"Windless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hoofs died away down the road towards Kelstein. Had Hetty known, her father was the horseman, with Patty riding pillion behind him. Over the frozen floods came the note of a church clock, borne on the almost windless air. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with you? You! My sun and moon! My basketful of flowers! My money-bag of shining dreams! My hours, Windless and still, of afternoon! You are my world and I your citizen. What meaning ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... blazing, and windless day, so hot that the branches of the coco-palms, which at early morn had swished and merrily swayed to the trade wind, now hung limp and motionless, as if they had suffered from a long tropical drought instead of merely a few hours' cessation of the brave, cool breeze, ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... sheer, bitter cold incarnate and palpable; of stark, sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded by vast plains eroded to the dead level of a windless sea. Every lofty object cast a sharply outlined shade of impenetrable blackness, beside which the weak light of the sun became a dazzling glare. The ground was either a brilliant white or an intense black, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... first rise from off the plains, and watch their white and lake-like fields, as they float in level bays and winding gulfs about the islanded summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating surface parts and passes away, and down under their depths the glittering city and green pasture lie like Atlantis,[31] between ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... in the afternoon. The quiet sun blazed down through the clear windless air and made a furnace of our hole in the sand. And all about us were the explosions of rifles and yells of the Indians. Only once in a while did father permit a single shot from the trench, and at that only ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... he had learned by this time that most difficult of all flying feats; to hold the body vertical and whirr the wings without rising or advancing—he loved to hover on windless nights over ponds and rivers and see the stars reflected in their still pools. Indeed, sometimes he hovered till he dropped, and only saved himself from a wetting by sweeping up in a tremendous curve along the surface ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... the horizon's verge; To leeward, stormy shadows, violet-black, And the wide sea between A vast unfurrowed field of windless green; The stormy shadows flicker on the track Of phantom sails ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... more the windless days are here, Quiet of autumn, when the year Halts and looks backward and draws breath Before it plunges into death. Silver of mist and gossamers, Through-shine of noonday's glassy gold, Pale blue of skies, where nothing stirs Save one blanched leaf, weary ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... great out-door refrigerator, maintained their green. A pale-blue mist rose from the Gulf and hung over the islands, the low sun showing an orange disk, which touched the shores with the loveliest color, but gave no warmth to the windless air. The parks and gardens were wholly deserted, and came and went, on either side, phantom-like in their soft, gray, faded tints. Under every bridge flashed and foamed the clear beryl-green waters. And nobody in St. Petersburg, except ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... and through the rest of the night it was kedge and tow again, the Shannon and the Guerriere hanging on doggedly, confident of taking their quarry. Another day dawned, hot and windless, and the situation was unchanged. Other British ships had crawled or drifted nearer, but the Constitution was always just beyond range of their heavy guns. We may imagine Isaac Hull striding across the poop and back again, ruddy, solid, composed, wearing a cocked hat and a gold-laced ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... a night that promised well for the enterprise—nearly windless, and what little breeze stirred came from a point or so west of north; a sky of lead-blue, faintly star-dotted, and no moon; a still sea for the small craft, the motor-launches and the coastal motor-boats, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... one of quiet beauty; there was a clear sky and a windless air; the banks of the river—high and dense masses of vegetation— glowed with colour; the broad sweep of water was like a sheet of molten silver and shimmered and eddied to the play of the gleaming paddles. As they moved easily and swiftly along, the paddlemen, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes, beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our feet. A little way down, where the lake narrowed, we saw Laura and Harry Lothrop ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... in the habit of a novice walked the path alone, moving slowly across the stripes of sunlight and shadow which inlaid the gravel with equal bars of black and reddish gold. There was a smell of autumn on the windless air, bitter yet sweet; the scent of dying leaves, and fading flowers loth to perish, of rose-berries that had usurped the place of roses, of chrysanthemums chilled by frost, of moist earth deprived of sun, and of the green moss-like film overgrowing ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... advancing slowly and reluctantly through the yellowish gloom with a curious, sliding motion, as if stepping on ice. Paul started toward them, but paused, struck motionless, and held by a sight still more strange. The same breathless stillness brooded over everything; the windless air now weighed like lead, and yet at this moment the greatest trees and smallest bushes suddenly began to quiver from bottom to top. As far as the horror-struck eyes could reach through that unnatural twilight, the mightiest cottonwoods were now bending and nodding ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... The winter night was windless and mild. Sir Roger's asthmatic and rheumatic afflictions were quite safe in the warm atmosphere. Moonlight flooded everything with its misty glory, stars spangled the sky, music came softened by distance from the ball-room—all ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... throng, till he gains the country of the Syrians. Then he sends away his retinue, and stays alone in a grove, hidden from human eyes. Here is a lofty tree, blossoming bright above all other trees, and on this tree the Phoenix builds his nest, on a windless day, when the holy jewel of heaven shines clear. For he is fain by the activity of his mind to convert old age into life, and thus renew his youth. He gathers from far and near the sweetest and most delightsome plants and leaves, and the ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... grieve in secret, Those who bear the sorrows of earth, The deep unappeasable longings Which beset them with throngings and throngings, (As, on a windless night, Through the fold of a dark mantle furled, Gleams on our world, world after unknown world) Give them peace, Wide as the veil that hides God's face, The pure plenitude of space, In which our universe is but a glittering crease,— ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... unforgettable scene—the mate in the high place, the men, sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight down through the windless air, while the Elsinore, with hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs. And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Presently it lit the little boat, and it did something more—it revealed a thickening of the atmosphere. They were running into a sea fog, one of those thin white fogs that come down in the Mediterranean on windless days. The blinding glare ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is there. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... land and the others rode at anchor behind them; for, as the beach was not large in extent, they lay at anchor with prows projecting 191 towards the sea in an order which was eight ships deep. For that night they lay thus; but at early dawn, after clear sky and windless calm, the sea began to be violently agitated and a great storm fell upon them with a strong East 192 Wind, that wind which they who dwell about those parts call Hellespontias. Now as many of them as perceived that the wind was rising and who were so moored ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... as he looked, for those were the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock-face. As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded comb turning over or failing ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... the rain, pouring out of a windless sky, and spattering up from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in another world—where one did have interviews. How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the other hand, worked in grim and orderly silence, with no sound but the cool, stern orders of the officers. In such a race the British were sure to win, and fortune aided them. The two ships were rolling heavily in the windless swell, and a little before noon the British saw the wounded foremast of their enemy suddenly snap and tumble, with all its canvas, upon the unfortunate Didon's decks. This gave new and exultant vigour to the British. Shot-holes were ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... He was by this strange slowness of apprehension on the part of His disciples. There is no other instance that I can recall in the whole Gospels, with the exception of Gethsemane, where our Lord's words seem to indicate such agitation of the windless sea of His spirit as this rapid succession of rebuking interrogations. They give a glimpse into the depths of His mind, showing us what He generally kept sacredly shut up, and let us see how deeply He was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... failing) such an imposing and magnificently respectable character. The scene of the error and the detection of Onomacritus presents itself always to me in a kind of pictorial vision. It is night, the clear, windless night of Athens; not of the Athens whose ruins remain, but of the ancient city that sank in ashes during the invasion of Xerxes. The time is the time of Pisistratus the successful tyrant; the scene is the ancient ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... cannot expect His power to come to me. If I fling myself about, in vain impatience, struggling, resisting providences, shirking duties, perturbing my soul, I cannot expect that the peace which brings strength, or the strength which brings peace, will come to me. It must be a windless sea that mirrors the sunshine and the blue, and the troubled heart has not God's strength in it. If I do not expect to get anything from Him, He will not give me anything; not because He will not, but because He cannot. Take the old Psalmist's words, 'I have quieted ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... sunshine beryl-bright And windless; yea, think as I might, I could not say, Even to within years' measure, when One would be at my side who ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... hundred miles at a walk. Standing by them were the six horses with the wagon, and its tunneled roof of canvas shone duskily on the empty verge of the wilderness. A dry windless air hung over the table-land of the Big Bend, but a sound rose from somewhere, floating voluminous upon ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... mild that only one or two light windless frosts had singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... weary hounds at last retire, Windless, displeased, from the fruitless chase, When the sly beast tapished in bush and brier, No art nor pains can rouse out of his place: The Christian knights so full of shame and ire Returned back, with faint and weary pace: Yet still the fearful dame fled swift ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... awoke again the sun shone on him, and the morning was calm and windless. He sat up and looked about him, but could see no signs of Fox save the lair wherein he had lain. So he arose to his feet and sought for him about the crannies of the rocks, and found him not; and he shouted for him, and ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... went on easily for sixteen hours, the wise captain judging— and his judgment proved true—that the centre of the storm was crossing our course ahead; and that if we waited, it would pass us. So, as he expected, we came after a day or two into an almost windless sea, where smooth mountainous waves, the relics of the storm, were weltering aimlessly up and down ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... birds of evening were beginning to brood over the painted water when The Aloha cast anchor. In the late light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock. Before the yacht, blazoned on a ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... morning of August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight—more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Louvain, the entire heart of the city was destroyed, and the fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station. The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang. In their work the soldiers were moving from the heart of the city to the outskirts, street by street, from ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... unsodden Where the infant frost has trodden With his morning-winged feet Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines Piercing with their trellised lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness; The dun and bladed grass no less, Pointing from this hoary tower In the windless air; the flower Glimmering at my feet; the line Of the olive-sandall'd Apennine In the south dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; And of living things each one; And my spirit, which so long Darken'd this swift stream of song,— Interpenetrated ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... midnight by a clock upon the mantel; a single candle, by which he had made a show of reading, was guttering all to a side and an ungracious end in a draught that came from some cranny in the ill-seamed ingle-walls, for all that the night seemed windless. A profound stillness wrapped all; the night was huge outside, with the sea dead-flat to moon ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... delectable way in the Valley of the Moon. The last Mariposa lily vanished from the burnt grasses as the California Indian summer dreamed itself out in purple mists on the windless air. Soft rain- showers first broke the spell. Snow fell on the summit of Sonoma Mountain. At the ranch house the morning air was crisp and brittle, yet mid-day made the shade welcome, and in the open, under the winter sun, roses bloomed and ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... a hot, windless day in London, in early September. Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were almost black green; and the mould in ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... edifice without being aware of their proximity to it, and they had gone an incredible number of blocks beyond it before they discovered their error. However, feeling that they might be embarrassingly late if they returned, they decided that a walk would make them as good. It was a windless winter morning, with an inch of crisp snow over the ground. So they walked, and for the most part they were silent, but on their way home, after they had turned back at noon, they ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... continued for several days, till the stone-like roof was a good foot in thickness, as was the ice over the surface of the pond. Then a thick, feather-soft, windless snow-fall, lasting twenty-four hours, served as a blanket against the further piercing of the frost; and the beavers, warm-housed, well-provisioned, and barricaded against all their enemies but man, settled themselves down to their long seclusion ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... home Of scrub and crag and scanty pasturage He saw again! What stress of pilgrimage Through roaring waterways and cities of men, What sojourn among folk beyond the ken Of mortal seafarers in homelier seas, More trodden lands! Sure, none had earned his ease As he, that windless morning when he drew Near silent Ithaca, gray in misty blue, And wondered on the old familiar scene, Which was to him as it had never been Aforetime. Say, had he but had inkling That in this hour all that long wandering Of his was self-ensured, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... broke very bright and fair, with a keen, windless frost that made the snow crisp and pleasant to ride over, hindering one in no way. And there was the sun shining over all in a way that made the cold seem nought to me, so that I had known nothing more pleasant than this English winter, having seen as yet nothing of the wet and cold times ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... distance. Only now and then, when the horses' feet fell in unison, there drifted after them the note of a violin—like a wind at night in an old casement. And then the three riders were presently aware of being quite alone on a windless waste, with a sentinel yucca standing on a distant height here and there between them and the descending moon, and distant groups of mesquite wreathing themselves in the silver mist of early morning. It had been a little past midnight when they ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... lee rail under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and when the breeze came screaming through the fog or rain they sprang ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of the woods. And scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,—all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... his cart's side the wagoner Is slouching slowly at his ease, Half-hidden in the windless blur Of white dust puffing to his knees. This wagon on the height above, From sky to sky on either hand, Is the sole thing that seems to move In ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... The day was windless and no leaf moved on any tree. There must be some animal among the shrubs that covered the embankment, some large animal, since its movements caused so much commotion; for, as she watched, first one bush and then another stirred and bent and was shaken ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... his forward-standing ears and his fidgeting. Immediately before her was the low rounded rock, a throne of dreams that she had graced before. From down the slope and almost hidden by the bulk of the rock, a little wand of smoke stood up in the windless air, to break at last into tiny ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... "your venomous bile pollutes the crystal flood of my narration. Did I ride? That was the undoing of the sage. When he recovered consciousness for the second time, it was to discover that the chain was missing and that the back tire was windless. In my endeavours to find the chain I lost myself. That reminds me. I must put an advertisement in The Times to the effect that any one returning a bicycle-chain to White Ladies will be assaulted. I have no desire to be reminded of to-day. If anybody had told me you could cover about fifty ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... here, in earnest, and the last few days have been hot and windless. School is over, for the next eight weeks, and I shall have my kiddies close beside me. Gershom, after a ten-day trip down to Minneapolis for books and clothes, is going to come back to Casa Grande and help ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,—each life complete in itself: why not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it. Knowles—that old skeptic—believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely bear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of the fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with windless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these contrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops spilt from wine-casks ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... clear, with a great moon,—and windless, and very warm. Shinzaburo sought the coolness of his veranda. Clad only in a light summer-robe, he sat there thinking, dreaming, sorrowing; —sometimes fanning himself; sometimes making a little smoke to drive the mosquitoes away. Everything was quiet. It was a lonesome neighborhood, and there ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... man concerned in what ensued) was John Norris, Lord Norris's second son, so famous afterwards in the Low Countries, grandson of Sir Henry Norris, executed for adultery with Anne Boleyn. Three small frigates were in the harbour. The summer had been hot and windless; the sea was smooth, there was a light and favourable air from the east; and Essex directed Norris to take a company of soldiers ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... was near its setting, and a still and tranquil light lay upon the river that was glassy smooth. Rowing close to the bank, the Highlander saw through the gold fretwork of the leaves above him far spaces of pale blue sky. All was quiet, windless, listlessly fair. A few birds were on the wing, and far toward the opposite shore an idle sail seemed scarce to hold its way. Presently the trees gave place to a grassy shore, rimmed by a fiery vine that strove to cool its leaves in the flood below. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... her. The third day was Saturday, when the office would close early; and after twelve o'clock, seeing that the others were all going, she too left, to spend the time as best she could until the following Monday. The day was windless and bright, and full of the promise of spring. Not feeling hungry she did not return to her lodgings, but went for a short walk in Kensington Gardens. Leaving the Broad Walk, she went into that secluded spot near the old farm-like buildings of Kensington Palace and sat ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... feathers floated about the room in increasing quantity till, through a mishap of Christian's, who shook the contents of one bag outside the tick, the atmosphere of the room became dense with gigantic flakes, which descended upon the workers like a windless snowstorm. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... nature, a broad, powerful nature, which is to others what the sea is to small rivulets, is capable. In stormy times it roars and thunders, raging, and raising such waves as weak rivers cannot throw up; but when it is windless and quiet, it spreads its boundless glassy surface, clearer than any river, a ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... night, and tired as she was, she lay thinking long in the silence. It was a strangely windless night, but her thoughts went whirling as though on wings of wind. Thoughts of fate, thoughts of scepticism jostled each other: pictures came; she saw the apple tree breaking through Lashnagar; she saw a landslide ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told to do. The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and tarnished darkness. She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... remained blank. Only the windless silence of space echoed over Johnson's channel, but the tapes later proved that I actually did hear a ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... and her great heart had throbbed audibly, shaking the world with its beats. No more thunder followed, but the rain was coming down heavily now in huge drops that fell straight through the gloomy, windless air. In half a minute I was drenched to the skin; but for a short time the rain seemed an advantage, as the brightness of the falling water lessened the gloom, turning the air from dark to lighter grey. This subdued rain-light did not last long: I had not been twenty minutes in the wood before ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the birds, we turned into an unfrequented lane, bordered by elms. The evening was dull, damp, and windless, and the air lay stagnant between the high banks of the lane. We walked on in complete silence, Chandrapal a few yards in front; none of us felt any desire to speak. Three nightingales were singing at intervals: one at some distance in the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... and the stars were out. Helouan, with her fairy twinkling lights, lay silent against the Desert edge. The sand was at the flood. The period of the Encroaching of the Desert was at hand, and the deeps were all astir with movement. But in the windless air was a great peace. A calm of infinite stillness breathed everywhere. The flow of Time, before it rushed away backwards, stopped somewhere between the dust of stars and Desert. The mystery of sand touched every street with its ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... that Friday, probably early, will be the day. Wilhelmina, accordingly, is on the road that morning, early enough; Husband with her, and ceremonial attendants, in honor of such a Brother; morning is of sultry windless sort; day hotter and hotter;—at Berneck is no Crown-Prince, in the House appointed for him; hour after hour, Wilhelmina waits there in vain. The truth is, one of the smallest accidents has happened: the Generals "lost a wheel ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lifting his head a little. There was a light in his eyes which for a moment half frightened, half fascinated her, so nakedly genuine was it—genuine as a flame which burns straight in an absolutely windless place. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... a perishing after-glow, A thin, red shred of moon Trailed. In the windless air The poplars all ranked lean and chill. The smell of winter loitered there, And the Year's heart felt still. Yet not so far away Seemed the mad Spring, But that, as lovers will, I let my laughing heart go play, ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... from its station on the top of the long slope and close under the bluff, not only shone abroad from every window like a place of festival, but from the great chimney at the west end poured forth a coil of smoke so thick and so voluminous, that it hung for miles along the windless night air, and its shadow lay far abroad in the moonlight upon the glittering alkali. As we continued to draw near, besides, a regular and panting throb began to divide the silence. First it seemed to me like the beating of a heart; and next it put into my mind the thought of some giant, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... so profound that he heard the soft sighs of the candles, the forest of unnumbered candles; the room was windless. Again the singular fancy overtook him that the key of B ruled the song of the lights, and he stirred painfully because certain sounds irritated him, recalling as a child his vague rage at the Kol Nidrei, which was sung in the key of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically against ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... his way up the avenue towards the Villa Mimosa, wondered whether he was not indeed finding his way into fairyland. On either side of him were drooping mimosa trees, heavy with the snaky, orange-coloured blossom whose perfumes hung heavy upon the windless air. In the background, bordering the gardens which were themselves a maze of colour, were great clumps of glorious purple rhododendrons, drooping clusters of red and white roses. A sudden turn revealed a long ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... soon as Willems' feet had left the planks, the silence which had been lifted up by the jerky rattle of his footsteps fell down again upon the courtyard; the silence of the cloudy sky and of the windless air, the sullen silence of the earth oppressed by the aspect of coming turmoil, the silence of the world collecting its faculties to withstand the storm. Through this silence Willems pushed his way, and stopped about six ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... midnight in November, keenly cold, but windless; and in the purplish sky, the wintry crown of stars burned with silvery lustre, unlike the golden glow of constellations throbbing in sultry summer, and their white fires sparkled, flared as if blown by interstellar storms. The large family of Lazarus huddled over ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the water-side, and when she was standing knee- deep in the little sandy bight aforesaid, she looked over to Green Eyot, and was minded to swim over thither, as oft she did. And it was a windless dawn after a hot night, and a light mist lay upon the face of the water, and above it rose ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... of the windless afternoon he made the waves of his agony travel as far as the O. S. N. Company's offices. Captain Mitchell on the balcony, trying to make out what went on generally, had heard him faintly but distinctly, and the feeble and appalling sound lingered in his ears after he had retreated ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... was just setting, and the whole of the Western sky was ablaze with glory. The hills, heather-covered, were enveloped in a purple haze. The evening was windless; not a sound was heard; not a bird chirped; and no one was near. He kissed ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... illimitable ferocity. She was invulnerable on these questions, because eventually she overrode all opponents with a sniff. This sniff was an active force. It was to her antagonists like a bang over the head, and none was known to recover from this expression of exalted contempt. It left them windless and conquered. They never again came forward as candidates for suppression. And Martha walked her kitchen with a stern brow, an invincible ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... took refuge in a clump of bamboos and pulled down one of the bamboos to conceal herself. The Mahommedans surrounded the clump but when they saw the one bamboo which the woman held shaking, while all the rest were still—for it was a windless night—they concluded that it was an evil spirit that they were pursuing and ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... ourselves in the midst of the vast jungles that cover Borneo, serving to keep the atmosphere cool and prevent air currents from ascending in these windless tropics. We were almost exactly on the equator, at an elevation of about 100 metres. In January there had been little rain and in daytime the weather had been rather muggy, but with no excessive heat to speak of, provided one's raiment is ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... at the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without her hair done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead; without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung disconsolately on Vera's shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near the men's hats or on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of freedom and laziness, of good-nature and sitting at ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... holding her breath. It was a silent night, windless and calm. The trees had no voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer musical with the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it were not, murmured so softly that these two could not hear it ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Sara, "these storms, these dangers, nay, even shipwreck itself, appear to me preferable to the still, windless water which the so-much-be-praised haven of domestic life represents. You speak, my father, of chimeras; but tell me, is not the so-lauded happiness of domestic life more a chimera than any other? When the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... General Shea reported that the wire in front of him was cut before noon, but General Girdwood was not certain that the wire was sufficiently broken on the 74th Division's front, though he intimated to the Corps Commander that he was ready to attack at the same time as the 60th. It still continued a windless day, and the dust clouds prevented any observation of the wire entanglements. General Girdwood turned this disadvantage to account, and ordering his artillery to raise their fire slightly so that it should fall just in front of and ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... For the owner of my wherry, supposing me to be the thief I seemed, was already out after me, and in another few minutes the hue and cry by water would be as loud as that by land. So on I went on the rapid ebb for dear life. And casting my eyes upward, I noticed that the air was still and windless; so that wherever she was, the Misericorde could be getting little help from her canvas. And if she were only drifting on the tide, why should not I with my oars make as good ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... in his saddle and pointed to the crest of the hill they had just descended. Above the pines circling the lower slope above the bare ledges of rock and outcrop, a column of thick black smoke was rising straight as a spire in the windless air. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... great siren whistle at the shops boomed out the fire alarm, and almost at the the same instant a red glow, capped by a rolling nimbus of sooty oil smoke, rose to beacon the destruction already begun in the shop yards. And while the roar of the siren was still jarring upon the windless night air, the electric-light circuits were cut out, leaving the yards and the Crow's Nest in darkness, and the frantic battle for the trains to be lighted only by the moon and the lurid glow of destruction spreading slowly under its ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice—level, doubtless, when it was made much earlier in ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... the bedrock and the next thing to do was to start three drifts in as many directions. This called for two more men to work the drifts, and a man with his team to haul the dirt to the water, while I stood at the windless and watched both ends. This went on for one week. When I washed out my dirt, paid off my help and other expenses, I had two dollars and ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... windless road Spake each to one another, "Whence came that blood upon your hand No other hand may cover?" "From breaking of a ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... morning I went out to Smolny. Going up the long wooden sidewalk from the outer gate I saw the first thin, hesitating snow-flakes fluttering down from the grey, windless sky. "Snow!" cried the soldier at the door, grinning with delight. "Good for the health!" Inside, the long, gloomy halls and bleak rooms seemed deserted. No one moved in all the enormous pile. A deep, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... so as to show all the white under surfaces of the leaves shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises white with spray at the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards the dew of the grass beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down under oppressive grace of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is one of the best for practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will only be able to understand them thoroughly ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... a mother when her young child calls Hearkens to that, and hath no other care: So Thetis, from her green and windless halls Rose, at the first word of Achilles' prayer, To comfort him, and promise gifts of fair New armour wrought by an immortal hand; Then like a silver cloud she scaled the air, Where bright the dwellings of ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Science, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... would turn back to another day when a storm was making and a tall ship standing down to weather the Head? For if there was a menace of weather to-day, so, too, was there a ship. We seemed to grow conscious of it by degrees, it drew on so slowly out of the broad, blue, windless south. For hours, in the early afternoon, it seemed scarcely to move on the mirroring surface of the sea. Yet it did move, growing nearer and larger, its huge spread of canvas hanging straight as cerecloth on the poles, and its wooden flanks, by and by, showing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We start ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... or three months yet till the late autumn berries are ripe; yes, I know. But there are other joys than berries in the wilds. Spring and summer they are still only in bloom, but there are harebells and ladyslippers, deep, windless woods, and the scent of trees, and stillness. There is a sound as of distant waters from the heavens; never so long-drawn a sound in all eternity. And a thrush may be singing as high as ever its ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... The phosphorescent light you now see pervading this great subterranean vault emanates from the rocks that form its dome; it is always thus upon Omean, just as the billows are always as you see them—rolling, ever rolling over a windless sea. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I strolled about the picturesque point. It was a windless, hazy day. An early frost had already clothed a number of the trees with their gorgeous autumnal mantles, the forerunners of Indian summer, the most glorious season of ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... to wait. The friendly little noises of my own movements left me. I give you my word, never before nor since have I experienced such stillness. In vain I told myself that with adobe walls two feet thick, a windless evening, and an hour after sunset, stillness was to be expected. That did not satisfy. Silence is made up of a thousand little noises so accustomed that they pass over the consciousness. Somehow these little noises seemed to lack. I ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... some vast refrain beyond the sun, The very weed breathed music from its sod; And night and day in ceaseless antiphon Rolled off through windless arches in the broad Abyss.—Thou saw'st I, too, Would in my place have blent accord as true, And justified this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... up as the rain began to fall heavily in the windless gray of six o'clock. He reported the cockney gone and the men loud in admiration of Sanford; so dinner was cheerful enough, although Sanford felt limp after his first attack of killing rage. Onnie's name on this animal's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea. And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think that ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the windless road, Spake each to one another, "Whence came that blood upon thy hand No other hand may cover?" "From breaking of a woman's heart, Brother, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... Hi jolted and whimpered. The hot miles wriggled slowly past. Dust lay a foot deep on the track. It was a windless day. Tsing Hi, gripping with fearful intensity his swag, could not lift a finger to wipe the stains which stood for many tears and coursed down his cheeks in tiny rivulets, making puddles on his cramped hands. He, the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... as two thousand years ago. A thick battalion of trees at the summit of the hillside makes stubborn insistence to the northern mistral, so that even when the wind tears over the plains of Provence like a wild fury, scourging and freezing, the Jardin de la Fontaine is serene and windless. The mistral goes always with a cloudless sky, as though the clouds were fleeing from its icy keenness, and the sun pours full upon the semi-circle of the Jardin de la Fontaine, turning it to a hothouse where the most delicate plants and shrubs ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... panting laughter alongside brought Venner and his guests to the rail in haste, and gone to the windless heavens was their ennui. A gleaming, gold-tinted creature, a miniature model of Aphrodite surely, arose from the blue sea and climbed nimbly into the main channels and thence to the deck, where little pools of water dripped from the radiant figure. She shook her small head saucily, and heavy ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... triumphant awe My spirit moved within me saw, With burning passion of stretched eyes, Clear as the light's own firstborn law, In windless wastes of skies Time's ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... from myriads of shining leaves, the Rector of Lapton Huish might as well have been living in a tropical swamp. To the north of them, the huge masses of Dartmoor stole the air, so that their life seemed to be lost in a windless eddy, and in the deep valleys with which the country was scored the air lay dead for many months at a time. Gabrielle, accustomed to the free spaces of Connemara, felt the change depressing, though she would not admit it; indeed, she had far too many things to think about to have ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus—a mountain in Thessaly in the Iliad; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in Odyssey, V. 41-47. [Footnote: Ibid., ii. 396.] Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... surbated|, weather- beaten; faint; done up, used up, knocked up; bushed * [U.S.]; exhausted, prostrate, spent; overtired, overspent, overfatigued; unrefreshed[obs3], unrestored. worn, worn out; battered, shattered, pulled down, seedy, altered. breathless, windless; short of breath, out of breath, short of wind; blown, puffing and blowing; short-breathed; anhelose[obs3]; broken winded, short-winded; dyspnaeal[obs3], dyspnaeic[obs3]. ready to drop, all in, more dead than alive, dog-weary, walked off one's legs, tired to death, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... quiet on the river now As when the snow lay windless in the wood, And the last Indian stood And looked to find the broken bough That told the path under the snow. All is as silent as the spiral lights Of purple and of gold that from the marshes rise, Like the wings of swarming dragon flies, Far up toward Eastmanville, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... sunset, and a windless heat brooded over the heights where usually the pines made whisperings, clouds of flame color hung above the dark summits of the mountain, and the reflected light turned the ghostly dwellings to a ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of bird and cloud, The grass shines windless, grey, and still, In dusky ruin the owl dreams on, The cuckoo echoes on the hill; Yet soft along Alulvan's walks ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... I feel around my heart the flush Of that calm, windless morning, glorified With summer sunshine brilliant and intense! A tiny boy, scarcely ten summers old, Along blue Esk, under the whispering trees, And by the crumbling banks, daisy-o'ergrown, A cloudless, livelong day I trode with one Whose soul was in his pastime, and whose skill Upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... drank pleasure from him late and soon With eyes that stared like windless lotus-flowers; Unselfish joy expanded all his powers As swells the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the starlight When the tides were low, And the surf fell sobbing To the undertow, I trod the windless dunes ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... maddening quietudes, when all signs fail and the sailor must stand by for the whims of the wind if he would save himself and his ship. For hours we raced along at seven or eight knots, with a strong breeze on the quarter and the seas ruffling about our prow. For still longer hours we pushed through a windless calm by ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... sight it seemed to be but a narrow, tideless, windless bit of backwater; and the first impulse of the passing stranger was to ask how it came to be called the "Perdu." On this point he would get little information from the folk of the neighborhood, who knew not French. But if he were to translate the term for their ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that had been opened for the milder part of the day; another Italian replaced the covers on hot-beds that might have contained violets. From the high furnace chimney a plume of yellow-brown smoke floated heavily on the windless air. The ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... spent dawns of which he was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of light upon light ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... our common amusements. Sometimes we passed whole days under the leafy covert of the forest with our books and music. This occurred during those rare days in this country, when the sun mounts his etherial throne in unclouded majesty, and the windless atmosphere is as a bath of pellucid and grateful water, wrapping the senses in tranquillity. When the clouds veiled the sky, and the wind scattered them there and here, rending their woof, and strewing its fragments through the aerial plains—then we rode out, and sought ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... to be, Or any power to cease; Whom objects but compelled to see, Whose trouble was a windblown sea, A windless sea ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the Pole to-night. We ought to do the trick, but oh! for a better surface. It is quite evident this is a comparatively windless area. The sastrugi are few and far between, and all soft. I should imagine occasional blizzards sweep up from the S.E., but none with violence. We have deep tracks in the snow, which is soft as deep as ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... was! How windless. There came to him the memory of the wind as it soothed him that day of Celia's home coming. He had not hated the wind. He had loved it. There came also the memory of the wind as it soughed around the dugout on those lonely nights, when ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... Manager Morton and the trainer and disappeared again. Captain Edwards led the way out of the building at a few minutes before two and they jogged down to the field and, heralded by a long cheer from the stand, took their places on the benches. It was a fine day for football, bright and windless and with a true November nip ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... overhead and a glimmering scarp of granite, and knew it for the gray rock, Cara Clowz. By the base of it he lowered Niotte to the ground, dismounted, and began to climb, leading Rubh by the bridle and seeking for a pathway. Behind him the voices of crashing trees filled the windless night. He found a ledge at length, and there the three huddled together—Niotte between swooning and sleep, Graul seated beside her, and Rubh standing patient, waiting for the day. When the crashing ceased ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... distinctly wanted some fresh element at her court, that should make Riseholme know that she was in residence again. August would soon be here with its languors and absence of stimulus, when it was really rather difficult in the drowsy windless weather to keep the flag of culture flying strongly from her own palace. The Guru had already said that he felt sure she had a beautiful soul, and— The outline of the scheme flashed upon her. She would have Yoga evenings in the hot August weather, at which, as the heat of the day abated, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over. The green mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in their clear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each other secretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The serene immensity of the sky, the warmth and dryness ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... momentary cessation of the ceaseless tap tap, he listened. Silence was never profounder than in this forest on that windless night. Earth and air seemed, to his strained ear, emptied of all sound. The clatter of his own steady, unhastened heart-beat was all that broke upon the stillness. He might be alone in the Universe for all token of life beyond these walls, or so he was saying to ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... on the first Tuesday in September. The day was windless and warm, and as Harold walked across the yard with the sheriff he looked around at the maple leaves, just touched with crimson and gold and russet, and his heart ached with desire to be free. The scent of the ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... Ilion's city came by stealth A spirit as of windless seas and skies, A gentle phantom-form of joy and wealth, With love's soft arrows speeding from its eyes— Love's rose, whose thorn doth pierce the soul ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the last suggestions of the stressful life behind me, and from the little station on the moorland I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... Penhallow walked to where on the Crest the eighteen guns were drawn up. The sky was clear as yet, a windless, hot day. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below—never a sign of life but the scent of ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... clear of bird and cloud, The grass shines windless, grey and still, In dusky ruin the owl dreams on, The cuckoo echoes on the hill; Yet soft along Alulvan's walks ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... breakfast, Dickson and Heritage might have been observed taking the air in the village street. It was the Poet who had insisted upon this walk, and he had his own purpose. They looked at the spires of smoke piercing the windless air, and studied the daffodils in the cottage gardens. Dickson was glum, but Heritage seemed in high spirits. He varied his garrulity with spells of ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... it; they depend on it; some say they like it; and when by a rare chance it goes down for a few hours, they become nervous, panicky, and apprehensive, always listening, expecting something to happen. But we of the windless North, with our sunlit spaces, our quiet days and nights, grow peevish, petulant, and full of grouch when the wind blows. We will stand anything but that. We resent wind; it is not in the bond; we will ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... a picnic so much! It was a perfect autumn evening, windless and frosty, with a dead black sky and a tiny rim of new moon like a thumb-nail paring. We had our eggs and bacon, washed down with tea and condensed milk, and followed by bread and jam. The little fire burned blue and cozy, ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... and windless, a scarlet sun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. The Fuzzies, who were in to wake Pappy Jack with their whistles, didn't like it; they were edgy and restless. Maybe it would rain today after all. They had breakfast outside on the picnic table, and then Ben decided he'd go back to his camp ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... had passed from the purely nomad and pastoral life, such as Abraham led, and had begun to 'sow in that land.' That marks a stage in progress. His father's life had been like a midsummer day, with bursts of splendour and heavy thunder-clouds; his was liker a calm day in autumn, windless and unchanging from morning till serene evening. The world thinks little of such lives, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... still, with the stillness set deep in peace of one who loves and awaits in awe love's next word. The earth lay in the sunshine, and listened for the whisper of spring. Faint birdnotes threaded the high windless ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... open western gate Where whining halt and leper wait, And came at last To the blue desert, where the deep Great seas of twilight lay asleep, Windless and vast. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... season which it revisits in the winter. There was indeed no hint of the great primary season in the sacred paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where the inverted penny chairs lay with their foreheads in the earth; and the shrivelled leaves, loosened from their boughs in the windless air, dropped ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... fallen once more, and the lamp been just brought out, when the same business was repeated. And again the missile whistled past my ear. One nut I had been willing to accept; a second, I rejected utterly. A cocoa-nut does not come slinging along on a windless evening, making an angle of about fifteen degrees with the horizon; cocoa-nuts do not fall on successive nights at the same hour and spot; in both cases, besides, a specific moment seemed to have been chosen, that when the lamp was just carried out, a specific person threatened, and that the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... late April, and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that made him shout a windless "HI!" In a second three rats had projected themselves from the dark tangle of the creeper towards Cossar. For three seconds Cossar stood unaware of them, and then he had become the most active thing in the world. He didn't ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... vanished as she talked with him, her radiances thinning into the neutral colors of smoke, and thence dwindling a little by a little into the vaulting spiral of a windless and a burnt-out fire, until nothing remained of her save her voice; and that was like the moving of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... later to the day on a sunshiny, windless morning, the Wondership was run out of its shed, glistening with new paint and with every bit of bright work burnished till it shone and sparkled like newly-minted silver. Amidships on the craft, the general construction of ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... priest of the Grail. It had seemed to Evelyn that she had been carried beyond the limits of earthly things. The thrill and shiver of the dead man's genius haunted the liquid ripple of the river; the moment was ecstatic; the deep, windless night was full of the haunting ripple of the Rhine. And she remembered how she had clasped her hands ... her very words came ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... was very silent. Every one had long since gone to bed, and not a sound was to be heard. The night was almost windless too, and not even the murmur of the waves in the Bay of St. Ia, which could be faintly heard outside, reached him. He felt ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... at the door of her room, and they went in almost directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared, without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione's room to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the duty of the author to make some examination of the music of this first lyric drama. But here we unfortunately find ourselves adrift upon a windless ocean. We are driven to the necessity of deducing our information from the results of analogical reconstruction. Nothing indeed can be more fascinating than the attempt to arrive at a comprehension of the music of Poliziano's "Orfeo." All record of it appears ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... tell him anything. The gun over the boy's shoulder was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the stillness from somewhere below, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... had taken with her all the good the earth had for him. She had been the sole object of his worship; he had acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things; but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that flows waveless and windless and silent around the worlds. Alas for life! But he would bear on till its winter came. The years would be as tedious as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief. Not willingly even yet would he fail of what work was his. The world was bad enough; he would not leave it worse than ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald |
