"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speaking the last sentence, and looked very human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon, of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary. He glanced towards her ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... anxious, watchful days Omega and Thalma went often to the Mirror and gazed into it in search of vapor clouds. And more than once those gossamer-like formations appeared over different parts of the world to gladden their hearts only to fade away before their vision. The reflections of those embryo clouds became less frequent as the days wore on. Omega and Thalma ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... to the beating of my heart I listen'd, and nought else around me heard. How stirless! even a waving gossamer— The mazy motes that rise and fall in air— Had been as signs of life; when, suddenly, As bursts the thunder-peal upon the calm, Whence I had come the clank of feet was heard— A noise remote, which near'd and near'd, and near'd— Even to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Maintain between them intervals as large At least as are the smallest bodies, which, When thrown against us, in our body rouse Sense-bearing motions. Hence it comes that we Sometimes don't feel alighting on our frames The clinging dust, or chalk that settles soft; Nor mists of night, nor spider's gossamer We feel against us, when, upon our road, Its net entangles us, nor on our head The dropping of its withered garmentings; Nor bird-feathers, nor vegetable down, Flying about, so light they barely fall; Nor ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... laces, the gossamer fabrics, the silks and velvets, the jewels, the elegant things from barbaric Russia, the wonders of the Orient, the plainer exhibit of our own land rich in mechanical wonders, the natural products, the sewing-machine that now could do the finest of work, the miniature looms weaving, the queer ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... coal cellar may seem a most curious place to choose to live in; but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home, household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did see him, which you are not likely to do—only a little old man, about a ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... white-winged bird flying from the black tempest screams aloud in their shadowy halls. There, from the high terraces, when the moon is at its full, we see the children of Coradine gathered together, arrayed like no others, in shining garments of gossamer threads, when, like thistle-down chased by eddying winds, now whirling in a cloud, now scattering far apart, they dance their moonlight dances on the wide alabaster floors; and coming and going they pass away, and seem to melt into the moonlight, yet ever to ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... such utter desolation, and where now was lying a bit of blackened paper, which the housemaid's broom had not found when, early in the day, the room was swept and dusted. So Ethelyn's white satin brushed against the gossamer thing, which floated upward for a moment, and then settled back upon the heavy, shining folds. It was Richard who saw it first, and Richard's hand which brushed away the skeleton of Frank's letter from the skirts of his bride, leaving a soiled, yellowish stain, which Susie Granger loudly deplored, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... her high destination, in the meridian of her glory. We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as a mere Rosy Melindi—who are always fishing for pretty complements —who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language, but poor and barren in sentiment. Beset, as she has been, by the intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden, and the artful—no wonder she has sometimes folded ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Saint Cuthbert's corpse they bore. They rested them in fair Melrose; But though alive he loved it well, Not there his relics might repose; For, wondrous tale to tell! In his stone coffin forth he rides, A ponderous barque for river tides, Yet light as gossamer it glides, Downward to Tilmouth cell. Nor long was his abiding there, For southward did the saint repair; Chester-le-Street, and Rippon, saw His holy corpse, ere Wardilaw Hailed him with joy and fear; And, after ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... given at the White House by President Tyler, in honor of the birthday of his eldest granddaughter. Dressed as a fairy, with gossamer wings, a diamond star on her forehead, and a silver wand, she received her guests. Prominent among the young people was the daughter of General Almonte, the Mexican Minister, arrayed as an Aztec Princess. Master ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... alone. He found Mademoiselle de Cressy in charge of the tea-table and the conversation. Like many Frenchwomen, she had a high-pitched voice; she also had definite opinions on matter-of-fact subjects. Now when you have come to talk gossamer with an attractive and sympathetic woman, it is irritating to have to discuss Tariff Reform and the position of the working classes in Germany with somebody else, especially when the attractive and pretty woman does not give you in any way to understand that ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... well go my way," remarked Mr. Carlyon, and Elizabeth nodded; and then Dinah fetched her a light gossamer scarf, which she tied ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... occurrences which alone could prompt its exercise would have rendered it a most efficient instrument in the preservation of the Union, But, sir, if the fact were otherwise— if all the teachings of experience were reversed—better, far better, a rope of sand, aye, the flimsiest gossamer that ever glistened in the morning dew, than chains of iron and shackles of steel; better the wildest anarchy, with the hope, the chance, of one hour's inspiration of the glorious breath of freedom, than ages of the hopeless ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... present, and to come. He serves up, with piquant sauce, occurrences which he would not have thought worthy of mention at his own breakfast-table. He spins out his two or three facts or ideas into the finest and flimsiest gossamer; or tucks them into a postscript, which alone, with the formula, should have been forwarded. He writes in a large hand, and resorts to every kind of device to fill up his sheet, instead of taking the manly course of writing only so long as he had something to say, or, if nothing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... veil of light the near edge of the shore alone stood out almost coal-black with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty miles away the serrated range of the interior stretched across the horizon, its outlines and shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and the openings of the estuary appeared, shining white, like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... foot-lights attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... shone like the dawn rosy-red and his eyelashes stormed the keen-edged blade: the whiteness of his brow resembled the moon shining bright, and the blackness of his locks was as the murky night; and his waist was more slender than the gossamer[FN231] and his back parts than two sand heaps bulkier, making a Babel of the heart with their softness; but his waist complained of the weight of his hips and loins; and his charms ravished all mankind, even as one of the poets saith in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... as she remembered sundry gossamer fabrics which were dignified by the title of party dresses, and which, with many tears, she had folded away as something she should never need in the country, she exclaimed aloud, "Why, can't I have a party here as well as at home? The house is a great deal ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... little social gatherings, where they exchanged pretty loving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed with occasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a long trill—a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip over metal strings as fine as gossamer threads—describe it how you will, you cannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark's throat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirruping exclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or more times repeated, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... above them. Looking up, they saw a dainty green monoplane, with widespread wings and whirring propeller, descending to earth. An instant later the machine had come to a halt on the lawn, alighting as lightly as wind-blown gossamer. In the machine was seated a pretty girl of about Peggy's age, though rather stouter. In harmony with the color of the machine she drove, the newly arrived girl aviator wore a green aviation costume, with a close-fitting motor bonnet. From ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... He had just taken from his trunk the manuscript of a poem begun the preceding Sunday afternoon, and he had some ideas he wanted to fix upon paper before they maliciously seized the first opportunity to vanish, for they were but gossamer. Bibbs was pleased with the beginnings of his poem, and if he could carry it through he meant to dare greatly with it—he would venture it upon an editor. For he had his plan of life now: his day would be of manual labor and thinking—he could think ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Miss Hassett-Bean cried with cold as she dressed, and put on two of everything; but she is luckier than the younger women. Monny and Mrs. East, though warned that nights would be chill, have come clothed in silk and gossamer, and have brought low-necked nightgowns of nainsook trimmed with lace. This was confided to me soon after sunrise by a blue-nosed Biddy, hovering over the kitchen fire and —incidentally—ingratiating herself with the cook. It wouldn't be Biddy if she weren't ingratiating ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... brows to shield his eyes, for the light outside the sill seemed dazzling after the semidark of the flat, he scanned first the opposite roof edges, a whole story higher than he, where sparrows were alighting, and where smoke plumes curled like veils of gossamer; next he scanned ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... it on either side, and on the east side the brook, which is a river in earliest spring, flows with broken gurgles over a stony bed, and slackened her pace, thinking she would walk leisurely there, for the young willows screened the sun like green veils of gossamer, and the wind did not press her back so hard, and then she heard the trot, trot of a ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... as light as gossamer, and his artless manner a triumph of even his incomparable art. Raffles was alive to the danger at last. I saw him refuse more champagne, even as I drained my glass again. But it was not the same danger to us ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... and seer, I must try to paint for you what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life, and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas of men, which are—it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms—are actually the motives of men in a greater ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... deep. There was tremendous boasting and the accounting of unrivaled adventures. In Aladdin's car, however, there was one man who did not join in the fellowship, for he was too sick. He had been a big man and strong, but he looked like a ghost made of white gossamer and violet shadows. His own mother would not have recognized him. He lay back into the corner of a seat with averted face and closed eyes. The more decent-minded endeavored, on his account, to impose upon the noisy a degree of quiet, ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... panic. Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was nearly six months before I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the plains attempt to intrude on the domains of their mountain relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among the tall grass ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... rather, I believe, by way of a contrast to set off her own brilliant complexion and imperial proportions. It is Juno and Arachne. The divine orbs of the goddess turned haughtily upon me, but did not see me,—looked through and beyond me, as if I had been nothing but gossamer, feathers, air; and the little black, bead-like eyes of the insect pierced me maliciously an instant, as the barouche dashed past, and disappeared in the Rue de Rivoli. I was humiliated; I felt that I was recognized,—known as the rash youth who had just called at the Hotel de ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... circuit round the bed and approached the table to look at the hat. A tight knot and a slight tear in the gossamer indicated that it had been discarded very hastily, and Caldew wondered whether Hazel had it on, waiting for an opportunity to slip away from the moat-house, when he had knocked at the door to summon ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of Water. After the disappearance of water, the form of Fire displays itself. When this disappears, the form that becomes perceivable is that of Wind as effulgent as a well-tempered weapon of high polish. Gradually, the form displayed by Wind becomes like that of the thinnest gossamer. Then having acquired whiteness, and also, the subtlety of air, the Brahman's soul is said to attain the supreme whiteness and subtlety of Ether. Listen to me as I tell thee the consequences of these diverse conditions when they occur. That Yogin who ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... sweetly breathed, the hours Wove, like a robe of gossamer, All grace about her, while the flowers Their tints ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... both sides extended covered passages, connected with each other; while in the court were laid out several rockeries. In one quarter were planted a number of banana trees; on the opposite stood a plant of begonia from Hsi Fu. Its appearance was like an open umbrella. The gossamer hanging (from its branches) resembled golden threads. The corollas (seemed) to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the spot, from which Ellen had been so fearfully expelled. Her person was of the smallest size that is believed to comport with beauty, and which poets and artists have chosen as the beau ideal of feminine loveliness. Her dress was of a dark and glossy silk, and fluttered like gossamer around her form. Long, flowing, and curling tresses of hair, still blacker and more shining than her robe, fell at times about her shoulders, completely enveloping the whole of her delicate bust in their ringlets; or at others streaming in the wind. The elevation ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... breathing the same fragrance of honeysuckle—this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this one ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... showed Carington how little chance he had even in Missouri; then Carington's strong-hearted insistence that, in view of the agitation over the ore discoveries at Joplin, he go on "out there" and prospect; and then Carington's foolishly irrelevant heel-piece, "Miss Gossamer sails for Europe Saturday!" and the sudden appeal of the notion to go "out there," its sharp striking-in.... Carington and he taking counsel with some of the other fellows in his rooms later on, all the deep voices roaring at once, all the boys insulting him at once, belittling ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... its closes were— As if the hand of Music through The sombre robe of Silence drew A thread of golden gossamer; So pure a flute the fairy blue. Like beggared princes of the wood, In silver rags the birches stood; The hemlocks, lordly counselors, Were dumb; the sturdy servitors, In beechen jackets patched and gray, Seemed waiting spellbound ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... silky, filleted little heads, and innocent young bosoms half-hidden by all sorts of dainty little conspiracies of lace and lawn. Youth, enchanting, self-absorbed, important, had coolly taken possession of the hall, as it does of everything, for its own happy plans, and something of the gossamer beauty of it seemed to be clouding older and wiser eyes to-night. Sidney found her eyes resting upon Barry's big, shapely hand, as he leaned forward, deep in conversation with Dr. Brown, in the chair ahead, and she was conscious that she wanted to sit back and ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... fifty-seven feet; the entire length of the bridge is two thousand two hundred and fifty-two feet; and it is hung one hundred feet above low-water mark by two cables of wire. Seen from below and at a little distance, it looks like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer under foot than this spider's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... officer across a dew-damped meadow and up a winding lane hung with gossamer-decked briars, until the party halted, ankle-deep among withered leaves, in a dry ditch just outside the wood. There were reasons why each detail of all that happened on that eventful night should impress itself upon Geoffrey's memory, and, long afterwards, when wandering far out in the shadow ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... board the packet excited my more than commiseration; attenuated in form, sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that unnatural light which shines as it were from the tomb. No man could have looked upon them without pity; so attractive, so young, yet so evidently past ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of individual freedom, the last woman in the world to be bullied in her affections, she keenly appreciated the niceness of his attitude. She did this consciously, but deeper than all consciousness, and intangible as gossamer, were the effects of this. All unrealizable, save for some supreme moment, did the web of Daylight's personality creep out and around her. Filament by filament, these secret and undreamable bonds were being established. They it was that could have given the cue ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. Sneer. Well, sir, the puff preliminary. Puff. O, that, sir, does well in the form of a caution. In a matter of gallantry now—Sir Flimsy Gossamer wishes to be well with Lady Fanny Fete—he applies to me—I open trenches for him with a paragraph in the Morning Post.—"It is recommended to the beautiful and accomplished Lady F four stars F dash E to be on ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... intoxication. One of the great flies now came flying past Count Hamilcar with softly buzzing wings. He went "brrr" with his lips and smiled a really cheerful smile as he watched how this queer bundle of gauzy wings and golden gossamer floated deliriously through the sunshine. "Mad with life," he thought, "if all this only has some object. At any rate there is more chance for meaning than for the lack of it, although—if I am a digit in the great calculation, then to be sure I have a meaning, but ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... caught a glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blond cheeks and brunette tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among them to be the darling of that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by those soft, languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women will ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... gem,—the body of it composed of a white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and frail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn we might reasonably predict a domicil of equal fitness and elegance. At least I demand of him as clean and handsome a nest as the King-Bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles beside the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... seem languid, but I am languid. You, with your fine sensibilities, ought to be the first to feel that; but no: you wait, looking exquisite, with eyes like blue-black water, and a mouth, a mouth like a flower. You soft gossamer beauty, I could crush you where you hover; but you won't come and be crushed. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... of districts, cities, towns, The whole world over, tight as beads of dew Upon a gossamer thread: he sifts, he weighs; All things are put to question; he must live Knowing that he grows wiser every day, Or else not live at all, and seeing too Each little drop of wisdom as it falls Into the dimpling cistern of his heart, O, give us once ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... man last night who had just come home from Simla. He saw a great deal of her, and he says that she and her mother were adored in India. They were thought so quaint and sweet—unlike other people—and the girl so lovely, in a sort of gossamer way. And who do you think was always about with them—at Peshawar first, and then at Simla—so that everybody talked? Captain Warkworth! My man believed there ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... praise for the toasted cheese of Wales and England. There is Christopher North's eloquent "threads of unbeaten gold, shining like gossamer filaments (that may be pulled from its tough and ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... nature was becoming idealized. The birds were then mostly silent. They had left their best notes on the hawthorns and among the roses; but the crickets made a cheerful chirrup, and the great brown butterflies displayed their richest velvets, and the gossamer-like insects in the dreamy atmosphere performed dances and undulations full of grace and mystery. And all these marvelous changes imparted to love that sweet sadness which is beyond all words ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... swiftly out of the blackness and stopped beside the cab. She was swathed in a long gossamer, and hooded. The carriage lamps gleamed strong ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... gladness, and gilded her mouse hair with gold, and lit up her eyes, and wove scarves about her with gossamer threads, and beneath her feet tall bluebells offered their heads as ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer- cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... baby thinks? Who can follow the gossamer links By which the mannikin feels his way Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind, and wailing, and alone, Into the light of day?— Out from the shore of the unknown sea, Tossing in pitiful agony;— Of the unknown sea that reels and rolls, Specked ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... a hole in the ground with his toe, and looked up, to see a lovely cobweb like a wheel, circle within circle, spun across a corner of the arch over the gate. Tiny drops glittered on every thread as the light shone through the gossamer curtain, and a soft breath of air made it tremble as if ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... to heaven, — 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong such ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... as the roadside pageant grew gayer and gayer, Rebecca began to brighten and look prettier, for most of her beautifying came from within. The people, walking, driving, or standing on their doorsteps, cheered Uncle Sam's coach with its freight of gossamer-muslined, fluttering-ribboned girls, and just behind, the gorgeously decorated haycart, driven by Abijah Flagg, bearing the jolly but inharmonious fife and drum corps. Was ever such a golden day; such crystal air; such mellow sunshine; such ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Nineteen times did he cast off one of his serpent's skins, and nineteen times did she cast off one of her suits of clothes, till at last she had only her every-day suit left, and he had only his human skin left. Then he threw off his last skin also, and it flew about in the air like a gossamer, whereupon she seized hold of it and threw it into the fire that was burning on the hearth till it was all consumed, and he stood before her no longer a serpent, but a simple Tsarevich. Then they married ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... was glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded sunshine flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... my love, with perfect faith— Am I not as the floating gossamer, Steering through ether on thy guiding breath? Am I not as the clay within thy hand, Taking the shape and image of thy thought? Heed not these idle tongues, that launch their doubts In erring love against thy watchful care. ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... virgin, the suitor, by his prayers and wooing, does all he can to overcome; but here the coyness is in the suitor himself. He has to overcome it by himself, and he cannot. He hardly knows the sort of enemy he has to conquer. Every woman seems to him enclosed in a bell-glass, fine as gossamer, but he cannot break it. He feels himself drawn, but he cannot approach. His heart is yearning; yet he says to himself, no, I do not love. A looker-on calls him inconstant, uncertain, capricious. He is not so; he is bound by viewless fetters, nor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... These symptoms, light as gossamer, resemble the clouds which scarcely break the azure surface of the sky and which they call flowers of the storm. But soon their colors take a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... more, saw no more, and while he was spinning out his gossamer phrases, given over to despair, she heard the song over and over in her mind, as the last image seen pursues a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... passage and opened the door suddenly. Such a dainty pretty Dot, in her new blue muslin dress that almost reached to the ground, and fitted closely to her slender little figure, and a new white straw hat with a new white gossamer floating out behind waiting to be tied when the kisses were all ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... and the people shouted "Long live the Queen!" Blanche veiled her face and trembled; for Victor whispered in her ear that the shouts were for her. And as the people saw her beautiful face through her gossamer veil, they ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... knew. The scientists lay down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human reason could not withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed by the sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the magic of Goliah. How did he do it? It was the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... where, above a large table, a bronze disc depended from the low ceiling. Her carriage was that of health and physical perfection—the effortless harmony of faultless coordination. A scarf of silken gossamer crossing over one shoulder was wrapped about her body; her black hair was piled high upon her head. With a wooden stick she tapped upon the bronze disc, lightly, and presently the summons was answered by a slave girl, who entered, ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of emerald moss the brooklet flows Melodious, and rejoicing as it goes; Past drooping ferns, and through the mazy whir Of insect wings of gold and gossamer. ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a child once ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... which these words were spoken was surprising; and, for a moment, Alice stood staring blankly at this superb cream-fleshed girl, superb in her dress of cream faille, her sensual beauty poetized by the long veils which hung like gossamer-webs from the ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... probably the most exotic touch of all; and beautiful noble mangoes like domes of a green cathedral; and various sorts of canes and shrubs and lilies growing among them. And everywhere leaped and swung the vines—thick ropy vines; knotted vines, like knotted cables; slender filament vines; spraying gossamer vines, with gorgeous crimson, purple, and yellow blooms; and long streamers that dipped to trail in the waters. Below them were broad pads of lotus and water lilies; with alligators like barnacled logs, and cormorants swimming about, and bright-eyed waterfowl. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... the veil lifts,—clean up over your head perhaps, and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... livery were seen receiving the shawls and hats of the guests, as carriage after carriage deposited its brilliant contents at the house of the financier. Mingled with the black coats of the gentlemen, and the gossamer attire of the ladies, were seen the brilliant uniforms of officers of the army and navy. The crowd poured into the magnificent ball room, where, flanked by her husband, and by the indefatigable Monsieur Charmant, the lovely hostess received her guests ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... light on the wings shifting INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came to all at the same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise act with one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings, deer, gossamer spiders, winged ants) the same. Whatever explanation of these facts we favor—whether the possession of swifter and finer means of external communication than we can perceive, or whether a common and inner sensitivity to the genius of the Tribe (the "Spirit of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... give to tell them, those women who tremble and weep, to lift their minds high enough to see beyond their wretchedness! Let them develop and strengthen themselves while still under the yoke, in order to throw it off one day like a gossamer garment which one casts aside ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... the sky she said good-bye to her brothers, and went to the great, wide moor, where the witches lived. There stood a great crop of thistles, all nodding and nodding in the breeze, while the down floated and glistened like gossamer through the air in the moonbeams. The Princess began to pluck and gather it as fast as she could, but she saw long skinny arms outstretched toward her, and, among the thistles, she saw a host of wicked faces all looking at her. Her heart stood still then and she grew icy ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... must have felt its light and gaiety and happiness. The high wide dining-room windows were open and looked, over sloping lawns, down to the Pol and up again to the woods beyond. The trees were faintly purple in the spring sun, daffodils were nodding on the lawn and little gossamer clouds of pale orange floated like feathers across the sky. The large dining-room table was cleared for action, and Gladys Sampson, very serious and important, stood at the far end of the room under a very bad oil-painting of her father, directing operations. The girls were dressed for the most ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Kitty Spruce being permitted by her mother to peep at the 'new lady' through the staircase window, could only draw a long breath and ejaculate: "Oh! Ain't she lovely!" while she followed with eagerly admiring eyes the gossamer trail of Maryllia's white gown on the soft turf, and strained her ears to catch the sound of the sweet voice which suddenly broke ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... people, showing the purity of their refinement. To this day he believes in them. How unostentatious their kindness was: the delicate, scentless air that hung about them: the fresh flowers always near. "Eating with iron forks, an' not a word,—my silver being packed; their under-clothes like gossamer, outside plainer than mine. Bah! I know the real stuff, when I see it, I hope. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... so rapidly did they revolve and so swiftly did we pass them. Higher and higher we went, till even to my untiring spirit the way seemed long. Beautiful creatures in human shape, but as delicate as gossamer, passed us every now and then, some in bands of twos and threes, some alone; and the higher we soared the more dazzlingly lovely these inhabitants of ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... to London signed by Dowie and the models and patterns had been sent to the village and brought to the castle by Jock Macaur. Later there had come rolls of fine flannel and lawn, with gossamer thread and fairy needles and embroidery ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... entered the convent, and found a neat, clean room of eight beds. Two babies had arrived. Six mothers were expectant. In charge of the room was a red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, a Flemish girl, motherly with the babies. Hilda dressed "Pervyse" in a long, white, immaculate dress, and a gossamer shawl, and pinned upon him a gold pin. She set the table in the convent—the cake in the center of the table, with one candle, and snowy blossoms from ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... has done so, is, undoubtedly, one great cause of the poem's popularity. Had he woven any gossamer of reverie or philosophic conjecture over "the Grave," or even shown much personal interest in it, he might have gained a more peculiar set of admirers, but would not have won his way to the world's heart. As it is, the popularity of "The Grave" has been ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... 'Harold, the scorner, thou art ours!' Then, as from the buzz of an army, came voices multitudinous, 'Thou art ours!' I sought to rise, and behold my limbs were bound, and the gyves were fine and frail, as the web of the gossamer, and they weighed on me like chains of iron. And I felt an anguish of soul that no words can speak—an anguish both of horror and shame; and my manhood seemed to ooze from me, and I was weak as a child new born. Then suddenly there rushed forth a freezing wind, as from an air of ice, and the bones ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the heiress. Poor Polly's eyes kept wandering towards them, and (I suppose, because I had heard so much about her) so did mine. It was only a quiet dinner-party, and Miss Chislett had brought out her needlework, some gossamer lace affair, and Leo leant over the sofa where she sat, playing with the contents of her workbox. Polly's eyes and mine were not the only ones turned towards them. Ours was not the only interest ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is not the effect of its antecedent thought, or of some external power? And a diversity of other questions, much more easily put than answered. Descartes, determined as he was to strip off all the garments which the intellect weaves for itself, forgot this gossamer shirt of the "self;" to the great detriment, and indeed ruin, of his toilet when he began to clothe ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... directions we may trace the same essentials: there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. This may be airy, light, and gossamer, or turgid and obscure: it may be commonplace or ponderous. Like Nature, it may have a thousand or a myriad shades to mirror as many moods and tenses. It may have the misty filminess of steam, the limpid deeps of water, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... large circles of gold hung by scarlet cloth from the swords of state;... hatchets of the same were intermixed with them; the breasts of the Ochras and various attendants were adorned with large stars, stools, crescents, and gossamer wings of solid gold.[165] ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within; for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but slightly veiled by the long lashes. Her expression was of sweetness and happiness; it belonged by right to any face that sheltered ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb—more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... illustrated publications; you triumph in them; and you think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why, woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money in gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could only tickle your face, and glitter in your eyes; it could not catch your feet and trip you up: but the bad art can, and does; for you can't like good woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones. If we were at this moment to come across ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... soul; but even as I spoke I saw—I cannot tell what I saw—a moving spot of milky whiteness in that dark and miserable wilderness, no bigger than a man's hand, no bigger than a flower. 'There is something,' I said unwillingly; 'it has no shape nor form. It is a gossamer-web upon some bush, or a ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an assorted cargo of dry-goods ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... remark the girl. At length she came toward them, her arms laden with flowers. She was at the age of ten, with a beautiful, serious face, which some might have called prophetic. Her hair was dark, shining like coal and purple, and gossamer in its fineness; her skin had the blue-whiteness of milk; while from under long black lashes two luminous brown eyes looked thoughtfully at the world. She smiled at the king, who eyed her fondly, and gave her unengaged hand to ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... extremely pleasant place, full of warm currents that took you gently forward without entailing the slightest exertion. But Michael's grave and expectant face—that Michael who had been so eagerly kind about meeting his debts for him—warned him that, however gossamer-like his own emotions were, he must attempt to ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... warm contiguity of numbers, the long lines of windows all aglow at evening, the genial stir and tumult of congregated life, took masterful possession of my mind. Could I bear to relinquish the familiar scene? A thousand threads of use and habit bound me to it, each in itself as light as gossamer, but the whole tough as cords of steel. I foresaw that I had underestimated the ease of my deliverance. It would require a strength of consistent resolution of which perhaps I was not capable. It was but too likely that I should be one of those who put their ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... thoughtless woman's really innocent life. A young girl flirts with a stranger on the street. The result is something disagreeable, and straight-way comes the excuse: "Why, I didn't think! I meant no harm; I just wanted to have a little fun." Now, look me straight in the eye, young gossamer-head, while I tell you what I know. The girl who will flirt with strange men in public places, however harmless and innocent it may appear, places herself in that man's estimation upon a level with the most abandoned of her sex and courts the same regard. Strong language, perhaps ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... his vision. The song was gone, and he heard only the wind softly moving the leaves. It had been vague and shadowy as gossamer, light as the substance of a dream, but it was real to him, nevertheless, and the deep glow of certain triumph permeated his being, body and mind. It was not strange that he had in his nature something of the Indian mysticism ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with her gossamer handkerchief she wiped away the fallen tear. "If the empress were to know this, she would be justly displeased, that, on such a day, my tears should dim the splendor of your little ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... on mountain and on plain! Make gossamer the iron chain! Make prison walls as paper screen, That tyrant maskers may be seen! Let earth as well as heaven be free! So, on, ye ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... one of the gipsies who was ordering and marshalling the rest, a chief. He drew the arrow swiftly but quietly, the string hummed, the pliant yew obeyed, and the long arrow shot forward in a steady swift flight like a line of gossamer drawn through the air. It missed the chief, but pierced the horse he rode just in front of the rider's thigh. The maddened horse reared and fell backwards ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... a coronet a coronal (an "ancestral coronal," p. 74) if you like, as you might call a hat a "swart sombrero," "a glossy four-and-nine," "a silken helm, to storm impermeable, and lightsome as the breezy gossamer;" but, in the long run, it's as well to call it a hat. It IS a hat; and that name is quite as poetticle as another. I think it's Playto, or els Harrystottle, who observes that what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Confess, now, ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... showed beneath her hood, was fine as silk and as glossy; her eyes had the colour of an Italian sky at noon, and her cheeks the delicate tinge of a carnation. The many laces and ribbons, knotted about her dress in a manner most mysterious to Wogan, added to her gossamer appearance; and, in a word, she seemed to him something too flowerlike ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... unreturning days of our youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil its taste. For it is all you have, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the long, poplar-lined road from —— his heart is stirred with the romance of his mission. It is morning and he is bound for the trenches; the early sunshine is tangled in the branches, and silvery gossamer, beaded with iridescent jewels of dew, hang fairylike from the green leaves. Birds are singing, crickets are thridding in the grass and the air is full of the minute clamouring, murmuring and infinitesimal shouting of little living things. Cool, ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... quarters looking as if a lady lived in them, and had but dropped a dainty reminder of herself here and there to give them character—an embroidered dressing-case on the bureau, an attractive travelling work-box on the table by her bed, a photograph, a lace-bordered handkerchief, a gossamer scarf on a chair-back ready for use if she should need it for a stroll in the moonlight with the Skeptic. The closet door, ajar, gave a glimpse of summer frocks, hanging in order on padded hangers brought in a trunk; beneath, a row of incredibly small, smart shoes ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... geaemes and reaeces, Loud a-laughen, wild in me'th, Wi' windblown heaeir, an' zunbrown'd feaeces, Leaepen on the high-sky'd e'th, Avore the lights Wer tin'd o' nights, An' while the gossamer's light netten Sparkled to the ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... poles, had long ignominiously withered in the wind; perhaps it was now only buried overnight for the nonce? Being dug up, or being cut down, and put into the balance, it weighed—less than was expected. It was as light as gossamer, said pious rumor, Had such an excellent odor too;—and came for a mere nothing of gold! This was Adalbert's first miracle after death; in life he had done many hundreds of them, and has done millions since,—chiefly upon paralytic nervous-systems, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... deer, And long to see them reft of fear.— Though well they shun our changeful moods, Taught by our rifle in the woods. Yet we may tell of mercy shown, Power unabused, the birdling flown,— When caught by thistly gossamer— Set free to wing the ambient air. Cautious we watch the gliding snake, 'Neath sheltering stone, or tangled brake, And list the chipmunk's merry trill Proclaim his wondrous climbing skill. The bird; the beast; ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... little of it; but she did not know him thoroughly yet. They took a walk, and the momentous subject was not mentioned: nevertheless, it pressed upon Nick's thoughts. As he talked, the "nighty" that was not, and must be, weighed upon his mind as heavily as though it were a coat of mail instead of the gossamer ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson |
