"Rayless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night. I was haunted by that form and face. I essayed to be calm, and to compose myself to slumber. Impossible! For the moment was swept away my past, with its dreary, lifeless forms, its ghostly ceremonies, its masked shapes, its soulless, rayless, emotionless existence. To awake and find life has been one grand error,—to awake and know that youth and early manhood are gone, and that you have been cheated of your honest and legitimate enjoyments,—to feel that Pleasure might have wooed you gracefully when young, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... my God! (He clambers up a steep cliff jutting out over the abyss.) I see thee, my eternity, as thou rapidly floatest on to meet me, black with the shadows of eternal night! shoreless, limitless, infinite! And in the midst of thy rayless gloom, like a burning sun, eternally shining, but illumining nothing, I see my God! (He takes some steps forward, and stands on the brink of the precipice.) Ha! they run, the New Men—they see me ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... exhibited at every close of day? Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off without leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single sunbeam in the evening sky! Day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or show, to hide in haste under the waters. And still the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might and his power, while the thin-lipped intruder ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... wild legion Cease to thunder at my door; Fleeting through night's rayless region, Hither they return no more. Clanking chains and sounds of woe Fill the forests as they go; And the tall oaks cower low, Bent their flaming ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of men laboured in a giant town by the light of beacons which shed forth their glare both day and night. No light of heaven pierced through the smoke of the factories with which the town was girt, but sometimes the red disk of a rayless sun might be seen riding in the black firmament through which iron bridges ploughed their way, and from which there descended a continual shower of soot and cinders. It was the most industrial of all the cities in the world and the richest. Its organisation seemed perfect. None of the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... way come—for this way leads The unseen conductor of the dead [353]—and she Whom shadows call their queen! [354] Oh light, sweet light, Rayless to me—mine once, and even now I feel thee palpable, round this worn form, Clinging in last embrace—I go to shroud The waning ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... last-shining star. In Bathrolaire when Day's old doors unbar The motley mask, fantastically wreathed, Pass through a strong portcullis brazen teethed, And enter glowing mines of cinnabar. Stupendous prisons shut them out from day, Gratings and caves and rayless catacombs, And the unrelenting rack and tourniquet Grind death in cells where jetting gaslight gloams, And iron ladders stretching far away Dive to the depths of those ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... daughters were welcomed into the Owen homestead, and the wide halls and great rooms of the rambling country house rang with the voices of children. Three of these little ones slipped back to Heaven before the portals had closed. The stricken parents with blinded eyes met only the rayless emptiness of unbelief. May God help the mother, fainting beneath a bereavement greater than she can bear, who cries for help and finds none; who stretches her empty arms upward in an agony of appeal and is answered by the hollow echo of her own cry; may God help her, for she is beyond the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... been looking out into the ancient blackness, pierced here and there with a rayless star; taking the sweet air of the moors and the night into his bosom deeply; seeking, perhaps finding, peace after the manner of the unhappy. He turned round as she came in, and showed her a pale face against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man, who loves, obeys, and enjoys. Nothing is gained by attributing to nature vicegerent forces. Is it not preferable to say that she responds to intelligent, loving Omnipotence? Our finiteness is illustrated by our initiation into organized being. Emerging from a rayless atom, too diminutive for the sight, we gradually develop and advance to the maturity of those conscious powers, the exercise of which furnishes indubitable evidence of our immortality. We are pervaded ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... breaks fair, and the sun rises from out a cloudless, frosty sky, promising a day of sunshine. But then, with the lighting of a hundred thousand fires, a change takes place. The smoke cannot escape in the windless air, but hangs like a pall over the houses. The sun grows chill, coppery and rayless, and soon a fog, creeping along the river, silently encloses each particle of smoke within a watery shroud, and a mantle of murky gloom invests ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... ceased with light; Of Nature's psalm no echo lingers. The death-cold mist, with ghostly fingers, Shrouds world and soul in rayless night. ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... been their guide. Her blindness rendered the scene familiar to her alone. Accustomed, through a perpetual night, to thread the windings of the city, she had led them unerringly towards the sea-shore, by which they had resolved to hazard an escape. Now, which way could they wend? all was rayless to them—a maze without a clue. Wearied, despondent, bewildered, they, however, passed along, the ashes falling upon their heads, the fragmentary stones dashing up in sparkles ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... highness, did I not tell you that the man who saved your life and honor—who is covered with wounds received in your defense, and almost dead from loss of blood, spilled that you might be saved from worse than death—is now lying in a rayless dungeon, a place of frightful filth, such as you would not walk across for all the wealth of London Bridge; is surrounded by loathsome, creeping things that would sicken you but to think of; is resting under ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... conceived. They come from afar across the waves, piloting the barge that conveys the chosen spirits to heaven, balancing themselves on their wide-spread wings, using them as sails, disdaining the aid of all mortal contrivance, and relying on their inexhaustible strength; red and rayless at first, from the distance, as the planet Mars when he appears struggling through the mist of the horizon, but growing brighter and brighter with amazing swiftness. They stand at the gate of Purgatory, they guard the entrance to each of the seven steps of its mountain—some with green vesture, vivid ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... and wickedness of human nature which left nothing to be desired, would have been equally destitute, had it not been for his temperamental gaiety and buoyant philosophy. There were times when these deserted him, and he brooded in rayless depths, but his Celtic inheritance and the vastness of his intellect saved him from despair until the end. Talleyrand was by no means an uncheerful soul; but his genius, remarkable as it was, flowed between narrower lines, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... her ebon throne In rayless majesty now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; An awful pause, prophetic ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty here stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... where, without light and air, they were locked and barred like felons, in a space too limited to permit their living during the long voyage before them. Think of eight hundred and fifty human beings all full grown men, pressed into this contracted, rayless, airless dungeon, in which they were to be deported from China to Havana, all the long way over the China sea, the Indian ocean, and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... smoke and fog, and sometimes sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much like the millionth magnification of a ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thought would never again have unclosed, the young lord looked up in his face, as if to thank him for the relief. Dick saw by the expression of wonder and astonishment in those eyes, so lately fixed and rayless, that he knew him, and that the delirium had passed away. Lord Reginald tried to speak, the colour for a moment mounted to his pallid cheek as he said, "Hargrave, I don't deserve this kindness at your hands." Then with a deep sigh he once ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... the rayless night-mist, sail towards me confidently, O seafarers; for all wanderers I light my far-shining torch, memorial of the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... was close on idiocy in a month; Allan, the color-bearer, was shot by the guard,—he had slipped near the dead line, and fallen with his head outside; fourteen were dead of disease; twelve more sank in rayless, hopeless apathy; and Drake—was busy on "A History of the Stockade Prison." The way in which he got the idea and his stationery is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... had nearly spoiled all by making a false step: the sound attracted Seaforth's attention—he paused and turned; and, as the full moon shed her light directly upon his pale and troubled features, Tom marked, almost with dismay, the fixed and rayless appearance ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive tint, and lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid obstacle in the path ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... eye is closed to each in rayless night, Yet each has beauty fit the gods to move, Give, Acon, give to Leonill thy light, She will be Venus, and thou ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... a thin, dry mist, that morning, The sun rose broad and red; 10 At first a rayless disk of fire, He brightened as he sped; Yet even his noontide glory Fell chastened and subdued On the cornfields and the orchards ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... it was past midnight when the "all night" operator took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered rayless houses, to a certain formal square ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob, that somewhere within those chaste recesses, after ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... I've looked but now On him, who could not look on me again. I've laid my hands upon his rayless eyes, And on their vacant orbits sworn a vow Of vengeance, only ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... day, cold and gray, flowers at sunset into rich redemptive beauty, cheerless avenue leading to its grand Cathedral West! Thus have I seen these Scottish lives, stern and cold and rayless, break into flame at evening, in whose light I caught the glory of the very gates of the ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... was to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away from it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive, which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was powerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantle of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could summon our fellow men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something of the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible, and then as maturer ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... is afforded by the varieties which grow wild in localities where they are quite isolated from the species, and where for this reason, no possibility of crossing disturbs the significance of the proof. As one instance the rayless form of the wild camomile, or the Matricaria Chamomilla discoidea may be mentioned. Many systematists have been so strongly [157] impressed with its absolute constancy and its behavior as an ordinary species, that they have ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... fresh supply of books, and started for Michigan, the State which held within its boundaries the first scenes of sorrow my young life had known, when, amid helpless and hopeless hours of persecution, my girlhood seemed rayless and forsaken, but when kind friends had come in the hour of need, and helpful hands had lifted me from the dark depths. From there I wrote to Mr. Arms, communicating to him my intention to travel. He sent me a touching reply, saying he had never intended me to battle with the outside world again, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... The rayless sun, Day's journey done, Sheds its last ebbing light On fields in leagues of beauty spread ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... discontinued; and all their friends disappointed and disheartened. This we can easily imagine, but not what the suspension was to the suffering prisoners who had for a short season enjoyed this one gleam of light from the outer world, and were now plunged into a rayless hopeless night. When the time of deliverance came, as we all know, many of them were past the power of rejoicing ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... afternoon wore on, however, there were indications that a change of weather was impending. The sky lost the pure brilliancy of its blue, and by insensible degrees assumed an ashen pallor, which the sun vainly struggled to pierce until he merged from a palpitating, rayless ball of light to a shapeless blotch of dim, watery radiance, and then disappeared. At the same time the wind died away until we were left becalmed and rolling rail-under upon a swell that gathered strength every hour as it came creeping up from the ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... of the night, ye are gems of the morn, Ye are dew-drops whose lustre illumines the thorn; And rayless that night is, that morning unblest, When no beam in your eye, lights up peace in the breast; And the sharp thorn of sorrow sinks deep in the heart, Till the sweet lip of Woman assuages the smart; 'Tis her's o'er the couch of misfortune to bend, In fondness a lover, in firmness ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... subject to the terrors and annoyances consequent upon its removal. Its place was a square aperture in the wall; nor would it suffer this opening to be glazed, or otherwise filled up, without creating some disturbance. It seemed as if those rayless sockets loved to look abroad, peradventure on the scenes of its former enjoyments and reminiscences. It was almost bleached white by exposure to the weather, and many curious persons have made a pilgrimage there even in late years. Several young men ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... brought me some tea, which refreshed me greatly; for I had tasted nothing at all beyond a little water since the preceding morning's breakfast. This refreshment seemed to relax and thaw the stiff frozen state of cheerless, rayless despair in which I had passed the night; I became susceptible of consolation—that consolation which lies involved in kindness and gentleness of manner—if not susceptible more than before of any positive hope. I sat down; and, having no witnesses to my weakness but this kind and faithful ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... not have comfortable quarters, and may we not be placed in one cell?" I asked, appealing to Hymbercourt. "I have been confined in a reeking, rayless dungeon unfit for swine, and doubtless Sir Max has been ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... the pale rayless globe mounted into the sky, the greyer became the fog, the more densely and swiftly blew the sand-clouds from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rayless sun Glares fiercely on the battle plain;— Morn saw the deadly fray begun, Morn heard thy bugle wake a strain, Poor soldier! and its warning breath Call'd thee, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... sleeps, locked in the torpor of a senseless and rayless dream; or that an evil incubus weighs upon it, crushing its risings, but deadening not its pangs? Does Memory fly to the green fields and happy home of his childhood, or the lonely studies of his daring and restless youth, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its moments of hopeless gloom, As rayless as is the dark night of the tomb; When the past has no spell, the future no ray, To chase the sad cloud from the spirit away; When earth, though in all her rich beauty arrayed, Hath a gloom o'er her flowers—o'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... rose, so ruddy in the light, Bends on its stem all rayless now, And by its side the lily white A sister shadow, seems to ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... with winged hope, Clearing the cope Of heaven as swift as light, Others, with souls Blind as the moles, Sinking in rayless night. ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... quite minutely this magnificent harbor, then solitary and fringed with rayless forests, now alive with commerce, and decorated with mansions of refinement and opulence. The long promontory, now crowded with the busy streets and thronged dwellings of Boston, was then a dense ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... an awful thing Frozen upon the very verge of life, And looking back along eternity With rayless eyes that keep ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... placid lake, the sunny slopes of grass and tree, the brilliant sky and the gleaming rubber-neck-boat-bird which, as Ikey described, "made go its legs," but only, as he had omitted to mention, for money. So there they stood, seven sorrowful little figures engulfed in the rayless despair of childhood and the bitterness of poverty. For these were the children of the poor, and full well they knew that money was not to be diverted from its mission: that car-fare could not ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... but perhaps we can adduce nothing more illustrative of that feeling than the following fact, which may vie with the sublimity of Rousseau's death, when he desired to look on the sun ere his eyes were closed in the rayless tomb:—M. Daubenton, the scientific colleague of Buffon, and the anatomical illustrator of his "Histoire Naturelle," on being chosen a member of the Conservative Senate, was seized with apoplexy the first time he assisted at the sessions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... be considered, that this doctrine, which throws such darkness over the future, also sends down a rayless night over the present. It refutes every theodicy; it nullifies every solution of evil. The consolation for the sufferings of this world is, that the fashion of this world passes away, and that there is a better world to come. The explanation of the evils of this life is, that they are finite, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... from its touch, Holbein's groups are instinct with life, character, and emotion. In particular is this true of the figure of Death, although it is a mere skeleton,—the face without a muscle, and for the eye but a rayless cavern. Death is not one whom "a limner would love to paint or a lady to look upon"; but Holbein has given a strange and fascinating interest to the figure, which in all other hands is merely repulsive. The grim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... of passion to her soul Swept, as the storm-voiced surges roll Up toward a star-like beacon steep, Dashed backward rayless to the deep. ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... that led thee alive, and fed thy soul with sorrows and joys and fears, Love that sped thee, alive and dead, to fame's fair goal with thy peerless peers, Feeds the flame of thy quenchless name with light that lightens the rayless years. ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... seated at his own command, haughty and inflexible as in life, the ivory sceptre in his ivory fingers, his white skull crowned with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor looked upon him with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and penetrating shadows that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before he left, however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne, fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the nails and combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow. Observing that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various |
