"Darkling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desolate she fled, and pour'd her thought, "To the dread verge of wild distraction wrought. 260 "White drops of mercy bath'd his hoary cheek, "He pour'd by heav'n inspir'd its accents meek; "In truth's clear mirror bade the mourner's view "Pierce the deep veil which darkling error drew; "And vanquish'd empire with a smile resign, 265 "While brighter worlds in fair perspective shine."— She paus'd—yet still the sweet enthusiast bends O'er the cold turf, and still her tear descends; The ever-falling ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. . . . . . . "Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... and looked up into the darkling heaven of her parasol; and then it occurred to her that her wisest plan would be to laugh. So she laughed. She laughed in almost precisely the same manner as James had heard Susan laugh thirty years previously, before love had come into Susan's life like a shell into ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... as the daylight comes When the darkling night has gone, And the quickened East is tremulous With the ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... lair, till I was feart that folk wid see them, and come peering down and get me. But a herrin' skiff took me away from that place in the dark of the night, and I drifted to the warm South Seas and the darkling women and the white glistening houses; but she came with me, she that had died. I would be seeing her rising before the bows o' the ship, rising from the sea, and waving on me to follow, and the weather was worse and worse at her every coming. An' there ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... enterprises he shared his pleasures with his sons, and so the years passed on with rays of brilliant sunshine piercing the clouds of darkling deeds. Alexandre Dumas has well summed up the character of Cosimo de' Medici: "He had," he says, "all the vices which rendered his private life sombre, and all the virtues which made his life in public renowned for splendour; whilst his family experienced unexampled ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... which the late student entered with all his heart and soul; and then last of all he cast the veil of a divine darkness over him, sent him into a chamber far more retired than that in which he laboured at Cambridge, and set him like the nightingale to sing darkling. The blackness about him was just the great canvas which God gave him to cover with forms of light and music. Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below; the windows of heaven were opened from above; from both rushed the deluge of song which flooded his soul, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... giant-like I stood On a white cliff, topped by a darkling wood. Below me, placid, bright and sparkling, lay The equal waters of a lovely bay. White cliffs surrounded it—and calm and fair It lay asleep, in warm and ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... of all this, was all I look'd to see? The mass of crumbling coffins—some belike (The undermost) with their contents crush'd in, Flatten'd, and shapeless. Even in this damp vault, With more completeness could the old Destroyer Have done his darkling work? Yet lo! I look'd Into a small square chamber, swept and clean, Except that on one side, against the wall, Lay a few fragments of dark rotten wood, And a small heap of fine, rich, reddish earth Was piled up in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... who saw her sitting there, the breeze blowing tendrils of bright hair about her face, her strong, lithe hands clasped youthfully about her knees, her beautiful eyes darkling or brightening with the thoughts that passed, could not have connected her with the mere ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... he might have done better had he shown more art: the wonder is, that he should have produced such magnificent effects with so little. He could not have made the satiated and meditative Harold so darkling and excursive, so lone, "aweary," and misanthropical, had he treated him as the hero of a scholastic epic. The might of the poet in such creations lay in the riches of his diction and in the felicity with which he described feelings in relation to the aspect of scenes amid the reminiscences ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... rever'd: Him, as he fled before him, from behind Eurypylus, Euaemon's noble son, Smote with the sword; and from the shoulder-point The brawny arm he sever'd; to the ground Down fell the gory hand; the darkling shades Of death, and ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... plain and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form. She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... waves roll darkling on, And with the current we must go, Perchance to meet some cheerful beams Of ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... little love-song Elizabeth had learned from Robert Burrell. Her foot had that spring to its lift and fall that shows there is a young innocent heart above it. In and out among the glades she went, almost as brightly and musically as the brook whose sparkling and darkling course she followed. When but a few hundred yards down the path, someone called her. She thought it was a fancy and went onward, nevertheless feeling a sudden silence and trouble. Immediately she heard footsteps ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... tided oceans ebb and flow; The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, O'erlap and move the universe; The workings of the law whence springs The rhythmic harmony of things, Which shapes in earth the darkling spar, And orbs in heaven the morning star. Of all I see, in earth and sky,— Star, flower, beast, bird,—what part have I? This conscious life,—is it the same Which thrills the universal frame, Whereby the caverned crystal shoots, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... when they came to the open land They wheeled, deployed and stood; Midmost were Marcus and the King, And Eldred on the right-hand wing, And leftwards Colan darkling, In the last ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... a last retreat Deep in the darkling dell, Where stands, amidst embowering oaks, A hermit's ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... the river that ran through the city—the same mighty fatherly river that washed the walls of his native town up north. In the river Christophe could recover the memory of his childish dreams.... But in his sorrow they took on, like the Rhine itself, a darkling hue. In the dying day he would lean against the parapet of the embankment and look down at the rushing river, the fused and fusing, heavy, opaque, and hurrying mass, which was always like a dream of the past, wherein nothing could be clearly seen but great moving veils, thousands ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... From earth can reach souls freed from earth's alloy, 'Tis sure the joy to know kind hands are here Drying the widow's and the orphan's tear; Helping them gently o'er lone life's rough ways, Sending what light may be to darkling days— A better service than to hang with verse, As our forefathers ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... to me as if there never had been such a day. I look at the sky as we drive along to the station. Call it sapphire, turquoise—indeed! What dull stone that ever lived darkling in a mine is fit to be named even in metaphor with this pale yet brilliant arch that so softly leans above us? It seems to me as if all the people we meet were handsome and well-featured—as if the Elbe were the noblest ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... he had done dread things; he became a tradition, a legend, and a warning to the young; a Richard in the bush to frighten colts. He was preached at boys caught playing marbles "for keeps": "Do you want to grow up like Joe Louden?" The very name became a darkling threat, and children of the town would have run had one called suddenly, "HERE COMES JOE LOUDEN!" Thus does the evil men do live after them, and the ill-fame of the unrighteous increase ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vale, To keep her tryst with Ulnor's lord; A warrior clad in coat of mail Stood darkling by ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... take the form of studied religious indifference. After defying and being expelled by Louis XV., he adopted (what has never, perhaps, been observed) the wild advice of d'Argenson ('La Bete,' and Louis's ex- minister of foreign affairs), he betook himself to a life of darkling adventures, to a hidden and homeless exile. In many of his journeys he found Pickle in his path, and Pickle finally made his labours vain. The real source of all this imbroglio, in addition to an exasperated daring and a strangely secretive temperament, was a deep, well-grounded ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... moment, when their orbit passes into the lighted heavens, and then they disappear in the shadow of the earth. But astronomers tell us that they are always there though to us they seem to blaze but for a moment. We cannot see them, but they move on their darkling path and have a sun round which they circle. So be sure that in many heathen lands there are believing souls, seen by us but for an instant and then lost, who yet fill their unseen place, and move obedient round the Sun of Righteousness. Their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... so the moon now peers Out of darkling clouds. The sad, Sleepless waterfalls forever ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... moonlight glow Like this and this?" What did she think Of him whose hands at Love's command Made Life as honey o'er the brink Of Death drip slow, darkling and slow? Ah, did ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... softly from the floor, and moved toward the door. She passed the looking-glass on the dressing-table as she went, and cast a darkling glance into it. A haggard ghost seemed to stare back at her, with crazy eyes. A braid of brown, silky hair had become loosened, and was creeping down upon the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... mystery of her melody and the charm of her young voice. Presently other voices joined in, all in the same meditative, somewhat doleful rhythm. Gayer strains would have sounded sacrilegiously out of tune with the darkling glint of the river, with the mysterious splash of its waves against the bobbing bulkheads of the pier, with the starry enchantment of the passing ferry-boats, with the love-enraptured solemnity ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... they went. In this order they made the circuit of the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar. The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart. Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal, military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison catch. The little girls were timid and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... art! And yet there dwells Within thy sylvan solitudes A memory which darkling broods And all thy ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of men broke into the courtyard, Brian fired the remaining three cannon as fast as he could touch linstock to powder. The bullet-hail tore the front ranks to shreds, but through the darkling smoke-cloud he saw other men come leaping, and knew that the game ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... scattered now? To them was linked the long forgotten quiver Of nights of youth, those evening hours in which Vague fear with monstrous, sultry happiness Was mingled, and the perfume of young locks With darkling breezes wafted from ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... canvas and stepped inside. She saw a folding camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself beside her. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... your son, who slipp'd away from her To meet with Mall my sister in a place, Where I appointed; and my mother too Seeks for my sister; so they both are gone: My mother hath a torch; marry, your wife Goes darkling up and down, and Coomes ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... endurable. The wind-swept crests, the undulating, barren plains no longer spoke of a boundless freedom and the elemental battle. These things had become something to forget in the absorbing claim of a life to come, wherein the harshness of battle had no place. The darkling woods, scarce trodden by the foot of man, no longer possessed the mystic charm of childhood's fancy. The trackless wastes held only threat, upon which watchful eyes would now gladly close. The stirring glacial fields ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... waited long to see his figure loom; And naught aroused me save his weeping voice of tender tone * And whispered I, 'Fair fall thy foot and welcome and well come!' His cheek I kissed a thousand times, and yet a thousand more; * Then clipt and clung about his breast enveiled in darkling room. And cried, 'Now verily I've won the aim of every wish * So praise and prayers to Allah for this grace now best become.' Then slept we even as we would the goodliest of nights * Till morning came to end our night and light up earth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... rather than of epic or drama—whose theatre is the human will. To such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... cowardly heart shall perish, and shall not parry the thrust of death by flight, though it bury itself in a valley, or crouch in darkling dens. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Though the fountain cease to play, Dew must glitter near the brink, Though the weary mind decay, As of old it thought so must it think. Leave alone the darkling eyes Fixed upon the moving skies, Cross the hands upon the bosom, there to rise To the throb of ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... soul Soars Fancy's flight beyond the Pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole In low pursuit— Know, prudent, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... breath; The quiet air of the New England town Seems confident that everyone is home Safe by his fire. The frosty stars look down Near, near above the kind familiar trees In whose dry branches roam The gentle spirits of the darkling breeze. Deep in its caverned heart the forest sings Of mysteries unknown and vanished lore; Old wisdom; dead desire; Dreams of the past, of immemorial springs.... The wind is rising cold from the river: close ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... and hillward the roads are sweet with fern. All day the windless heaven pavilions the sea-blue, Then twilight comes and drenches the sultry dells with dew. The lone white star of evening comes out among the hills, And in the darkling forest begin the whip-poor-wills. The fireflies that wander, the hawks that flit and scream, And all the wilding vagrants of summer dusk and dream, Have all their will, and reck not of any after thing, Inheriting ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... Silent, sequester'd, few demand, I ween, That last perfection Phidian chisels gave. Dimly the soft and musing Form is seen In the hush'd, shelly, shadowy, lone concave.— As sleeps her pure, tho' darkling fountain there, I love to recollect her, stretch'd supine Upon its mossy brink, with pendent hair, As dripping o'er the flood.—Ah! well combine Such gentle graces, modest, pensive, fair, To aid the magic of ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled into ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect—the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George's Hill and the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... deck-watch ye show, Why, lads, so silent here to me, Your watchmate of times long ago? Once, for all the darkling sea, You your voices raised how clearly, Striking in when tempest sung; Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly, Life is storm—let storm! you rung. Taking things as fated merely, Childlike though the world ye spanned; Nor holding unto life ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... road, with dark hedges of Norway spruce drawn about it like a funeral scarf. The panelled wooden shutters of the front windows were never opened, and a stranger passing by would have thought the house uninhabited; but all Elmerton knew that behind those darkling hedges and close shutters, somewhere in the depths of the tall many-chimneyed house, lived—"if you can call it living!" Mrs. Tree said—Miss Virginia Dane. Miss Dane was a contemporary of Mrs. Tree's,—indeed, report would have her some years older,—but she had no other point ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... throws it by. Oh, then with mad disdain we spurn A mother's gentle teaching; throw Her bosom from us, and we burn, To rush in freedom, where the glow Of pleasure lights the dancing wave: We launch the bark, we woo the gale, And reckless of the darkling grave That yawns ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... far around star-gleams are sparkling Amid the twilight space; And Earth, that lay so cold and darkling, Has veiled her dusky face. Are those the Normes that beckon onward As if to Odin's board, Where by the hands of warriors nightly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... scenes that followed. Darkling, I passed again through the station called Sybaris, and on and on by the sea-shore, the sound of breakers often audible. From time to time I discerned black mountain masses against a patch of grey sky, or caught a glimpse of blanching wave, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... imprison her sad gaze, All still the sky and darkling drearily; She feels the chilly breath of dear, dead days Come ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... darkling, No stately hollyhocks dim; She is only thinking and dreaming Of the garden, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... and resumed his task of baling with renewed zest. "Nevertheless," he continued, "it will be well to keep her afloat as long as we may, since she affords a bigger mark to steer for than would the heads of us two afloat upon the darkling water." ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... gripped it and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the darkling populous about them with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... their affection rested. When two hearts have thus by mutual gift bestowed themselves the one upon the other and become fused and molten into one, is it possible ever to sever the connection? But the kiss they had exchanged the day before, among the darkling shadows of the forest, was replete with the joy of their new-found safety and the hope that their escape awakened in their bosom, while this was the kiss of parting, full of anguish and doubt unutterable. Would they meet again some day? and how, under ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... elected to cross by way of the Pont des Invalides—how unwisely was borne in upon him almost as soon as he turned from the brilliant Quai de la Conference into the darkling rue Francois Premier. He had won scarcely twenty yards from the corner when, with a rush, its motor purring like some great tiger-cat, a powerful touring-car swept up from behind, drew abreast, but instead of passing checked speed until its pace ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... heart, auspicious Smile! As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam: What time, in sickly mood, at parting day 5 I lay me down and think of happier years; Of joys, that glimmer'd in Hope's twilight ray, Then left me darkling in a vale of tears. O pleasant days of Hope—for ever gone! Could I recall you!—But that thought is vain. 10 Availeth not Persuasion's sweetest tone To lure the fleet-wing'd Travellers back again: Yet fair, though faint, their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sir, said Starbuck drawing near, 'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one. Omen? omen? —the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint. —Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... and flinging a wet orange gleam to the west, a tumble of creamy foam about her to her rolling, shadows like the passage of phantom hands hurrying over her sails to the swaying of her masts, and the swelling sea darkling from ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... Knew her, as even she her mother knew; Ne'er from her bosom's harbourage he flew But 'round her hopping here, there, everywhere, Piped he to none but her his lady fair. 10 Now must he wander o'er the darkling way Thither, whence life-return the Fates denay. But ah! beshrew you, evil Shadows low'ring In Orcus ever loveliest things devouring: Who bore so pretty a Sparrow fro' her ta'en. 15 (Oh hapless birdie and Oh deed of bane!) Now by your wanton work my girl appears With ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... gleaming with statues, and bright with a hundred thousand flowers; of the bridges and shining fountains and rivers wherein the castle windows reflect their festive gleams, when the halls are filled with happy feasters, and over the darkling woods comes the sound of music;—always, I say, when I think of Castle Bluebeard:—it is to think of that dark little closet, which I know is there, and which the lordly owner opens shuddering—after midnight—when he ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mountain with its headlong gulfs Had lost all memory of the world below; For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain A burning sun, and every sun the lord Of its own darkling planets,—all those lights Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth, Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns, Trembling and indistinguishable from stars, In those black gulfs around the mountain's feet. Then, into the glimmering dome, with ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... from me. I walked up and down our rock cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward that flared ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... bloodhounds now they search me out,— Hark, to the whistle and the shout! If farther through the wilds I go, I only fall upon the foe; I'll couch me here till evening gray, Then darkling try ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... speaking through the facts of Christ's death and Resurrection and Ascension, has given to us the sure and certain hope of immortality, and has declared to us plainly the conditions upon which that immortality may be ours, and the woful loss and eclipse into the shadow of which we shall stumble darkling if it is not ours, then surely that is a reason for prizing and laying to heart, and living by the revelation so mercifully made. People do not usually kick over their telescopes, and neglect to look through them, because they are so powerful that they show them the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "The darkling pathway o'er the restless waters Of seven seas that circle Death's domain I trod, and followed after earth's sad daughters Torn from their loved ones and ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! 30 He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... when darkness fills The dismal days with darkling ills, Rest in the calm the promise gives, That Christ, thy Light ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... highest and most solitary part of the by-road. On the left, a row of fieldside trees beshaded it; on the right, it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his eyes returned to the cabman's face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John's communication, with the air of one ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shouldst indeed see wondrous things * That would efface all sorrows and disperse all sores of sprite:' Then deigned our Caliph's Bride to cry, 'Where is that dress of thine?' * And I replied, 'In house of him kept darkling as the night.' So down upon it pounced Masrr and brought it unto her, * And when 'twas there each feather cast a ray of beaming light: Therewith I took it from his hand and opened it straightway * And saw its plumd bosom and its buttons pleased ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... saw that flood, Which now so dull and darkling steals, Thick, here and there, with human blood, 35 To ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... a bit does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter or to parley with fortune—when she declares ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... something about you (not all, mind—no, no; no man knows that).—Ah, my bride, my ringdove, my rose, my poppet—choose, in fact, whatever name you like—bulbul of my grove, fountain of my desert, sunshine of my darkling life, and joy of my dungeoned existence, it is because I DO know a little about you that I conclude to say nothing of that private closet, and keep my key in my pocket. You take away that closet key then, and the house key. You lock Delia in. You keep her out of harm's way and gadding, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... sees, on the horizon, Something darkle in the sunlight, Something blue upon the billows, Speaks these words in wonder guessing: What is this upon the surges, What this blue upon the waters, What this darkling in the sunlight? 'Tis perhaps a flock of wild-geese, Or perchance the blue-duck flying; Then upon thy wings arising, Fly away to highest heaven. "Art thou then a shoal of sea-trout, Or perchance a school of salmon? Dive ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... wedding festivities, as you may remember, for you were our honoured guest at the time, and greatly displeased at his absence," he resumed, after a few seconds of darkling reflection. "None of us knew where he had flown to, for he did not evidently consider his owl's nest sufficiently remote; but we had his fraternal blessing to sustain us. And after that he continued to make periodical disappearances to his retreat, stopping away each time ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden without ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... waste-paper basket she had bought for him, and found him sitting at the little toilet table at which he was to "write." The outlook was, for a London outlook, spacious, down a long slope of roofs towards the Junction, a huge sky of blue passing upward to the darkling zenith and downward into a hazy bristling mystery of roofs and chimneys, from which emerged signal lights and steam puffs, gliding chains of lit window carriages and the vague vistas of streets. She showed him the basket and put it beside him, and then her eye caught the yellow document ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... as their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a very darkling mood—"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives? Wouldn't that be ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... speak. A stone could have been no colder as she stood in the light of the fire, her face still and strong, the eyes darkling, luminous. There was on her the dignity of the fearless, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sleep, and sleeping hear, The while we dare to call thee dear, So may thy dreams be good, altho' The loving power thou dost not know. As music parts the silence,—lo! Through heaven the stars begin to peep, To comfort us that darkling pine Because those fairer lights of thine Have set into the Sea of Sleep. Yet closed still thine eyelids keep; And may our voices through the sphere Of Dreamland all as softly rise As through these shadowy rural dells, Where bashful Echo somewhere dwells, ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... her good-naturedly; and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth's rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to labor and effort, viz.: the lash, when another, viz.: money, might be added with good effect. Fear, and the other low and bad qualities of the slave, are appealed to, but never the good. The relation, therefore, between capital and labor, which ought to be generous and confiding, is darkling, suspicious, unkindly, full of reproachful threats, and without concord or peace. This condition of things renders the interests of society a prey to politicians. Politics cease ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... away is gliding The pleasant Oxus's stream, I see the green glades darkling, I see the clear pools gleam. I hear the bulbuls calling From blooming tree to tree. Wave, bird, and tree are singing, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... of the Sun (Bright cynosure of every darkling sign, Wherein all numbers consummate in One,) Poised on the bolt of an Un-finite line, As one whose spirit's state, Is unafraid but desperate, Through far unfathomed fears, Through Time to timeless years, I soar, through ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... mountain where I stood, Homesick for happiness, Only a narrow valley and a darkling wood To cross, and then the long distress Of solitude would be forever past,— I should be home at last. But not too soon! oh, let me linger here And feed my eyes, hungry with sorrow, On all this loveliness, so near, And ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind? Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise, No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?— Enquirer, cease; petitions yet remain, Which Heaven may hear; nor deem religion vain. Still raise for ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... sprang the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the selfsame seas By each was cleaving, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence. He who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow-beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of that great ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... fight the warriors followed these; And, as they charged, the thunder-tramp of men And steeds, and clang of armour, rang to heaven. As when a rushing mighty wind stirs up The barren sea-plain from its nethermost floor, And darkling to the strand roll roaring waves Belching sea-tangle from the bursting surf, And wild sounds rise from beaches harvestless; So, as they charged, the wide earth ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Richard! if my brother died, 'T was but a fatal chance; For darkling was the battle tried, And ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of ill-omen, and the darkling sky but reflected the gloom of our faces; our thoughts were in keeping with the day, for we had lost a shipmate, one among us was gone, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... weight of grief that oppresses me takes from me that lightness which is necessary to follow your quick & winged motions alas in the midst of my course one thought would make me droop to the ground while you would outspeed me to your Kingdom of Glory & leave me here darkling ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... woman, her face darkling with passion, "he is Victor's brother, and he is no good. He drinks and gambles and makes the big noise with his mouth. Bou, wou, wou! I am the big man! I can do this! I can do that! I am the best man in the world! Always he has lived in the towns in the winter and spent his money but this winter ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... wide sea-beach, all sparkling With coral sand and many-tinted shells, While high above, in tropic rankness darkling, A cloud of verdure ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... nuncle, The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had it head bit off by it young. So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... wind and wave and wood— Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters Betraying the close kisses of the wind— And win him unto me: and few there be So gross of heart who have not felt and known A higher than they see: They with dim eyes Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee To understand my presence, and to feel My fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with power. I have rais'd thee nigher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man's first, last home: and thou with ravish'd sense Listenest the lordly music flowing ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... Darkling and strange art thou thus vexed and chidden; More dark and strange thy veiled agony, City of storm, in whose grey heart are hidden What stormier woes, what lives that groan and beat, Stern and thin-cheeked, against ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... thy thought; nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze, At darkling cloisters paved with tombs, where rot the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... plaster bulk of the Presbyterian Church, the drug store and dwelling of Dr. Pelliter, and was on the outskirts of the village. The shadow of the western range had now slipped across the valley and nearly climbed the opposite wall; lavender scarfs of mist veiled the far, jumbled peaks in the darkling rift; slim, swaying columns of smoke from the clustered chimneys of Greenstream towered dizzily through the shaded air to where, high above, they were transformed to gold by the last, up-flung rays ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the twilight, the western glow of clear- burning fires, bringing no weariness of heat but the exquisite coolness of darkling airs, is of all the ceremonial of the day the most solemn and sacred moment. The dawn has its own splendours, but it brightens out of secret mists and folded clouds into the common light of day, when the ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... shalt feel Their eloquent music from thee steal Those darkling thoughts, that should mournfully twine With the light, the life, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... thinking this, the first time she saw the passenger with the red hair. She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having unconsciously intruded and having been ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not very easy under this hint,'Ha!—aye,' he said; 'it is time to be going, neighbour. I have a many miles to ride, and I care not to ride darkling in these parts. You and I, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... had occurred, I might find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never look at Blithedale more. Had it been evening, I would have stolen softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then, were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide in, and take my place among them, without a word. My entrance might ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... if his thought recurred, At such a time, to England and the maid Beloved, to whom he gave his plighted word Ere parting? Who will wonder at the shade Of sorrow darkling on his troubled brow, As he reflects on what may not ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... eyes to those of Megabyzus, he saw them filled with a strange fire—eyes like those of an evil spirit, gleaming behind the living windows of darkling hue. It was but for a moment, and the priest turned ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... my Love's endangered state, Wrought by keen anguish mad, I struck at fate, Prostrating mockingly in sport or hate The aspirations, darkling, we Cherish and ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... (after a lively college breakfast, or a "commonising" with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... appreciated by many liberals. Patience, ob- servation, intellectual culture, reading, writing, exten- sive travel, and twenty years in the pulpit, have equipped him as a critic who knows whereof he speaks. His allu- sion to Christian Science in the following paragraph, [15] glows in the shadow of darkling criticism like a mid- night sun. Its manly honesty follows like a benediction after prayer, and closes the task of talking to deaf ears and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... arrived at a hillside, at the foot of which lay the lake, whose darkling waters were just distinguishable through an opening in the trees. As the duke was debating with himself whether to go on or retrace his course, the trampling of a horse was heard behind them, and looking in the direction ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... thought toward passion moved with dread, Like one who, hurrying to be wed, Steps, darkling, ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... goes, stands the bridge all sparkling; And his mind bewilder'd grows, and his eye swims darkling. Wakening, giddying, then comes in, with a deadly fright, Memory of all his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps the just, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, and drives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, golden borders ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... faint spectre of itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It's like a hole in this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine. No—not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling sky. Just by it there's a group of stars like ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... read Michelet's Louis Quatorze et la Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged tragedies of Madame and of Moliere, as they look, darkling and sombre, out of their niches in the great gingerbread facade of the Grand Age, go ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to betray me?" cried Bartolomeo, with a darkling look at Bonaparte. "Do you know that there are still ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... patriotic partiality that makes one lament the disappearance of this careful and honourable figure crowded out by meaner men at meaner wages, by the German waiter who has learnt five languages in the course of running away from his own, or the Italian waiter who regards those he serves with a darkling contempt which must certainly be that either of a dynamiter or an exiled prince. The human and hospitable English waiter is vanishing. And Dickens might perhaps have saved ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
