"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must have grown pretty tired of squeaking. It was a moonless evening, though not very dark. I could see objects at a little distance through the crack, but could not see so far as the stump. It got rather dull, watching there; and being amidst nice cozy straw, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... o'clock, when he had sent Nanny to bed, that she might have a good night's rest before the fatigues of the morrow, he stole softly out to pay a last visit to Milly's grave. It was a moonless night, but the sky was thick with stars, and their light was enough to show that the grass had grown long on the grave, and that there was a tombstone telling in bright letters, on a dark ground, that beneath were deposited the remains of Amelia, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the midnight Is heavy upon the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed: Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark room, For it may be that ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... roll as big around as a barrel of black-eyed peas and as loose as the wrapper of a two-for-fiver. I don't mind telling you that I was not touring among the Antipodes when the burglar-proof safe of the Farmers' National Bank of Butterville, Ia., flew open some moonless nights ago to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... ridge of the Seely Hill when they found old Jerry Lance lying stone-dead in his house? And had I not predicted with an air of mysterious knowledge that Jourdan would recover when Red Mike threw him? The sky was moonless and he could not get out if ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... as silent as death. "I can't go to bed and not know where she is," he reflected. "I wonder what she meant when she talked to me so strangely—what she had in her mind! I must know, I must know!" He opened the door, and went out into the night. The sky was moonless, but for a wonder it was resplendent with stars. All the factory fires were low, and the air was no longer smoke-sodden. The wind came from the sea, and he breathed deeply. It seemed as though a great healing power ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... attractions in these tropics, if only for the freedom from severe heat, the glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night for a lover, a lady, and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... June were breathing by, The twilight's last faint rays were gleaming, And midway in the moonless sky The star of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... felt much better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... down to watch the fading light. The tide came rippling in. The night grew darker,—starless, moonless. Dickens seemed suddenly to be possessed with the spirit of mischief; he threw his arm around me, and ran me down the inclined plane to the end of the jetty till we reached the toll-post. He put his other arm around this, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... though there can be no question, as is seen by a comparison with the Syriac, that the period of the full moon is referred to. No doubt it was because travelling was so much more safe and easy than in the moonless nights, that the two great spring and autumn festivals of the Jews were held at the full moon. Indeed, the latter feast, when the Israelites "camped out" for a week "in booths," was held at the time of the "harvest moon." The phenomenon of the "harvest moon" may be briefly explained as follows. At ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... rid of him as soon as you can," said Clementina, when again the moonless night of the pines had received them: "he is certainly more than half a lunatic. It is almost full moon now," she added, looking up. "I have never seen ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the first night after the new moon in the month of Pharmuthi, the sanctuary in bygone years was always adorned with flowers. As soon as the darkness of this moonless night passed away, the high festival of the spring equinox and the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... night could dawn on night, With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred, A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, More desperate than strife with hope debarred, 60 More fatal than the adamantine Never Encompassing her passionate endeavour, Dawns glooming ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... rough, and our feet not well shod for the long journey," she said, almost with a smile on her pure face, "the sky may be sunless and moonless, and thick clouds may hide even the stars—but there are soft green meadows beyond, and glorious sunshine. If I am not to meet him here, I shall be gathered lovingly into his arms there, and God ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... Ridge past that old stone where in days gone by at the place of Thor the wild Saxons worshiped their war-god. Nigel looked at it with a wary eye and spurred Pommers onward as he passed it, for still it was said that wild fires danced round it on the moonless nights, and they who had ears for such things could hear the scream and sob of those whose lives had been ripped from them that the fiend might be honored. Thor's stone, Thor's jumps, Thor's punch-bowl—the whole country-side was one grim monument to the God of Battles, though the pious ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... zodial light; and, in this last cause, we have an explanation not only of ancient obscurations of the solar light, but, also, of those phosphorescent mists, such as occurred in 1743 and 1831, rendering moonless nights so light that the smallest print could be ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... moonless night, a dark night. Quasimodo fixed his gaze in vain upon la Esmeralda; soon she was no more than a whiteness amid the twilight; then nothing. All was ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a fisherman. It might be a lady; but it was neither Mrs Hilary nor Miss O'Carroll, ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... and hatred followed: I myself Bore, men imagined, no inglorious part: The gods thought otherwise, by whose decree Deprived of life, and more, of death deprived, I still hear shrieking through the moonless night Their discontented and deserted shades. Observe these horrid walls, this rueful waste! Here some refresh the vigour of the mind With contemplation and cold penitence: Nor wonder while thou hearest that the soul Thus purified hereafter may ascend Surmounting all obstruction, ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... of foul weather were very dark and moonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning into her last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled up the face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But we made shift as well as we could, working hard all the time that the daylight lasted, ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... found. For centuries the planet has been diligently examined with this special object, and as failure after failure came to be recorded, the conclusion seemed almost to be justified that the chain of analogical reasoning had broken down. The moonless Mars was thought to be an exception to the rule that all the great planets outside Venus were dignified by an attendant retinue of satellites. It seemed almost hopeless to begin again a research which had often been tried, and had invariably led to disappointment; yet, fortunately, the present ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... moonless, but there was that soft diffused light in the air invariable in June, except on the cloudiest of evenings. There was just enough of it to enable us to see our way as we strolled towards Mannering's house. When we ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... him, whipped by icy blasts— Gigantic chestnuts, without leaf or bird, And, like himself, grown old in that same place. Through the dark network of their undergrowth, Pallid his aspect; and the earth was brown. Starless and moonless, a rough winter's night Was letting down her lappets o'er the mist. This—nothing more: old Faun, dull sky, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... did not want to listen, so much was he afraid, and he did not want his hopes to crumble with each obstinate refusal of his father. He preferred to learn the truth at once, good or bad, later on; and he went out into the night. It was a moonless night, a starless night, one of those foggy nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farm-yard, for it was the season when the earliest apples were gathered, the "soon ripe" ones, as they are called in the language of the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... not inclined to argue about the matter. He sat silent, watching star after star shine out of the moonless sky. After a ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... boat at midnight sent alone To drift upon the moonless sea; A lute whose leading chord is gone; A wounded bird that hath but one Imperfect wing to soar upon, Are like me ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... inescapable. It sweeps over and into everything in its path. No trench is too deep for it, no dug-out, unless hermetically sealed, is safe from it. Night and darkness only heighten its effect. It is the only weapon that is as effective in a fog or in the inky blackness of a moonless night as in the most brilliant sunshine. Only the mask and the training that go with it protect. Terror, confusion, lack of discipline and control ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... down the slope and across the moonless valley with small regard for her own or her companion's safety. It swerved from side to side, skidded and leaped with terrifying suddenness, but held its way as straight as the bird that flies, driven by a steady hand ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the great things we meant to achieve. Whether the results were commensurate with our efforts I cannot say. I only know that Frieda's cheeks flamed with the excitement of reading English monosyllables; and her eyes shone like stars on a moonless night when I explained to her how she and I and George Washington were Fellow ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... seat, from which the sky could be seen completely swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, which was mild enough, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and saint of Thine Along the glorious line, Sitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet We'll hold communion sweet, Know them by look and voice, and thank them all For helping us in thrall, For words of hope, and bright examples given To show through moonless skies that there is light ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... preparations were made, and one dark moonless night in September a long procession of boats floated silently down the river. In one of the boats sat Wolfe, and as they drifted slowly along in the starlight in a low voice he repeated Gray's poem called an ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... to listen. The night was moonless and starry, except where a bank of clouds came drifting up from the south-west. A moist breeze, smelling of soft, mountain snow, gently stirred the trees about them. But from the shanty no sound could be discerned. They approached ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... event took place so interesting in astronomical history, that we have to look back to the memorable discovery of Uranus in 1781 before we can find a parallel to it in importance. Mars had always been looked upon as one of the moonless planets, though grounds were not wanting for the surmise that probably moons to Mars really existed. It was under the influence of this belief that an attempt was made by Professor Asaph Hall at Washington to make a determined ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... moonless night; the dark blue canopy spangled with myriad stars—grandeur, peace, and purity above; squalor, worry, and profanity below. Fit basis for many an ancient system of Theology— unscientific, if you will, but ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... impatience of a man That's new come home, who having long been absent With haste runs over every different room In pain to see the whole. Thrice happy meeting! Nor time nor death shall part them ever more. 'Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our bed, and then ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... night, well. It was a clear, star-lit, moonless sort of night: at least, I think there was no moon; or, at any rate, the moon could have been little more than a thin crescent, for it was ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... what, poor fool? Is this, then, all that comes Of that night when the closing door fell dumb On music and on voices, and I went Forth from the ordered tumult of the dance, Under the clear cope of the moonless night, Wandering away without the city-walls, Between the silent meadows and the stars, Till something woke in me, and moved my spirit, And of themselves my thoughts turned toward God; When straight within my soul I felt as ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals when she set off on the long ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... been, she could not tell; she knew not whether it were evening, or midnight, or near the morning; but she felt cold and cramped; everything save the busy river was still, and the daylight was all gone, and stars out bright in the deep, moonless sky, ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... coast, often at the very edge of the high, precipitous cliffs, with no more between it and the rocks far beneath than a low wall. It was a road of dangerous curves and corners which needed careful negotiation even in broad daylight, and this was a black, moonless and starless night. But Copplestone had impressed upon his driver that he must get to Scarhaven as quickly as possible, and he and his companion were both so full of their purpose that they paid no heed to the perpetual danger which they ran as the car tore round ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of the house. That disturbed him to fierce longings—the clear, high measure ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... earth. Full sixteen times since that disastrous day The face of nature hath renewed its youth; Still have I seen no change come over thine, That looked a grave amid a blooming world. Thou'rt like some moonless image, carved in stone By sculptor's chisel, that doth ever keep The selfsame ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... have found me or even looked for me on that lonely coast. I therefore sat down where I was, on the corals where they seemed least pointed. I did not succeed at all in making a fire; the night was quite dark and moonless, and a fine rain penetrated everything. I have rarely passed a longer night or felt so lonely. The new day revived my spirits, breakfast did not detain me long, as I had nothing to eat, so I kept along the shore, jumping and climbing, and had to swim through several lagoons, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... o'er the moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And none are wakeful but the dead; No bloodless shape my way pursues, No sheeted ghost my couch annoys, Visions more sad my fancy views, Visions of long ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... country-side had started on his hardest race: little less than three leagues and back, which he reckoned to accomplish in two hours, though the night was moonless and the way rugged. He rushed against the still cold air till it felt like a wind upon his face. The dim homestead sank below the ridges at his back, and fresh ridges of snowlands rose out of the obscure ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... picturesque appearance as they wound up the hill, each one carrying a tiny pine-tree, the top of which was encircled with a diadem of flame, beautifully lighting up the darker verdure beneath, and gleaming like a spectral crown through the moonless, misty evening. We could not help laughing at their watchwords. They ran in this wise: Shorge Washingtone, James K. Polk, Napoleon Bonaparte! Liberte, egalite, fraternite! Andrew Jacksone, President Fillmore, and Lafayette! I give them to you word for word, as ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... to Calais, appalled And astonished, the vast fleet veers; And the skies are shrouded and palled, But the moonless midnight hears And sees how swift on them drive and drift strange flames that the ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... country-home a whole summer before he determined to make a still more attractive home of it by lighting it with a new-fashioned gas of domestic manufacture. He succeeded in lighting not only his house but the whole country-side, for one moonless night his mansion was burned to the ground. Nothing was left of the house but the foundations, and on these the owner felt no desire to build again. He departed from the Lethbury neighborhood and ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... are readily taken on to Alta Vista. My wife rode a sure-footed black nag, I a mule which was perfect whilst the foot-long lever acting curb lay loose on its neck. Returning, we were amazed at the places they had passed during the moonless night. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... A moonless, cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs floating ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... tired foliage on to these benches which have rested many vagrants. Darkness has ceased to be the lawful cloak of the unhappy; but Mother Night was soft and moonless, and man had not despoiled ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... three days, waiting for a propitious, moonless night and roaming singly round the outskirts of the park. Once Beautrelet saw the postern. Contrived between two buttresses placed very close together, it was almost merged, behind the screen of brambles that concealed it, in the pattern formed by ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... seat, on dark and moonless nights, she had watched the fishermen's torches flaring below her in the blackness, and had thrilled at the mystery of their occupation, and had imagined them lifting from the sea strange and wonderful ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Mall Drake was smitten by a sudden impulse. The fog had cleared from the streets; he looked up at the sky. The night was moonless but starlit, and very clear. He lifted the trap, spoke to the cabman, and in a few minutes was driving ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... was moonless, Anthony could see that. That it was a beautiful specimen of a "Queen Anne" residence he could not perceive. Indeed, almost before the car had been berthed close to the shadowy elegance of a tremendous cedar, the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... down provisionally by the open window, and looked out into the still autumnal night. The air was soft and humid, with a scent of smoke in it from remote forest fires. The village lights showed themselves dimmed by the haze that thickened the moonless dark. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the tree-tops ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... pound gate had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespassers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the gap ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... been settled, there was nothing more to do except to chat away the time till morning. As they talked, the first faint flush of dawn appeared in the east, giving promise of a fine day despite the fact that the moonless night had hinted ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... and the hour had already deepened into the darkness of a calm, moonless, summer night; the hearth, therefore, in a short time, became surrounded by a circle, consisting of every person in the house; the door was closed and securely bolted;—a struggle for the safest seat took place, and to Bartley's shame be it spoken, he ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... be a dark, moonless night. Only a few feebly gleaming stars, thinly scattered over the firmament, enabled him to distinguish the canopy of the sky from the waste of waters that surrounded him. Even a ship under full spread of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... bay-window, where he had stood to gaze his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman's quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the window, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and music were enlivening the party within the close-drawn curtains, without were moonless night and thickly-falling snow; and the morning opened on one vast expanse of white, mantling alike the lawns and the trees, and weighing down the wide-spreading branches. Lord Curryfin, determined not to be baulked of his skating, sallied ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me. There is a trap-door at the back of that building, near the corner of Paul's Wharf, which could tell some strange tales of what has passed through it upon the moonless nights." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... gathering swiftly, investing the world with its legion of gloom; and in the shadow of the great Castle of Caylus, rising like a rock itself out of the solid rock behind Lagardere, the moat was soon very dark indeed. There was little light in the moonless sky; there came none from the castle, which in its dim outline of towers and battlements might have been the enchanted palace of some fairy tale, so soundless, so lightless, so unpeopled did it seem. There was ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... moonless, and the two stumbled and groped their way down the lane at a pace whose slowness ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... right, walk waist-high through the water; the crayfish, dazed by the brilliant light, are whipped up into the nets and dropped into baskets carried by the women and children who follow. They can only be caught on dark, moonless nights. ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... a new, manly feeling of self-pride took possession of him. It drowned his shame, and, instead of the shame, pity for the woman sprang up within him—for the half-clad woman, who went out alone into the dark of the chilly May night. He hastily came out on the deck—it was a starlit, but moonless night; the coolness and the darkness embraced him. On the shore the golden-red pile of coals was still glimmering. Foma listened—an oppressive stillness filled the air, only the water was murmuring, breaking against the anchor chains. There was not a sound of footsteps to be heard. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... round the Pound as quickly as his shaking knees would let him; but quicker still she slid away, and when he came where she had been the place was as empty as the sky in its moonless season. He called and ran about and called again; but he got no answer, nor found what he sought. All that night he spent in calling and running to and fro. What he did on Sunday you may know, and I may know, but he did not. On Sunday night he stayed beside ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... quite cast down They looked upon the royal town, And from their eyes, oppressed with woe, Their tears again began to flow. Of Rama reft, the city wore No look of beauty as before, Like a dull river or a lake By Garud robbed of every snake. Dark, dismal as the moonless sky, Or as a sea whose bed is dry, So sad, to every pleasure dead, They saw the town, disquieted. On to their houses, high and vast, Where stores of precious wealth were massed, The melancholy Brahmans passed, Their hearts ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... over the fell in a moonless night," said Westburnflat, "without asking leave of young Earnscliff; or some Englified justice of the peace: thae were gude days on the Border when there was neither peace nor justice ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... endeavour to frighten them away by sheer terror. It was unquestionably a horribly uncanny performance, what with the white streaked faces and limbs, and the clang of the metal dresses; the surroundings, too, added to the weird, unearthly effect, the dark moonless night, the dim masses of forest closing in on the garden, and the uncertain flare of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... fatigue was so great that it finally got the better of their fears and struck them down upon the bare earth, where they lay on their back, with open mouth and arms outstretched, like logs beneath the moonless sky. The bustle of the camp was stilled, and all along the naked range, from end to end, there reigned a ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... till he could see her face, still and pale and cold, almost, it seemed to him, luminously white in the heavy darkness of the moonless hour. ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Silent, we filled the still, deserted street, A column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... closed down, dark and moonless, with a heaviness in the air which was oppressive. Campbell had to grant men and horses a breathing period. He put out pickets, leaving the rest of them to lie with their mounts saddled and to hand. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... had it not been for the moonless dark of it, you might have seen the same laborer who had been so concerned with tape-measures and distances near the Treasury Building, a long shallow basket stoutly woven of willow on his arm, making secretly for the mouth of the drain that once witnessed the investigations of Storri. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... moonless, and the thick-leafed masses of the oaks and hickories rose a wall of black to curtain half the hemisphere of starry sky. As always in our forest land, the hour was shrilly vocal, though to me the chirping din of frogs and insects hath ever stood for silence. ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... While on mine hands And hair and lids thy kisses die away Through all my being their strange echoes thrill And from the body's flowery mysticism I draw the last white honey. What is thine ill? What wouldst thou more of that great symbolism? Beyond this ultimate moment nothing lies But moonless cold and darkness. ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly, furtive things, traveling very ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow canon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... set, leaving the moonless planet in utter blackness, broken only by the cold gleam of the stars. The lights streaming from the portholes of the Lord Nelson gave a small degree of illumination ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... white flash in solitude, Forgotten phantom of a moonless night, Shall I kiss thy sad mouth once again, or wait Drowned beneath fathoms of a tideless mood Until the stars flee through the western gate Driven in shivering fear before ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... It was a moonless night, but with an intensely blue sky that gave the Milky Way the appearance of a luminous trail across the heavens. The murmur of the waves seemed sad and softened, and they touched the heart of the man who paced ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Europe, and the barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was at the time quiet, and still ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... once, a Bengal Light blazes up, and every black rock and frowning cliff stands out in the brilliant glare. The contrast is sublime beyond imagination. It is as if a man had seen the hills and trees of this earth only in the dim outline of a moonless night, and they should, for the first time, be revealed to him in the gushing glory of the morning sun. But the greatest wonder in this region of the cave, is Mammoth Dome—a giant among giants. It is so immensely high and vast, that ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... occurrence. To Angele's mind—what there was left of it—the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion. No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded too well for any other supposition. One moonless night, Angele, arriving under the black shadow of the pear trees a little earlier than usual, found the apparently familiar figure waiting for her. All unsuspecting she gave herself to the embrace of a strange pair of arms, and Vanamee arriving but a score of moments later, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a moonless night, and the wind, which has risen to a gale, fills the air with noises—the rattling of loosely-fastened shutters, the sough of the pine trees behind the house, the thousand-and-one eerie sounds that a high wind and night bring into empty rooms ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... been lying all night upon his stomach before a window firing out into the darkness at the dim forms which occasionally showed against the dull, dead background of the moonless desert. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... feet wide and less than ten feet long. There, on the face of that precipice, one hundred miles from the nearest settlement, all through the lonely watches of the night, the strong-hearted wife, with tear-dimmed eyes, hung over the sufferer. Many a silent prayer in the weary hours of that moonless night did she send up to the Father of mercies. Many a plan for bringing succor or for alleviating pain on ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... a way into the city. As a subaltern he had idolised Wolfe, and here on the ground of Wolfe's triumphant stroke he still dreamed of rivalling it. In Quebec a cautious phlegmatic British General sat and waited, keeping, as the moonless nights drew on, his officers ready against surprise. For a week they had slept in their clothes and with their ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... set, and the twilight passed away, the night was clear and starlight, but moonless, when Luis and his companion left the venta and resumed their progress northwards. After following the highway for a short league, they took a cross-road, on either side of which the richly cultivated plain was sprinkled with farmhouses, and with a few country villas. In spite ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... he slept, dreaming little because of his loss of blood and the slightness of his food. During the short summer night both kept awake. All the while the darkness lasted things moved about them, things they never saw by day. For some nights the hyaenas did not come, and then one moonless night near a dozen came and fought for what was left of the lion. The night was a tumult of growling, and Ugh-lomi and Eudena could hear the bones snap in their teeth. But they knew the hyaena dare not attack any ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Her hair, naturally wavy, flowed completely over her shoulders; her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... walked, on and on for what seemed an interminable distance. It was quite moonless and only a few stars twinkled here and there through a veil of light clouds that had drifted up with the sunset. The grass underfoot was black, the sea was nearly as dark, and the inland country ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... dark The floating smell of flowers invisible, The mystic yearning of the garden wet, The moonless-passing night—into his brain Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned In the dim summer; 'twas the moment deep When we are conscious of the secret dawn, Amid the darkness that we feel is green.... When the long day that glideth without cloud, The summer day, was at her deep blue hour Of lilies ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... we will now try our telescope on a nebula, selecting the great nebula in the Sword. The place of this object is indicated in Plate 2. There can be no difficulty in finding it since it is clearly visible to the naked eye on a moonless night—the only sort of night on which an observer would care to look at nebulae. A low power should ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... the one his parents had given to him. But he appeared less and less in public. He began to neglect his practice; he resigned from his club; he avoided the company of his former associates, taking his walks at night alone, even though the sky was moonless, storms were threatening, and the cut-throat crew were abroad that made life at some hours and in some quarters of the city not of a pin's fee in value. His housekeeper told a neighbor that on some nights he paced the floor till dawn, and ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in, the spectacle was most strange. The fiery stream found a lurid reflection in the slowly-drifting steam cloud, which overhung it, while the red-hot stones which shot through the cloud shone strangely beside the quiet stars in a moonless sky. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... other nights, far more commonplace, which yet Willie liked well to look out upon, but which could not keep him long from his bed. There was, for instance, the moonless and cloudy night, when, if he had been able to pierce the darkness to the core, he would have found nothing but blackness. It had a power of its own, but one cannot say it had much to look at. On such a night he would say to himself that the day was so sound asleep he was dreaming ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... eighteenth of December was moonless and dark. A column of five hundred men of the Forty-First and Hundredth regiments, a grenadier company of the First Royals, and fifty militia, filed out of the portals of Fort George, bearing scaling ladders and other implements of assault, as silent, as ghosts. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... moor and moss and briar and brake, And in his heart their sorrow spake Whose lips were dumb as death, and said Mute words of presage blind and vain As rain-stars blurred and marred by rain To wanderers on a moonless main Where night and day ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 1851.—This evening I walked up and down on the Pont des Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven delighting in the freshness of the water, streaked with light from the two quays, and glimmering under the twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young people, families, couples and children, who were returning to their homes, to their ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tenants and horses in Waverley-Chase by moonlight, and of cases of carbines and pistols purchased in Holland, and addressed to the Baronet, but intercepted by the vigilance of a riding officer of the excise, who was afterwards tossed in a blanket on a moonless night, by an association of stout yeomen, for his officiousness. Nay, it was even said, that at the arrest of Sir William Wyndham, the leader of the Tory party, a letter from Sir Everard was found in the pocket ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... thou didst in our land alight; Thy lustre hath dispelled the moonless midnight gloom! Wherefore with camphor white and rose-water and musk It e'en behoveth us ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... bruising and destroying much more than they devour. Sometimes their ravages are a matter of serious concern to the farmer. But every such neighborhood has its coon-dog, and the boys and young men dearly love the sport. The party sets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moonless night, and stealthily approaches the cornfield. The dog knows his business, and when he is put into a patch of corn and told to "hunt them up" he makes a thorough search, and will not be misled by any other scent. You hear him rattling through the corn, hither and yon, with great ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... turned towards the window. This was a moonless night, and little enough illumination entered the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... good-night. I saw his lithe figure swing along through the sub-tropical darkness of a moonless summer night. Then the latch on the gate clicked with the ringing sound of metal striking against metal. I closed the ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... I quitted Fort Garry, at ten o'clock at night, and, turning out into the level prairie, commenced a long journey towards the West. The night was cold and moonless, but a brilliant aurora flashed and trembled in many-coloured shafts across the starry sky. Behind me lay friends and news of friends, civilization, tidings of a terrible war, firesides, and houses; before me lay unknown savage tribes, long days of saddle-travel, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... silence there suddenly fell a deep growl of thunder. The startled people lifted their heads. With almost an instantaneousness, the heavens darkened. It might well have been a moonless midnight, so dark did it ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... encourager les autres. I cannot say that is true—the police of Paris keep their own secrets—but I believe a front place was found for some of them in the fighting lines. Paris lost many of its rebels, who will never reappear in the Place Pigalle and the Avenue de Clichy on moonless nights. Poor devils of misery! They did but make war on the well-to-do, and with less deadly methods, as a rule, than those encouraged in greater wars when, for trade interests also, men kill each other with explosive bombs and wrap each other's bowels round their ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the taxis, the slightly dancing shadows of people. Siegmund went on slowly, like a slow bullet winging into the heart of life. He did not lose this sense of wonder, not in the train, nor as he walked home in the moonless dark. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... applying the oars, however, and while the canoe continued to move under the impulse it had thus received, its occupants employed themselves in bending their heads to the water, and listening for any sounds that might indicate the presence of others abroad on the pond. The night, as it was yet moonless, and as the sky was overclouded, was consequently a dark one; and the adventurers could distinguish little else but the dark outlines of the Green Mountains, that rose high in the western heavens, casting, by their huge shadows, an impenetrable pall of darkness over the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... It was a moonless night, and the air was chill, but they were certainly nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny shrub standing up stiff and erect ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... venison. During the breakfast Kali related his adventures, while Stas interpreted them in English for Nell who did not understand the Kiswahili language. The buffalo, as it appeared, fled far. It was difficult for Kali to find the tracks as it was a moonless night. Fortunately, rain had fallen two days before and the ground was not too hard; in consequence of this the heavy animal's hoofs left deep imprints upon it. Kali sought them with the aid of his toes and walked a long distance. The buffalo finally fell and must have dropped dead as there ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... which was not all a dream; The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in eternal space, Rayless and pathless; and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... under the trees which overshadowed the strand, some distance back from high-water mark. Singly or in groups of two or three, the men had gone across in boats after sunset, successfully eluding observation, for the night was moonless and very dark. ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... is deaf with age; A garden of moonless trees Would answer not though she should cry ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... have been laid up by the vagaries of an English spring, and during those days there have been developments, the true and sinister meaning of which no one can appreciate save myself. I may say that we have had cloudy and moonless nights of late, which according to my information were the seasons upon which sheep disappeared. Well, sheep have disappeared. Two of Miss Allerton's, one of old Pearson's of the Cat Walk, and one of Mrs. Moulton's. Four in all during three nights. No trace is left of them ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ponderable matters. If we look [Page 81] into our western sky soon after sunset, on a clear, moonless night in March or April, we shall see a dim, soft light, somewhat like the milky-way, often reaching, well defined, to the Pleiades. It is wedge-shaped, inclined to the south, and the smallest star can easily be seen through it. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... might make of them, and the course he should pursue with her. And through all the debate Love stood off but a little way—a strong temptation, the stronger of a gleam of policy behind. At the very moment he was most inclined to yield to the allurement, a hand very fair even in the moonless gloaming was laid softly upon his shoulder. The touch thrilled him; he ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... face is like a donkey's; and natives have ridden him, and he has no mouth in consequence, and occasionally shies. But his merits are equally surprising; and I don't think I should ever have known Jack's merits if I had not been riding up of late on moonless nights. Jack is a bit of a dandy; he loves to misbehave in a gallant manner, above all on Apia Street, and when I stop to speak to people, they say (Dr. Stuebel the German consul said about three days ago), 'O what a wild horse! it cannot be safe to ride him.' Such ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The night was moonless but strewn with stars. A tonic north-east wind hummed over the high moors, and seemed to prick old Dapple, prescient of his own straw and rack, to his very best trot. It was a penetrating wind, too; ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... wrongful Gain of Nature's fastnesses, a ruffian couched And preyed upon his kind. Long time he throve, But vengeance woke at length, and the heavy tread Of frowning men from far Loch Tay—skiff-laden. Adown the glen they came one moonless night, Goaded by tingling sneer of white-hair'd sire. They rest where Tarken pours his scanty tide, Then silently—nor moon nor star appearing— Launch forth upon the lake, and softly steal Towards ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... sneak out on moonless winter nights and stare up at the stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father where he ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... for treasure, fished in still lagoons and dozed day-long on warm white sand. Of deep-sea fishings he heard tell, and mighty silver gatherings of the mile-long net; of sudden perils, noise of breakers on a moonless night, or the tall bows of the great liner taking shape overhead through the fog; of the merry home-coming, the headland rounded, the harbour lights opened out; the groups seen dimly on the quay, the cheery hail, the splash of the hawser; the trudge up the steep little street ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... since leaving their own world the adventurers found themselves amid surroundings that at least held some semblance of an aspect of familiarity. The scene they faced now might have been one of their own land viewed on an abnormally bright though moonless evening. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... The night was moonless and half cloudy. The wind shrieked among the rim rocks and boomed against the cliffs. Our lantern would not stay lighted. Time and again we crept beneath a rock slab and relighted it only to have it snuffed out the instant we emerged into the wind. Across the rocks we crept, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... me, and I dozed again, that ghoul of a cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, selected a handy shoe, and then started to have it out, once for all, with that man-eating cockroach. He broke cover from under some curiosities, and went away at a killing pace. But I had stopped his "earths" all round ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lonely glens, amid the roar of rivers, When the dim nights were moonless, have I known Joys which no tongue can tell; my pale lip quivers When thought revisits them:—know thou alone, 535 That after many wondrous years were flown, I was awakened by a shriek of woe; And over me a mystic robe was thrown, By viewless hands, and a bright Star did ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... moonlight, but when the moonless nights came he continued his vigils. He would have known the way by that time with his ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... drumming of sleepless London seemed very remote from us, as side by side we crept up the narrow path to the studio. This was a starry but moonless night, and the little dingy white building with a solitary tree peeping, in silhouette above its glazed roof, bore an odd resemblance to one of those tombs which form a city of the dead so near to the city of feverish life, on the slopes ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... proceeding some distance, he became so ill that we could go no further, and some means of conveyance must be found. A stretcher was procured, and two men to carry him. To these I confided my charge, and began to retrace my steps. It was now after dark, a clear, moonless night. Crossing the little stream at the point where I had left the regiment a few hours before, to my great disappointment not ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... the new star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could see, it would be the most beautiful object in the night sky. What was the reason ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... landing they disappeared into the forest, and no doubt hurried to Pontiac's warriors to let them know how weakly manned was the schooner. The weather continued calm, and by nightfall the Gladwyn was still nine miles below the fort. As darkness fell on that moonless night the captain, alarmed at the flight of the Iroquois, posted a careful guard and had his cannon at bow and stern made ready to resist attack. So dark was the night that it was impossible to discern objects at any distance. ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships of the line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was under easy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black with haze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres over the sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-east the dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain, consisting of twenty-seven ships of line, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... again from the fish to the fruits, And emptied the vessels of sauce, and drank of the kava deep; Till the young lay stupid as stones, and the strongest nodded to sleep. Sleep that was mighty as death and blind as a moonless night Tethered them hand and foot; and their souls were drowned, and the light Was cloaked from their eyes. Senseless together, the old and the young, The fighter deadly to smite and the prater cunning of tongue, The woman wedded and fruitful, inured to the pangs of birth, And the ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mimes, Terrible; firs bowed down as briars or palms Even at the breathless blast as of a breeze Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in the carriage, the old man was still shy and constrained; but the warm soft air, the light breeze, and the light shadows, the scent of the grass and the birch-buds, the peaceful light of the starlit, moonless night, the pleasant tramp and snort of the horses—all the witchery of the roadside, the spring and the night, sank into the poor German's soul, and he was himself the first to begin a conversation ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... their next attempt would be. He still cherished a hope of escape. He had crippled pretty well half of the attacking force, and if he could but hold them off till darkness came, there might be an opportunity of escape in the moonless night. ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... you haven't been murdered," he proceeded, "in a moonless garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day when, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Nature. I had no great variety even in her, but the better did I understand what I had. The next Summer I began to hunt for glow-worms, and carry them carefully to my hollow, that in the warm, soft, moonless nights they might illumine it with a strange light. When I had been very successful, I would call my uncle and aunt to see. My aunt tried me by always having something to do first. My uncle, on the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... it that the military was approaching. Pandemonium seemed suddenly to have broken loose, and shouts, and yells, and oaths arose from five thousand throats, as the men sprung behind their barricades. It was a moonless night, but the stars were shining brightly, and, in their light, the sheen of nearly a thousand bayonets made the street look like a lane of steel. The Twenty-seventh Regiment of National Guards, led by Colonel Stevens, had been sent from the City Hall, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... moonless, starless night, with my eyes still full of the light indoors; and our hands meet blindly before exchanging a pressure. She says good-evening and I kiss her without answering. I am afraid of betraying my ill-humour; I feel ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Through chasms of horrid cloud, on scathless wing; Old Chaos round him, like a tiar, Swathed the long rush of immaterial fire; As thou, descending from afar, Wast canopied with living arch of light, Pale pillars of immortal star, Burst through the curtains of the moonless night. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... of a moonless black night by a hand on my bedclothes and the light of a lantern in ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... The moonless night, at ten o'clock, found Van alone at his tent. From the top of the hill whereon he had camped a panoramic view of all the town swung far in both directions. The glare of the lamps, the noise of life—even the odor of man upon the air—impinged ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... of the moonless if starry night, lights from windows shone vividly. This was no dark or lonely scene, nor even a silent one. Briarmains stood near the highway. It was rather an old place, and had been built ere that highway was cut, and when a lane winding up through fields ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... moonless night, and a haze of cloud obscured the stars. We passed silently under the vine-covered arbour, across the garden, to the gateway. Into the heavy lock Dona Orosia slipped a great key; it turned easily, the door swung open, and we stepped out. Locking ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... vicinity of the Milky Way, they are present in great numbers and form groups and aggregations of striking appearance and conspicuous brilliancy. On taking a casual glance at the midnight sky on a clear moonless night, one is struck with the apparent countless multitude of the stars; yet this impression of their vast number is deceptive, for not more than two thousand stars are usually ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... I wrote At the bottom of the note, (Wrote and freely Gave to Greeley) In the middle of the night, In the mellow, moonless night, When the stars were out of sight, When my pulses, like a knell, (Israfel!) Danced with dim and dying fays O'er the ruins of my days, O'er the dimeless, timeless days, When the fifty, drawn at thirty, Seeming thrifty, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... after dinner, the night seemed to them so lovely—a moonless, starry night,—that they proposed to go for a walk in the garden. Olivier and Christophe left the house. Jacqueline went up to her room to fetch a shawl. She did not come down. Christophe went to look for her, fuming at the eternal dilatoriness of woman.—(For some time without knowing it he ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... a while in low tones, and then fell silent. The night had come, starless and moonless, favorable to the designs of Tandakora, but they felt intense satisfaction, nevertheless. It was partly physical. Robert's making of an easy road to the water, the coming of the pigeons, to be eaten, apparently sent by Areskoui, and the ease with which ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler |
