"Fleecy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accustomed place in the doorway, watching the fleecy clouds that a high wind drove across the sky, vast sliding shutters which opened and closed over the cool glow of the moon. The cold breeze chilled the Major, and he drew his blanket tight about him. Terry's voice roused ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... either of rain or frost, disclosed a vast tract of wild, flat, ill-cultivated-looking country to the south, little interrupted by woods or signs of population; the whole losing itself, as it were, in an indistinct grey outline, commingling with the fleecy white clouds ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... against the cushions; her tiny feet in shoes of gilded leather were stretched out on a coverlet of purple silk richly wrought with gold and silver threads. Her elbow was buried in the fleecy down of the cushions; her ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... glen, when the new moon is beaming All weirdly and wan, through a cloud's fleecy haze, 'Till I stand, young and free, in the land of my dreaming, Clasping hands with the ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... contented with the general impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building, the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches, the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it were, from the garden ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... blue sky studded with fleecy clouds streamed a banner of royal purple bearing in its center a great white E—a flare of intense color visible from afar over the topmost branches of the empty elms, and a beacon toward which the stream of spectators set their steps. In the tower of College Hall the ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... description are tranquil and relatively permanent, sometimes enduring without striking change for many days. Certain of the included species mimic terrestrial cloud-scenery—now appearing like fleecy cirrus transpenetrated with the red glow of sunset—now like prodigious masses of cumulo-stratus hanging heavily above the horizon. The solar clouds, however, have the peculiarity of possessing stems. Slender columns can ordinarily be seen ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the air which they contained and which is a powerful non-conductor of heat, is squeezed out. Consequently wherever the blanket is compressed, its power of retaining the heat of the sleeper is diminished. Soft fleecy substances, like eider-down quilts, which are extremely warm as coverlets, are well-nigh useless as mattresses. There is another cause why a sleeper requires more protection from below, than from above: it is that if the ground be at all wet, its damp will penetrate through ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... ground might have enabled one to get a comprehensive view of the surrounding country, dense groves of trees or red-and-white villages almost invariably intervened. One could be within a few hundred yards of the firing-line and literally not see a thing save the fleecy puffs of bursting shrapnel. Indeed, I don't know what we should have done had it not been for the church towers. These were conveniently sprinkled over the landscape— every cluster of houses seemed to have one—and ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and leap for fields of fruit and for hives ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... waning moon. The river bank and hill-side of the vale, And orchard fruitage streaked with morning pale, Grow rosy with the rosy summer hours. Green is the dewy turf and gay with flowers. The morning sky is azure; we behold The white clouds sleeping on the eastern hill, At eve—a fleecy flock—they follow still The shepherd sun upon his path of gold. Sweet is the air, and peace is everywhere: Save that in distant skies beyond our time We mark the vivid shafts of lightning fly, Shot from the twanging bow of thunder where The sky is ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... way and we sound it with our legs, we find it up to our hips. Here we enter a white world indeed. It is like some conjurer's trick. The very trees have turned to snow. The smallest branch is like a cluster of great white antlers. The eye is bewildered by the soft fleecy labyrinth before it. On the lower ranges the forests were entirely bare, but now we perceive the summit of every mountain about us runs up into a kind of arctic region where the trees are loaded with snow. The beginning of this colder zone is sharply marked ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... was now up; but so was the breeze: fleecy clouds flew with vast rapidity across her bright face, and it was by fitful though vivid glances Staines examined the raft ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... as the anti-aircraft guns are popularly known, seemed to be making extraordinarily bad practice as the fleecy puffs of shrapnel burst all around the plane without apparent effect, and the machine, having spotted something, dropped a signal that burst into brilliant sparkles and turned ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... uncertainty of seeing Kinchinjunga the view when it is seen is all the more impressive. The traveller waits for hours and days, even for only a glimpse. One minute's sight of the mountains would satisfy him. But still the clouds eddy about in fleecy billows wholly obscuring the mountains. Six thousand feet below may now and then be seen the silver streak of the Rangit River and forest-clad mountains beyond. Around him are dripping forests, each leaf glistening with ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... the air like a streamer; it had a slow pulse, lifting it and letting it drop, like the appearance of a waterfall seen from the window of a car in motion, only this was irregular and quite slow; it was soft and fleecy; it made no audible noise; it looked dangerous to see it fall from so great a height; but it was caught in the air, to your relief, as one who falls in his dream lights upon his soft bed. The lines of Gray, in his Bard, were suggested by the sight of this mountain, ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... or lane, he found Matilda wrapped in her cloak, beneath which she carried the disguise prepared for both. The moon was in the last quarter, and as the fleecy clouds passed away from before it, he could observe that the lips and cheek of the American were almost livid, although her eyes sparkled with deep mental excitement. Neither spoke, yet their breathing was heavy and audible to each. Gerald seated himself on a projection of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... rose again six inches and fell three. Rain nearly ceased, and large masses of fleecy clouds float down here from the north-west, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven green, To behold the wandering moon, Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way, And oft, as if her head she bow'd, Stooping through a fleecy cloud. Oft, on a plat of rising ground I hear the far-off curfeu sound, Over some wide-water'd shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar; Or, if the air will not permit, Some still removed place will fit, Where glowing embers through the room Teach light ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... their ponderous weight that they cannot rise from the horizon; but, obeying an impulse from higher currents, their dense consistency slowly yields. The gloom upon them deepens; and they soon present to our view a ponderous mass of almost level surface. From time to time a fleecy tuft of mist, with yet some gleaming light left upon it, drops down upon the dense floor of grey, and loses itself in the opaque and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... as far as it extended, and displayed in its precincts, at a little distance from the course of the stream, the towering and lordly castle to which it gave the name. The mist which continued to encumber the valley with its fleecy clouds, showed imperfectly the rude fortifications which served to defend the small town of Douglas, which was strong enough to repel a desultory attack, but not to withstand what was called in those days ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the sea marge, and gave glimpses far above of strange and stately trees lining the glens, and of a veil of perpetual mist which shrouded the inner summits; while up and down, between them and the mountain side, white fleecy clouds hung motionless in the burning air, increasing the impression of vastness and of solemn ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... although most favourable for to-day's excursion, betokened change. The light fleecy clouds playing about the summits of the Causses, on either side grew heavier in appearance. We must hasten on. We heard, too, a pitiful story of two American ladies who had lately made this journey in a perpetual downpour, arriving at Le Rozier drenched to the skin, and having seen ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... truly to a man who had paddled two days in a hot sticky fog, as, clad in white, she sat still and placid on her airy perch. Her hair, of the very light fleecy gold seldom seen after babyhood, hung over her shoulders unconfined by comb or ribbon, felling around her like a veil and glittering in the horizontal sunbeams; her face, throat and hands were white as the petals of a ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... open stripe of dark knitting, and a stripe of white knitting, with a pattern worked in cross stitch on it, and is quite new. Large wooden pins are required, and 12-threaded fleecy, dark claret for the open stripe, and white, with 4 shades of gold, green, lilac, and scarlet, form a good combination of colours for the close stripe, and are extremely rich in their effect. For the open stripe cast ...
— Exercises in Knitting • Cornelia Mee
... sweet fragrance of rosy blossoms or ripened fruit. Soft grew the green grass beneath the feet. The smooth waves gently lapped the shore, and water-lilies floated on the surface of the tide; while in the blue sky above sailed the fleecy clouds. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... for the Spanish Main, And ha! for the Spanish gold; King Philip's ships are riding deep With the weight of wealth untold. They're prey for the saucy lads Who dance on the Plymouth Hoe; They'll all sail home thro' the fleecy foam, With a rich galleon in tow-tow-tow, With a ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... moments to gaze and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed. Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin. All around the horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never changing, never moving, like a silver setting for ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... in your fleecy fold, Mother will keep you from harm and cold; Fondly we watched you in vale and glade, Say, will you ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... evidently had taken the lead while I slept. That realization straightened me, shamed, in my saddle. The fog, fleecy, not so wet as impenetrable—when had it ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... angels of the sky were noiselessly casting their fleecy veils of light over and into the awful depths below, and driving away the crouching monster of blackness that was thus roused from his slumber and forced to flee. Grand as was the scene, it was soothing ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... August 1909, clear and calm. The sun had only just passed below the horizon, the sky immediately above it being a rippled glory of gold, merging higher up into gold flecked with crimson, then into a placid sea of pale apple-green. Above this were fleecy clouds of delicate rose-pink, which reflected their splendours upon the higher parts of the surrounding hills, the latter standing out clear and sharp, and glowing with roseate hues, whilst their bases were seen dimly as through a thin veiling ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... pleasant a place as Thrushcross Grange?' he inquired, turning to take a last glance into the valley, whence a light mist mounted and formed a fleecy cloud on the ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... whole procession of summit peaks, their lower half rooted in a deep sombre shadow cast by the western wall, the heights bathed in a warm purple haze, in which the irregular marbling of snow burned with a pure crimson light. A few fleecy clouds, dyed fiery orange, drifted slowly eastward across the narrow zone of sky which stretched from summit to summit like a roof. At times the sound of waterfalls, faint and mingled with echoes, floated up through the still air. The snow near by lay in cold ghastly shade, warmed here ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... grand old trees that fringed the bank of the stream was reflected with exaggerated beauty far down among the waters; the glittering stars stole in and out among their branches, and shone in the clear crystal mirror. Now a fleecy speck of cloud floated over the face of the Queen of Night, from behind which she would soon emerge, with increased brilliancy, to dart her long arrowy beams away down to the pebbly bottom of the flowing river, kissing the fairies that the old German legends tell ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... The air escaping from the discharge pipe of the air-pump was visible, and looked like dull, grey steam. Immediately on being set free it swelled and expanded greatly, and sank away from us slowly. But at the instant of its expansion the cold thus produced froze the moisture of the air into a fine fleecy snow, which lasted but a second as it sank away from us and melted in the heat, which the thermometer showed to be close upon ninety-five degrees. This miniature snowstorm was seen for an instant only after each down motion ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... free as ever, What are England's rights, I ask. Me from my delights to sever, Me to torture, me to task? Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit Nature's claim; Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Fair are the fleecy flocks that feed On yonder heath-clad hills, Where wild meandering crystal Tweed Collects his glassy rills. And sweet the buds that scent the air, And deck the breast of May; But none of these are sweet or fair, Compared to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... suggested enormous white clouds piled against the horizon. To the west rose another range, one of whose summits was loftier than any within his range of vision. Seen in the far distance, the soft air gave it a slight bluish tint, which gradually dissolved into fleecy whiteness toward the crest. To the eastward the landscape was made up of ridges, elevations and valleys, with growths of pine, cedar, oak and other species of wood. The lake's outlet was toward the west, winding in and out among the depressions until ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... to thrill mysteriously through the atmosphere, like the flowing of amber wine through crystal—the heavy vapors shuddered together as though suddenly lashed by a whip of flame,— they rose, swayed to and fro, and parted asunder. ... then, dissolving into thin, milk-white veils of fleecy film, they floated away, disclosing as they vanished, the giant summits of the encircling mountains, that lifted themselves to the light, one above another, in the form of frozen billows. Over these a delicate pink flush flitted in tremulous wavy lines—long arrows of gold began to pierce the tender ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... round us, and before us, a growin' more gorgus in dress, or so it seemed to us. Gemms of every gorgus coler under the heavens and some jest the coler of the heavens when it is blue and shinin' or when it is purplish dark in the night time, or when it is full of white fleecy clouds, or when it ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... spring amain, And seemed with tender irony to flout Man's folly and pain when twixt dead spears sprang out The crocus-point and pied the plain with fires More gracious than his beacons; and from pyres Of burnt dead men the asphodel uprose Like fleecy clouds flushed with the morning rose, A holy pall to hide his folly and pain. Thus upon earth hope fell like a new rain, And by and by the pent folk within walls Took heart and ploughed the glebe and from the stalls Led out their kine to pasture. Goats and sheep Cropt at their ease, and ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... briskly, and breathed the soft spring air into his lungs. The half-moon lay in the west between two Gothic pinnacles, and threw upon the silvered street a dark tracery from the stone-work above. There was a brisk breeze, and light, fleecy clouds drifted swiftly across the sky. Old's was on the very border of the town, and in five minutes Smith found himself beyond the houses and between the hedges of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gaily with him, as with a beloved brother, while he was obliged to do violence to his feelings, to refrain from imprinting a kiss upon the little blonde head, from which the light breeze lifted the curls and scattered them like fleecy clouds. At such moments, he seemed to tread an enchanted path strewn with flowers, at the ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... laden with their delicious fragrance; the grass in the pastures wore its freshest green, the young grain was sprouting in the fields, troops of robins and thrushes darted about, filling the air with melody, and over all the blue sky looked down, flecked with its white, fleecy clouds. The sunlight played warm and beautiful over this lovely scene, and through the early loveliness of the season, the married pair drove on towards their ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... error drew; "And vanquish'd empire with a smile resign, 265 "While brighter worlds in fair perspective shine."— She paus'd—yet still the sweet enthusiast bends O'er the cold turf, and still her tear descends; The ever-falling tears her beauties shroud, Till slow she vanish'd in a fleecy cloud. 270 ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... grey re-appearing tower shall soon Salute with gladsome note the rising moon, While with a hoary light she frosts the ground, And pours a deeper blue to Aether's bound; Pleased, as she moves, her pomp of clouds to fold 330 In robes of azure, fleecy-white, and gold. [93] ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... numerous bands; No sound, no whisper, but the chief's commands, Those only heard; with awe the rest obey, As if some god had snatch'd their voice away. Not so the Trojans; from their host ascends A general shout that all the region rends. As when the fleecy flocks unnumber'd stand In wealthy folds, and wait the milker's hand, The hollow vales incessant bleating fills, The lambs reply from all the neighbouring hills: Such clamours rose from various nations round, Mix'd was the murmur, and confused the sound. Each host now joins, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... years since Jane Austen lived. But when you tramp that five miles from Overton, where the railroad-station is, to Steventon, where she was born, it doesn't seem like it. Rural England does not change much. Great fleecy clouds roll lazily across the blue, overhead, and the hedgerows are full of twittering birds that you hear but seldom see; and the pastures contain mild-faced cows that look at you with wide-open eyes over the stone walls; and in the towering elm-trees ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... thought proper to suggest the propriety of her humoring his mother—felt no fears of Mrs. Markham, senior, whom she still associated in her mind with heavy black silk, gold-bowed spectacles, handsome lace and fleecy crochet-work. ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old,—namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at "My Cid, with the fleecy beard," in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy galleons from west to east, the wind was strong but kind, and we worked in a glow of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was buried in the corner, close beside the church. My husband went away as soon as the burial was over, and I came across the graveyard alone. It was a bright winter's day, with the ground all asnow, and no footstep had broken the fleecy white that lay on my way. As I passed under the tower I heard a voice, and the words, too, Anna, as plainly as ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... service-bushes and the wild cherries were a mass of white beauty. Meadowlarks and robins and bluebirds twittered and sang from every branch, it almost seemed. A sky of tenderest blue bent over us and fleecy little clouds drifted lazily across.... Soon we came to the pineries, where we traveled up deep gorges and canons. The sun shot arrows of gold through the pines down upon us and we gathered our arms full ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... the library now, and the soft May breeze came stealing through the open window, stirring the fleecy curtain and blowing across the tasteful bouquet which Katy had arranged; but Katy was too wretched to care for her surroundings. It was the first time Wilford had ever spoken to her just in this way, and his ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... again in this wise, 'Thou shepherd of the fleecy sheep, Menalcas, the pipe-player, never wilt thou vanquish me in song, not thou, if thou shouldst sing till some ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... sky covered with great fleecy patches, through which the full moon, just fairly risen, appeared to be racing, under the effect of that optical illusion caused by the rapidly moving clouds. The coyotes had commenced their nocturnal concert in the timbered recesses of the creek not far away, and on the battle-field ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... clear. As he stood in his dressing-gown, with a cigarette between his fingers, at one of the upper windows of his tall, towerlike hotel, he would have said that his life at the moment resembled the blue dome above him, from which, after a cloudy dawn and dull early morning, the last fleecy drifts were ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing but the story, the scene and the drama—the chance to pile up palaces and spires in his backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly, fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over the front, with every incident of human life going forward lightly and gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace are the painter's great qualities, marking the hithermost limit ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... feathery flowers, towering above the ranker growth of midsummer, possess an unseasonable, ethereal, chaste, spring-like beauty. On some plants the flowers are fleecy white and exquisite; others, again, are dull and coarser. Why is this? Because these are what botanists term polygamous flowers, i.e., some of them are perfect, containing both stamens and pistils; some are male only; ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... and plunged one into a sort of dreamy state. Dark, heavy clouds, rolling up behind us, swept slowly across the heavens. They gathered at our backs, and the sky there grew dark, while in front of us it still showed clear, except for a few fleecy cloudlets, racing merrily across the open. But the gathering clouds grew darker and swifter. In the distance could be heard the rattle of thunder, and its angry rumbling came every moment nearer. Large drops of rain fell, pattering on the grass, with a sound like the clang of metal. There ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... what time Latona's twins Cover'd of Libra and the fleecy star, Together both, girding the' horizon hang, In even balance from the zenith pois'd, Till from that verge, each, changing hemisphere, Part the nice level; e'en so brief a space Did Beatrice's silence hold. A smile Bat painted on her cheek; and her fix'd gaze Bent ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... these prayers in your breast; and these are the songs that you will sing and these are the prayer-sticks that you will make; and when you display the white and black on your body the rain will come.' He gave Tiyo part of everything in the kiva as well as two maidens clothed in fleecy clouds, one for his wife, and one as a wife for his brother. With this paraphernalia and the maidens, Tiyo ascended from the kiva. Parting from the Spider Woman, he gained the heights of To-ko-na-bi. He now instructed his people in the ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... soon as he was alone, opened the casement and looked out—there was no one to be seen; he listened, but all was silent. The moon was just rising above the distant hill, but her light was dimmed by fleecy clouds, and Philip watched for a few minutes; at length he heard a whispering below. He looked out, and could distinguish through the dark the four expected assailants, standing close to the door of the house. He walked away softly from the window, and went into the next room to Amine, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... (q.v.). Their complexion varies from reddish-yellow to brownish-black, with head-hair often of a russet-brown, and body-hair, black and bristly on upper lip, chin, chest, axillae and pubes, yellowish and fleecy on cheeks, back and limbs. Their average height is 4 ft. 9 in. Even when forced to keep clean, their skins give out a rancid odour, something (Sir H. H. Johnston says) between the smell of a monkey and a negro. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... coming! Promising lovely things— The gold and the gray of the summer day, The winter with fleecy-wings; Promising swift birds glancing, And the patter of raindrops dancing, And the sunbeam's arrowy lancing, Dear gifts ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... Fortune tried Her darling son; then smiling to his part Returned; and gained her pardon for the past By greater gifts to come. For now the air Had grown more clear, and Phoebus' warmer rays Coped with the flood and scattered all the clouds In fleecy masses; and the reddening east Proclaimed the coming day; the land resumed Its ancient marks; no more in middle air The moisture hung, but from about the stars Sank to the depths; the forest glad upreared Its foliage; hills again emerged to view And 'neath the warmth ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... magnificent grove in winter when whitened with snow and illuminated by the morning sun, which, having melted the snow in part, has intermingled black masses among the brightness. The whole sky was scattered over with fleecy dark clouds, such as any sunshiny day produces, and which were changing their shapes and position every moment. But this line of clouds immoveably attached themselves to the island, and manifestly took their shape from the influence of its mountains. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... deepened, affording an excellent skating-ground for the boys in the cold days of December and January. A whirring noise was heard. The grist-mill had just commenced its work for the day. Down below the dam the shallow water eddied and whirled, breaking in fleecy foam over protuberant rocks which lay in ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... fairyland,—a creation of that matchless magician the hoar-frost. There had been just snow enough to cover the earth and all its covers with one sheet of pure and uniform white, and just time enough since the snow had fallen to allow the hedges to be freed of their fleecy load, and clothed with a delicate coating of rime. The atmosphere was deliciously calm; soft, even mild, in spite of the thermometer; no perceptible air, but a stillness that might almost be felt, the sky, rather gray than blue, throwing out in bold relief the ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... were captured, and nightdresses finally removed, ready for the clean Sunday shirt. But before the Sunday shirt was slipped over the fleecy head, away darted the naked body, to wallow in the sheepskin which formed the parlour rug, whilst the mother walked after, protesting sharply, holding the shirt like a noose, and the father's bronze voice rang out, and the naked child ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a day when the hearts of God's angels must have bled for the suffering ones. The breeze was fresh and fair; the sea tossed gayly its foam-crested waves; sea-birds soared in wider circles, and the clouds shook out their fleecy folds, through which the sunlight streamed in grateful warmth: the two ghosts were talking, as ever, of home, of earth, of land. Land—land anywhere, so that it were solid and broad. Oh, to pace ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... apple, the hawthorn and the wild cherry are but just beginning to push green points between their bud scales. But the elms are a glory of dull gold; every twig is fringed with blossoms. The maples have lost their fleecy white softness, for the staminate flowers which were so beautiful in March have withered now. But the fruit blossoms remind us of Lowell's line, "The maple puts her corals on in May." In Iowa he might have made ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... of fire far out on the lake. The last pink curtain of mist rolled slowly away light and fleecy as cotton wool, and the sun, behind this lazy apparel of his rising, spreads a crimson glow over the sky and lake. Miles it comes across the rippling waves, stealing through each arch and pillared opening of the peristyle, creeping over the motionless ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... distance, faintly outlined against the blue sky, was a fleecy, cloud-like mass, grayish blue at the base, with points here and there of dazzling whiteness, which Houston had known at once as the first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains, but which Rutherford failed ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... speak, That dimples your transparent cheek, Encircles all the heart, and feedeth The senses with a still delight Of dainty sorrow without sound, Like the tender amber round, Which the moon about her spreadeth, Moving thro' a fleecy night. ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... e'en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye: It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... arisen, dividing the sky with the last lights of sunset. We had turned to the left on reaching the river, our faces towards the Chatelet, whose square grey walls frowned over the Pont au Change. Here and there the cloud edges still flamed in gold, that slowly faded to a fleecy silver-white before the moonlight. To our left was the long row of gabled houses, some of them seven storeys or more in height, that stretched, a jagged outline of pointed roofs and overhanging turrets, to the ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... continual plash. The water of this fountain, as it spouted upward, was constantly taking new shapes, not very distinctly, but plainly enough for a nimble fancy to recognize what they were. Now it was the shape of a man in a long robe, the fleecy whiteness of which was made out of the fountain's spray; now it was a lion, or a tiger, or a wolf, or an ass, or, as often as anything else, a hog, wallowing in the marble basin as if it were his sty. It was either magic or some very curious machinery that caused the ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... winds were spent With the fever of day, And stirred scarce a leaf Of the green wood's array; And the white, fleecy clouds Hovered light on the air, Like an angel's wing, bent For ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... on the Milky Way. The clouds are as soft as a fleecy rug, And as cool as cool can be. The skies fit into my figure snug, And they make me feel so blithe and smug That I am glad Fate made me Me. Oh Me! Ah Me! 'Tis a lovely fate And a mission great To be Like me And to love the skies, And the clouds to prize, And ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... with no wind and a sea so calm that the veriest cock-boat could have safely ventured upon it. The only drawback was that there was a moon, well advanced in her first quarter, floating high in a sky dappled with light, fleecy cloud through which enough light percolated to render even small craft distinctly visible on the horizon. But, after all, this would not greatly matter, indeed it would be an advantage to us, always provided, of course, that we ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... business,—namely, his instructions for the settlement of Anty Lynch's property, respecting which he and Lord Ballindine had been together to the lawyer's in Clare Street,—he started for home, by the Ballinasloe canal-boat, and reached that famous depot of the fleecy tribe without adventure. I will not attempt to describe the tedium of that horrid voyage, for it has been often described before; and to Martin, who was in no ways fastidious, it was not so unendurable as it must always be to those who have been accustomed to more rapid ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... When her murmuring lips were heard to say, "Thank God, I am not as my fellow-men!" Her pastor loved as a pastor might— His house that was built on a golden rock; He pointed it out as a shining light To the lesser lambs of his fleecy flock. The stilts were a help to the church, no doubt, They kindled its self-expiring embers, So that before the season was out It gained a ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... charm of house and dale was strong. Perhaps it owed something to the play of soft light and shade, for, as a rule, in Canada all was sharply cut. The English landscape had a strange elusive beauty that gripped one hard, and melted as the fleecy clouds rolled by. When the light came back color and line were as ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... on a winter night, Snug by his parlor-fire a gouty wight Sat all alone, with one hand rubbing His feet, rolled up in fleecy hose: While t'other held beneath his nose The Public Ledger, in whose columns grubbing, He noted all the sales of hops, Ships, shops, and slops; Gum, galls, and groceries; ginger, gin, Tar, tallow, turmeric, turpentine, and tin; When lo! a decent personage ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Pallene was the name of a mountain and a city of Thrace. Tritonis was a lake in the neighbourhood. Vibius Sequester says, 'When a person has nine times bathed himself in the Tritonian lake, in Thrace, he is changed into a bird.' The continuous fall of fleecy snow in that neighbourhood is supposed by some to have ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... languor, the fleecy snow is falling. Through the windows, flowery with blossoming geranium and heliotrope, through the downward sweep of crimson and muslin curtain, one watches it as the wind whirls and sways it in ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tearing madly through sunlit fleecy monsters which looked soft and warm and alluring, and were cold and damp and blinding in their depths. Bell kept on his course. The two planes were approaching each other at a rate of nearly two hundred ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... raised the island, a fleecy speck of cloud against the sky line, and he shortened sail at once and lingered out the day so as to bring him up to it by dark. After supper every light on board was doused, and the great hull, gliding through the glass-smooth ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... And as he told in accents low The story of his love and wo, She felt new pains in her bosom rise, And the tear-drop started in her eyes. And 'O sweet spirit of earth,' she cried, 'Return no more to your woodland height, But ever here with me abide In the land of everlasting light! Within the fleecy drift we'll lie, We'll hang upon the rainbow's rim; And all the jewels of the sky Around thy brow shall brightly beam! And thou shalt bathe thee in the stream That rolls its whitening foam aboon, And ride upon the lightning's gleam, And dance upon the orbed moon! We'll sit within ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... Not Cytherea from a fairer swain Received her apple on the Trojan plain. IV. The sun's bright orb, declining all serene, Now glanced obliquely o'er the woodland scene; 640 Creation smiles around; on every spray The warbling birds exalt their evening lay; Blithe skipping o'er yon hill, the fleecy train Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain; The golden lime and orange there were seen On fragrant branches of perpetual green; The crystal streams that velvet meadows lave, To the green ocean roll with chiding wave. The glassy ocean, hush'd, forgets to roar, But trembling ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... and outshines the light! Fierce flames innocuous, as they step, retire! 70 And slow they move amid a world of fire!" He spoke,—to Heaven his arms repentant spread, And kneeling bow'd his gem-incircled head. Two Sister-Nymphs, the fair AVENAS, lead Their fleecy squadrons on the lawns of Tweed; 75 Pass with light step his wave-worn banks along, And wake his Echoes with their silver tongue; Or touch the reed, as gentle Love inspires, In notes accordant to their ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... bridge of the Merced river and caught upon the glass the Half Dome, bathed in mellow light; the Yosemite Falls with its great mass of falling waters exquisitely illuminated; Sentinel Peak, the swiftly moving river fringed with green trees, the grassy meadows and the fleecy clouds. The picture of reflected beauty so produced, such tints and colors, such glints of stream and forest, such a glorified reproduction of the beauties of the Valley can only be imagined, they can ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... the blockade. In Manchester the huge cotton-mills, employing thousands of hands, were shut down for lack of cotton, and the mill-hands were starving for lack of work; while shut up in the blockaded ports of the South were tons upon tons of the fleecy staple, that, once in England, would be worth its weight in gold. It was small wonder that the merchants of England set to work deliberately to fit out blockade-runners, that they might again get their mills ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... mind was trying to realize the heavenly scenes that it believed were about to burst upon its vision. The quiet, sunlit water, the trees still bare but bourgeoning, the songs of birds, the blue sky across which fleecy clouds were peacefully floating, the breezes that kissed his fevered cheek, the fragrance of the bordering evergreens, and the electric air that entered his lungs so long accustomed to the poisonous fetor of his cell, were well calculated ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... still less, if his work were cut away? Still, it was a gleam, a gleam in the blackness. She came in at the far end of the fields they called "the wild." A rose-leaf hue tinged the white cloud-banks, which towered away to the east beyond the river; and peeping over that mountain-top was the moon, fleecy and unsubstantial in the flax-blue sky. It was one of nature's moments of wild colour. The oak-trees above the hedgerows had not lost their leaves, and in the darting, rain-washed light from the setting sun, had a sheen of old gold with heart of ivy-green; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various |
