"Lambent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human hands could be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range of the Rockies. Far to the north, standing aloof from the range, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it would suit ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... more—no more shall I drink wine from the hand of Ul-Jabal. My knees totter beneath the weight of my lean body. Daggers of lambent fever race through my brain incessant. Some fibrillary twitchings at the right angle of the mouth have ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... with the ordinary workaday type of local young man. Paston was uniformly gay, jovial, companionable, definite sometimes as regarded particulars, indefinite always as regarded generals. He stood constantly in a lambent flicker of humorous good-nature, and he baffled the old gentleman as one is baffled by the play of sunshine over a rippling pool. Marshall would ask himself whether the depth of the pool was a finger-length or a fathom, and would speculate on what there might be ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... fallen sycamore Whitely arches a pathway o'er, And shadows darkle The lambent cool, As, softly a-sparkle. Sunbeams arrow lightnings ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... Then, feeling the cold begin to creep in upon him in the stillness, Kane had to lift his thick-gloved hands to chafe his ears. He did it cautiously, but the caution was superfluous. The great wolf apparently had no objection to his moving as much as he liked. Once, indeed, those green, lambent eyes flamed over him, but casually, in making a swift circuit of the shores of the lake and the black fringe of the firs; but for all the interest which their owner vouchsafed him, Kane might as well ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor fly,—Green or otherwise—nor particle of solid opaque matter floating in it. 'Tis, indeed, pure optic illusion on the Widow's part, illusion born, perchance, partly of fear, partly of pique. There is nothing, my dear paternal Uncle, but one lambent, feverish fire, deliciously attractive, even in its angry heat, fascinating even whilst phlogistic, shooting out from every part of it, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... it understood my words or the gesture of menace. The cilia fluttered about its spherical body. Bands of lambent color flashed. I could not rid myself of the curious certainty, that it was trying to communicate ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... last of them received the brand, a startled wondering cry burst from some of the multitude who thronged "The Broadway," and following the many pointing fingers of the startled ones, every one saw how that purple, lambent flames played about Apleon's forehead in the form of the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... white shroud. But he was unable to attach to her image any sign of decay, and her unearthly beauty aroused him to renewed frenzy. Through his closed eyelids he saw the coffin transform itself into a nuptial bed. Marcolina lay laughing there with lambent eyes. As if in mockery, with her small, white hands she unveiled her firm little breasts. But as he stretched forth his arms towards her, in the moment when he was about to clasp her in his passionate ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... phosphorescent than usual, so that every little fish left a track of light behind him, greatly disproportionate to his size. As the night wore on, the sea grew brighter and brighter, until by midnight we appeared to be sailing on an ocean of lambent flames. Every little wave that broke against the ship's side sent up a shower of diamond-like spray, wonderfully beautiful to see, while a passing school of porpoises fairly set the sea blazing as they leaped and gambolled in its glowing waters. Looking up ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... great time. As flame after flame of lambent fire plays over the southern sky some eve of summer lightning, so Patsy came, and flashed, and passed. Hearts waited expectant before her, grew angry and determined as they listened (not the young men only) ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... of the Psalmists puts the same idea, 'The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears are open unto their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil.' The same eye that beams in lambent love on 'the righteous' burns terribly to the evil doer. 'The face of the Lord' means the side of the divine nature which is turned to us, and is manifested by His self-revealing activity, so that the expression comes near in meaning to 'the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... other letters and opened them, and his eyes read all the words, from the last to the first. One by one the sheets fell upon the table, and all alone in the midst the lock of red auburn hair sent up its little lambent flame in the sunshine. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... daughters, listen, you shall know. From out the lips of a most lovely youth (And though a miserable slave, in sooth I dare not hurt him, and I speak his praise), Well, from the mouth of a poor slave, a blaze Of lambent lustre came, Which mildly burned in rays of gentlest flame; Till reaching you, The living fire at once consumed ye two. I stood betwixt ye both, and though I sought To stay its fury, the strange fire would not ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... so many.—I'm obliged to make the retainers come by all manner of accidents; and I should never have finished the job if I hadn't thought of setting the castle on fire. 'And now forked tongues of liquid fire, and greedy lambent flames burst forth from every window of the devoted edifice. The devouring element——.' That's the best passage in ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the fantastic tricks played at times upon some body of worshippers, where light to the church is admitted through stained glass windows? A lambent red flame lighting up the hair of a man's head, while at the same moment his beard is blue and luminous. Over the shoulders of another, the purple mantle of royalty seems about falling, investing him for a moment with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... coming, we are coming! not as comes the tempest's wrath, When the frown of desolation sits brooding o'er its path; But with mercy, such as leaves his holy signet-light upon The air in lambent beauty, when the darkened storm is gone. We will vote for Birney, We will vote for Birney, We're for Morris and for Birney, And for Freedom through ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... from high Heaven first came Our light, from God Himself the rushing fire? For Moses erst, amid the prickly brier, Saw God made manifest in lambent flame. ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... colour mounted in his face, the light in his eyes was lambent. He found himself looking deep into other eyes that were like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge and resurge of feeling for which there was no name. Aware that they revealed more than he ought ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... no wingles here! I know that it seems incredible to any one that has never been in warmer climes, but the word beauty has a new meaning here. The glow which is lambent upon the faces of the sons and daughters of this section of sunny Italy, is something that I never saw elsewhere, and that cannot be described. It is a solemn truth, that nine tenths of all the ladies of Turin and Milan are perfect beauties; and I need ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... architecture, the vast industrialism of an age, all this thing called progress—all, all were for this alone, this thing of love! The atmosphere about him thrilled, vibrant with this message of the universe. The interspaces of all things seemed lambent, and therein fixed centrally was this ineffaceable and ineffable picture. He gazed, and as he gazed there came to him but one thought: ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... another. Then Mr. Abercrombie was prevailed upon to read one of his own outpourings of genius, a poem called "The Tigress," in which someone, presumably the author, described the torments involved in his adoration of a feminine person with "jetty brows and lambent eyes," whose kiss was like "a viper's sting" and who had, so to speak, raised the very dickens with his feelings. He read it with passionate fervor, and Captain Dan, listening, decided that the Tigress must be ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of flame Through cloud and breeze unwavering came, And darted to its place of rest On some meek brow of Jesus blest. Nor fades it yet, that living gleam, And still those lambent lightnings stream; Where'er the Lord is, there are they; In every heart that gives them room, They light His altar every day, Zeal to inflame, and ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... been their meeting on the morning of the lad's first adventuring into the world. Memories flooded them, as they looked across the valley to the bleak cliffs of Stone Mountain, which rose in aged, rugged grandeur, softened in this hour by the veils of haze, warmed with the lambent hues of sunset. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... around her arms, and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears, nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light, as with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather a celestial glory than a light—an emanation that penetrates the grossest body with more subtilety than the rays of the sun penetrate ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... under the great arc-lamps which seemed suspended in the mild lambent air, the branches of the trees lining the Boulevards showed brightly, delicately green; and the tints of the dresses worn by the women walking up and down outside the cafes and still brilliantly lighted shops mingled luminously, as ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... destructive, gleam, Alike o'er all his lightnings fly; Thy lambent glories only beam Around the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... smiling in frustration and amusement and irritation and admiration and love. She was so quick, and so lambent, like discernible fire, and so vindictive, and so rich in her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... emigrant wagon, behind whose tailboard she was gravely trotting. She was a half-broken colt—in which character she had at different times unseated everybody in the train—and, although covered with dust, she had a beautiful coat, and the most lambent gazelle-like eyes I had ever seen. I think she kept these latter organs purely for ornament—apparently looking at things with her nose, her sensitive ears, and, sometimes, even a slight lifting of her slim near fore-leg. On our first interview ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... grows queenlier in mid-space When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,— So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace When the drear soul desires thee. Of that face What shall be said,—which, like a governing star, Gathers and garners from all things that are Their silent ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... agony, clothed with crimson fire. A smile of ineffable joy lit up the countenance of the sufferer—the message from heaven was understood. The angel lifted this soul from the fire, and, pausing for a moment on the peak of a lambent flame, the angelic deliverer and the liberated soul, now became angelic in brilliancy, paused to look ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Of the undistinguished multitude. Brave as the silent myriads are, Crushed by the juggernaut world-car; Strong with the people's strength, yet mild, Simple and tender as a child; Wise with the wisdom of the heart, Able in council, field, and mart; Nor lacking in the lambent gleam, The great soul's final stamp—the beam Of genial fun, the humor sane Wherewith the hero sports with pain. His virtues hold within the span Of his obscurest fellow-man. To live without reproach, to die Without a fear—in these words lie His highest aims, for none too high. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... wild humour flickers over this page like lambent flame; yet he was serious at heart without a doubt, and his whirling words rouse an echo in many a breast to this day. But both Shakspere and Lamb had their higher moments. Turn to "Cymbeline," and observe the glorious triumph of the dirge ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... round the mournful beauty played Of lambent light and purple shade, Lost on the fixed and dumb despair Of frozen earth ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there darted from it and alighted upon one of the foremost ships, a dazzling lightning stroke a mile in length, at whose touch the metallic sides of the car curled and withered and, licked for a moment by what seemed lambent flames, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... vigorous motion, such as takes place when an oar is dipped, a stone thrown, or paddle-wheels dashed into the water; but at other times, the mere motion of the ocean swell, even in calm weather, is sufficient to stir up the lambent light and cause the crest of every undulation to glitter as if tipped with burnished silver. In such circumstances we have seen the ends of the oars of a boat silvered with it when lifted out of the wave, and the drops which fell from them before being redipped resembled the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... my own investigations, have passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it. The strong interest that notices things was absent from him. Would it ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... this brochure? She had read it surely with care. She must have cherished it, or why identify it as her own? Perhaps she was a lover of old books; it could not be that she was a lover of cruel stories. Those eyes were made for throwing forth the lambent light of affection and love; how unlike to the staring blood-shot orbs of that Jane Grierson on that terrific woodcut! Yet, true to the nature of my species, at least my sex, I found in the grim pamphlet that inexpressible ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... about an acre of plate glass under the Royal arms on Mr. Eglantine's shop-window; and at night, when the gas is lighted, and the washballs are illuminated, and the lambent flame plays fitfully over numberless bottles of vari-coloured perfumes—now flashes on a case of razors, and now lightens up a crystal vase, containing a hundred thousand of his patent tooth-brushes—the effect of the sight may be imagined. You don't suppose that he is a creature who ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... naenias, Et maestum gemitu pectus, & hispidis Frontem nubibus expedi, Cum Sol non solito lumine riserit, Et fortuna volubilis Fati difficilem jecerit aleam. Quod vexant hodie Noti, Cras lambent hilares aequor AEtesiae. Moestum sol hodie caput, Cras laetum roseo promet ab aequore. Alterno redeunt choro Risus & gemitus, & madidis prope Sicci cum Lacrymis joci. Nascuntur mediis gaudia luctibus, Sic fatis placitum. suis Tempestiva fluunt ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... show him o'er his head The Northern fires beyond the zenith spread In lambent glory, blue and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... other: Topaz-brown And lambent burnt her eyes and shot Sharp flame at his of amethyst.— "I hate you! Go, and be forgot As death forgets!" their glitter hissed (So seemed it) in their hatred. Ho! Dared any mortal front her so?— Tempestuous eyebrows knitted down— Tense nostril, ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale, lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in our lovely native fable talk, we call the "Fairy's ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... as he clung to the pony's bridle. Not nearly so bright as the lambent phosphorescence from the fireflies which flickered across our path, the puny light of the match was sufficient for the guide to pick up the ribbon-like path, and once more we were on our way ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... shall be 'white as no fuller on earth can white them.' Nor shall that be a fading splendour, nor shall we fear as we enter into the cloud, nor, looking on Him, shall flesh bend beneath the burden, and the eyes become drowsy, but we shall be as the Lawgiver and the Prophet who stood by Him in the lambent lustre, and shone with a brightness above that which had once been veiled on Sinai. We shall never vanish from His side, but dwell with Him in the abiding temple which He has built, and there, looking upon Him for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Shepherd-King, but in answer to His cry for help He came down riding upon a cherub, flying on the wings Of wind; the Holy Spirit had been in the world from the earliest days of prayer and inspired speech, but He came down from the throne to sit on each bowed head in lambent flame. So Christ is with us all the days, yet He comes. He will come at last to receive His own to Himself, and to judge the world; but He comes in dark and lonely hours that ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... calm, cool nights how often have I stood on the deck of a ship watching with wonder and awe the stars overhead, and the sea-fire below, especially in the foaming, silvery wake of the vessel, where often suddenly appear globes of soft and lambent light, given out perhaps from the surface of ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... sky shone overhead, awaiting the coming of the stars. Strange indeed was the silence out here, broken only by the lapping of the water on the sides of the boat and the calling of birds in the distance. Far away the orange ray of a lighthouse began to quiver in the lambent dusk. The pale green light on the waves did not die out, but the shadows grew darker, so that Eyre, with his gun close at hand, could not make out his groups of guillemots, although he heard them calling all around. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... the edge of the water. The eastern sky blooms into vivid pink from the reflection of this fiery incandescence, which fades only to give place to the leaping brightness of phosphorescent waves, and the nightly pageant of tropical skies ablaze with lambent flames of summer lightning. Morning reveals the dark forests of mysterious Borneo, rolling back to the misty blue of a mountain background. The pathless jungles of teak and iron wood, inextricably tangled by ropes of liana or ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of Latmos when he slept And dreamed Heaven down to him. A glorious shape That to the brightness of ethereal charms Join'd the familiar sweetness of a maid; A soft clear forehead circled by the light That heaven sets lambent on its imaged self; A face that beaming on the heart of man As by a silent teaching in the sense Makes goodness natural. Upon each limb Grace laid its sweet commandment lovingly, Whilst the fair bosom glowed with tenderness, As from the fulness of a soul beneath, Woman's divinest ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... her Eyes not yet freed from the Dullness of the late Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, seem'd like a thin Veil not to hide, but to heighten the Beauty which it cover'd; her Night-gown hanging loose, discover'd her charming Bosom, which cou'd bear no Name, but Transport, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... rain down from heaven as thick as hail, not one of them would fit it.'—Yorick's last breath was hanging upon his trembling lips ready to depart as he uttered this:—yet still it was uttered with something of a Cervantick tone;—and as he spoke it, Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a moment in his eyes;—faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which (as Shakespeare said of his ancestor) were wont to set the table in ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... regarded "as the social regenerator of his day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped state of things. . . . His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing under the edge of the summer cloud, does to the electric death-spark ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hat. Through the confusion clouding his thoughts, he both foreglimpsed humiliation and was dimly aware of a personality of force and charm: of a well-poised figure cloaked in a light pongee travelling-wrap; of a face that seemed to consist chiefly in dark eyes glowing lambent in the shadow of a wide-brimmed, flopsy hat. He was sensitive to a hint of breeding and reserve in the woman's attitude; as though (he thought) the contretemps diverted and engaged her more than he did who ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... is mad! Come back, come back!" cried Hassan, excitedly; whereupon the savages, looking more like demons than men, as their faces were lighted up by the glow of the lambent flames, seized hold of my companion and dragged ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the halls of numbered dead Where lambent lights and crystal dews Invoke the ghouls to guard each tomb That vandals of the sobbing night, When hell-winds stir the conquered dead, And thunder shook the mourner's pews, Giant cavalcades of marshalled Doom ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... Mr. Davis, "was not only a young man of eminent ability and attainments, but he was warm-hearted, frank, honorable, eminently conscientious. His health was then good, and he was always bright and genial: sometimes he showed the lambent play ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... no considerable series of stanzas in Don Juan are so free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflame with righteous wrath. Nowhere in such space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... in the afternoon a low hissing was heard in the caisson, and with a quick flicker the candles first burned low, then flamed anew, the color of the flame a lambent green. For a few moments none of the men realized what had happened, and stood there, stupefied and staggering. An acrid burning sensation gripped the men by the throat and they were stricken blind. Suffering terrible agony, every man managed to climb the long ladder, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... night it seemed to him to grow more beautiful. He could put down on paper the outlines of an every-day landscape, and give them a dash of brilliant color to look well on a wall; but how to carry away, except in the memory, any impression of the strange lambent darkness, the tender hues, the loneliness and the pathos of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... hedge a grim barricade of stiff, dark sticks. Each stalk had turned into a tall, straight flame of lambent rose. From a dead thing of dreary ugliness it had become a thing ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... it was that the Count de Cabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs-beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... covered his eyes with his hands, and prayed the wordless prayer of one who hastily commits himself to God; and in the darkness behind his hands there was an illumination, and in the midst of it a sentence in letters each a lambent flame—the Creed of Father Hilarion and the Princess ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... in those crystal eyes, Fair Zillia!—Ah! more dear to LOVE the gaze That dwells upon its object, than the rays Of that vague glance, quick, as in summer skies The lightning's lambent flash, when neither rise Thunder, nor storm.—I mark, while transport plays Warm in thy Lover's eye, what dread betrays Thy throbbing heart:—yet why from his soft sighs Fleet'st thou so swift away?—like the young Hind[1], That ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... entirely superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house of Brentham, who laughed occasionally, even before his angelic jokes were well launched. His lambent flashes sometimes even played over the cardinal, whose cerulean armor, nevertheless, remained always unscathed. Monsignore Chidioch, however, who would once unnecessarily rush to the aid of his chief, was tumbled over by the bishop with relentless ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... often some theosophical theory to bring forward, which, I must add, never seemed to me to mean, or, at least, to reveal, anything. He was a great reader of mystical books, and yet the man's nature seemed cold. It was sunshiny, but not sunny. His intellect was rather a lambent flame than a genial warmth. He could make things, but he could not grow anything. And when I came to see that he had had more than any one else to do with the education of Miss Oldcastle, I understood her a little better, and saw that her so-called education had been in a great measure ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Las Casas' soul Sought with exulting hope, her heav'nly goal: 210 A bending angel consecrates his tears, And leads his kindred mind to purer spheres. But, ah! whence pours that stream of lambent light, That soft-descending on the raptur'd sight, Gilds the dark horrors of the raging storm— 215 It lights on earth—mild vision! gentle form— 'Tis Sensibility! she stands confest, With trembling step she moves, and panting breast; Wav'd by the gentle breath of passing sighs Loose in the air ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... this in your life there shall be no deception,— 575 If ye in this falseness longer continue With treacherous lying, who stand here before me, That you on the mountain bale-fire shall take, Hottest of war-waves, and your corpses consume, The lambent flame, so for you shall that lie 580 To leaving of life [surely] be turned. Ye may not prove that word, which ye just now in wrong Concealed 'neath heaps[1] of sins. Nor may ye hide that fate, Obscure its deepest might." In thought ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... yellow skull stood out; the ribs of the skeleton. Two tiny, fiery eyes glimmered at the base of the antennae—two minute jewelled sparks of glowing, lambent fire. They seemed to ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... his cheek, and then proceeded to examine the heavens above. A cloud, much darker and more descending than the others, which obscured the firmament, spread over the zenith, and based itself upon the horizon to leeward. Oswald's eye had been fixed upon it but a few seconds, when he beheld a small lambent gleam of lightning pierce through the most opaque part; then another, and more vivid. Of a sudden the wind lulled, and the Circassian righted from her careen. Again the wind howled, and again the vessel was pressed down to her bearings by its force; ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... imperial tent of their great Queen 465 Of woven exhalations, underlaid With lambent lightning-fire, as may be seen A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid With crimson silk—cressets from the serene Hung there, and on the water for her tread 470 A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn, Dyed in the beams of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... golden wedding of the spring, the reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Its own color, however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost any hue and within the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is a chariot wheel with petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambent tongues of flame; while another kind seems the button of some natural legion of honor, and still another a pin-wheel in Nature's ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... else no fire: Man's being is a fire lit unto God, And many thoughts colour the sacred flame; But the air for him, the draught wherein he glows, The breathing spirit that has turned mere life Into the hot vehement being of man Lambent upon the altar of the world, Is woman and desire of her, nought else. Behold, we know not what we do at all When we love women: is it we who love, Or Destiny rather visiting our souls In passion?—How shall I ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... impressing on Mrs Toots the necessity of caution, when Mr Feeder, B.A., offered her his arm, and led her down to the carriages that were waiting to go to church. Doctor Blimber escorted Mrs Toots. Mr Toots escorted the fair bride, around whose lambent spectacles two gauzy little bridesmaids fluttered like moths. Mr Feeder's brother, Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., had already gone on, in advance, to assume his ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Claude, like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism than Lesueur is the French Raphael. With a grace and lambent color all his own—a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and a sense of design in line and mass more suave and ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... beamed down upon him from above; and, quickly casting a startled glance aloft, Blyth shudderingly beheld a ball of lambent greenish light quivering upon the upper extremity of the long tapering yard and swaying to and fro with the roll of the raft, much as the flame of a candle would have done under similar circumstances. Clinging lightly to the ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... devoted itself to polo with unexpected results, for it beat by two goals to one that very terrible polo corps the Lushkar Light Horse, though the latter had four ponies apiece for a short hour's fight, as well as a native officer who played like a lambent flame ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... read into the silent night, The winking stars soft peeping in his room, While at his hand the dreamy, lambent light Just lit his book and left all else in gloom. His study walls evanished, and in mist He saw the maid whose dead ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... presence, which defied time and space, come silently to me, breathing inspiration that may not be spoken, healing the madness of despair and leaving to me in the midst of anxiety a peace which was wholly unaccountable! In the lambent flame of the rough stone fireplace, in the darkness between Hamilton's hut and mine, through which I often stole, dreading what I might find—everywhere, I felt and saw, or seemed to see, those gray eyes ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... immortal evening. Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats's eager, inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation that in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... first you will know not what they mean, And you may never know, And we may never tell you:— These sudden flashes in your soul, Like lambent lightning on snowy clouds At midnight when the moon is full. They come in solitude, or perhaps You sit with your friend, and all at once A silence falls on speech, and his eyes Without a flicker glow at you:— You two have seen ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... knew I wanted to marry her, when I saw her. I love her passionately," and he threw a pebble in the water farther than he had yet; "but she is so pure, so delicate, that when I approach her, in spite of my besottedness, my love grows lambent. That's not like me, you know," with great vehemence. "Will ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... the conception of the Universe involved must surely exclude the real being, or even the real existence, of anything but God. Matthew Arnold never committed himself to Pantheism, nor, indeed, to any other theory of the Universe. For his delicate humour and lambent satire always had in view simply the practical object of clearing a plain way for the good life through the "Aberglaube" of theology. His description of God as "the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness," might seem, in fact, the negation of Pantheism, because, if God is ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... left. There they were met by a taller young lady, who was introduced as "My daughter Rosabella." Her beauty was superlative and peculiar. Her complexion was like a glowing reflection upon ivory from gold in the sunshine. Her large brown eyes were deeply fringed, and lambent with interior light. Lustrous dark brown hair shaded her forehead in little waves, slight as the rippling of water touched by an insect's wing. It was arranged at the back of her head in circling braids, over which fell clusters of ringlets, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... matter new meanders takes, And slender trains of twisting fibres makes; And how the viscous seeks a closer tone, By just degrees to harden into bone; While the more loose flow from the vital urn, And in full tides of purple streams return; How lambent flames from life's bright lamps arise, And dart in emanations through the eyes; How from each sluice a gentle torrent pours, To slake a feverish heat with ambient showers; Whence their mechanic powers the spirits claim; How great their force, how delicate their frame; How the same nerves are fashioned ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... eye, and leading him to a sheltered nest of bark and sawdust. It was warm and odorous. Nevertheless, they both deemed it necessary to enwrap themselves in the single blanket. The eye beamed fitfully upon them, occasionally a wave of lambent tremulousness passed across it; its weirdness was an excuse for their drawing nearer each ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... hues of sunny cheerfulness caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith; and never was there a Christian's victory over death more grandly evidenced than in that last scene lighted with its lambent humour. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Contracted by increasing drought, till it must shatter into fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength. Rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibers of a perennial endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or, rather let me say, rising, to repose, finishes the infallible luster of ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... half listening, half chatting to Mr. Mattock, and wore on his drawn eyelids and slightly drawn upper lip a look of lambent pugnacity awake to the challenge, indifferent to the antagonist, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sarcasm in the liquid voice perplexed him, and the strange lambent light that seemed now and then to ray out of the brilliant eyes that had never wandered from his, sent an ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... through the soft, lambent air, everything he passed appealed to his heart and imagination. Each of the small, yet dignified, eighteenth-century houses, which add such distinction and grace to each Surrey township—Epsom, Leatherhead, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... were the pleasing triumphs of the sky, For James his late nocturnal victory; The pledge of his Almighty Patron's love, The fireworks which his angels made above. I saw myself the lambent easy light Gild the brown horror, and dispel the night: The messenger with speed the tidings bore; 660 News, which three labouring nations did restore; But Heaven's own Nuntius ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Ecstasy sore maltreats my soul and yearning burns my sprite, * And tears betray love's secresy which I would lief contain: I weet no way, I know no case that can make light my load, * Or heal my wasting body or cast out from me this bane. A hell of fire is in my heart upflames with lambent tongue * And Laza's furnace-fires within my liver place have ta'en. O thou, exaggerating blame for what befel, enough * I bear with patience whatsoe'er hath writ for me the Pen! I swear, by Allah, ne'er to find aught comfort for their loss; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... market is what men are for preserving: an observation of still reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith, as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... European waters, save that Lambert Heinrichzoon, commonly called Pretty Lambert, a Rotterdam skipper, whom we have seen the sea-fights with Frederic Spinola, of the Dunkirk pirate fleet, Adrian Dirkzoon. It was a desperate fight.—Pretty Lambent, sustained at a distance by Rear-Admiral Gerbrantzon, laid himself yard-arm to yard-arm alongside the pirate vessel, boarded her, and after beating down all resistance made prisoners such of the crew as remained ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... struggle, floated near to the principal heap of mingled treasure and ruin, heavily squatted on the very summit of the pile, was such a creature as no words could depict—of a ghastly color, bulky and malformed, furnished with three burning eyes that turned now green, now red with lambent flame, and great shapeless limbs, which it uplifted one after the other, striking awkward, pawing blows at the bell! It seemed to the horrified onlookers to be the very demon of greed defending its spoil. Blank sank helpless on the bottom side of the bell, and the others ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and still leave without a rival, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... whose skies are lead and soil is sand, yet everlasting life with those I love; give me a lodge in some vast wilderness hallowed by children's laughter; give me a cave in the mountain crag to house those dearest to my heart; give me a tent on the far frontier, where, by the lambent light of their mother's eyes, I may watch my children grow in grace and the truth of God, and I'll build a heaven grander, nobler, sweeter than was ever dreamed of by the gross ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... heard." Her calm regard was unchanged—nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his kissing of her feet—he did go forth again. This time he might return, immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . He knew he could not, but—he might! She promises that he can: ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Bounderby. There were occasions when in looking at him she was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, 'Alas, poor Yorick!' After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully cheerful, and would say, 'You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful to find;' and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr. Bounderby bore up as he did. One idiosyncrasy for which she often apologized, she found it excessively ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... was the son of a bondwoman, who had been taken at the sacking of a town belonging to the Latins, and was born whilst his mother was a slave. While yet an infant in his cradle, a lambent flame[1] is said to have played round his head, which Tan'aquil converted into an omen of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... some Titanic bloom, The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core, Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or, Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor, By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore, A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb, The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea— For these alone the finials ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... sea-wave, or river whirlpool, entirely sacred in the Greek mind, and the [Greek: *bostruchos*] or similarly curling wave in flowing hair, are the two main sources of the spiral form in lambent or rampant decoration. Of such lambent ornament, the most important piece is the crocket, of which I rapidly set ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... shown the least sign of concern. The Chief seized her by the shoulder and shook her roughly, ordering her to come with him. She did not understand his language, but his meaning was obvious. She looked up and stared straight into his one open eye. In her own eyes shifted the dangerous, lambent flame of a beast at bay, and for a moment she was on the point of darting at ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career, from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into a Hero for the notice, however stolid his brain, however tough his heart, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... season the Firefly, and many misinterpreted her illy suppressed excitement and the scrutiny of those lambent eyes sending out their flame signals in search of answering lights. Even her secretary did not know that the dark shadows which ringed them were not due to the balls and other frivolities in which she was so conspicuous; ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... almost a part of it, borne along on its wings like the birds that beat their wings past her upon the gale. The lightning, which till now had shaken quivering lances of flame across the black water, a flash, then darkness, then again a flash, now became continuous, playing in lambent flames amid the blackness, lighting up the wild turmoil of wind and wave and cloud. The thunder rolled without pause,—overhead, around, beneath them. Crash! boom! crash! And all the while the water hissed past them; all the while the wind buffeted ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards |
