"Formless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone, a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us, seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... for him; but the Silent One, reaching a long arm from the door-step, rapped him smartly on the head with his gun. The marshal squawked and went down in a formless heap. ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, La Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but "the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland—formless grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... he had been sampling them. The glass lid to the beaker of formalin which was kept for tissue specimens had been pushed aside just enough to admit the little creature's two-inch girth. Now Fuzzy lay in the bottom of the beaker, immersed in formalin, a formless, shapeless blob of sickly ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... Politically, socially, theologically, ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise; till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Canyon. All the day long we watched and waited for his triumphal return with the longed-for supplies at his back, but the sun departed without his approach and the twilight died into that mystery which leaves the world formless against the night. And still we had faith in the stranger's story. Early the next morning Prof., Clem, and I started on his track thinking we would soon meet the train. It led us up the valley of the Paria, between the great cliffs about three miles, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... light began to break over an indescribably hideous scene of slaughter. Scarcely ten thousand men remained of the three hundred thousand who had started the day before in obedience to the order of the Tsar; and these were split up into formless squads and ragged companies fighting desperately amidst heaps of corpses for dear life, without any pretence at ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... water for food. They are of no use to anybody, either for their skin or their flesh. Nothing could be more thoroughly disgusting and uncanny than they are, and yet nothing more fascinating. One can watch them—the irresponsible, formless lumps of intelligent flesh—for hours without tiring. I scarcely know what the fascination is. A small seal playing by himself near the shore, floating on and diving under the breakers, is not so very disagreeable, especially if he comes so near that you can see his pathetic eyes; but these ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... furnaces of desire, (Ere Thou cam'st questioning,) This formless and unfinished gift I brought, And on life's anvil flung it down, white hot: A glowing thing, of selfishness and fire, With blow on blow, I made the anvil ring; (Ere Thou ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... wood nor metal.' Within these temples cemented with the blood of oppressed races grin and crouch the hideous, foul demons which usurp the libations, the offerings, and the sacrifices. One only God, infinite, eternal, formless, colourless, fills the immensity of the heavens which you people with a multitude of phantoms. Our God has created us; you ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... this was the newest of his experiences. Sooner or later, if he chose, he could escape into great, grey, formless India, beyond tents and padres and colonels. Meantime, if the Sahibs were to be impressed, he would do his best to impress them. He too was ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... the rough and still formless model out of which there was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound which was scampering at full speed with a rush ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... a little iron mixed with our black lead but nothing to hinder its crystallisation. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless diamond, though they would be HHH pencils to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... most of them, why. But when the cars and cages were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance, imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of his native wilderness, a message from the sombre ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... time finding his place. Dorothy looked out of the window over the tops of the yellowing woods to the gray and turbid river below. Where the hemlocks darkened the channel of the glen she heard the angry floods rushing down. The formless rain mists hung low ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... round and large, the pupils very dark and the whites very white; his hair went into short, soft, frizzy curls; his shoulders were small and round, the arms feeble, the thighs short, round, and formless; his back was well developed, the folds of the skin in the torso, when he bent, were very large and fat in line. It was probably for this that Michael Angelo chose him. He is well seen in three of the figures surrounding the ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely and unscrupulously as ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... should harbor like scruples, especially since the full comprehension of Luther's preaching on good works depended on an evangelical understanding of faith, as deep as was Luther's own. The Middle Ages had differentiated between fides informis, a formless faith, and fides formata or informata, a formed or ornate faith. The former was held to be a knowledge without any life or effect, the latter to be identical with love for, as they said, love which proves itself and is effective ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... in the name of the Mighty God; and the evening stars looked down on me, rocking Alice in my soul, and singing lamentful lullabies to her, sleeping, till such time as Lethean vapors curled through the horizon of my mind, and hid its formless shadows of suffering. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... up the mountain trail to the house, the hounds came belling joyously to meet them; but no light gleamed cheerfully from the windows; no door was flung gayly open; no little Huldy cried out her glad greeting. Filled with formless apprehensions, Pap climbed over the wheel, lifted Cornelia down, and dreading they knew not what, the two went,—holding by each other's hand,—opened the door, and entered, shrinking and reluctant. They blew the smouldering coals to a little flame, piled on light-wood till ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care. The anger touched his pride, his self-esteem, and grew cold, deliberate: he watched with a contracted ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... lips, her quiet manner—the lure of all these combined, and his two children, when they came—two in four years—held him. He would dandle Frank, Jr., who was the first to arrive, on his knee, looking at his chubby feet, his kindling eyes, his almost formless yet bud-like mouth, and wonder at the process by which children came into the world. There was so much to think of in this connection—the spermatozoic beginning, the strange period of gestation ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... his forehead. Had this stuttering static anything in kind with those other formless events? If not, what terrified creature was invoking his aid in ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... empire of law; that the real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world, which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they abjured "the dreams of their youth." The nucleus of their new creed was contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... blood ran warm in his veins. At other times he would be only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet, again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and formless, with a moaning cry for Justice—Justice—Judgment on him who had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many a Hall was spilt by the men of Percival Reed's clan without giving any ease to that ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... turned from the litter of rock about the formless mass on the ground. He stared around the village, the fury slowly ebbing ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner when it turned out to be only a cold, and he could ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a rushing sound, and looking for it, saw in the opposite direction a formless object, as much darker than the gray of the void as the flame was brighter, and it too was growing larger, and coming. And it seemed to him that this light and darkness were the good and evil of his life, and he watched, to see ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... no one else could have drawn them. But he had not beheld the creations of Boz in the same light of imaginative vision. Sometimes, too, it must be allowed that Mr. Thackeray drew very badly. His "Peg of Limavaddy," in the "Irish Sketch Book," is a most formless lady, and by no means justifies the enthusiasm of her poet. Thus the task of illustrating "Pickwick" fell to Mr. Browne, and he carried on the conceptions of his predecessor with extraordinary vigour. The old vein of exaggerated caricature he inherited ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... close to the surface of his confused mind. It was the end of science, the end of all his work. All of the stifling, strangling restrictions of security on his work, on his private life, came whirling back as a monstrous, formless threat, something unspeakably big and powerful and unbeatable against which he ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... of sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phaedra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia, and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; "If ever we win to life, it will be through you. And what a bliss it will be for you, Jean Servien, to have created ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... of Moses, The earliest scribe that we keep: Void was the earth and formless, And dark was the face of the deep, Till God's word flashed in lightning, Beautiful, bountiful, bright, And night was the name of the darkness, And day was the name of ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... are not dry treatises, based on Blue books and the gathering together of information and statistics from a formless and largely worthless collection of earlier sources. He has approached this question of man in relation to the State in the same generous spirit displayed in his works of fiction; and it is only ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... There was an essence of a floating, formless resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it came to him, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... stupendous sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... his nature and trained by his philosophy. It must die, if at all, violently, painfully, and—in silence. The truer and more constant the soul, the more complete the destruction of its idol. Character is not always the slow growth of years: often do the elements mingle long in formless solution; some sudden jar causes them to spring at once to the definite crystal. There had, hitherto, been a kind of impersonality about Balder, having its ultimate ground in his blindness to the immutable unity of God. But so soon as his eye became single, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... fitful beauty, Every moment fraught with change, Every break and mystic chasm Opening up a Heaven-range: Now the eastern peaks are kindling Glow as though the Morning's heart Throbbed against them, while the formless Clouds to phantom ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the noble church, full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth, and the hand that had traced the Sonnets, and the ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suddenly saw my brother's face looking out from among the trees as I passed. I saw the features as distinctly as if the meridian sun had beamed upon them... It was by degrees that the features showed themselves thus out of what had been a formless shadow. I gazed upon it intently. Presently it faded away by as insensible degrees as those by which it had become agonisingly clear. After a short time ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... left upon my own mind. I began to conclude, in a dim, formless way, that my father must have been a somewhat stern and unsympathetic man; that I had felt constrained and uncomfortable in his presence upstairs, and had often been pleased to get away from his eye to ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... qualities, and fashion, to assimilate either with worn-out or ill-fitting garments. Some of the shops presented mountains of old shoes, some trodden down at heel, others twisted, torn, split, and in holes, presenting a mass of nameless, formless, colorless objects, among which were grimly visible some species of fossil soles, about an inch thick, studded with thick nails, like a prison door, and hard as a horseshoe, the actual skeletons of shoes whose other component ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... shares not the agitations of the body, be they great or small. Recall too all thou hast learned (and now holdest as true) concerning pleasure and pain. But perhaps what men call Fame allures thee? Behold how quickly all things are forgotten! Before us, after us, the formless Void of endless ages! How vain is human praise! How fickle and undiscriminating those who seem to praise! How limited the sphere of the greatest fame! For the whole earth is but a point in space, thy dwelling-place a tiny nook therein. How few are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand of her hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp and ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... munificence with an imperishable garb of language. But this also is vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable than what is made. Not words nor works, but only that which is formless endures, the vitality that is another name for change, the breath that fills and shatters the bubbles of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... was closing. They had a drink of champagne all round that made the fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards the door, and stood, a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street in ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... decreasing. How quickly does the snowball grow into hugeness as it is rolled on,—but when the change comes in the weather how quickly does it melt, and before it is gone become a thing ugly, weak, and formless! Where is the individual who does not assert to himself that he would be more loyal to a falling than to a rising friend? Such is perhaps the nature of each one of us. But when any large number ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... don't want you to; I don't, myself. I've bungled the matter as I might have known I would. I was trying to put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a quite formless desire to have you possessed of the whole case as it had come up in my mind. I've made a mess of it," said Ferris rising, with a rueful air. "Besides, I ought to have spoken to ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... scrolls, ribands, and breviaries, not one of them displays the attributes which would serve to identify them in accordance with the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages. At most might we venture to give the name of Daniel to a headless figure because a formless dragon writhes under his feet, emblematical of the Devil conquered by ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Generation after generation passes by, and is crumbled into sand as rocks are crumbled by the sea. Each brought with it its heroes and its villains, its triumphs and its sorrows; but the history is formless legend, incredible and unintelligible; the figures of the actors are indistinct as the rude ballad or ruder inscription, which may be the only authentic record of them. We do not see the men and women, we see ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... quarters, the points on which they had not expressed themselves to be in unity. And secondly, it is plain that by the same Communique it was not intended to cut off the possibility of advancing claims which during these very formless negotiations had not been brought forward, so long as the general decisions of the ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... made by Mr. Bertram Dobell, to whom the public are indebted for so many important literary 'finds.' In a parcel of pamphlets he came upon a number of loose printed leaves entitled 'A Prospect of Society'. They obviously belonged to 'The Traveller'; but seemed to be its 'formless unarranged material,' and contained many variations from the text of the first edition. Mr. Dobell's impression was that 'the author's manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion, and was then printed without any attempt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... unequal when you come to put them in their proper attitude. Here, then, rests the shell of the poor hawk ready to receive from your skill and judgment, the size, the shape, the features, and expression it bad ere death and your dissecting hand brought it to its present still and formless state. The cold hand of death stamps deep its mark upon the prostrate victim. When the heart ceases to beat and the blood no longer courses through the veins, the features collapse, and the whole frame seems to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more or ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... shoulders. He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground under his feet. They found the steps, without his being aware that he was ascending them—slowly, one by one. Doubt entered into him—a doubt of a new kind, formless, hideous. It seemed to spread itself all over him, enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails. He stopped suddenly, with a thought that he who experienced such a feeling had no business to live—or perhaps was no ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the farm-house with its veiled windows. Formless and immense, the shadow of Harding Powell swayed uneasily on one of the yellow blinds. Across the field her own house showed pure and dim against the darkening slope behind it, showed a washed and watered white in the liquid, lucid twilight. Her house was open always and on every ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with the crash of ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... old camping-ground after a ride of three hours and thirty minutes ( nine miles), we crossed two short divides, and descended the Wady el-Kusayb, which gives a name to "Sharp Peak." Here a few formless stone-heaps and straggling bushes represented the ruins, the gardens of palms, and the bullrushes of the Bedawi shepherd lads.[EN20] Our tents had been pitched in the rond-point of the Wady Surr, which before had given us hospitality ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... truly delightful bit of reminiscent description which deserves more than one reading. "A Little Girl's Three Wishes", by Mrs. R. M. Moody, is entertaining in quality and correct in metre. It is a relief to behold amidst the formless cacophony of modern poetry such a regular, old-fashioned specimen of the octosyllabic couplet. "Two Little Waterwheels", by Dora M. Hepner, is an exquisite idyllic sketch. In the second paragraph we ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... monera, the organisms of the lowest form, discovered by himself, which have not so much as the organic rank of a cell, but are only corpuscules of mucus, without kernel or external covering, called by him cytod, and arising from an organic carbon formation. The lowest and most formless moneron is the bathybius, discovered by Thomas Huxley, a network of recticular mucus, which in the greatest depths of the sea, as far down as 7,000 metres, covers stone fragments and other objects, but are also found in less depths, in the Mediterranean Sea, for instance. ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... speech is the medium of social bliss for superior intelligences in an eternal world;" [51] and who, when he has exhausted censure in condemning the practical instruction of others, thus lavishes praise, in both his grammars, upon that formless, void, and incomprehensible theory of his own: "This application of words," says he, "in their endless use, by one plain rule, to all things which nouns can name, instead of being the fit subject of blind cavil, is the most sublime ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? before the sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite. Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing, Escap'd the Stygian pool, though long detain'd In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne, With other notes than to the Orphean lyre I sung of Chaos and ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... nothing. Then Lisle pointed again, impatiently, and he made out something between a gray trunk and a thicket. Sportsman as he was, he had not the bush-man's eye, and he would never have supposed that formless object to be a deer. It moved, however; a prong of horn appeared; and waiting for nothing further he ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... moving. The grey light of dawn was filtering down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the chinks in the tarpaulins overhead. A formless pale figure came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... three of the canoes, the Lirongs, with the main mass of the Tinjar people, came down the broad straight reach. It was that most beautiful half-hour of the tropical day, between the setting of the sun and the fall of darkness — the great forest stood black and formless, while the sky and the smooth river were luminous with delicate green and golden light. The Lirongs were in full war dress, with feathered coats of leopard skin and plumed caps plaited of tough rattan, and very effective they were as they came swiftly on over the shining water, sixty to ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... were not for one nation at the expense of suffering to another; they are kingdoms conquered from the barren realms of Darkness, to increase the happiness, and dignity, and power, of all men; new forms of Truth, new maxims of Wisdom, new images and scenes of Beauty, won from the "void and formless Infinite"; a "possession for ever," to all the generations ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twin pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and cracking under the jingling canter of Cambyses or the tuneless tramp of Gorboduc. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... even another lost soul. And then the panics of which there have been no records and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die in mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of a formless past—except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from which one wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the long ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whispers to the voice and inspiration of Him who loved us, and who will guide us with counsel here, and after that receive us into glory, where we shall meet those beloved ones—not as our forefathers dreamed, as meagre shadows flitting through dreary and formless chaos—but as we knew them once—the body of the flesh alone put off, but the real body, the spiritual body to which flesh and blood was but a husk and shell, living and loving more fully, more utterly, than even ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... weakling, of such a sort he seemed more fit to give pain to folks outside his doors than pleasure to his wife within. The old fellow thought more of his blue bags than of his better half, though these were far otherwise shapen, being bulgy and fat and formless. But the lawyer ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... enemy at the outset of the war had his fleet in two principal divisions: one still somewhat formless and as yet unready, but of very considerable power, was in the ports of the Peninsula; the other—Cervera's—at the Cape Verde Islands, a possession of Portugal. The latter was really exceptional in its qualities, as our Italian author has said. It was exceptional in a general sense, because ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... season when Nature brews the irresistible philter. Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding—where opposition is fated to avail not—is graceful in ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... its grave; and he mourns by that corpse till he himself crumble off from it. The whole world lies before him, like the Egyptian Sphynx of stone, half-buried in the sand; and the All is the cold iron mask of a formless Eternity."[22] ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Francis Newman looked up in faith—even though it was an absolutely undogmatic, formless faith—to a God who watched over mankind, one may hope that he too "believed more than he ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Formless and gross did tragedy arise, A simple chorus, rather mad than wise; For fruitful vintages the dancing throng Roar'd to the god of grapes a drunken song: Wild mirth and wine sustain'd the frantic note, And the best singer had ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... again just off the entrance to Queenborough, and the thick haze that had obscured everything earlier in the evening was rapidly thinning away. A watery moon showed up the various warships at anchor—dim grey formless shapes, marked ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that "No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... their view; the horizon seemed bounded by majestic mountains of porphyry—this third element or place of deposit of the enchanting primeval earth, out of which mighty but formless mass our living, breathing, and beautiful world sprang into creation, and the stars sang together for joy. In the midst of these mountains stood the "Giant," with his snow-crowned point, like the great finger of God, reaching up into ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... feeling, but it was now what you would call "damp" rather than "moist"—the way you often feel winter-winds along the shores of great lakes or along sea-coasts. There was a cutting edge to it—it was "raw" And it had not been blowing very long before low-hanging, dark, and formless cloud-masses began to scud up from the north to the zenith. The northern lights, too, made their appearance again about that time. They formed an arc very far to the south, vaulting up behind my back, beyond the zenith. No streamers in them, no filtered rays and streaks—nothing ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... his puny hand, Nor starry servitors to work his will, Only his soul and his strong purpose planned, His dream of goodness and his hate of ill; He, but a handful of the eddying dust, At the wind's fancy shaped, from nowhere blowing; A moment man—then, with another gust, A formless vapour into nowhere going, Even as he ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... the encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death—the horror was that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... dumb, not daring to move or breathe, roused from the deep sleep of youth and health by this nameless, formless terror. Maren, while she strives to hold the door at which Louis rattles again and again, calls to her in anguish, "Anethe, Anethe! Get out of the window! run! hide!" The poor girl, almost paralyzed with fear, tries to obey, puts her bare feet ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... rising star that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... that they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to worship the old gods; or that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite worship, the old black magic may spring out upon them. As to the former alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and commanding. They will cry, "Here is the great god"; and, intoxicated by the mystery, will fall down to worship. But that which does not command can never save, and for a guiding faith we need ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... they were not used to gun fire, and it is certainly exciting to be shot at. Conspicuous among them was Johnson, who pulled and hauled lustily, shouting exuberantly the formless calls which sailors use in pulling ropes, and smiling sardonically. In five minutes from the time of the second gun the yards were backed, and, with weather leeches trembling, the ship lay "hove to," drifting bodily to leeward. The cruiser had ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... perished. All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so long as the surrounding countries—France, Germany, and Spain—remained mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable. The Italians feared nothing from them; they would call down the King of France or the Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, because they knew that the king could not bring France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only a few miserable, hungry retainers ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a death march ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... Worthy the wondrous name fame's far voice blows. And lo! his ancient foes Rise up to praise the plan Of modest grandeur, loyal trust, And generous power from man to man, That lifted him above the formless dust. O heart by kindliness betrayed, O noble spirit snared and strayed— Unmatched, upright thou standest still As that firm pine-tree rooted on ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... with evident interest, looking first at the bottle and then at the wild, formless pictures. "Our crazy Frenchman was an absintheur. I thought the pictures were rather the product of a disordered mind ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... After passages of dark music, in which the formless ugly reigned, occurred the poetic duel between Sordello and Eglamor at Palma's Court of Love. But why all this stress and fury? On the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick riotous orchestration came a disillusioning ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... their size, and that is all. And if the city be hideously aggressive, what word of excuse can be found for the outskirts, for the Italian and Chinese quarters, for the crude, new districts which fasten like limpets upon the formless mass of Chicago? These, to an enduring ugliness add a spice of cruelty and debauch, which are separate ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... of the universe; I am the source of all happiness; I am the humbler of all pride; I am omnipresent; I am infinite; I am the Lord of the senses; and my prowess is great. O Brahmana, alone do I set a-going the wheel of Time; I am formless; I am the Destroyer of all creatures; and I am the cause of all efforts of all my creatures. O best of Munis, my soul completely pervadeth all my creatures, but, O foremost of all regenerate ones, no one knoweth me. It is me that the pious and the devoted ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... against their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... years that have passed since I had that strange experience, I have from time to time, when in the mood, gone back to the book and have had to cut it down a good deal and to reshape it, as in the first draft it would have made too long and formless a history. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... found wanting where he was most ambitious to excel. It was a thing to lay to heart, an epochal page in his history which sleep alone could fitly round. Nevertheless, a disturbing impression of something essential left undone haunted the borderland of dreams to remain formless till morning, when his pocket handkerchief jerked a note odorous of patchouli to his ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... me as I walked along. They were erect of form and plain of feature, with expressions devoid of either intelligence or passion. Garbed in formless robes of sombre grey, like saints of song and story, they went their way with solemn resignation. Some of them led small children by the hand; others pushed perambulators containing white robed infants being taken to or from the nurseries for their scheduled stays in the mothers' ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... his eyes, and remained for a space in a state of coma. He was trying, as well as an exceedingly severe headache would permit, to recall the salient events of the previous night. At present his memories refused to solidify. They poured about in his brain in a fluid and formless condition, exasperating to one who sought for ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... despite his hesitating entrance, did not seem in the least disconcerted. He was a tall man, looking even taller by reason of the long formless overcoat he wore, known as a "duster," and by a long straight beard that depended from his chin, which he combed with two reflective fingers as he contemplated the editor. The red dust which still lay in ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... shadowy onsweeping of something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos, which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell. But as it happened nobody was ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of twenty-three when he wrote this. That, with so much command of expression and of measure, he should run waste and formless and even void, as he does in other parts of his volumes, is ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... over, and he and I retired to the same bed, I prayed to our Father in heaven (muffling my very thoughts in the bed-clothes lest he should hear them) to keep my earthly father safe for me from all the formless dangers of the darkness; and how, when at the first gray streak of dawn the spectre shook me, and I awoke, I held my heart and my breathing still, to listen for his breathing, and thanked God when he groaned in his sleep; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... ye but show your little mense, Just much about it wi' your scanty sense: Will your poor, narrow foot-path of a street, Where twa wheel-barrows tremble when they meet, Your ruin'd, formless bulk o' stane and lime, Compare wi' bonie brigs o' modern time? There's men of taste wou'd tak the Ducat stream,^4 Tho' they should cast the very sark and swim, E'er they would grate their feelings wi' the view O' sic an ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... was startled when he entered the library, his coat fastened and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see covered, and his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to stand in the shadow, like a thing ashamed. And the clasp of his hand was so soft and yet so forceful, that it chilled the heart. She was afraid of him, repelled by him, and ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning—then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore—then a few sunny smiles and many tears—a little ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... something vast and black heaped up in the adjacent chair. He had the look on his pink and naturally pleasant face of one who has abandoned hope. On seeing Mr. Twist a ray of interest lit him up, and he half rose. The formless mass in the next chair which Mr. Twist had taken for inanimate matter, probably cushions and wraps, and now perceived was one of the higher mammals, put out a hand and said something,—at least, it opened that part of its face ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... turning noiselessly, they peered at one another, conscious that naught else was real in the misty, golden-tinted gloom; that they were alone together there in a formless, soundless chaos peopled by shapes impalpable ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last dim, weird battle of the west. A death-white mist slept over land and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down to his blood, till all his heat was cold With formless fear: and even on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... country stretches away on every side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days none of the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved more than a half of their original height;[152] all that remains is a formless mass encumbered with heaps of debris at its foot, and yet, as every traveller in the country has remarked, these ruined monuments have an extraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They give an impression of far greater height than they really possess (Fig. 36). At certain ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... which repelled most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it. While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless force belongs, of course, to the forests, to Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy and the English tragedy, and, in no small degree, the German tragedy too. The real romance of the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... spell Beguiles the wise, mother of daring deeds, Battles and toils. And haughty Mano came, The Fiend of Pride; and smooth Self-Righteousness. Uddhachcha; and—with many a hideous band Of vile and formless things, which crept and flapped Toad-like and bat-like—Ignorance, the Dam Of Fear and Wrong, Avidya, hideous hag, Whose footsteps left the midnight darker, while The rooted mountains shook, the wild winds howled, The broken clouds shed from their caverns streams Of levin-lighted ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... black dripping wharf, almost deserted, on which were seen, through the mist as through a sheet of oiled paper, a few passengers wrapped in ulsters and formless india-rubber garments, and the helmsman standing motionless, muffled in his hooded cloak, his manner grave and sibylline, behind this ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... God God's message on them fell. Old bonds of sin, Snapt by the vastness of the growing soul, Burst of themselves; and in the heart late bound Virtue had room to breathe. As when that Voice Primeval o'er the formless chaos rolled, And, straight, confusions ceased, the greater orb Ruling the day, the lesser, night; even so, Born of that Bethlehem Mystery, order lived: Divine commandments fixed a firmament Betwixt man's lower instincts and his mind: From unsuspected summits ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... feast-cooking. Candles were stuck everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... downward. Plainly this lay no longer in the direction of his inn; but the hope of a little more light tempted him forward to reconnoitre. The lane ended in a terrace with a bartizan wall, which gave an outlook between high houses, as out of an embrasure, into the valley lying dark and formless several hundred feet below. Denis looked down, and could discern a few tree-tops waving and a single speck of brightness where the river ran across a weir. The weather was clearing up, and the sky had lightened, so as to ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished, here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail, vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top, like a sort ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... this an allusion to the seven activities or changes which water goes through to produce form; Water being the formative power which Fire, itself formless and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... understanding of what the drama is about, nor what the issues of the battle are, can be grasped. Good lawyers are good thinkers and usually plain talkers. The present-day revolt against the confused pleadings may go to the opposite extreme and abolish them all, leaving the case to be presented as formless and loose. The vexed question of the proper form of a pleading may delay justice until it is determined on appeal from the City Court to the Supreme Court, then to the Appellate Division, then to the Court of Appeals. In ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... with whom I have spoken about this matter, have been deeply grieved at such ignorance in the church about the condition of heaven and of spirits and angels; and in their displeasure they charged me to declare positively that they are not formless minds nor ethereal breaths, but are men in very form, and see, hear, and feel equally with those who are ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... night and troubled thoughts by day Disturb the prince and banish quiet sleep. He dreamed that darkness, visible and dense, Shrouded the heavens and brooded o'er the earth, Whose rayless, formless, vacant nothingness Curdled his blood and made his eyeballs ache; When suddenly from out this empty void A cloud, shining with golden light, was borne By gentle winds, loaded with sweet perfumes, Sweeter than spring-time on this earth can yield. ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... believed his boy to be dead. The terrible wreck at Cherry Brook had yielded up to him from its ashes only a few formless trinkets of all that had once been his child's, only a few unrecognizable bones, to be interred, long afterward, where flowers might bloom above them. The last search had been made, the last clew followed, the last resources of wealth and skill were at an end, and ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... of the Eddas.—We now come to the gods of the system. Odin is in the Eddas the founder of the world as now constituted. He has displaced the old formless race of gods, and is the leader of a new and vigorous race now ruling in their stead. The old scholars rationalised Odin into a chief who had led a migration from Asia to Norway in early times. He is the inventor of the art of writing by runes and the founder ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... dissatisfaction soon gave way to parades and informal meetings at which imported Chinese labor and the rich "nobs," the supposed dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language. The agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader appeared in Dennis Kearney, a native of Cork County, Ireland. For fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled in San Francisco as a drayman. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... is what specifically appeals to an aesthetic nature; it is equally removed from the crudity of formless stimulation and from the emotional looseness of reverie and discursive thought. The indulgence in sentiment and suggestion, of which our time is fond, to the sacrifice of formal beauty, marks an absence of cultivation ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... them. But now we must proceed in another direction." At that we turned away from the little world, and across the intervening space we let ourselves descend into the Eternal Realm between the two courts, into the formless void, a boundless tract, most deep and dark, chaotic and uninhabited, at one time cold, at another hot, {69a} now silent, now resounding with the roaring of cataracts falling and quenching the fires, and anon of the fire bursting out and burning up the water. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... eat, Nathaniel," said a slender, yet well-filled-out young woman, who held a book between her fingers, to a formless bundle, huddled in many shawls, by her side. Painfully the bundle unfolded itself, stretched and grew gradually into the form of a man—hollow chested, thin legged, narrow shouldered, attired in flopping garments, such as one ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... places his hand on the formless block, to give it a form according to his intention, he has not any scruples in doing violence to it. For the nature on which he works does not deserve any respect in itself, and he does not value the whole for its parts, but the parts on account of the whole. When the child of the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... place—so near that he could see a dim, formless shape outlined against the sky-line,—Glory stumbled over a sunken rock and fell heavily upon his knees. When he picked himself up he hobbled and Weary ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... iron." Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, {7} like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of greater ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... remarked that, though he did not object to it in the least, they had better take care, as this man would turn them all out before long. This man was, in fact, to stand at the helm of Piedmont, with short intervals, till he died, and was to carve out from the block of formless marble, not the Italy of sublime dreams, which, owing her deliverance to her sons alone, should arise immaculate from the grave a Messiah among the nations, but the actual Italy which has been accomplished; imperfect and peccable ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... standards of technic, which may result in an absolute failure of poetic musical comprehension. These should not be transplanted here from European soil. The other is the non-technical, sentimental, formless species of teaching which can only result in emotional enervation. Yet if forced to choose between the two the former would be preferable since without tools it is impossible to carve anything of beauty. The final beauty of the violin tone, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... that by processes of condensation, following the loss of heat by radiation into surrounding space, formless nebulae gravitated into nebula of smaller and smaller volumes until finally the planetary form was reached, and that planetaries were the ancestors of stars in general. That the planetaries do develop into stars, we have every reason ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Near by the corpse of the child that serv'd in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl'd whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and signaled for help ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... absolute power to meet every demand made upon it. The exquisite joy of understanding, and being understood, is too keen to let us believe, that there may be a terminal line, beyond which we may not pass. Friendship comes as a mystery, formless, undefined, without set bounds; and it is often a sore experience to discover that it is circumscribed, and limited like everything human. At first to speak of it as having qualifications was a profanation, and to find them ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... men, if solved, would only have the effect to destroy our faith; which is the solution of a thousand other difficulties; without which our existence is without aim, our pains without solution, and the Godlike Trinity within our breasts three avenging angels. From the formless earthworm up to the beaming human countenance; from the chaos of the first day up to the present age of the world; from the first faint motion of the heart to its full, bold throbbing in the breast of manhood, the invisible hand of God leads, protects, and nourishes the inward ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... playing. It was a Russian folk song, plaintive and simple, with a curious minor refrain like the sigh of an aching heart—wild sad harmony with pain in it that gripped the throat. Swayed by the sorrow-haunted music a wave of foreboding came over her, a strange indefinite fear that was formless but that weighed on her like a crushing burden. The happiness of the last few weeks seemed suddenly swamped in the recollection of the misery rampant in the world. Who, if their inmost hearts were known, were truly happy? And her thoughts, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... a phantom, A shape of the sea-mist, A shape of the brumal Rain, and the darkness Fearful and formless; Day ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... bulk of Azuria appeared in the sky. Clouds turned green. The sun was formless and purple in the vibrations of wrath that were emanating from Azuria. The whitish, or yellowish, or brownish peoples of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia fled to hilltops and built forts. In a real existence, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust? ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... combination, brought about the downfall of the great American republic were in operation from the beginning—being, as has been said, inherent in the system—it was not until the year 1995 (as the ancients for some reason not now known reckoned time) that the collapse of the vast, formless fabric was complete. In that year the defeat and massacre of the last army of law and order in the lava beds of California extinguished the final fires of enlightened patriotism and quenched in blood the monarchical ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... when he communes with his own soul in the stillness of night. The Gospel is preached to all; nowhere in the word of God are any forbidden to hear it, or, hearing, to accept its solace. Think not upon that dark mystery, which even to the understandings God has most enlightened shows but as a formless dread. The sinner shall not brood upon his sin, save to abhor it. Shall he who repents darken repentance with a questioning of God's mercy? Then indeed were there no such thing as ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... up a stone and flung it furiously among the unclean beasts. They fled. On the ground he could distinguish a mass, a red, formless ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... not having revealed to him the mysteries of railroad practice from the beginning. But frankness was not an ingredient of the Honourable Hilary's nature, and Austen was not the kind of man who would accept a hint and a wink. Hilary Vane had formless forebodings, and found himself for once in his life ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not so well as you think, for when you have this Niafer I shall return to you in the appearance of a light formless cloud, and I shall rise about you, not suddenly but a little by a little. So shall you see through me the woman for love of whom your living was once made high-hearted and fearless, and for whose sake death was derided, and paradise was ransacked: and you will ask forlornly, 'Was it for this?' ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells |
