"Twilight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alphabets: an element that appeals to the soul directly, or to the imagination directly, I think. Suppose you found a Chinese ideogram—of course there is no such a one—to express the forgotten Celtic culture; and it proved in analysis, to be composed of the signs for twilight, wind, and pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with certain other elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul, would have to supply. In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the imagination—that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... not easy to undress in a small tent without waking one's companion, and Cathcart, hardened and warm-blooded as he was in spite of his fifty odd years, did what Hank would have described as "considerable of his twilight" in the open. He noticed, during the process, that Punk had meanwhile gone back to his lean-to, and that Hank and Defago were at it hammer and tongs, or, rather, hammer and anvil, the little French Canadian being ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... night in the study. Towards morning he slept for an hour or two, just long enough to let the fire go out and to get thoroughly chilled. When he opened his eyes a muddy twilight had begun to show at the window; the sounds of a clapping door within the house, which had probably awakened him, made him aware that the servant was ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the yellow twilight might be seen the stacks of dry corn-stalks and heaps of golden pumpkins in the neighboring fields, from which the slow oxen were bringing home a cart well laden ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck. The early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty. She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer's boy at home had started his horse. Then, summoning all her courage, with an apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry's arithmetical ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... to my children. They are brought up with songs; for I wished early, as it were, to bathe their souls in harmony. Several of them, especially my first-born and Eva, are regular little enthusiasts in music; and every evening, as soon as twilight comes on, the children throng about me, and then I sit down to the piano, and either accompany myself, or play to little songs which they themselves sing. It is my Henrik's reward, when he has been very good for the whole day, that I should sit by his bed, and sing ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... day and night there is twilight, but the transition from Carnival to Lent is as sudden as a plunge from sunshine into cold water. Carnival ends at twelve o'clock on the night of Shrove Tuesday. And the theory of its observance is, or was, that the fun and revelry should grow ever ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... it, for I took a long nap on the sofa in Mrs. Splinter's parlor through the soft spring twilight, while Bessie held what seemed to me interminable ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... case for quinine. Prayers might be more useful, and could I have given them he should not have wanted. Last night I was suddenly sent for to Father Domenico's monastery above Montemirto: they told me he was ill. I ran up through the dim twilight of moonbeams and olives with a sinking heart. Something told me my monk was dead. He was lying in a little low whitewashed room; they had carried him there from his own cell in hopes he might still be alive. The windows were wide open; they framed some ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... 'Thou hast done me no evil, but I have no need of thee,' he answered. 'The world is wide, and there is Heaven also, and Hell, and that dim twilight house that lies between. Go wherever thou wilt, but trouble me not, for my love is calling ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... paragraph had given him! Never before had the fact that she was another man's wife come home to him so keenly. He tried to put the subject out of his thoughts, to forget that there had been a son born to the house of Granger; but often in the dreary spring twilight, walking among the oaks of Lyvedon, he had said to himself, "Her child ought to have been ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the other domestics. Leaving the house I walked about the streets seeking some small eating-place where I could dine without being recognised. As I wandered along wearily I heard a harsh voice behind me calling me by name, and, turning, found that the speaker was Mr. Stephen Strong. Even in the twilight there was no possibility of ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... back to Romsey in the twilight, carrying two of the Boyce children with us. In the evening I stroll out alone, to look at the village in the moonlight. The streets are like narrow lanes. The houses are very old, and for the most part dilapidated, but streets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... in what he deems eternal sunshine. But then how often overcast by the clouds of care, how often dusked by the blight of misery and misfortune! And certain as the gradual rise of such affection is its gradual decline and melancholy setting. Then, in the chill, dim twilight of his soul, he execrates custom; because he has madly expected that feelings could be habitual that were not homogeneous, and because he has been guided by the observation of sense, and not by the ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... merely opening the door slightly, and sliding the tray in on the floor. No words were exchanged, nor was the tray removed until just at twilight, when the fellow appeared again on a similar mission. It became dark, but no light was furnished. Outside the clouds had thickened, and a heavy swell was tossing the vessel about rather roughly. Seemingly the engine was merely endeavouring to maintain head-way, with ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... taken in a mere flash of time—in less than ten minutes, some close observers said; others made it eight minutes. The six shells, the signal agreed upon, were fired. The men started the march. Rock Redoubt loomed before them in the thick dusk of twilight. They advanced in good order with their bayonets fixed and in utter silence, as they had been commanded. But when the first volley of musketry came down from the top of the redoubt, they broke their silence and huzzaed with all their power. Then they rushed forward, charging with ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... sometimes appears to me as if I had in a manner slept out my life in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where I have fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures, and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet, or the noises of the throng below. Waked out of this dim, twilight existence, and startled with the passing scene, I have felt a wish to descend to the world of realities, and join in the chase. But I fear too late, and that I had better return to my bookish chimeras and indolence once more! Zanetto, lascia le donne, et studia la ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... this twilight region, Teufelsdroeckh hastens from the Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the whole habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modern researches of every conceivable kind, he strives ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... displaced all ceremony. It was very pleasant to go in there after dinner, even to sit with the colonel over his claret, and hear more stories about Bingo; for afterward I could go into the pretty drawing-room and take my tea from Lilian's hands, and listen while she played Schubert to us in the summer twilight. ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... was being prepared we shut ourselves up in a room to avoid the crowd of women who pestered us to buy a thousand trifles, and at two o'clock we started, Moreau having got his money. We got to Cosne at twilight, and though Clairmont was waiting for us at Briane, I decided on stopping where I was, and this night proved superior to the first. The next day we made a breakfast of the meal which had been prepared for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... evening of their marriage, about the early twilight hour, and Madeline, alone, almost for the first time since morning, sat awaiting the return of her husband. Full of pleasant thoughts was her mind, and warm with love her heart. A few hours of separation from Edward had made her impatient to meet him again. When, ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... almost stealthily down the stairs and into the avenue. Half-way to the gate he paused to listen. He was hidden from sight now by the gathering twilight and the rolling mists. From behind the house came the softly muffled roar of the tide sweeping in, and, with sharper insistence, the whirr of machinery from the boathouse. Granet lit a cigarette and walked thoughtfully away. Just as he climbed into the car, a peculiar light through the ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of rigor from her mind. They were so happy in that kitchen! The cotton curtain, drawn half-way, gave free entry to the sunset beams. The burnished copper pans set the end wall all aglow, lending a rosy tint to the twilight lingering in the room. And there, in the golden shade, the lovers' little round faces shone out, peaceful and radiant, like moons. Their love was instinct with such calm certainty that no neglect was even ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... about it is, that its structure is polysynthetic, like the languages of America. Like them, it forms its compounds by the elimination of certain radicals in the simple words; so that ilhun, the twilight, is contracted from hill, dead, and egun, day; and belhaur, the knee, from belhar, front, and oin, leg. . . . The fact is indisputable, and is eminently noteworthy, that while the affinities of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... dim twilight of a February morning that the doors were thrown open, and that the chiefs of the hostile parties showed themselves to the multitude. Conway was received with loud applause. But, when Pitt appeared, all eyes were fixed on him alone. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't know. It seemed to him ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... of kings and nobles, Tourney and knightly gage, Till the summer twilight faded From Froissart's ancient page. Then in the darkened parlor I saw a fairer sight— The brave old King whose valor makes The shame of ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... distress he chose to describe. But there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings even in poetry." Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things—grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise on the sea, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... cloistered gloom. Guided by it, Clarence presently found himself on the threshold of a low-vaulted room. Two other narrow embrasured windows like the one he had just seen, and a fourth, wider latticed casement, hung with gauze curtains, suffused the apartment with a clear, yet mysterious twilight that seemed its own. The gloomy walls were warmed by bright-fringed bookshelves, topped with trifles of light feminine coloring and adornment. Low easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful tables, a dainty ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... is no night in June and we danced on the lawn in the bright twilight until late. Mrs. Blaine, Miss Dodge, Mr. Blaine, and other guests were trying to do the Scotch reel, and "whooping" like Highlanders. We were gay revelers during those two weeks. One night afterwards, at a dinner in our home in New ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... of prismatic colors. One does not soon forget such a scene as was presented at the close of this day. The sun set in a blaze of orange and scarlet, seen across the long level of the cactus-covered prairie, while soft twilight shadows gathered about the crumbling, vine-screened walls of the old Spanish church in the environs of Tula. Soon the stars came into view, one by one, while the moon rode high and serene among the lesser lights of the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... came still evening on, and twilight gray Had in her sober livery all things clad; Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird, They to their grassy couch, these to their nests, Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale; She all night long her amorous ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... In the deepening twilight of a clear evening the harbour gathers to itself the additional charm of mysterious indefiniteness, and among the long-drawn-out reflections appear sinuous lines of yellow light beneath the lamps by the bridge. Looking ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... schooner until she should sink, with the object of assuring himself that none of us had escaped to tell the tale of his atrocious conduct. As I have already mentioned, the Dolores happened to founder at the precise moment of sunset, and in those latitudes the duration of twilight is exceedingly brief. Still, following upon sunset there were a few minutes during which the light would be strong enough to enable a sharp eye on board the distant brig, especially if aided by a good glass, to detect the presence of the two boats ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... quite sure what you want of me," replied the other, eyeing the captain suspiciously in the dim twilight. "But come in—come in," he added, hastily. "We are just sitting down to supper. Come and take something with us, if you're not too proud to ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your "sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings, Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose. Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward, They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs, That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close, Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young. Only to Earth's best loved, at the breathless turns Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung, And a ghostly lamp of their moment's union burns, Will such pure notes from the fountain-head ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time become completely overcast, and although it was only mid afternoon, it was as dark as though twilight were coming on. The wind came in stronger gusts, and the waves broke ever more threateningly against the side of the boat. The land was blotted out, and only the tossing waters met ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... left Nellie's face now, leaving it very white, though in the deepening twilight this was not noticeable. Her heart was beating tumultuously, and a new feeling of peace and rest was stealing over her. How powerful seemed the man standing there. So long had she been called upon to be strong, always ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... murmur Of its subsiding, As the pulse of the storm beats firmer, And the steady rain Drops into a cadenced chiding. Deep-breathing rain, The sad and ghostly noise Wherewith thou dost complain,— Thy plaintive, spiritual voice, Heard thus at close of day Through vaults of twilight-gray,— Doth vex me with sweet pain! And still my soul is fain To know the secret of that yearning Which in ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... Schiaparelli took up the task at Milan in 1882. His observations were made in daylight. It was found that much more could be seen, and higher magnifying powers used, high up in the sky near the sun, than at low altitudes, through the agitated air of morning or evening twilight. A notable discovery ensued.[819] Following the planet hour by hour, instead of making necessarily brief inspections at intervals of about a day, as previous observers had done, it was found that the markings faintly visible remained ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the sour twilight crowds were battling for the latest papers, and knots of people were trying to make out the multitudes of appeals (See App. III, Sect. 6) and proclamations pasted in every flat place; from the Tsay-ee-kah, the Peasants' Soviets, the "moderate" Socialist parties, the Army Committees-threatening, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... though not without regret at his refusal to accept more. Paul agreed to row him down, and the two started in the early twilight. As he shook Peter's hand, Mr. Fogo looked ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his golden arrows, and reigning for a-while in heaven, pouring down heat and growth and life: but he too must die. The dark clouds of evening must cover him. The red glare upon them was his dying blood. The twilight, which lingered after the sun was gone, was his bride, the dawn, come to soothe his dying hour. True, he had come to life again, often and often, morning after morning: but would it be so for ever? Would not a night come at last, after which he would never rise again? Would not he ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... almost picturesque in the opposite roof, whose outline was delicately drawn on the pale-blue sky. Everything was refined, subdued and shadowy in the tender light, but Percival, gazing, saw no charm in the little twilight picture. Sorrow may be soothed by quiet loveliness, but perplexities absorb all our faculties, and we do not heed the beauty of the world, which is simple and unperplexed. If it is forced upon our notice, the contrast irritates ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... nothing more to do, Sandy," the boy said one night when he and the Scotchman were sitting in the twilight on the steps ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... the Doctor; "because this kind of Thrush was named after Alexander Wilson, who wrote a description of it, and published a colored plate of it, seventy-five years ago. But your name of 'sunset bird' is very good, my lad, for they sing best about twilight. We will go down to the river path and hear them, though you cannot ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... silence fell. Each seemed busy with their own thoughts. About them was quiet, stillness, peace—twilight was falling, and a soft, mellow light ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... The short Indian twilight was drawing to a close when I arrived on the ground, and, without losing time, I drew up the Grenadiers in line, with the two guns a little in advance ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... great change that was drawing near. The capacious blue sky that arched above him, the sighing of the gentle breeze through the solemn pines, the repose of the encircling mountains, bright with sunrise, or purpling in the twilight, distilled the soothing influences of nature into his spirit, and there was a great calm within. Beyond those California hills the hills of God rose in their supernal beauty before the vision of his faith, and when the summons came for him one midnight, his ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... the steps with the agility of youth, bent low with sugared compliments over the hands of his hostesses and of Mistress Betty Carrington, and gave courteous greeting to the assembled gentlemen, after which the company flowed back into the grateful twilight of hall and "great room," where the weather, the state of the crops, and the last horse-race engaged them until ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... parting I had to run away from the holy influence. I remember that there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this chapel, waited in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him to hurry in case I should be recaptured by God and meet you only to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... importance given to love by the novelists (including her cruder self), she dreaded meeting Raphael Leon. It was very unlikely her whereabouts would penetrate to the West; and she rarely went outside of the Ghetto by day, or even walked within it in the evening. In the twilight, unless prostrated by headache, she played on Hannah's disused old-fashioned grand piano. It had one cracked note which nearly always spoiled the melody; she would not have the note repaired, taking a morbid pleasure in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had been a Sunday night custom, and more passed between these two in those twilight hours than anyone else ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... twilight, lying on the old sofa, looking at the fire, and thinking. It was her favorite way of spending the hour of dusk. No one disturbed her, and she used to lie there on Beth's little red pillow, planning stories, dreaming ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... She allowed him to ring the bell, and, without asking leave, he threw coals upon the fire. For five minutes their dialogue suffered interruption; when it began again, the curtains were drawn, and warm rays succeeded to turbid twilight. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... feeds the ravens, and watches the dying sparrow, and says to his children 'Love one another,' the sunset splendour is glad over us, the western sky is refulgent as the court of the Father when the glad news is spread abroad that a sinner has repented. We have mourned in the twilight of our little faith, but, having sent away our sin, the glory of God's heaven over his darkening earth has ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... on his face, with his lips to the sacred symbol. The sun went down, and twilight gradually disappeared; night had, for some time, shrouded all in darkness, and Philip yet remained in alternate prayer ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I'd have near the Park, From Town just an appetite-ride; With fairy-like grounds, and a bark O'er its miniature waters to glide. There oft, 'neath the pale twilight star, Or the moonlight unruffled and clear, My meerschaum I'd smoke, or cigar, If I had a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... As the twilight was beginning to fade, we heard the sound of a carriage. The new man had arrived in a fly from the station. Before bedtime, he made his appearance in the kitchen, to receive the domestic instructions of which a stranger stood ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... and religiously taught, but they were too childish to dwell on thoughts of awe or grief, and the small minds were chiefly fixed upon the dolls, as the one bright spot in the dreary day. Mary yielded, and worked and answered their chatter till twilight came on, and the rival Mary came up to put them to bed, an operation in which she gave her assistance, almost questioning if she were not forgotten, but she learnt that her father was still in the house, the nurse believed ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chapter of the Church's life being written as we talk together. Its writing began in the closing twilight of the eighteenth century. That chapter isn't finished yet. Some of its best pages are now being written, with ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... strains of music float upon the air; gay and festive throngs move along the promenades of the Nevskoi; gilded and glittering equipages pass over the bridges and disappear in the shadowy recesses of the islands. Whatever may be unseemly in life is covered by a rich and mystic drapery of twilight. The floating bath-houses of the Neva, with their variegated tressel-work and brilliant colors, resemble fairy palaces; and the plashing of the bathers falls upon the ear like the gambols of water-spirits. Not far from the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... years rolled on; he counted them by the steps he had cut—a few for a year—only a few. He sang no more; he said no more, 'I will do this or that'—he only worked. And at night, when the twilight settled down, there looked out at him from the holes and crevices in ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... his duty for a moment and with his back turned to the trail, three dark figures, hardly distinguishable from the twilight shadows, glided noiselessly and swiftly from it. An instant later they had vanished in the little thicket from which E-chee had flung his billet of wood into the water on the night of ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... held her slender feet towards the flames, which touched her pale cheeks with red; and, with her jet black hair, her elegant figure, which still retained its youthful grace, she shed upon the dim twilight of the old-fashioned room that refined and aristocratic charm of which my father spoke in his letters. She looked slowly all around her, recognizing most of the things which my aunt's pious care had preserved in their former place, and said, sorrowfully: "What recollections!" ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... pale-faced women were the last to leave Paul's late camping ground. As they were pushed off into the stream by Jim Newall, who with another Indian paddled them back to the settlement, Margaret saw the other canoes, nine in number, going up the river. In the twilight she watched them, and it came to her mind that when Paul Guidon saw the porpoises at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy coming toward the sloop, he was not to be blamed for thinking they were canoes. She remarked to Mrs. ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... insistent criticism. For the first time the insidious beauty of Roselawn's tranquillity was cloying the energy of his mind—a mind that never gave him rest, but was always questioning and seeking the truth in every phase of human endeavour. The peacefulness of the twilight hour was lulling his mental faculties, and the perfumes of summer's zenith were stirring his senses like music ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... 7th of July. We had expected to make Cape Resolution the evening before. Kit and I had been on deck till one o'clock, watching in the gleaming twilight. Never shall I forget those twilights. The sun was not out of sight more than three hours and a half, and the whole northern semicircle glowed continuously. It shone on the sails; it shone on the sea. The great glassy faces of the swells cast it back in ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... above the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard campaign surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they brought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and seemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar twilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally, one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliage and the voice of those far waters ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... spread out his hands, for Corsica chooses to ignore the game laws. And the colonel, having finished his coffee, buckled on his sword, and went out into the twilight streets of what was once the capital of Corsica. Bastia, indeed, has, like the majority of men and women, its history written on its face. On the high land above the old port stands the citadel, just as the Genoese merchant-adventurers planned it five hundred years ago. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... were thousands of people who seemed as anxious as themselves to witness the sudden change from deepening twilight to the grand illumination that made fairyland of the Court of Honor. But they were there for some minutes, sitting silently in the growing darkness, finding the buildings taking on a new beauty by the dim, uncertain light, ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... sunset colors faded, the twilight deepened and night came on. The birds twittered sleepily in their nests, a night-hawk screeched across the sky, in the distance the coyotes howled dismally, and the ceaseless throbbing of the ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... had fallen so thickly on the leafy end of the brushwood, which was outward, that it had entirely shut us in. All day the snow kept on, as we could tell from the lessening light, and by two o'clock only a faint twilight made ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... quaint picture of youthful love in the soft summer twilight, at that ever beautiful trysting-place, gives an unwonted touch of sentiment to the austere daily life of colonial New England. The omnipotent Puritan law-giver, who meddled and interfered in every detail, small and great, of the public and private life of the citizen, could not leave untouched, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... is sitting on a seat in the garden of Versailles or some such place of formal grandeur. It is after the revolution and the death of the King—one evening at twilight time— ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... habits, and always catches its prey upon the wing. It is a bird that bears a good many different names; one of the most appropriate is that of the 'night-jar,'—though it is not really a night bird, but more of the twilight. It is called 'jar,' from the peculiar jarring noise which you heard, just like that made by the vibrating of a spinning-wheel. In some places they call it the 'goatsucker,' from a foolish idea that it sucked the milk ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... shades reposed, His bow and darts behind him slung; As dewey twilight round him closed, Lisette these numbers sung: "O Love! thy sylvan bower I'll fly while I've the power; Thy primrose way leads maids where they ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... he shouted. "I saw him—I spotted him—it was broad twilight after those stairs—and I went for him with my bare hands. Not fists, Bunny; not fists for a thing like that; I meant getting my fingers into his vile little heart and tearing it out by the roots. I was stark mad. But ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... amalgams of past and never-to-come fashions—the clerks of London—hurried about with the horrid consciousness of exposing their costliest garments to the "pelting of the pitiless storm." Evening stole on. A London twilight has nothing of the pale grey comfort that is diffused by that gradual change from day to night which I have experienced when seated by the hearth or the open window of a rural home. There it seems like the very happiness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Everything prospered in the strange settlement. Above all, the great temple which they had erected in the centre of the city grew ever taller and larger. From the first blush of dawn until the closing of the twilight, the clatter of the hammer and the rasp of the saw was never absent from the monument which the immigrants erected to Him who had led them ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sufficient to afford nourishment to a few stunted shrubs and wild plants, which grew on its sides, and nodded over the summit. A clear stream broke out of it, and ran amongst the pieces of rocks fallen into it. Here twilight always reigned—it seemed the Temple of Solitude; yet, paradoxical as the assertion may appear, when the foot sounded on the rock, it terrified the intruder, and inspired a strange feeling, as if the rightful ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... arms rest o'er thee so fair and so lone, Like that white path of stars across the night's zone: That pathway, when twilight late vanishing dies, Embraces the earth, though it quits ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... like to its souls entomb'd, Consuming on, and ne'er to be consum'd, Seem'd nigh at hand, where oft the sulphury damps O'er-aw'd its light, as glimmer dying lamps, Spreading a horrid gloom from side to side, A twilight scene of terrors half descried. Sad boil'd the billows of that burning sea, And Fate's sad yellings dismal seem'd to be; Blue roll'd its waves with horrors uncontrolled, And its live wrecks of souls ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... A cow lowing makes one think of twilight and the home pastures, of little stumbling, nosing calves, of the loveliest thing in ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... door-way, and were ushered into a long hall supported by massive pillars of carved white stone. A roaring log-fire in the immense fireplace threw a ruddy glow over the long array of armor and gleaming weapons which lined the walls, and made the pale winter twilight outside look bleak indeed. Charles, emerging slim and graceful out of an exquisite ulster, sauntered up to the fire, and asked where Sir George Danvers was. As he stood inside the wide fireplace, leaning against one of the pillars which supported ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... house that George Lescott, distinguished landscape painter of New York and the world-at-large, arrived in the twilight. His first impression was received in shadowy evening mists that gave a touch of the weird. The sweep of the stone-guarded well rose in a yard tramped bare of grass. The house itself, a rambling structure of logs, with additions of undressed lumber, was without ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Dazzled to trace it in the sunny skies. It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; 70 And like a new-born spirit did he pass Through the green evening quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away. One track unseams A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences 80 Melting ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... at him. Her lace sleeves had fallen back, and her white arm, with its little clenched fist, flashed through the twilight, aimlessly yet passionately. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... page from the inner banqueting-hall had come with word that their master intended to drink wine at the lodgings of the Lord Chandos that night, and that he desired his squires to sleep at the hotel of the "Half Moon" on the Rue des Apotres. Thither then they both set out in the twilight after the long course of juggling tricks and glee-singing with which the principal meal ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of its place;—he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,—does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits—well, we will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of "perfecting" ourselves in OUR virtue, which alone remains: may its glance some day overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this aging civilization with its dull gloomy seriousness! And if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter, easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain HARD, we latest ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... evening of the same day, when the fishermen had finished their dinner, Malva, tired and thoughtful, had seated herself on an old boat turned upside down and was watching the sea, already screened in twilight. In the distance a fire was burning, and Malva knew that Vassili had lighted it. Solitary and as if lost in the darkening shadows, the flame leaped high at times and then fell back as if broken. And Malva felt a certain sadness as she watched that red dot abandoned ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man, rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break forth again the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... of the short twilight that in the south of France intervenes between day and night. The Carlists had reached the upper end of the walk, and, turning round, began to descend it again three abreast, and with the man who has been particularly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... almost silent, but not uninterested spectator of the family storm. As the parties were talking, it had grown almost dark; and after the lull which succeeded the passionate outbreak of the Major, George's deep voice, as it here broke trembling into the twilight room, was heard with no small emotion ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading trees, or standing belly deep in the creek or pond, or lying upon the smooth places in the quiet summer afternoon, the day's grazing done, and waiting to be summoned home to be milked; and again in the twilight lying upon the level summit of the hill, or where the sward is thickest and softest; or in winter a herd of them filing along toward the spring to drink, or being "foddered" from the stack in the field upon the new snow—surely the cow is a picturesque animal, and all her goings ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... in her cheeks and her lips closed tight. One second she sat very still, then a dancing light leaped sparkling into her eyes; a flock of dimples chased each other around her lips like swallows circling their homing place at twilight. ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... alone. It would spoil it if I went. It's such a nice little spontaneous idea of your own, you see. But if we made it a regular family delegation—besides, it will take as much as all me to manage the second. Rosamond is very elegant to-day. Last night's twilight isn't over. And it's funny we've plans too; we're going to give lessons,—differently; we're going to lead off, for once,—we Holabirds; and I don't know exactly how the music will chime in. It may ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and wood, and trees, many and fair. By whiles he rode through hail and snow, by whiles through noontide heat, so that he was sore vexed. Whiles he saw the sun shine bright, whiles it was as if the twilight fell. He saw all kinds of beasts run through the forest, and folk, young and old, go up and down the woods. All this did he see in his dream, but nowhere in all this land did he come to where he might find shelter. But as it drew towards evening, and the ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... The rainy twilight shadows the road, and suddenly, in a ditch—the dead! They have dragged themselves here from the battlefield—they are all corrupt now. The coming of darkness makes it difficult to distinguish their nationality, but the same great pity envelops them all. Only one word ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... strange misgivings, lest Some madness in his brain had thence been born. The artist-mind alone can feel his meaning:— Such as have watched the battle-rank'd array Of sunset, or the face of girlhood seen in Line-blending twilight, with sick hope. Oh! they May feed desire on some fond bosom leaning: But where shall such ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... later, when the long summer twilight was deepening into gloom, Jim Dodge crossed the empty library and paused at the open door of the room beyond. The somber light from the two tall windows fell upon the figure of the girl. She was sitting before Andrew Bolton's desk, her head upon her folded arms. Something in the spiritless ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... Vane that Mr. Rangely had spent the day with Victoria, and had remained at Fairview far into the evening; rumour went farther (thanks to Mrs. Pomfret) and declared the engagement already an accomplished fact. And to Austen, in the twilight in front of Jabe Jenney's, the affair might well have assumed the proportions of an intimacy of long standing rather than that of the chance acquaintance of an hour. Friends in common, modes of life in common, and incidents in common are apt ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... most of the first-cabin and second-cabin passengers were loafing about, that evening, enjoying the long twilight, who should saunter to the Adams party but the long-nosed man himself. ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and overshoes, for a long walk with Dad. They would come back to find the dining-room warm, the long table set, the house deliciously fragrant from the immense turkey that their mother, a fresh apron over her holiday gown, was basting at the oven. Then came the feast, and then games until twilight, and more table-setting; and the baby, whoever he was, was tucked away upstairs before tea, and the evening ended with singing, gathered ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... tacit understanding that his stay was no longer welcome—and that the King's uncle, the Earl of Hertford, now created Duke of Somerset, was placed at the head of public affairs. Somerset was a Lutheran, but just emerging from the twilight of Lutheranism into the full ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... was fading in the narrow court. Our blades shone white in the twilight as the weapons clashed in and out. I saw, without looking, Grammont leaning against the wall, his gory face ashen, and Yeux-gris watching me with all his soul, now and then shouting a ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... her kitchen hearth in the twilight of this eventful day and had just shaken the ashes out of a new pipe, when she heard a hurried tramp along the road. Yet it did not seem so much the tramp of human footsteps as the clatter of sticks or the rattling of ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... feet in the sand, the only sight an occasional crescent-shaped dune, dimly visible in the starlight—the eastern horizon began to be faintly illumined. The moon had long since set. Could this be the approach of dawn? Sunrise was not due for at least two hours. In the tropics there is little twilight preceding the day; "the dawn comes up like thunder." Surely the moon could not be going to rise again! What could be the meaning of the rapidly brightening eastern sky? While we watched and marveled, the pure white light grew brighter and brighter, until we cried out in ecstasy as a ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... all the colours of the rainbow, and flags and streamers of a great many more. It was a very bright day, and the prince, burned up with the heat, began to long for the cold water and the cool princess. But he had to endure till twilight; for the boats had provisions on board, and it was not till the sun went down that the gay party began to vanish. Boat after boat drew away to the shore, following that of the king and queen, till only one, apparently the princess's own boat, remained. But she did not want to go home even yet, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... I knew already, and I wanted a secret which is not revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of the imagination which planted the little snow-white feet in the sally garden, and which heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into the breast, and was intimate with twilight and the creatures that move in the dusk and undergrowths, with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... hour of twilight when the afflicted family returned, and after partaking of supper, sparingly, and in silence, the different members retired to their chambers, and at an early hour sought relief to their ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... that he did not wish to be followed, so I stayed where I was and watched the gray twilight creep over the face of the sea, and the night quickly succeed to it. Not a cloud had been in the sky all day long, and as the darkness increased the stars came out, until the whole heavens were ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... full as he could carry. Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But usually the women and children were alone. The stay-at-home mothers stood gossiping at the corners of the alley, as the twilight sank, folding their arms under their ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the study with a garish light reflected from the snow without, and the bishop pulled down the heavy shades, introducing thereby an effect of twilight in the room. At the same time the wood fire in the grate, which had previously seemed pale and thin, took on a ruddy and cheerful activity, relieved from the overpowering ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... insubstantial society I grew up, and began to be old, before I had yet learned age is disastrous. And it was there, in that cold, bright chamber, one snowy twilight, first suddenly awoke in me an imperative desire for ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... were very frequent, and the refractions peculiar to the snowy horizons; besides, the sun at the time of its greatest southern declension, December 21st, approaches within thirteen degrees of the polar horizon; hence, every day there was a certain twilight for a few hours. Only the mist and snow-storms often plunged these regions in ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... Sirens: Shall we not rise with you at night, Up through the shimmering green twilight, That maketh there our changeless day, Then going through the moonlight gray, Shall we not sit upon these sands, To think upon the troublous lands Long left behind, where once ye were, When every day ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... youth, Unwearied mining in the precious stores Of classic lore—and better, nobler still, In God's own holy writ. And scatter here And there a thread of grey, to mark the grief That prematurely checked the bounding flow Of the warm current in his veins, and shed An early twilight o'er so bright a dawn. No wrinkle sits upon that brow!—and thus It ever was. The angry strife and cares Of avaricious miser did not leave Their base memorial on so fair a page. The eyebrows next draw closer down, and throw A softening shade o'er the mild orbs below. ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... the slipper he had picked up seemed to him as ridiculous as his other misconceptions. He sank back gloomily in his seat; by degrees the fatigue and excitement of the day began to mercifully benumb his senses; twilight had fallen and the talk had ceased. The lady had allowed her book to drop in her lap as the darkness gathered, and had closed her eyes; he closed his own, and slipped away presently into a dream, in which ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... being half-way down his throat, and pretty soon Nipsy could stand his feelings no longer. Catching up the largest, smoothest, softest cricket, he ran down to the shore as fast as his legs could carry him. There, in the twilight, he saw a lonely figure ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... your face whether you love her, as you sit there in the twilight looking into the guiding star eyes, as well as though you grabbed her as you would a sack of wheat, and hung on like a ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... the western sky, and the magnificent American twilight gathered upon the forest and river, the excited Hans Vanderbum could scarcely conceal his impatience and anxiety. Never before, since his marriage, had he been in such a predicament, and never ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... here of chief importance to expect no more than the nature of things makes possible. If the period of tradition in history is the region of twilight, we should not expect in it perfect light. The creations of genius always seem like miracles, because they are, for the most part, created far out of the reach of observation. If we were in possession of all the historical testimonies, we never could wholly ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the fourth day out there came symptoms of a change. The chief had adopted the plan of travelling during every hour of the short day, or twilight, in order to make more sure of not missing the trail, and the stars with frequent aurora borealis had made each night so brilliant that he advanced almost as easily as during the day-time. The fourth day, however, on awaking, his ears were greeted with sounds that ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Turk, the wife of the dead man and the sister of the accused, had rocked her anaemic baby to sleep after a long period of twilight fretfulness and stood looking down into its crib awhile with a distrait and numbed face of distress. She was leaving it to the care of another and did not know ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... his party pointed out Harry and the parson. The little man blinked through the smoky twilight. He stood up, took his candle and lurched across the room to Harry. Down under Harry's nose he put the candle with a bang. Harry jerked back and glared at him, and he, rocking a little and blinking, said thickly, "It's a filthy likeness, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... The short twilight was thickening into darkness when Desmond, with face, legs, and arms stained brown, slipped out of the fort in native dress and walked slowly towards the houses of the native merchants. In his hand he carried ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... The long twilight had set in, yet the afterglow hung brilliantly about them. Skippy was balanced gingerly on the front edge of a rocker which swayed perilously under him and added to his general discomfort. There was a safe straight-backed stationary chair only ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... of blood and dashed it against the brow of Night, still crowned with her fading stars. Of a sudden the heavens were filled with blots and threads of flaming colour latticed against the pale background of the twilight sky. Miriam watched it with a kind of rapture, letting its glory and its peace sink into her troubled soul, while from below arose the sound of awakening camps making ready for the daily battle. Soon a ray of burning light, cast like a spear from the crest of the Mount of Olives across ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard |
