"Windless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought would turn back to another day when a storm was making and a tall ship standing down to weather the Head? For if there was a menace of weather to-day, so, too, was there a ship. We seemed to grow conscious of it by degrees, it drew on so slowly out of the broad, blue, windless south. For hours, in the early afternoon, it seemed scarcely to move on the mirroring surface of the sea. Yet it did move, growing nearer and larger, its huge spread of canvas hanging straight as cerecloth on the poles, and its wooden flanks, by and by, showing the scars and rime ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... recounting which with this Tallies as footprint with the foot of man? Four hundred years ago—that self-same day - Connor, the son of Nessa, Ulster's King, Sat throned, and judged his people. As he sat, Under clear skies, behold, o'er all the earth Swept a great shadow from the windless east; And darkness hung upon the air three hours; Dead fell the birds, and beasts astonied fled. Then to his Chief of Druids, Connor spake Whispering; and he, his oracles explored, Shivering made answer, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... Kirby pointed. They could see the thin trail of smoke rising steadily this windless morning. "Best make it fast—the cap'n is already thinkin' about pointin' ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... a mother when her young child calls Hearkens to that, and hath no other care: So Thetis, from her green and windless halls Rose, at the first word of Achilles' prayer, To comfort him, and promise gifts of fair New armour wrought by an immortal hand; Then like a silver cloud she scaled the air, Where bright the dwellings ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... save the new life Which I lay at your feet with this prayer—Be my wife Stoop, and raise me! Lord Alfred could scarcely restrain The sudden, acute pang of anger and pain With which he had heard this. As though to some wind The leaves of the hush'd, windless laurels behind The two thus in converse were suddenly stirr'd. The sound half betrayed him. They started. He heard The low voice of Lucile; but so faint was its tone That her answer escaped him. Luvois hurried on, As ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... breathless silence in the room; Isabel's heart beat thick and heavy and her eyes grew large with expectancy; it was a windless frosty night again, and the ivy outside on the wall, and the laurels in the garden seemed to be ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... her! Her memory is the shrine Of pleasing thoughts, soft as the scent of flowers, Calm as on windless eve the sun's decline, Sweet as the song of birds among ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... gusts; but the south side of Yawning-gap lightened by the sparks and gledes that flew out of Muspell-heim; as cold arose out of Niflheim and all things grim, so was that part that looked towards Muspell hot and bright; but Yawning-gap was as light as windless air, and when the blast of heat met the rime, so that it melted and dropped and quickened; from those life-drops there was shaped the likeness of a man, and he was named Ymir; he was bad, and all his kind; and so it is said, when he slept he fell into a sweat; then ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... to read small print at the full range of human vision. As soon as Willems' feet had left the planks, the silence which had been lifted up by the jerky rattle of his footsteps fell down again upon the courtyard; the silence of the cloudy sky and of the windless air, the sullen silence of the earth oppressed by the aspect of coming turmoil, the silence of the world collecting its faculties to withstand the storm. Through this silence Willems pushed his way, and stopped about six feet from Lingard. He stopped simply because ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the sun shone on him, and the morning was calm and windless. He sat up and looked about him, but could see no signs of Fox save the lair wherein he had lain. So he arose to his feet and sought for him about the crannies of the rocks, and found him not; and he shouted for him, and had no answer. Then he said, "Belike he has gone down to the boat ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... the women unload the linen and carry it to the spring, where they put home-made soap on the clothes, dipped them in the spring, and rubbed them on the smooth rocks until they were white as snow. Then they were spread out to dry on the tops of the low bushes growing on the warm, windless southern slopes of the mountain." After a happy day in the woods came "the late return at twilight, when the younger children were all asleep in the slow carreta and the Indians were singing hymns as they drove the linen-laden horses down the ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... and held. A second later it missed them and began a search. Presently it lit the little boat, and it did something more—it revealed a thickening of the atmosphere. They were running into a sea fog, one of those thin white fogs that come down in the Mediterranean on windless days. The blinding glare ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... open western gate Where whining halt and leper wait, And came at last To the blue desert, where the deep Great seas of twilight lay asleep, Windless and vast. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... the Bush, an ocean of tree-tops, as level as the windless sea, and over this green expanse shadows of fleecy clouds chased each other. Presently Jim discovered a brown space in the distance, and detected a thin column of smoke rising on occasions between the vagrant winds. He called ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... pair of idiots! They will have a glorious life. Such harmony, such congeniality! Such incomparable sweetness on her part, such equable spirits on his! Not the surpassing repose of a windless tropic night can approach to the divine serenity of their future. Ha! by the Furies! he will have an enviable companion; a matchless Griselda!" Laughing scornfully, he started up and strode across the floor. As Beulah caught the withering expression which sat on every feature she ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... miles at a walk. Standing by them were the six horses with the wagon, and its tunneled roof of canvas shone duskily on the empty verge of the wilderness. A dry windless air hung over the table-land of the Big Bend, but a sound rose from somewhere, floating voluminous upon ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... wide world a shelter for the would-be world-improver? Yet they despaired not, their hearts failed them not. The majestic splendour of the night, as it deepened in its solemn calm; as the shadows of the windless trees fell larger and sharper upon the silvery earth; as the skies grew mellower and more luminous in the strengthening starlight, inspired them with the serenity of faith,—for night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the universe, and on the leaves ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crossing The chamber in the gray Figures of jigging fieldfolk - Saviours of corn and hay - To the air of "Haste to the Wedding," As after a wedding-day; Yea, up and down the middle In windless whirls went they! ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus—a mountain in Thessaly in the Iliad; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in Odyssey, V. 41-47. [Footnote: Ibid., ii. 396.] Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Science, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia and an ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... on the river now As when the snow lay windless in the wood, And the last Indian stood And looked to find the broken bough That told the path under the snow. All is as silent as the spiral lights Of purple and of gold that from the marshes rise, Like the wings of swarming dragon flies, Far up ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... buoyantly it hovers aloft in the heights! If one ever comes into the midst of a cumulus cloud in the mountains, one sees how its myriads of single particles are in ceaseless movement. And yet the whole remains stationary, on windless days preserving its form unchanged for hours. More recent meteorological research has established that in many cumulus forms the entire mass is in constant rotation, although seen from outside, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... such strength and violence that the paper was, as one might say, absolutely sucked round the man's leg. That is a positive proof that the train was moving at the time it happened, for the day, as you know, has been windless. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... "your venomous bile pollutes the crystal flood of my narration. Did I ride? That was the undoing of the sage. When he recovered consciousness for the second time, it was to discover that the chain was missing and that the back tire was windless. In my endeavours to find the chain I lost myself. That reminds me. I must put an advertisement in The Times to the effect that any one returning a bicycle-chain to White Ladies will be assaulted. I have no desire to ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... lay when the fierce war Of wintry winds shook that innocuous liquor In many a mimic moon and bearded star O'er woods and lawns;—the serpent heard it flicker In sleep, and dreaming still, he crept afar— 285 And when the windless snow descended thicker Than autumn leaves, she watched it as it came Melt on the surface of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... through the windless night the clipper rolled In a great swell with oily gradual heaves, Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled, Clang, and the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... hour had passed since the tramp of the horses of the departing Vigilantes had died away into the silence of the windless night, when another knock summoned ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... trees of Eden, dropping purple blooms, and balm, Are the odors wafted toward me from its isles of windless calm,— And the gold of all our sunsets, with their sapphire all impearled, Would not match the fused and glowing heaven of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... three months yet till the late autumn berries are ripe; yes, I know. But there are other joys than berries in the wilds. Spring and summer they are still only in bloom, but there are harebells and ladyslippers, deep, windless woods, and the scent of trees, and stillness. There is a sound as of distant waters from the heavens; never so long-drawn a sound in all eternity. And a thrush may be singing as high as ever its voice can go, and then, just at its highest pitch, the note breaks suddenly at a right ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the vaporous day, Dull on the windless waters falls the pallid ray. So slumb'ringly the glassy river goes, The water-lily dips not as it flows; The swallow, haunter of the charmed spot, Skims through the silence, and awakes it not; Perch'd as in sleep, the gray kingfisher broods, A sentinel among the solitudes; And faints the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... unforgettable scene—the mate in the high place, the men, sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight down through the windless air, while the Elsinore, with hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs. And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... very coarse gold. Now we were on the bedrock and the next thing to do was to start three drifts in as many directions. This called for two more men to work the drifts, and a man with his team to haul the dirt to the water, while I stood at the windless and watched both ends. This went on for one week. When I washed out my dirt, paid off my help and other expenses, I had two dollars ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... very quiet, almost too quiet sometimes. On windless nights they are silent as the grave, and the house might be miles in the country. The roar of London's traffic reaches me only in heavy, distant vibrations. It holds an ominous note sometimes, like that of an approaching ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... who grieve in secret, Those who bear the sorrows of earth, The deep unappeasable longings Which beset them with throngings and throngings, (As, on a windless night, Through the fold of a dark mantle furled, Gleams on our world, world after unknown world) Give them peace, Wide as the veil that hides God's face, The pure plenitude of space, In which our universe is but a glittering crease,— Give ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... at the door of her room, and they went in almost directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared, without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione's room to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and there with patches ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern, stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red underwing had ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... more for full a minute; no sound was heard except the distant murmur of the sea, for the day was fine and windless. The April sun shone brightly in upon the pair, as if to bless ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... as smooth and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes, beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our feet. A little way down, where the lake narrowed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... were scrub pines in which Judith had made a camp. The snow had thickened until Doug could see scarcely ten feet ahead. He was utterly weary and very cold. He knew that he ought to go into camp for the night but he could not. He tied the horses beneath the trees, a grateful, windless haven to the poor brutes, and went ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... passed overhead almost every clear windless night, but the buzz of propellers, that often went on for hours, and the dull boom of bombs exploding far away had never caused anything more than ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... were away from under the keel, left us borne upon the waters of the bay, which were as still as the windless night itself. The pushing off of that boat was like a launching into space, as a bird opens its wings on the brow of a cliff, and remains poised in the air. A sense of freedom came to me, the unreasonable feeling ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... bottom of the stairs, I stood for a minute, and listened. All was silent, save for a faint drip, drip of water, falling, drop-by-drop, somewhere to my left. As I stood, I noticed how quietly the candle burnt; never a flicker nor flare, so utterly windless was the place. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... we linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The clouds have broken and the heavens ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... height. The silvery sheen is spread also over the music, which arises from the orchestra like a light mist burdened with sweet odors. Amneris enters the temple to ask the blessing of the goddess upon her marriage, and the pious canticle of the servitors within floats out on the windless air. A tone of tender pathos breathes through the music which comes with Aida, who is to hold secret converse with her lover. Will he come? And if so, will he speak a cruel farewell and doom her ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of quiet beauty; there was a clear sky and a windless air; the banks of the river—high and dense masses of vegetation— glowed with colour; the broad sweep of water was like a sheet of molten silver and shimmered and eddied to the play of the gleaming paddles. As they moved easily and swiftly along, the paddlemen, dressed in ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... On clear windless days the intermittent clouds of vapour sent up from the crater assume the most fantastic shapes—trees, ships, men, birds, animals—ever changing like the forms of Proteus. It would seem as if the Spirit of the Mountain were idly amusing ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... windless, the house silent as the grave. He walked about the hills during the afternoon, practicing his Hebrew "Names" and "Words" like a schoolboy learning a lesson. And all about him the slopes of mountain watched him, listening. So did the sheet of snow, shining in the ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... windless day, so hot that the branches of the coco-palms, which at early morn had swished and merrily swayed to the trade wind, now hung limp and motionless, as if they had suffered from a long tropical drought instead of merely a few hours' cessation of the brave, cool breeze, which for ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... of moodiness that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below—never ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... other side the two Aiantes and Odysseus and Diomedes stirred the Danaans to fight; yet these of themselves feared neither the Trojans' violence nor assaults, but stood like mists that Kronos' son setteth in windless air on the mountain tops, at peace, while the might of the north wind sleepeth and of all the violent winds that blow with keen breath and scatter apart the shadowing clouds. Even so the Danaans withstood the Trojans steadfastly and fled not. And Atreides ranged through ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... as the weary hounds at last retire, Windless, displeased, from the fruitless chase, When the sly beast tapished in bush and brier, No art nor pains can rouse out of his place: The Christian knights so full of shame and ire Returned back, with faint and weary pace: Yet still the fearful dame fled swift ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... from Houten early next morning and by breakfast time was ready to get down to business with Barry. The day dawned muggy and windless; one of the native seamen in a commandeered canoe paddled up from his observation point near the river mouth to report and get his relief. There was no sign of Leyden's schooner, nor did the day promise a wind that ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moonlight breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze with the beauty of the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... learnt utter reproach, and love. There on the plain Goliath stood alone, Poised in his mighty bulk, with black locks flowing, A handsbreadth taller even than Saul the king Who shouldered it above the men of Israel, And beat his words of sure defiance out, Ringing across the windless noon. And all Israel heard, and fear was on them, knowing, If thus the issue, how it should prevail. And Jonathan in the tent of Saul his father, Watched, and his blood was quick, and in his mind He strove against the last of doubt. And then The young man David stood ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... melting into the blue interstice between it and its next neighbor. Commonly the sharper one edge is, the softer is the other, and the clouds look flat, and as if they slipped over each other like the scales of a fish. When both edges are soft, as is always the case when the sky is clear and windless, the cloud looks solid, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the souls of the jolly, jolly mariners, Crying: "Under Heaven, here is neither lead nor lea! Must we sing for evermore On the windless, glassy floor? Take back your golden fiddles and we'll ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... glimmering scarp of granite, and knew it for the gray rock, Cara Clowz. By the base of it he lowered Niotte to the ground, dismounted, and began to climb, leading Rubh by the bridle and seeking for a pathway. Behind him the voices of crashing trees filled the windless night. He found a ledge at length, and there the three huddled together—Niotte between swooning and sleep, Graul seated beside her, and Rubh standing patient, waiting for the day. When the crashing ceased around them, the King could hear the soft flakes of sweat dripping from the stallion's belly, ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the trees in the windless air. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... was windless and mild. Sir Roger's asthmatic and rheumatic afflictions were quite safe in the warm atmosphere. Moonlight flooded everything with its misty glory, stars spangled the sky, music came softened by distance from the ball-room—all was conducive to love and to love-making. Sir Roger Trajenna, inspired ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... sailor must stand by for the whims of the wind if he would save himself and his ship. For hours we raced along at seven or eight knots, with a strong breeze on the quarter and the seas ruffling about our prow. For still longer hours we pushed through a windless calm by motor power. Showers ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... The night was almost windless; sweet, nameless odors poured up from the heated summer soil; the shadows of the grasses were outlined like Japanese pictures on the white roadway. Except for the child and the cat, no living being moved, as far as the eye ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... are new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... indeed, our rampart against the hateful humidity of the coast and gives to us in the interior the dry, windless, exhilarating cold that is characteristic of our winters. We owe it mainly to this range that our snowfall averages about six feet instead of the thirty or forty feet that falls on the coast. The winds that sweep ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... singing of the birds, we turned into an unfrequented lane, bordered by elms. The evening was dull, damp, and windless, and the air lay stagnant between the high banks of the lane. We walked on in complete silence, Chandrapal a few yards in front; none of us felt any desire to speak. Three nightingales were singing at intervals: one at some distance in the woods ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... originally five feet wide. We took out all the roots and underground growths down to mineral soil. You must cut away all the brush that has grown in, chop it into short lengths, and pile it in little piles in the trail itself for burning on windless days. You must grub out the roots that have grown in, too. Really the entire trail ought to be grubbed again, but we can't do that now. You will have to assign men to cut brush, to pile it, and to grub up the roots. That's about all ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes, and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... "these storms, these dangers, nay, even shipwreck itself, appear to me preferable to the still, windless water which the so-much-be-praised haven of domestic life represents. You speak, my father, of chimeras; but tell me, is not the so-lauded happiness of domestic life more a chimera than any other? When the saloon is set in order, one does ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the windless road, Spake each to one another, "Whence came that blood upon thy hand No other hand may cover?" "From breaking of a woman's ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... glow of pious eve and me, Lost moments, thick as clouds of summer flies, Specks of old time, which else one could not see, Made manifest in the windless calm, arise. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... woods. And scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spent dawns of which he was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of light upon light ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... slowed down to leeward of the island and watched the shadows melt away. It was Sunday, a day of heavenly calm, fresh yet windless, with a sea so smooth that the barrier reefs for once were silent, and one could hear, far across the hushed and shining water, the coo of pigeons in the forest. Under bare steerage way, with the leadsman droning ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... she found the house locked. She remembered that this was "make-up day" at the weekly which took most of her father's work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a beaming, windless afternoon. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... was a lady, as a lady was before the light of that poor worn word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and form the fragile beauty of a rose-petal come to its fading on a windless ledge, she moved down the years with the stedfast sweetness of the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... garden is backed by two sunny rooms again, and behind that is the kitchen garden. And here is the long covered way near the public work. It has twice as many windows opening out as it has opposite opening into my garden, and on blowing as well as windless days the shutters are ever open. In front is my colonnade, fringed with violets. Here is my basking-walk. You see how it shelters one, too, from the African winds. It cuts off the wind from the other side in winter. It has advantages both for winter and summer: according ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... morning cheerfully enough, and for three hours or more paddled easily up the glassy and windless reaches, between two green flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and insects; while down from the branches which overhung the stream long trailers hung to the water's edge, and seemed admiring in the clear ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... IN the windless September dawn a voice went singing, a man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the elan of it all told he was young, jubilant, and ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and grasped its edge with determined softness. And while Gyp gazed at the pinkish nails and their absurdly wee half-moons, at the sleeping tranquillity stirred by breathing no more than a rose-leaf on a windless day, her lips grew fuller, trembled, reached toward the dark lashes, till she had to rein her neck back with a jerk to stop such self-indulgence. Soothed, hypnotized, almost in a dream, she lay ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the white rail of the bridge. He was a very young man, and he was very keen on getting the chance of distinguishing himself; and here, on the warm, windless swells abeam, the chance seemed to sit beckoning him. "I've been thinking, sir, if you can lend me half a dozen men, I could take her ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... in the steely chill of dawn he came out upon a spacious lake. The night had been windless, and now, in the first of the coming light, the water was smooth like blue-black oil under innumerable writhing wisps and streamers of mist. A keen smell, raw but sweet, rose from the wet shores, the wet ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... penguins at Cape Crozier, but had also made a complete examination of the enormous and interesting pressure ridges which form the junction of the Great Barrier ice-mass with the land, and subsequently had spent much time in studying the windless area to the south of Ross Island. Also, with Armitage and Heald, he had made an excellent little journey, on which Armitage obtained some very good photographs, [Page 177] sufficient in themselves to prove the receding glacial conditions of the ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... among the pathways overgrown, Of all the former flowers that kissed your feet Remains a poppy, pallid from the heat, A wild poppy that the wild winds have sown. Alas! the rose forgets your hands of rose; The lilies slumber in the lily bed; 'Tis only poppies in the dreamy close, The changeless, windless garden of the dead, You tend, with buds soft as your kiss that lies In over happy dreams, ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... saw her by night. Her hour is the fulness of the sun's flood-tide: she comes in the dead hush and white flame of windless noons,—when colors appear to take a very unearthliness of intensity,—when even the flash of some colibri, bosomed with living fire, shooting hither and thither among the grenadilla blossoms, seemeth a spectral happening because of the great green ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the afternoon. The quiet sun blazed down through the clear windless air and made a furnace of our hole in the sand. And all about us were the explosions of rifles and yells of the Indians. Only once in a while did father permit a single shot from the trench, and at that only by our best marksmen, such as Laban ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... bidden to take a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... more the windless days are here, Quiet of autumn, when the year Halts and looks backward and draws breath Before it plunges into death. Silver of mist and gossamers, Through-shine of noonday's glassy gold, Pale blue of skies, where nothing stirs Save one blanched leaf, weary and old, That over and over slowly ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... scrub and crag and scanty pasturage He saw again! What stress of pilgrimage Through roaring waterways and cities of men, What sojourn among folk beyond the ken Of mortal seafarers in homelier seas, More trodden lands! Sure, none had earned his ease As he, that windless morning when he drew Near silent Ithaca, gray in misty blue, And wondered on the old familiar scene, Which was to him as it had never been Aforetime. Say, had he but had inkling That in this hour all that long wandering Of his was self-ensured, had he been bold To plan and carry what ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... I strolled about the picturesque point. It was a windless, hazy day. An early frost had already clothed a number of the trees with their gorgeous autumnal mantles, the forerunners of Indian summer, the most glorious ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... something that made him shout a windless "HI!" In a second three rats had projected themselves from the dark tangle of the creeper towards Cossar. For three seconds Cossar stood unaware of them, and then he had become the most active thing in the world. He didn't fire his gun. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... bosom of Omean. The phosphorescent light you now see pervading this great subterranean vault emanates from the rocks that form its dome; it is always thus upon Omean, just as the billows are always as you see them—rolling, ever rolling over a windless sea. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Francois came down the deserted street, treading on air. It was a bland summer night, windless, moon-washed, odorous with garden-scents; the moon, nearing its full, was a silver egg set on end—("Leda-hatched," he termed it; "one may look for the advent of Queen Heleine ere dawn"); and the sky he likened to blue velvet studded with the gilt nail-heads of a seraphic ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian summer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to her bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it with taps of her naked foot while she braced her ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... on the horizon's verge; To leeward, stormy shadows, violet-black, And the wide sea between A vast unfurrowed field of windless green; The stormy shadows flicker on the track Of phantom ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... station of Mockery Dale. It was tremendously hot, for the afternoon sun was raking the valley from stem to stern, and since what little breeze there was blew from the south-east, the fitful puffs passed over the dip in the moorland and left it windless. This suited the butterflies admirably. Indeed, from all the insects an unmistakable hum of approval of the atmosphere rose steadily. Anthony could not hear it, any more than he could hear the lark ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... autumn. The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... in his saddle and pointed to the crest of the hill they had just descended. Above the pines circling the lower slope above the bare ledges of rock and outcrop, a column of thick black smoke was rising straight as a spire in the windless air. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate. The old stone church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow with crimson and purple. He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice through its open lattices. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... in the midst of the vast jungles that cover Borneo, serving to keep the atmosphere cool and prevent air currents from ascending in these windless tropics. We were almost exactly on the equator, at an elevation of about 100 metres. In January there had been little rain and in daytime the weather had been rather muggy, but with no excessive heat to speak of, provided one's raiment is suited ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... summer months there was a great tranquillity and hushed joy in this hard life. A tender magic breathed in the colour and music of the forest, in its long pauses of windless day-dreaming, in its breezy frolic with the sunshine. The trees and boulders were kindly; and the turf reminded her of her mother's bosom. About her refuge the wild flowers grew in plenty—primrose and blue gentian, yellow cinquefoil and pink geranium, and forget-me-nots, and many ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over. The green mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in their clear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each other secretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... baggage at Goritz, Wunsch to guard the Bridges and it; and, in succinct condition, are all under way. At one in the afternoon we are got to Leissow and Bischofsee; scrubby hamlets (as the rest all are), not above two miles from Kunersdorf. The August day is windless, shiny, sultry; man and horse are weary with the labors, and with the want of sleep: we decide to bivouac here, and rest on the scrubby surface, heather or whatever it is, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... rain, pouring out of a windless sky, and spattering up from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in another world—where one did have interviews. How Helen ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... lay moored by the land and the others rode at anchor behind them; for, as the beach was not large in extent, they lay at anchor with prows projecting 191 towards the sea in an order which was eight ships deep. For that night they lay thus; but at early dawn, after clear sky and windless calm, the sea began to be violently agitated and a great storm fell upon them with a strong East 192 Wind, that wind which they who dwell about those parts call Hellespontias. Now as many of them as perceived that the wind was rising ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... might find peace and felicity in his new state. And while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... its delectable way in the Valley of the Moon. The last Mariposa lily vanished from the burnt grasses as the California Indian summer dreamed itself out in purple mists on the windless air. Soft rain- showers first broke the spell. Snow fell on the summit of Sonoma Mountain. At the ranch house the morning air was crisp and brittle, yet mid-day made the shade welcome, and in the open, under the winter sun, roses ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... to it stood wide open, for the day was hot and windless. Archie went softly in. He fell on his knees by his dying wife, he folded her to his heart, he whispered into her fast-closing ears the despairing words of love, reawakened, when all repentance was too late. He called ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... These windless mornings the bank of city smoke northward was like gray powder, out of which the skyscrapers stretched their lofty heads. The buildings along the shore, etched in the transparent air, breathing silently white mists ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... her fourth rising, for 'tis that Gives surest counsel, clear she ride thro' heaven With horns unblunted, then shall that whole day, And to the month's end those that spring from it, Rainless and windless be, while safe ashore Shall sailors pay their vows to Panope, Glaucus, and Melicertes, Ino's child. The sun too, both at rising, and when soon He dives beneath the waves, shall yield thee signs; For signs, none trustier, travel with the sun, Both those which in their course with dawn ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... I not voyaged, friend beloved, with thee On the great waters of the unsounded sea, Momently listening with suspended oar For the low rote of waves upon a shore Changeless as heaven, where never fog-cloud drifts Over its windless wood, nor mirage lifts The steadfast hills; where never birds of doubt Sing to mislead, and every dream dies out, And the dark riddles which perplex us here In the sharp solvent of its light are clear? Thou knowest how vain our quest; how, soon or late, The baffling ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... haggard; toilworn^, wayworn:, footsore, surbated^, weather-beaten; faint; done up, used up, knocked up; bushed [U.S.]; exhausted, prostrate, spent; overtired, overspent, overfatigued; unrefreshed^, unrestored. worn, worn out; battered, shattered, pulled down, seedy, altered. breathless, windless; short of breath, out of breath, short of wind; blown, puffing and blowing; short-breathed; anhelose^; broken winded, short-winded; dyspnaeal^, dyspnaeic^. ready to drop, all in, more dead than alive, dog-weary, walked off one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... stars were out. Helouan, with her fairy twinkling lights, lay silent against the Desert edge. The sand was at the flood. The period of the Encroaching of the Desert was at hand, and the deeps were all astir with movement. But in the windless air was a great peace. A calm of infinite stillness breathed everywhere. The flow of Time, before it rushed away backwards, stopped somewhere between the dust of stars and Desert. The mystery of sand touched every street with its ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... of the clamor the great siren whistle at the shops boomed out the fire alarm, and almost at the the same instant a red glow, capped by a rolling nimbus of sooty oil smoke, rose to beacon the destruction already begun in the shop yards. And while the roar of the siren was still jarring upon the windless night air, the electric-light circuits were cut out, leaving the yards and the Crow's Nest in darkness, and the frantic battle for the trains to be lighted only by the moon and the lurid glow of destruction spreading slowly under its black ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... Brooksites seeking safety in the State House and the Baxterites in the Antony. The feet of General White's troops fought bravely. Three hours later it was announced that they had made the fifty miles to Pine Bluff without a break, windless, but happy. Each faction was deficient in arms to equip their adherents. A company of cadets from St. John's College had been placed ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... of August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the report. Revolver ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey |
