"Ebon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... throne of jasper sat A monstrous idol, black and fat; Thick rose-oil dropped upon its head: Drop by drop, heavy and sweet, Trickled down to its ebon feet Whereon the blood of goats was shed, And smeared around its perfumed knees ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... desire to have more, is to bring into our lives the one solid and sufficient good without which there is no gladness, and with which there can be no unmingled sorrow, wrapping the whole man in its ebon folds. For this Christ is enough for all my nature and for the satisfaction of every desire. In Him my mind finds the truth; my will the law; my love the answering love; my hope its object; my fears their dissipation; my sins their forgiveness; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... hall: I halted there a minute; I looked at some pictures on the walls (one, I remember, represented a grim man in a cuirass, and one a lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace), at a bronze lamp pendent from the ceiling, at a great clock whose case was of oak curiously carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing. Everything appeared very stately and imposing to me; but then I was so little accustomed to grandeur. The hall-door, which was half of glass, stood open; I stepped over the threshold. It was a fine autumn morning; the early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Check'd their light footsteps—statue-like they stood, As worshipp'd forms, the Genii of the Wood! But see, the regal plumes, the couch of state! [o] Still, where it moves, the wise in council wait! See now borne forth the monstrous mask of gold, [Footnote 1] And ebon chair [also Footnote 1] of many a serpent-fold; These now exchang'd for gifts that thrice surpass The wondrous ring, and lamp, and horse of brass. [p] What long-drawn tube transports the gazer home, [Footnote ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... interesting to me was the large colony of yellow-headed blackbirds that had taken up their residence in the rushes and flags of the upper end of the lake. These birds are not such exclusive westerners as their ebon-hued cousins just described; for I found them breeding at Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, a few years ago, and they sometimes straggle, I believe, as far east as Ohio. A most beautiful bird is ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... I look down to the damned fiends, Fiends, look on me! and thou, dread god of hell, With ebon sceptre strike this hateful earth, And make it swallow both ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... green fire darted from the blackness and thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... thou com'st at last, Wand of ebon, tipped with gold,— Often carried in the past By a hand that now lies cold In his grave beyond the sea, Many thousand miles ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... who care not for renown, And build their walls, and, if our host assent, Acesta from Acestes name the town." Such counsel cheered him, but his breast is rent With trouble, musing on the dark event. And now black Night, upon her course midway, With ebon car had climbed the steep ascent, When, gliding down before him as he lay, His father's phantom stood, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... sable Goddess! from her ebon throne In rayless majesty now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; An awful pause, prophetic ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... remember Arthur Darrell, of Christchurch, Frank, the man that used to speak at the Union, and was always raving about ebon ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... of the grave That now o'er care-worn temples wave, Oh! what change hath pass'd since ye O'er youthful brows fell carelessly! In silken curls of ebon hue That with such wild luxuriance grew, The raven's dark and glossy wing A richer shadow scarce could fling. The brow that tells a tale of Care That Sorrow's pen hath written there, In characters too deeply traced Ever on earth to be effaced, Was then a page of spotless white, Where ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... bowing and stooping in the most awkward manner, partly by way of salutation and partly to avoid striking his head against the low deck-beams. He was dark-complexioned, bushy whiskered, with keen restless black eyes, and a shock of ebon hair very imperfectly concealed by a black-and-red-striped fisherman's cap of knitted worsted, which he removed deferentially the moment his eye fell upon us. He wore large gold ear-rings in his ears, and was attired in a thick dreadnought ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... a king that I should call my own This splendid ebon throne? Or by what reason or what right divine, Can ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... rosy night Drives off the ebon morn afar, While through the murmur of the light The huntsman winds his mad guitar. Then, lady, wake! my brigantine Pants, neighs, and prances to be free; Till the creation I am thine, To some rich desert ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... thou lingerer, Light! Eve saddens into Night. Mother of wildly-working dreams! we view 75 The sombre hours, that round thee stand With down-cast eyes (a duteous band!) Their dark robes dripping with the heavy dew. Sorceress of the ebon throne! Thy power the Pixies own, 80 When round thy raven brow Heaven's lucent roses glow, And clouds in watery colours drest Float in light drapery o'er thy sable vest: What time the pale moon sheds a softer day 85 Mellowing the woods beneath its pensive beam: For mid the quivering light ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dream-realm of joy, the central form of which was everywhere present, although unbeheld. Then, remembering how my songs seemed to have called her from the marble, piercing through the pearly shroud of alabaster—"Why," thought I, "should not my voice reach her now, through the ebon night that inwraps her." My voice burst into song so spontaneously that ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... attention, their leader surveyed the bloody section of shore. He checked each of the prone men and found only one still alive, a seven-foot, ebon-skinned warrior who got to his feet when the leader kicked him and stood erect but swaying drunkenly from the blow Mike had laid across his skull during ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... arrestment, for, indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated. The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls the ebon ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... down a declivity of from ten to twenty-five degrees. The scene was awful, the momentum incredible, the fusion perfect (white heat), and the velocity forty miles an hour. The banks on each side of the stream were red-hot, jagged and overhanging. As we viewed it rushing out from under its ebon counterpane, and in the twinkling of an eye diving again into its fiery den, it seemed to say, 'Stand off! Scan me not! I am God's messenger. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... my song,—not thine the power To paint that never-dying flame, Which gilds through life the gloomy hour, Which nurtures this love-wasted frame; For since with Laura dwells my wander'd heart, Cheer'd by that fostering flame, I brave Death's ebon dart. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... before. As he progressed, the country seemed to Will more and more beautiful, and by the time he reached Peach Grove he had come to the unpatriotic conclusion that all it needed was Mary Brown, with her roses, and ringlets, and eyes, passing like an angel—lovers will be poets—among these ebon beauties, to make it the finest country in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... reason for sending thee up to the monastery was to help thy learning; and I would fain begin, by hearing thee read aloud from the Scriptures. And with these words, and bidding him read on, He lays on ebon desk before his son The sacred text, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... cried out the mirage faded, the Arab vanished, the thud of the horse's hoofs died in her ears, and Tahar, the dragoman, glided round the tent, and stood before her. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight like ebon jewels. ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... gallery.) I dare not whisper it even to myself; but my mind misgives me. The event will, I fear, be different from what he anticipates. I see before me spirits, who, still and thoughtful, weigh in ebon scales the doom of princes and of many thousands. Slowly the beam moves up and down; deeply the judges appear to ponder; at length one scale sinks, the other rises, breathed on by the caprice of destiny, ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... watched the beating of their giant wings of shadow and heard the thunder of their laughter as they fled ahead, leaving scores of like monstrous shapes to follow. There was a faint lightning of phosphor in the creaming heads of the ebon surges, and my sick imagination twisted that pallid complexion into the dim reflection of the lamps of illuminated pavilions at the bottom of the sea; mystic palaces of green marble, radiant cities in the measureless kingdoms of the ocean gods. I had a fancy of roofs of pearl below, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... thro timeless hours my eyes Without intent have watched the slowing flight Of ebon crows across quiescent skies Till all are gone; the last, a lonely bird, Scudding to rest thro streams of golden curd That flow far eastward to the coming night. And as I turn again to foiling thought My spirit leaves ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... false and forced bliss; Ill may a sad mind forge a merry face, Nor hath constrained laughter any grace. Then laid she wine on cares to make them sink: Who fears the threats of Fortune, let him drink.[94] 60 To these quick nuptials enter'd suddenly Admired Teras with the ebon thigh; A nymph that haunted the green Sestian groves, And would consort soft virgins in their loves, At gaysome triumphs and on solemn days, Singing prophetic elegies and lays, And fingering of a silver lute she tied With black and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished—in the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets—all grim with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed from that ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... snow bedding, stick out from under the white spread of the mountain tops like big black horns, do they long for the azure sea and lemon groves? No wonder they call the peaks the 'Horns of The Old One'; or that when my light falls upon them I think of ebon fangs protruding from white guns, and call the place 'The Mouth of Hell.' If those boys but show their heads above the crest the awful silence is broken by the roar of guns. What a life! Always under potential fire and for ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... long-tailed, ebon-eyed, nocturnal ranger! What led thee hither 'mongst the types and cases? Didst thou not know that running midnight races O'er standing types was fraught with imminent danger? Did hunger lead thee—didst thou think to find Some rich old cheese to fill ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... joys of that domestic glade Can wipe the tear from off his rugged brow, A stone beneath the yew-tree's ebon shade Deep o'er his heart a heavier shade doth throw. (Oh! sad indeed, when thus such tidings come That stun, even when by slow degrees they steal,) That tablet tells how cold within the tomb Are hands whose fond warm grasp ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the stream, and easily establish themselves on banks and bars, where their tough, interlacing roots soon form an almost impregnable barrier to the onslaught of the flood. Only a stone's throw away there stood a great old black willow, with a sturdy trunk of ebon hue, crowned with a mass of soft green leafage, lighter where the breeze lifted up the under side to the sunlight. Many times, doubtless, the winds had shorn and the sleet had rudely trimmed this old veteran, but there remained full life and vigor, even more ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... carpet at Paul's feet. He glanced upward at the darkening pall which seemed to rest upon the hill top. Its oppressive blackness suggested weight, so that one trembled for the stability of the chalky scarp which must uphold that ebon canopy. Paul moved further along the aisle to a spot where the foliage was unbroken, as rain began a rapid tattoo upon the leafy roof. In the following instant the hillside was illuminated wildly as lightning wrote its message in angular characters across ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... smoking at the club windows on the Ponte Vecchio; Marmalada, Giovanelli of the Bersaglieri, young Ponto of the K.O.B.'s, and myself—men who never give a thought save to the gold embroidery of their pantoufles or the exquisite ebon laquer of their Russia leather cricket-shoes. Suddenly we heard a clatter in the streets. The riderless chargers of the Bersaglieri were racing down the Santo Croce, and just turning, with a swing and shriek of clattering ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... of gray masonry with a strong white light. Every castellated turret and twisted chimney stood out in bold relief from the heavy background of the pine wood behind, and the great courtyard lay white and still, lined by a dark rim of ebon shadow. ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... much from the cold as poor Gahra. His ebon skin has turned ashen gray, he shivers continually, can hardly speak, and sits on his ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... mountain-top, there seemed to be more daylight left than on its rocky sides, and the moon among the parting clouds shone intermittently over the primeval waste. The top of the Peak is, so to speak, a vast black glacier, whereof the crevasses are great fissures, ebon-black in colour, sometimes ten feet deep, and with ten feet more of black water at the bottom. For miles on either side the ground is seamed and torn with these crevasses, now shallower, now deeper, succeeding each other at intervals of a yard or two, and it ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a hero; let thy might Tramp on eternal snows its way, And through the ebon walls of night, Hew down a passage ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... as this young lady always seemed to be upon the verge of laughter—brim full with it, and ready to overflow, like a goblet of Bohemian glass filled with the "foaming draught of eastern France," if we may be permitted to make so unworthy a comparison. Her merry black eyes were now dancing, and her ebon curls rippled from her smooth ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... purest pearl outshining, shell-pink nails, and she will wear Just one red camellia twining in her ebon wealth of hair. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... "what heaven-directed blight Involves each countenance with clouds of night! What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews! Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze? The court is thronged with ghosts that 'neath the gloom Seek Pluto's realm, and Dis's awful doom; In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head, And sable mist creeps upward from ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang |
