"Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one-fourth of the thickness of the teeth, so that it penetrates far beyond what is called the enamel, the least injury to which, according to the dentists of Europe, is fatal; yet among these people, where the practice of thus wounding the enamel is universal, we never saw a rotten tooth; nor is the blackness a stain, but a covering, which may be washed off at pleasure, and the teeth, then appear as white as ivory, which, however, is not an excellence in the estimation of the belles and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... of fearful blackness which was to overshadow the nation soon broke upon us in His Majesty's illness. I had for some time suspicion that all was not well. It was his habit to talk with most condescending frankness to ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... how He attached them to His Sacred Person. And thus my curate's confessional is thronged every Saturday night by silent, humble, thoughtful young fellows, sitting there in the dark, for the two candles at the altar rails throw but a feeble light into the blackness; and Mrs. Darcy, under all improvements, has retained ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... by the Tzendals as their principal deity and their beneficent patron. But he had a rival in their religious observances, the feared Yalahau Lord of Blackness, or Lord of the Waters. He was represented as a terrible warrior, cruel to the people, and one of ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... them. They were monsters beckoning them to destruction. The light, too, of the full moon—for it would be full moon that night—would add to the terrors of Lightning Speed. That intense white world would be as terrifying to him as the blackness of the gorge and the sudden awful gap over which he ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... the tangle of serpents, and did not succeed. From terror he passed to anger: "I must be able to do it!" he exclaimed aloud. From the gloomy gorge of Jenne, the dull rumble of thunder answered him. He glanced in that direction. A flash of lightning rent the clouds and disappeared above the blackness of Monte Preclaro. Benedetto tried again to free his feet from the serpents, and again the leonine voice of the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... portended change; and by evening, after we had reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... to Houston as though the glorious sunlight had suddenly turned to blackness, a blackness in which the scrap of paper gleamed white before him, its red spots glowing like spots of flame. He seemed again to see Morgan as he looked when parting from him the previous evening; the haggard face, with its hollow eyes and faint, pathetic smile, and as he recalled his ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... and wretched personalities and by their futilities bringing shame and disaster upon the Irish Cause. There followed what Mr William O'Brien describes in his Evening Memories as "eight years of unredeemed blackness and horror, upon which no Irishman of any of the three contending factions can look back without shame and few English ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... returned to the daughter of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west were made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of the ground when it had ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... fortress in safety would hardly be possible, and, besides, such a mode of retreat would leave him uninformed on the second object of his enterprise-to know the most vulnerable side of the fortress. He threw himself along the summit of the wall as if to sleep. He looked down and saw nothing but the blackness of space, for here the broad expanse of shadow rendered rocks and building of the same hue and level. But hope buoyed him in her arms, and turning his eyes toward the sentinel, he observed him to have arrived within a few paces of the square ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... again!—Night's sombre shades have fled: But the pale rays that glimmer from their sheath, Serve but to show the blackness overhead, And the wild ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... favour, for his face was as the face of an ass, his shape that of an ape and his look as the look of a malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... chocolate; and then lay back upon the pillow with Ulick for the inner circle of her thought. It seemed that she could think of him for hours; the romance of his personality carried her on and on. At one moment she dwelt on the gold glow in his dark eyes, the paint-like blackness of his hair, and his long thin hands. At another her fancy liked to evoke his superstitions. For him the past, present and future were not twain, but one thing. And every time she saw him, she was more and more ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its magic. Giovanni's rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew the shrub ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whatsoe'er we do some night is mingled, And e'en our eye has something of its blackness. The glitter in the fabrics of our looms Is but the woof, the pattern, its true warp Is night. Aye, death is everywhere; and with our glances And with our words we cover him from sight, And like the children, when in merry playing They hide some toy, so we forget ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... hundred pipers and a' and a'," and Walter stood for a long time where he was. There was a little frown on his forehead. This had all come up with the blackness and suddenness of a thundercloud. A few days ago nobody had even thought of such a thing. It was absurd to think of it now. Some way out would be found. War was a hellish, horrible, hideous thing—too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilized ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... of the hand-cart emigrants were not yet at an end. Some were already beyond all human aid, some had lost their reason, and around others the blackness of despair had settled, all efforts to rouse them from their stupor being unavailing. Each day the weather grew colder, and many were frost-bitten, losing fingers, toes, or ears, one sick man who held on to the wagon bars to avoid jolting having all his fingers ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the vision he forgot his surprise at her being in such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in, or whose was the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she stood out from the blackness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thing apart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes were still ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... empty stomach and lighting a match thereto and sending a few initiatory puffs into the air, these mountaineers made off in the darkness toward their homes in different directions. Some went in groups, some by twos, some singly. Seen from a distance in the blackness of the night these companies resembled a regiment of glow-worms in a potato patch. From over the flint hills in the distance came the familiar rattle and rumble of old-fashioned lumber wagons whose occupants had come far to hear the much-discussed preacher from "over east." ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... character, was deliberately and steadily throttled. And at no long interval of time the blight of Spain was destined to descend on Italy, paralyzing the fair movements of her manifold existence to a rigid uniformity, shrouding the light and color of her art and letters in the blackness of inquisitorial gloom. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... late in December, the two privateers were running near the coast of France. There was a heavy mist and rain, also a fresh breeze, so the steersmen could not well see what way they were going. Suddenly the hulls of two large vessels loomed up in the blackness, and the twinkling lights from their port-holes shone upon the dripping sides of the British privateers. Voices came through the mist—French voices—so it was apparent that the ships ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... here. So then you see Paul regards it as possible for, and more than possibly characteristic of, a Christian, that the very same emotion should he excited by that great bright future hope, and by the blackness of present sorrow. That is strong meat; and so he goes on to explain how he thinks it can and must be so, and points out that trouble, through a series of results, arrives at last at this, that if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the pleasure of the moment. The spectacle lasts all night, and the crowd becomes more and more wrought up, the leaps ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... mud and water, she clinging lightly to my arm and I holding the perfectly useless umbrella over her head. The rain was descending steadily and the sky overhead was just black, but along the western horizon, as I caught a glimpse of it between the trees, I fancied the blackness was a little less opaque. The storm was ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... paint? And how astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a cleanliness of body equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as a snare of the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked at the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish organist, or rather with the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and fiery moustache which was all I ever saw of him, and which I loved to distraction for at least six months; ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... again in a cold, dark room, and he saw gleaming through the blackness a tearful, wistful face which he knew was Nannie's. She was in trouble—she wanted something, she was calling him in weird, spirit ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... with a misty sky of sooty blackness, and was rendered extremely cold by a sharp wind blowing from the west. Paris, lighted up, had gone to sleep, showing no signs of life save such as attached to the gas-jets, those specks which scintillated and grew smaller and smaller ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... cloud which imagination might transform into the white wing of a distant ship. And now upon the golden sand the lovely Nisida put off her garments one by one: and set at liberty the dark masses of her shining hair, which floated like an ample veil of raven blackness over the dazzling whiteness of her skin. Imagination might have invested her forehead with a halo, so magnificent was the lustrous effect of the sun upon the silken glossiness of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... ordinary country wood. What could have carried Peter out here it was impossible to conceive; but clearly something had, and Varney raced on, hoping at every moment to descry his great form looming up ahead of him out of the blackness. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... brief, darkest hour before the true daybreak. An icy wind sweeps down canons and over mesas, stinging the marrow of the wayfarer's bones. In the heavens, the innumerable stars burn steadily in crystal coldness. Shadows lie in Stygian blackness at foot of rock and valley. Soft and clear the lights of night swathe the uplands. An awesome silence hangs over the desert. Hushed and humbled by the immensity of space, one expects to hear the rush of worlds through the universe. At times the bosom ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... look on that morning of misery—shall I ever forget it? Yet, blind and confiding as you were, how soon did your ill-judged confidence in me return! Vain hopes! I was even then past recovery—even then sealed over to blackness of darkness forever. ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I've traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy into it. Look ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... to this taunt. The suffering one faded slowly down the path to the bunk house and was lost in its blackness. A light shone out and presently came sombre chords from a guitar, followed by the voice of Sandy in gloomy song: "There's a broken heart for every light ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... goes the candle-flame when it vanishes into blackness and what becomes of sound when the great maw of silence digests it. But what science can know the destiny of the pins and pins and pins, and what is the oblivion which swallows that great army of street-walking ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... along the road when, miraculously as it seemed, the light of the moon broke through the trees by the wayside and lit up his figure. For a moment it fell upon his head like a halo, and touched the knapsack of dreams with glory. Then all was lost in the blackness of night. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... thing as carbon making part of delicate leaves and beautiful flowers, and still more of pure white sugar. But we can make an experiment by which we can draw the hydrogen and oxygen out of common loaf sugar, and then you will see the carbon stand out in all its blackness. I have here a plate with a heap of white sugar in it. I pour upon it first some hot water to melt and warm it, and then some strong sulphuric acid. This acid does nothing more than simply draw the hydrogen and oxygen ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... step backward, and hurtled into the water. For a long time I groped in the depths of the pool. To me it seemed that I struggled there for hours in the blackness; that serpents drew their slimy lengths across my face; that fishes poked their noses with bold inquisitiveness about me and dared to nibble at my hands; that Mr. Pound looked up at me from the abyss, benignly ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... hearing Buddha's words, that he was now about to die, their minds confused, their eyes bedimmed, as if they saw before them nought but blackness, with hands conjoined, spake thus to Buddha: "Buddha is leaving now the pain of birth and death, and entering on the eternal joy of rest; doubtless we ought to rejoice thereat. Even as when a house is burnt a man rejoices if his friends ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... had been recalled by his father's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have seen his mood during the years of personal rule, as he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness" amidst fancies of coming death, the melancholy which formed the ground of his nature feeding itself on the inaction of the time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the tyranny was over. His father had sat, with three ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... themselves in basket chairs upon the lawn, feeling himself vaguely exhilarated by the not too abstruse music of the posturing fiddlers, his eyes caressed by the soft glow of the Japanese lanterns, strung like antique jewelled necklets against the almost tangible blackness of the night, he found himself listening with an half-malicious amusement to the commonplace of the conversational formulae affected by the young world of society, the well-worn, patched-up questions, the anticipated answers. It was very little changed ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the blackness of a narrow entry to stand still awhile, and recover strength for fresh running. For a time nothing but heavy pants and gasps were heard amongst them. No one knew his neighbour, and their good feeling, so lately abused and preyed upon, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... really need the warmth. It was of that soft coal which people in the Middle States burn in happy indifference to its dust-making qualities, because of its charm of sudden-puffing flames, which burst from the bubbling blackness with a singing noise, like the explosion of an oak-gall stepped ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... what panic threatened still) Whittling idly at a scrap of wood, And carved a little boat out for the child Of some old sea-companion. So great and calm a master of the world Seemed Drake that, as he whittled, and the chips Fluttered into the blackness over the quay, Men said that in this hour of England's need Each tiny flake turned to a battle-ship; For now began the lanthorns, one by one, To glitter, and half-reveal the shadowy hulks Before him.—So the huge old legend grew, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... to her place among them, with no stain of bribes in her hands, and with no soil of meanness upon her garments. And then the "peace" and "prosperity," which President Buchanan saw in vision on the eve of May-day, will indeed prevail and be established, while the blackness of infamy will brood forever over the memory of the magistrate who used the highest office of the Republic to perpetuate the wrongs of the Slave by the sacrifice of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... secret of that unpretentious little house below us? We peered out in the gathering blackness eagerly in the direction where we knew it must be, nestled among the trees. Whoever it sheltered was still there, and we could locate the place by a single gleam that came from an upper window. Whether there were lights below, we could not tell. If there were they must have been effectively ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... he stopped to look about. His view commanded a horizon of two or three miles, for he seemed to be near the center of the tableland. Its surface was broken by the hummocks and hollows of the peat, and tufts of white wild cotton relieved the blackness of the gashes in the soil. Sheep fed in the distance, and he heard the harsh cry of a grouse that skimmed the heath. The skyline was clear, and by and by two sharp but distant figures cut ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... with him and went to bed, but my trouble had now cankered too deeply to be easily calmed. In the blackness of the bedchamber it beset me again. Like other maladies, nostalgia, when once set up, must run its course, I suppose. It never has appeared to me that I slept at all that night, yet perhaps I did. Long before daylight, however, ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... beauties from Teheran and the handsome dancing girl from Cairo; there was Amriph, who basked erstwhile in the sunshine of a bargain from Damascus and a seraph from Bagdad, but who now groped about in the blackness of their contempt; and others, all of whom felt in their bitter hearts that their misery was due to the ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... screen himself. He held his breath and listened. Now he crept forward a foot at a time. Now he advanced swiftly for yards. He worked his way to the right and the left. But nowhere could he see what he was searching for, and no betraying sound came out of the thick blackness. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of the other fortresses, destroyed the works, and retired to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... fighting for life, with an awful sensation of being sunk in a gulf of blackness. I fancied I heard Lillian Underwood's voice in a piercing scream. Then I knew ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... unconscientious; however it can never do altogether without the form at least of morality, as this is the law of all thinking beings,—it must seek to found its depraved way of acting on something like principles. Although Richard is thoroughly acquainted with the blackness of his mind and his hellish mission, he yet endeavours to justify this to himself by a sophism: the happiness of being beloved is denied to him; what then remains to him but the happiness of ruling? All that stands in the way of this must be removed. This envy of the enjoyment of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... bases waves were breaking into spray that, catching the gleam of the sunlight, reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Now and then the train plunged into the darkness of a tunnel, where all was blackness, but as it emerged again the sunlight became all the brighter by comparison. As we passed through Pisa, a few hours out from Florence, we caught excellent view of the famous leaning tower, with the appearance of ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... hour of silence followed, during which they swung steadily along. At seven o'clock, the blackness was broken by a last display of the aurora borealis, which showed to the west a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... for her! and poor Herbert too who would acutely feel this ingratitude. The blackness of it was beyond what Julius thought probable in the lad, and the discussion of it occupied the brothers till they reached the Reynolds colony, where they were received by the daughter-in-law, a much more civilized person ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Waldron asked with a smile as he closed the door behind them, shutting himself and Dorothy out into the cool, wet freshness of the night, where the two gleaming rails were slipping fast away into the blackness behind and only distant lights here and there betokened the existence of other human beings in a world ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... Jesus, lying in a blue shirt prostrate beneath the cross, the blackness of which bedimmed the gold of His aureole. Then, with her glance ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... a complete darkness, but a series of lights showing against the silence of the blackness of the nave; and in the middle of the nave, like a great funeral thing, was the choir which these Spanish churches have preserved, an intact tradition, from the origins of the Christian Faith. Go to the earliest of the basilicas in Rome, and you will ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the builders have builded, The painters have fashioned their tales of delight; For what and for whom hath the world's book been gilded, When all is for these but the blackness ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... of the same intensity as in shape 2 when seen in reflex movement. But there is no vestige whatsoever of a handle. Two of the subjects stated that for them the place where the handle should have been, appeared of a velvety blackness more intense than the rest of the background. The writer was not able to make this observation. It coincides interestingly with that of von Kries,[21] who reports as to the phases of fading after-images, that between the disappearance of the primary image and the appearance of the 'ghost,' ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... ensign, which is the representative and symbol of our national life. The men who joined so gallantly in the assault on Port Hudson; who fell so nobly at Milliken's Bend, in repelling the attack of men whose blackness was not, like theirs, of the outside skin, but of a blacker, deeper dye, the blackness of treason in their inner hearts; the men whose blood drenched the sands of Morris Island, and made South Carolina more a sacred soil than it had ever been before, because it was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him made him seem as though he floated in ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... these sounds were real. Somewhere close by was a furtive whisper of sound that came and went, a soft-drawn breath, a scraping of fingers on the panelling above me in the darkness; and in that moment also I became aware that the lattice yawned wide upon a square of glimmering blackness. Suddenly a sly-creeping foot touched me unseen and then (even as the owner of this foot tripped over me) came the roaring flash of a pistol hard by, followed immediately by another and, as I lay deafened and half-dazed, the floor quivered to the soft, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... he saw that the door was standing wide open. A second or two of stillness followed, and then, as he still stood looking intently, he saw the figure of a man suddenly appear, sharp and vivid, from the gaping blackness of the open doorway. Hiram could see his face as clear as day. It was Levi West, and he carried an empty meal bag ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerating the sinister blackness of the night. We were, apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modern ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... finally got courage to look through a side window, feeling quite sure that Mrs. Norton was out with her Chinaman, looking after some choice little chickens left in her care by the doctor. But not one light was to be seen in any place, and the inky blackness was awful to look upon, so I turned away, and just as I did so, something cracked and rattled down over the shingles and then fell to the ground. But which roof those sounds came from was impossible to tell. With "goose flesh" on my arms, and each hair on my head trying to stand ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... page and hiring a taxi on another. I am mistaken though if you will feel inclined to skip a single page of a novel at once so original and well-told. As a detail of criticism I had the feeling that the "blackness" of the Penny exceptions would have shown up better had we seen more of the family in its ordinary rule; but of the power behind Mr. HERGESHEIMER'S work there can be no question. He is, I am sure, an artist upon a quite unusual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... clutched the rail to steady himself as the ship he was on soared again with a strange intoxicating motion. The next instant, as he glanced over the edge, he saw that they were far out over the blackness ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... Monsieur Boissegur. Mr. Grimm was going toward the enframed figure when, without any apparent reason, the ambassador turned and ran along the hall; and at that instant the lights went out again. For one moment Grimm stood still, dazed and blinded by the sudden blackness, and again he started toward the door. ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... thundering craft that bore him into a slow-forming curve that did not end for fourscore miles before the wild flight was checked. He swung it back, to guide the ship with shaking hands where a range of mountains rose in icy blackness, and where a gleaming cylinder rested upon a bank of snow whose white expanse showed a figure that came staggering to ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... came swiftly out of the blackness and stopped beside the cab. She was swathed in a long gossamer, and hooded. The carriage lamps gleamed strong against the ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... and harder, neglected his business, got quarrelsome. And one night, when the heavens was curtained with blackness, like a pall let down to cover the accursed scene, he left Cicely with her pretty baby asleep on her bosom, went down to the saloon, got into a quarrel with that very friend of hisen, the saloon-keeper, over a game of billiards,—they was both intoxicated,—and then and there Paul ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... the enemy ship, Emmett felt overcome with an absurd sensation of freedom. Completely surrounded by billions of motionless, pin-point stars and securely hidden by the vast blackness of space, the aliens and the problem of survival seemed ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... crater of Tycho. In the middle of it rose a conical mountain about five thousand feet high, the summit of which was just beginning to catch the solar rays. Half of the vast plain was already brilliantly illuminated, but round the central cone was a semicircle of shadow of impenetrable blackness. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... Simper, glancing down one of the alleys which seemed to stretch away into blackness,—"I declare it seems quite a lovers' walk. How kind in Lord Mauleverer!—such a ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten. But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr. Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... of darkness was so dense that I could not see the sparse houses I chanced to pass, nor did I know where I was any more. I urged forward blindly, walking towards the light, which was all that broke the blackness before me; its faint illumination seemed to me somehow to be kindly, inviting, irresistible. At last I came to a halt in front of a building I had never before seen, although I thought myself well acquainted with that part of the city. It was a circular edifice, or so it seemed to me then; and ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the negro, we find coloured skins, they always tend to the yellow, as in the various mulatto shades of the West Indies, and especially in the Southern States of America; and the same is true of the "half-castes" of British India, though with a distinct darkness or blackness, which the descendant of the negro does ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... Joukahainen Shook his head, his mouth drawn crooked, And he tossed his locks of blackness. And he spake the words ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... September night, with a violet sky overhead sprinkled with silver. But a touch of autumn decay was in the air, which was heavy and still, and a white mist was rising in thick, sluggish clouds from the green, stagnant surface of the lake. The wood was veiled in blackness, in which the trunks of the trees were just visible, standing in straight, regular rows, like ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... the loose end of things, where the outer world began with the paddock, there was darkness once again—not the blackness that crouched so solidly under the crowding laurels, but a duskiness hung from far-spread arms of high-standing elms. There, where the small grave made a darker spot on the grey, I overtook them, only just in time to see Rosa laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the moonlight, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... the midst of the storm, into the alternating throbs of blackness and radiance; now the possessor of no more room than what my body filled, and now isolated in world-wide space. And the thunder seemed to follow me, bellowing after me as ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... something large and black among the trees. Its outline was barely discernible against the less solid blackness of the night, and it was obscured by the dark tree branches. But as he looked he thought he could see that it terminated in a little dome, like the police telephone booths on the street corners away home in ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... gold and fire; but all was coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an untrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepened almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it perfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one of Goldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water," would have completed ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror, by the glories of God manifest, and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... utter darkness were coloured black like the coalfields in an atlas of physical geography, certain races would be signalised by their opaqueness. If such a map were ever compiled, Australia would of necessity be characterised by blackness; such a blackness, indeed, that jet itself would be as snowy white beside it. But why should this lamentable state of things be said of Australians, who claim to be progressive in their ideas and advanced in their views, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... shapes by the forces at work within them, and the black glistening water, carved into countless hollows and ridges by the agitation of its surface; the whole apparently motionless as if modelled in metal. Then comes the blackness of darkness, so thick and impenetrable that the half-stunned skipper, scarcely conscious of where he is, dares not move by so much as a single footstep lest he should step overboard. The next moment down comes the rain, not in drops, not even in sheets of water, ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... curious sense of being whirled at a terrific speed into some subterranean suck of waters. There was nothing to do but wait. We struck rocks and went rolling, shipping buckets of water at every dip. Then there was a long sickening swoop through utter blackness. It ended abruptly with a thud ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... without water, clouds driven by a tempest, to which is reserved the blackness of darkness. [2:18]For speaking extravagant words of vanity, they entice with carnal desires of lewdness those scarcely escaped from them, those living in error, [2:19]promising them liberty, when they themselves are servants of corruption; ...
— The New Testament • Various
... is styled Amid, or Kara Amid, in the public writings of the Turks, contains above 16,000 houses, and is the residence of a pacha with three tails. The epithet of Kara is derived from the blackness of the stone which composes the strong and ancient wall of Amida. ——In my Mem. Hist. sur l'Armenie, l. i. p. 166, 173, I conceive that I have proved this city, still called, by the Armenians, Dirkranagerd, the city of Tigranes, to be the same with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... through the blackness of midnight, he moved slowly down the deserted nave of the Cathedral and mounted the winding stairs to the ambulatory above. Pausing at the door of the sanctum for a moment to gather up his remnant of moral strength, he entered and stood hesitant ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... her smoky black hair floating around her and her arms cutting through the room's blackness. "Gerald!" Suddenly the room was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald, the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her dressing table, and, more than that, the drained ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... railroad tracks below. I could barely see them branching out, elbowing, winding, and sliding out into the night in pairs. I was fascinated by the dotted lights, the significant red and green of signal lamps. These simple things stood for a complexity that it made me dizzy to think of. Then the blackness below me was split by the fiery eye of a monster engine, his breath enveloped me in blinding clouds, his long body shot by, rattling a hundred claws of steel; and he was gone, with an imperative shriek that ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... looked up, quickly, and as I did so I saw the lights sink into a dull, ruddy tint; so that the room glowed with a strange, heavy, crimson twilight that gave the shadows behind the chairs and tables a double depth of blackness; and wherever the light struck, it was as though luminous blood had ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... than during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke, heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... blackness and chaos grew something real and tangible, a pair of small white hands, and on the finger of one of these hands was a ring that he remembered well, for it was a ring that he himself had placed on that finger, and the hands were held out to him, and ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... black. Of course it would have been just my luck to get a broken neck out of it and give the scientist no chance to revive me. But after a second or two, or a minute, or it could have been an hour, the blackness went away enough to allow me to know I was hanging on the end of the rope, kicking, fighting, choking to death. My tongue swelled, my face and head and heart and body seemed ready to burst. Slowly I went into a deep mist that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... three paces away from me, was the dim outline of the young girl's form vaguely discernible in the gloom—a white mass, almost motionless, against a background of inky blackness. With a quick intaking of my breath I sprang forward, the shawl outspread in my hand, and with a quick dexterous gesture I threw it over her head, and the next second had her, faintly struggling, in my arms. She was as light as a feather, ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... peered through the void sand; but in mockery of all life there were trees borne down by Jordan in some ancient flood, and these, grotesquely planted upon the forlorn shore, spread out their grim skeleton arms, all scorched and charred to blackness by the heats of the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified could she be, in such a condition, for a race of any kind; and against two such obstinate brutes as time and space! This hour of the progress, this noontide of Kate's ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... reached the canyon gates. In the blackness of the gorge, with only the light of a narrow strip of stars overhead, he was forced to ride more slowly. But his confidence that he would find her at the Ranger Station had increased as he approached the scenes ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... which it was intolerable to her to see; and woke with the struggle, and the miserable sensation of seeing her dearest friend weep and being unable to comfort her. The moon was shining into the room, throwing part of it into a cold, full light, while blackness lay in all corners. The impression of her dream was so strong that Mary's eyes turned instantly to the spot where in her dream her godmother had stood. To be sure, there was nobody there; but as her consciousness returned, and with it the ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... imagination would not be repressed beyond its appointed period—a time determined by laws of her being over which she had no control. It arose, at length, as from the dead, overshadowing her with all the blackness of her crime. The woman who drank strong drink that she might murder, dared not sleep without a light by her bed; rose and walked in the night, a sleepless spirit in a sleeping body, rubbing the spotted hand of her dreams, which, often as water had cleared it of the deed, yet smelt so in her sleeping ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless Dinkie is wandering unguarded ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... hideous gloom in which their single lamp, for she dared burn no more lest the oil should give out, seemed but as one star to the whole night, ah! who that had not endured it could know what it meant? There the sick man, yonder the grinning skeletons, around the blackness and the silence, and beyond these again a miserable death, or Jacob Meyer. But of him Benita saw nothing, though once or twice she thought that she heard his voice raving outside the wall which they had built. If so, either he ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... forward and looked squarely into Miss Taylor's blue eyes. Miss Taylor looked into the velvet blackness of hers and wondered ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... courtesy—if I only look on her when she does not know that I am near. And in seeing her, in the mere beholding of her dear face, there is a poor comfort which may hold a man from madness—as a prisoner shut in a dungeon to perish of thirst, might save himself from death if he found somewhere in the blackness a rare falling drop and could ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... himself would have dared to bring into close contact two such characters as Iago and Desdemona? Had the colors in which he has arrayed Desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the overpowering blackness of his character must have passed over the sun-bright purity of hers. For observe that Iago's disbelief in the virtue of Desdemona is not pretended, it is real. It arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving goodness than she is ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... crowd were upon the deck of that steamer, as they strained their eyes towards the land, and anon lost their balance by the dashing of the billows! The lightning played with terrific splendor, alternating with the blackness of the heavens; and the roar of the waves was only hushed by the awful ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... night. Quite dark, save for the stars; the lights already disappearing in the fringe of mean houses whose outline was merged against the blackness of the town; the green and red and white disks along the railway line behind the dim mass of the gasworks; the occasional streak of conglomerate fireflies that was a tramcar; and the red, remorseless glow of here and there a furnace that never ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... was eclipsed, and "carrying no stern light," was Captain Kettle's comment. There was a small glow from her deck and two or three of her ports were lit, but for the most part she crept along as a mysterious black ship voyaging into a region of blackness. It was too dark to make out more than her bare existence, but Kettle took a squint at the Southern Cross, which hung low in the sky like an ill-made kite, to get her bearings, and so made note of her course, and from that tried to deduce ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... pleasure of the comparative comfort awaiting him in the shaded depths. Brushing the perspiration out of his eyes, he glanced northward. Even as he looked the summits of the peaks were blurred from sight by a dark gray veil of rain. Above, all was blackness save when for an instant a wide, white sheet of lightning blazed above the mesa, and was followed a moment later by the first tremendous roar of thunder. Scamp pricked up his drooping ears and mended ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls; it was you put that darkness over ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... a dull plopping sound in his brain. Then, slowly, an ache came out of the blackness, and the beginning of sound. He was fighting out of the unconsciousness, fighting against time and the monster who'd try ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... that is gathering blackness in the northwest, and must sooner or later precipitate itself and with the force of a tempest sweep away—to use the words of General Tornel—in one mighty flood "the religion, language, and national existence of the Mexicans." This is Mormonism. I have watched this delusion from its rise, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... with keeping my guide in eye, I took stock of the thing with idle fingers; in the blackness my finger-tips were all the eyes I had for so small a thing. It was about the size of a five-pound butter box, I should say; it seemed as it lay in my hand a sort of an old and polished casket, a thing done with an exotic artistry, broad, lacquered surfaces ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... two acts while what varies are merely the distinctive attributes of consciousness; just as when we see at first a black and then a white cow, the distinction of the two perceptions is due to the varying blackness and whiteness while the generic character of the cow remains the same. The difference of the one permanent factor (from the two—or more—varying factors) is proved throughout by the two varying factors, and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... their way through the narrowed streets seemed like little fire-flies, children's toys pulled by an invisible string of fire. Further afield, the flare of the city painted the murky sky. The line of the river scintillated with rising and falling stars. The tall buildings stabbed the blackness, fingers of fire. Here, midway to the clouds, was another world, a world of luxury, of brilliant toilettes, of light laughter, the popping of corks, the joy of living, with everywhere the vague perfume and flavour ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... words her heart leapt within her breast. She raised her head quickly, thinking to pierce the blackness that surrounded her and behold the one who spoke. As she did so the gloom melted, and in its place a soft warm glow flooded all her prison. By its rich light she saw before her a glorious figure, clad all in deepest rose—Prince Ember, freed ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... then stare hard ahead into the blackness. "You are great and strong," he would add. "It is I who am weak and little, Louis. I am the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... melody he blew that deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naive and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne describes Miriam in The Marble Faun, so ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... in dark uniforms, which in the blackness of the night would not be seen at any distance, whereas the white tropical uniforms would ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... for a title-page vignette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the successive volumes of the family tea-table. She was giving forth with charming distinctness the delightful Essay of Elia, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweeps," and all were smiling over the "innocent blackness," when the imposing knock and ring called their thoughts to loftier spheres, and they ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... well that, in all the blackness of his guilt, Margaret Wilmot would cling to her father as truly, as tenderly, as she had clung to him in those early days when the suspicion of his worthlessness had been only a dark shadow for ever brooding between ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... current or motion in their still, glassy waters, though I have wandered by their banks a hundred times, watching the red-finned roach and silvery dace pursue each other among the shadowy lily leaves, now startling a fat yellow frog from the marge, and following him as he dived through the limpid blackness to the very bottom, now starting in my own turn, as a big water-rat would swim from side to side, and vanish in some hole of the marly bank, and now endeavoring to catch the great azure-bodied, gauze-winged ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the breaches fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically forth ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vance like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his interruption—a touch ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... round.) That just shows your hideous blackness of soul-your dense stupidity-your brutal narrow-mindedness. There's only one fault about you. You're the best of good fellows, and I don't know what I should have done without you, but-you aren't married. (Wags his head gravely.) Take ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... need, she should owe everything to him, and to him only. And so, without reserve, he devoted himself body and soul to the preparations for her flight. The hot breath of the storm, the thunder and lightning, torrents of rain, and blackness of night could not delay him, while he leaped from rock to rock, feeling his way-soaked through, weary and in peril; he thought only of her, and of how he could most safely carry her to Alexandria, and then surround ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... path was the blackness of desolation. The trees were still burning, but it was in a smoldering, smoking way, with blazing branches here and there, dropping piecemeal to the ground. The flames, which charged forward as they do through the dry prairie grass, had passed by, and the brother and sister had now the opportunity ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... a full minute, as it seemed to him, she looked steadfastly out of the window at the wall of blackness flitting past, and the steady drumming of the wheels grated on his nerves and got into his blood. When it was about to become unbearable she turned and gave him her hand again. "I'm just as sorry as I can be!" she declared, and the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... me that should affright a man? Then surely are men changed from what they used to be!" And with a little coquettish movement she turned herself, and held up one arm, so as to show all her loveliness and the rich hair of raven blackness that streamed in soft ripples down her snowy robes, almost to ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... hurried round the bend of the lane, up a transverse alley and across a little square lost between high shuttered buildings. Alfieri, at his first word, gripped his arm with a backward glance; then urged him on under the denser blackness of an arched passage-way, at the end of which an oil-light glimmered. Here a gate in a wall confronted them. It opened at Alfieri's tap and Odo scented wet box-borders and felt the gravel of a path under foot. The gate was at once locked behind them and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... said; and, breaking from him, went to one of the windows and looked vacantly out into blackness, which reflected the long room, with its dingy greenish maps, and the desks and ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... encouraged by God knows what brave illusion, had penetrated even these desperate fastnesses. A little breeze accompanied it and the dirty pieces of paper blew to and fro; then suddenly a shaft of light quivered upon the blackness, quivered and spread like a golden fan, then flooded the huge cave with trembling ripples of light. There was even, I dare swear, at this safe distance, a smell of flowers ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... an inscription to John Florio, the other to Henry Lambton of Lambton. The almost unique large-paper one of Sejanus, 1605, in the Huth Collection, was given to the poet's "perfect friend," Francis Crane. In the Museum are the Masque of Queens and the Masque of Blackness and Beauty offered to the queen of James I. But of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and many others, we have not a single memorial of this kind. Of Massinger there is one: the copy of his Duke of Milan, 1623, received from him by Sir F. Foljambe. In the case of Taylor the water-poet, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Russian queen. How softly and eagerly this coming tide swirls round them! All day the fishes haunt their shadows; all night the phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and washes with long, refluent waves along their sides, decking their blackness ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... through his consciousness. So long had brown hands done his bidding up here in the North that he had nearly forgotten that a woman's skin could be so white! To have those little white hands just once, softly feeling, caressing, losing themselves in the blackness of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... his dreadful fate. Arnold had here a fine opportunity to retrieve in some degree the bitter mischief of which he had been the occasion. Had he but come forth and suffered in Andre's place, the blackness of his crime would have almost disappeared in the brilliancy of his atonement; but he chose a living death instead, and his hapless victim went to his doom accompanied by the pity of every honest American heart. His ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... sympathetically by, conscious that he had given his last aid and must stand aside. Gladys knelt by the bed with folded hands, her golden head bowed in deep and bitter silence. She saw her last friend drifting towards the mystic sea, and felt as if the blackness of midnight ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... every one is plunged in slumber. Yet no. In a solitary window a light is flickering where some good burgher is mending his boots, or a baker drawing a batch of dough. O night and powers of heaven, how perfect is the blackness of your infinite vault—how lofty, how remote its inaccessible depths where it lies spread in an intangible, yet audible, silence! Freshly does the lulling breath of night blow in your face, until once more you relapse into snoring oblivion, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... them, the freckled man found he could by a peculiar movement of his legs and arms encase himself in his bathing-dress. The tall man was compelled to whistle and shiver. As night settled finally over the sea, red and green lights began to dot the blackness. There were ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... provide it with proper food and shelter,' we are making him a little nearer the kingdom of heaven than he was before. For 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' If he sows seeds of unkindness and cruelty to man and beast, no one knows what the blackness of the harvest will be. His poor horse, quivering under a blow, is not the worst sufferer. Oh, if people would only understand that their unkind deeds will recoil upon their own heads with tenfold force—but, my dear child, I am fancying that I am addressing a drawing-room meeting—and here we are ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... yet men have spoken Just as bravely long ago, When the hair had raven blackness Which is now ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... traces of the Roman occupation of England, while around were stone benches built into the wall. Walking to the opposite side of the narrow, prison-like place, we saw before us an arch with an impenetrable blackness beyond. Before this arch stood a kind of frame made of iron resting on either side upon steel ropes raised slightly from the ground. Following Goliba's example, we got upon it, crouching in a kneeling position in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... timidly, as he guided her with swiftly steady step through the dense blackness, "perhaps I had no right to speak as I did. If I ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... spite of the rain, which fell with steady insistence and began to weigh down our overcoats; in spite of the blackness which made the travelling unbelievably difficult; in spite of the fact that we were in a land of enemies, playing a desperate game against terrible odds, we were happier than either of us had been since being taken to Germany, for a weight had been ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... but even the whiteness of ermine gains by being necked with blackness. "How can he treat me with so little consideration? It is just as if he had said: 'Good morning, mother. I am going to disgrace the family by my marriage, but I know you will be ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... mesdames come within?" A matron speaks. It is what we have been hoping, and we follow eagerly, escorted by the troupe. Inside the door it is blackness. We tread an earth-floor, and by sounds and scents infer that this is the stable. We pass up some dark, uncertain stairs, and stand in the living-room of the family. It is long, dark and low-ceiled. The rafters are ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... upon the face of the fall, staining it and the clouds of mist that hung above, to a hundred glorious hues; indeed the substance of the foaming water seemed to be interlaced with rainbows whereof the arch reached their crest and the feet were lost in the sullen blackness of the pool beneath. Beautiful too was the valley, glowing in the quiet light of evening, and even the native town thus gilded and glorified, looked like some happy ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... awful dirty cloth that you can't put a little more blackness on, I reckon," he drawled, and dipping it into the water he rubbed it vigorously across ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels |
