"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and melodious hum, which frequently swells to a startling sound as the cicada trills his sonorous drum on the sunny bark of some tall tree. At morning the dew hangs in diamond drops on the threads and gossamer which the spiders suspend across every pathway; and above the pool dragon flies, of more than metallic lustre, flash in the early sunbeams. The earth teems with countless ants, which emerge from beneath its surface, or make their devious highways to ascend ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... carefully twice, rejecting, trying to shake off the bonds of custom and get down to primitive needs. At last we made a judicious selection. Everything old or worn was left; everything merely ornamental, except good lace, which was light. Gossamer evening dresses were all left. I calculated on taking two or three books that would bear the most reading if we were again shut up where none could be had, and so, of course, took Shakspere first. Here I was interrupted to go and pay a farewell visit, and when we returned Max had packed and ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... central, idea to which all its component parts are related, and teaches a lesson of its own, so unobtrusively that we become possessed of it almost unawares. Some are intensely, even tragically, serious; others so light and airy that they seem as if woven out of gossamer. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... destination, in the meridian of her glory. We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as a mere Rosy Melindi—who are always fishing for pretty complements —who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language, but poor and barren in sentiment. Beset, as she has been, by the intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden, and the artful—no wonder she has sometimes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the storm abated; but the sea still ran dangerously high, and the wind sobbed through the rigging mournfully. The heaven was spangled with tremulous stars, and at the horizon the clouds hung down in gossamer folds—God's robe ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... thoughts were busy in her mind that Dot ran down the passage and opened the door suddenly. Such a dainty pretty Dot, in her new blue muslin dress that almost reached to the ground, and fitted closely to her slender little figure, and a new white straw hat with a new white gossamer floating out behind waiting to be tied when the kisses were all given ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... of clever devices that she sets down as intuitions or the ready reading of character. Violet speaks quietly and resents nothing, therefore she is quite sure the young wife's conscience will not allow her to. Conscience is a great factor in the make-up of other people, but her own seems of a gossamer quality. Indeed, she feels rather aggrieved that her coup de main has wrought so little disaster. "But it will make her more careful how she goes on with Eugene," she comments to herself. Only Eugene seems not to have the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... empty stomach, when the Spirit of the Storm rode out, before his very eyes, to wage his mighty war. And then at other times it would all be quite different, and he would see the figures of beautiful maidens in gossamer garments, and they would seem to be at play, flinging flecks of sunlight this way and that, or winding and unwinding their flaky veils to fling them saucily across the ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... new, my soul was stilled to that {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... two of its fastenings, and towards midnight flapped loudly in an eddy of the light wind. The sleeper stirred, and passed a languid hand over his face. A spider within the porch had been busy while he slept, and his hand encountered gossamer. ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I believe, by way of a contrast to set off her own brilliant complexion and imperial proportions. It is Juno and Arachne. The divine orbs of the goddess turned haughtily upon me, but did not see me,—looked through and beyond me, as if I had been nothing but gossamer, feathers, air; and the little black, bead-like eyes of the insect pierced me maliciously an instant, as the barouche dashed past, and disappeared in the Rue de Rivoli. I was humiliated; I felt that I was recognized,—known as the rash youth who had just called at the Hotel de Waldoborough, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... hear this "Raphael of Music" at the piano, so many and so eloquent have been the descriptions given of his playing. It is easy to fancy him sweeping the ivory keys with his gossamer touch that enveloped with ethereal beauty the most unaccustomed of his complicated chromatic modulations. We can feel his individuality pulsating through every tone evoked by those individualized fingers ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... snorted and settled into a swift stride. Bobby leaned over to watch the sunlight twinkle on the wheel-spokes. The narrow tires sunk slightly in the yielding shingle fragments. Brittle! Brittle! Brittle! the sound said to Bobby. Above all things he loved to watch the gossamer-like wheels, apparently too light and delicate to bear the weight they must carry, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... under-grasses, lost in marveling. Or the cool term of morning, and the stir Of odorous breaths from wood and meadow walks, The bobwhite's liquid yodel, and the whir Of sudden flight; and, where the milkmaid talks Across the bars, on tilted barley-stalks The dewdrops' glint in webs of gossamer. ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among the tall grass ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... he watched the pitiless, grey light break over Rome. The magic city of the moonlit night, the creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and mortar. The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure love and lying friendship. In the chaos substituted for his accustomed world he recognised only ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... long ignominiously withered in the wind; perhaps it was now only buried overnight for the nonce? Being dug up, or being cut down, and put into the balance, it weighed—less than was expected. It was as light as gossamer, said pious rumor, Had such an excellent odor too;—and came for a mere nothing of gold! This was Adalbert's first miracle after death; in life he had done many hundreds of them, and has done millions ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... my love, with perfect faith— Am I not as the floating gossamer, Steering through ether on thy guiding breath? Am I not as the clay within thy hand, Taking the shape and image of thy thought? Heed not these idle tongues, that launch their doubts In erring love against thy watchful care. That which thou doest I accept with joy; I wait for ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... can tell what a baby thinks? Who can follow the gossamer links By which the manikin feels his way Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind, and wailing, and alone, Into the light of day?— Out from the shore of the unknown sea, Tossing in pitiful agony,— Of the unknown sea that reels and rolls, Specked with the barks of little souls— ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... painter, are you not? I saw you looking at that dealer's show, The croutes he has for sale, a shabby lot— What do I know of Art? What do I know . . . Well, look! That David Strong so well displayed, "White Sorcery" it's called, all gossamer, And pale moon-magic and a dancing maid (You like the little elfin face of her?)— That's good; but still, the picture as a whole, The values,—Pah! He never painted worse; Perhaps because his fire was lacking coal, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought that Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her engagement she had grown to look upon her first love as the gossamer, fairylike romance of a child. For months she had known that the engagement must be broken sooner or later; and she knew now, while she listened to Marthy's shuffling feet hastening to deliver her message, that she must break it to-night. In the dim pool of her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... panic. Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was nearly six months before I heard ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... reflection with softer colors arched like a corona above a high wooded hill. Then followed sunset and twilight with the hymn of the thrush. A single star like a great silver lamp trembled above the summit of a hill, where the gathering mist like a thin gossamer film was settling on ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... in these latter days, so proudly she walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with her in the vanity of her fairness—that I sometimes fear an impending dies irae, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... invented a waterproof composition—there was fourteen weeks of drought; he sold his patent for two-and-sixpence, and had the satisfaction of walking home for the next three months wet through, from his gossamer to his ci-devant Wellingtons, now literally, from their hydraulic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns. At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... thought, rolled up we shall find them Among mosses old and dry; From gossamer threads that bind them, They will start like the butterfly, All winged: so we went forth seeking, Yet still they have kept unseen; Though we think our feet have been keeping The track where they have been, For we saw where their dance went flying ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... delightful week in the beginning of November, when the air is mild and still, and a beautiful blueish mist floats in the atmosphere, through which the landscape is seen as through a veil of gossamer—had come and gone, and a slight flurry of snow had covered the ground with a white mantle, when one morning a great squealing was heard from the pen in which the pigs were ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... tried to reason it out, and could not. He suddenly found himself bitterly disappointed that he had missed seeing her, for if they had met, he would have known by this time what to think, what to hope. He felt old— he felt fully thirty-six years old—as he passed his hand over his crown, whose gossamer growth opposed so little resistance to his touch. He had begun to lose his hair early, but till then he had not much regretted his baldness. He entered into a little question of their comparative ages, which led him to the conclusion that Cynthia must ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... blindfold along a road that not of his choosing. Everything and every one had combined to constrain him: his favours to John, the failure of his business, Polly's inclinations and persuasions, his own fastidious shrinkings. So that, in the end, all he had had to do was to brush aside a flimsy gossamer veil, which hung between him and his fate. Was it straining a point to see in the whole affair the workings of a Power outside himself—against himself, in so far as it took no count of his poor ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... where they exchanged pretty loving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed with occasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a long trill—a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip over metal strings as fine as gossamer threads—describe it how you will, you cannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark's throat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirruping exclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or more ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was indeed a ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the words sounded to the listening ear like a part of the music to which they kept time. They saw a multitude of people, and exchanged the compliments of the evening, yet these people made no more impression upon their thoughts than gossamer would have made upon ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... constantly shifting times before you, that you may be enabled to see the flitting shadows of the hour as they pass across it, grave or gay, portentous or hopeful, draped in solid political vesture, the toga of the statesman, or robed in the blue gossamer of metaphysics, in the drapery of sorrow or light hues of joy, in the tried armor of the Divine, or the dubious motley of the progressive, in the soft, floating, lustrous, aerial texture of the woman, or the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... my way," remarked Mr. Carlyon, and Elizabeth nodded; and then Dinah fetched her a light gossamer scarf, which she tied ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... next moment the veil lifts,—clean up over your head perhaps, and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... "Dumb-Belles." For Aunt Eunice and Aunt Clara, maiden sisters of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an assorted cargo of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... what a green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist? ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... fleet, Sucked in their wake, down ruining Through channelled night, where only sing The shrill gusts streaming through the hair Of them who sway and bend them there, And peer in vain with shielded eyes To rend the dark. Clinging it lies, Thick as wet gossamer that shrouds October brushwoods, or low clouds That from the mountain tops roll down Into the lowland vales, to drown Men's voices and to choke their breath And make a silence like to death. But this was hot and dry; it came And smote them, like the ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... knows better than he that what seems a bell-pull has often, owing to former violence and broken wires, no connection with the bell. Here a chimney smokes, there the flue is blocked with birds' nests. In certain country inns, the flimsy gossamer of spiders makes an undesirable fretwork over the greenish knobs of the ill-puttied panes. Mice, rats, and "such small deer" scamper uncannily the live-long night along the worn waxcloths and unspeakable ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... portraits of the two daughters of the house. When it came to Delphine's he gently drew her light shawl from her shoulders, spread it over the keyboard, and then played through it, his fingers, with every tone they produced, coming in touch with the gossamer-like fabric, still warm and hallowed for him from its contact ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... prayers and wooing, does all he can to overcome; but here the coyness is in the suitor himself. He has to overcome it by himself, and he cannot. He hardly knows the sort of enemy he has to conquer. Every woman seems to him enclosed in a bell-glass, fine as gossamer, but he cannot break it. He feels himself drawn, but he cannot approach. His heart is yearning; yet he says to himself, no, I do not love. A looker-on calls him inconstant, uncertain, capricious. He is not so; he is bound by viewless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... of a fashionable restaurant practically out of doors—a cool green lawn for a carpet and a fountain playing close at hand. Mary wore a white dinner-gown, gossamer-like and airy. Her rich brown hair was tastefully arranged, her voice had never seemed to him so soft and pleasant. All around was the hum of cheerful conversation. A little world of people seemed to be there whose philosophy of life after all was surely the only true one, where hearts ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by broods of small spiders are sometimes very numerous, and cover everything: they are especially noticeable in hedges, and are one of the causes of what is called in the country 'Gossamer.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... is a lottery. The town that had welcomed her so wildly now went Elssler-mad. The gossamer floatings of this French danseuse possessed everyone. People courted trash and trumpery. Greatness gave way to triviality. This pitiful condition preyed upon her. The flame of genius never for a moment became less dim, but her eyes grew larger, brighter, more melancholy. Sometimes ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... in Alaska is usually very large, it naturally follows that an umbrella is a convenient companion. A gossamer for a lady and a mackintosh for a gentleman, and heavy shoes, and coarse, warm and comfortable clothing ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... sewing silk is too coarse for ordinary fly-tying and it doesn't seem to have the strength. Size 00 is a good size for all flies including bucktails and streamers. For dry flies and small wet flies a gossamer silk size 000 and 0000 is the best to {14} use. Although the strength of this fine silk is much less than the size 00, it has the advantage that more turns can be used, and the heads ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg
... shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... infant genius of American poetic expression, (eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes, and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox publishers—causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial gossamer delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges—lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some western ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... began with a fairy play acted by the juniors. They looked very pretty in their gauzy garments, and little Desiree, in a gossamer robe of elfin green, made an attractive queen, so dainty and ethereal that the audience almost expected to see through her. "What a sweet child!" was the general comment, as she tripped back in response to a storm of clapping, to give an encore ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... old familiar cottage-green! I see once more thy pleasant sheen; The gossamer suspended over Smart celandine by lusty clover; And the last blossom of the plum Inviting her first leaves to come; Which hang a little back, but show 'Tis not their nature to say no. I scarcely am in voice to sing How graceful are the steps of Spring; And ah! it makes me sigh to look How ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!—Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... all prosperous and sunshine, and what Captain Beaufort would call plain sailing. To Ballymahon the first stage. Do you remember Ballymahon, and the first sight of the gossamer in the hedges sparkling with dew, going there packed into the chaise with your four sisters and me to see the museum of a Mr. Smith, who had a Cellini cup and a Raphael plate, and miniatures of Madame de Maintenon, and wonders ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... treat her seriously. She had left all that was serious in that other life that had ended with the fall of the safety-curtain on a certain night in England many aeons ago. Her personality now was light as gossamer, irresponsible as thistledown. The deeper things of life passed her by. She seemed wholly ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the custom to begin collecting linen for a girl's trousseau as soon as she is born, but the American bride cares nothing for dozens upon dozens of stout linen articles. She much prefers gossamer texture lavishly embellished with equally perishable lace. Everything must be bought for beauty; utility is not considered at all. No stout hand-woven underwear trimmed with solidly stitched needlework! Modern Miss Millions demands handkerchief linen and Valenciennes lace of a quality that used ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... rise beyond was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... attends its progressive movement. We confess ourselves partial to plumes of feathers above the radiant braidings of the silken tresses on the heads of virgins and matrons—provided they be not "dumpy women"—tall, white, blue, and pink plumes, silent in their wavings as gossamer, and as finely delicate, stirred up by your very breath as you bend down to salute their cheeks—not with kisses—for they would be out of order both of time and place—but with words almost as tender as kisses, and awakening almost as ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... be very interesting to know whether the gossamer threads thrown out by these insects are in an excited state of electricity: their divergent state would seem to imply they were; for there seems to be no other natural cause which could prevent them from coming together, especially before the insect had left its resting-place. If electric, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... on earth as it lay, That bright little fury went, humming, away, With gossamer softness, and fair to the eye, Like some living brilliant, just dropped from ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... its graceful varieties demonstrates its beauty, its constructive strength combined with extraordinary lightness, which becomes domesticated in that fragile sceptre of social influence and festivity, the fan, and which again spreads its silken, or gossamer, wing as a suggestive field for the designer. We find the principle springing to life again in the fountain jet, and symbolical of life as it has ever been; by means of the same principle applied to construction the Gothic ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... interruption, but both being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... to grope; and I retiring brushed Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face, And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed; He should to antenatal night retrace, 70 And hide his elements in that large womb Beyond the reach ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... perpetual firing and popping off of guns and pistols. But all this was over by the time I was up and dressed, and seated at breakfast in my partitioned room. It was a perfect October day; the dew not yet off the blades of grass, glistening on the delicate gossamer webs, which stretched from flower to flower in the garden, lying in the morning shadow of the house. But beyond the garden, on the sunny hill-side, men, women, and children were clambering up the vineyards like ants,—busy, irregular in movement, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... smoke in a sliver and coil automatically in a can. Once more it was flattened into a lap, given to a comber that felt out its fibres, removing with superhuman precision those for the finer fabric too short, thrusting it forth again in another filmy sliver ready for the drawing frames. Six of these gossamer ropes were taken up, and again six. Then came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... toiling lazily over steeps, gray, rugged, and rutty, lead away to unknown regions. A bald spot—rock—whose face has borne the violence of the storm for ages, yet defiantly stands there, inviting the fury of its ancient enemy. The clouds, broken into fantastic forms, cast gossamer shadows, which go floating phantom-like, away, as unreal as spirits and as tranquil as the promised land. Jutting crags, piled up in grotesque confusion, capped by monstrous rocky platforms, overhang ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... crimson with spite! You with the crooked corners of your seesaw mouth, with the broken ridges and ditches in your shrivelled half-inch forehead, you would make an outcry about my ugliness! Why the bit of a dwarf can hardly peer out of its pulpit when it is hubbubbing there, and is so gossamer-shankt it durst not walk across the great square if the wind chance to be blowing strong; the congregation are hard put to find him out when he is grimacing and gesticulating before the altar, and need all their christian faith and hope to believe him actually ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the breath of a maiden's Yes: Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long! There were tones in the voice that whispered then You may hear to-day in a ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... am languid. You, with your fine sensibilities, ought to be the first to feel that; but no: you wait, looking exquisite, with eyes like blue-black water, and a mouth, a mouth like a flower. You soft gossamer beauty, I could crush you where you hover; but you won't come and be crushed. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... digging a hole in the ground with his toe, and looked up, to see a lovely cobweb like a wheel, circle within circle, spun across a corner of the arch over the gate. Tiny drops glittered on every thread as the light shone through the gossamer curtain, and a soft breath of air made it tremble as if ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... crushing down beneath his chariot wheels their mountainous and howling ridges into one level plain of foaming water. Our chainplates, strong fastenings, and clenched bolts, drew like pliant wires, shrouds and stays were torn away like the summer gossamer, and our masts and spars, crackling before his fury like dry reeds in autumn, were blown clean out of the ship, over her ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the German lines, then pushed them away, her cheeks the pinker. They were as bad as French postcards, she thought, aghast. Whose room was this, anyway? Whose piano was this? Whose was the lacy negligee she had worn and the gossamer lingerie the maid had placed in the chiffonier for her? Was ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Beautiful are the mornings in Jamaica, when the sun, appearing through a cloudless and serene atmosphere, illumines with his rays the summits of the mountains, and gilds the leaves of the plantain and orange-trees. The plants are spread over with gossamer of fine and transparent silk, or gemmed with dew-drops, and the vivid hues of industrious insects, reflecting unnumbered tints from the rays of the sun. The aspect of the richly cultivated valleys is different, but not less pleasing; the whole of nature teems with the most varied productions. ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Night Watches, but it hardly shows Mr. JACOBS at his best in this particular vein. There are also several charming illustrations by Mr. STANLEY DAVIS, executed with a buff tint, which help to sustain the gossamer illusion. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... and a wish I had for happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words; but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy was ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... blue Puritan-like spider threw her silver gossamer web about him, tangling more and more his big, fine manly heart, and flinging diamond dust, and powder made of charms and incantations, in his eyes to blind him. But as yet she knew not of the Presence that was ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... told that they could get up lace so cheap that the people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry bushes with it to keep off the insects. Spider-webbing is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric. Sixteen square yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce! If the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island plantations could have been shut into that dressing-room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at 120 degrees, they ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... went straight at the foundations of Bob's make up, and began to look over boxes of little gossamer shirts and tiny union suits of a fabric so delicately fine that Burns handled a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... is what every puny whipster can do. To talk much, and in many languages, and yet to have said nothing, that, my dear GILLIE, is what all have striven for, but only one, gifted above his fellows with magic power of weaving the gossamer thread of words, has truly attained. For it is in that reconcilement of apparent opposites, and in the cadenced measures of a musical voice, that the dignified traditions of an aesthetic purity, repellent to the thin, colourless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... small complications, simplicity. Being out in all weathers, and rolling about so, how can they stand upon trifles? Solid stays, and stanchions, and strong bulwarks are their need, and not a dance of gnats in gossamer; hating all fogs, they blow not up with their own breath misty mysteries, and gazing mainly at the sky and sea, believe purely in God and the devil. In a word, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... this ruin and the forest together. But first promise not to interrupt me. If you snap the golden threads of thought, they will float away on the air like the film of the gossamer, and I shall never be able ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the Old world yet had found the New, The fairies oft in their frolics flew To the fragrant isles of the Caribbee— Bright bosom-gems of a golden sea. Too dark was the film of the Indian's eye, These gossamer sprites to suspect or spy,— So they danced 'mid the spicy groves unseen, And mad were their merry pranks, I ween; For the fairies, like other discreet little elves, Are freest and fondest when all ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... the Beagle has been within the mouth of the Plata, the rigging has been coated with the web of the Gossamer Spider. One day (November 1st, 1832) I paid particular attention to this subject. The weather had been fine and clear, and in the morning the air was full of patches of the flocculent web, as on ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... had been written to London signed by Dowie and the models and patterns had been sent to the village and brought to the castle by Jock Macaur. Later there had come rolls of fine flannel and lawn, with gossamer thread and fairy needles and embroidery ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... supposition, that Miss Thusa's iron features relaxed a little, and she glanced round the enclosure, more in condescension than hope, surveying the boughs of the lilacs, drooping with their weight of purple blossoms, and peering at the gossamer's web. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the beating of my heart I listen'd, and nought else around me heard. How stirless! even a waving gossamer— The mazy motes that rise and fall in air— Had been as signs of life; when, suddenly, As bursts the thunder-peal upon the calm, Whence I had come the clank of feet was heard— A noise remote, which near'd and near'd, and near'd— Even to the threshold ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... with woods and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road for me ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... preaching, the unreturning days of our youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil its taste. For it is all you have, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... plane, responding perfectly to Bill's touch, soared upward, it seemed as though they were rising on gossamer wings out of a well of darkness and mists. They actually rose to greet the sun whose first rays were gilding the tops of the hills. They went up in the very face of the great orb whose light, first striking the upper wings, turned all the delicate wires and cords ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... seen Irene Lawrence in the carriage and on horseback; but as she stepped into the room now, and stood there rather surprised, she might have been a daughter of Juno. Tall, slender, arrowy straight, but lithe and faultlessly rounded, her fleecy white shawl like a gossamer web falling off her shoulders, her haughty carriage, her wealth of purple-black hair coiled about her shapely head, a hundred times handsomer than any artifice of dressing, her brilliant complexion, her large eyes with their long sweeping lashes that veiled ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... our voyage we had most beautiful weather; the deep blue sea upon which the foam-crested waves chased each other as if at play, and the bright heavens where thin and transparent clouds were floating like veils of gossamer, filled the heart with gladness and disposed it to profitable musings. Light winds filled the sails that swelled beautifully on their masts and drove the ship, that under a cloud of white canvass looked like a stately queen, onward. Sometimes she ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... about them everywhere were soft, fleecy clouds, and over their heads was the glowing sky, and the stars were shining through it, as a lady's eyes shine through a veil of gossamer. And the sky and stars seemed so near that Connla thought he could almost ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... her. I should feel a difficulty in describing this, which consisted in a certain braverie that bespoke courage and self-possession. There was no coarseness of manner—only the levity of a heart gay as summer, and light as gossamer, but capable, when occasion required, of exhibiting a wonderful boldness and strength. She was a woman that would be termed beautiful in any country; but with her beauty there was combined elegance, both ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... a thousand knick-knacks of which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young American bride is often ushered into her new home,—her wardrobe all gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a museum of elegant and costly gewgaws, and, amid the whole collection of elegancies and fragilities, she, perhaps, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... he had even in Missouri; then Carington's strong-hearted insistence that, in view of the agitation over the ore discoveries at Joplin, he go on "out there" and prospect; and then Carington's foolishly irrelevant heel-piece, "Miss Gossamer sails for Europe Saturday!" and the sudden appeal of the notion to go "out there," its sharp striking-in.... Carington and he taking counsel with some of the other fellows in his rooms later on, all the deep voices roaring at once, all the boys insulting him at once, belittling ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... he fell into a series of fitful dozes. He dreamed the room in which he was sleeping was suddenly transformed into a huge spider web from which there was no escape. And he caught glimpses of Storch himself hanging spider-wise from a gossamer thread, spinning dizzily in midair... He awoke repeatedly, returning as often to the same dream. Toward morning he heard a faint stirring about. But he lay huddled in a pretense of sleep... Finally the door banged and he knew that Storch had left... He let ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the green of the ocean, the tonic of the sea air, and the swift, never-to-be-forgotten creak-creak-creak of flying wings close overhead. There was a thrill in the cautious creeping toward the lake wreathed in the gossamer mists of the autumn morning, and the wriggling through the stiffened yellow grass, and a pang of delighted wonder at coming so close to the wild, winged things, squattering and making soft duck-chatterings in the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... own, making them seem different in the transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in the history ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... beware how he comes before the eyes of Richard. Hark thee—thou art wise—he hath been over-bold among those in whose fair looks and weak judgments we trust our honour, as you of the East lodge your treasures in caskets of silver wire, as fine and as frail as the web of a gossamer." ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... all! Then on again through a patch of woodland which looked as though a huge gossamer veil had been laid over it. If ever pastelle colors were displayed to perfection Nature here held her exhibition. Soft pinks, pale blues, silver grays, the tenderest greens with here and there a touch of the maple buds' rich mahogany reds, and above and about ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... day that The Gates was published, Yvonne came down late to breakfast, a gossamer study all filmy lace, with the morning sun in her hair. The windows were open, and a hint of spring lent zest to every joy, the loamy fragrance of nascent plant life stealing into the room from the little garden. Tulips decorated the ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... where the wind sweeps clean, Where the smooth-limbed ash to the blue stands bare, And the gossamer spreads her opalled ware— And Jones is ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... pushed back, and Peter, with this fairy-like creature in a dinner-gown of most fetching pink gossamer clinging to his arm, took to the deck ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... example of Lorenzo himself, otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron—the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... us! As you value your comfort, dear reader, never purchase a hard hat. A hard heart may be borne with, but a hard hat—never! And last of all, a hat should be light—yes, the lighter the better—light as a gossamer web, though 'tis a simile that will not bear stretching. You may have the misfortune to be a heavy-headed man, but do not add to it that of being heavy-hatted. Avoid the extremity of suffering; and observe the climax ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... moiety of an exploded cracker.... The maids, I say, will have taken down all that holly stuff and nonsense about the clocks, lamps, and looking-glasses, the dear boys will be back at school, fondly thinking of the pantomime fairies whom they have seen; whose gaudy gossamer wings are battered by this time; and whose pink cotton (or silk is it?) lower extremities are all dingy and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... of lemon yellow that the boy daubed above the hills might have been painted with a brush dipped in the sunset. The heavy clouds with their gossamer edgings had truth of tone and color. Then the experimenter came to the purple ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... on which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before. When she found herself in the ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the fiercest hunters when Kargynda turns at bay. Close, Children of the Starlight! close, for the Emerald Throne! Close round the life that closeth your life within the zone! Rests the Golden Circle's glory, rests the silver gleam on her Who shall rein Kargynda's fury with a thread of gossamer. He metes not mortal measure, He pays not human price, Who crowns that life's devotion with the death of sacrifice! Woe worth the moment's panic; woe worth the victory won! But the Night is near the breaking when the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... meadow-grasses thrown on the threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle down and dandelion down, the brown down of the goat's-beard; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores twirling aslant—the wind carries them all on its back, gossamer web and great heron's vanes—the same weight to the wind; the drops of the waterfall blown aside sprinkle the bright green ferns. The voice of the cuckoo in his season travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the most distant hill, and deep into ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... slanted dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray corners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading. For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life—then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat and the swish ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... awakened in his memory like forgotten melodies, valse tunes, fragments of poems, elder-blossoms, and swallows, sunsets on a mirror-like sea. All his memories of the springtime of life came dancing along in clouds of gossamer and enveloped her. He drew a cross at the bottom of the page, as lovers do, and by the side of it he wrote the words: ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... procession, every line of the limbs and of the light draperies suggesting motion and glee. How did he know that some of these were men, and some were women? He had never seen such dresses as they wore, which seemed to be composed of tunics and gossamer veils of blue and red. Yet he did know quite distinctly which were men and which were women, and he knew that it was a marriage scene. The bride wore a wreath of flowers; the bridegroom carried a sheaf or garland of fruit ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall |
