"Sunbeam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Braes." Ellen liked it there much better than in the city; there was more that reminded her of old times. The sky and the land, though different from those she best loved, were yet but another expression of nature's face; it was the same face still; and on many a sunbeam Ellen travelled across the Atlantic.* [* "Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee." GEORGE HERBERT.] She was sorry to lose M. Muller, but she could not have kept him in Edinburgh; he quitted ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and, stooping carefully, he scooped up a double handful of shingly sand from the river bottom. He stood up, letting the water run away through his tightly closed fingers. As he bent his head to examine the pebbles left in his hand, a sunbeam darted over his shoulder—there was a ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... reached the column that concealed me, an electrical current doubtless warned her of my presence, for she shuddered as if struck by an unseen arrow, and quickly turned her head; a stray sunbeam lit up her face, and I recognised in Irene de Chateaudun, Louise Guerin; in the rich heiress, the screen-painter ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... was sad and anxious; though now and then a thought that all was clear, darted like a sunbeam across his mind, and called forth a grateful emotion. He longed for the holidays to come,—the favor he was in was ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... himself there was not a soul in his bedroom. The morning sun was streaming in at the window through the lower blind, and a quivering sunbeam, bright and keen as the sword's edge, was flashing on the glass bottle. He heard the rattle of wheels— so there was no snow now in the street. The lieutenant looked at the ray, at the familiar furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was to laugh. His chest and ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... thus speaking, the glass door which led from the dining-room into the garden was obscured by the interposition between it and the light of a dark body. The glasses of a pair of spectacles, catching a sunbeam, sent forth a fugitive gleam; the latch creaked, the door opened, and the Penitentiary gravely entered the room. He saluted those present, taking off his broad-brimmed hat and bowing until ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the first group, "are separating the golden skeins so that they can be spun into sunbeams. It takes great patience before they are completely finished; and if one of the spinners should sigh while weaving, it would ruin the beam and make it dull and heavy. So, you see, the sunbeam-children must be very light-hearted. Then those others are coaxing the flowers to spring up and bud. After they are all well above ground the flower-children hide a secret in the heart of each blossom, and a very beautiful secret it is, and so wonderful that ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... thanks for your note and its inclosure. There goes a gleam of sunshine into a dark house, which is always pleasant to think of. I have not yet got the senator's sunbeam to add to it; but as soon as I do, both shall ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... horse, he threw himself with his face to the ground and said: "Long life to my lord and father! How fares it with thee? Wherefore so sad, my lord?" And Prince Lasar answered: "My dear son, whence art thou come like a sunbeam to cheer me? How can I help grieving? Prince Daniil has invaded our dominion with an immense army and threatens to seize it and carry off the Tsar and me and the twelve knights prisoners." Then spoke Yaroslav Lasarevich: ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... dressed—but indeed I never thought of the dress she wore. The quiet composure of the figure was what attracted me, and the peculiar expression of the face. It was sad, almost severe; so I thought it at first; till a smile once for an instant broke upon the lips, like a flitting sunbeam out of a cloudy sky; then I saw that kindliness was quite at home there, and sympathy and a sense of merriment were not wanting; but the clouds closed again, and the look of care, of sorrow, I could not quite tell ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... soul is a forgotten well; Clad round with its own rank luxuriance; A fountain a kind sunbeam searches for, Sinking the lustre of its arrowy finger Through the long grass its own strange virtue [5] Hath blinded up its crystal eye withal: Make me a broad strong river coming down With shouts from its high hills, whose rocky hearts ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... belles of the county; her hair was as bright as a sunbeam, her eyes as blue as a summer sky, her full lips were red, her cheeks had the bloom of the peach upon them. Mildred was a well-grown girl, with a largely ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... know, Mr. Boyle, I think men are the most irresponsible creatures! A woman wouldn't turn her family over to a neighbor and go off like that for three or four years, just chasing a sunbeam. I—I'm horribly disappointed in father. A man has no right to a family when he puts everything else first in his mind. He'll be gone three or four years, and will spend all he has, and we—can shift for ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... she had some difficulty in persuading a friend that Miss Barrett was old enough to be introduced into society." Miss Mitford added that she was "certainly one of the most interesting persons" she had ever seen; "of a slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam." ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... to be reminded that pain is not the law but the disease of our existence, and that it has been conquered for us in body and soul by Him in whose eternity of bliss a few years of sadness were but as a mote within the sunbeam's blaze." ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... did she hold him, yet repel? What was her object? Was she some princess who had been hidden away during her girlhood, to appear only when the bud opened into womanhood, rich, glorious, and warm? Like a sunbeam, like a shadow, she flitted through the corridors and galleries of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, and whenever he had sought to point her out to some one, to discover her name, lo, she was gone! Tormenting mystery! Ah, that soft lisp of hers, those enchanting caprices, those amazing ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate. Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows. She did not make much headway, as she sorrowfully admitted to herself. The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into "deeps of affliction." The fulfillment thereof exalted her ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into the chamber, and stood peeping over the shoulder of her mistress at her young charge. She had put her finger upon her lip, as if to hush her to deeper slumbers, when, suddenly, a glad sunbeam shot from the east, and fell upon the sleeper's face. With one bound she freed herself from the bedclothes, and stood by the window, pointing toward the glorious vision that had so long been hidden from her sight. Never ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... human life: for the sculptured figures to which it refers have supplied the poet with an example of the "glory" which may "arise" from "defect," the power from limitation. It needs, he says, the obstructing prism to set free the rainbow hues of the sunbeam. Only dumbness can give to love the full eloquence of the eyes; only deafness can impress love's yearnings on the movements of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... days gone by. Yet in the midst of a literature professedly false, and which paints in fascinating colors the various phases of unrepented vice and crime, without the redeeming shadows of honor and Christian morality, our little volume must fall a welcome sunbeam. The strange career of our heroine constitutes a sensational biography charming and beautiful in ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... irregular and precarious stepping-stones, over which I dared not follow her; so I was fain to return to the stone so 'pure and flat,' on which I sat, enjoying the grand sylvan solitude, the dark background and the grey bridge mid-way, so tall and slim, across whose ruins a sunbeam glimmered, and the gigantic forest trees that slumbered round, opening here and there in dusky vistas, and breaking in front into detached and solemn groups. It was the setting of ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... into the wood by now. It was quite dusky. The thick trees met overhead, and only an occasional sunbeam ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... gaze, and her fingers clasped his hand. From her face his eyes went slowly round the apartment, lingering with an intent look on familiar objects, and then they went to the roof, and for fully twenty minutes he watched the glowing patch where a sunbeam struck the canvas cover, and there was in his face something of the wonder of a creature born into a new world. Aurora was very grave: she did not smile, her heart felt no elation—it was numb and old. Jim ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... sky, Glad soaring bird; Sing out thy notes on high 10 To sunbeam straying by Or passing cloud; Heedless if thou art heard ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... which frequently rendered her existence painful by a morbid apprehension of wicked and supernatural influences. In other respects she was artlessness itself, could never understand what falsehood meant, and, as to truth, her unspotted mind was transparent as a sunbeam. Our readers are not to understand, however, that though apparently flexible and ductile, she possessed no power of moral resistance. So very far from that, her disposition, wherever she thought herself right, was not only firm and unbending, but sometimes rose ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... this moment a kind of hostility against herself. She thought on something which she was preparing for Sara, and which was to be an agreeable surprise to her, and which was to be made known to her in a few days—she thought of this, and in that moment of trouble the thought of it, like a sunbeam on dark clouds, brightened the night in her soul. The thought of gratifying one, who on this evening had so deeply wounded her, gave a mild and beneficial turn ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... intent to charm, Declares she thinks the weather fine and warm, Such words as these address her trembling ear— "I really think we shall have rain, my dear; Pray do not go, my love," cries soft mama; "You shall not go, that's flat," cries stern papa. A lucky sunbeam shines on the discourse, The parents soften, and Miss mounts her horse. Each tickled with some laugh-inspiring notion, Behold the jocund party all in motion: Some by a rattling buggy are befriended, Some mount the cart—but not to be suspended. The mourning-coach[B] ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails into the lid of a soap box that was partly filled with straw. Something else was there; as ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... an uninspired man. If the reader will turn to the ninth verse of the chapter and read to the conclusion of the chapter, and place "uninspired" where he finds "natural," and "inspired" where "spiritual" is found, the passage will be as clear as a sunbeam. "The things of the Spirit" are things produced by the Spirit, which needed an inspired man to explain. The day of Pentecost was a "thing of the Spirit," and there was not an uninspired man in all that great throng that could ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney
... had read about laundries, and it was too much to ask anyone—if it was not absolutely necessary—to work in a laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly come by without a Christian effort, of "Sunbeam." But, oh! I have a large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working day, all over the "civilized," world to keep people "civilized." The labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons and thread manufactured and patterns cut and garments ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... one window infinitely so. A single sunbeam shone coldly in through the latter and lit up the well-scrubbed bare floor. There was nothing but the plainest of "fixings" in the apartment, but they had been set in position by the deft hand of a woman of taste. The bed on which the unconscious man had been placed was narrow ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... carbine in his hand. It seemed to them a horror beyond imagination that they should be called out to kill the Gadfly. He and his stinging repartees, his perpetual laughter, his bright, infectious courage, had come into their dull and dreary lives like a wandering sunbeam; and that he should die, and at their hands, was to them as the darkening of the clear lamps ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... a good bow at the battle of Hastings, and never shot at such a mark in his life—and neither will I. I might as well shoot at the edge of our parson's whittle, or at a wheat straw, or at a sunbeam, as at a twinkling white streak ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... it shall be said, This dog watched beside a bed Day and night unweary,— Watched within a curtained room Where no sunbeam brake the gloom, Round the sick ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... sent her a swift approving smile, and Polly's heart was so warm that a little sunbeam seemed suddenly to have hopped right down there. And the little play went on from first to last perfectly splendidly, and Mrs. Pepper, feeling very strange indeed to be sitting there in the middle of the afternoon with nothing in her hands ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... has seen, that lifts the low, And level lays the lofty brow, Has seen this broken pile compleat, Big with the vanity of state; But transient is the smile of fate! A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day,' Is all the proud and mighty have Between ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... it sat a handsome well-dressed man, busily eating. In front of him was a roast chicken, a cut-glass dish of celery and a ruby mound of jelly; a crusty loaf of new bread lay broken at his right; at his left, winking in the sunbeam, stood a decanter half filled with a topaz liquor. He was daintily poising a bit of jelly on some bread, the mouthful was in the air, when his eyes fell on Caroline, an amazed and cobwebbed statue in ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Breathing into his grave the flower soul Of an immortal April. Oh, I wish ... Weak though I am, would all earth's verdancy Were a long dream and kiss for my beloved! Would that whatever is beyond man's touch, Air-born, transcending earth, or fleeting, all That has a sunbeam as its heart, a breeze as body, Fair vision, thought, or heaven—would that I Could close them into forms and scatter them Upon his flower-clad grave with ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... to meet the sea, with steep green ravines furrowed in between them; and when at last we rounded the Espalamarca, and the white walls and the Moorish towers of Horta stood revealed before us, and a stray sunbeam pierced the clouds on the great mountain Pico across the bay, and the Spanish steamship in the harbor flung out her gorgeous ensign of gold and blood—then, indeed, we felt that all the glowing cup of the tropics was proffered to our lips, and the dream of our voyage ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Mullen had read the service in his melodious voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as though he saw a vision in the sunbeam above Judy's head. On that solitary occasion his soul, which revolted from what he described in secret as the "Methodistical low church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple word with the facial solemnity ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... with so good an aim that it made a cannon against the boatswain's nose and his glass, breaking both one and the other with a loud crash, which was followed by a volley of oaths. The steerage of a frigate, even when a sunbeam penetrates through a scuttle, is not over and above brilliantly lighted; and on the present occasion a purser's dip here and there just enabled us to grope our way about the deck. Now it happened that the carpenter at ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... the Shepherds: The heavens open in a circular whirl among the storm darkness, cherubs whirling distantly like innumerable motes in a sunbeam; the angel steps forward on a ray of light, projecting into the ink-black night. The herds have perceived the vision, and rush headlong in all directions, while the trees groan beneath the blast of that opening ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... he said. "I am your friend. I only came to see if you were asleep. I am deaf, you did not know that? I never realised how ugly I was till now. I seem to you like some awful beast, eh? And you—you are a sunbeam!" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... she said, the light coming into her eye and voice as if by an actual sunbeam. "Then it is true, what you wrote me ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... The tumult of acclamation that greeted her swept by him unheeded. He was conscious only of a passionate desire to fling back the golden veil that covered her and see the laughing face behind. Its elusiveness mocked him. She was like a sunbeam standing there, a flitting, quivering shaft of light, too spiritual to be grasped fully, almost too dazzling for ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... particularly happy. Here, after carefully locking the door, he would take a bag of gold coin, or a gold cup as big as a washbowl, or a heavy golden bar, or a peck-measure of gold-dust, and bring them from the obscure corners of the room into the one bright and narrow sunbeam that fell from the dungeon-like window. He valued the sunbeam for no other reason but that his treasure would not shine without its help. And then would he reckon over the coins in the bag; toss ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... heavy eyes, and a sudden light of consciousness gleamed in them like a sunbeam. "Moufflou!" he murmured, in his little thin faint voice. The dog pressed close to his breast and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... guide, who conducted me into a spacious dining-room. The walls were adorned with paintings, principally of fruit and flowers. A large and superb picture of a sylvan dell in the side of a rock, was one exception. Its deep, cool shadows, and the pellucid water, which a wandering sunbeam accidentally revealed, were strikingly realistic. Nearly all of the pictures were upon panels of crystal that were set in the wall. The light shining through them gave them an exceedingly natural effect. One picture that I especially ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... evident, you, too, are in your spring-time, while I, near my autumn, can afford to refer to the peculiarities of that period. I cannot regret that you have a life of struggle before you; for it is not merely the pleasing fancy which paints fine pictures. You would have let a sunbeam play over that little hand, had you possessed the technical knowledge to manage it: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... my line is preaching just now, and piloting, you know." The Pilot's smile was like a sunbeam on a rainy day, for there were tears in his eyes and voice. "And we have just got to be faithful. You see what he says: 'Well done, good and FAITHFUL servant. Thou hast ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... or irrelevant frisking; their feet struck the ground for every note of the fiddle, pat as its echo, their faces shone, their hearts leaped, and their poor frozen natures came out, and warmed themselves at the glowing melody; a great sunbeam had come into their abode, and these human motes danced in it. The elder ones recovered their gravity first, they sat down breathless, and put their hands to their hearts; they looked at one another, and then at the goddess ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Lucrine Lake to their elegant villas on the sea-coast of Puteoli and Cargeta, they compare these expeditions to the marches of Caesar and Alexander. Yet, should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament, in affected language, that they were not born in the regions of eternal darkness. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction they express an exquisite sensibility ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... waters of the bay, and the promontory of Tarifa revealed its black outline faintly in the fog, resembling a fabulous rhinoceros bearing upon its snout, like a horn, the tower of the lighthouse. Through the ashen-gray clouds there penetrated a timid sunbeam,—a triangle of misty light, similar to the luminous stream from a magic lantern,—which traced a large shaft of pale gold across the green-black surface of the sea. In the center of this circle of anemic light there floated, like a dying swan, ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and mysterious strand. Oh, hadst thou seen it, wrapped in murky clouds! There day is night, and night a horror black, Its folk more dreadful even than the night. And there I found—her, who so hateful seems To thee. In sooth, O king, she shone on me Like the stray sunbeam that some prisoner sees Pierce through the crannies of his lonely cell! Dark though she seem to thee, in that black land Like some lone, radiant ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... way down there could not get in at all. So Polly got the broom, and carefully swept away the dust and the spider-webs, and then she washed and polished the four panes until they shone again, and the very next afternoon a sunbeam came to visit the geranium, and a tiny new leaf peeped out to greet it. When the window was cleaned, the shelf (holding a few old tin pans) that hung below it looked so dingy that Polly could not rest until she had scrubbed it well. Nor did she stop there, but also ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... thy pencil's truth, Portray Bathyllus, lovely youth! Let his hair, in masses bright, Fall like floating rays of light; And there the raven's die confuse With the golden sunbeam's hues. Let no wreath, with artful twine. The flowing of his locks confine; But leave them loose to every breeze, To take what shape and course they please. Beneath the forehead, fair as snow, But flushed with manhood's early glow, And guileless as the dews of dawn, Let the majestic brows ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the glass to his lips a slanting sunbeam shot through the window, and made the wine glow red as blood. The drinkers paused glass in hand, and glancing up saw the red sun setting behind the trees in the park. Then the old lord's picture caught the evening light, the green bars of the nebuly coat danced before Westray's ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... is coming again, my dear; Sunshine and violets blue, you know; Crocuses lifting their sleepy heads Out of their sheets of snow. And I know a blossom sweeter by far That violets blue, or crocuses are, And bright as the sunbeam's glow. But how can I dare to look in her eyes, Colored with heaven's own hue? That wouldn't do at all, my dear, ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... little bird before she got into bed. She had been asleep a long time when a little sobbing voice suddenly awoke her, and she sat up to listen. The house was perfectly still; her cat was curled up at the door, fast asleep; her bird's head was under its wing; a long sunbeam was slanting down through an opening in the green window-curtain, and the motes ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... sorry when the door closed; it seemed like shutting out a friendly sunbeam. And her father! what could be the matter with him? He was so restless; not speaking (she wished he would), but starting up and then sitting down, and meddling with her irons; he seemed so fierce, too, to judge from his face. She wondered if he disliked Will being ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... rains, and partly crumbled down by the frosts, seemed to be composed of earths of a mineral kind, of clay of different colours and of red pumice stone. The clay was white, brown, yellow and deep blue; while the pumice stone, lit up by the sunbeam, was red like vermilion. The loneliness, the wildness and romantic beauty of the scene I am not likely ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... mother clambered over a large tree trunk that had fallen across the path and the little pappoose was jolted wide awake, he did not cry. His beady black eyes followed every stray sunbeam and every bounding rabbit, or chance bird with wonder and delight. When his mother went to work she placed his rude cradle beside a tree where he could look on, out of harm's way. He was very little trouble, and she always took him with her when she went to get cedar bark, to gather rushes for mats ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... passage considerably prolonged by contrary winds, we arrived at Vao, a small island north-east of Malekula. When one has sailed along the lifeless, greyish-green shores of Malekula, Vao is like a sunbeam breaking through the mist. This change of mood comes gradually, as one notices the warm air of spring, and dry souls, weather-beaten captains and old pirates may hardly be aware of anything beyond a better appetite and greater thirst. And ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... seated herself; and then pensively moved to the other end of the bench, because a slanting sunbeam fell there. Since it was absolutely necessary to blast Mr. Kennaston's dearest hopes, she thoughtfully endeavoured to distract his attention from his own miseries—as far as might be possible—by showing him how exactly like an aureole her hair was in the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... undertook the task; but he had scarcely approached the hole when he started back, calling: "There is a human being there who seems to be alive. Yes, he is raising his hand. It is a boy or a youth, and assuredly no slave; his head is covered with long waving locks, and—a sunbeam is shining into the cellar—I can see a broad gold circlet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not rest. He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe, and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much dwelt on in the middle ages:—the monastic path, going towards heaven straight as a sunbeam; the secular, twining its way through a tortuous difficult course—the 'broad way,' tending downward to the abyss. To his terrified apprehension, he had abandoned the direct and narrow path for the fatal road, and there might at any moment be captured, and whirled away by the grisly phantom ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... olive-coloured girl from a land where it is always spring. Her whole being translated into music, with hair dishevelled and feet hardly touching the ground, the girl suggested an orange-leaf dancing on a sunbeam. The rasping street-organ, perchance, brought to her melodious reminiscences of some flute-playing Savoyard boy, brown-limbed ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... Oh! those happy, happy days! It sometimes almost maddens me, Mr. Stewart, to compare myself, as I am now, with what I was then. Every morning I rose with a light and happy heart, exulting in the sunbeam that awakened me with its smile, and blessing, in the gladfulness of youthful gratitude, the gracious Giver of light and life. My heart overflowed with love to all created beings. I could look back without regret, and the future was bright with hope. And now, what am I? A broken-hearted man, but ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... some of the densest spots than in winter-time, scarce a crevice existing by which a ray could get down to the ground. But in open places she could see well enough. Summer was ending: in the daytime singing insects hung in every sunbeam; vegetation was heavy nightly with globes of dew; and after showers creeping damps and twilight chills came up from the hollows. The plantations were always weird at this hour of eve—more spectral far than in the leafless season, when there were fewer masses and more minute lineality. The smooth ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... me, Phil!" cried the girl, as she skipped over the stones like a sunbeam and disappeared into the ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... from life, no doubt—of an Ancient Welsh Bard. He was depicted as a baldheaded, elderly gentleman, with upturned eyes, apparently regarding with reverence a hole in an Indian-ink cloud through which slanted a gamboge sunbeam, and having a white beard, which streamed like a (horse-hair) "meteor on the troubled air." This venerable minstrel was seated on a cairn of rude stones, his white robe clasped at his throat and round his waist by golden brooches, and with a harp, shaped like that of David in old Bible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... edge of the clearing he could see Danny Stern and his crew, tiny beneath the cavernous sunbeam-shot overhang of giant leaves. Danny was standing up at the controls of the 'dozer, waving his arms. His crew was struggling to get a log set so he could shove it into place with the 'dozer. They were repairing a break in the barricade—the place where one of New Earth's ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... of frosty filaments shines a painted window in palpitation; its pulses of color interwoven in motion, intermittent in fire,—emerald and ruby and pale purple and violet melting into a blue that is not of the sky, but of the sunbeam;—purer than the crystal, softer than the rainbow, and brighter ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Apostle's mind. Be that as it may, at all events faith is here represented as the means or condition through which this dwelling takes effect. You have but to believe in Him and He comes, drawn from heaven, floating down on a sunbeam, as it were, and enters into the heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... expressed in the Revised Version. 'His glory' is the flashing brightness of the divine self-manifestation, and in that Light resides the strength which is the standard or measure of the gift to us. The tremendous force of the sunbeam which still falls so gently on a sleeper's face as not to disturb the closed eyes is but a parable of the strength which characterises the divine glory. And wonderful and condemnatory as the thought is, that power is the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the beholder with an unpleasant fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal gloating on its prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the natural protection of thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness, uncombed and matted, gave evidence of long exposure to the rudest visitations of the sunbeam and the tempest. He was armed with a rifle, and a broad leathern belt, drawn closely around his waist, supported a knife and a tomahawk. He seemed, in short, an outlaw, destitute of all the nobler sympathies of human nature, and prepared at all points of assault or defense. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... bank rose bold and rich in swelling curves, with a fine corn-field, topped already to admit every sunbeam to the ripening ears. A buckwheat stubble, conspicuous by its deep ruddy hue, and two or three brown pastures divided by high fences, along the lines of which flourished a copious growth of cat-briers and sumacs, with here and there a goodly ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Then as now the supernatural and marvellous had a wondrous fascination for the Celtic mind. Sometimes the attraction becomes so strong as seemingly to overbalance the faculty of distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely told that to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another Saint sailed away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside! More than once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a missionary band beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... where a wood-spring lies have found the rarest secret the forest can reveal. Such was our good fortune that day. At the end of our path we found it, under the pines, a crystal-clear thing with lips unkissed by so much as a stray sunbeam. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... first sunbeam the Clown stretched his great arms above his head, whistled a lively jig tune, reached for a fry pan, and soon had a mess of pork hissing over the fire. Later on, from a bent sapling a smoke-begrimed coffee pail bubbled, boiled over, and was ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... plunged in for a bath, and we can only suppose the intense cold had caused an attack of cramp, so that he could not get out again, and thus was drowned. Many tears were shed for the loss of the cheery little bird, who seemed like a bright ubiquitous sunbeam about the house, and our only consolation was the thought that, as far as we knew, he had never had a sorrow in his life, and we can only hope that if there are "happy hunting-grounds" for birds our Dick may be there, ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... neglected by me in my devotion to those of the State, that I am somewhat like the man who portioned out his capital at so much a day, calculating to live just long enough to make it last. Unfortunately he lived too long." Audley smiled—but the smile was cold as a sunbeam upon ice-and went on with the same firm, unfaltering accents. "The prospects that face me I am prepared for; they do not take me by surprise. I knew long since how this would end, if I survived the loss of office. I knew it before you came to me, and therefore ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lense effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... for some time, and as again the wild chant went up from those harsh strained voices, a stray sunbeam, like a gleam of good promise, shot across the floor. But what was this little figure stealing in through a side-door and joining the circling throng?—a figure in lilac gown, with the stiff muslin cap and folded neckerchief. She entered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... other form of government, for any other people, or for any other time. Many laws are to be found there which are unnecessary and superfluous if applied elsewhere. Many actions, innocent in themselves, are prohibited. All the mala prohibita are not mala in se. But one thing is as clear as a sunbeam, and that is a very important light to the student of Ethics; if God was the author of these laws, nothing morally wrong was commanded or allowed by them. When it was said of the Jews through the prophet, "I gave them statutes which were not good," it cannot mean ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... better to live together in harmony than to foment those bickerings which have led so recently to the dismissal of my poor brother in the Gospel. Our home affairs are, I believe, managed prudently,—the two servants being most excellent persons, and my little Rachel a very sunbeam in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... almost feel the silence, 'twas so impressive. Slowly they walked up the wide church aisle and stood before the quaint baptismal font. A stray sunbeam glancing through one of the beautiful, variously-colored memorial windows, lighted up the pictured saint-like faces over the chancel, making them appear as if imbued with life. Mary softly whispered to Ralph, as if loath to profane the sacredness of the place by loud talking, ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... lived in a state of chronic alarm lest she should be coming down upon them with some new and vigorous alteration or improvement. Her daughter was in some respects like her mother, as full of energy, but with a little more discretion; bright as a sunbeam, and honest as the day; abounding also in good works. Such were the three families who maintained an intimacy with Colonel Dawson, when the rest of the neighbouring gentry dropped off ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... trail. These, and a single tiny grey bird with a dreary note interminably repeated, were the only living things she saw except here and there a summer-battered butterfly of the Vanessa tribe flitting in some stray sunbeam. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... stud the Southern Pacific Ocean. The first beams with lovely luxuriance in its wood-crowned heights; while the second and third rise from the bosom of the sea in frowning sterility amidst the gay ripple that ever and anon laves their sides, and plashes in the brilliancy of the sunbeam. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... of the blast there entered in a sunbeam, clearer by seven times than ever they saw day, and a marvellous great glory fell upon them all. Then each knight, looking on his neighbour, found his face fairer than he had ever seen, and so—all standing ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... "Thither came Uriel, gleaming through the even On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star In autumn thwarts the night, when vapours fired Impress the air, and shows the mariner From what point of his compass ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... planes are connected by flat taper mirrors composed of thin glass silvered on the outside. When the reflector faces the sun at right angles, each mirror intercepts a pencil of rays of 32.61 square inches section, hence the entire reflecting surface receives the radiant heat of an annular sunbeam of 32.61 x 96 3,130 square inches section. It should be observed that the area thus stated is 0.011 less than the total foreshortened superficies of the ninety-six mirrors if sufficiently wide to come in perfect contact at the vertices. Fig. 2 represents a transverse section of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... the prairie together, eastward, as the speaker pointed. An object was just visible low down on the horizon, like a moving blazing star. It was not that. At a glance we all knew what it was. It was a helmet, flashing under the sunbeam, as it rose and fell to the measured gallop ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... lake. Mud-hens, in their midsummer fluttering, had woven the rushes into a Gobelin tapestry. The deep notes of the old frog were hushed, but in an out-of-the-way nook the youngster was trying his voice on the water-dog. A dragon-fly lighted on a stake and flashed a sunbeam from his bedazzled wing; and a bright bug, like a streak of blue flame, zigzagged his ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... the picture little worth looking at, but could not forbear smiling, to see that a very plump and comfortable tabby-cat—whom we ourselves have often observed haunting the Pantheon—had established herself on the altar, in the genial sunbeam, and was fast asleep among the holy tapers. Their footsteps disturbing her, she awoke, raised herself, and sat blinking in the sun, yet with a certain dignity and self-possession, as if conscious of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... optical effect then occurred. The room, which had been previously partially lighted by the sunbeam, grew darker and darker as the star increased in radiance, until we found ourselves in an Egyptian gloom. The star twinkled, trembled, and turned, at first with a slow, gyratory motion, then faster ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... wonderful region for grasshoppers out there, you know; you'd improvise us such charming dishes of locusts and wild honey! As for cookies, a snowflake and a sunbeam, and there they are," said Ray, making inroads on the Fort-Riley stores; while little Jane set down a cup of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of hope was brought upon that sunbeam, even coupled with the conviction that he had been hitherto so wofully astray. To-morrow might be bright (and to all the wanderers in this world the anchor is to-morrow); he would be able to guide his course by the sun, and would come all right. He resolved ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... came Jack Fyfe with his hunter's stride, soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm. A sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly, the faint curl of his ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... we are looking at her, it is clearing away—like a sunbeam, out peeps a smile from each corner of her rosy mouth, and hark! you may almost hear her merry laugh as clapping ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... A sunbeam shooting between the branches just glinted on the case, the polished metal of which lighted up like a looking-glass. The monkey, with the frivolity peculiar to his species, instantly had his attention distracted. His ideas, if such ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... plant-development and division; for instance, that the sum of what is called vital force in a full-grown tree is not greater, instead of less, than that in the seeding, and in the grove greater than in the single parental tree. This power, if it be properly a force, is doubtless as truly derived from the sunbeam as is the power which the plant and animal expend in work. Here, then, is a source of replenishment as lasting as the sun itself, and a ground—so far as a supply of force is concerned—for indefinite duration. For all that any one ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... accomplishment. But too many resplendent pigments, fruits of the fecundity of modern chemistry, have been found deficient. The yellow and orange chromates of lead, for instance, withstanding as they do the action of the sunbeam, become by time, foul air, and the influence of other pigments, inferior to the ochres. So the dazzling scarlet of iodine and mercury must yield the palm of excellence to the more sober vermilion, being a chameleon colour, subject to the most sudden and opposite changes. And the blues of cobalt, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field |
