"Dreaminess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... youth, vigor, and strength of life, constantly renewing themselves, without long stay, in the end fulfil the rule of ultimate destruction. Thus he pondered, without excessive joy or grief, without hesitation or confusion of thought, without dreaminess or extreme longing, without aversion or discontent, but perfectly at peace, with no hindrance, radiant with the beams of increased illumination. At this time a Deva of the Pure abode, transforming himself into the shape of a Bhikshu, came to the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... lordship pensive, those dreamy blue eyes of his intently studying Miss Bishop's face for all their dreaminess; his mind increasingly uneasy. At length Miss Bishop looked ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... success was in the playing of Hungarian music, some of which he adapted for his instrument, but the stormier pieces of Chopin which he arranged for the violin were given by him with tremendous effect. In the more tender pieces, such as the nocturnes of Field and of Chopin, he played with the utmost dreaminess. ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... corpulence: his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair: his eyes were large and soft in their expression: and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more: and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any object in ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... and the Kanaka flashed his white teeth in a grateful smile. He was a beautiful creature, almost feminine in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was a softness and dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to contradict his well-earned reputation for strife ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field. She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding: her features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she did not know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her troubles. He himself was full of vague latter-day glooms and popular melancholies, and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young thing then and there, absolutely as happy as if she were ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... short time, a lotuslike dreaminess stole over me, and past and future seemed to blend in a supreme present of contentment and rest. Then I knew I had wooed and won Tobacco and that thenceforth I had at hand an ever ready solace in time of ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... was taken out of one of his mother's discarded dresses. His face was nearly colorless without being pallid; and the faint golden down on his cheeks and upper lip, instead of being disagreeably juvenile, really added to the pleasant dreaminess that hung like a haze over his mild young features. He was slender, he carried himself rather quaintly; but his gait was buoyant and spirited. At that season the lilacs were in bloom, and Silverthorn held a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... tenderly pass little miss there, and her unbreeched brother, over to their smiling mamma. Now you have the balmy corner to yourself! "Psalms," first lesson—second ditto—prayers—thanksgivings—all reverently attended to; there is a little dreaminess settling on your lids—your lips begin to close with languor; but you have not dozed. Let's hear the sermon. You are seated with tolerable erectness; and, judging from the steady determination of your eyebrows, one would imagine that your eyes would be open for the whole of the discourse. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... proposing to himself. I was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... side. His figure had widened. He carried himself well, and with an air of fearless alertness. He was well trained in martial exercises, and the hot suns of France had bronzed his cheeks, and given them a healthy glow of life and animation. He still retained much of his boyish beauty, but the dreaminess and far-away vacancy had almost entirely left his eyes. Now and again the old listening look would creep into them, and he would seem for a few moments to be lost to outward impressions; but if recalled at such moments ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of self-harm," and which the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did but reinforce. This morbid languor of nature, connected both with his fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifies Coleridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse, with the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike that of the "Lake School," to which in some respects he belongs, singularly unaffected by any moral, or professional, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... twitchings in the hypochondriac and epigastric regions, by dimness and rolling of the eyes, by piercing cries, tears, hiccough, and immoderate laughter. They are preceded or followed by a state of languor or dreaminess, by a species of depression, and even ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... she tried to kiss him and then let her head fall back on his shoulder.... Through the window panes he saw the funnel of the steamer slip by against the sky, he saw the empty deck, and clouds of smoke. Once more he slipped into dreaminess.... ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... up, looked abroad, saw the beauty of the day, heard the dreaminess of the afternoon coming on, heard louder God's call to his heart, and knew that there was strength for all his need. It was then Pat came with his refreshment ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... while again before he spoke. "He will be the last of the Allways," he said. "I should like to think of the name being continued; and he's a good business man, in spite of his dreaminess. Perhaps he would get on better with ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... she said nothing; she only grew more exacting of 'Tenty's presence, wanted her earlier in the evening, found fault with her food, and behaved generally so unlike her usual stern patience, that Content was really roused out of her dreaminess to wonder ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... by our military manoeuvres, and we heard of the war only in the same sleepy way. Now and then, at Leipzig, at Dalenburg, at Bremen, at Berlin, we seemed to wake up; but soon sank back into feeble dreaminess again. It was particularly depressing and weakening to me never to be able to grasp our position as part of the great whole of the campaign, and never to find any satisfactory explanation of the reason or the aim of our manoeuvres. That was my case at least; others may have ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... was mistaken in thinking that the expression in Jane's eyes was softened to the verge of dreaminess and my inmost soul shouted at the idea of Jane and Polk and their day alone ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... inquiry, others observing the costumes of the dancers and their involved movements with a simple sense of enjoyment. The rhythmic swaying of handsome men and women in the mazes of a dance often produces on the bystanders a sensation of poetic dreaminess, quite independent of the accompanying music, and which may be traced directly to the magnetism of the ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... she wondered why Mr. Dugdale woke from his dreaminess to bid her good-night with a fatherly air, addressing her more than once by his superlative of kindness, "My child." When she took her husband's arm to go out of the lighted hall-into the night, Agatha trembled, as if something were going ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... regard fixe sur des apparitions confuses dans le lointain; and it is those very qualities, still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in the Black Book of Carmarthen, in the Book of Taliesin, in the Red Book of Hergest, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier-dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It causes a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain or feeling of terror, though I was quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... abstract thought, the dreaminess of look, the almost furtive glance. The minuteness of finish reminds us of Antonello, and the turn of the head suggests several of the latter's portraits. The delicacy with which the features are modelled, the high forehead, and the lighting of the face are points to be noted, as ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... have made him a good wife and roused him out of that dreaminess he allowed to hang about him. And because it was to be so, I plead with Uncle James until he relented. He hath promised me ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a matter of great importance one way or the other; but it seems better to accept a person's definite statement until it is proved to be false. The Breton or Celtic imagination had peculiar qualities of dreaminess, and magic and mystery. Marie's mind was not cast in a precisely similar mould. Occasionally she is successful enough; but generally she gives the effect of building with a substance the significance of which she does not completely realise. She may be likened to a ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... could have understood the boy. I daresay he was not enough of an ugly duckling to attract special attention, and with many other chicks in the brood he could not have more than the rest, and yet he required it. He ought to have been an only child. If he had been mine, I should have known what his dreaminess meant, why he loved to wander away and be alone; what was the conflict that began in his cradle—or earlier. Surely a mother must remember what there was in her mind to influence her child; she must have the key to all that is wrong in him; she must know if his soul is likely to ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... palace hour after hour. When night came—if so it could be called in that lovely place, where night was only day shadowed over and made more delicious—the boy felt himself lulled by sweet music to a soft dreaminess, which was all the sleep that was needed ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... to us about a certain mystical dreaminess and obscurity in these wild wood tribes, which we never wish to have brought out into the daylight of absolute knowledge. Every one of them was a self-discovered treasure of our childhood, as much our own as if God had made it on purpose and presented it; ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wise. She effaced herself, so she believed, by withdrawing a little into a corner near the fire, holding up her Conder fan open to shield her face from the glow, and taking no part in the conversation, while listening to it with a pretty appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming attitude, of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... to tell the story of his term in college, and his determination to leave the divinity school. More than once he made an effort to begin, but the old man, who brightened a little during their meal, relapsed again into dreaminess, and did not seem to be listening to him. They pulled their chairs near to the fire, and Mr. Conneally sat holding his son's hand fast. Sometimes he stroked or patted it gently, but otherwise he seemed scarcely to recognise that he was not alone. ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... extraordinary experience to-night," he said. The old dreaminess in his voice, as of one narcotized or in a trance, sometimes a little forced, as of one trying to dream, to which she had become accustomed, and of which in her heart of hearts she was very weary, was gone. In its place she recognized a resonance which still further confused her with ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the Springs too were favorites. But, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... front against the world. "I am going on quietly here, rather than happily," writes he to his friend Newman; "sometimes quite helpless, not from distinct illness, but from sad thoughts and a ghastly dreaminess. The heart is gone out of my life. My children, however, are doing well; and the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... one of these waking reveries, little Ned gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him; now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for the mother to comprehend that heart, the more contracted in proportion as it was touched, while emotion was synonymous with expansion in the opulent and impulsive Venetian. That evening she had not even observed Alba's dreaminess, Dorsenne once gone, and it required that Hafner should call her attention to it. To the scheming Baron, if the novelist was attentive to the young girl it was certainly with the object of capturing a considerable dowry. Julien's income of twenty-five ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... but the opening flower, lived only in the incredibly leisurely, masterful motion with which the grotesquely shaped protecting petals curled themselves back from the center. Their motion was so slow that the mind was lost in dreaminess in following it. Had that last one moved? No, it stood still, poised breathlessly . . . and yet, there before them, revealed, exultant, the starry heart of the great flower ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... black hair, fastened it with slender wooden pins. The man, reclining at full length, had made room on his mat for the gun—as one would do for a friend—and, supported on his elbow, looked toward the yacht with eyes whose fixed dreaminess like a transparent veil would show the slow passage of every gloomy thought by deepening gradually into ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... as the meal was about concluded, and William had partaken of his share in spite of his dreaminess, she had no anxieties connected with his sustenance. As for Mr. Baxter, he felt a little remorse, undoubtedly, but he was also puzzled. So plain a man was he that he had no perception of the callous brutality of the words "THAT GIRL" when applied to some girls. He referred ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... man seems a travesty of the hog, the parrot, the ape, the hawk, or the shark; now they seem travesties of him. As we gaze at the ruminating ox, couched on the summer grass, notice the slow rhythm of his jaw, and the wondering dreaminess of his eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmin transmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor is it incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... represents him as a worn-out, vulgar-looking man of fifty, whose outward appearance contrasted painfully with his artistic performances, and whose heavy, thick-set form in conjunction with the delicacy and dreaminess of his musical thoughts and execution called to mind Rossini's saying of a celebrated singer, "Elle a l'air d'un elephant qui aurait avale un rossignol." One can easily imagine the surprise and disillusion of the four pupils of Zimmermann—MM. Marmontel, Prudent, A. Petit, and Chollet—who, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in small doses is also to some extent aphrodisiacal; it slightly stimulates both the brain and the spinal cord, and has sensory effects on the skin like alcohol; these effects are favored by the state of agreeable dreaminess it produces. In the seventeenth century Venette (La Generation de l'Homme, Part II, Chapter V) strongly recommended small doses of opium, then little known, for this purpose; he had himself, he says, in illness experienced its joys, "a shadow of those of heaven." In India ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... particularly, as regards one's personal virtues or defects, which are many or few according to the disposition of the speaker towards the one spoken of. Nevertheless I must tell you that your tendency to dreaminess, and your exalted ideas of sentiment, are what mostly constitute the modern young lady. Take those elements out of human life, and one-third of our fiction volumes crumble on the shelf. Society limps into retirement, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... noticed; no one saw anything beyond the laughing lips, the laughing shape, the eyes that melted so near to tears. The torn dress, the straggling hair, the tattered shoes, the unmended stocking, the straw hat split, the mingled poverty and carelessness—perhaps rather dreaminess—disappeared when once you had met the full untroubled gaze of those beautiful eyes. Untroubled, that is, with any ulterior thought of evil or cunning; they were as open as the day, the day which you can make your own for evil or good. So, too, like the day, was ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... and practical nature of Rameses was averse to every kind of dreaminess or self-absorption, and no one had ever seen him, even in hours of extreme weariness, give himself up to vague and melancholy brooding; but now he would often sit gazing at the ground in wrapt meditation, and start like an awakened sleeper when his reverie was disturbed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that one seldom sees out of Normandy. Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden, outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and bird have got up so early that the rest of the world has never caught them ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... myths and traditions which still lingered in Brittany and England. The spirit of these poems was very different from that of the Chansons de Geste. The latter were the typical offspring of the French genius—positive, definite, materialistic; the former were impregnated with all the dreaminess, the mystery, and the romantic spirituality of the Celt. The legends upon which they were based revolved for the most part round the history of King Arthur and his knights; they told of the strange adventures of Lancelot, of the marvellous quest of the Holy Grail, of the overwhelming and fatal ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... manuscripts now in his mother's house, and with ochre, charcoal, and black lead, his success in that line was marvellous. These habits induced others kindred, among them absence of mind, under whose influence, sometimes, when in the company of others, he gazed silently at and about them with dreaminess, as if he was thinking how to connect contemporary things strange to him with those, his only familiars, two centuries before. It seems a pity for such a spirit to be without other guides than a weak, toiling mother, and a teacher dull and despotic ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... remark of his, towards the end of the meal, anent the mysticism, the spiritism of the East, and the growing cult of the same order in the West, appeared to suddenly wake her from her dreaminess. Her dark eyes were turned quickly up to his, a new and ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... Lincoln you were kind enough to send me, reproduced from an early daguerreotype. It seems to me both striking and singular. The fine brows and forehead, and the pensive sweetness of the clear eyes, give to the noble face a peculiar charm. There is in the expression the dreaminess of the familiar face without its later sadness. I shall treasure ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... husband or to touch his hand. She did not want to speak. She only wanted to feel in the uttermost depths of her spirit this movement, steady and persistent, towards the goal of her earthly desires, to realise absolutely the marvellous truth that after years of lovelessness, and a dreaminess more benumbing than acute misery, happiness more intense than any she had been able to conceive of in her moments of greatest yearning was being poured into her heart, that she was being taken to the place where ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... diagram on a table, and expounded the gun. Absorbed in his explanation he lost the drowsy incertitude of his speech and the dreaminess of his eyes. He spoke with rapidity, sureness, and a note of enthusiasm rang oddly in his voice. On the margins he sketched illustrations of the Gatling, the Maxim, and the Hotchkiss and other guns, and demonstrated the superior ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... development of a modern European people, and I say that the Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and traditions I now first touched in the town ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... experience when in the first grip of some horrible and deadly disease. As the footsteps approached this feeling of weakness increased. He felt a strange lassitude creeping over him, a sort of exhaustion, accompanied by a growing numbness in the extremities, and a sensation of dreaminess in the head, as if perhaps the consciousness were leaving its accustomed seat in the brain and preparing to act on another plane. Yet, strange to say, as the vitality was slowly withdrawn from his body, his senses seemed to ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... earnestness in which there seemed to him to be a hint of effort, as if she were, perhaps, urging imagination to take her away and to make her one with that on which she looked. It struck him just then that, since they had been married, she had changed a good deal, or developed. A new dreaminess had been added to her power and her buoyancy which, at times, made her very different from the radiant girl ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... for such rude knowledge as then yielded a scanty return for intense toil. His countenance was handsome, and would have been rather gay than thoughtful in its expression, but for that vague and abstracted dreaminess of eye which so usually denotes a propensity to revery and contemplation, and betrays that the past or the future is more congenial to the mind than the enjoyment and ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... matter of fact there was a great change in him; his bearded face, still burnt by the Ceylon sun, was lined and wasted, his expression had lost its old dreaminess, and when he did not smile, was sterner and more set than it had been; his manner, as Mark noticed later, had a new firmness and decision; he looked a man who could be mercilessly severe in a just cause, and even his evident affection ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... some evasive answer, which, however, seemed to satisfy him, for he plunged into the strange tale of the recluse of the canyon with more vigor than dreaminess; but first ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... should be brought to mind, it is necessary that it should descend from the height of pure memory to the precise point where action is taking place. Such a power is the mark of the well-balanced mind, pursuing a via media between impulsiveness on the one hand, and dreaminess on the other. "The characteristic of the man of action," says Bergson in this connexion, "is the promptitude with which he summons to the help of a given situation all the memories which have reference to it. To live only in the present, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... letter to Leonard which would convey at least something of her feelings and wishes towards him. In the depths of her heart, which now and again beat furiously, she had a secret hope that when once the idea was broached Leonard would do the rest. And as she thought of that 'rest' a languorous dreaminess came upon her. She thought how he would come to her full of love, of yearning passion; how she would try to keep towards him, at first, an independent front which would preserve her secret anxiety until the time should come when she might yield herself to his ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... sort of languishing verse of the mystical type an effect of quaintness and dreaminess is produced by emphasizing the last syllables of words whose accent by right falls on a previous syllable. This is done by pairing them with pronounced rhymes. For instance, "tears" rhymes with "barriers," ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... ever felt for her before. She was not only lovely and gentle; she had revealed unexpected qualities of mind which might develop later into an attraction that he had never dreamed she could possess. Never, he felt, had the outlook appeared so desirable. He was in that particular dreaminess of mood when one is easily borne off on waves of sentiment or imagination; and it is possible that, if his mother had been able to refrain from improving perfection, he might have found himself sufficiently in love ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... did not also; but it was in a different way. Alice was of a more lively disposition, and her father said she reminded him every day more and more of her dead mother. Ruth had an element of romanticism in her character, which perhaps accounted for her dreaminess at times. In the work of acting and posing for moving pictures, which was what the two girls, and their father, a veteran actor, were engaged in, Ruth always played the romantic parts, while nothing so rejoiced Alice as to have a hoydenish ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... him dazedly into the house. The same sense of remote abstraction, of vague dreaminess, was overcoming him. He resented it, and fought against it, but in vain; he was only half conscious that his host had bathed his head and given him some slight restorative, had said something to him soothingly, and ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... no lack of care or concentration in anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to him impossible. He might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was Robert ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... young man, twenty-seven years of age—as I had occasion to mention before—unrestrained, impetuous, given to abrupt deviations. A certain dreaminess, peculiar to my age; a self-respect which was easily offended and which revolted at the slightest insignificant provocation; a passionate impetuosity in solving world problems; fits of melancholy alternated by equally ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... aspects of nature, the climate and the scenery, exert an appreciable and an acknowledged influence on the mental characteristics of a people. The sprightliness and vivacity of the Frank, the impetuosity of the Arab, the immobility of the Russ, the rugged sternness of the Scot, the repose and dreaminess of the Hindoo are largely due to the country in which they dwell, the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the landscapes and skies they daily look upon. The nomadic Arab is not only indebted to the country in which he dwells for his habit of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had done their work well. It was a great sensation. Henry was variously described. One report said that he had a dreaminess of eye that was not characteristic of this strong, pragmatic family; another declared him to be "tall, rather handsome, black-bearded, and with the quiet sense of humor that belongs to the temperament of a modest man." One reporter had noticed ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... his own education still unconsciously went on as well, under the sternest and most potent of teachers; and, neglected and miserable as he was, he managed gradually to transfer to London all the dreaminess and all the romance with which he had invested Chatham. There were then at the top of Bayham Street some almshouses, and were still when he revisited it with me nearly twenty-seven years ago; and to go to this spot, he told me, and look ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... a fresh-colored, blue-eyed man, of nearly thirty years of age. His frankness of manner and shrewdness of expression contrasted forcibly with the subtle dreaminess characteristic of Alan Walcott's face. Alan eyed him curiously, as if doubtful whether he ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... following a life of prodigality. Did not their Benjamin suffer at having been thus monopolized, shut up for their sole pleasure within the four walls of their house? He had at all times displayed an anxious dreaminess, his eyes had ever sought far-away things, the unknown land where perfect satisfaction dwelt, yonder, behind the horizon. And now that age was stealing upon him his torment seemed to increase, as if he were in despair ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Visitors looked with interest and sympathy at the narrow back and body of this invalid child, whose eyes were full of bright, beaming spirit. He sometimes nodded on the steps by the Speaker's chair; and these spells of dreaminess and fatigue increased as his disease advanced upon his wasting system. Once he did not awaken at all until adjournment. The great Congress and audience passed out, and the little fellow still slept, with his head against ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... up, with eyes slowly changing from far-away dreaminess to present and practical—pleasant blue eyes with lashes and brows of the same color as the thick, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... indignation to utter another word. In the course of sixty years on this planet I've seen many kinds of men, and I've learned to detect in some a certain look about the eyes—a curious light and a far-away dreaminess of expression—that seems always the sign or mark of an unflinching obstinacy. I remember that self-same look on Brand's face as we lay all flattened on the water tanks of the Moroa, and he blew the main deck off the ship together with three hundred human beings; ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... of her hands, the sound of her voice as she maintained a steady stream of directions to Patsy, the fact of being so near to her, filled Durham with a gentle soothing. The dreaminess which had been upon him when the journey began, and before he sank into the contented slumber, returned. Her voice reached him as from a distance; his grip of the seats loosened, and as the waggonette turned ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... satisfaction beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess. And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Jimmy fell back in his bunk, and for a long time lay very still wiping the perspiration off his chin. The dinner-tins were put away quickly. On deck we discussed the incident in whispers. Some showed a chuckling exultation. Many looked grave. Wamibo, after long periods of staring dreaminess, attempted abortive smiles; and one of the young Scandinavians, much tormented by doubt, ventured in the second dog-watch to approach Singleton (the old man did not encourage us much to speak to him) and ask ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... wizard-like acts, whereby people—sensible women and men—were sent at his will into a curious torpor, which was neither sleep nor yet wakefulness, and which produced a yet more strange sense of unreality and dreaminess, and visions of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his wife. She hung on his arm, and, with his hand laid tenderly ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at the door with her book in her hand, startled from her dreaminess by the woman's tone ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... argument he went wearily with Garry in a taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire. And he told the judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused. Garry, aghast, stared at the judge and the judge, with peculiar interest stared at ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Bertuccio, and Lucius Brutus they were conspicuously manifest. But the controlling attribute,—that which imparted individual character, colour and fascination to his acting,—was the thoughtful introspective habit of a stately mind, abstracted from passion and suffused with mournful dreaminess of temperament. The moment that charm began to work, his victory was complete. It was that which made him the true image of Shakespeare's thought, in the glittering halls of Elsinore, on its midnight battlements, and in its lonely, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... himself to his mistress and to the world, one can well, with him, live through the misanthropical epoch. For the rest, we readily conceded to these works a cheerful aversion from those exalted sentiments, which, by reason of their easy misapplication to life, are often open to the suspicion of dreaminess. We pardoned the author for prosecuting with ridicule what we held as true and reverend, the more readily as he thereby gave us to understand that it caused him ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... in them now less of dreaminess, and more of thought. The abrupt change in her outlook brought Evelyn Desmond's pretty, effective figure to the forefront of her mind. For ten years,—the period of Honor's education in England,—the two girls had lived and learned ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and exquisite—such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and these ribbons one could divine a statue, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... hotels had cost more than Mr. Hale had anticipated, and they were glad to take the first clean, cheerful for the first time for many days, did Margaret feel at rest. There rooms they met with that were at liberty to receive them. There, was a dreaminess in the rest, too, which made it still more perfect and luxurious to repose in. The distant sea, lapping the sandy shore with measured sound; the nearer cries of the donkey-boys; the unusual scenes moving before ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... sure that I wish him to," said the painter's wife, her eyes straying as if in a sudden dreaminess. "It's a distinction nowadays not to care for money. Norbert jokes about making an ugly woman beautiful," she went on earnestly, "but what he will really do is to discover the very best aspect of the face, and so make something much ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... of men whose whole previous lives have tended to unfit them for old age. Their chief discomfort is probably for lack of something to do or think about. But, judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems to have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in which they sit between asleep and awake, and find the long day wearing towards bedtime without its having made any distinct record of itself upon their consciousness. Sitting on stone benches in the sunshine, they subside into slumber, or nearly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to be set in the background, to be limited in means, was always to him a source of anger, which manifested itself now in impassioned vehemence, now in vague, gloomy dreaminess, from which he would rise up again with some violent sarcasm ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... manifest if melancholy truth that the architect was an artist. But the artistic temperament was far from explaining him; there was something else about him that was not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his dreaminess, he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and even sports apart from his ordinary life, like memories of some previous existence. On this occasion, nevertheless, he hastened to disclaim any authority ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... visible pleasure overtook her, her frame began to quiver, and the soft murmurs of spermatic effusion came from her lips. She spent. On I went driving as if I meant to send my prick into her womb, fell into a half dreaminess, and became conscious of a great wetness on my ballocks; it was her discharge more than mine, the most copious I recollect, excepting from one woman. Then I dropped off on her side. She lay still as death, the thunder rolled over us unheeded by her in ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... glowing sunshine. He tried to possess his troubled soul with the severe intellectual ardor of the law. But his gift of second sight would not rest. He could not overcome his intuition that, for all the peace and dreaminess of the outward world, destiny was upon him. Looking out from his spiritual seclusion, he beheld what seemed to him complete political confusion, both local and national. His despairing mood found expression a little later in the words: "Indeed if we were now to have ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... placated: "Well, she's the only girl who's anywhere near it. I don't say she's faultless, but she has a great deal of character, and she's very practical; just the counterpart of his dreaminess; and she is very, very good-looking, don't ...
— A Likely Story • William Dean Howells
... producing a rapidity and profusion of growth which would turn Malacca into a jungle were it not for axe and billhook, but her work does not jar upon the general silence. Yet with all this indefiniteness, dreaminess, featurelessness, indolence, and silence, of which I have attempted to convey an idea, Malacca is very fascinating, and no city in the world, except Canton, will leave so vivid an impression upon me, though it may be but of a fragrant tropic ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... not begin the recital immediately upon taking her chair, across the hearth from her son; she led up to it. She was an ample, fresh-coloured, lively woman; and like her son only in being a kind soul: he got neither his mortal seriousness nor his dreaminess from her. She was more than content with Cora's abandonment of him, though, as chivalrousness was not demanded of her, she would have preferred that he should have been the jilt. She thought Richard well off in his release, even ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these twins of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Marcia's dreaminess departed. Her eyes ran keenly along the benches of the Strangers' Gallery opposite till they discovered the dark head of a man who was leaning forward on his elbows, closely attentive, apparently, to ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... already, the Morris dance is a bodily manifestation of vigour and rude health, and not at all of sinuous grace or dreaminess. This will be obvious at a glance to anyone who watches the traditional Morris dancer at his evolutions. The first step, therefore, towards acquiring the true art of the Morris-man is to put away all thought and remembrance of the ballroom ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... another. This new sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment amidst the soft-breathing airs and garden-scents of advancing spring—amidst the new abundance of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine, and the delicious dreaminess of gliding on the river—could hardly be without some intoxicating effect on her, after her years of privation; and even in the first week Maggie began to be less haunted by her sad memories and anticipations. Life was ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... indeed it has become,—nothing BUT heaps,— heaps of dull earth with here and there a few faded green tufts of wild tamarisk, which while faintly relieveing the blankness of the ground, at the same time intensify its monotonous dreaminess. Alwyn, beholding the mournful desolation of the scene, felt a strong sense of disappointment,—he had expected something different,—his imagination had pictured these historical ruins as being of larger extent and more imposing character. His eyes rested rather wearily on the slow, dull gleam ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... owed its' characteristics to the influence of Beethoven's Liederkreis: all the same, the impression that it has left on my mind is that it was absolutely part of myself, and pervaded by a delicate sentimentality which was brought into relief by the dreaminess of the accompaniment. My poetical efforts lay in the direction of a sketch of a tragi-operatic subject, which I finished in its entirety in Prague under the title of Die Hochzeit ('The Wedding'). I wrote it ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... dividing the two, as far as our well-being and enjoyment of life are concerned, is downhill; the dreaminess of childhood, the joyousness of youth, the troubles of middle age, the infirmity and frequent misery of old age, the agonies of our last illness, and finally the struggle with death—do all these not make one ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... flirt with damsels before the very windows of the headmaster's rooms, nor yet towards their mockery of all that was sacred, simply because fate had cast in their way an injudicious priest. No, despite its dreaminess, his soul ever remembered its celestial origin, and could not be diverted from the path of virtue. Yet still he hung his head, for, while his ambition had come to life, it could find no sort of outlet. Truly 'twere well if it had NOT come to life, for throughout the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... later he entered her sitting-room. There she sat, as usual, with her books, awaiting him perhaps for the last time, a fair, girlish figure with gold hair, but oh, so cold!—it makes me shiver to think of how she used to look. Possibly there was a dreaminess about her blue eyes that made up for her manner; but how Nino could love her I cannot understand. It must have been like making love to ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... won lively admiration. His warm regard for a man like Baron Bunsen seemed to afford the best augury for the liberality of his sentiments. As yet the danger of impracticability, discouragement, confusion, and paralysis of all that had been hoped for, was but faintly indicated in the dreaminess ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler |
