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Dusky

adjective
1.
Lighted by or as if by twilight.  Synonyms: twilight, twilit.  "The twilight glow of the sky" , "A boat on a twilit river"
2.
Naturally having skin of a dark color.  Synonyms: dark-skinned, swart, swarthy.  "Gold earrings gleamed against her dusky cheeks" , "A smile on his swarthy face" , "'swart' is archaic"



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"Dusky" Quotes from Famous Books



... and so, though she knew she could be happier with him than with the one who with his arm around her waist was pleading for her love, she yielded at last, and in that dim old church, with the summer moonlight stealing up the dusky aisles, she promised to be the wife of J.C. De ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes

... Owing, possibly, to the little care taken to preserve this variety from admixture, it is now not frequently seen. Another variety is often red, with a black breast and single dentated comb. The tarsi are smooth, and of a dusky blue. When this sort of Bantam is pure, it yields in courage and spirit to none, and is, in fact, a game-fowl in miniature, being as beautiful and graceful as it is spirited. A pure white Bantam, possessing all the qualifications ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... The dusky recesses of the rooms, heavy with opulent comfort, stretched away from our long feast. There you could rest, effectually sheltered from the harsh noises of the world. And I rejoiced. Each minute I saw more clearly things as they are. I saw you giving the ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... practically disappeared. But some flavour of its old associations may still cling to it in the minds of the sais and ayah who proudly parade to a festival carrying umbrellas spread over them to shade their dusky features from the sun; though the Raja, in obedience to the dictates of fashion, has discarded the umbrella ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... of Peter Abelard is one of those human documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of personality and, like the ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... o'er some forest rill, Fring'd with the early daffodil, And quiv'ring maiden-hair, When thou hast mark'd the dusky bed, With leaves and water-rust o'erspread, That seem'd an amber light to shed ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... Saturday afternoon in early springtime, away back in the year 1712, Rebecca Gratz, her younger brothers and sister and the one guest she had invited to her eleventh birthday party, Matilda Hoffman, a girl about her own age, whose fair long braids formed a striking contrast to Rebecca's dusky curls. ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger

... number of stands at which cheap jewelry, meerschaum pipes, glass-blown ships, ivory boxes and paper-knives, artificial flowers and stamped cards are made and sold as souvenirs of the Exposition. In addition to these, and several grades better, are a couple of Lahore shawlmakers, dusky Asiatics, engaged with native loom and needle in making the shawls for which India is celebrated. Then we have a jacquard loom worked by manual power, and the large embroidering-machine of Lemaire of Naude, and the diamond-workers of Amsterdam working in a glazed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... till it became a compact body, as much as a furlong square; yet it was but the vanguard of a series of similar hosts, formed one after another out of the hot mould or sand, rising into the air like clouds, enlarging into a dusky canopy, and then discharged against the fruitful plain. At length the huge innumerous mass was put into motion, and began its career, darkening the face of day. As became an instrument of divine power, it seemed to have no volition of its own; it was set ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... three inches broad, rather tough, fleshy, convex, bell-shaped, then depressed, subumbonate, smooth, hygrophanous, margin slightly striate, brownish lilac, then dusky. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... short, the emigrants' quarters; but which, owing to the present trip being a down-river one, will doubtless be found comparatively tenantless. Owing to obstructions against the side windows, the whole place is dim and dusky; very much so, for the most part; yet, by starts, haggardly lit here and there by narrow, capricious sky-lights in the cornices. But there would seem no special need for light, the place being designed ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... of people sot on the peaceful decks,—stately gentlemen, handsome ladies, and pretty children. And in one corner, off kinder by themselves, sot that band of dusky singers, whose songs have delighted the world. Modest, good-lookin' dark ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... loud, stunning tide Of human care and crime, With whom the melodies abide Of th' everlasting chime! Who carry music in their heart Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, Plying their daily task with busier feet Because their secret souls a ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... to mark the numerous mountain ranges, which intersect Ceylon in every direction, becoming every instant more defined, their summits still magically lighted by the setting sun, while the thick cocoa-groves, the hills, and plains lay enveloped in dusky night. The fragrant odours, however, were wanting, and the vessel smelt, as usual, of nothing more than ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... musket they had among them. Loopholes had been left in all the windows, and every now and then I peeped through one of them, to try and discover what was taking place. There was just sufficient light to enable me to see the dusky forms of the rebels breaking through the fences and shrubberies which surrounded the house. As they arrived, they formed in front, dancing, and shrieking, and firing off their muskets and blunderbusses in the most irregular ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the Epic Poem Temora, in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear supports the king; the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul with all ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... face, dusky red, twitching as if he were going to cry, and words breaking out that seemed rent from him by some ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... over the boat, as may be said, the only ones who showed no sorrow in their countenances being the dusky islanders, who seemed to take everything as it came along as a matter of course, and who obeyed the Caucasian captain like so many machines under ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... the Big House; he had intended to be a jockey, but had suddenly shot up into a fine tall man, and had had to become a coachman instead. Bryden tried to recall the face, but he could only remember a straight nose, and a somewhat dusky complexion. Mike was one of the heroes of his childhood, and his youth floated before him, and he caught glimpses of himself, something that was more than a phantom and less than a reality. Suddenly his reverie was broken: the carman pointed ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... just beyond the eastern boundary of the town; not mingling with its business, but standing in a solemn quiet of its own, as if to guard the repose of the sleepers under its shadow. The churchyard too, was beautiful, with its grand and dusky old yew-trees, spreading their broad sweeping branches like cedars, and with many a bright colored flower-bed lying amongst the dark green of the graves. The townspeople loved to stroll down to it in the twilight, with half-stirred idle thoughts of better things soothing away ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton

... pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something indescribable, the look of one who dies cursing, of a man who is weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The strongest lowered their heads to rub their faces against the dusky backs of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that was blinding them. Many were limping, but if any one of them happened to fall and thus delay the march he would hear a curse as a ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... Every moment she not only knew something fresh, but knew that she had known it before. The dust of the years had to be swept away; but it was only dust, and flew at a breath. The light soon failed us in that dusky chamber; and we sat and whispered, till only when we kissed could we see each other's eyes. At length ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... the wind in rapid whirls, The gurgling rivulet to the vallies hies, Whilst on its bank the spangled serpent curls. * * * * * Pale rugged Winter bending o'er his tread; His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew; His eyes a dusky light congeal'd and dead, His robe a ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... the dusky chieftains to the charms of delirium tremens and their subjects to life-long slavery, one can almost see these pious deacons proceeding to church to offer up thanks for the return of their successful vessels. Alas! even "the best laid schemes of mice and men" come to an end. The War of 1812, the ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... as if turned by one crank, and sitting there they looked out into the moonlight where the shining figure flashed to and fro, now so near they could see the smiling face under the crown, now so far away that it glittered like a fire-fly among the dusky green. Lita enjoyed that race as heartily as she had done several others of late, and caracoled about as if anxious to make up for her lack of skill by speed and obedience. How much Ben liked it there is no need to tell, yet it was a proof of the good which three months ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... blessing, Sissot; and I will fain hope thou didst mean that any way. I will go bail thy pen meant not Cicely, good wife; but if it were not in thine heart that Sissot's fair hair, and rose-red complexion, and grey eyes, should have gone better with that blue velvet gown than Queen Isabel's dusky hair and brown eyes, then do I know little of man or woman. And I dare be ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... by too great humidity attracted up by it, that Clouds are generated by Mists, and farther coagulations, which hinder the Sun-beams that they cannot have a reflection, nor get a right penetrating power. So likewise the small terrestrial fire doth not burn so lively in dusky, dark, rainy weather, nor manifests it self with joy in its operation, as it doth when there is a fair, pure, serene, unfalsified heavenly Air; the reason is, because the sympathy is bound and hindered by the obstruction ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus

... another, and some more than twice as long as others. In one light-grey ass the shoulder- stripe was only six inches in length, and as thin as a piece of string; and in another animal of the same colour there was only a dusky shade representing a stripe. I have heard of three white asses, not albinoes, with no trace of shoulder or spinal stripes (2/47. One case is given by Martin 'The Horse' page 205.); and I have seen nine other asses with no shoulder-stripe, and some of them had ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... power apparently and the admiration of men . . . Isabel Hyde . . . Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as beautiful as she—"Am I pretty?" She pulled the pins out of her hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that like an Indian veil, darkly burnished ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... minute nothing happened; then as suddenly and silently as a picture flashed from a magic lantern slide, a man's head came into view. A man's eyes, dusky, fierce, with something of a stare in them, looked the motionless ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... dusky stillness, the man from the nineteenth century saw the closing scene of the great revolt, the forcible establishment of his rule. With a quality of startling discovery it came to him that this was his world, and not that other he had left behind; that this was no spectacle to culminate and cease; ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... above the dusky pine trees. The soft December air, mild as spring on that sheltered coast, scarcely stirred the drooping boughs that overshadowed the terrace. Colonel Estcourt lit his cigar, and began to pace with ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... caretaker, sat back in a patched chair in the dusky, unoccupied office of the Labyrinth mine and addressed himself to four lads of seventeen who were clad in the khaki uniform of the ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman

... a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight, A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair, Like twilights too her dusky hair, But all things else about her drawn From May-time ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... consists of his wife Olive, as good a soul as ever lived, always hard at work. From early morning until dusky eve she is on her feet. It has always been a matter of gossip and astonishment, among the neighbors, as to how little Mrs. Teed, for she is by no means what you would call a large woman, could work so incessantly without becoming weary ...
— The Haunted House - A True Ghost Story • Walter Hubbell

... stumbled as best I could into the Rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... Sicily lay at our feet, with all its 'many folded' mountains, its plains, its promontories, and its bays; and round all, the sea stretched far and wide like a lower sky; the Lipari islands, Stromboli and its volcano, floating upon it like small dusky clouds; and the Calabrian coast visible, I should suppose, for two hundred miles, like a long horizontal bank of vapor! As the sun rose, the great pyramidal shadow of AEtna was cast across the island, and all beneath it rested in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... breast which has been drawn over them, so as to make this strange hand-wing. If you cannot examine a live bat, perhaps by studying this picture of one, you may understand better how this soft, dusky wing ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... at the entrance to the Lane showed that it was no thoroughfare for vehicles. The houses were of three storeys. There were two or three dirty little shops, but the rest were ordinary lodging-houses, the front-doors standing wide open as a matter of course, exhibiting a dusky passage, filthy stairs, with generally a glimpse right through into the yard in the rear. In Elm Court the houses were smaller, and had their fronts whitewashed. Under the archway which led into the Court were fastened up several written ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... it were the precipice and the river; on the other, the plain extending to the city, which in the present day is in great part divided by walls and dotted with gardens; while a square enclosure of moderate size, shaded by dusky cypresses, honeycombed with tombs, and adorned with urns and other sepulchral monuments, surrounds the church. This is a public cemetery, laid out toward the end of the eighteenth century, and fearfully filled in three weeks by the dire pestilence which devastated Sicily ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... shines forth hidden truth, free from all falsehood; and this truth is born from the unveiling of the veiled Divine purity; for after the revelation of these things, the spirit is at last unclothed of the dusky light which up till now has followed it, and in which it has hitherto seen things in an earthly way. Indeed, the spirit finds itself now changed and something very different from what it supposed itself to be according ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge

... volcano, in which the directors had caused forges to be set up for the manufacture of railroad iron. Hence, also, is obtained a plentiful supply of fuel for the use of the engines. Whoever had gazed into the dismal obscurity of the broad cavern mouth, whence ever and anon darted huge tongues of dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-shaped monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque, into which the smoke seemed to wreathe itself, and had heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks, and deep, shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... western sky illuminated the scene with the peculiar effect with which we are all familiar. The hall seemed very dark, but, getting to the back drawing-room, whose windows command the west, I was again in the same dusky light. ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... floors? There is something awful in the bedroom of a respectable old couple of sixty-five. Think of the old feathers, turbans, bugles, petticoats, pomatum-pots, spencers, white satin shoes, false fronts, the old flaccid boneless stays tied up in faded riband, the dusky fans, the old forty-years-old baby linen, the letters of Sir George when he was young, the doll of poor Maria who died in 1803, Frederick's first corduroy breeches, and the newspaper which contains the account of his distinguishing himself at the siege of ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... instigator." All Federalists agreed that the Southern Democratic talk was constructive insurrection,—which it certainly was,—and they painted graphic pictures of noisy "Jacobins" over their wine, and eager, dusky listeners behind their chairs. "It is evident that the French principles of liberty and equality have been effused into the minds of the negroes, and that the incautious and intemperate use of the words by some whites among us have inspired them with hopes of success." "While the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... lower part of the church, near the open door; and even as Adams rose to his feet and throwing up his arm, called out, "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country"—there was heard from without the shrill, reduplicating yell of the Indian war whoop; and dusky figures were seen to pass, their faces grisly with streaks of black and red, feathers tossing in their hair, and blankets gathered round their shoulders; each, as he passed through the dim light-ray, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... was in Westminster, not far from the river and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries of life. Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become quickly fond of it. It was a house with white paneling, graceful ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak. There was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... beyond them, spread Broad fields thick set with sheaves of yellow wheat, Where scarlet poppies, slumberously sweet, Glow with a dusky red— ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... her tears were those of indignation rather than grief. How long she had been standing there he could not tell; but, as soon as she saw that her father had finished his work, little Marian—for she it was—darted forward, and throwing her arms around his neck, with a sob, let her small dusky head fall upon the polished ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... not a little of heather. Above the still unseen village a big ziarat or monastery shone yellow in the sinking sunlight, and overhead rose a rugged grey wall of strangely pinnacled crags, outliers of the Wardwan, showing dusky blue in the clear-cut shadows, and rose grey where the low sun caught with dying glory the projecting peaks ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... glimpse of Georgian Bay, and a missionary was probably the first of the French race to launch his canoe on the lordly Mississippi. As a father the priest watched over his wilderness flock; while the French traders fraternized with the red men, and often mated with dusky beauties. Many French traders, according to Sir William Johnson—a good authority, of whom we shall learn more later-were 'gentlemen in manners, character, and dress,' and they treated the natives kindly. At the great centres of trade—Montreal, ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... procession was indeed made early every morning about one o'clock, when the country vehicles passed up with loads of vegetables for Covent Garden market. She often saw them creeping along at this silent and dusky hour—waggon after waggon, bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall, yet never falling, walls of baskets enclosing masses of beans and peas, pyramids of snow-white turnips, swaying howdahs of mixed produce—creeping along behind aged night-horses, who seemed ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... in some surprise; her face was one dusky flush; and her eyes were flashing. He had seen her angry often enough, but never so angry as this; and he saw plainly that he had ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson

... crown of the head as each hair would naturally lie and was confined by a circlet of gold, the token of the royal blood of his mother's house. The complexion was the hue of a healthy tan, different, however, from the brown of exposure in that it was transparent and the red in the cheek was dusky. The face was the classic type of the race, for be it known there were ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... down and smoothed with gentle fingers the soft, dusky hair. The fragrance of it filled his nostrils. Its softness sent a delicious ecstasy thrilling from his finger-tips up his arm. All his life he would remember this one moment. He gazed down at her tenderly, a wonderful ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western Isles. Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight, as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which Achilles loathed ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... light, and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairiness; two characteristics that I disliked. It was his mind that puzzled, and yet attracted me. The doctor's phrase—an innocent—came back to me; and I was wondering if that were, after all, the true description, when the road ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... temporarily lost; breathing improves. I've always breathed easily in Sam's friendship. That was why I could dance with him as I did even up to the last bar of the music. Then he swung me out through one of the long windows on to the porch under the dusky spring starlight. ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... elders thus conversed in the dusky drawing-room, where the smell of the old roses almost overpowered that of the new, another couple sat in a little homely bower in the garden. It was Walter and his rather distant cousin, Molly Wentworth, who for fifteen years had been as brother ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... the effort involved in keeping the thermometer of the closing day of August at an altitude intolerable to the human kind and irksome to the brute, a large, red-hot sun was languidly sinking beyond an extensive belt of dusky-brown elms fringing the western boundary of a seventy acre expanse of stubbles diagonally traversed by a parish right-of-way leading from the village of Bensley to the village of Dorton Ware. A knee-deep ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... darkies! How they flocked and stared at their soldier-brethren with pathetic worship, dumb admiration, and, here and there, with a look of contemptuous resentment that was most curious. And how those dusky sons of Mars were drinking deep into their broad nostrils the incense wafted to them from ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... Bridge, lying like a dumped car-load of tin cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noble with a dignity beyond words. We saw it very early, when the under sides of the clouds turned chilly pink over a high-piled, brooding, dusky-purple city. Just at the point of dawn, what looked like the Sultan Harun-al-Raschid's own private shallop, all spangled with coloured lights, stole across the iron-grey water, and disappeared into the darkness of a slip. She came out again in three minutes, but the full day had come too; so ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... Anne thought about the letter that Captain Enos had promised to write for her; and when supper was over and the kitchen began to grow dusky with the shadows of the October evening, she ran out to the little shed and came tugging in a big ...
— A Little Maid of Province Town • Alice Turner Curtis

... splendors of the tropic sky by day and by night— all terrestrial and celestial phenomena are manna to a man of such self-abnegation and devoted philanthropic spirit. He can be charmed with the primitive simplicity of Ethiop's dusky children, with whom he has spent so many years of his life; he has a sturdy faith in their capabilities; sees virtue in them where others see nothing but savagery; and wherever he has gone among them, he ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... like a strange dream! The houses on the other side of the river seemed built out of darkness. One would have said that silver and shadow had fashioned the world anew. The huge dome of St. Paul's loomed like a bubble through the dusky air. ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... have seen nothing. Why do you ask?" Not for worlds would she own to any one the ghostly fears that shook her out there in the dusky avenue, with the sound of those ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford

... 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

... about London in hansoms, even on Derby Day. So he dragged himself wearily along the streets until he happened to meet an intimate friend. To him he explained matters, and his friend called a hansom for him and paid the driver as well before he would take up his dusky fare. He thought the fact of his driving a street nigger a great joke, and made merry over his passenger as he passed the other drivers. But he was very much astonished when he drove up in front of quite an imposing dwelling ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... "certainly thought she saw a man behind us once; but we were among the deer, and it was dusky in the woods; and, for myself, I think it was but a stag. But, if you think there is danger anywhere, I ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... the splendour of revealed truth and the holiness of Christian life, are but as moonlight is to sunlight. The Stoical philosophy may be compared to a torch which flings a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern; Christianity to the sun pouring into the inmost depths of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. The torch had a value and brightness of its own, but compared with the dawning of that new glory it ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... the twins before it came to blows, and left the excited family sitting silently in the dusky room. ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow

... off the unbearable man, and walked into the room. It was a great, tapestried chamber, dusky in the early candle-light, furnished with heavily carved chairs and chests, and a huge, four-posted bed. In a distant corner stood a man bending over a tiny oil-stove, and stirring the contents of a steaming dish that stood thereon. Beside the bed was a sister ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... look back and see again the reflection of her own youth. There, folded thick on the daughter's head, lay the massive dark hair, which, on the mother's, was fast turning gray. There, in the daughter's cheek, glowed the lovely dusky red which had faded from the mother's to bloom again no more. Miss Vanstone had already reached the first maturity of womanhood; she had completed her six-and-twentieth year. Inheriting the dark majestic character of her mother's beauty, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... day of life is closing—the long night Of dreamless rest a dusky shadow throws, Between the dying and the things of earth, Enfolding in a chill oblivious pall The last sad struggles of a broken heart. Yes! ere the rising of to-morrow's sun, The bitter grief that brought him to this pass Will be forgotten in ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... was set forth, piping hot and flanked by flagons of beer and wine, on the lawn, and the guests had assembled to partake of the good cheer, while yet the afterglow lingered along the Danube, these dusky musicians appeared and installed themselves in a corner. The old stream's murmur could not drown the piercing and pathetic notes of the violin, the gentle wail of the guzla or the soft thrumming ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... to know what's going on in those runners' heads," Rangsley said, pointing back with his crop. He laughed gayly. The great white face of the quarry rose up pale in the moonlight; the dusky red fires of the limekilns glowed at the base, sending up a blood-red dust of sullen smoke. "I'll swear they think they've ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... that when a patient is confined to bed the parts pressed on be well washed every day with strong salt and water or alum water, and carefully dried. Glycerine of Tannin may then be applied. If any redness appears, especially if any dusky patch is formed, collodion may be applied with a brush, and all pressure should be taken off the part by a circular air-pillow or by a cushion; or small bran or sand-bags may be made and carefully arranged. If the skin is broken, zinc or ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... Naomi, caught on a lonely hillside by the sudden fall of night, had with one accord pointed to the dusky road below, along which rocked noiselessly three tall camels bearing the Magi rapidly in the direction ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips

... mountain-tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower, If chance the radiant Sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... was dusky in twilight and she was very cold. The wind had risen, and little tufts of the hay about her blew here and there, clinging to her clothing and lodging among her short curls. Montgomery had not returned, and after lying still a moment longer, ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond

... waves. The whirl of opinions and perplexities which had encircled him at Oxford now were like the distant sound of the ocean—they reminded him of his present security. The undulating meadows, the green lanes, the open heath, the common with its wide-spreading dusky elms, the high timber which fringed the level path from village to village, ever and anon broken and thrown into groups, or losing itself in copses—even the gate, and the stile, and the turnpike-road had the charm, not of novelty, but of long familiar use; they had the ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... within the dusky circle of lamplight, where the bold, sneering lines of his face stood out in relief against the twilight of the room, threw back his head and laughed. It was a clear laugh, but low, and in it were all the devils of triumph, and of insolence. Where the studied insult of words had failed, ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... pine-tops; flocks of beautiful green swallows skim over the streams, and the noisy Clarke's crow may oftentimes be seen on the highest points around the Valley; and in the deep woods beyond the walls you may frequently hear and see the dusky grouse and the pileated woodpecker, or woodcock almost as large as a pigeon. The junco or snow-bird builds its nest on the floor of the Valley among the ferns; several species of sparrow are common and the beautiful lazuli bunting, a ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... sharp a pang of remorse at the thought of his share in this tragedy, that he cast about in his mind seeking a means to unravel the web of death which he himself had woven. But ever that evil voice was whispering at his ear. It reminded him that he, the white Inkoos, had been refused by this dusky beauty, and that if he found a way to save him, within some few hours she would be the wife of the savage gentleman at her side, the man who had named him Black Heart and who despised him, the man whom he had meant to murder and who immediately repaid his treachery by rescuing him from ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard

... she whispered, and looked at the small white kneeling figure of the younger girl, her hair hanging in a dusky mass of waves and curls and tangles upon her back. Deleah was hurrying conscientiously through the established form of her orisons, trying to achieve the prescribed sum of her supplications before ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... and found in the big attic and the stuffy, shut-up best parlor the most fascinating of treasure hordes. The former, with its rows of old trunks and sea chests under the low eaves, the queer garments and discarded hats hanging on the nails, the dusky corners where the light from the little windows scarcely penetrated even on a sunny May afternoon, was the girl's especial Paradise. Here she came to play by herself on rainy days or when she did not ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... he walked wildly about the paths of the dusky garden, where the trickling of the brooks seemed loud by comparison with the stillness around; treading recklessly on the cracking snails that had come forth to feed, and entangling his spurs in the long grass till the rowels were choked with its blades. Presently he heard another ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy

... down there!" She pinned wildly at the loosened knot of dull red hair which lay upon her shoulders. "That was fierce!" She looked in horror down the dusky cellarway. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... Sometimes, in the distance, masses of foam rose up like a wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as the coming waves took form out of the unseen, it seemed as if no phantom were too vast or shapeless to come rolling in upon their dusky shoulders. ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... every turn Morena's dusky height Sustains aloft the battery's iron load; And, far as mortal eye can compass sight, The mountain-howitzer, the broken road, The bristling palisade, the fosse o'erflowed, The stationed bands, the never-vacant watch, The magazine in rocky durance stowed, The holstered ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... came that we were needed, there was none so glad as I to leave teaching contrabands, the new work I had taken up, and go to nurse "our boys," as my dusky flock so proudly called the wounded of the Fifty-Fourth. Feeling more satisfaction, as I assumed my big apron and turned up my cuffs, than if dressing for the President's levee, I fell to work on board the hospital-ship in Hilton-Head harbor. The scene was most familiar, and yet ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott

... no direct answer. Was it hopeless? He tried to read the face—the too thin straight nose, white between dusky red cheeks, the projecting lower lip, and the lip above it long, the eyes small, red, and eagerly attentive. This was not the time for reason. He said, "I should be your worst enemy, Peter. Every one has been good to you; over and over the Squire has saved you from jail. Mrs. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... gathered over the still, blue arm of the sea. The stifling smoke of powder darkened the clear sky like black vapors, while flashes of lightning and peals of thunder constantly illumined and shook the dusky atmosphere. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... broad black breast of a midnight lake, The City delighted the cradling night: Like a straggling palace of cloud it rose; The towers were crowned with a crystal light Like the starry crown of a white snowflake As they pierced in a wild white pinnacled crowd, Through the dusky wreaths of enchanted cloud That swirled all round ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... Rather small, perhaps, but exquisitely fair, with large laughing blue eyes, and the most fetching manner. If he had raised her veil, I don't believe he would ever have gone abroad to cultivate the dusky nigger." ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... of such an emergency, if she might sometimes apply to me for some of the articles of which they might be in especial need. From that time Canada became the ultimate destination of all my old clothes. I could imagine superannuated cloaks and shawls wrapped around dusky and shivering shoulders, and familiar bonnets walking about Canada in their old age on the woolly heads of poor fugitive ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... swinging oval door— At last she steps upon the prairie floor, Shading her dark eyes from the dazzling ray— A dusky princess, lovelier than the day! No matron, to her hidden foeman's sight, Has ever seemed so radiantly bright. Her dress is rich, in style unlike the Sioux. (These belles in doe-skin have ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... bingo,—of a gun, You musty, dusky, husky son! John Bull, who loves a harmless joke, Is apt at me to grin; But why be cross with laughing folk, Unless they laugh and win? John Bull has money in his box; And though his wit's divine, Yet let me laugh at Johnny's locks, And John ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton



Words linked to "Dusky" :   swarthy, brunette, twilight, dusk, brunet, archaism, dark, duskiness, archaicism



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