"Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... triumph. No disaster crushed his spirit, no extremity of danger ruffled his bearing. In the agony of dissolution now invading that proud army, which for four years had wrested victory from every peril, in that blackness of utter darkness, he preserved the serene lucidity of his mind. He looked the stubborn facts calmly in the face, and when no military resource remained, when he recognised the impossibility of making another march or fighting another battle, he bowed his head in submission ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... upon the bridge. The moon was in its last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... she spoke she looked into the water, and my father looked too; and they both trembled. Deep down in the blackness of the sea was it that they saw—yet it quickly came nearer and nearer, like unto a great flame of white fire. It was a tanlfa. Like flashes of lightning did my father dash his paddle into the water and urge the canoe to the land, for he ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... along the slopes of Waban. On the other side of Ceriso, where the black rock begins, about a mile from the spring, is the work of an older, forgotten people. The rock hereabout is all volcanic, fracturing with a crystalline whitish surface, but weathered outside to furnace blackness. Around the spring, where must have been a gathering place of the tribes, it is scored over with strange pictures and symbols that have no meaning to the Indians of the present day; but out where the rock begins, there is carved into the white heart of it a pointing arrow over ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... dark, we are dark Ah God, we have no stars! About our souls in care and cark Our blackness shuts like prison-bars; The poor souls crouch so far behind That never a comfort can they find By reaching ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... word to him. The throbbing of his head stopped all further thought. It had become violent. He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of a light dreamer to catch the sequence of a dream, when blackness follows close up, devouring all that is said and done. In despair, he thought with kindness of Mrs. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that the coffee-rooms and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be determined by one who has elected to know how the market receives and how it distributes its supplies. In November fog and mist, or the blackness of early winter, with snow on the ground, or cold rain falling, resolution is needed for such an expedition, and still more, if one would see all that the deep night hides, and that comes to light as the dawn struggles through. This business of feeding ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... something like the outline of a path stretching away before me. Following it rapidly—as rapidly as I dared—I came to a corner, as it seemed to me, turned it blindly, and stopped short, peeping into a curtain of solid blackness which barred my path, and overhead mingled confusedly with the dark shapes of trees. But this, too, after a brief hesitation, I made out to be a wall. Advancing to it with outstretched hands, I felt the woodwork of a door, and, groping about, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the night wore slowly away. The intense impenetrable blackness, the roar and thunder of the sea, the terrible jerking, jolting and hurling beneath them, shook the nerves of the girls, keeping them constantly in a half-dazed condition that perhaps lessened the keenness of their suffering. Harriet and Jane, however, ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... indulgence, then through heart-breaking separations from all that man holds dear. Again, we have waited with him in a sunny island, where generous hands concealed his chains with flowers; and, lastly, we have followed him when the last ray of earthly hope went out in night, and seen how, in the blackness of earthly darkness, the firmament of the unseen has blazed with stars of new and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... seized the bridle of King Philip's horse and led him away, led him away from the danger and tumult of the battle-field. Out into the quiet country they rode in silence, with five horsemen only following them. On they journeyed through the blackness of the night and on until they reached Amiens. But of their flight or journey or destination, not one of the victors thought or cared, for the battle-field had become the seat of wild rejoicing and ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... rigging and bare poles, howled and yelled and roared so terrifically, as would have silenced a salvo of artillery fired alongside. The overwhelming sea ran in dark watery mountains crested with devilish fire. The inky blackness added supernatural horror; the wrath of the Almighty seemed upon them; and His hand to drop the black sky down on them for their funeral pall. Surely Noah from his ark ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... blackness without seemed turning into heavy grayness, lulled possibly by the wind which had moderated its violence and had now sunk to a moan not unpleasant, and by the rythmic breathing of the sleeping man at her side, she ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... independent, though perfectly legal and constitutional conduct, roused the wrath of the King to fury. Six of the most eminent of the ministers, one of whom was John Welsh of Ayr, son-in-law of Knox, were confined in a miserable dungeon in the castle of Blackness, for a period of fourteen months, and then banished to France. Eight others were imprisoned for a time, and banished to the remotest parts of Scotland. The severity of Robert Bruce's treatment was increased; and six other ministers, who had not been directly involved ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... closer than ever to the Son of His love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely shared and expressed God's own sympathy and conscience, and was made perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless soul the awful blackness of the ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... appeared before. A wide prospect, whose grateful silence was only broken by the cry or song of some wild bird. Great thickets of dwarf thorn tree and brambles and gorse, aflame with yellow flowers or dark to blackness by contrast with the pale verdure of the earth. And open reaches of elastic turf, its green suffused or sprinkled with red or blue or yellow, according to the kind of flowers proper to the season and place. The sight, too, ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... thwart me in this great revenge; But rather come with large propitious eyes Smiling encouragement with ancient looks! Ye sages whose pale, melancholy orbs Gaze through the darkness of a thousand years, Oh, pierce the solid blackness of to-day, And fire anew this crucible of thought Until my soul flames up to the result! (He enters and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... suddenly breaking the silence; "were you ever seized by an uncontrollable, unaccountable, irresistible presentiment of coming evil,—a feeling as if a sudden gulf of blackness and horror yawned before you—a dreadful something haunting you, you knew not what, but only knew that ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... A great blackness fell on her. She had no pride now; she turned and went slowly back, not to the parsonage, but aslant by the bank of a dyke leading to the highroad along which, a few hours ago, she had returned so wearily. She must ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hundred yards long, you generally find a more commodious place, perhaps high enough to sit. But what a place of rest! surrounded by bodies, by heaps of mummies in all directions; which, previous to my being accustomed to the sight, impressed me with horror. The blackness of the walls, the faint light given by the candles or torches for want of air, the different objects that surrounded me, seeming to converse with each other, and the Arabs, with the candles or torches in their hands, naked and covered with dust, themselves resembling living mummies, absolutely ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... evenings were very dreary when the sun set early and the rain and the fogs overspread the mountains, and enshrouded the home with blackness. ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... him, and yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... after tears! Like a sunny day succeeding clouds and blackness. A pretty story this, of the wife of Tigranes. Xenophon's women: this one, Pantheia, Croesus' wife, the wife of Ischomachus (Economist), the daughter ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... broke the blackness ahead of him. The bullet sank into the woodwork just above his head with a vicious splash. But he refrained from reply. Another crack split the silence, and the wall to the left of him flung back its response. Still he offered ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Haemorrhages from inflammation. Case of haemorrhage from the kidney cured by cold bathing. Case of haemorrhage from the nose cured by cold immersion. II. Haemorrhage from venous paralysis. Of Piles. Black stools. Petechiae. Consumption. Scurvy of the lungs. Blackness of the face and eyes in epileptic fits. Cure of haemorrhages ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... loved me, why did you leave me? I do not comprehend. How could you let me stand in the darkness under your window and then turn away from it into the awful blackness and solitude to ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... give me a chance. You cannot take a child from a mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I've traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... hoverers was, startling. Face, neck and hands became covered with mixture of lampblack and turpentine, forming a coating as thick as heavy brown paper, and absolutely irremovable by water alone. The hair also became of midnight blackness, and gummed up into elflocks of fantastic shape and effect. Any one of us could have gone on the negro minstrel stage, without changing a hair, and put to blush the most elaborate make-up of the grotesque ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... although it had two windows, one to the street, and one to the garden behind: both ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that little was half-swallowed by the general brownness. A tall eight-day clock stood in one corner, up to which, whoever would learn from it the time, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... points alone visible. The uneasy question still stirred within me; and now, looking towards the northwest, where the sky yet glowed faintly with twilight, a long line of pines, gaunt and humanesque, as no tree but our northern white-pine is, was relieved in massy blackness against the golden gray, like a long procession of giants. They were in groups of two and three, with now and then an isolated one, stretching along the horizon, losing themselves in the gloom of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... her troubles the night was now creeping on, and the gray clouds overhead changed to inky blackness. But the wind, as if satisfied at last with its mischievous pranks, stopped blowing this ocean and hurried away to another part of the world to blow something else; so that the waves, not being joggled any more, began to quiet down ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... it, over and over,—demanding, entreating, threatening, to know if it wanted any more,—when he felt the fellows of his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back and trying to put his coat on him. And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... harbor. But the latter was an untried and dangerous course for an inexperienced boatman, and, grim as the coast looked, he was obliged to trust to its tender mercies for the chance of getting ashore. The rain now fell in blinding torrents and a blackness as of night brooded over the sea. Greenleaf was utterly bewildered, but held on to the tiller with his aching, stiffening hand, and strove to inspire his companion with courage. The boat was "down by the head," on account of the wind's drawing the jib, and rolled and plunged ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Cuthbert, the night I went forth to thee in the chantry our father missed me from the house. He thought I had gone to meet Philip in the wood at night. He reviled me cruelly, and I feared to tell him it was thou I had gone to see. Then, I know not how, but I fear he struck me. A great blackness came before mine eyes; and when I opened them again a week or more had passed, and I knew, as I began to understand what had chanced, that I could no longer remain beneath the roof of ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... his braves held back, the blackness of death in their looks. He saw. "My knife is sharp," he said. "The woman is brave. She shall live—go and fight Yellow Hawk, or starve ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... contained in cups absorbed the carbon dioxide as fast as they exhaled it. They had darkened those windows through which the sun was actually pouring, for, on account of the emptiness of the surrounding ether and consequent absence of diffusion of light, nothing but the inky blackness of space and the bright stars looked in at the rest. On raising the shades they got an idea of their speed. A small crescent, smaller than the familiar moon, accompanied by one still tinier, was all that could be seen of the earth and its satellite. "We must," said ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... was need for courage, for already the white caps were around them, and behind them the waters hissed and shrieked like demons let loose and howling for their victims. The heavens were rapidly being overwhelmed with the blackness of darkness. But here is the point! Skillfully the two girls, who were in the stern of the canoes, steered them sharply around, and the strong strokes of Frank and Alec did the rest, and they were in the shelter of the rock. But it would only be ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... function was entirely lost sight of, that spirit wholly cast aside, and the new institution entered upon its second period, becoming a mere political machine which, in its utter disregard of rights and justice, in the shrewdness and daring of its schemes, and in the blackness of its methods, almost surpassed even our own most skilful efforts in those directions. "My kingdom is not of this world," Christ had said, and yet the church, founded upon His teachings and led by men pretending to be His true representatives, had become, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... blasted, dead. All Nature mourning dons her sad attire, And plants and trees with falling leaves expire. And Samas' light and moon-god's soothing rays Earth's love no more attracts; recurring days Are shortened by a blackness deep profound That rises higher as the days come round. At last their light flees from the darkened skies, The last faint gleam now passes, slowly dies. Upon a blasted world, dread darkness falls, O'er dying nature, crumbling cities' walls. Volcanoes' fires are now the only ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... all that," explained Paulus. "Pure air is one of the essentials to life. One of the crudest imperfections of the past was the wilderness of smoking chimneys which belched forth their blackness and poison into the atmosphere. As you have noticed, our city is clean, and the air above us is as clear as that ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... the Lives of Lamb and Keats, which had just appeared, said he had been reading them with great sadness. "There is," said he, "something in the noble brotherly love of Charles to brighten, and hallow, and relieve that sadness; but Keats's deathbed is the blackness of midnight, unmitigated by one ray ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and look forward from the beginning—a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes, sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of lightning cleaving through its blackness. But nowhere dull, nowhere without design in ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... beauty so cold can provoke such conflagrations. Granted—and certain subtle women decline to grant it—that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and compensate her for old age! Mr. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... of those words. For them virtue and vice are much alike. Their wills are iron. They fix their eye upon their goal, and straight thereto they firmly march over the obstacles of precipices, through the blackness of quagmires, crashing athwart laws, customs, and conventionalities, as elephants calmly striding through underbrush. They disregard the prejudices of the world equally for evil and for good. And a moral independence which might furnish forth the most glorious of martyrs in invincible panoply ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pause out in the blackness, made denser now that the candle's light from the cabin was cut off; ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... run—in any direction. I finally got courage to look through a side window, feeling quite sure that Mrs. Norton was out with her Chinaman, looking after some choice little chickens left in her care by the doctor. But not one light was to be seen in any place, and the inky blackness was awful to look upon, so I turned away, and just as I did so, something cracked and rattled down over the shingles and then fell to the ground. But which roof those sounds came from was impossible to tell. With "goose flesh" on my arms, and each hair on my head trying ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... things. The force of association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the colour or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... In this blackness he seemed at length to step forward and to stand upon the very threshold of an abyss, beyond which, in vague vapours, lay things unknown, creatures unsuspected hitherto. From this darkness anything might come to them, angel or devil, nymph or satyr. So, at least, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... none to assist her; the bigotry of patriotism rejected her for her birth,—the scrupulousness of modesty, for her history. The night, that consecrated so many homes and gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... now, and thinking, as she looked out into the tragic night, and watched the blackness of the monumental clouds. She did not return to her former self, as some women do when the goad leaves the heart in peace for a moment. She did not say to herself that she would order the convent gate to be shut on Angus ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... either did not understand or did not agree with him. Mr. Amos, of course, was in the former condition. Eleanor watched them with absorbed interest; when suddenly this vision was crossed by another, that looked to her eyes much as a white angel might, coming across a cloud of both moral and physical blackness. Mr. Rhys himself; his very self, and looking very much like it; only in a white dress literally, which in England she had never seen him wear. But the white dress alone did not make the impression to her eyes; there was that air of freshness and purity which some people always carry ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... that my pilot knew not where we were. Upon the tenth day, a seaman being sent to look out for land from the mast-head, he gave notice that on starboard and larboard he could see nothing but the sky and the sea which bounded the horizon, but just before us, upon the stern, he saw a great blackness. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... she used to examine the bruises on her neck, her arms, and her legs. After passing through the stage of blackness and purpleness, their discoloration had spread out into faint violet and yellow; now already this was beginning to fade; and it seemed that as the ugly marks of his hands disappeared from her skin, the memory of all the causes that had brought them there began ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... three o'clock in the morning, a ring of fires was lit all round the ceremonial ground, in the light of which the white trunks of the gum-trees and the surrounding scrub stood out weird and ghastly against the blackness of darkness beyond. Amid the wildest excitement the men of the Wollunqua totem now ranged themselves in single file on their knees beside the mound which bore the red image of their great mythical forefather, and with their hands on their thighs surged round and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... storm that wrecks a summer day, With funeral blackness and with leaping fire And boiling roar of rain, more real than they That, when the warring heavens begin to tire, With tender fingers on the tumult paint; Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope With soft effulgence, like some ...
— The Silk-Hat Soldier - And Other Poems in War Time • Richard le Gallienne
... of windows, at a distance of perhaps twenty feet, Smith brought the car to a halt, and they peered in. There were no panes; the windows opened directly into a vast room; but nothing was clearly visible in the blackness save the outlines of the opening in ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... his head this way and that, gave a suspicious sniff and turned carefully around the corner of a square-faced boulder. In front was blackness. Bud urged him a little with rein and soft pressure of the spurs, and Sunfish stepped forward. He seemed reassured to find firm, smooth sand under his feet, and hurried a little until Boise was just ahead clicking his feet now and then ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... wealth of foliage. Below, these distant tree-masses made sharp capes and promontories on the white grass; above, their rounded tops rose dark against a blue, light-breathing sky. At one point the river pierced the blackness of the wood, and in the space thus made the spire of a noble church shot heavenward. Swans floated dimly along the stream and under the bridge. The air was fresh, but the rawness of spring was gone. It was the last week of May; the "high midsummer pomps" were ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... awe of the pale lady in bed. Margaret was much pleased with her, and there was no more to be done but to settle that she should come on Saturday, and to let nurse take her into the town to invest her with the universal blackness of the household, where the two Margarets ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... questions. What was the moral condition of the Negro before the war, and what is his moral condition to-day? Before the war, what a picture comes before us at these words, what a panorama of deeds passes before our mind's eye. Years of gross darkness, darkness that deepens into the blackness of the pit, those days that seem like a hideous nightmare to the hoary headed, and the story of which sounds to the youth like a heart-rending and nauseating recital. Yet, it was not all dark, some would say; perhaps not, but the bright spots only ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... pins and loosened the bands of their hair, and I never knew before that they were so lovely. The soft and shining tresses flowed down, rippling like sea-waves; some had hair golden and radiant as this wine in my cup, the faces of others appeared amidst the blackness of ebony; there were locks that seemed of burnished and scintillating copper, some glowed with hair of tawny splendor, and others were crowned with the brightness of the sardonyx. Then, laughing, and without the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... there struggling with the darkness, is as gloomy and desolate as Dore's pictures of Dante's Inferno. On Sunday, when the shops are closed, the silence and solitude of the streets, the general smoky blackness of the buildings and the atmosphere give one a melancholy impression of the great center of civilization. Now that it has been discovered that smoke can be utilized and the atmosphere cleared, it is astonishing that the authorities do not avail themselves of the discovery, and thus bring ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... flash came blackness. The fire seemed for a time to have been extinguished. Gradually here and there, far below, bits of burning tinder gleamed, fiery stars in an inverted heaven. Soon the ruins were again blazing. They soared close, but high, ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... Penny! I do hope you'll be very happy!" she exclaimed in a stifled voice. Then slipped from the room like a shadow—very noiselessly and swiftly—to lie on her bed hour after hour staring up into the blackness with wide, tearless eyes until sheer bodily exhaustion conquered the tortured spirit which could find neither rest nor comfort, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... down he went for many minutes, his candle feebly illuminating a blurred patch about his head. Above, through a bewildering space of darkness, the grated opening at the surface shone like a faint star in another sphere; below was solid blackness; about him the slime of the dripping timbers sparkled in the candle's rays. Down, down, down! The journey might have seemed interminable—a long pilgrimage into the earth's black distances—had the boy had ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... proposed, in the darkness of night, to make a dash. He added the Viper's solitary midshipman, with himself and six of his crew, to the twelve volunteers on board the flagship's cutter, raising its crew to twenty men, and, with the Amethyst's boat and a small boat from the Viper, pulled off in the blackness of the night on ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... make against some Government vessel that would follow us. But I found to my surprise that the men on the ship knew nothing of the dangerous position in which they were, and worked with a calm disregard to the blackness of the night, and to the hazard of the moment. Black I did not meet, for they put me into a cabin aft, of which I was the sole occupant; and, being ordered by the man John, who was half-drunk and very threatening, to ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... weirs, whirling in the dark eddies beyond, gliding in the brown shade of vine-clad hills and under the beetling brows of solemn rocks, now mingling with the imaged dovecot with pigeons perched upon the red-tiled roof, now with the tracery of Gothic gables or the grim blackness of feudal walls splashed with fern and pellitory, now in a warm glow of dying summer, and now in the melancholy gray of wintry clouds heavy with rain. Away they went, the multitudinous leaves—children of the poplar, the willow, the fig-tree, and vine; some broad and clumsy ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... say that Nagasaki is ascending at the same time as ourselves; but yonder, and very far away, is a vapory mist which seems luminous against the blackness of the sky, and from the town rises a confused murmur of voices and laughter, and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... some spur of hill between us and part of the town, for the light seemed to glide from behind it as we held on, but its mass was lost in the shadows. I was watching the lights as they came, one by one, to view, and then of a sudden, on the blackness of the cliff above the hall, shone out a cross of light, tall and bright and clear, as it were a portent, or as set there to guard the place. So suddenly did it come that I started, and I heard Father Phelim draw in his breath with some words ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... and Paulina felt a momentary terror creep over her as she looked into the massy blackness of the dark alleys which ran up into the woods, forced into deeper shade under the glare of the lamps from the encampment. She now reflected with some alarm that the forest commenced at this point, stretching away (as she had been told) in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... them open in a glass of water, and thus they eagerly yield to every moment of April warmth. The blossom of the birch is more delicate, that of the willow more showy, but the alders come first. They cluster and dance everywhere upon the bare boughs above the watercourses; the blackness of the buds is softened into rich brown and yellow; and as this graceful creature thus comes waving into the spring, it is pleasant to remember that the Norse Eddas fabled the first woman to have been named Embla, because she was created from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... darkness!" he said. "Down through long vistas of shadow and blackness you go, glad and exultant, delighting in evil, and thinking 'God sees me not!' And then suddenly at the end, a sword of fire cuts the darkness asunder,—and the majesty of the Divine Law breaks your ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... towards the guard-tent. A dim figure loomed out of the blackness. They noted with satisfaction, as it approached, that it was small. Sentries at the public-school camp vary in physique. They felt that it was lucky that the task of sentry-go had not fallen that night to some muscular forward from one of the school fifteens, or worse still, ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... it to us, nevertheless, when the softening airs and the steady set of the breeze showed us that we had come into the latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... allus been kind to you—you can't say I ain't." Mr. Beale was confused by the two desires which make it difficult to confess anything truthfully—the desire to tell the worst of oneself and the desire to do full justice to oneself at the same time. It is so very hard not to blacken the blackness, or whiten the whiteness, when one comes to trying to tell the truth about oneself. "But I been a beast all the ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... long lost to him. Katy wished—she didn't quite put the wish into words—but she did want Ernest to have what he wanted. One by one the other stars twinkled forth and the darkness deepened till their faces were dim, white blurs, and the girls' pink-and-blue dresses faded into patches of dusk in the blackness. Fireflies winked in the gloom. At the Captain's suggestion, Katy and Ernest rested on their oars. They stopped singing and listened to the night's silences—silences broken by rustling movements from a thicket ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... in all its fury when Thorpe was half way down the Avenue in the taxi he had picked up at the Plaza. Pedestrians scurried in all directions, seeking shelter from the wind and rain; the blackness of night had fallen upon the city; the mighty roar of a thousand cannon came out of the clouds; terrifying flashes rent the skies. The man in the taxi neither saw nor heard the savage assault of the elements. He was accustomed to the roar of battle. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... in June. London, swart and grim, semi-shrouded in a warm close mist of mingled human breath and acrid vapour steaming up from the clammy crowded streets,—London, with a million twinkling lights gleaming sharp upon its native blackness, and looking, to a dreamer's eye, like some gigantic Fortress, built line upon line and tower upon tower,—with huge ramparts raised about it frowningly as though in self-defence against Heaven. Around and above it the deep sky swept in a ring of sable blue, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... their treatment that weighed upon them like a burden that human nature could not bear. They had come to lift such a burden from the backs of another nation, and they had been treated like dogs all the way over! Like the low rumbling of oncoming thunder was the blackness of their countenances as they marched up, up, and up into Brest. The sun grew hot, and their knees wobbled under them from sheer weakness; strong men when they started, who were fine and fit, now faint like babies, yet with spirits unbroken, and great vengeance ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... netted us no tangible results it was an experience of which we often think. We started just at dusk and installed ourselves in the bushes a few yards from the water hole. In half an hour the forest was enveloped in the velvety blackness of the tropic night. Not a star nor a gleam of light was visible and I could not see my hand ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... here and there. Goats and donkeys dispute the dusty roadway with the curious stranger, while women, with babies hanging upon their backs, half concealed their dark-brown faces in red or light blue rebosas, and peered at us with eyes of wonderful blackness and fire. The rebosa, the universal garment of the common class of women in Mexico, is utilized as a carry-all for baby or bundles. It is worn over the head and shoulders in the daytime, when not otherwise in use, and at night is the one blanket or covering while the owner is ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... length between the rails of the tracks, began to move. Two minutes later a new coal-car, one of a lot that had been delivered in the mine the day before, and had not yet been used, was drawn up out of the blackness to the mouth of the slope, and stopped in front of them. Some hay had been thrown into the bottom, and as the ladies were helped in, Miss Nellie exclaimed that it looked as though they were going ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... two girls saw a light that shone like a flame in the darkness below. Quietly there floated into their line of vision something white, ethereal—perchance a spirit from another world. It vanished and the blackness was again unbroken. The figure had seemed strangely tall. It appeared to swim along, rather than to walk, draperies as fine as mist hanging ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... their nests on the high dry trees; the crows flew clamorously to the crevices of the rocks, and all nature seemed conscious of the approaching thunder gust. The clouds now rolled in volumes over the mountain tops; their summits still bright and snowy, but the lower parts of an inky blackness. The rain began to patter down in broad and scattered drops; the winds freshened, and curled up the waves; at length it seemed as if the bellying clouds were torn open by the mountain tops, and complete torrents of rain came rattling down. The lightning leaped from cloud to cloud, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... see a coil of foam on the blackness to mark where the smack had gone down, and, as he cleared his eyes, he saw the cloudy shape of the steamer far away. "Harry, boy!" he sang out, but Harry must have been hit by a spar, and Jack Brown was left alone on that bleak, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... kissed my hand, and up the ghostly walk between the rose bushes. I wondered uneasily what the Lieutenant would be at, and what he intended; but the lanthorn-light which now fell on the ground at our feet, and now showed one of us to the other, high-lit in a frame of blackness, discovered nothing in his grizzled face but settled hostility. He wheeled at the end of the walk to go to the main door, but as he did so I saw the flutter of a white skirt by the stone seat against the house, and I stepped ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... from time to time in the dark streets beyond. He waited and waited and waited. Now and then a dog or a cat rushed by him, startling him. Then, after twenty minutes or so, he wearied of waiting. Weariness and curiosity defeated caution; he pulled up the trap-door by its ring and peered down into blackness. Blackness, stillness, emptiness, and a queer, mouldy smell. Henry sat on the hole's edge for a full minute, dangling his legs. Then, catching his breath a little (it may or may not have been mentioned that ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... was standing at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and a prodigiously dark alley near where the elevated railroad crosses the street. The time was two o'clock in the morning; the outlook a stretch of cold, drizzling, unsociable blackness until the dawn. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... upspringing, Or its dread opposite flinging Blackness and darkness about thee,— Both are ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... again in a cold, dark room, and he saw gleaming through the blackness a tearful, wistful face which he knew was Nannie's. She was in trouble—she wanted something, she was calling him in weird, spirit ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... and contaminates the animal spirits, it is proper afterwards that he should have a bath of pure and clean water, with abundance of whey; to purify, by the water, the feculency of the foul humour, and by the whey to clarify the blackness of the vapour. But, before all things, I think it desirable to enliven him by pleasant conversations, by vocal and instrumental music, to which it will not be amiss to add dancers, that their movements, figures, and agility may stir up and awaken the sluggishness ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... in torrents over the great battlefield, as Hal Paine and Chester Crawford, taking advantage of the inky blackness of the night, crept from the shelter of the American trenches that faced the enemy across ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... and knees shrouded in blackness! I see your cheeks wet with tears! The walls and the pillars drip blood; the porch is full of shadows, and pale ghosts are hastening out of the gray ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... overhead sprinkled with silver. But a touch of autumn decay was in the air, which was heavy and still, and a white mist was rising in thick, sluggish clouds from the green, stagnant surface of the lake. The wood was veiled in blackness, in which the trunks of the trees were just visible, standing in straight, regular rows, like ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... to think of that; to remember that, only a few blocks away, some of my friends were still dining, or making their way into theaters. But the silence of the house came out to meet me on the threshold, and its blackness enveloped me like a wave. It was unfortunate, too, that I remembered just then that it was, or soon would be, the very ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... muffled though they were, seemed like rifle shots to ears newly accustomed to the silences of the night. But the speed of the motor increased rapidly, and she felt the damp of the river fog brushing her cheek. She could see nothing though she peered into the blackness eagerly. The car was rushing to destruction for all that she knew, yet Karl was driving straight and hard for the entrance of the bridge. Marishka saw the dim gleam of a lantern, heard a hoarse shout, and then the sound of shots lost in the crashing of the timbers of the bridge as they thundered ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... on to riot, and with his own hand had slain the first constable who had endeavoured to do his duty against him. There had been courage in the doing of the deed, and probably no malice; but the deed, let its moral blackness have been what it might, had sent him to Bermuda, with a sentence against him of penal servitude for life. Had he been then amenable to prison discipline,—even then, with such a sentence against him as that,—he might have won his way back, after the lapse of years, ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... in flame! Why was thine hand so strong, thine heart so bold? Wherefore. O dead in anger, dead in shame, The long, long wrestling ere thy breath was cold? O ill-starred Wife, What brought this blackness over all thy life? [A throng of Men and Women ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... had just struck four bells, and there was a gleam of daylight; I was at the helm, with the captain, who had never lain down for above an hour at a time since the gale began, beside me. Suddenly I saw it become lighter ahead, just like a gray shadow against the blackness. I had but just noticed it when the skipper cried out, 'Good God! there is a berg straight ahead, it is all over with us!' and then he gave a shout, 'All hands ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... far off, a faint and feeble little light glimmered, one small point of light in vast blackness. In the whole universe there wasn't anything or anybody but just that tiny light, and swift black water, and drowning me. Something deep within me—I think occultists call it the body-spirit—was clamoring frantically to hold fast to the light, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... note that in spite of the harmony of shapes in Fig. 4 some of the pieces of paper seem unduly prominent because of their blackness. They do not seem harmonious with the gray tone of the others. If we replace them with other pieces gray in color, as in Fig. 5, the result will be a more pleasing relationship of tone throughout the design. Thus we have made a ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... in appalling blackness. Again the dust-choked air was almost unbreathable. The shrieks of the crowd died away in wheezing gasps; and then a wilder ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... wind, man and dog reached their refuge among the rocks, the snow had begun to fall, and the night seemed solid with blackness. The very flakes might have been black as the snow of hell for any gleam they gave. But they arrived at last, and Steenie, making Snootie go in before him, entered the low door with bent head, and closed it ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... sensations of the grim passage into the "Valley of the Shadow"—even to the closing of the coffin-lid and the descent into the grave. Now, in his fever-dream, the dreadful details and sensations imagined in health came to him, but with tenfold vividness. At the point when in the blackness and suffocation of conscious burial horror had reached its extremest limit and the sufferer was upon the verge of real death from sheer terror, relief came. He seemed to feel himself freed from the closeness, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... himself from them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... of wind compelled him to crouch close to the ground, and just as he rose a jagged flash of lightning turned the blackness into a purple glare. Ned's eyes happened to be resting on the channel between the two islands, and in that brief instant of light he saw a boat gliding swiftly down the current, cutting gracefully through the great waves that rose to ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... with a dizziness. The place seemed to spin around and I felt that I was falling. Next, a great weight seemed to press me down like some horrid nightmare. I endeavored to groan, to cry out and struggle from under it, but it held me fast. After this I seemed to be falling backward through a blackness—an inky blackness. It came close to me, and pressed close upon my lips and my eyes. It smothered me; I ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... rugged and marvellous in its granite and snow. For the first time Bob realized that even so immediately behind the scene of his summer's work were other higher, more wonderful countries. As he watched, the peak was lost in the blackness of one of those sudden storms that gather out of nothing about the great crests. The cloud spread like magic in all directions. The faint roll of thunder came down a wind, damp and cool, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... so, not so, unless we weep for joy. The cloud that has so long hung over us in blackness is beginning to break. We have experienced more of gladness this day than has been ours since the last report that the Messiah had ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... from his lips with every shallow breath he could draw, fought the stealthy tide of blackness which crept up his brain, his stubborn will holding to rags of consciousness, refusing to acknowledge the pain of his fatally ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton |
