sky; The passing winds were wailing In a low, unearthly sigh; The darkness gathered deeper, For no starry light was shed, And silence reigned unbroken, As the silence of ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... in the wainscot that's not feeling quite well this morning," suggested Honor, though it would have needed an absolute giant of a mouse to give vent to the unearthly yowl in which Pete had indulged. She said it, however, rather too innocently on this occasion. Miss Farrar was not dull, and had suspected from the beginning who was at the bottom of the mischief; indeed, it was easy enough by this time to trace the noise to the right spot, for the kitten ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... wielded bow, the violin wailed forth into stray chords and phrases, wild, unearthly, discordant. Hade, his face bent over the instrument, swayed in time with its ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... been goblin blood, then," laughed Tom rather unsteadily, for this mystery began to look unearthly. ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... and dark and mysterious. Her face bore unmistakable traces of sorrow. Deep lines were graven on her pale forehead, and on her wan, thin cheeks. Her hair was white as snow, and her complexion was of an unearthly grayish hue. It was a memorable face—a face which, once seen, might haunt one long afterward. In the eyes there was tenderness and softness, yet the fashion of the mouth and chin seemed to speak of resolution ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... story were all nailed and boarded up, and it seemed about the last place that you would expect to find any one sleeping. I left the dog and cat in the hotel, took one of the rifles with me, and pulled in my drawbridge. I almost dropped it as I did so, for at that instant the wolves set up another unearthly howling. I got into bed as quick as I could. They went the length of the street with their horrible noise; and then I heard them scratching at the doors and windows of the barn. I could have shot them easily in the bright moonlight; but ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... dipped to the horizon a solid pile of unearthly clouds came up from the southeast; their bodies were singularly and unnaturally black, and mottled with copper-color, and hemmed with a fiery yellow. And these infernal clouds towered up their heads, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... unearthly screech, that made the horses' knees bend under them. When Keith whirled to see what it was, she was standing upon the rock, with her skirts held tightly around her, like the pictures of women when a mouse ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... she listened, wore an extraordinary look that for an instant made his blood run cold. He saw the parted lips, the small white teeth, the slim neck of ivory, the young bosom panting from his tempestuous embrace. Of an unearthly loveliness and brightness she seemed to him, yet with this strange, remote expression that touched his ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... dirty shoulders, great baskets of beauty, baskets heaped up with charming aristocrats, gracious and delicate purities of shape and colour and scent. The strangest effect of all is when they happen, round about Easter, to be selling only lilies, and the unearthly purity of the lilies shines on the passersby from close to the seller's terrible face. Christ must often have looked like that, when he sat close ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... the fear which she detected in the blue eyes of Vivian. For to Vivian the approaching night was a terrible ordeal through which she must go. Her reason fled away to parts unknown, and only imagination remained to create a mountain lion in every thicket, and mysterious, unearthly, disembodied presences in the air, behind her back, at her very elbow. She was grateful when Carver came to sit beside her. With Virginia on the other side, two less avenues of approach were opened. At all events she would ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... were identified as well as discovered. A tall man in leggings and moccasions, a flat felt hat over his long gray hair, stood gazing at them, his rifle butt resting on the ground. Suddenly he emitted an unearthly yell, whether of defiance or of greeting, and springing to his own horse's picket pin gathered in the lariat, and mounting bareback came on, his rifle high above his head, and repeating again and again his war ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... you keep, O spirit beautiful and swift, this guard About my slumber? Shelley, from the deep Why do you come with veiled face, mighty bard, As that unearthly shape was veiled ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... unreality never before heard of in English. No such profusion of color, oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations and mystical effects had ever before been wrought into language. There are tales as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... him gently when he was startled from sleep by a strange accident. As I walked towards him the violin seemed entirely to collapse in his hands, and, as a matter of fact, the belly then gave way and broke under the strain of the strings. As the strings slackened, the last note became an unearthly discord. If I were superstitious I should say that some evil spirit then went out of the violin, and broke in his parting throes the wooden tabernacle which had so long sheltered him. It was the last time the instrument was ever used, and that hideous chord was ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... to him in very deed a Morning-Star; did not her presence bring with it airs from Heaven? As from AEolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's Statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale Doubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomed-up with happiness and hope. The past, then, was all a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then, and could not discern it! But lo now! the black walls ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... unshrinking gaze, Sustain, rash youth, the withering blaze Of that unearthly eye, That blasts where'er it lights—the breath That, like the Simoom, scatters death On all that yet ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... being performed; there rose before me a vast desert, not of this world, weird and unutterably sad, without shape, half lit up by a ghostly moon, in the midst of which hopeless despair waited and sobbed and tore its hair. It was terrible and impressive because so unearthly; and yet irresistibly attractive,—never had my spirit come in such close proximity to the infinite. It was almost an hallucination. I imagined that in the shapeless desert, in the dusk of a world of shadows, I was searching for somebody dearer to me than the whole world, one without ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... calm night, and not a sound disturbed the stillness of the air. The tired coolies and servants were fast asleep, the lamp burnt dimly, being scantily fed with oil, and we were in the act of lying down to rest when a frightful scream made us spring to our feet. There was something so unearthly in the yell that we could hardly believe it human. The next moment a figure bounded into the little room that we occupied. It was a black, stark naked. His tongue, half bitten through, protruded from his mouth; his bloodshot eyes, with ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... will spring to life the heroes of old? How the power of your immensity enfolds me, and reverberates through all my being with a wild, strange spell, and flashes in my eyes with an almost supernatural radiance! Yes, a strange, brilliant, unearthly vista indeed do you disclose, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... An unearthly chorus, sounding like the discordant laughter of invisible fiends greeted his retreat, and he never stopped until he had got home, panting and ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... who waited outside as Vengeance enthroned, expectation began to take on a creepy quality. The besiegers were preparing against themselves a host, not of men, but of frightful spectres, of famished maniacs, of unearthly ghouls, who would clutch and tear with claws any man that stood between them and a morsel of food. And the fury of desperation sharpened with each succeeding ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... conquests,—never accepted by themselves,—had driven them in on themselves and kept their racial self-consciousness at a perpetual boiling-point; and it all went into their religion, which compensated them with unearthly dignities for the indignities they suffered on earth .... them.... the Chosen People of the Lord! It bred in them scorn of the Gentiles, for which there was no solvent in the Roman polity, the Roman citizenship, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd and unearthly as that of a steam-whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which she shot askance from the ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... out, and the place a grave. Yet, cold as it was, the dreamer was bathed in perspiration, so clear had been that unearthly vision, so ghostly ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... admiration the scrupulously clean and shining kitchen tins that garnished the walls and reflected the red light of the blazing fire. The wooden dresser was a miracle of whiteness, and ranged thereon was a set of old-fashioned blue china, on which was displayed the usual number of those unearthly figures which none but the Chinese can create. Tick, tick, went the old Dutch clock in the corner, and the smoke-jack kept up its whirring noise. Old Tom and Aunt Rachel were both napping; and so Caddy, having no other resource, went ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... corpse; for, vague as such an appeal might seem now, the age was then but barely past, when the assistance of the murdered was often required in the discovery of the murderer. Many a brave heart grew chill, and brown cheeks blanched, in anticipation of the unearthly sign, so fully were they convinced of Stanley's guilt, but none came. The stagnated blood did not flow forth again—the eye did not glare with more consciousness than before—the cold hand did not move to point its finger at the prisoner; and Don Felix, fearing the effect of Stanley's appeal ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... slipped stealthily past like a shadow moving from shadow to shadow until he was lost in the deeper shade, out of which, as if in mocking challenge of a spirit band to any mortal who would follow, came the wild, snarling, unearthly cries of his invisible mates. And still to the eastward the higher levels of the Mesa above the rim of the dark Basin, the slow drifting clouds of dust that lifted from the tired feet of the grading teams coming into the camp from the day's work on the canals, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... fire burning in the grate of his room, and a candle on the table. By the fire, with a dark riding-hood about her head, was Sarah Malcolm. To Kerrel's natural question of what she was doing there at such an unearthly hour she muttered something about having things to collect. Kerrel then, reminding her that Mrs Duncomb had been her acquaintance, asked her if anyone had been "taken up'' ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... much, wrinkled somewhat, care-marked about the brow, but very capable, and evidently as bold and daring, to the line, as he asserted himself,—he stood there, flung back, fixed, petrified, as it were, by the baleful judgment that lighted those unearthly eyes which watched him from across the table there; and though his arm be flung up over his face, half to protect, half in menace,—though his fist be clenched and swollen, his brow dark and frowning, we know he will not spring forward, but will stand there still, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Desmond flashed out, and turning on his heel strode off toward a wooded headland, whose red rocks took an almost unearthly glow from ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... The trees and lianas became less numerous, and the black rocks came toward us in a sinister manner that conjured up thoughts of a dead something toward which the encircling ridges were guiding us like the arms of a corral. The place was fear-inspiring. It had the unearthly appearance that made the imaginative minds of the ancients people the silent woods with devils and dryads. The soft moaning of the Pacific was barred out by the leafy barriers, and we walked in a silence that was tremendous. The ticking of our watches sounded to our strained ears like ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... slope and to the distant mountains. Dull silver, immutable, perpetual, they reared themselves to meet the moonbeams. Between him and those stern and changeless fronts, pallid as with snows, stretched the gray woods. The moon shone very brightly, and there was no wind. So unearthly was the quiet of the night, so solemn the light, so high and still and calm the universe around him, that awe fell upon his soul. It was well to lie upon the hilltop and guess at the riddle of the world; now dimly to see the meaning, now to lose it quite, to wonder, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... when the full moon, shining like sun-lighted snow and hanging so low in the sky that it seems to be dropping earthward, fills the clear, dry air with a silvery radiance and floods the barren plain with a transfiguring whiteness, in which the gray sands glimmer as if with some unearthly ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... MacLaggan drank thereof, and then raised his head, with his immoral-looking beard hanging in a sodden point like a wet deck-swab, and asked for more. That is, he asked as well as any Christian and civilised goat could ask, by standing up on his hind legs like a circus-horse and making strange, unearthly noises. Then he rammed his wicked old nose into the dish again, and pushed it all round the room, trying to sop up more liquor, which wasn't there, and trod on Denison's canvas-slippered foot, and knocked over the little tin kerosene oil lamp which was standing ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the side of a fire, gripping a rifle and kicking the embers into a blaze. He saw the man struggling with the horse and fired. The colt with one unearthly scream of terror leaped and plunged head down towards the water, shot dead through ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... and gave a good pattern of the unworldly life, which attracted Ellenbog strongly. In 1503 he went home for the long vacation to Memmingen. On the way he was taken by the plague, and with difficulty dragged himself in to Ravensburg. For three months he lay ill, and death came very close. As its unearthly glow irradiated the world around him, reversing its light and shade, the visions of the nunnery recurred. He vowed that if his life were still his to give, it should be given to God's service; and on recovering ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... closely matted brambles stretched from tree to tree along the slopes. The slender cypresses, the tall pines with their straight trunks, formed a thick colonnade, a lattice through which the sunlight flitted, a false unearthly light, that striped the ground with bands of gold and bars ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... It was extraordinary. What the dickens was it? A vision of exquisite and unearthly and brilliantly coloured beauty seemed to be before his eyes. Islands, all white and green and in a sea of terrific blue.... And music, the thin note of distant trumpets.... Amazing! He read on. "Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! Eternal Summer gilds them yet." Terrific, but not ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... and dread. Every voice was hushed except to give necessary orders; every eye swept the hills and valleys around; every ear was intensely strained to catch the faintest noise, in momentary expectation of the unearthly war-whoop and of seeing dusky forms with gleaming tomahawks uplifted. In the moonlight mirage of the prairies, every taller clump of grass, every blacker hillock grew into a blood thirsty Indian, just ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... came an indescribable, unearthly sound that echoed and reechoed among the cliffs. I could not tell the direction from which it came; a sudden chill crept along my spine, my hair prickled and lifted. Then the echoes ceased, the silence that ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... be sure to believe that we are all dead," Charley agreed. "There is something unearthly about that ringing, but of course there is a natural cause for it if we ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding, virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity and despair. Such ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... dragoons, well polished and groomed. This led to a square lined with infantry. In the centre on one side was the Royal door thrown wide, towards which stretched a broad ribbon of crimson carpet. The car came to a standstill. Nothing daunted, the trooper descended in solitary state. An unearthly silence held the throng and to Mac the carpet seemed interminable, but at last it ended, and, passing through the cavernous, gloomy opening, he was soon swallowed up in a great crowd of mighty dignitaries. Acres of the same crimson carpet covered the platform, its far limits bordered by ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... "Go not without my thanks, though I must reject thy counsel. To-morrow I am admitted into the Brotherhood of Righteousness." In the fading light his face shone weird and unearthly amid the raven hair. "But why didst thou risk thy good name to tell ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... weak and full of faith. I remained silent, overwhelmed at this secret of my innermost heart, voiced by his bloodless lips—as if a dream had come to pass, as if a miracle had taken place. He added, with an indefinable smile of an almost unearthly wistfulness: ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... opened; and to the astonished gaze of the two sitting by the hearth, there appeared the figure of a little child. A snow-white robe draped his slender limbs. In one hand he bore a lighted taper, and in the other a most beautiful wreath of white roses. His dark blue eyes shone with an unearthly lustre, as it appeared to the amazed and bewildered Heinrich, and his golden curls floated upon ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... undisturbed. I was awakened, at the first slight peep of dawn, by a sound from an apartment beneath our own—a plaintive, monotonous chant, rising and then falling in a sort of mournful cadence. It seemed to me a wail of something unearthly—so wild—so strange—so unaccountable. In terror I awoke my husband, who reassured me by telling me it was the morning salutation of the Indians to ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... visions of the future—to the day when, with his hand on Cressingham's lying throat, he would see his face blacken and hear the rattling agonies of his gasps for breath. He leaned back in his chair and laughed hoarsely. The unearthly, hideous sound startled him, and he glanced round nervously as if he feared to betray his secret. Then he drank another glass of brandy, and with twenty-six shillings of prison money in his pocket and ten years of the blackest hatred in his heart, he went out ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... the unplaying fountain. I stand in the black night of the old cedar's shade. On any other day no possible consideration would have induced me to venture within the jurisdiction of its inky arms after nightfall; to-day, I feel as if no earthly or unearthly thing would have power to scare me. How long I stay, I do not know. Now and then, I put up my hands to my face, to ascertain whether my cheeks and eyes feel less swollen and burning; whether the moist and searching night-air is restoring me to my own likeness. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... back to him. Her face was tender with pride, and more than tender. Pride seemed in some strange way to hallow her, to give an unimagined benignance to her eyes, an unearthly brightness to the smile upon her lips and the colour upon her cheeks. So that Willoughby, looking at her, was ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... but little doubt that we were on some marauding expedition. Now and then we stopped, apparently that our leader might listen to ascertain whether any enemy was near, when from the forest there came forth shrill whistles, chirrups, unearthly cries, drumming noises, such as make one of these Indian forests apparently more full of life during the night than when the sun sheds his beams over the scene. Now we glided away more towards the centre of the river, which was as smooth as polished glass, and reflected, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... tree-high, on the flat mangold field across the road. The green leaves had the cold glitter of wet, pointed metal. To the north-east a dead smear of dawn. The brougham didn't look like itself, standing still in that unearthly light. As if it were taking part in a funeral, the funeral of some dreadful death. She put on her dressing-gown and waited, looking out. She had to look. Downstairs the hall clock struck ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... the smoke and roar of exploding firecrackers. But when the clock has tolled the death of the old and announced the birth of the New Year, one would think that Pandemonium was let loose. Unless one has heard it, no idea can be formed as to what this unearthly noise really is. We are told it is to frighten away evil spirits, to invoke the favor of the gods, to bid, as they fondly hope, a final farewell to ill-luck; and, again, simply because they are happy, and when ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... then, using great caution, he bent forward once more, and stared down, and, at that, the big seaman came up behind, walking upon his toes, and stooped to see what manner of thing we had discovered. Thus we each of us stared down upon a most unearthly sight; for the valley all beneath us was a-swarm with moving creatures, white and unwholesome in the moonlight, and their movements were somewhat like the movements of monstrous slugs, though the things themselves had ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... still, except that she still bobbed her old head up and down in a strange unearthly manner. She had about ten cards in her hand which she held motionless. Her eyes seemed to be fixed in one continued stare directly on the face of her foe. Her lower jaw had fallen so as to give a monstrous extension to her cadaverous face. There she sat apparently speechless; ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... night that the two spent wading the sea of moonlight together on the plain. The almost unearthly beauty of the scene grew upon them. They had none of the loneliness that had possessed each the night before, and might now discover all the ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... had rung through earth and sky. The room was full of people, and a horror-stricken crowd beheld the fainting Felipe upheld by the strong arm of his father, who clutched him by the throat. They saw another thing, an unearthly spectacle—Don Juan's face grown young and beautiful as Antinous, with its dark hair and brilliant eyes and red lips, a head that made horrible efforts, but could not move ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... gusts should hurl them from their narrow resting-place. The darkness made everything more fearful, for his eyes could distinguish nothing but the gulfs of black water glistening here and there with hissing foam, and he shuddered as his ears caught the unearthly noises that came to him in the mingled scream of weltering tempest and plangent wave. It was fearful to be isolated on the black rent rock, and see the waves gaining on them higher, higher, higher, every moment and he ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... soon led to a stream, called the Big Sandy; I believe it is in the northwest part of Fillmore County, where, about nine o'clock, A. M., we were suddenly alarmed by the unearthly whoops and yells of one hundred or more Indians (Pawnees), all mounted and riding up and down across the trail on the open upland opposite us, about a good ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... with von Glahn, still coughing terribly, on top. That saved Fred's life. For over him now, for the next five minutes, there raged a furious fight. Horses were all through the grounds; Fred heard them, and the savage, unearthly cries of their riders. For the first minute there was a good deal of firing. He guessed that the firing squad that had been meant for him was putting up a stiff struggle; later ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... and eternal happiness depended on the success of his attempt. The farmer, who ardently loved his wife, set out on Hallow-e'en and, in the midst of a plot of furze, waited impatiently for the procession of the Fairies. At the ringing of the Fairy bridles, and the wild unearthly sound which accompanied the cavalcade, his heart failed him, and he suffered the ghostly train to pass by without interruption. When the last had rode past, the whole troop vanished, with loud shouts of laughter and exultation; ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... terrible concussions of the high explosive shells assailed both ears and nerves, and kept up a pall of dust over the trenches. The whizzing and swirling of the shells was incessant. Some whined, others moaned, and others roared like express trains. Light shells passed with an unearthly shriek. It was useless taking any notice of the lighter shells. They had come and burst before one realised what had happened. The heavier shells, particularly those that were timed to burst in the air, ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... looked as though a fire of molten gold burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... laugh was frozen on his lips. As he spoke he looked behind him, warned by a faint sound—and his hair rose. For waving its arms wildly, a figure, all in white, was running toward him. As it came it made strange, unearthly sounds—horrid noises, such as Jake had ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... a dream before," said the favorite, her face glowing with a new, almost an unearthly radiance; "I mean I never had one just like it. When dear mother died, you remember I told you a dream about the angels. Last night I thought they came to me again, and I saw ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... supposed to know the sites which are likely to be most favourable to the deceased. Sometimes the body is exhumed at great expense, still on the advice of the same magicians, who, being in direct communication with both earthly and unearthly spirits, get to know that the spot which had been originally selected was not a favourable one. Under such circumstances, a speedy removal is necessary, which, of course entails both worry and money-spending and special fees for the reporting of ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... familiar to Daisy. She was dimly conscious some one was speaking to her. She raised her face up and gazed at the speaker. The cold, pale moonlight fell full upon it, clearly revealing its strange, unearthly whiteness, and the bright flashing eyes, gazing dreamily past the terror-stricken man looking down on her, with white, livid lips and blanched, horror-stricken face. His eyes almost leaped from their sockets in abject ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... snapped into place, and, yelling for help when help was miles beyond range of his ringing voice, Sergeant Wing was jerked violently to earth, dragged into a tent, strapped to a cot, deftly gagged, and then left to himself. An instant later the Picacho was lighted up with a lurid, unearthly glare; the huge column of sparks went whirling and hissing up on high, and, far and near, the great beacon was warning all seers that the fierce Apache was out in force and raiding the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... up his rifle and strode on down the passage, at that moment illuminated by the last unearthly rays of the aurora borealis. A single, dazzling beam played before him like a powerful searchlight, to light a high vaulted tunnel of basalt rocks which were distorted by some long-gone convulsion of the earth into a hundred weird ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... his expressive, Jewish face; all these rendered him the most extraordinary person I ever beheld. There is something scriptural in the tout ensemble of the strange physiognomy of this uncouth and unearthly figure. Not that, as in times of old, he plays, as Holy Writ tells us, on a ten-stringed instrument; on the contrary, he brings the most powerful, the most wonderful, and the most heart-rending tones from one ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... always strong, was enormously excited and though now I felt glad that I had attempted this journey with all its perils, I was horribly afraid, so much afraid that I should have liked to turn and run away. From the beginning I knew myself to be in the presence of an unearthly being clothed in soft and perfect woman's flesh, something alien, too, and different from ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... He laboured in those fields which ensure instant payment. Verily he had his reward: ten per cent., at least, beyond all other men, without needing to think of reversions, either above or below. The unearthly was suffocated in him by the earthly. Let us leave him, and return to a better man, viz., to the Rev. John Coleridge, author of the Quale-quare-quidditive case—a man equal in simplicity oL habits and in humility, but better in the sight of God, because he laboured in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's "Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, "Dead!" ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... fields of turnips, which show up like masses of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling, overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls, plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark, flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in Great Expectations, "intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it"; still farther away is the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... to have heard th' unearthly symphonies, Which o'er the starlight peace of Syrian skies Came floating like a dream, that blessed night When angel songs were heard by sinful men, Hymning Messiah's advent! O to have watch'd ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... shuddered, as if there were a mysterious and unearthly power in Fanshawe's voice; for she saw that the stranger endeavored in vain, borne down by the influence of a superior mind, to maintain the boldness of look and bearing that seemed natural to him. He at first made a step forward, ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are the pleasures of piety, Drawn from the fountain of mercy and love; Endless, exhaustless, exempt from satiety, Rising unearthly, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... no sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare, aglow, the openings of the communal houses facing it loomed dark, like the doors of tombs. A ghastly, unearthly silence greeted Trevison's call after the echoes died away; the upper tier of adobe boxes seemed to nod in ghostly derision as his gaze swept them. There was no sound, no movement, except the regular cough of his own laboring lungs, and the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to him with the bright smile upon her face which for me was the best part of a beauty that, if I had been in Dante's place, I should have found a thought too seraphic and unearthly for my fancy. ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the corner of the two roads, his throbbing head bent to his knees. The clouds in the west glowed with a fierce purple, when he started up at last. He started up and walked, swiftly and with firm step, towards Walkherd Lodge. The clouds in the west seemed to glow with an unearthly light. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... and were coordinated into unity by the master brain, which had once been in the body of Master Scientist Cram. A voice out of nothingness; a voice from what seemed so clearly to be the dead. To Hawk Carse, man of action, it was unearthly; it was a miracle the fact of which he could not question, but which he could not hope to understand. And well might it have been unearthly ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... it roll'd! Shook, as it peal'd, the trembling tower; Rung by no mortal hand, but toll'd By some unseen, unearthly power. The selfsame power from Heaven thrill'd My being to its utmost centre, As, all with fear and gladness fill'd, Beneath the lofty ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... quantity of large tanks, stood the Wenuses, blowing assiduously through pellucid pipettes and simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence. Grotesque ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... beauty. On a bright hot day the pinnacles seem so far off in the haze as to suggest a dream of fairyland. On a wet day, after a shower, the tower has the appearance of being so close at hand that it almost seems to speak. Viewed by moonlight, the tower has an unearthly look, which cannot well be described. The tower is 225 feet high to the top of the pinnacles, and the effect of it is extremely fine. From the main cornice upwards, the whole of the stonework is open, and composed of what at a distance appears to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... will tend to become a chaos. Bear in mind the great extent and variety of the objects which come under the care of the librarian, all of which are to be classified and reduced to order. These include not only books upon every earthly subject (and very many upon unearthly ones) but a possibly wide range of newspapers and periodicals, a great mass of miscellaneous pamphlets, sometimes of maps and charts, of manuscripts and broadsides, and frequently collections of engravings, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... thinks it best not to report, seeing that the old hypocrite, getting next door to light-headed at the golden prospect before her, took such liberties with unearthly names and persons which ought never to have approached her lips, and rained down such an awful shower of blessings on Trottle's head, that his hair almost stood on end to hear her. He went on down-stairs as ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... said at length, gazing down into her upturned face where the dusk and the moon-fire met and blended in a radiance of unearthly beauty, "is it not wonderful that, all unwittingly and unconscious of each other's existence, we have been brought together from the ends of the earth?" She was about to reply when a voice, close at hand, cut her short. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... unison with our thoughts; and equally so with the laughter that at that moment sounded in our ears—for it was laughter wild and maniac. It was heard in the forest behind us; ringing among the trees, and mingling its shrill unearthly echo with the roaring of the torrent. Both of us were startled at the sound. Though the voice was a woman's, I could see that it had produced on Wingrove a certain impression of fear. On hearing it, he trembled and turned pale. I needed no explanation. A glance towards the forest revealed ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... barriers, and the greater part of Veere was blotted out in a night. What remains is a mere symbol of the past; but there is enough to loiter in with perfect content, for Veere is unique. Certainly no little town is so good to approach—with the friendliness of its red roofs before one all the way, the unearthly hugeness of its church and the magic of its stadhuis tower ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... over from their feeding to their resting places, as the glowing sun plunged abruptly beneath the horizon. The brief evening chorus of animals then began, the chief performers being the howling monkeys, whose frightful unearthly roar deepened the feeling of solitude which crept up as darkness closed around us. Soon after, the fireflies in great diversity of species came forth and flitted about the trees. As night advanced, all became silent in the forest, save the occasional hooting of tree-frogs, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... now given to the interest of the assembled and distinct crowds that had witnessed these startling incidents. Scarcely had the wretched man gained the protection of the soldiery, when a shriek divided the air, so wild, so piercing, and so unearthly, that even the warrior of the Fleur de lis seemed to lose sight of his victim, in the harrowing interest produced by that dreadful scream. All turned their eyes for a moment in the quarter whence it proceeded; ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... and mournfully in a church across the harbor. Behind me, in the kitchen, I heard my wife singing. Sometimes now her spirits were fitfully high, and then she would sing the old songs of her girlhood. But even in her singing was something strange, as if a wailing, unearthly cry rang through it. Nothing about her was ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that art was an expression of the same thing. Anyway, both seem to express emotions different from and transcending the emotions of life. Certainly both have the power of transporting men to superhuman ecstasies; both are means to unearthly states of mind. Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world. Rightly, therefore, do we regard art and religion as twin manifestations of the spirit; ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... and the fire went completely out. Hilda presently fell asleep in the darkness, and now a moonbeam shining into the drawing room and falling across her tired face made it look white and unearthly, almost like the face of a dead girl. It was in this attitude that Quentyns found her when he came back somewhere ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... gratefully remember—of a long talk with W. B. Yeats, I never felt that I was listening to a man of flesh and blood. It is fitting that these men had their earthly dwelling in a sea-girt isle, where every foot of ground has its own superstition, and where the constant mists are peopled with unearthly figures. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the Tower. Again—Loon Lake. Can you imagine two more lonesome wailing words to make a picture with? But—Cohocton. How oddly right my absurd instinct had been about that—and, shall we ever forget the unearthly beauty of the evening which brought us at dark to the quaint little operatic-looking village, deep and snug among the ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... landmark in the history of Raphael, for it shows the perfection of his second manner, and the change that had come over him from his Florentine experience and associations. His earlier pictures had been full of a sweet, unearthly feeling, and a color which could be called spiritual was spread over them; now his madonnas were like beautiful, earthly mothers, his colors were deep and rich, and his landscapes were often replaced ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... must be humoured along. Again, when night fell, she was taken into harbour for shelter. The wind still blew fair in the morning; she made a better day of it, but was once more safely berthed for the night. Day after day she crept down the coast, lurching along in the light, with unearthly shrieks of pain and complaint, and lying silent in harbour ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... westward, a faint new moon half swathed in mist above, and over all the north a huge towered thunder-cloud kept flashing distant lightnings. The pallid primrose of the West, forced down and reflected back from the vast bank of tempest, gave unearthly beauty to the hues of church and palace—tender half-tones of violet and russet paling into grays and yellows on what in daylight seemed but dull red brick. Even the uncompromising facade of St. Francesco helped; and the dukes were like statues ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... back. Giant boulders, carved to grotesque and ghostly shapes by a million years' wind and water, reared themselves aloft and threw shadows in the moonlight. The wind, caught in the gulch, rose and fell in unearthly, sibilant sounds. If ever fiends from below walk the earth, this time and place was a fitting one for them. Jack curved a hand around his mouth, and emitted a strange, mournful, low cry, which might have been the scream ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... curtain lecture are too precious to the enraptured husband to be shared with other ears. And in the hush of the bed-time hour, when tired daddies are seeking repose in the oblivion of sleep, the unearthly bangs on the grand piano below in the parlor, and the unearthly screams and yells of the budding prima donna, as she sings ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... until Wednesday. Then, before Isoult was down in the morning, having apparently risen at some unearthly hour, Mr Rose presented himself, and asked for John. The two went out of doors together, to Robin's deep concern, and not much less to Isoult's, for she had her full share of womanly curiosity in ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... virtuous young woman, who, on the birth of her son, intrusted him to a priest, who hurried him to the baptismal fount, and so saved him from sharing the lot of his father, though he retained many marks of his unearthly origin. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the same house with her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as "Master Ughtred." "Master" was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small sons of baronets and the like. The ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... beautiful smile; he held out a hand to my aunt, and a hand to me. I was too deeply affected by his noble conduct to speak. I closed my eyes; I put his hand, in a kind of spiritual self-forgetfulness, to my lips. He murmured a soft remonstrance. Oh the ecstasy, the pure, unearthly ecstasy of that moment! I sat—I hardly know on what—quite lost in my own exalted feelings. When I opened my eyes again, it was like descending from heaven to earth. There was nobody but my aunt in ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the ruby for the Vizier of the King of Delhi stole it. Then Alam, the eunuch, stole it from the Vizier. Its possession was desirable, not only because of its great value as a jewel, but because it held in its satanic glitter an unearthly power, either of preservation to its holder or malignant evil against ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... be done? Yell? I couldn't do it for the life of me. Get up and look for him? Wild horses could not have dragged a toe of me out of bed. Stay where I was till the unearthly truant returned? No, thank you. At the bare notion my rigid muscles relaxed, my erect hair lay down, and I collapsed, a limp heap, on to the pillow, with every available sheet and blanket drawn over ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... to follow his example. It was a horrible scene: those four wicked faces; those myriads of tiny faces, just as wicked; the certain unearthly air that pervaded the apartment; the red, unwholesome glare cast by the fire; the wild and reckless way in which the weird company drank the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... down immediately. Just as they were passing out of the dining-room, midnight began to boom from the clock tower, and when the last stroke sounded they heard a crash and a sudden shrill cry; a dreadful peal of thunder shook the house, a strain of unearthly music floated through the air, a panel at the top of the staircase flew back with a loud noise, and out on the landing, looking very pale and white, with a little casket in her hand, stepped Virginia. In a moment they had all rushed ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... her, Joe," exclaimed Mrs. Abbot; "it's really too bad, at this unearthly hour. Besides, we shall be quite comfortable here by ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... eyes turn towards the Christ? Was there a ripple of interest and expectancy through the crowd? Did any realize the unearthly beauty and spiritual power of his presence? We know not. Scripture is silent, only telling us that on the following day, when, with two disciples, he looked on Jesus as He walked, and repeated his affirmation, "Behold the Lamb of God," those two disciples ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... was startled at the change he saw in his patient since he had left him last. There was something in his look that struck chill upon his heart. He came forward and took the feeble hand in his. It was deadly cold, and the unearthly radiance upon the lad's face was as significant in its own way. Had not their mother looked at them with just such a smile when she had slipped away into another world, whilst they were trying to persuade themselves ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... slight overdose of ornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere even in Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisite rhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in the dramatists had been snatches ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... mumbled in reply. "I found it outside the door, with a stone on it to prevent the wind from blowing it away. What does it mean, citizen?" she went on, her voice shaking with terror, for of a truth the citizen Representative looked as if he had seen some weird and unearthly apparition. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... of a peculiar nature. Bride and bridegroom, linked arm in arm, marched up and down on a pad about twenty yards in length, a nude minstrel marched in front, and drew unearthly music from a kind of mouth organ. Girls squatting in the dust en route clapped their hands and chanted a chorus. The groom hopped first on one leg and then on the other, and tried to look gorgeously happy; the bride kicked her satin skirts out behind, pranced along the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... see him now, looking a veritable giant in that morning mist. Indeed, there was something quite unearthly about his appearance as he arose out of those rolling vapours, such light as there was being concentrated upon the blade of his big spear, which was well known as the broadest carried by any warrior in Zululand, and a copper torque he ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... not say that I was entirely easy in my mind as we lay out that blizzard somewhere off Terror Point; I don't know how the others were feeling. The unearthly banging going on underneath us may have had something to do with it. But we were quite lost in the pressure and it might be the deuce and all to get out in the dark. The wind eddied and swirled quite out of its usual straightforward ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... leaf-flickerings; Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell Wherewith in every lonesome dell Time to himself his hours doth tell; All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones, Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans, And night's unearthly undertones; All placid lakes and waveless deeps, All cool reposing mountain-steeps, Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps; Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights, And warmths, and mysteries, and mights, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... a dance," Sarah sniffed. "Funny, ain't it, you come home so dead tired every night, an' yet any night in the week you can get out an' dance unearthly hours." ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not shewn to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and disjointed; he is the double thrall of his passions and his evil destiny. Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure self-will. There is no conflict of opposite ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... night, but seldom all night; and even should one have the capacity to do so, his companions in durance would wake him with a shout or a song or a curse or the kicking of a door. A noisy and chaotic medley frequently continued without interruption for hours at a time. Noise, unearthly noise, was the poetic license allowed the occupants of these cells. I spent several days and nights in one or another of them, and I question whether I averaged more than two or three hours' sleep a night during that time. Seldom did the regular attendants ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers |
