"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I felt much better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; the other sat upright, keeping guard ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... mounted on frozen mounds, had utterly failed to batter a way into the city. As a subaltern he had idolised Wolfe, and here on the ground of Wolfe's triumphant stroke he still dreamed of rivalling it. In Quebec a cautious phlegmatic British General sat and waited, keeping, as the moonless nights drew on, his officers ready against surprise. For a week they had slept in their clothes and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fine but moonless. Save for the taxi-man and herself, it would seem that nothing moved anywhere about. She came up level with the trees. There was a kind of very small lodge among them, closely invested with ragged shrubs and ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Mall Drake was smitten by a sudden impulse. The fog had cleared from the streets; he looked up at the sky. The night was moonless but starlit, and very clear. He lifted the trap, spoke to the cabman, and in a few minutes was driving ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Either to old Laertes or the Queen. And now, all stretch'd their hands toward the feast Reeking before them, and when hunger none Felt more or thirst, Mesaulius clear'd the board. Then, fed to full satiety, in haste Each sought his couch. Black came a moonless night, And Jove all night descended fast in show'rs, With howlings of the ever wat'ry West. 560 Ulysses, at that sound, for trial sake Of his good host, if putting off his cloak He would accommodate him, or require That service for him at some other ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvellous suns, and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the east, from the aromatic breath of the leopard, and the perfume of the fallen pomegranate, and the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress of the girl-bather's feet, and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide from the maiden's ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... horrid cloud, on scathless wing; Old Chaos round him, like a tiar, Swathed the long rush of immaterial fire; As thou, descending from afar, Wast canopied with living arch of light, Pale pillars of immortal star, Burst through the curtains of the moonless night. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... prevent as far as possible births and deaths occurring on the island. Even now, funerals, dogs and kuruma are prohibited. The iron lanterns of the shrine and galleries and a hundred more in the pine tree-studded approaches are undoubtedly "a most magnificent spectacle at full tide on a moonless night"; but what of the subservience to the profitable foreign tourist ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... completely over her shoulders; her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... noisy children who played upon the waste ground in front of the parlor windows. Solvent tenants were disturbed at unhallowed hours by the noise of ghostly furniture vans creeping stealthily away in the moonless night. Insolvent tenants openly defied the collector of the water-rate from their ten-roomed strongholds, and existed for weeks without any visible means of procuring that ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... around him, whipped by icy blasts— Gigantic chestnuts, without leaf or bird, And, like himself, grown old in that same place. Through the dark network of their undergrowth, Pallid his aspect; and the earth was brown. Starless and moonless, a rough winter's night Was letting down her lappets o'er the mist. This—nothing more: old Faun, dull ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... slowly and silently; one by one the fires are extinguished, and the plain is wrapped in the gloom of a moonless night. The swan utters its wild note, the gruya whoops over the stream, and the wolf howls on the skirts ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... remember, I left off in the middle of Mr. Carville's courtship and went to bed. We were speeding southward. It was a dark, moonless night. The islands of the Grecian Archipelago were roofed over with a vault of low-lying clouds, as if those ferriferous hummocks and limestone peaks were the invisible pillars of an enormous crypt. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... We were very close together now—my leg touched her horse. Already, overhead in a moonless sky, the stars shone brightly. In the growing gloom her face was visible, though ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... with Nature. I had no great variety even in her, but the better did I understand what I had. The next Summer I began to hunt for glow-worms, and carry them carefully to my hollow, that in the warm, soft, moonless nights they might illumine it with a strange light. When I had been very successful, I would call my uncle and aunt to see. My aunt tried me by always having something to do first. My uncle, on the other hand, would lay down his book at once, and follow me submissively. He could not generate ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village and waken ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... up. To each and every scout from Homeport the unusual was a warning, a signal to alert mind and body. The runners in the night—that furred monkey race of hunters who combed the moonless dark of Astra when most of the higher fauna were asleep—were very distantly related to Sssuri's species, though the gap between them was that between highly civilized man and the jungle ape. The ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome, But what on earth is half so dear— So longed ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... not been for the moonless dark of it, you might have seen the same laborer who had been so concerned with tape-measures and distances near the Treasury Building, a long shallow basket stoutly woven of willow on his arm, making secretly for the mouth of the drain that once witnessed the investigations of Storri. The basket ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... sneak out on moonless winter nights and stare up at the stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father where ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... snowy poles of moonless Mars, That marvellous round of milky light Below Orion, and those double stars Whereof the one ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... that the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the tree-tops of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... under the impulse it had thus received, its occupants employed themselves in bending their heads to the water, and listening for any sounds that might indicate the presence of others abroad on the pond. The night, as it was yet moonless, and as the sky was overclouded, was consequently a dark one; and the adventurers could distinguish little else but the dark outlines of the Green Mountains, that rose high in the western heavens, casting, by their huge shadows, an impenetrable pall of darkness over the intervening space beneath, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... and saint of Thine Along the glorious line, Sitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet We'll hold communion sweet, Know them by look and voice, and thank them all For helping us in thrall, For words of hope, and bright examples given To show through moonless skies that ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... The night was moonless, with cold dashes of rain, and though the streets of Turin were well-lit no lantern-ray reached the windings of the lane behind ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... While on mine hands And hair and lids thy kisses die away Through all my being their strange echoes thrill And from the body's flowery mysticism I draw the last white honey. What is thine ill? What wouldst thou more of that great symbolism? Beyond this ultimate moment nothing lies But moonless cold and darkness. ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... darkness of a moonless winter night had fallen, nowhere more darkly and coldly than upon a certain small western town, whose houses were huddled together in the valley as if for mutual protection against the fierce winds sweeping through the trackless forests which surrounded ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... one dull, gray, moonless night, when neither could woo coveted sleep to his tired eyes, the Boy said to his companion, "Father Paul, I'm going to be a man—a man, do you hear? I am going to New Orleans—you know Mr. Ledoux asked us to come in September—and I'm going to marry Opal, whatever the consequences! I will ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... A moonless night was chosen for the expedition, and the advance was made stealthily and swiftly. While the attacking forces approached the sleeping town, Sir Philip spoke so earnestly to the men that one who was with him afterwards said, "he did so link our minds that we did desire ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... heavy swell rolling in from the westward, the well-known sign of an Atlantic storm that might break on the Spanish coast before many hours. The flickering signals of the British fleet seemed to come nearer as the darkness of the moonless autumn night deepened, and about nine a shadowy mass of sails was seen not far off. It was the "Euryalus" that had closed in with every light shaded to have a near look ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... if blacker night could dawn on night, With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred, A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, More desperate than strife with hope debarred, 60 More fatal than the adamantine Never Encompassing her passionate endeavour, Dawns glooming in her ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... appalled And astonished, the vast fleet veers; And the skies are shrouded and palled, But the moonless midnight hears And sees how swift on them drive and drift strange flames that the ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... after dinner, the night seemed to them so lovely—a moonless, starry night,—that they proposed to go for a walk in the garden. Olivier and Christophe left the house. Jacqueline went up to her room to fetch a shawl. She did not come down. Christophe went to look for her, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... brave Commandant Bravida (quartermaster. Ret) when coffee had been served and the chairs pulled together, then with his elbow on the table, between sips of his coffee, our hero gave a moving description of all the dangers which awaited him "Over there" He spoke of long moonless watches, of pestilential marshes, of rivers poisoned by the leaves of oleanders, of snows, scorching suns, scorpions and clouds of locusts; he also spoke of the habits of the great lions of the Atlas, their phenomenal strength, ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... writes (without, if I remember right, having seen it himself) in his charming book, A Naturalist's Rambles in the China Seas. Our friend described the appearance as that of a sea of shining snow rather than of milk, heaving gently beneath a starlit but moonless sky. A bucket of water, when taken up, was filled with the same half-luminous whiteness, which stuck to its sides when the water was drained off. The captain of the Indiaman was well enough aware of the rarity of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... curtain, put it aside, and entered the black hall. There I found a great silent assembly. How it was visible I neither saw nor could imagine, for the walls, the floor, the roof, were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness, blacker than the blackest of moonless, starless nights; yet my eyes could separate, although vaguely, not a few of the individuals in the mass interpenetrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness. It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves. I pressed their balls and looked ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... standing with its rim on the eastern ridge of the Seely Hill when they found old Jerry Lance lying stone-dead in his house? And had I not predicted with an air of mysterious knowledge that Jourdan would recover when Red Mike threw him? The sky was moonless and he could not ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... leaete at evenen tide, I zot to spend a moonless hour 'Ithin the window, wi' the zide A-bound wi' rwoses out in flow'r, Bezide the bow'r, vorsook o' birds, An' listen'd to ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... theatre. M. Vandeloup, however, still sat smoking, and occasionally drinking his brandy and soda, while he thought over his difficulties, and wondered how he could get out of them. It was a wonderfully hot night, and not even the dark blue of the moonless sky, studded with stars, could give any sensation of coolness. Round the balcony were several windows belonging to the dressing-rooms of the theatre, and the lights within shone through the vivid red ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... must have grown pretty tired of squeaking. It was a moonless evening, though not very dark. I could see objects at a little distance through the crack, but could not see so far as the stump. It got rather dull, watching there; and being amidst nice cozy straw, I presently ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... falls on that which sinks with all we love below the verge.' Even at night there is no cessation to this coming and going; only, a red light or a white, and the distant strokes of a paddle-wheel in the hush of the moonless void are then the sole signs of all this motion. What hopes and fears contend in unseen hearts under those moving stars! Is it nothing to have the opportunity to watch them from the ivied porch of the ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... notwithstanding the complainings of their empty stomachs, had thrown themselves down to sleep. Their fatigue was so great that it finally got the better of their fears and struck them down upon the bare earth, where they lay on their back, with open mouth and arms outstretched, like logs beneath the moonless sky. The bustle of the camp was stilled, and all along the naked range, from end to end, there reigned a silence as ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... moonless if starry night, lights from windows shone vividly. This was no dark or lonely scene, nor even a silent one. Briarmains stood near the highway. It was rather an old place, and had been built ere that highway was cut, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the quiet waters of the great China Sea, while back of him loomed the rugged bulk of the mountain, the summit indistinct in the darkness of the moonless night. The growths of the tropics came up to where he stood and then died out from lack of soil. Elephant's Head stood out boldly, its rugged lines unsoftened by the growths which flourish ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the bower there, and on the morrow betimes, the Sage drove together three or four milch goats that he pastured there, and went their ways over the plain, and so in due time entered into the lava-sea. But the first night that they lay there, though it was moonless and somewhat cloudy, they saw no glare of the distant earth-fires which they had looked for; and when on the morrow they questioned the Sage thereof, he said: "The Earth-fires ceased about the end of last year, as I have heard tell. But sooth it is that the foreboding of the Giant's ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... The night was both moonless and star-less—I had arranged all that—when the boats pushed off from the side of our vessel, and made their way toward the ship that, unfortunately for itself, had been singled out by Fate to carry me home in triumph. I was in excellent spirits, and, indeed, as I stepped over the side, a ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... spell of foul weather were very dark and moonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning into her last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled up the face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But we made shift as well ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow canon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly to the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... impatience of a man That's new come home, who having long been absent With haste runs over every different room In pain to see the whole. Thrice happy meeting! Nor time nor death shall part them ever more. 'Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... connected with Wolfe's approach by night to Quebec is thus given by Mr. Parkman: "For full two hours the procession of boats, borne on the current, steered silently down the St. Lawrence. The stars were visible, but the night was moonless and sufficiently dark. The general was in one of the foremost boats; and near him was a young midshipman, John Robison, afterwards professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He used to tell in his later life how Wolfe, with a low voice, repeated Gray's ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... attractions in these tropics, if only for the freedom from severe heat, the glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night for a lover, a ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... of the truth in religion, as well as in other matters, is to be wild-headed, inconsiderate, self-conceited, and intolerably arrogant. The bloody battle that Valiant fought, you must know, was not fought at the mouth of any dark lane in the midnight city, nor on the side of any lonely road in the moonless country. This terrible fight was fought in Valiant's own heart. For Valiant was none of your calculating and cold-blooded friends of the truth. He did not wait till he saw the truth walking in silver slippers. Let ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... A moonless, cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... love's sake Rode Balen forth by lawn and lake, By moor and moss and briar and brake, And in his heart their sorrow spake Whose lips were dumb as death, and said Mute words of presage blind and vain As rain-stars blurred and marred by rain To wanderers on a moonless main Where night and day ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... police of Paris keep their own secrets—but I believe a front place was found for some of them in the fighting lines. Paris lost many of its rebels, who will never reappear in the Place Pigalle and the Avenue de Clichy on moonless nights. Poor devils of misery! They did but make war on the well-to-do, and with less deadly methods, as a rule, than those encouraged in greater wars when, for trade interests also, men kill each other with explosive bombs and wrap each other's bowels round their bayonets and blow up ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... dappled through the tired foliage on to these benches which have rested many vagrants. Darkness has ceased to be the lawful cloak of the unhappy; but Mother Night was soft and moonless, and man had not despoiled ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... she is," he reflected. "I wonder what she meant when she talked to me so strangely—what she had in her mind! I must know, I must know!" He opened the door, and went out into the night. The sky was moonless, but for a wonder it was resplendent with stars. All the factory fires were low, and the air was no longer smoke-sodden. The wind came from the sea, and he breathed deeply. It seemed as though a great healing power passed over his ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... commoners he was known as well by that name as by the one his parents had given to him. But he appeared less and less in public. He began to neglect his practice; he resigned from his club; he avoided the company of his former associates, taking his walks at night alone, even though the sky was moonless, storms were threatening, and the cut-throat crew were abroad that made life at some hours and in some quarters of the city not of a pin's fee in value. His housekeeper told a neighbor that on some nights ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... serious case. Cape Norman lies thirty miles to the northward of St. Anthony, and the trail is a rough one. The night was moonless and pitchy black, but Grenfell set out at once to look for dogs. He borrowed four from one man, hired one from another, and arranged with a man, named Walter, to furnish four additional ones and to drive the team. Walter was to report at the hospital at ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... this woman says, "My days were sunless and my nights were moonless, Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, If you loved me not!" And I who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... Down moonless lanes from doubt to doubt; With hasting, hungry tread Up slopes of frost unpitying Where the last star went out; There fell I in unlifting dark, And lying while an aeon's wing Dragged o'er me bare, wind-stript and stark, As ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... that no hostile power on earth would dare to touch the water. To her any miracle seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she did. She had neither fear nor hesitation. She would slip out of her room unheard, and speed over the dark country on moonless nights on his errands; she would seek for weapons and bring them in and distribute them; she would take his messages to those on whom he could rely, and rouse to his cause the hesitating and half-hearted ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... the old man at first seemed still unsociable and absorbed in his own thoughts. But the calm, warm air, the gentle breeze, the dim shadows, the scent of the grass and the birch buds, the peaceful light of the moonless, starry sky, the rhythmical tramp and snorting of the horses, the mingled fascinations of the journey, of the spring, of the night—all entered into the soul of the poor German, and he began to talk with Lavretsky of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... awakened near midnight of a moonless black night by a hand on my bedclothes and the light of ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... On a dark and moonless night in the early spring three hundred armed Thebans appeared before the gates of Plataea, which were opened to them by a party of the citizens who favoured their design. Marching in a body to the market-place, they made proclamation ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could see, it would be the most beautiful ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... amid the roar of rivers, When the dim nights were moonless, have I known Joys which no tongue can tell; my pale lip quivers When thought revisits them:—know thou alone, 535 That after many wondrous years were flown, I was awakened by a shriek of woe; And over me a mystic robe was thrown, By viewless hands, and a bright Star did glow Before my steps—the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a moonless clear night, on the Heavens glittering with stars, and know that each fixed star of all the myriads is a Sun, and each probably possessing its retinue of worlds, all peopled with living beings, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and good wishes. The stars were shining in a moonless sky. On the pavement in the avenue they heard the aide-de-camp changing his step to fit his general's. ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... from the immense throng. Word had passed through it that the military was approaching. Pandemonium seemed suddenly to have broken loose, and shouts, and yells, and oaths arose from five thousand throats, as the men sprung behind their barricades. It was a moonless night, but the stars were shining brightly, and, in their light, the sheen of nearly a thousand bayonets made the street look like a lane of steel. The Twenty-seventh Regiment of National Guards, led by Colonel Stevens, had been sent from the City Hall, and their regular ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... chief command of them to a naval officer named Delouche; and on the evening of the twenty-eighth, after long consultation and much debate among their respective captains, they set sail together at ten o'clock. The night was moonless and dark. In less than an hour they were at the entrance of the north channel. Delouche had been all enthusiasm; but as he neared the danger his nerves failed, and he set fire to his ship half an hour too soon, the rest ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... under rock and tree, lay crouched in his skiff, rocking upon the billows, until he fell asleep. When he awoke all was quiet. The gust had passed away, and only now and then a faint gleam of lightning in the east showed which way it had gone. The night was dark and moonless; and from the state of the tide Sam concluded it was near midnight. He was on the point of making loose his skiff to return homewards, when he saw a light gleaming along the water from a distance, which seemed rapidly ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... honey-seeking bill into the white blossoms of a little bush beside my window, I should have thought it no such bad thing to be a bird, even if one next became a bat, like the colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy." Was this weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far primeval time? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at nightfall, that he is one still? I wonder whether he can enjoy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the fish, and again from the fish to the fruits, And emptied the vessels of sauce, and drank of the kava deep; Till the young lay stupid as stones, and the strongest nodded to sleep. Sleep that was mighty as death and blind as a moonless night Tethered them hand and foot; and their souls were drowned, and the light Was cloaked from their eyes. Senseless together, the old and the young, The fighter deadly to smite and the prater cunning of tongue, The woman wedded and fruitful, inured to the pangs of ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some hole. A fall would have been a real calamity, as nobody would ever have found me or even looked for me on that lonely coast. I therefore sat down where I was, on the corals where they seemed least pointed. I did not succeed at all in making a fire; the night was quite dark and moonless, and a fine rain penetrated everything. I have rarely passed a longer night or felt so lonely. The new day revived my spirits, breakfast did not detain me long, as I had nothing to eat, so I kept along the shore, jumping and climbing, and had to swim through several lagoons, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... gate had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespassers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... seemed to be true, for the next moment the group turned, and began to retreat along the road, moving briskly out of our sight. We were left in the thick gloom of a moonless evening and the peaceful silence of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... moonless night; the dark blue canopy spangled with myriad stars—grandeur, peace, and purity above; squalor, worry, and profanity below. Fit basis for many an ancient system of Theology— unscientific, if you will, but by ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... many a fair sea-circle, day by day, Scarce-rocking, her full-busted figure-head Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows: Then follow'd calms, and then winds variable, Then baffling, a long course of them; and last Storm, such as drove her under moonless heavens Till hard upon the cry of 'breakers' came The crash of ruin, and the loss of all But Enoch and two others. Half the night, Buoy'd upon floating tackle and broken spars, These drifted, stranding on an isle at morn Rich, but loneliest ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... appears to be afflicted with St. Vitus's dance—a room quite free from ornament, with furniture responding exclusively to the purposes of resting, eating, and drinking, with curtainless windows looking out upon the moonless night that is beginning to sigh and moan at the approach of a storm—my dinner is not a very cheerful one. Not that I am necessarily unhappy when I take a solitary meal. In this matter all depends upon the mood, and the mood frequently depends upon influences too subtle ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the wild strain of the Tsigane musicians, as they swayed to and fro in their red coats on the bandstand, floated towards the dome through the heavy summer air. In the near distance the fantastic shapes of chimney-cowls raised themselves against the starry but moonless sky, and miles away the grandiose contours of a dome far greater than Hugo's—the dome of St. Paul's—finished the prospect in solemn majesty. It was a scene well calculated to intensify a man's emotions, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to reach ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... quite dark, with a stiff breeze blowing right abaft. The night, a moonless and very black one, favoured us altogether for the run which, I did not doubt, we had to make against some Government vessel that would follow us. But I found to my surprise that the men on the ship knew nothing of the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... three days, waiting for a propitious, moonless night and roaming singly round the outskirts of the park. Once Beautrelet saw the postern. Contrived between two buttresses placed very close together, it was almost merged, behind the screen of brambles that concealed it, ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... reaped disappointment, but not despair. One night, shortly after his arrival, he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a fisherman. ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... every noble resolve, I cry aloud against the utterness of the destroyer. My life has indeed been a sad one; so sad, so lonely, that no language in my power of utterance can give to the reader a full conception of its moonless darkness. Would that the magic pen of a De Quincey were mine that my miseries might stand out until strong-hearted men and true-hearted women would weep, and every young man and maiden also would tremble and turn from everything intoxicating as from ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... know. They," said Psmith, indicating the rest with a wave of the hand, "don't know. Nobody knows. His locality is as hard to ascertain as that of a black cat in a coal-cellar on a moonless night. Shortly before I joined this journal, Mr. Wilberfloss, by his doctor's orders, started out on a holiday, leaving no address. No letters were to be forwarded. He was to enjoy complete rest. Where is he now? Who shall say? Possibly legging it ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fellow-officer to return it to her. About midnight the tide began to ebb, and two lanterns were hung as a sign from the masthead of the Sutherland. Instantly all the ships glided silent as the great river down with the tide. The night was moonless. Near the little bridle path now known as Wolfe's Cove the ships draw {270} ashore. Sharp as iron on stone a sentry's voice ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... dark, the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could not ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... manifold gradations of character and colour; its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn; the illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon, bringing up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood; its sheen on moonless nights, when only little punctures, green and red and orange, and its audible stillness, reminded him that down in the obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily, monotonously, everlastingly to the sea. It was ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... succession as to be almost of nightly occurrence during the favouring moonless nights. Later, the conditions were reversed, and the attacks by aeroplane were all made in bright moonlight. But ever the defence became more strenuous. Then aeroplanes began to play the role of "hornets", as Mr. Winston Churchill, speaking ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... behind him. Oh, world-enchanting Benares! what happy man could have quitted thee on such an autumn night with satiated eyes? It is a moonless night. From the Ganges stream, in whatever direction you look you will see the sky studded with stars—from endless ages ever-burning stars, resting never. Below, a second sky reflected in the deep blue water; on shore, flights of steps, and ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... the "Philadelphia" is one of the most striking pictures in the series. The effect of the mounting flames against the moonless and midnight sky is impressive and spectacular, and their lurid reflection in the water, with a glimpse of the Algerian fort and batteries in the background to the right, and the little vessel of Decatur, ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the foot ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... looming through a cloud-rent in the west—a scarlet sun in a green sky. His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body of a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the moonless ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... to argue about the matter. He sat silent, watching star after star shine out of the moonless sky. After a long silence ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships of the line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was under easy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black with haze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres over the sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-east the dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain, consisting of twenty-seven ships of line, under ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... a long wait. About half-past ten a new and larger sound came from the south. The knife in the ground increased but did not explain it. The night was moonless, dark now, and it was safe to sit very near the road. In twenty minutes the sound was near at hand in five, a dark mass was passing along the road. There is no mistaking the language of drivers. There is never any question ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... again, the trees were better grown and stood wider, and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, disgusted at the chance. This part of the wood had been certainly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is deaf with age; A garden of moonless trees Would answer not though she should cry ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... Cavanagh! They cross Wyatt's Buildings and cross this house. It was a moonless night or we should have seen it at once! I watched him, saw him drop to this roof—and brought the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... into crystalline brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white, A million moons ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were made, and one dark moonless night in September a long procession of boats floated silently down the river. In one of the boats sat Wolfe, and as they drifted slowly along in the starlight in a low voice he repeated Gray's poem called an Elegy in ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... leaving their own world the adventurers found themselves amid surroundings that at least held some semblance of an aspect of familiarity. The scene they faced now might have been one of their own land viewed on an abnormally bright though moonless evening. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... to-night. After a while, as it darkened, he rose from the fallen log upon which he had been sitting, and began to follow the little stream, still wrapped in far-away thoughts. The twilight had settled into a night that was moonless, but had that luminosity often seen on clear nights in late autumn. He could see all about him, even in the wood. As he reached another somewhat open space, coming upon it silently from behind a thick growth of underbrush, with only the narrow ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... forces dimmed and dwindled. The darkness was gathering swiftly, investing the world with its legion of gloom; and in the shadow of the great Castle of Caylus, rising like a rock itself out of the solid rock behind Lagardere, the moat was soon very dark indeed. There was little light in the moonless sky; there came none from the castle, which in its dim outline of towers and battlements might have been the enchanted palace of some fairy tale, so soundless, so lightless, so unpeopled did it seem. There was a faint gleam discernible in the windows of the Inn ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Pound as quickly as his shaking knees would let him; but quicker still she slid away, and when he came where she had been the place was as empty as the sky in its moonless season. He called and ran about and called again; but he got no answer, nor found what he sought. All that night he spent in calling and running to and fro. What he did on Sunday you may know, and I may know, but he did not. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the city any longer, but planned flight at once. Since it was impossible for him to go out by day without being detected, he undertook to escape by night, but failed to secure secrecy, being betrayed by the moon, which was at its full. The Romans accordingly waited for moonless nights, and then starting out in darkness and a foreign land that was likewise hostile, they scattered in tremendous fear. Some were caught when it became day and lost their lives: others got safely away to Syria in the company ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... its aggregate bets, and arrange the remainder in a line of perhaps five figures. Whereupon the betting-men grow seedier and more seedy; some of the more mercurial go off in a fit of apoplectic amazement; some betake themselves to Waterloo Stairs on a moonless night; some proceed to the Diggings, some to St Luke's, and some to the dogs; some become so unsteady, that they sign the wrong name to a draft, or enter the wrong house at night, or are detected in a crowd ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... a fine night—moonless, but thick with stars. So much, at least, could be said in favour of the place: there was abundant sky-room; you got a clear half of the great vault at once. How he pitied, on such a night, the dwellers in old, congested cities, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... now dark and moonless, and on the third of our stay the lions were exceptionally troublesome. We could see little beyond the light of the fires, but roars and growls came from all quarters, and there were evidences that a large ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... and tramped drowsily down the dusty road beneath the moonless sky, and down through the steep, sleeping city, and across the Pont des Bergues, and so to the Quai du Seujet and the Alle Petit Chat, which lay dense and black and warm in shadow, and was full of miawling cats, strange sounds, and queer acrid smells. The drainage system of the St. Gervais quarter ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... briars or palms Even at the breathless blast as of a breeze Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And raiment of the ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the city, going back to the music store. It was a little after eleven o'clock. The night was moonless, filled with a gray blur of faint light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon at once. From time to time there were sudden explosions of a southeast wind at the street corners. McTeague went on, slanting his head against the gusts, to keep his cap from blowing ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... buzzards on a fence as they sat along the sidewalk near the hotel smoking their cigarettes. The wind had fallen, leaving a peace in the ears like the cessation of a hateful turmoil. There was the promise of a cool night in the unusual clearness of the stars. Morgan rode away into the moonless night, leaving the town to take care of its ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... warm dusk, moonless, windless. The sounds of the village street came in—laughter, a touch at a piano, a chiming clock. Bights starred and quickened in the blurred houses. Footsteps echoed on the board walks. The gate opened. ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... volunteered with two regiments, the 21st Georgia and 21st North Carolina, to move on Manassas Junction. Stuart was placed in command, and without a moment's delay the detachment moved northward through the woods. The night was hot and moonless. The infantry moved in order of battle, the skirmishers in advance; and pushing slowly forward over a broken country, it was nearly midnight before they reached the Junction. Half a mile from the depot their advance was greeted by ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the window. This was a moonless night, and little enough illumination entered the room ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... fell in a moonless night," said Westburnflat, "without asking leave of young Earnscliff; or some Englified justice of the peace: thae were gude days on the Border when there was neither ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... It was a dark, moonless night, only tempered by the reflections of furnace fires among the hills. Dennis thought they were northern lights. The lane was cool, and fresh and damp, and full of autumn scents of fading leaves, and toadstools, and Herb Robert and late Meadow Sweet. And as we crossed ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... time the murky darkness had so increased that one might have believed himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a chamber where all the lights had been extinguished. On every hand was heard the complaints of women, the wailing of children, and the cries of men. One called his father, another his son, and another his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other. Many in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... some night with its moonless weather, I know you will reason beyond a doubt That the rain and the wind and the leaves together Are making the sounds you will hear about: The wintry rustle of dead leaves falling, The whispering wind through the matted glen; But I can swear it's a sergeant calling The ghostly roll ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... other parts of the heavens, and especially in the vicinity of the Milky Way, they are present in great numbers and form groups and aggregations of striking appearance and conspicuous brilliancy. On taking a casual glance at the midnight sky on a clear moonless night, one is struck with the apparent countless multitude of the stars; yet this impression of their vast number is deceptive, for not more than two thousand stars are ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... that lonely walk. The darkness of a moonless night settled down upon her before she had gone three miles, but she would not allow herself to think of fear. She stumbled frequently as she neared her journey's end, and her tired body cried out for rest, but she pushed resolutely on, almost sobbing with relief as she entered ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... convent wert thou thrust, Here on the verge of habitable earth. Full sixteen times since that disastrous day The face of nature hath renewed its youth; Still have I seen no change come over thine, That looked a grave amid a blooming world. Thou'rt like some moonless image, carved in stone By sculptor's chisel, that doth ever keep The selfsame fixed ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of the house. That disturbed ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... at about the centre of Hydra and is on the meridian, April 26th. Owing to its many faint stars it is best seen on a clear moonless night. ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... moonless. The fountain was lit up by torches, and many lamps also were lighted in the garden. Genji was taken to an airy room in the southern front of the building, where incense which was burning threw its sweet odors around. The priest related to him many interesting anecdotes, and also ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... stone. But there were some who said It moved its lips; And when they went away, the earth stirred And they heard it moan. Now it comes leaping down the tunnel roads Where the moss hangs like stalactites, Screaming out curses, snapping at the toads; Negroes who pass there on the moonless nights Behind them hear a sound that stops their breath. The keen wind whistles through its teeth, And the white skull goes ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... the land of the Indians lay under the shroud of this moonless night, and while the Faithful were harried on every side, and the champions of ungodliness prospered, the very air reeking with the smell of bloody sacrifices, a certain mall of the royal household, chief satrap in rank, in courage, stature, comeliness, and in all those qualities which mark beauty ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... eighteenth of December was moonless and dark. A column of five hundred men of the Forty-First and Hundredth regiments, a grenadier company of the First Royals, and fifty militia, filed out of the portals of Fort George, bearing scaling ladders ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow |
