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Fading   Listen
noun
Fading  n.  Loss of color, freshness, or vigor.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fading" Quotes from Famous Books



... term for countries with advanced, industrialized economies; this term is fading from use; see ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... so important and difficult an enterprize might well please even a great queen. Hatasu, delighted with the result, did her best to prevent it fading away from human remembrance by building a new temple to Ammon, and representing the entire expedition upon its walls. At Tel-el-Bahiri, in the valley of El-Assasif, near Thebes, she found a convenient site ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... feeling to Mildred,—the being left on the house-top in the cold grey morning, at an hour when she had always hitherto been asleep in bed. The world itself, as she looked round her, seemed unlike the one she had hitherto lived in. The stars were in the sky; but they were dim,—fading before the light of morning. There were no fields, no gardens, no roads to be seen;—only grey water, far away on every side. She could see nothing beyond this grey water, except towards the east, where a line of low hills stood between her ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... let die," was content to occupy himself with the most ephemeral of all hackwork. His own polemical writings may be justly described in the words he himself uses of a book by one of his opponents, as calculated "to gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the constancy and solid firmness of any wise man ... but to catch the worthless approbation of an ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... reflecting each other's ardent looks, ... then, ... their figures grew less and less distinct, ... they appeared to melt mysteriously into the azure, pearly light that surrounded them, and finally, like faint clouds fading on the edge of a sea-horizon, they vanished! The effect of this brief voluptuous dance, and its equally voluptuous end, was simply indescribable,—the young men, who had watched it through in silence and flushed ecstasy, now sprang from their couches with shouts of rapture ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... night, with my little pipe alight, I am sitting by the camp-fire's fading cheer; Oh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill, And the breakers in the bay are moaning drear. The toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed, And I alone a weary vigil keep; In the sightless, sullen sky I can hear the night-hawk cry, And ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... "Sweet By and By" was gradually fading out; next it ceased altogether, and there was an ominous stillness. After ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... between daylight and darkness is called "the painter's hour"? There is, however, this inconvenience attending it, which allowance must be made for—the reds look darker than by day, indeed almost black, and the light blues turn white, or nearly so. This low, fading light also suggests many useful hints as to arrangement, from the circumstance of the dashings of the brush in a picture but newly commenced, suggesting forms that were not originally intended, but which often prove much ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various

... she sighed, a bit wounded and rebuffed, it seems to me now, for she smiled in a way more sad and tenderly reproachful than anything, as she looked away, in a muse, to the fading colors in the west. "Ah, Dannie," she repeated, her face grown grave and wistful, "you've come back the same as you went away. Ye've come back," says she, with a brief little chuckle ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... place a right construction on the conduct of Wieland? Was the error that misled him so easily rectified? Were views so vivid and faith so strenuous thus liable to fading and to change? Was there not reason to doubt the accuracy of my perceptions? With images like these was my mind thronged, till the deportment of my brother called away ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... had come so opportunely to enable us to part company with her. The wind—which, after all, was the merest zephyr—was very light and partial, playing about the surface of the water around us in occasional cat's-paws, and failing to reach the barque altogether so long as the fast-fading twilight permitted us to see her, while, a quarter of a mile to windward and right out to the horizon, the water was quite blue with ripples. We accordingly braced sharp up and luffed our way to the spot where the breeze was ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... parrakeets broke into shrill chatter, but during the hot hours of the day only the full drone of insects, like the beat of a distant surf, filled the ear, while nothing moved amid the solemn vistas of stupendous trunks, fading away into the darkness which held us in. Once some bandy-legged, lurching creature, an ant-eater or a bear, scuttled clumsily amid the shadows. It was the only sign of earth life which I saw in this ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... just in front of the bridge, and as I pushed the canoe beneath it, after supper, I felt the indefinable sensation of having passed that way before. I knew beforehand what the little boat would drift into. The broad saffron light of evening fading over a still lagoon; two converging lines of pine trees running back into the sunset; a grassy point upon the right; and behind that a neglected garden, a tangled bower of honeysuckle, a straight path bordered with box, leading to a deserted house with a high, white-pillared ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... wise. He Was perhaps the most far-seeing of the Albanian Nationalists. We stood on a height and looked over Albania —range behind range like the stony waves of a great sea, sweeping towards the horizon intensely and marvellously blue, and fading finally into the sky in a pale mauve distance. He thrust out his hands towards it with pride and enthusiasm. It was a mistake, he said, now to work against Turkey. The Turk was no longer Albania's worst foe. Albania ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... its earthly mate; Heroic love that to its sphere's eclipse Can dare to join its fate With one beloved devoted human heart, And share with it the passion and the smart, The undying bliss Of its most fleeting kiss; The fading grace Of its most sweet embrace:- Angelic love, heroic love! Whose birth can only be above, Whose wandering must be on earth, Whose haven where it first had birth! Love that can part with all but its own ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... as things of light and lightness! We hear your voice in still small accents tell, Of realms of bliss and never-fading brightness, Where those who loved ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... nothing for it but to take a candle and go alone. No repetition of the noise occurred to daunt her afresh; and she reached the landing above almost reassured, and thinking how odd it was that the idea of finding somebody—Susanna—there, though it had come as a fear, was fading out as a ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... memory is touched, it is revived and shows itself to be supplied with the excitement which is discharged in a motor attack. It is just here that the office of psychotherapy begins, its task being to bring about adjustment and forgetfulness for the unconscious processes. Indeed, the fading of memories and the flagging of affects, which we are apt to take as self-evident and to explain as a primary influence of time on the psychic memories, are in reality secondary changes brought about by painstaking ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... do not begin to appear under conditions at Beltsville until about the middle of July or later. The first symptom is fading of the green color, especially around the margins of the leaf blade. Sometimes this chlorosis results in blotches, which may extend for a considerable distance from the margin towards the mid-rib. This stage ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... merged in the ultimate distance! The near-by peaks and ridges stood out with dazzling distinction, the glaciation, the drainage, the relation of each part to the others all revealed. The snow-covered tops of the remoter peaks, dwindling and fading, rose to our view as though floating in thin air when their bases were hidden by the haze, and the beautiful crescent curve of the whole Alaskan range exhibited itself from Denali to the sea. To the right hand the glittering, tiny threads ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... the men came tumbling up, and as fast as it could be achieved, the anchor was raised, sail after sail hoisted, and an hour after, with every scrap of canvas that could be set, the Nautilus was slowly gliding along right out to sea, with the palm and mangrove-lined shore slowly fading into the haze, while the men collected together in knots and discussed the possibility of catching ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn

... a thick gray beard. His big head was quite bald, and the bareness of his forehead only served to make his bushy eyebrows more prominent. Behind these his round deepset eyes seemed to flash like lightning at the end of summer behind the fading foliage. He was of small stature, but very broad-shouldered; in fact, built like a gladiator. The rags in which he was clad were defiantly filthy. His face was short and of a vulgar type, like that of Socrates; and if the fire of genius glowed in his strongly marked features, I certainly could ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... education, and which they may, perhaps, find to be worth all the rest. Such is the picture which Plato draws and which we only reproduce, partly in his own words, of the dangers which beset youth in times of transition, when old opinions are fading away and the new are not yet firmly established. Their condition is ingeniously compared by him to that of a supposititious son, who has made the discovery that his reputed parents are not his real ones, and, in consequence, they have lost their ...
— The Republic • Plato

... flown to him.... But truly I didn't know ... I didn't guess.... People speak of presentiments: there are no such things. I was perfectly calm, just as one is after a nightmare of which the memory is fading away.... No, I swear to you, I knew nothing ... ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... would be. Even in the short time during which we have any observations, some are already on record. One of the most interesting is the fading of the 7th Pleiad, due, according to Ovid, to grief at the taking of Troy. Again, the "fiery Dogstar," as it used to be, is now, and has been for ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... of that iron forearm which fell slowly by Lingard's side. She had regained fully the possession of her personality. There remained only a fading, slightly breathless impression of a short flight above that earth on which her feet were firmly planted now. "And is that all?" she asked herself, not bitterly, but with a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking—to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history—passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories—to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... dimly round Baby; within, strange shadows are flitting by. The wee body is pressing heavily upon the spirit; Baby is becoming conscious of the burthen. He will be quiet for hours on his little cot; he does not sleep, but he dreams. Earth's joys and lights are fast fading out of those resilient eyes; Baby's spirit is waiting on the shores of eternity, and already hears "the ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... Asmodeus, and the noonday sun poured into every cranny of his brain, he suffers a shock compared with which any galvanic battery, not fatal, gives but a gentle tap. The suddenness of the transition—no gentle fading out of half-remembered dreams, no slow lifting of lids, no pleasant uncertainty of time and place gradually replacing itself by dawning outlines of familiar chair and window frame and cornice—the leap from absolute nonentity into a glaring, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... breakfast, the scowl on his face fading slowly to a frown. He lit a cigar and with a moody air went to his smoking-room. The criminal carelessness of the cat ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson

... was fading from her face again. She had made a mistake in thus assailing him, and already she knew it. He only laughed at her puny efforts to hurt him, laughed ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... cheek was tinged with exquisite rose colour, and the dark liquid eyes and softly smiling mouth had an affectionate pensiveness far lovelier than her last year's bloom, and yet there was something painful in that beauty—it was too like the fragility of the flower fading under one hour's sunshine; and there was a sadness in seeing the matronly stamp on a face so young that it should have shown only girlhood's freedom from care. Arthur indeed was boasting of the return of the colour, which spread and deepened ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a large vaulted hall, sitting at an open window through which the evening bells of Pesth are pealing. The outlook is charming. The castle stands high; beneath me, first, the Danube, spanned by the suspension bridge; across it, Pesth; and further off the endless plain beyond Pesth, fading away into the purple haze of evening. To the left of Pesth I look up the Danube; far, very far away on my left,—that is, on its right bank,—it is first bordered by the town of Ofen; back of that are hills, blue and still bluer, and then comes the brown-red in the evening ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... picture "A Bride." A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour—a young girl naked of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly dropped back, white arms inert, pendant. And in her eyes' deep ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... beside the fire. It was growing dusk. The distant snow-ridge was swiftly fading into a pale and ghostly sheet in the gray gloom of the night. Up that ridge Aldous knew ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... beautiful violet eyes, now fading in death; she opened her bloodless lips, now paling in death, and ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... twilight was fading when Mildred came from her state-room. She found Boyd pacing the deck, ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... There is no death here, only change for the better. And so with everything that has bloomed and flourished in this garden during the past season, provision has been made for new and more abundant life. All these bright but falling leaves and fading flowers are merely Nature's robes, ornaments that she is throwing carelessly aside as she withdraws for a little time from her regal state. Wait till she appears again next spring, as young, fresh, and beautiful as when, like Eve, she saw her first bright morning. Come and see her upon her throne ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... for Jimmy can wash in a piece of a minute if he wants to," warned Charlotte, and in a second the parson had sent the gray car flying out toward Old Harpeth, though I saw him glance back with a trace of distress in his eyes at the fading vision of a small boy running, howling, to the front ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the fading landscape. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the previous evening, and strained his view to catch every peculiarity of the landscape; but it wore the same wild, barren aspect when seen by the rays of the morning sun which it had done when surveyed by the fading glimmer of eve. Descending into the grotto, he lifted the stone, filled his pockets with gems, put the box together as well and securely as he could, sprinkled fresh sand over the spot from which it had been taken, and then carefully trod down the earth to give it everywhere a uniform ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... fancy yet joys to retrace the resemblance Of comrades, in friendship and mischief allied, How welcome to me your ne'er-fading remembrance, Which rests in the bosom, though hope ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero

... with her volume in her hand to catch the fading light from the window, when another visiter came in. It was David Bartholomew, who having knocked and fancied that he heard the word of permission, walked in and was at her side before she knew it. Matilda started, and then looked very ...
— Trading • Susan Warner

... place beside the weather rigging. Except for the ship's own lantern, and for some lights in Shoreby town, that were already fading to leeward, the whole world of air was as black as in a pit. Only from time to time, as the Good Hope swooped dizzily down into the valley of the rollers, a crest would break—a great cataract of snowy foam would leap in one instant into being—and, in an instant more, would stream ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his arms involuntarily toward her, and scarce knowing what she did, she went forward to the embrace. Very lovingly he folded her for a moment to his bosom, then turning her face to the fading sunlight which streamed through the dingy window, he looked at it wistfully and long, as if he would remember every feature. Pushing back the silken curls which clustered around her forehead, he kissed her twice, and then releasing ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes

... over which the sun sets, farther and farther toward the south, we have a genial and gentle sadness. But sadness belongs to all very deep joys. It is almost as needful to the perfectness of joy, as shadows in landscapes are to the charm of the picture. Then, too, comes the fading out of flowers,—each variety in its turn, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... threw on his coat and ran for the shaft. Then he pulled himself up, singing, and dived into the fresh-made drifts of a new storm as he started toward town; nor did he stop to investigate the fast fading footprints of some one who evidently had passed the mine a short time before. Fairchild was too happy to notice such things just now; in a tin can in his side pocket was a blackish, muggy mixture which ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... the room very cold. The storm had fallen now in a fury about the house, and the rain lashed the windows and then fell in gurgling stuttering torrents through the pipes and along the leads. Miss Monogue could not move; the scene, the place, the incidents were slowly fading away, and the room slowly coming back again. The face opposite her, also, gradually seemed to drop, as though it had been a mask, the expression that it had worn. Peter Westcott, the Peter that she knew, sat before her again; she could have believed as she looked at him, that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... Me Long" celebrated its two-hundredth performance. Souvenir programs. A few appropriate words by the management. A flashlight of the cast. A round of wine passed in the after-the-performance gloom of the wings. Aqueous figures fading off in the orderly back-stage ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... his throne, and at his side was Ingebjorg the Fair, looking like spring by the side of fading autumn. ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various

... a love of allegory; her studies in Holland and Norway are interesting. Her 'Whitby,' lighted by sunset, with figures massed in the streets in dark relief against it, is beautiful. Her 'Friends,' showing two women watching the twilight fading from the summits of a mountain range, the cedared slopes and river valley below meantime gathering blueness and shadow, is of such strength and sweetness of fancy that it affects one ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... figure which loomed above him in the fading light which came through the porthole of the state-room. The hour was seven-thirty, and he had just woken from a troubled doze, full of strange nightmares, and for the moment he thought that he must still be dreaming, for the figure before him could ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... Laughter and banter filled the forest as they squatted or lay down to wait for the feast. I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mape-wood in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea, and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of the silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... thou nearer, Thou Spirit of the distant height, Whither now that slender flight Of swallows, winging, guides my sight! The hill cloth seem to me A fading memory Of long delight, And in its distant blue Half hideth from my view This shrinking season that must now retire; And so shall hold it, hopeful, a desire And knowledge old as night and always new. Draw nigher! And, with bended brow, I will be thy reverer Through ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... watched them from her window, in the clear, fading light. "How good he is," she thought. And she turned, with a smile and a sigh, to set the table for ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan

... they half-starve you, and what they do give you to eat is so murdered in the cooking that you can hardly swallow it. Economical for the management, but not very good for the guests. But one must take things as they come, in this horrible war." She paused, the forced smile fading from her lips. Somehow Norah felt that she was sorry for her: she looked suddenly ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce

... amid the raven locks that adorn his poetical cranium, and gently at first, then furiously, irritates the cuticle of his imaginative head-piece, hoping thereby to waken up his ideas and find a foundation upon which to erect another stone in the edifice of his never-fading glory. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various

... time When thou wert young and happy, like a dream Now perished! No; the murmured prayer alone Rose from the trembling lips towards the Throne Of Mercy; that ere spring returned again, And the long winter blew its dreary blast, To sweep the verdure from the fading plain, Thy burden would be dropped, thy sorrows past! O blind and aged man, bowed down with cares, When will the grave shelter ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... of her lovers, giving their names and circumstantial details. Rosanette drew back, all the colour fading from ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... terrible faintness; for that child-phantom, gliding on before, stopped like a retribution at that very spot, and, raising its little hand, pointed to that very box, glancing upward with its solemn eye, as, rising slowly in the air, it grew indistinct, its outlines fading into darkness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... delight, In memory I trace; In fancy stop their rapid flight, And all the past replace; But, ah! I wake to endless woes, And tears the fading visions close! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... lie awake whole nights thinking of it. And oh, the strange thoughts that passed through my soul, like so many rivers of light; deep and rich were their waves as they rolled;—these were more to me than sleep, more than soft slumber after long months of watching over the decaying, fading frame of a friend, and the loved one laid to rest in the dust. But I cannot describe my feelings to those who have never been slaves; then why should I attempt it? He who has passed from spiritual death to life, and received ...
— The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. • Lunsford Lane

... that seemed to ask, "Child, have you strength to bear?" But she herself had not the strength to tell her. Besides, it seemed as though these close cords of love were knitted so tightly around the mother, and every breath of her fading life so fondly cherished, that she could not perforce depart. Months might pass ere that frail tabernacle was ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... prophet showed him Samaria spread out before him like one of those wreaths of flowers which the guests at a banquet bind round their brows, and which gradually fade as their wearers drink deeper and deeper. "Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley of them that are overcome with wine. Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one; as a tempest of hail, a destroying storm, as a tempest of mighty waters overflowing, shall be cast down to the earth with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... though she all unworthy were Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say, In all things else she beares the greatest sway: Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And love of things so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... been examining one of the beautiful flowers which the boatmen picked for her. The outside of the leaves was of a delicate white, deepening in colour through every shade of rose to the deepest crimson, and then fading again to a creamy-yellowish tint at the heart. Many of the leaves were five feet and upwards in diameter, and perfectly smooth on the upper surface, with an upright edge of an inch to two inches all the way round. We managed, though not without difficulty, to ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... heart, When, fading slowly down the past, Fond memories depart, And each that leaves it seems the last; Long after all the rest are flown, Returns a solitary tone,— The after-echo of departed years,— And touches ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... left. No wonder the Mermaids and the Mer-babies and the Sea-gulls were astonished. Even the sea was speckled with fish who were putting their heads out of the water to watch. For the Philosopher's castle was fading away, melting like ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... it. He looked with tender sympathy at the little marble image which yesterday was a poor, ragged peasant, to-day was a bright and winged angel. His thoughts flew back to the imperial palace, where his little motherless daughter was fading away from earth, and the father prayed for his only child. He took from the passive hands a rose, and softly as he came, he left the solitary cottage, wherein an angel ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... the thin, cold starlight and the pale luminosity of the fading aurora, he recognized each surrounding detail, and wondered at the accuracy with which the trivialities of the setting had been subconsciously ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... power away— As round this humble spot I wing, My thrilling voice shall daily sing A requiem o'er the faded flower, That bloom'd and wither'd in an hour, And prov'd life is, in every view, Naught but a rose-bud twin'd with rue. A blossom born at day's first light, And fading with the earliest night; Nor stranger's step, nor shrieking loom, Shall scare the warbler ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various

... that lends an appropriate setting to so strange and uncanny an event. The sky is leaden except for a streak on the western horizon where the fading, sinister light of the sun gives token of a stormy morrow. Through the walled banks, the river rushes turbulently, swollen by recent rains; its waters tinged by the dyes and other refuse from ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... truth, but after a woman's fashion she added to the truth. He said that he had loved Jane Beach, and she did not doubt that he still loved her more than ever. How was she to know that the image of this faraway and hateful Jane was fading from his mind, to be replaced by that of a certain present Juanna? She took it all for granted, and filled in the details with a liberal hand and ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... have saved it. I had taken all manner of precautions to prevent the end doing any damage when the smash came, for come I knew it must. We now return to the six-wire cable. As I sat watching the cable to-night, large phosphorescent globes kept rolling from it and fading in the black water. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... De Courtenay, also rising, the gaiety fading from his face and his eyes beginning to sparkle bodefully, "of the North-west Company, trading from Montreal into the fur country. I am sent of my uncle Elsworth McTavish, who is a shareholder and a most responsible man, to take charge of the post De Brisac on the south branch of ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... had abandoned all ideas of a coronet with the departure of the Marquess of Eltringham and his sisters for their own seat; and as a final effort of her fading charms, had begun to calculate the capabilities of Captain Jarvis, who had at this time honored Bath ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper

... came to, it was early morning, and through the holes in the plaster wall I could see the stars fading before the dawn. The gatlings were gone and the men were gone, and I was wondering if they had deserted me, when Von Ritter came back and asked if I were strong enough to ride, and I stood up feeling dizzy and very weak. But my head was clear ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... home with Winton in fading daylight, she felt very happy—saturated with air and elation. The trees and fields, the hay-stacks, gates, and ponds beside the lanes grew dim; lights came up in the cottage windows; the air smelled ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... was fading into evening. It had been cloudy weather, but the clouds had softened and broken up. Now they were lost in slowly darkening blue. The sea was perfectly and utterly still. It seemed to sleep, but in its sleep it still waxed ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... we hardly could tell why, but yet we instinctively felt, that the moss-grown thatch, the mouldering paling, the hoary apple trees, in a word, the evidences of decay visible around the place, were but types of the fading fortunes of the inmates. ...
— The Widow's Dog • Mary Russell Mitford

... mantelpiece. Jill took the photograph, to the window, where the fading light could fall on it. Why, she could not have said, but the thing interested her. There was mystery about it. It seemed in itself so insignificant to have the ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... contrast there is between the Worker and His work, between the Creator and the creature! We see it in a thousand things; but in none is it so manifest for the wayfaring man, or written so large upon the fading draperies of time, as in this: "They shall ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth

... in such a feeble state that he could hardly speak, that the time would soon come when he would be summoned before a higher tribunal, and conjured him, by the hopes he had of forgiveness, now that the world was fading away before his eyes, to put away all pride, and to do that justice to his son which our hero's noble conduct towards him demanded—to make a confession, either in writing or in presence of witnesses, before he died—which would prove the ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... mother, who perhaps did not see in the character of Morton all the charms which she would wish to find in a son-in-law, was anxious to shake off the Bragton alliance; but Arabella, as she said so often both to herself and to her mother, was sick of the dust of the battle and conscious of fading strength. She would make this one more attempt, but must make it with great care. When last in town this young lord had whispered a word or two to her, which then had set her hoping for a couple of days; ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... back to where Mary had stood, his eyes blinking rapidly. After some moments he walked slowly on toward the wharves. In the distance before him the spars and funnels of ships loomed through the dusk, their outlines rapidly fading into the sky beyond—a late September sky, now fast turning to a burned-out sheet of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... listening unmoved to the sack of his town outside, sat the prince himself. Strange, gloomy man, the great dead intelligence of his race shining in his face as weird and out of place as a lonely sea beacon fading to nothing before the glow of sunrise, never had he appeared so mysterious as at that moment. Even in the heat of excitement I stared at him in amazement, wishing in a hasty thought the confusion of the past few weeks had given me opportunity to penetrate the recesses of his mind, and therefrom ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... the arch of the rainbow the chariot is gliding; Through the paths of the thunder the horsemen are riding; Glide swiftly, bright spirits, the prize is before you, A crown never fading, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... Kay, guided by a maid, proceeded to her room. A recent job of calcimining had transformed the room from a dirty grayish, white to a soft shade of pink; the old-fashioned furniture had been "done over," and glowed dully in the fading light. Kay threw open the small square-hinged window, gazed through the iron bars sunk in the thick walls, and she found herself looking down the valley, more beautiful than ever now in the ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... richness of the down- washed soil at that spot, grows to one of those vast air-gardens of creepers and parasites of which we have so often read and dreamed. Such a one is this: but we will not go up to it now. This sketch shall be completed by the background of green and gray, fading aloft into tender cobalt: the background of mountain, ribbed and gullied into sharpest slopes by the tropic rains, yet showing, even where steepest, never a face of rock, or a crag peeping through the trees. Up to the sky-line, a thousand ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... strength failed visibly, although artificial nourishment was given him, by Dr. Maerz's orders. He was fading away as fast as twilight in the tropics. His brown face and hands had taken on a dull gray hue, like dry garden earth, and his broad and powerful chest rose and sank rapidly and silently under the bedclothes. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... remind us of fading flowers, extinguished lights or vanishing shades, and they are not the least attractive of their sex: but the large-boned, stiff and meagre Sabina had none of the yielding and tender grace of these gentle creatures. Her feeble health, which was very evident, became her particularly ill ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... fading leaves and dreary skies, A late-born rose burst into bloom And gazed about with sad surprise, 'Neath fading leaves and dreary skies; Let fall from Summer's bier, it lies In Autumn's pathway 'mid the gloom Of fading leaves and dreary ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... Millennium[421]; in which blessed age, all habits will be reduced to a primitive simplicity; and whoever shall be found to have persevered in a constancy of dress, in spite of all the allurements of profane and heathen habits, shall be rewarded with a never-fading doublet of a thousand years. All points in the system which are doubted, shall be attested by the knight's extemporary oath, for the satisfaction of ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... the spring, but the notes seem to come from far off and to be full of memory rather than of promise; and at early morning, or when the shadows lengthen at evening, the south wind that stirs the trees has a salt smell, and sends a premonitory shiver of change to the fading foliage. But how bright are the squares and the streets, for all this note of melancholy! Life ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... she answered. "My Matthew, who was at the Tower of an errand said she came in from the flower-garden and sank lifeless. And the servants who carried her to her chamber say 'twas like death. And she hath been so long fading. And we know full well the end must ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... beach, fading gradually away to the south and east, its town roosting on its barren rock, and indistinctly seen; its low lands covered with a luxuriant growth of lime and other trees; and lastly, by way of seasoning, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... Neal waited for an hour while the June twilight slowly faded. He watched the sandhills round his lair turn from bright yellow to grey, watched them while they seemed in the fading light to grow loftier, and assume a weird majesty which was not their's in the daytime. The objects near at hand, the faded flowers, and the snail-shells, and the rods of woven bent, lost their bright colours and became almost invisible. The eternal roaring of the sea seemed to ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham

... his arm again. The man indeed seemed to be transported with passion, with sheer lust of cruelty. It is doubtful if he had heard her enter. His dark face twitched distortedly in the fading light. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... tumbled green-clothed granite of the harbor approaches; for the black, sharp-toothed reefs that showed on the half-water near the can-buoy, and for the procession of stately headlands to north and south, fading from sight in a ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... they had had wealth, relatives, men and maid servants—abundance of all kinds; but by the fickleness of fortune, one after another, all had gone. The mother of the family, seeing the faces of her son and daughter daily fading like the dew-drenched lotus from the pinch of poverty, had early sunk upon the bed of death. All the other stars had been extinguished with that moon. The support of the race, the jewel of his mother's eye, the hope of his father's age, even he had been laid on the pyre before his ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

... the only sign of cloud was some fiery vapour, as if indeed the distant sea had seethed at contact with that royal and flaming visit. And directly the sun had disappeared the heavens above it purpled and became a lake of blood, whilst the Campagna turned to grey. At the far end of the fading plain there remained only that purple lake whose brasier slowly died out behind the black arches of the aqueduct, while in the opposite direction the scattered arches remained bright and rosy against a pewter-like sky. Then the fiery vapour was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... gentlewoman describes her best of all. She was a gentlewoman, then, past middle age, yet beautiful with the high type of beauty that only ripe years, beautifully lived, can bring—the beauty that compensates for the fading of the rose on cheek and lip, the dimming of the light in the eyes, for the frost on the brow—the beauty of patience, of tenderness, of faith unquenchable by fire or flood of adversity. A history was written on the face—a history in ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... Duke of Canizzaro. Her dress was a very rich black Genoa velvet, black blonde mantilla, and a very splendid parure of diamonds. She seems in exceedingly delicate health. She and her contemporaries are fast fading away, the last record of the days of Viceroyalty. In their place a new race have started up, whose manners and appearance have little of the vieille cour about them; chiefly. It is said, wives ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... Husband, Father, Friend, A generous nation's grateful tears are thine; E'en unborn ages shall thy worth commend, And never-fading laurels ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... the world," he answered with such happiness in his voice that Dorothy felt her resentment fading away. "Now, Miss Japan, let's go and buy everything there is ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick

... by; surrounded by the good life, Siddhartha hardly felt them fading away. He had become rich, for quite a while he possessed a house of his own and his own servants, and a garden before the city by the river. The people liked him, they came to him, whenever they needed money or advice, but there was nobody close ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... The fading light fell on the low iron bed upon which the young man lay, propped up with pillows. His face was much altered by these two or three days of suffering. The fair hair was covered by a bandage and the blue eyes looked ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various

... lovely face at public places; And with blue, laughing eyes, behind her fan, First acts her part with that great actor, MAN. Too soon a flirt, approach her and she flies! Frowns when pursued, and, when entreated, sighs! Plays with unhappy men as cats with mice; Till fading beauty hints the late advice. Her prudence dictates what her pride disdain'd, And now she sues to slaves herself had chain'd! Then comes that good old character, a Wife, With all the dear, distracting cares ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... fading tree, Lines of white in a sullen sea, Shadows rising on you and me—The swallows are making them ready to fly, Wheeling out on a windy sky: Good-bye, Summer! ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... sat: he sauntered lingeringly, fondling the spaniel in his bosom, calling her tender names in a tender voice. On the front-door steps he turned; once again he looked at the moon, at the grey cathedral, over the remoter spires and house-roofs fading into a blue sea of night-mist; he tasted the sweet breath of dusk, and noted the folded bloom of the garden; he suddenly looked round; a keen beam out of his eye rased the white facade of the classes, swept the long ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... being almost out of sight, and anything under 800 feet seems low. Towards the end of August the heights are capped with purple, although the distant moors, however brilliant they may appear when close at hand, generally assume more delicate shades, fading into grays and blues ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home

... bent and brooded seemed to leave her cold. The room was no longer brightly lighted, and she appeared mournfully a part of the hovering shadows. Her spirit had power to step forth and clothe the flesh. Almost always she looked the thing she felt. Now, in the half light, bent above the fading coals, she looked old. Her husband, with his hand upon the mantel-shelf, gazed down upon her. "It was wise of you to send me that note. Burr and I might have walked in here, or we might have spoken loudly. I heard Cary when he went out. How ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... gardens and the broad-leaved aloes clinging to the rocks. Isola Bella, the loveliest of them all, as its name denotes, was farther off; it rose like a pyramid from the water, terrace above terrace to the summit, and its gardens of never fading foliage, with the glorious panorama around, might make it a paradise, if life were to be dreamed away. On the northern side of the bay lies a large town (I forget its name,) with a lofty Romanesque ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins



Words linked to "Fading" :   attenuation, fading away



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