"Starless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... why—but I knew darkness then, And saw the stars that hung so still; but when I lay abed the old starless ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... to the log house by the Spring Waiontha, lantern in hand and my packet tucked beneath my arm, it was twilight, and the starless skies threatened rain. Road and field and forest were foggy and silent; and I thought of the first time I had ever set eyes on Lois, in the late afternoon stillness which heralded ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... party,— For a prince, his demeanour was rather too hearty. You know, we are used to quite different graces, * * * * * The Czar's look, I own, was much brighter and brisker, But then he is sadly deficient in whisker; And wore but a starless blue coat, and in kersey- mere breeches whisk'd round in a waltz with the J * *, Who, lovely as ever, seem'd just as delighted With majesty's presence as those ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... the starless night before dissolution—must wear away. About six o'clock, the hour which called up the household, I went out to the court, and washed my face in its cold, fresh well-water. Entering by the carre, a piece of mirror- glass, set in an oaken cabinet, repeated my image. It said I was ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of Life; As one who, wandering in a starless night, Feels momently the jar of unseen waves, And hears the thunder of an unknown sea ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... which like a silver clasp unites to-day with yesterday; when morning and evening sit together hand in hand beneath the starless ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... quickly parted, sweet and calm, That long forgot yet ever haunting psalm Floated from lips that flew to greet me home. A meteor flamed; I woke in rude alarm; Above me orbed the temple's sullen dome; Around me swam the early morning's starless gloom. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... in, black and starless, yet fortunately with a gradual dying away of the storm. For an hour past they had been struggling on, doubting their direction, wondering dully if they were not lost and merely drifting about in a circle. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... So, though we know, and therefore dare say, little about that future, I do beseech you to take this to heart, that he who there can stand before God, and say, 'Behold! I and the children whom God hath given me' will wear a crown brighter than the starless ones of those who saved themselves, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... to seek up and down through the earth for the sound of its magical bells. They will speak of the hopes that have perished, and the joys that have faded so fast With the music of memory wing'ed, they will seem but the voice of the past; As, when the bright morning has vanished, and evening grows starless and dark, The nightingale song of remembrance recalls the sweet strain of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... we are forced to believe, then each moving star will go on in an unbending line forever unless hindered by the attraction of other stars. If they go on thus, they must, after countless years, scatter in all directions, so that the inhabitants of each shall see only a black, starless sky. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... is no comfort, none; All the dewy tender breath Idly falls when life is done On the starless brow of death. ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... a moment. After the starless darkness and the icy night air, and the fierce silent two hours' race, his senses reeled on sudden entrance into warmth, and light, and the cheery hum of voices. A sudden unforeseen anguish assailed him, as now first he entertained the possibility of being ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... she heard a knock. Mr. Baines had had to arouse his clerk from sleep. Instead of going down to the front-door, Mary threw up the bedroom window and looked out. It was a mild but starless night. Trafalgar Road was silent save for the steam-car, which, with its load of revellers returning from Hanbridge—that centre of gaiety—slipped rumbling down ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... through the rain along the smoking trail; twilight by day, depthless darkness by night, where we lay panting in starless obscurity, listening to the giant winds of the wilderness—vast, resistless, illimitable winds flowing steadily through the unseen and naked crests of forests, colder and ever colder they blew, heralding the trampling blasts of winter, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... The night in starless gloom descends, Nor can the pale moonshine Break through the clouds whose veil extends In boundless form, and darkly blends ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... shoved off from the Shawnee, whose lofty spars and drooping canvas towered darkly up in the starless night. At the last moment Gerald Rodman had hoisted a light on the mizzen-rigging as a guide to the four absent boats. As the mutineers pulled quickly away its rays shone dimly over the ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the ocean one cold starless night, A small bark was sailing in pitiful plight: The boom of the billows, as on rushed the storm, O'ercame the stout hearts ...
— Favourite Welsh Hymns - Translated into English • Joseph Morris
... he had put his hand on mine, with a glad countenance, wherefrom I took courage, he brought me within the secret things. Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding though the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible cries, words of woe, accents of anger, voices high and hoarse, and sounds of hands with them, were making a tumult which whirls forever in that air dark without change, like the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... some minutes to find the door, and bruising her hands against the wall and oaken chair, she at last found it and thrust it open, the night without was moonless and starless and stormy, and in its unillumined blackness she saw no trace of the little girl. She went out on to the doorstep and listened, but there was no sound. The wind was high; the perfume of the stocks and wallflowers was strong; far away the sound of the river rushing through ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... a leeward shore" they were doomed to experience during a moonless and starless night. They reduced their sails to a few yards of canvass, and lowered their yards on deck. The waves, that rolled the vessel with irresistible force, threatened to swallow them up; a tremendous sea ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... wish audibly, though her lips did move a little, while her gaze black like a starless night never for a moment wavered before him. He stepped in, and as he turned to close the door she was still there motionless and disturbing, with her voluptuous mouth and slanting eyes, with the expression of expectant sensual ferocity of a baffled ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... dark and starless night. Tattoo-beat had long been heard, and Hay's Brigade, weary after a long day's march, rested beneath the dewy boughs of gigantic oaks in a dense forest near the placid Rappahannock. No sound broke the stillness of the night. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... to the crack; but the breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was black as pitch. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her husband's door—where she stopped again to listen to his breathing—to the top of the stairs. There she paused a moment, and assured ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... the Southern Cross on its western way. And yonder, farther still, away to the south, float the Magellanic clouds, and the "Coal Sacks"—those mysterious, dark spots in the sky, which seem as though it had been rent, and these were holes in the "azure robe of night," looking out into the starless, empty, black abyss beyond. One who has never watched the southern sky in the stillness of the night, after the sea-breeze with its turmoil is done, can have no idea of its ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... from scolding me. He carried me back to my dungeon, laid me tenderly on the bed, gave me some medicine, and asked me if there was any thing more he could do. Then he went away, and I was left with my own thoughts—starless as the midnight darkness ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... lost in the darkness of night, For the moon is swept from the starless heaven, And the latest line of lowering light That lingered on the stormy even, A dim-seen line, half cloud, half wave, Hath sunk into the weltering grave. Castle-Oban is dark without and within, And downwards ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... scrutinized so long through the night every wavering shade of cloud and moving form of buffalo in the dim distance, that their sleepless eyes, strained and aching, failed to distinguish this moving mass that was so like the brown plains and starless sky that it could scarce be told from them. The night, too, was bitter; northern cold cut hardly chillier than this that parted the blaze of one hot day from the blaze of another. The sea-winds were blowing cruelly keen, and men who at noon gladly ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... his way in a pitiless storm on a black and starless night. Suddenly his horse drew back and refused to take another step. He urged it forward, but it only threw itself back upon its haunches. Just then a vivid flash of lightning revealed a great precipice upon the brink of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... two months later—by which time the party was drawing near to Santa Rosa, and the great railway survey was approaching completion— that in the dead of a dark and starless night three Indians stealthily approached the surveyors' camp and, having first reconnoitred the ground as carefully as the pitch darkness would permit, made their way, noiseless as shadows, to the tent occupied by young Escombe. The leading Indian was Arima, the ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... them out upon the same placid sea at last; and the same solemn light streams upon the clasped hands and the uplifted faces. We don't mind the drapery so much then. It seems a very superficial matter beside the silent and starless mystery that ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor. It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... beyond the still grey shoji For the breadth of innumerable countries, Is the sea with ships asleep In the blue-black starless night. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... morning—that sunrise of which poets write so sweetly, but which to the unromantic traveller is wont to seem a dreary thing—mother and nurse and child went their way in a great black steamer, redolent of oil and boiled mutton; and at nine o'clock at night—a starless March night—Clarissa and her belongings were deposited on St. Katharine's Wharf, amidst a clamour and bustle ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... she saw a pale yellow light revealed against a bank the little book named it "Wilkinson Island." She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a starless night. ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... sin atones? For here the air is horrid with men's groans, The priests who call upon Thy name are slain, Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain From those whose children lie upon the stones? Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom Curtains the land, and through the starless night Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see! If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might Lest Mahomet be ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... the peaceful breast of Faith My troubled soul hath found repose, Free from the sad and starless gloom ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... Again she shrieked, and a descending blow cleft Metea's skull in sunder, and his blood fell on her neck. It was the young Indian who advised her liberation in the morning who dealt Metea's death-blow. Taking Alice in his arms, he stepped lightly from the hut. It was a still and starless night, and the sleeping Indians saw them not. Unloosing a canoe, he placed Alice in it, and ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... wakeneth into rest; Wide-eyed on the dawning she gazeth, too glad to change or smile, And but little moveth her body, nor speaketh she yet for a while; And yet kneels Sigurd moveless her wakening speech to heed, While soft the waves of the daylight o'er the starless heavens speed, And the gleaming rims of the Shield-burg yet bright and brighter grow, And the thin moon hangeth her horns dead-white in ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... ninety years old, and no man spoke any more of flight. All the night long they watched in the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath their mothers' skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the dark, starless sky. All night long they were left alone, though far off they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... wagon-loads in all. Scarcely an officer of rank remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless night. We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death. We counted only thirty men disabled ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... from out our course, through might of seas we drive, 200 Nor e'en might Palinurus self the day from night-tide sift, Nor have a deeming of the road atwixt the watery drift. Still on for three uncertain suns, that blind mists overlay, And e'en so many starless nights, across the sea we stray; But on the fourth day at the last afar upon us broke The mountains of another land, mid curling wreaths of smoke. Then fall the sails, we rise on oars, no sloth hath any ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... without a wife, a father without a child, a man without a friend. I thank you for the drinks. Go to your homes and on soft beds may you sleep well; I'll go out and sleep on yonder bench in the night wind. A few more drinks, a few more drunkard's dreams, and I'll go out into the moonless, starless ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... starless, and the wind blew raw and bleak as the baronet dashed down the avenue and out into the high-road. He almost wondered at himself for complying with the dying woman's desire, but some inward impulse beyond his control seemed ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... time, aided by the gloom of a starless night, in every street of Paris preparations were going on for the enormous perpetration. Soldiers were assembling in different places of rendezvous. Guards were stationed at important points in the city, that their victims might not escape. Armed citizens, with loaded muskets ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... our Indian companion whether he could take us through the darkness to a place called the "Buck Pens." Ko-nip-ha-tco said he could. Under his guidance we started in the twilight, the sky covered with clouds. The night which followed was starless, and soon we were splashing through a country which, to my eyes, was trackless. There were visible to me no landmarks. But our Indian, following a trail made by his own people, about nine o'clock brought us to the object of our search. ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter,—it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... follow through the trees, Threading the coppice 'neath a starless sky, When, lo! the very Queen of Goddesses, In golden beauty gleaming wondrously, Even she that hath the Heaven for canopy, And in the arms of mighty Zeus doth sleep,— And then for dread methought that I must die, But Hera called me ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... a reward indeed. At first the space was clear and white, but in the course of a hundred minutes there came suddenly into view the minutest conceivable specks. I can only compare the coming of these to the growth of the stars in a starless space upon the eye of an intense watcher in a summer twilight. You knew but a few minutes since a star was not visible there, and now there is no mistaking its pale beauty. It was so with these inexpressibly minute sporules; they were not there a short time since, but they grew ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... inviting the children to spend the following week at Valley Mead. But, in spite of the success of his mission, he sat with a box of fresh eggs in his lap and a huge bunch of flowers in his hand, his hat rammed over his eyes, staring gloomily out of the car window into the starless night. ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... an obscure and starless heaven, we had left far behind us the plantations of the valley, and were mounting a certain canon in the hills, narrow, encumbered with great rocks, and echoing with the roar of a tumultuous torrent. Cascade after cascade thundered and hung up its flag of whiteness in the night, or fanned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... starless, with a chill mist hanging over the valley; but my uncle's cob was a swift one, and we soon began to ascend the hill up past the castle, and then, turning to the left, drove along a steep, rough by-road which led to ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... once out of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in "Hamlet" the stage on which the whole is acted is really the heart of Hamlet, so he makes his visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead, and Hades open beneath his feet. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than they can comprehend the comedies. It needs acquaintance with society and social ways to clear ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing over the dial; remembrancers ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... there was an eternal world and a spiritual state, and asserted that "there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." But mere negation can never satisfy. The heart still moans out its sorrow under the darkness of agnosticism, as the ocean sighing under a starless midnight. Nature's instincts are more cogent than reason. It was hardly to be wondered at, then, that these two great classes were largely represented in the crowds that gathered on the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... it was to find herself in the depths of a moonless and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloud stretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a distant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible against the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by its great contrast with the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... sky. It was not the sky of the City, distant, and marbled with streaks of smoke. It was close and clear; starless, too; and no moon hung upon it. Yet though it was night there ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... him, who knows what gift is thine, Death? Hardly may we think or hope, when we Pass likewise thither where to-night is he, Beyond the irremeable outer seas that shine And darken round such dreams as half divine Some sunlit harbour in that starless sea Where gleams no ship to windward or to lee, To read with him the secret ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Night, black and starless, was upon us before we had penetrated half a mile into the woods. My youthful companion began to sing martial airs, and stimulated his courage by beating time with his feet on the bottom of the cart. A chill Autumn rain commenced to fall, tinkling against ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... the starless night of death Our being's brief eclipse, When faltering heart and failing breath Have bleached the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... maketh lovers wise In her pale beauty trembling down, Lending curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes, A strangeness not her own. And, though they shut their lids to kiss, In starless darkness peace to win, Even on that secret world from this ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... tongue adheres. My pulse beats quick, my breath heaves short, My limbs deny their slight support. Cold dews my pallid face o'erspread, With deadly languor droops my head. My ears with tingling echoes ring, And life itself is on the wing; My eyes refuse the cheering light, Their orbs are veil'd in starless night: Such pangs my nature sinks beneath, And feels a ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... "constellations,'' preserving the memory of mythological heroes and heroines, and perhaps of otherwise unrecorded history. * The tendency of stars to assemble in immense clouds, swarms, and clusters. * The existence in some of the richest regions of the universe of absolutely black, starless gaps, deeps, or holes, as if one were looking out of a window into the murkiest night. * The marvelous phenomena of new, or temporary, stars, which appear as suddenly as conflagrations, and often turn into something else as eccentric as themselves. * The amazing forms of the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... herself away, and left her husband to all his gloom of Care, made tenfold darker by the absence of those gleams of tenderness which before had fitfully irradiated life. The night was starless, and he alone. ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the Druid's spell At moonrise by his holy oak! No more along the shadowy glen Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men; No more the unquiet churchyard dead Glimpse upward from their turfy bed, Startling the traveller, late and lone; As, on some night of starless weather, They silently commune together, Each sitting on his own head-stone The roofless house, decayed, deserted, Its living tenants all departed, No longer rings with midnight revel Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil; No pale blue flame sends ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... mistook it for her destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the "streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for knowledge and the spectacle of the world, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Zodiacal light has been traced for 70 degrees, and probably farther. It is very possible that the earth is occasionally involved in it, and that from it we derive that diffused light which, though faint, is very serviceable to us on a starless evening, and of which no other account has as yet been given. The light we receive in this way is often as powerful as that which we should receive from the stars if they ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... at last, black as the brow of a Congo nigger, and starless as a company of travelling actors. I could not remain under the tree all night, that was certain; and so I left it, although I could scarcely see my hand before me. That hand, by the way, still tenaciously grasped the invaluable sixpence. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... cudgel in the air and waved it conceitedly to and fro in time to the song that rose beyond the window. "Fau'ow er Wur'!—Fau'ow er Wur'!" he cried delightedly again and again in my ear, eager apparently for my approval. So we stood, then, beneath the starless sky, listening to the rich choragium of the "World's End." They sang in unison, sang with a kind of forlorn heat and enthusiasm. And when the song was ended, and the roar of applause over, Night, like a darkened water whelmed silently in, engulfed ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... At fifteen summers was mature and strong. She pitched the tipi,[2] dug the tipsin[3] roots, Gathered wild rice and store of savage fruits. Fearless and self-reliant, she could go Across the prairie on a starless night; She speared the fish while in his wildest flight, And almost like a warrior drew the bow. Yet she was not all hardness: the keen glance, Lighting the darkness of her eyes, perchance Betrayed no softness, ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... the city crowded to the wall of dark buildings surrounding the Plaza, and subsided to an indefinite buzz through which sharply perforated the crackle of the languid fires and the rattle of fork and spoon. A sedative wind blew from the southeast. The starless firmament pressed down upon the earth ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the pleasant impression produced upon the mind of the lonely woman who now owned it, and who hoped to spend here in seclusion and peace the residue of a life whose radiant dawn had been suddenly swallowed by drab clouds and starless gloom. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of life. Wounded and fallen, trampled in the mire and mud of the conflict, then the ranks closed again and left no place for her. So she crawled aside to die. With a past whose black despair was as the shadow of a starless night, a future which her early religious training lit up with the lurid light of hell, and the strong bands of a pitiless death dragging her to the grave—still she craved, as the awful hour drew near, to see ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... dawn, Caesar, tired of not sleeping, got up and started to take a walk in the corridor. It was raining; on the horizon, below the black, starless sky, a vague clarity began to appear. Caesar took out his Proudhon book and immersed ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of light. The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment. There was no need for Syme to search his memory ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. 'None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... in the starless night; Alas, for him no cheerful morning's dawn I wear the ransomed spirit's robe of white, Yet still I hear ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' guidance. These posts show out white against a starless night, and dark against the snow which sometimes covers the heath ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... mantling mists that circle round the tomb, Where bitter groans resound for aye amid the starless gloom; Who saw the cities of the blest, and with as fearless tread Paced through the ebon halls of hell, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... was very dark and starless, and he stood leaning up against a tree, when he heard the splash of oars from the landing-place, a short sharp order, and then ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... for the opening, she was alarmed and dismayed to find that it had disappeared. Her heart now for the first time sank within her. She listened, but no sound, save the ominous moan in the air, came to her ear. The solemn, still, black night was all about her. She looked up, and a cold, starless, dim blank was all over her; and all around, standing thick, were cold, dark, silent trees. She stood and tried to think back: where was she, and how came she there? She knew she had once turned ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three, turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture. Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else, yet because we did not live in those days. ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the bosom of eternity, and when the hammer falls on the brazen bell, the entire universe confirms what it announces. The suns and the worlds mark at this very moment, in the immortal light, the same point of time that is indicated below on earth, some starless night, by the humblest village clock. We must imitate the clock. In full consciousness, through absolute submission, man should make himself the humble instrument of truth, and go through supreme servitude to supreme power. When he does not do ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... it was but a dull, poor life coming for Lloyd. He was too young to be put to hard, hard work with neither chance for learning nor play. But, as she sat looking in the fire, she suddenly remembered how God, who held the great, moaning sea and the starless night in the hollow of His hand, held her, too, and ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... senate chamber, to the presidential chair. Take them with you thru the streets, along the highways, and over the unbeaten paths of your life. Take them with you down the rivers, and out into the storm driven sea. Chain them to the wheel of your ship, sail on thru the starless night alone. Trust them, for they are the initiative of ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... bore this in mind when, arriving at his post opposite the camp in the early dusk, he chose his ambushing boulder so near the descending hill trail that a stout club might have been substituted for the pistol. The weather promise was for a starless night, but the electric arc-lights were already scintillating at their mastheads in the headquarters railroad yard across the Pannikin. Later, when the daylight was quite gone and the electrics were hollowing out a bowl of stark whiteness in the night, Ruiz Gregorio wished he had chosen otherwise. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and the dulness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendour. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that when he stays lost, and is neither dead nor mad, it is because he wants to be lost. So where was to be the gain in finding 'Thanase alive? Oh, much, indeed, to Bonaventure! The star of a new hope shot up into his starless sky when that thought came, and in that star trembled that which he had not all these weary months of search dared see even with fancy's eye,—the image of Zosephine! This—this! that he had never set out to achieve—this! ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the town, and sentinels kept a very careful watch. On the Sabbath, as the people were returning from public worship, one or two Indians were seen on the neighboring hills, which led the people to suspect that an assault was contemplated. The night was moonless, starless, and of Egyptian darkness. The Indians, perfectly acquainted with the location of every building and every inch of the ground, crept noiselessly, three hundred in number, each to his appointed post. They spread themselves over ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... for us, but there were no teachers and no money with which to employ teachers. No night in Egypt in the time of Israel was darker than those years immediately following the Negro's emancipation. And what must have been our condition to-day had not those pillars of light been placed in our starless sky? But what is more, for thirty years the same spirit and the same people who first made these colleges possible among us, have continued their aid, and still ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Lhari, but he heard them through an ever-increasing distance: Vorongil's face bent over his, only a blurred crimson blob that flashed away like a vanishing star in the viewport. It flamed out into green darkness, vanished, and Bart fell through what seemed to be a bottomless chasm of starless night. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... a little as I walked out on to the bridge, swaying just the least bit as the torrent of angry water swept under it I had said "Bonsoir" to my friend the Frenchman and was free to go home. But I lingered long on the heaving bridge, though it was cold and starless, and I got quite wet with the ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Southron, "even as the starless night—but yet—if this contrivance of thine should endanger thy safety, fair and no less kind than fair damsel, it were utterly unworthy of me to accept it at ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... fences between. Every man was alert to his duty; every nerve was taut with the consciousness that somewhere within the cordon was the leader who heretofore had escaped them, that each man was a link forged in the endless chain which was stretched around the invisible enemy. And, meanwhile, the starless sky and the waiting chain were equally silent and equally freighted with mystery. And the future seemed full of ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... came—out of season, but no less violent because of that. It rained three days and nights on end—three windless days and starless nights, during which we had to linger alongshore close to the papyrus. In order to keep mosquitoes out we had to light a smudge in the sand-box below. The smudge added to the heat, and the heat drove men to the open air to gasp a ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... climbed the many stairs with cat-like stealth, and like cats crept out upon the grimy leads. But to-night they were no blacker than their canopy of sky; not a chimney-stack stood out against the starless night; one had to feel one's way in order to avoid tripping over the low parapets of the L-shaped wells that ran from roof to basement to light the inner rooms. One of these wells was spanned by a flimsy bridge with ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... taking advantage of the door being open. He did not want to listen, for he was afraid and did not want his hopes to crumble slowly 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, starless night, one of those misty nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farmyard, for it was the season when the earliest applies were gathered, the "early ripe," as they are called in the cider country. As Cesaire passed ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... succeeds this era joyous, bright? Is it a cloudless eve or starless night? To those who're busied in life's brilliant dawn With gathering flowers that bloom when spring is gone, And, ere their morning sun begins to wane, Add many a link to fond affection's chain, To Heaven's supreme behest have meekly bowed— 'Twill prove indeed ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... cave, nor entrust herself to the anchorite, till she had once more seen and spoken to Polykarp. He no doubt knew where to seek her, and certainly, she thought, he would by this time have returned, if the storm and the starless night had not rendered it an impossibility to come up the mountain ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... inferior Orbs, enclos'd 420 From Chaos and th' inroad of Darkness old, Satan alighted walks: a Globe farr off It seem'd, now seems a boundless Continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless expos'd, and ever-threatning storms Of Chaos blustring round, inclement skie; Save on that side which from the wall of Heav'n Though distant farr som small reflection gaines Of glimmering air less vext with tempest loud: Here walk'd the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the loosening of the fetters of her tongue, the quickening of her nature, the miracle vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a reason! Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his burning forehead on his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate soul, that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love him. Far better that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... laughed at him, and snuggled down good naturedly to their broken slumbers again, but Cameron stood in his corner, glaring out the tiny crack into the dark starless night that was whirling by, startled into thoughtfulness. The dream had been so vivid that he could not easily get rid of it. His heart was boiling hot with rage at his old enemy, yet something stronger was there, too, a great horror at himself. He had been ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... the 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 ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... over it; till at last they were but going on a narrow shelf, the Shivering Flood swirling and rattling far below them betwixt sheer rock-walls grown exceeding high; and above them the cliffs going up towards the heavens as black as a moonless starless night of winter. And as the flood thundered below, so above them roared the ceaseless thunder of the wind of the pass, that blew exceeding fierce down that strait place; so that the skirts of their garments were wrapped ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... At the starless midnight hour, When winter rules with boundless power: As the storms the forests tear, And thunders rend the howling air, Listening to the doubling roar, Surging on the rocky shore, All I can—I weep and pray, For his weal that's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... heart I will cherish; but I can not believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. And I would rather that every God would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, that that just one soul should suffer eternal agony. I have made up my mind that if there is a God, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That he will forgive the forgiving. Upon that rock I stand. That every man should ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... but not my friends! Strange allies to his cause! Well, dusk was long My portion; now all gathering storms of hate Are less than naught to me. Six months ago, When here I stood that memorable night, My gloom was starless; now one fiery star Pierces it. And this broken frame of mine Cannot annul that much of victory— The solace born of passion to destroy That shall survive me if indeed I die. Alone my life was lived; if now I go, It is alone into a quiet grave Above whose mound the fairer future days Shall pass, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... poor fisherman's cottage in Havre a young man was walking up and down in feverish uneasiness. From time to time he looked through the window which opened on to the sea. The waves ran high, the wind whistled, while dark clouds rolled over the starless sky. ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... Tragedy. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the whole play, which is very unskilfully constructed, is by Tourneur, or perhaps by the author[281] of the Second Maiden's Tragedy. All the figures are shrouded in a blank starless gloom; to read the play is to watch the riot of devils. Here is an extract from the scene where Orlando, returning from the wars, hears that Charlemagne, his uncle, has married Ganelon's niece, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... clear—cruelly clear and distinct—and everything was mournfully sleeping, standing out in strange huddled masses in the dull clear air. The flush of sunset—a hectic flush—had not yet gone, and would not be gone till morning from the white starless sky; it was reflected on the silken surface of the Neva, while faintly gurgling and faintly moving, the cold blue ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... brain, striving to clear away the mists. "Sartor" had effectually blindfolded her, and she threw herself down to sleep with a shivering dread, as of a young child separated from its mother, and wailing in some starless desert. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer. Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangled condition was so great a miracle, that, spite of my poor shipmates having perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky was starless, I could not but consider that God's hand was very ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... pine woods that separated Aldercliffe from Pine Lea darkness had fallen, and he was compelled to move cautiously along the narrow, curving trail. How black the night was! A storm must be brewing, thought he, as he glanced up into the starless heavens. Stumbling over the rough and slippery ground on he went. Then suddenly he rounded a turn in the path and ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... so rich in stars and crowded nebula: that it seemed a perfect blaze of illumination. And there were the Magellanic clouds, white-looking patches made up of countless stars individually unseen to the naked eye, and nebulae—mists of radiating light—all shining brilliantly and revolving around the starless South Pole. To the northward was the constellation of the Great Bear, which reaches its meridian altitude about the same time as the constellations of the Cross and the Centaur. As the boys looked, stars appeared and disappeared. They were ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... verandah steps, head on one side, eyes shut, hands folded as if in prayer. "Well, Yosepu, what is it?" "Amma! the light of your eyes revives me!" "Well, tell me the trouble." "All yesterday I saw you not; it was a starless night to me!" This is merely the preface. "But, Yosepu, what is wrong?" "Tingalu, that golden child with a voice like a bird, she lies on her mat. I am concerned about the babe," (Tingalu, turned four, is as hardy as a gipsy), "I fear for her delicate interior. Those ignorant children" (the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the name he had heard, Martin Pinzon, as his own. The room was very hot. The August night outside was hot too and sultry and starless. The girl's father was resting now, breathing unevenly. The girl's name was Nina. One of the small caravels in her father's three-ship fleet was named after her. Her ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... presently to smile back at her. Then he went out of the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace. A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy. The moon this night, afloat in a luminous gray void, somehow reminded Florian of a ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... ordinary sense, but absolutely black, as if the sun were instantly eclipsed, or had dropped altogether out of the firmament. Scarce ten minutes after its commencement the obscurity has reached completeness—that of a total solar eclipse or as in a starless night. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... dissatisfaction with the present life, the secret yearning for something better, the impulse towards something worse. She sighed furtively, and half-impatiently went outside to tend the evening camp-fire. The blazing branches illuminated the starless summer night, and cast a superb glow over the beautiful half-clothed figure crouching not far from them. Beyond, the dark blue bay ebbed ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... had waned and the night was starless when the chimes of San Nicolo told three of the morning in low melodious tones like a voice from ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... are writ in gore, Nor written thus in vain— Thy triumphs tell of fame no more, Or deepen every stain: If thou hadst died, as honor dies, Some new Napoleon might arise, To shame the world again; But who would soar the solar height, To set in such a starless night? ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist: it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... to the sullen gaze of grief the sight Of sun illumined skies may seem less bright, Or gathering clouds less grand, yet she, as ever, Is lovely or majestic. Though fate sever The long linked bands of love, and all delight Be lost, as in a sudden starless night, The radiance may return, if He, the giver Of peace on earth, vouchsafe the storm to still This breast once shaken with the strife of care Is touched with silent joy. The cot—the hill, Beyond the broad blue wave—and faces fair, Are pictured in my dreams, yet scenes that fill My waking ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... lonely, lonely is The human bosom, That ne'er has nursed the sweets Of young Love's blossom! The loveliest breast is like A starless morning, When clouds frown dark and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the soul of man. His life has capitulated to the Spirit that denies, and the unbelief is as bitter as it is hopeless. "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief; shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." "Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Love's young dream had been sweet indeed; but, ah! how bitter was the awakening. Her castles in the air had all melted into clouds, and here in the very flower of her youth she felt that her life was ruined, and she was as one wandering in a sterile waste, with a black and starless sky overhead. She clasped her hands with a sensation of pain, and a rose at her breast fell down withered and dead. She took it up with listless fingers, and with the quiver of her hand the leaves ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... foaming torrent. Nor did night Acknowledge Phoebus' rise, for all the sky Felt her dominion and obscured its face, And darkness joined with darkness. Thus doth lie The lowest earth beneath the snowy zone And never-ending winters, where the sky Is starless ever, and no growth of herb Sprouts from the frozen earth; but standing ice Tempers (7) the stars which in the middle zone Kindle their flames. Thus, Father of the world, And thou, trident-god who rul'st the sea Second in place, Neptunus, load the air With clouds ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... United States. We desired to explain and explode two erroneous ideas,—the curse of Canaan, and the theory that the Negro is a distinct species,—that were educated into our white countrymen during the long and starless night of the bondage of the Negro. It must appear patent to every honest student of God's word, that the slavery interpretation of the curse of Canaan is without warrant of Scripture, and at war with the broad and catholic ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... who live where men are not, In the high starless air of fruitful night On that serenest and obscurest height Where dead and unborn things are one in thought And whence the live unconquerable springs Feed full of force the torrents ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... simple continuation over it of the general ground of the Galaxy. The conclusion can hardly be avoided that, in looking at it, we see through and beyond the Milky Way, far out into space, through a starless region, disconnecting it altogether from our system. It is not easy for language to convey a full impression of the beauty and sublimity of the spectacle which this nebula offers as it enters the field ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... largo, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... horrible scene which next burst on me,—a scene which strained to their utmost tension every sense of sight, hearing and touch, in a manner unprecedented in any dream I have previously had. It was night, dark and starless, and I found myself, together with the whole company of doomed men and women who knew that they were soon to die, but not how or where, in a railway train hurrying through the darkness to some unknown destination. I sat in a carriage quite at the rear end of the train, in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... grouped together with a certain ingenuity, which, if it failed to convince, at least silenced my opponents. And now the brief twilight, if so short a struggle between day and darkness deserved the name, passed off, and night suddenly closed around us—a night black and starless, for a heavy mass of lowering cloud seemed to unite with the dense vapor that arose from the river, and the low-lying grounds alongside of it. The air was hot and sultry, too, like the precursor of a thunder-storm, and the rush of the stream as it washed among the willows sounded preternaturally ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... by the light of a candle which he held himself. Yet he smelt it furtively before trying it with his lips, and denied himself a gulp till he was reassured. But soon the empty pannikin was held out for more. And it was the starless hour before dawn when Vanheimert tripped over Howie's legs and took a contented header into the corner from which he had ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... call to life from out the tomb; Death's bands thus swiftly rent, Life's tidal force Undammed, had rushed with too impetuous vent, Did not a tortuous cave arrest its course, Ere he at length emerged beneath night's starless gloom. ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer |
