"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sisters of the earth-life! On pearly wings of gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our heaven-heart; that the beautiful and the true in this weary earth-life may receive ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... of countenance. He wore his hair, which was light and curly, cut very close, and incipient whiskers adorned the outline of his lower jaw. He was dressed in a gray tweed wrapper, with trousers of the Brougham pattern, and he sported a hat—black, but whether beaver or gossamer we are uninformed—high in the crown, but very narrow in the brim, bearing altogether no very remote resemblance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke they wafted ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of thousands of grey people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a beggar, creep along with weary faces and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that unnatural light which shines as it were from the tomb. No man could have looked upon them without pity; so attractive, so young, yet so ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... the earliest rays of the sun; and in their virgin light the aeroplane was transformed into a thing of gossamer gold. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... watchful days Omega and Thalma went often to the Mirror and gazed into it in search of vapor clouds. And more than once those gossamer-like formations appeared over different parts of the world to gladden their hearts only to fade away before their vision. The reflections of those embryo clouds became less frequent as the days wore on. Omega and Thalma ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... cut in pieces, and nailed to poles, had 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 since,—chiefly upon paralytic ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... a doubt weighing upon his spirit, Felix longed to tell his mother all. The slight cloud that had arisen of late years between them was so gossamer-like yet, that the faintest breath could drive it away. Though her boy was not the brilliant genius she had secretly and fondly hoped he would prove, he was still dearer to Felicita than ought else on earth or, indeed, in heaven; ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... by the heiress. Poor Polly's eyes kept wandering towards them, and (I suppose, because I had heard so much about her) so did mine. It was only a quiet dinner-party, and Miss Chislett had brought out her needlework, some gossamer lace affair, and Leo leant over the sofa where she sat, playing with the contents of her workbox. Polly's eyes and mine were not the only ones turned towards them. Ours was not the only interest in the future ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... efficient instrument in the preservation of the Union, But, sir, if the fact were otherwise— if all the teachings of experience were reversed—better, far better, a rope of sand, aye, the flimsiest gossamer that ever glistened in the morning dew, than chains of iron and shackles of steel; better the wildest anarchy, with the hope, the chance, of one hour's inspiration of the glorious breath of freedom, than ages of the hopeless bondage ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... us hasten home," pleaded poor Madge, who felt that this might be her only chance to throw about him the gossamer threads which would draw the cord and cable that could bind him to her. "What is supper to the witchery of ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Bird-like in her love of individual freedom, the last woman in the world to be bullied in her affections, she keenly appreciated the niceness of his attitude. She did this consciously, but deeper than all consciousness, and intangible as gossamer, were the effects of this. All unrealizable, save for some supreme moment, did the web of Daylight's personality creep out and around her. Filament by filament, these secret and undreamable bonds were being established. They it was that could have given the cue to her saying yes ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... earth as it lay, That bright little fury went, humming, away, With gossamer softness, and fair to the eye, Like some living brilliant, just ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... I did swear to wed thee? Well, and what is marriage? Is it the union of the heart, that bond beautiful as gossamer and than gossamer more light, which binds soul to soul, as they float through the dreamy night of passion, a bond to be, perchance, melted in the dews of dawn? Or is it the iron link of enforced, unchanging union whereby if sinks the one the other must be dragged beneath the sea of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... it, her long train sweeping across the hearth where that morning she had knelt in such utter desolation, and where now was lying a bit of blackened paper, which the housemaid's broom had not found when, early in the day, the room was swept and dusted. So Ethelyn's white satin brushed against the gossamer thing, which floated upward for a moment, and then settled back upon the heavy, shining folds. It was Richard who saw it first, and Richard's hand which brushed away the skeleton of Frank's letter from the skirts ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... ceased and the season of dreams begun. Though the sky was a clear steel-blue overhead, the horizon was veiled in a thin blue haze into which the landscape and distant objects seemed to fade and lose themselves. Filmy threads of gossamer floated through the air, suffused with a soft golden glow. Most of the birds had ceased to sing and the drone of insects became less persistent, as if fearful to disturb the hush and calm ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... gossamer, resemble the clouds which scarcely break the azure surface of the sky and which they call flowers of the storm. But soon their colors take a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... dawn rosy-red and his eyelashes stormed the keen-edged blade: the whiteness of his brow resembled the moon shining bright, and the blackness of his locks was as the murky night; and his waist was more slender than the gossamer[FN231] and his back parts than two sand heaps bulkier, making a Babel of the heart with their softness; but his waist complained of the weight of his hips and loins; and his charms ravished all mankind, even as one of the poets saith ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... a chair, within a suspended framework of steely bars, themselves the foundation for a network of fine-drawn colored wires. Shimmering, like the gossamer threads of a spider's spinning, they wove upward, around and over the chair, so that he who sat there would be completely ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child, fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where the sun shines always, and the birds sing. To the blind child the dark ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the stitches of gossamer fineness with absorbed interest. Then she folded the sheet carefully and handed it back ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... pages, read the English translation beneath 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 she usurping her ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... continuous. The gills are attached to the stem, frequently notched, membranaceous, persistent, changing color, dry, powdery, with rusty-yellow spores which drop slowly. The veil and gills are the chief marks of distinction. The former is gossamer-like and separate from the cuticle, and the latter are always powdered. It is always essential to note the color of the gills in the young plant, since color is variable and sometimes shows only the slightest trace on the stem, colored from ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer. Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537—1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels. All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he died—so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... 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, and ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... are not made; they grow, they drop from the clouds, they float over the land like gossamer, [Footnote: These fine cobwebs, produced by field-spiders, have always in the popular mind been connected with the gods. After the advent of Christianity they were connected with the Virgin Mary. The shroud in which she was wrapped after her death was believed to have been woven of the very finest ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... out at the old man's eyes; his tongue, utterly unprepared for the unexpected contingency, refused its office; a corncob imperfectly denuded dropped from his nerveless hand, and was critically examined, in turn, by the gossamer dogs, hoping against hope. A smoking brand in the fireplace fell suddenly upon a bed of hot coals, where, lacking the fortitude of Guatimozin, it emitted a sputtering protest, followed by a thin flame like a ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... our feet nonchalantly elevated on a railing, and our eyes drinking in the magnificent prospect of the vast city, as brilliant in variegated colors as a flower garden, while a soft breeze, that gently swayed the gigantic gossamer, soothed us like ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... the virgin, the suitor, by his 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... her post in the ante-room. There she stood thinking, or dreaming. She was startled back to actual life by a voice close to her. One of the dancing young ladies had met with a misfortune. Her dress, of some gossamer material, had been looped up by nosegays of flowers, and one of these had fallen off in the dance, leaving her gown to trail. To repair this, she had begged her partner to bring her to the room where the assistants should have been. None were ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... done her pleasant work famously. Not a fashionable person among her own friends, or a distinguished one known to bridegroom or bride, had been omitted. Thus the stately church was crowded. Snowy feathers waved over gossamer bonnets; lace, glittering silks, and a flash of jewels were seen on every hand, fluttering in the dim religious light around smiling ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... whose umbrageous brims so far exceed in dimensions the little umbrellas raised above them, that a stranger is at a loss to conjecture the use of the latter. Shortly after the sun has set, these habiliments are all thrown off, dresses of gossamer are substituted in their place, and the fair wearers rush out into the open air, to enjoy the cool ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... The gossamer floats up on phantom wing; The sailor-vision voyages the skies And carries into chaos everything That ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... built for her use a little child's playhouse. It was just large enough for half a dozen children, and would perhaps hold nearly as many grown people. But it had a good-sized verandah and on this were tables piled with the loveliest fairy-like gossamer garments and comforts for tiny mites of humanity. Such exquisite blankets and afghans and tufted silk coverlets and such dainty frocks and caps and little coats and everything an infant could possibly use, from baskets to bibs and ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... got two "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 dry-goods above, and, favored by a pass, and Major Mulford's ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... seriousness, had settled upon her. Her love for the big doctor was singularly clear-eyed and far-seeing. There were going to be times when every ounce of skill, tact, patience, love itself, would be called upon, for the reins must be gossamer-light, invisible, but always firm and sure, that should guide and tone down so impatient and fiery a nature as his. It was very easy to love him; it wasn't always going to be easy to live with him, and Alicia knew it. But she also knew, with a faith ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... sure. Suppose it's ever so many millions of tiny grains blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It's like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers: little ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... grown to love the hunt—the early sun sparkling on the yellow of frost-coated grass, 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
... one hand flung across his brows to shield his eyes, for the light outside the sill seemed dazzling after the semidark of the flat, he scanned first the opposite roof edges, a whole story higher than he, where sparrows were alighting, and where smoke plumes curled like veils of gossamer; next he scanned ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... shone in the old man's eyes. She was wondering if she should go down and visit the place, when, one day, Willow Lane came to her. It was a warm languorous October day, a day when all nature seemed at a standstill. Her work was done, she was resting under her soft coverlet of blue gossamer, preparing for her long sleep. Helen had had a hard day, for she had not yet learned her new strange task. The room was noisy, fifty little heads were bent over fifty different schemes for mischief, and fifty sibilant whispers delivered forbidden messages. The teacher was writing ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... knew little regarding these things, and had a sad want of respect for the splendours around her. "I only know they cost a precious deal of money, Major," she said to her guest, "and that I don't advise you to try one of them gossamer gilt chairs: I came down on one the night we gave our second dinner-party. Why didn't you come and see us before? We'd have asked ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... calculation to a sphere to which it did not apply. Experience proved that the Roman symmachy, notwithstanding its seemingly looser bond of connection, kept together against Pyrrhus like a wall of rock, whereas the Carthaginian fell to pieces like a gossamer web as soon as a hostile army set foot on African soil. It was so on the landing of Agathocles and of Regulus, and likewise in the mercenary war; the spirit that prevailed in Africa is illustrated by the fact, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... her. Her beauty struck him as never before. Something had been added to it. H lne seemed to him a girl, a frail girl. How could he ever have thought this Woman worldly! Her fragrance reached him. It was a fragrance that had no weight, but it bound him—bound him hand and foot in its gossamer web. He felt that he ought to struggle, but that he did not wish to. He waited for H ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... ha," breathed a sweet, melancholy tone from below; and they turned and saw it in Luigi's hands, the frosty film of gossamer. He held it up a moment, pressed it to his lips, folded it again into his breast; and if it was plain that somebody had it, it was plainer still that somebody meant to keep it. And then, as if twin stars were bending over him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 bows, into ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... had but dropped a dainty reminder of herself here and there to give them character—an embroidered dressing-case on the bureau, an attractive travelling work-box on the table by her bed, a photograph, a lace-bordered handkerchief, a gossamer scarf on a chair-back ready for use if she should need it for a stroll in the moonlight with the Skeptic. The closet door, ajar, gave a glimpse of summer frocks, hanging in order on padded hangers brought in a trunk; beneath, a row of incredibly ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... of art 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
... a circuit round the bed and approached the table to look at the hat. A tight knot and a slight tear in the gossamer indicated that it had been discarded very hastily, and Caldew wondered whether Hazel had it on, waiting for an opportunity to slip away from the moat-house, when he had knocked at the door to summon her ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... they were very simple. She had on what is called a gossamer, which covered her from neck to toe, and on her head a hat wrapped all about with a ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... spiders' webs, also woven of silver and gold and silk and linen. They are used by the women as head dresses and scarfs and rich men use them for turbans. Sometimes an Indian noble will have seventy or eighty yards of this delicate gossamer wound about his head and the ends, beautifully embroidered, with long fringes of gold, hang gracefully down upon ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... not August now; the summer was past, yet the weather was fit for the height of summer. Warm, spicy, dry air, showing misty in the distance like a gossamer veil, and near by a still glow over everything. The two young people wandered over the bridge and slowly mounted the bank among the oaks and beeches, keeping in the shade as much as might be. There was ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... 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 of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. Yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! Believe that the American climate is unmanning, or that one American whom you know is severely taxed by Lilliput labors. The last hot summer enfeebled ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... of emerald moss the brooklet flows Melodious, and rejoicing as it goes; Past drooping ferns, and through the mazy whir Of insect wings of gold and gossamer. ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... swallow-haunted head, Yet at the wind's relentless urging turns Its flying arms in wild appeal outspread; So am I vex'd by vain desire, that burns These barren places whence the hair hath fled, To wander far amid the woodland ferns, Where dewdrops shine along the gossamer thread; Where its own sunlight on the reddening leaf Sleeps, when soft mists ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... dreamed of under the sun Were brought and displayed at the royal throne, And put by, one by one Till a graybeard monster came to the King— Haggard and wrinkled and old— And spread to his gaze this wondrous thing,— A gossamer veil ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... women and children, every one of whom was stretched in various attitudes upon the floor, as peacefully enfolded in the arms of Morpheus, and, perchance, as sweetly dreaming as if resting upon beds of down and pillowed upon fine linen and gossamer lace. ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... passionately. "It is true, that before you returned, and while I was reckless because I believed you despised me, I trifled away more time there than I should. But Miss Marchmont, in reality, is as indifferent towards me as I towards her. I am not bound to her by even a gossamer thread." ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... temperature of the Rockies farther east is unknown; and although there is snow to the right, snow to the left, snow all around, and ice under foot, I travel all through the gloomy sheds in my shirt-sleeves, with but a gossamer rubber coat thrown over my shoulders to keep off the snow- water which is constantly melting and dripping through the roof, making it almost like going through a shower of rain. Often, when it is warm and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... two of these gossamer webs, two heavy sweaters and wrap yourself in oil skins and maybe you ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... They put their April raiment on; And those eternal forms, Unhurt by a thousand storms, Shot up to the height of the sky again, And danced as merrily as young men. I saw them mask their awful glance Sidewise meek in gossamer lids; And to speak my thought if none forbids It was as if the eternal gods, Tired of their starry periods, Hid their majesty in cloth Woven of tulips and painted moth. On carpets green the maskers march Below May's well-appointed arch, Each star, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ever alive to the least as to the greatest of the complicated truths of existence; descending to what pedants would call the trivial and the frivolous. From every mesh in the social web, he can disentangle a grace. And for him each airy gossamer floats in the gold of the sunlight. Know you not that around the animalcule that sports in the water there shines a halo, as around the star (The monas mica, found in the purest pools, is encompassed with ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... stately, in characteristic elegance of attire and manner both. Her white morning dress floated off in soft edges of lace from her white arms; a shawl of precious texture was gathered loosely about them; on her head a gossamer web of some fancy manufacture fell off on either side, a mock covering for it. She came up to Daisy and kissed her, and then examined into her various arrangements, to see that she was in all respects well and properly cared for. Her mother's ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... subtilty of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them to the demands of fancy and thought. The nice optics that see what is not to be seen have passed into a sarcastic proverb; yet those are precisely ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... of the gossamer, the cobwebs which may be seen in large quantities on the furze bushes; and so of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... altars of the morning. The fields lay yellow below; the rich colours of decay hung heavy on the woods, and seemed to clothe them as with the trappings of a majestic sorrow; but the spider webs sparkled with dew, and the gossamer films floated thick in the level sunbeams. It was a great time for the spiders, those visible ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... she began to undress, softly and bashfully, as if she had found some new value in her own beauty. Her hands lingered fondly among the tresses of her hair, and gathering them up beneath her pretty Valenciennes cap, she smiled to see its gossamer shadows fall upon her forehead, giving the ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... patronage, and in some degree the 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
... pure merino-wool. It is of varying thickness, and many ladies, both young and old, are adopting it for combinations; these and one petticoat forming the whole of the clothing. Of course, the thickness of these garments is to be suited to the season, and the gossamer clothing manufactured for the warm season leaves nothing to be desired in its lightness ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade Doris away ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... was a closed book to me. I tried the poets, who added to my sufferings, by translating them into their passionate language. Thus, reason is baffled by the graceful apparition of a lovely blonde, who glided across my existence like a gossamer over a clear sky, and banished repose for ever from my heart! My eyes had scarcely rested upon the angle of my dreams ere she took flight, leaving on my brow the shadow of her wings! She was only a child, and that child had passed over my destiny like a ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... were out in geaemes and reaeces, Loud a-laughen, wild in me'th, Wi' windblown heaeir, an' zunbrown'd feaeces, Leaepen on the high-sky'd e'th, Avore the lights Wer tin'd o' nights, An' while the gossamer's light netten Sparkled ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... waiting Wilbur Cowan. Her dark hair was still plainly, though rather effectively, drawn about her small head—she had definitely rebuffed the suggestion of her mother that it be marcelled—but her wisp of a frock of bronze gossamer was revolutionary in the extreme. Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising aplomb, bore the scrutiny of the family while she pulled long white gloves along her bare arms. A feathered fan ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... man last night who had just come home from Simla. He saw a great deal of her, and he says that she and her mother were adored in India. They were thought so quaint and sweet—unlike other people—and the girl so lovely, in a sort of gossamer way. And who do you think was always about with them—at Peshawar first, and then at Simla—so that everybody talked? Captain Warkworth! My man believed there was an ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a veil of iridescent gossamer draped over the ugliness of reality. Happiness is rooted in illusion—in the ignoring of harsh fact and jarring circumstance, and the perception only of what ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... dawn have scarcely lifted their gossamer veils from the dreaming sea, when the pinnacled rocks of Rum and Aye, the outposts of the Banda group, pierce the swathing vapours. The creamy cliffs of Swangi (the Ghost Island), traditionally haunted by the spirits ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... from this spot into the distance at every hour of the day and season of the year. But the fairest time of all on the Steiger was at sunset, on clear autumn days, when the scene close at hand, where the threads of gossamer were floating, was steeped in golden light, the distance in such exquisite tints-from crimson to the deepest violet blue, edged with a line of light-the Saale glimmered with a silvery lustre amid its fringe of alders, and the sun flashed on the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... three dots, cased in a filament of jelly. The lines were destined for his backbone and stomach; the dots for his eyes and mouth. The latter was ready for immediate work, given only the impulse. As he sank slowly, head downwards, the impulse was supplied. Out from his neck there floated two sprays of gossamer network, of such delicate texture, such dainty tracery, that nothing but the gentle laving of water could have unravelled them and left them whole. Through them the water flowed, and with it came the dim consciousness of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright With tangled gossamer that fell by night, Pearling ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 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 ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... weavers gone blind from the intricacies of their queen's coronation robe, can kneel at her hem to kiss the cloth of gold that cursed them. A peasant can look on at a poet with no thought to barter his black bread and lentils for a single gossamer fancy. Backstair slaveys vie with each other whose master is more mighty. And this is the story of Millie Moores who, with no anarchy in her heart and no feud with the human democracy, could design for women to whom befell the wine and pearl dog-collars ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... 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 for both ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... that a hand held the glass, said: "Is that you? Are you ready for me? Follow. 'In those days no one leaped up to meet pale riding Death; no one saw in her face that she was brotherhood incarnate; no one with a heart as light as gossamer kissed her feet, and, smiling, passed into the Universe.'" His voice died away, and when next he spoke it was in a quick, husky whisper: "I must—I must—I must—-" There was silence; then he added: "Give me ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... old and wistful Drifts my dream. Petal-patined the dream, white-mistful As the dew-sweet haunt of the dim whitebeam Because of memory, a little wind ... It is the gossamer-float of the butterfly This drift of dream From the sweet of to-day to the sweet Of days long drifted by. It is the drift of the butterfly, it is the fleet Drift of petals which my noon has thinned, It is the ebbing out of my life, of the petals of days. To the years, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... Her person was of the smallest size that is believed to comport with beauty, and which poets and artists have chosen as the beau ideal of feminine loveliness. Her dress was of a dark and glossy silk, and fluttered like gossamer around her form. Long, flowing, and curling tresses of hair, still blacker and more shining than her robe, fell at times about her shoulders, completely enveloping the whole of her delicate bust in their ringlets; or at others streaming in the wind. The elevation at which she stood prevented ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a bad woman! It metamorphoses one entirely. He loses all semblance to his former self, parts with all his reason, no more walks upright, and bids philosophy adieu. One drop from the cup of her incantations, and the gossamer net-work which she threw about him is changed into prisonbars, her silken chain into links of forged iron; strong will is dwindled, and he who on some 'heaven-kissing hill' stood up to gaze upon the stars, is fit to grovel in a sty.—Miserable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, Ulysses put on his shirt and cloak, while the goddess wore a dress of a light gossamer fabric, very fine and graceful, with a beautiful golden girdle about her waist and a veil to cover her head. She at once set herself to think how she could speed Ulysses on his way. So she gave him a great bronze axe that suited his hands; it was ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... more, or less. Her little waist and little black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but slightly veiled by the long lashes. Her expression was of sweetness and happiness; it belonged by right to any face ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... are still richer than anything the loom can weave. In the great fresco, each individual of the multitude that fills a public place, or defiles in open procession under the noonday light, is not only a masterpiece of fashion, but a model of neatness; linen, delicate as woven gossamer, falls into folds as finely exact as an engraver's point could draw; velvet shoes tread without speck or spot upon the well-scoured pavement of a public street; men-at-arms grasp weapons and hold bridles with hands ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... cunning; he can read The inside of the earth, and spell the stars; He knows the policies of foreign lands; Can string you names of districts, cities, towns, The whole world over, tight as beads of dew Upon a gossamer thread; he sifts, he weighs; All things are put to question; he must live Knowing that he grows wiser every day Or else not live at all, and seeing too Each little drop of wisdom as it falls Into the ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth. How slight it is, how invisible it has been, how suddenly it appears! And the sunshine of the warm April afternoon, heightened ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... is glass nought like ashes of fern; *But for* they have y-knowen it so ferne** *because **before Therefore ceaseth their jangling and their wonder. As sore wonder some on cause of thunder, On ebb and flood, on gossamer and mist, And on all things, till that the cause is wist.* *known Thus jangle they, and deemen and devise, Till that the king gan ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... outposts of the shade; While gnats keep up a dizzy reel, And the grasshopper, perched upon his blade, Loud drones his fairy threshing-wheel:— Hour when some poet-wit might feign The drowsy tune of the throbbing air The weaving of the gossamer In secret nooks of wood and lane— The gossamer, silk night-robes of the flowers, Fluttered apart by amorous morning hours. Yea, as the weaving of the gossamer, If truly that the mystic golden boom, Is the strange rapture of my hidden loom, ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... wants and new ideas every day! Dana's dress was, probably, an holan batista, which he calls "Bolan";—it was, in other words, a figured linen cambric. But you have bought those cambrics by the piece, and also pias, thin, gossamer fabrics, of all degrees of color and beauty, sometimes with pattern flounces,—do you hear? And you have bought Spanish table-cloths with red or blue edges, with bull-fights on them, and balloon-ascensions, and platoons of soldiery in review, and with bull-fighting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and beating of the ear, there is sometimes a considerable effusion of fluid between the integument and the cartilage occupying the whole of the inside of the flap of the ear. The only remedy is to open the enlarged part from end to end, carefully to take out the gossamer lining of the cyst, and then to insert some bits of lint on each side of the incision, in order to prevent its closing too soon. In a few days, the parietes of the cyst will begin to adhere, and a perfect cure ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... at them—an acre or more of black dots scattered on the steel-grey shades of the level sea, under the uniform gossamer grey mist with a formless brighter patch in one place—the veiled whiteness of the cliff coming through, like a diffused, mysterious radiance. It was a delicate and wonderful picture, something expressive, suggestive, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... was tremendous boasting and the accounting of unrivaled adventures. In Aladdin's car, however, there was one man who did not join in the fellowship, for he was too sick. He had been a big man and strong, but he looked like a ghost made of white gossamer and violet shadows. His own mother would not have recognized him. He lay back into the corner of a seat with averted face and closed eyes. The more decent-minded endeavored, on his account, to impose upon the noisy a degree of quiet, but their efforts were unavailing. Aladdin, drumming with ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... threads formed 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
... as Robin Goodfellow. Shakespeare, in Midsummer Night's Dream, represents him as "a very Shetlander among the gossamer-winged, dainty-limbed fairies, strong enough to knock all their heads together, a rough, knurly-limbed, fawn-faced, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... October sky was pale amethyst, and the sunlight burned like orange flame through the yellow leaves of beech and oak. Gnats and midges danced and wavered overhead; a spider dropped from a twig halfway to the ground and hung suspended on the end of his gossamer thread. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... afternoon. A tram-car was waiting, and she hurried her charges into it, taking no heed of Tom's desire to sit where he could see the horses, or of Floss's loudly-expressed determination to ride on the roof. She took her seat, and, leaning back, drew her black gossamer veil tightly over her face, and closed her eyes, seeming to become totally ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... sweet in a thoughtless woman's really innocent life. A young girl flirts with a stranger on the street. The result is something disagreeable, and straight-way comes the excuse: "Why, I didn't think! I meant no harm; I just wanted to have a little fun." Now, look me straight in the eye, young gossamer-head, while I tell you what I know. The girl who will flirt with strange men in public places, however harmless and innocent it may appear, places herself in that man's estimation upon a level with the most abandoned of her sex and courts the same regard. Strong language, ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... and it is a literal fact that I rubbed my eyes, half believing that I dreamed. For beneath, she was arrayed in gossamer silk which more than indicated the perfect lines of her slim shape; wore a jeweled girdle and barbaric ornaments; was a figure fit for the walled gardens of Stamboul—a figure amazing, incomprehensible, in the prosaic setting ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the window, while he showed Carington how little chance 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 ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately: long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. Here comes the lady:—O, so light a foot Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint: A lover may bestride the gossamer That idles in the wanton summer air And yet not fall; so ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... mentioned, but I do remember walking along a lane at no great distance from Howden Clough. I was troubled about a personal matter, and, if I may so put it, a secret matter, a matter which I cannot discuss, but which does not even by a gossamer thread connect me with the crime of which I am accused. And if you condemn me on such an evidence, then no man's life is safe. No man can be worried and perplexed without, under similar circumstances, being accused of a crime of ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... to arrive, Fanny Forrest came rustling down the stairs and into the brightly lighted parlor. It had begun to rain just before sunset, and she had brought Celestine with her to hold the umbrella over her while her own jewelled hands gathered those costly skirts about her under the folds of the gossamer that enveloped her from head to feet. The girl, a bright, intelligent mulattress, followed her mistress upstairs to the room set apart for the use of the ladies, and was busy removing her wraps when Nellie ran up to inquire if she could be ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... glamour. Foul is fair! Foul fair thee, young springal, if thou go to the nets. Shadow and goblin to goblin and shadow! Flesh and blood to blood and flesh!"—and dancing round him, with wanton looks and bare arms, and gossamer robes that brushed him ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the great flies now came flying past Count Hamilcar with softly buzzing wings. He went "brrr" with his lips and smiled a really cheerful smile as he watched how this queer bundle of gauzy wings and golden gossamer floated deliriously through the sunshine. "Mad with life," he thought, "if all this only has some object. At any rate there is more chance for meaning than for the lack of it, although—if I am a digit in the great calculation, then to be ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... are regarded as the dwelling-place or symbol of the god. In past times the Tantis made the famous fine cotton cloth, known as abrawan or 'running water,' which was supplied only to the imperial zenana at Delhi. Sir H. Risley relates the following stories illustrating its gossamer texture. On one occasion a daughter of Aurangzeb was reproached on entering the room for her immodest attire, through which her limbs could be seen, and excused herself by the plea that she had on seven folds of cloth over her body. Again in the reign of Alivardi ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... dropping one by one, and lay in little hillocks upon the faded grass. The blue hills which embosomed the lake were encircled with a misty veil, while the sunshine seemed to fall with a somber light upon the fields of yellow corn. Everything, even the gossamer thistle-top which floated upon the autumnal air, conspired to make the day one of those indescribable days when all hearts are pervaded with a feeling of pleasurable sadness—a sense ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... the pass; below them a short valley led down to Katmai and the sea. The day was bright, the air clear, nevertheless after the guide had stared up at the peaks for a time he shook his head, then reentered the tent and lay down. The mountains were "smoking"; from their tops streamed a gossamer veil which the travelers knew to be drifting snow clouds carried by the wind. It meant delay, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... balloon gossamer came rattling down the long stay and the jaws of the booms ratched, fore and main, as they swung over. From astern came the voices of the men in boat and dory, warning each other to hang on when they felt her jibing. Some of them must have come near to being ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... for these robes of mine The loveliness of earth, But happenings remote and fine Like threads of dreams will blow and shine In gossamer and crystalline, And I was glad from birth. So even while my eyes repine, My heart is ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... pastures of Parrox, over the grassy spaces of the Downs, topping the larks in thought, and shining beam for beam against the new-risen sun. The time of his going-out was September of the harvest: a fresh wet air was abroad. He looked at the thin blue of the sky, he saw dew and gossamer lie heavy on the hedge-rows. All his heart laughed. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... Gossamer veils hung everywhere over the level country, big drops fell from the trees on the dry leaves carpeting the ground, and the cold in the woods threatened to paralyze little Maya's wings. No ray of the dawn had as yet found its way between the trees. The air was as hushed as if the ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels |
