"Dreamlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... performance in a country where business is brisk and natural facilities favorable to the manipulations of a clever man would not be so surprising, but we all know the Monk Road has no gold mines or streams of commerce to disturb its dreamlike serenity." ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... title of the book has a subtle intention. It indicates, and is true to the verities in doing so, the strange dreamlike quality of life to the man who has not yet fought his own battles, or come into conscious possession of his will—only such battles bite ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... in her presence. It followed from all this that the name of Clement Lindsay had no peculiar meaning for her. Nor was she like to recognize him as the youth in whose company she had gone through her mortal peril, for all her recollections were confused and dreamlike from the moment when she awoke and found herself in the foaming rapids just above the fall, until that when her senses returned, and she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over her with that look of tenderness in his square features which had lingered in her recollection, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... strange phenomena. Thord's appearance on the same ship in which he and Lotys were passengers, seemed to him quite simple and natural,—Thord's death moved him to a certain grave compassion,—but the whole swift circumstance had been so dreamlike, that he had no time to think of it, or regret it,—and the only active consciousness his mind held was that he and Lotys were journeying to 'the other side';—that 'other side' which he now felt ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... sick at heart. Even they are compelled to hear the commands of the lovely gospel of fraternity, and, unless they die quickly in the fury of combat, their last moments are spent in listening to the same blessed words. It seems so mad and dreamlike that I have found myself thinking that, despite all our confidence, the world may be but a phantasmagoria, and ourselves, with our flesh that seems so solid, may be no more than fleeting wraiths. There is no one to rush between the scowling nations, as the poor hermit did ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... walked in slippers; he would as soon have thought of turning back on this account as he would have thought of stopping if thorns and briars had beset his path. He felt almost as if it were a dream that he was walking thus, serving the woman he loved; but even as he brooded on the dreamlike strangeness of it, his mind was doing its practical work. If Winifred and Mrs. Martha were in the vehicle he had seen, what time they would gain while driving on the road they would be apt to lose by their feebleness on the mountain ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Turner, although he was sure he had never seen it before. The boy had oval cheeks, finely tinted with colour, big, shy blue eyes quilled about with long black lashes, and silvery-golden hair lying over his head in soft ringlets like a girl's. What girl's? Something far back in Robert Turner's dreamlike boyhood seemed to call to him like a note of a forgotten melody, sweet yet stirring like a pain. The more he looked at the boy the stronger the impression of a resemblance grew in every feature but the mouth. That was alien to his recollection ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... voices booming faintly over the vast solitude. Surely and steadily they pressed on, seeming like the deer to move but slowly, but in reality running their hardest with a swinging relentless stride. There was something almost dreamlike in this strange procession as it moved on between green earth and blue heaven, with none to see it, as it appeared, but the white-winged curlew which whistled mournfully overhead. But presently a little group of horsemen appeared on the far side of the hounds, just six of ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... was hard for her to realise her position; for a time she was conscious only of an overwhelming sense of loneliness. The interval of life with her grandfather was dreamlike as she looked back upon it; yet harder to grasp was the situation in which she now found herself, surrounded by luxuries which had come to her as if from the clouds, her own mistress, free to form wishes merely for the sake of satisfying them. She cared ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... comparative ease, but that thought never entered his head, as they floated down the river, right in the middle now, and with the trees apparently gliding by them and the verdure and water-growth gradually growing confused and dim. To Vane all now seemed dreamlike and strange. He was in no trouble—there was no sense of dread, and the despair of a few minutes before was blunted, as with his body lower in the water, which kept rising now above his lips, ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on some unfooted lawn Whose air the unrisen sunbeams fear to fret Lives a ghost's life of ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... which I must brag, namely, her bow. No sea could ever come over it. It laughs at the sea, that bow does; it challenges the sea; it snorts defiance at the sea. And withal it is a beautiful bow; the lines of it are dreamlike; I doubt if ever a boat was blessed with a more beautiful and at the same time a more capable bow. It was made to punch storms. To touch that bow is to rest one's hand on the cosmic nose of things. To look at it is to ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Piero della Francesca, in the National Gallery, are entirely omitted, as the nose-holding in the Raising of Lazarus, is omitted by Rembrandt. Christ kneels in the Jordan, with John bending over him, and vague multitudes crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light. Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long, straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have spoken already. But I must speak of the S. Rocco Christ ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... for a little more? She wanted to see "angels," and gives a very pretty picture of an experience with a bevy of children. Telepathy from the sitter will hardly account for the following, especially the strange turn at the end, which is signally dreamlike. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes—not a soul to meet us at the train—where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's—" ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... beeches. The rosy light of sunset lay over the world like a pink kiss. Of all the airy, fairy places, full of weird, elfin grace, Rainbow Valley that winter evening was the most beautiful. But all its dreamlike loveliness was lost on poor, sore-hearted ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... it were a great rock of pointed crystal, white and unearthly. Serapion's eyes brightened with eagerness, and the Sea-farers gazed long at the peak, which rather seemed a star, or a headland on some celestial shore, so bright and dreamlike was it and so magically ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... use of crying? If it would bring them all back, I'd cry a bath-tub full. But it won't. Thinking about it only makes it worse. It had to be, and in some ways I'm thankful it did. It was all unreal and dreamlike up there. I knew nothing about the sorrows and hardships in the real world. But how I am talking! I wonder, do you understand at all what I ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence wrought kindly ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of regard—the childhood's recollections of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoe; the dialogue of the two upright judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean Marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... When they entered the clubhouse Doctor Gregory turned toward the swimming pool and Rachael was instantly drawn into a game of bridge. She played like a woman in a dream, was joined by Billy, went home in a dream, and presently found herself and her husband fellow guests at a dreamlike dinner- party. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... I had confused thoughts; impressions, vague and dreamlike. As though in a dream I felt myself standing there with Mary clinging to me. Both of us were ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... affairs was really very horrible, and could be met by no laws at that time (or I presume now) in existence. I once thought of writing a pamphlet on the subject, but quitted the Consulate before finding time to effect my purpose; and all that phase of my life immediately assumed so dreamlike a consistency that I despaired of making it seem solid or tangible to the public. And now it looks distant and dim, like troubles of a century ago. The origin of the evil lay in the character of the seamen, scarcely any of whom were American, but the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... waltzer, and my step had fitted in with that of Nina as harmoniously as the two notes of a perfect chord. She found it so on this occasion, and glanced up with a look of gratified surprise as I bore her lightly with languorous, dreamlike ease of movement through the glittering ranks of our guests, who watched us admiringly as we circled the room ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines, 'Obstinate questionings,' &c. To that dreamlike vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but having in the Poem regarded it as presumptive ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... our talk with him. He was said to have died of a disease of the lungs, yet here again history is curiously mistaken. Mr. Calhoun slept himself away. I sometimes think with a shudder that perhaps this was the revenge which Nemesis took of him for his mistakes. His last days were dreamlike in their passing. His last speech in the Senate was read by one of his friends, as Doctor Ward had advised him. Some said afterwards that his illness was that accursed "sleeping sickness" imported from Africa with these same slaves: It were a strange thing ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... following work, designing to put in a form somewhat permanent my recollections of experiences in the great war, believing it may be a source of satisfaction to my children in later years. Already many of those scenes begin to appear dim and dreamlike, through the receding years, and many faces, once so clearly pictured in memory as seen around the camp-fire, in the march, and on the field of battle, have faded quite away. These things admonish me that what is ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... self-contained. Her griefs seemed lighter when they were shared with others, even in spirit. There was in her nature a childish strain that craved sympathy and comforting. She had never known—or if so it was only in a dim and dreamlike past—the tender, brooding care that was her conception of a mother's love. Mrs. Hohlfelder had been fond of her in a placid way, and had given her every comfort and luxury her means permitted. Clara's ideal of maternal ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... wreaths of mist glittering like silver over the mountains, their tops soaring above the mist like islands of the sea! Then the day gleaming over the dazzling white snow-peaks! And the evenings, and the sunsets with the pale moon overhead, white mountains and islands lay hushed and dreamlike as a youthful longing! Here and there past homely little havens with houses around them set in smiling green trees! Ah! those snug homes in the lee of the skerries awake a longing for life and warmth in the breast. You may shrug your shoulders as much as ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... night before. She had broken her rule never to go anywhere with Walter unless the girls were along, and she would never, never do it again. She was particularly hard on herself to-day—and on poor Walter—because of the fact that she had enjoyed that dreamlike sail over the moonlight waters of Lake Worth more than she had ever ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... figure in a dream. So perhaps for a minute he seemed, touched with the light as he was, which made a glorification in the brown locks of his hair and gleamed about "pleasant outlines" standing as fixed and still as a statue. But they were not statue eyes which looked into hers, and Faith's dreamlike gaze was only for a moment. Then every line of her face changed with joy—and she sprang up to hide it in Mr. Linden's arms. He stood still, holding her as one holds some rescued thing. For Faith was too weak to be just herself, and weariness and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... it. It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and solid-looking in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short feathery antennae, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid of a ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond the dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as science aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden reality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a different scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of hypothesis, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... more than I could bear, and returning to the ship bade farewell to Nauplius and resumed the voyage. Very soon we seemed quite close to the Isle of Dreams, though there was a certain dimness and vagueness about its outline; but it had something dreamlike in its very nature; for as we approached it receded, and seemed to get further and further off. At last we reached it and sailed into Slumber, the port, close to the ivory gates where stands the temple of the Cock. It was evening when we landed, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... me,' and Mrs. Claughton, taking the bedroom candle, rose and followed out on to the landing, and so into the adjacent drawing-room. She cannot remember opening the door, which the housemaid had locked outside, and she owns that this passage is dreamlike in her memory. Seeing that her candle was flickering out, she substituted for it a pink one taken from a chiffonier. The figure walked nearly to the window, turned three-quarters round, said 'To-morrow!' and was no more seen. Mrs. Claughton went back to her ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... do the Greeks premise as the model of their life in Hades? Anaemic, dreamlike, weak . it is the continuous accentuation of old age, when the memory gradually becomes weaker and weaker, and the body still more so. The senility of senility . this would be our state of life in the eyes ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... were a shadow in a land of shadows. The thought came to her that she was dead, and that her spirit was passing over the dim ghost trail to the shadow-land. She tried to shake off the fancy, but all was so vague and dreamlike that she hardly knew where or what she was; yet over it all brooded the consciousness of dull, heavy, torturing pain, like the dumb agony that comes to us in fevered sleep, burdening our dreams with a ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... glanced at the tiny map to the right of the dash, and set his course. It was a matter of moments only, but while Kane worked, Prester Kleig studied the instruments on the dash, for it had been months since he had flown, save for his recent half-dreamlike experience. There was a button which released the mechanism of the deadly guns, fired by compressed air, all operated from the noiseless motor, whose muzzles exactly cleared the tips of Mayther's wings, two guns to each wing, one on the entering edge, one on the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... which gave rise to it has ceased. What is seen on the neutral surface (it will be shown later why we studiously avoid speaking of 'white light') is no outwardly existing colour at all. It is the activity of the eye itself, working in a dreamlike way from its blood-vessel system, and coming to our ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... not laugh, as he himself had laughed on that faraway, dreamlike evening in his rooms. Instead of laughter, two great tears welled up in her eyes and glistened slowly down her ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring a study—a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house—overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below. Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... when Caterina was waked from her heavy sleep by Martha bringing in the warm water, the sun was shining, the wind had abated, and those hours of suffering in the night seemed unreal and dreamlike, in spite of weary limbs and aching eyes. She got up and began to dress with a strange feeling of insensibility, as if nothing could make her cry again; and she even felt a sort of longing to be down-stairs in the midst of company, that she might get rid ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... "wandered," as they said. And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground had given way. It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike wonder and ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... left hip and elbow and stared glumly down upon the cabin directly beneath them. Whenever his pale, straight-lidded eyes focussed upon the dusty top of the Ford car standing in front of the cabin, Casey said something under his breath. Miles away to the south, pale violet, dreamlike in the distance, the jagged outline of a small mountain range stood as if painted upon the horizon. A wavy ribbon of smudgy brown was drawn uncertainly across the base of the mountains. This, Casey knew, when his eyes lifted to look that way, marked the line of the Sante Fe and a train moving ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... to think, her days had been full, at night she had gone to bed to sleep in happy dreamlessness. The hotel bedrooms with their litter of trunks suggesting imminent flight had held no restfulness. To Gillian the transitory sensation had strained already over-excited nerves and heightened the dreamlike feeling that made everything seem unreal. But here, the visible evidences of travel removed, the deep silence of a large country house penetrating her mind and conducing to peace, she could think at last. The surroundings were helpful. There was about ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... called it, was still in progress. Without noise, the six half-nude figures were describing circles upon the smooth floor. The silence and the serpentlike motions had a peculiar hypnotic effect upon us, and in a sort of dreamlike trance we watched them wriggle by the narrow aperture to which we pressed our faces. With each circle more of the brown, sweat-polished bodies showed beneath the twisted mats. The pace was beginning ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... More he could not say. The mists of sleep, which still shrouded his brain, and the shake-up he had had from his encounter with the table, a corner of which he had rammed with the top of his head, combined to produce a dreamlike state. ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... has taken the place of the good fairies of former times, had gratified M. Wilkie's every longing in a single night. Without any period of transition, dreamlike as it were, he had passed from what he called "straitened circumstances" to the splendid enjoyment of a princely fortune. Madame d'Argeles's renunciation had been so correctly drawn up, that as soon as he presented his claims and displayed his credentials he was placed in possession of the Chalusse ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... of France certainly should die without having seen Carcassonne, foremost of what I will call the pictorial Quadrilateral, no formidable array after the manner of their Austrian cognominal, but lovely, dreamlike things. These four walled-in towns or citadels, perfect as when they represented mediaeval defence, are Carcassonne, Provins in the Brie, Semur in upper Burgundy, and the Breton Guerande, scene ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... had hardly yet recovered sufficient independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined; but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the Warden and he had ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unspeaking while the shower fell. There was an unreal dreamlike quality about the happening to the girl. Then, almost intrusively, she became deeply aware of his presence there beside her—and conscious that he was aware ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... by since, on that chill November evening, the news of Lord Ingleby's death had reached Shenstone. The happenings of the weeks which followed, now seemed vague and dreamlike to Myra, just a few events standing out clearly from the dim blur of misery. She remembered the reliable strength of the doctor; the unselfish devotion of Margaret O'Mara; the unspeakable comfort of Jane's wholesome understanding tenderness. Then the dreaded arrival of her ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... her usual prayers. She could not remember anything but Jack's entreaty—"Kiss me, mi madre! Bless me, mi madre!" She could not see anything but that last rapid turn in the saddle, and that piteous young face, showing so weird and dreamlike through the gray mist of ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... knowing that we were seeing the end of the Golden Age. Oh, those lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day's shock of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... learning in the world. For once, college professors were to be paid adequate salaries, and alluring provision for their declining years was to be made. New Haven should become a very hotbed of culture. Art galleries, libraries, museums and theatres of a dreamlike splendor were to rise whenever and wherever I should will. Why absurd? Was it not I who would defray the cost? The famous buildings of the Old World were to be reproduced, if, indeed, the originals could not be purchased, brought to this country ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage. There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... second of silence—not because Ishmael had any feeling for Polkinghorne beyond a pleasant liking, but because it was the first time the thought of death as an actuality instead of a dreamlike hypothesis had ever struck home to him. Then he said: "Poor old Polkinghorne ... but he was hardly older than us. It doesn't seem possible anyone like us can ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and slender harebells shake their blue pendants, looking in and out of the lattices like little capricious fairies. There are fragments of ruins lying on the ground, and the whole air of the thing is as wild, and dreamlike, and picturesque as the poet's ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... dangerous it was to approach an inviting flower growing on the edge of a precipice. She was not, of course, insensible to his coming in such a manner, with an excuse for the sake of seeing her, but she did not wish to increase her dreamlike inquietude by seeing him. And again, if he ventured to visit her apartment, as he did before, it might be a serious ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... one's face was rapt and serious. In the burnished silver of the moonlight the little valley had a beauty, dreamlike in its quality. In that land so truly named the Dark and Bloody Ground it seemed the abode ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her believe that ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that sprang into his mind was "salver." It was the silver salver on which Thompson brought in visitors' cards. But it was a plate as well; and, being a plate, he remembered vaguely something about a collection. The association of ideas worked itself out in a remote and dreamlike way; he felt in his pocket for a shilling, a sixpence, or a threepenny bit, and wondered for a second where the big, dark building was to which all this belonged. Something was changed, it seemed. His clothes, this ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... round in enchanted circles; and the other slenderer sound is the smaller jet that rains down its spray into the violet-borders deep in the shrubbery; and that other, the shallow babble of the waters that go down the marble steps to the lake. How dreamlike and plaintive they all sound in the night stillness! The nightingale sings from the dark shadows of the wilderness; and the musky odors of the cyclamen come floating ever and anon through the casement, in that strange, cloudy way in which flower-scents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to the eye of a Florentine used to the mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed, in ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... courage to open and read it. For the handwriting, like that of the note handed him in the street, was Georgian's, and he felt himself in a maze concerning her which made everything in her connection seem dreamlike and unreal. It was not long, however, before he had mastered its contents. They were strange enough, as this transcription of them ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... any other book of murders—the Causes Celebres, for instance. The legendary murder, or attempt at it, will bring its own imaginative probability with it, when repeated by Eldredge; and at the same time it will have a dreamlike effect; so that Middleton shall hardly know whether he is awake or not. This incident is very essential towards bringing together the past time and the present, and the ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... back, and the world's light wanes, As a dream dies down and is dead; And the clouds and the gleams overhead Change, and change; and the sea remains, A shadow of dreamlike dread. ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an actual ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... kill the King?" was mainly thrasonic wind from Captain Bertin. But SECONDLY, that there is no "Island" in the River thereabouts, for Captain Bertin to fire from! So that probably the whole story is wind or little more: dreamlike, or at best some idle thrasonic-theoretic question, on the part of Bertin; proper answer thereto (consisting mainly in a glass of wine) from Monseigneur:—all which, on retrospection, Monseigneur feels, or would fain feel, to have been not theoretic-thrasonic but practical, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... had begun to surmise that the woman was come thither for purposes of her own. Yet the scene was almost dreamlike in its beauty. It thrilled me to the soul to watch how the woman's blue eyes gazed about her—gazed as though she were ardently, caressingly whispering to all living ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... and consternation only augmented the instinctive recurring emotion. She felt something she could not explain. And that something was scarcely owing to this young man's pitiful position between duty to his father and love for his country. It had to do with his blazing eyes; intangible, dreamlike perceptions of him as not real, of vague sweet fancies that retreated before her introspective questioning. What alarmed Lenore was a tendency of her mind to shirk this revealing analysis. Never before had she been afraid to look into herself. But now she was finding unplumbed wells ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... glimmer of the dawn grows into the brilliance of the day, the rays of the sun, falling ever more brightly upon the landscape, bring more clearly into view the features which at first were dim and dreamlike. As the glory creeps over vale and hill, touching here a winding river, there a patch of vivid green, yonder a window of some distant dwelling, new points of beauty and interest are continually being revealed; ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... very like each other.' Jim's faculties were stunned for the time; there was a dreamlike ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... had created for her. The change from the beautiful home in Surrey to the sad dreariness of Banbrigg had followed too suddenly upon the revelation of her blessedness. It indisposed her to make known what was so dreamlike. For the past became more dreadful viewed from the ground of hope. Emily came to contemplate it as some hideous beast, which, though she seemed to be escaping its reach, might even yet spring upon her. How had she borne that past so lightly? Her fear ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... died. The Assembly, as one man, spontaneously rose, and did reverence to the Eldest of the World; old Jean is to take seance among them, honourably, with covered head. He gazes feebly there, with his old eyes, on that new wonder-scene; dreamlike to him, and uncertain, wavering amid fragments of old memories and dreams. For Time is all growing unsubstantial, dreamlike; Jean's eyes and mind are weary, and about to close,—and open on a far other wonder-scene, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... dream life was enough while it lasted. Perhaps—But I will tell you how I find myself when I do my best to recall it all. I don't remember anything clearly until I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea. I had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up—fresh and vivid—not a bit dreamlike—because the ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... slept not, though the wild bees made A dreamlike murmuring in the shade, And on me the warm-fingered hours Pressed with ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... for the sale. The sheriff stood facing them under the towering pillars of the portico; his voice rang clearly through the air. To Gordon the occasion, the loud sing-song of the sheriff, appeared unreal, dreamlike; he listened incredulously to the meager cataloguing of his dwelling, the scant acreage, with an innate sense of outrage, of a shameful violation of his privacy. He was still unable to realize that his home and his father's, the clearing that his grandfather ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale, in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that nocturnal landscape—a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on earth—no ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... trapezes which hung from the ceiling and were looped up now to the stanchions, the coarse canvas of the mattresses, the disciplined lines, the tramping feet, the commanding voices of the instructors, gave a confused and dreamlike suggestion of the lower deck of a man-of-war. To-night, under the west end of the gallery, a small platform was raised for the Mayor of Marylebone and a score of guests. The galleries themselves were packed with members of the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... days of Hendrik Hudson, the hunting-ground of Indian tribes, the scenes of massacre and battle, the last camp of the Army of the Revolution, the Head-quarters of Washington—down there were the homes of legend and poetry, the dreamlike hills of Rip van Winkle's sleep, the cliffs and caves haunted by the Culprit Fay, the solitudes traversed by the Spy—all outspread before us, and visible as in a Claude Lorraine glass, in the tranquil lucidity of distance. And here, on the hilltop, was our ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... reach of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery may tend ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... day, That murky pass had he gone through, And come to country that he knew; And homeward turned his horse's head. And passing village and homestead Nigh to his palace came at last; And still the further that he passed From that strange castle of the fays, More dreamlike seemed those seven days, And dreamlike the delicious night; And like a dream the shoulders white, And clinging arms and yellow hair, And dreamlike the sad morning there. Until at last he 'gan to deem That all might well have been ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... had cleared a little, he became aware of voices. One in particular seemed, even in his dreamlike state, to sting into his consciousness with a peculiar, bitter instinct of hatred. When at length he realized that it was the voice of Tex Lynch, the discovery had a curiously reviving effect upon his dazed senses. He could not yet remember what had happened, but intuitively he ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... Civil War. I shall not mention the name of the town, because there are people still living there who could be connected with this narrative. I have only a faint recollection of the place of my birth. At times I can close my eyes and call up in a dreamlike way things that seem to have happened ages ago in some other world. I can see in this half vision a little house—I am quite sure it was not a large one—I can remember that flowers grew in the front yard, and that around ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... sunlight of a richer glister; the river, now steel, now silver, now amber, reflected the atmosphere as a sensitive soul reflects the moods of those most dear; the forests, splendid with color, showed the lavish predominance of the rich reds characteristic of the Chilhowee woods; a dreamlike haze over all added a vague ideality that made the scene like some fondest memory or ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... eternally fresh and beautiful. Then come the great white silent snowflakes, sailing round and falling gently down, alighting on trunk, branch, and leaf, and covering and draping the hills, until they are pure and fair as the hills of Beulah. There is a dreamlike beauty in an evergreen forest mantled with snow. What words could tell the purity of coloring, the gracefulness of form of the pine boughs bending under their white burden of feathery crystals? Especially is this true of the young and pliant trees in hedgerows and thickets, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... She dreamed of a sinister mark on a face that she had never before seen—a face going into bronzed young manhood with quick brown eyes looking eagerly at her. And before her wondering look it faded, dreamlike, into a soft mist, and where it had been, a man lay, lifting himself on one arm from the ground—his sleeve tattered, his collar torn, his eyes half-living, half-dead, his hair clotted, his lips stiffened and distended, his face ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... early that night and it flooded the mountains with a glory of silver mists. The shoulders of the peaks stood out in blue barriers, strong, abiding, beautiful. In the valleys it was all a nocturne of dove grays and dreamlike softness. The stars, too, shone down in a million splinters of happy light, but the radiance of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... where he was well known, and must needs be in no haste to trade, (for country people were never sure of what they wanted until they looked the cart over), he had plenty of time to resign himself to the involuntary and dreamlike states of mind, which solved for him the questions in which he was most interested. I was not so much impressed that such notions should come from a tin pedler as by the notions themselves; for at that period the democracy of our New England towns considered ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... great and beautiful a design," was the first comment of Miss Church-Member. "Those porticos hanging in mid-air, those domes and pillars, dreamlike, stand before me more like a hundred fabled castles than aught real to sight ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... around him didn't look dreamlike at all. It was perfectly solid and real, and it looked just the way it had looked before Mike Fueyo had ... well, Malone amended, before whatever had happened had happened. It was a perfectly complete little room, and ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the wild and frenzied fugitive in the stately form, with its young beauty and air of well-born pride, which the next day sat by the side of Eugenie. And that day he told his sad and troubled story, and Eugenie wept: and from that day he came daily; and two weeks—happy, dreamlike, intoxicating to both—passed by; and as their last sun set, he was kneeling at her feet, and breathing to one to whom the homage of wit, and genius, and complacent wealth had hitherto been vainly proffered, the impetuous, agitated, delicious secrets of the First Love. He spoke, and rose to ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... about Mr. Smith than I know! Perhaps more than Mrs. Ellsworth knows!" exclaimed Annesley, forgetting the strain of expectation—the dread that a pair of mysterious, nightmare men might break up the dreamlike dinner-party for two. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the half-intelligible shouts of ranchmen; slept through the sunlight on his ceiling, through its slow descent of his wall, and awoke with it in his eyes! He woke, too, with a delicious sense of freedom from pain, and of even drawing a long breath without difficulty—two facts so marvelous and dreamlike that he naturally closed his eyes again lest he should waken to a world of suffering and dyspnoea. Satisfied at last that this relief was real, he again opened his eyes, but upon surroundings so strange, so wildly absurd and improbable, that he again ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that he had found his ordained sphere. He knew this breed,—this savage, blood-mad, fierce-eyed creature that turned, snarling, at his approach. He had something in common with the breed, knowing their blood-lusts and their mighty moods; and dim, dreamlike memory reminded him that he had mastered them in a long war that went down to the roots of time. Fenris was only a fellow wilderness creature, a pack brother of the dark forests, and he had ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... losing a chance of getting a new bit of rigging," said Harek, laughing; for he seemed none the worse for the things of last night, which indeed began to seem ghostly and dreamlike to us all. "But what good is ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... snowy palaces, vast and beautiful and dreamlike, risin' up from the blue waters, and their pure white columns and statuary reflected into the mirrow below, and the green beauty of the Wooded Island, and the tall trees a-dottin' ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... out on the grassy bank and lay looking up into the blue sky overhead. How beautiful it was! How gracefully the clouds floated by! One took on the shape of a buffalo with big horns and head bent down as if to charge. But it was so far away and dreamlike it was not fearful to the child. And now it changed; the horns disappeared; the body became smaller, and folded wings appeared at the sides; it was now, in Swift Fawn's thoughts, a graceful swan sailing, onward, onward, in ...
— Timid Hare • Mary Hazelton Wade
... side by side with a most bitter enemy; and oh! it was not possible that somewhere, not many hundred feet away perhaps, from where she stood, the being she had once despised, but who now, in every moment of this weird, dreamlike life, became more and more dear—it was not possible that HE was unconsciously, even now walking to his doom, whilst she did ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... peculiar, dreamlike steadiness, Tommy put his hand where an undeflected bullet would go through it. He pressed the trigger again. He felt a tiny breeze upon his hand. But the bullet had been unable to elude the compound-wound magnets, each of which now had quite four times ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... love in the precisely happy medium becoming a maiden)—the father's love and satisfaction in her—the calm prosperity of the whole household—was delightful at the time, and, looking back upon it, it was dreamlike. ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the immediate moment was in her mind. To her thought, long confused and fleeting, the dreamlike character of this sudden change seemed natural and simple. She had no plan of campaign, no route of escape, no future. Her mind, relaxed from the quick decision that had cleared its mists in the moment of action, began to dull and settle and fall into its ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... standing behind her, jested with her to hide his emotion, for he fancied he divined her intention. And it was as he thought; she finished the faces with a few strokes of the crayon—old King David was he, and she was Abishag, the Shunammite. But they were enveloped in a dreamlike brightness, it was themselves deified; the one with hair all white, the other with hair all blond, covering them like an imperial mantle, with features lengthened by ecstasy, exalted to the bliss of angels, with the glance and the smile of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... strange and dreamlike, the oddest thing of all was to see Calcraft take the pinioned fin-like hand of the prisoner and shake it when he had drawn the white cap over the face and arranged the rope. He came creaking in new boots down the sticky steps of the gallows, pulled a rope to free a support which ran on ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... seemed, a passion had actually commenced in his boy's heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... of a colour unknown to our climate; a place of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright silver, which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other lands. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... bands of white, and flecked with sailing cloud-shadows from the skies above. Orr's Island, with its blue-black spruces, its silver firs, its golden larches, its scarlet sumachs, lay on the bosom of the deep like a great many-colored gem on an enchanted mirror. A vague, dreamlike sense of rest and Sabbath stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky fingers; and the small tide-waves that ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... destitute of imagery, expressed tender feelings in ingenious turns; it extends its sportiveness to the very limits where the self- meditation, which endeavours to transfuse an inexpressible disposition of mind into thought, wings again the thought to dreamlike intimations. The forms of the song were diversified by the introduction into poetry of what in music is effected by variation. The rich properties of the Spanish language however could not fully develop themselves in these species of poetry, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... least a large part of them—seem to lead a dreamlike existence," was Jim's comment. "They don't seem to belong to the hurry and bustle of life such as we ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... certain and present, was He now to Cecile as if in reality he was holding her little hand; as if in reality He was carrying tired Maurice. He was there, the Goal was certain, the End sure. When they got to the great big terminus she still felt dreamlike, allowing Joe and Pericard to get their tickets and make all arrangements. Then the children and dog found themselves in a third-class compartment. Toby was well and skillfully hidden under the seat, the whistle sounded, and Pericard came close ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... That ride was dreamlike to Joan. Pierre put her in her saddle and she rode after him across the Square and along a road flanked by the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that first week, in which the stun and shock were reacting in prompt, cheerful, benevolent organizing and providing,—in which, through wonderful, dreamlike ruins, like the ruins of the far-off past, people were wandering, amazed, seeing a sudden torch laid right upon the heart and centre of a living metropolis and turning it to a shadow and a decay,—in which human interests and experiences came to mingle that had never ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... with a smart air, back to back, with one's partner. Berenice, in her lithe, rhythmic way, seemed to him the soul of spirited and gracious ease—unconscious of everybody and everything save the spirit of the dance itself as a medium of sweet emotion, of some far-off, dreamlike spirit of gaiety. He wondered. He was ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... felt that it was all absurd and dreamlike. He had never hurt a man before in his life. Martindale knew it. Why could he not go back, face them, give up his gun, wait for the law ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... the next few minutes seemed to me unreal and dreamlike. I was tired, I suppose, and so more than usually susceptible. Night had no unfamiliar effects for me, even night on the borders of this great river; nor was my occupation a new one, or the expectation I felt, as fearful and absorbing as that with which ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... Somewhat dreamlike Wordsworth's views may be, but his belief is clearly not in transmigration. To the educated Hindu, who may not consciously have rejected the idea of transmigration, the doctrine is really now no more than a current ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... feet till morn returning made Some village all a-hum with wakeful stir; And from that place the royal wayfarer Went ever faster on and yet more fast, Till, ere the noontide sultriness was past, Upon his ear the burden of the seas Came dreamlike, heard upon a cool fresh breeze That tempered gratefully a fervent sky. And many an hour ere sundown he drew nigh A fair-built seaport, warder of the land And watcher of the wave, with odours fanned Of green fields and of blue from either side;— A pleasant place, wherein he might abide, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... "4. Thereat sleepfray'd, dreamlike the God takes Wing And soars to his own skies, while Psyche strives To clasp his foot, and fain thereon would ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... to realize that, for Tommy, their meeting had been six weeks ago. It all seemed dreamlike. The closer he came to it, the less he could realize that in a few hours he'd be getting off on a strange world, with only the strange name Raynor Three as a guide. He felt terribly alone, and having Tommy ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... rains, vivified by the glorious sun, its verdure tolerates no trace of age. No ill or sour vapours contaminate its breath. Bland and ever fresh breezes preserve its excellencies untarnished. It typifies all that is tranquil, quiet, easeful, dreamlike, for it ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the party rode past the Church of the Cristo de la Vega, and faced the long hill that leads to the gate Del Cambron. Above them towered the city of Toledo—silent and dreamlike. Concepcion had ceased singing now, and the hard breathing of the horses alone broke the silence. The Tagus, emerging here from rocky fastness, flowed noiselessly away to the west—a gleaming ribbon ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... before his brain grew clearer, and then his first matter-of-fact un-dreamlike thought was of Ned, and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... down in the chair he had vacated. She had never felt quite like this before in her life. Everything seemed dreamlike. The splashing of water in the bathroom came faintly to her, and she realized that she had been on the point of falling asleep again. She got up and opened the window, and once more the air acted as a restorative. She watched the activities of the street with a distant interest. They, too, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... beautiful in the sense that all healthy, sound, young, well-formed things are, but there was, as it were, no soul in the beauty, nothing transcendent in any of the lines or in the colour. It was something essentially of earth, un-dreamlike, appealing to the senses, and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... but a fissure in a mountain-range. The moon had now risen high in the heavens, and her beams performed odd tricks of shadow play as they danced through these colossal halls of emptiness and silence. Nothing seemed real or substantial; these enormous masses of masonry and iron looked almost dreamlike, the ghosts of a forgotten past, shadows that must surely vanish with ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen |
