"Shimmer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perhaps, who needed some attention. She could tell afterwards the very pattern of the lace on the fine nightgown, and describe how the fair curls clustered on the lady's neck. It was only when the lady disappeared before her, a white shimmer down the darkness of the underground corridor, that the poor thing realized she had seen a ghost, and fell fainting, with a clatter of her dustpan and brush ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... we cherish, savage while so tender, Do the lilies perish mourning their lost splendor? Does the diamond shimmer brightlier that eternal Time makes nothing dimmer of its ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o'clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said. "I am feverish: I hear the wind blowing: I will go out of doors ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... miles wide. He was still on the Home ranch. A few miles to the south he could just make out the line of wire fence that separated it from the third division; and to the north, seen faint and blue through the haze and shimmer of the noon sun, a long file of telegraph poles showed the line of the railroad and marked Derrick's northeast boundary. The road over which Presley was travelling ran almost diametrically straight. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Immermann's own statement, he began Muenchhausen without a shimmer of an idea as to how he would finish it; but he finished it, having in the meantime gone through a complete inner transformation, in a way that surprised even himself and greatly pleased his readers. We have here, consequently, a novel which, though written as a whole, falls naturally into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... know, those gray old wives, The sights we see in our daily drives: Shimmer of lake and shine of sea, Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It wasn't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... tagging around after you, suggesting by their mere presence that, unless you're watched, you'll do something desperate in the wild desire to break the monotony. Well, I drank deep of that life," Constance looked dreamily over the stretch of meadow and pine-edged woods, all dazzling with a shimmer of icy snow, "before ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... came to the mouth of the ravine, and there the voices of the people woke him. And Rold knew nothing that he had done in his sleep, and looked in amazement at the sword in his hand and said: 'What art thou, thou beautiful thing? Lights shimmer in thee, thou art restless. It is the sword of Welleran, the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... my hand, then, come with me By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . . Look how the long volutes of foam unfold To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . . Take my hand, Do not remember how these depths are cold, Nor how, when you are dead, Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head. You lean your face upon your hands and cry, The blown sand whispers about your feet, Terrible seems it now to die,— Terrible ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... the fiery glow, Salamander! Rushingly together flow. Undine! Shimmer in the meteor's gleam, Sylphide! ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... few moments a big hole was torn in the side of the "Crown of Castille" and with a gurgling sound the waters rushed in. At the same time long, yellow threads of the finest oats floated far out on the sea and, glistening with a golden shimmer, gave proof long after the steamer had sunk of the precious cargo which had lain within its flanks. You poor French army horses, I fear your rations were cut short ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... was headed straight out across the fjord, and the long line with its trailing hooks hauled in and coiled up neatly in the bottom of a shallow tub. Peer's heart was beating. There came a tug—the first—and the faint shimmer of a fish deep down in the water. Pooh! only a big cod. Peer heaved it in with a careless swing over the gunwale. Next came a ling—a deep water fish at any rate this time. Then a tusk, and another, and another; these would please the women, being good eating, and perhaps make them hold ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... gleaming eyes, warm graspings from outstretched hands. And well windeth the river into grim old caves, and even the merriest boat that King Cole ever launched flitteth by the dark doors, intent only on the brilliant chateaux, that shimmer above in the gorgeous sunlight of a brave Espagne. But laughing imps, with flying feet, venture singly into these realms of the Unknown. Bright streameth the light there from carbuncles and glowing rubies; ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest; and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun. A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... wondrous men, by their sides they had sacks of the otter's skin, And about their bodies the sacks were tied, and they carried their harps within, With stitches of silver and golden thread each case for a harp was sewed; And, beneath the embroidery gleaming red, the shimmer of rubies showed! ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... attached to the completed receptors. Those that were still full bulked enormous, like ghostly moons. The Jovian gases that strained their tough elastomer did not much blur the stars seen through them; but they swelled high enough to catch the light of the hidden sun and shimmer with it. The nearly discharged balloons hung thin, straining outward. Two full ones passed in slow orbit against the constellations. They were waiting to be hauled in and coupled fast, to release their loads into the Station's ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... ordeal. Just as I stepped forward, the slab of rock on which the girl lay broke off in front of me, and, tipping up, overturned itself into the chasm. Far below I could see the shimmer of the girl's dress as her body went plunging down into that awful pit. And remembering her generous courage and offer of self-sacrifice, I felt tears rise in my eyes. But there was ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... it foolish? The Di down there is the Diaphanous, too. Some pioneer poet named it for its shimmer, but what good did it do? Missouri promptly called it the 'Di.' No more good is it to name a child Salome in the backwoods of Missouri. She's bound to grow up Sally. I've always been Sally, except at school. I'll always be Sally down here with ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... stacklike granaries. There were a few other ships in the air at the fifty-thousand-foot level, and below, swarms of small airboats darted back and forth on different levels, depending upon speed and direction. Far ahead, to the northeast, was the shimmer of the Red Sea and the hazy ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... too, for he was leaning as far away from the fire as he could without jibing his chair, and through the delicate haze of roasting tweed that surrounded him I could see something wistfully appealing in his glance. The Lawyer, too, had a mysterious shimmer in his loyal eyes, but his old training in the P. and O. service had been too strong for him. He would never speak, I felt sure, while his commanding officer had ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... wild melancholy singing. The singing and the recurrent splash grew louder, filled the silence of the river, grew softer; and presently the receding oars flashed again, below the island. But not until the last glint was lost in the shimmer of the water, the last sound had died out of the summer night, did the Brazilian begin to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... owed her every possible reparation, he was resolved to shield her womanly pride from any additional wounds. He withdrew his encircling arm, released her hand, walked to the end of the aviary, and stood watching the shimmer of the fountain, where two of the ring-doves held their wings aslant to catch the spray. After some moments she joined him, and laid her slender fingers ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... beautiful tall flower in this garden of flowers. There was a strange simplicity, too, about her dress—a plain, tight-fitting, tight-sleeved dress of unrelieved black, her only adornment being some bands of big blue beads worn loosely round the neck. The black figure, in this shimmer of rose-pink and gold and flowers, was effective enough; but even the finest of pictures or the finest of statues has not the subtle attraction of a graceful carriage. Macleod had never seen any woman walk as this woman walked, in so stately and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... beneath the statue— had passed by and had not seen her. Indeed, the night at present was so dark, that one standing still and looking for her would hardly be able to define her figure. And yet, dark as it was, she could see something of the movement of the waters beneath her, some shimmer produced by the gliding movement of the stream. Ah! she would go now and have done with it. Every moment that she remained was but ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... distance, above Madrid a bright glow began to appear, irradiated by the lights of the city; a few tombstones in the cemetery cast a pallid shimmer. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... and sat looking seaward, singing a difficult passage, in the midst of which her nimble voice tripped on an E flat, and, missing the staccato step, rolled helplessly down in a legato flood of melody; whereupon, with an impatient grimace she shut her eyes, weary of watching the wave-shimmer that almost dazzled her. After a few seconds, when she opened them, there stood just on the edge of the cliff, as if poised in air, a woman whose face and form were as sharply cut in profile on the azure sea and sky as white cameo features on black ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... had your study-hours at night." I am sure that's what you are thinking. I thought so too, and put the thought into practice; but then it would be moonlight sometimes, and the white beams would shimmer on the water, and the regular beat and dash of the oars would come to my ears in time with the wild, chanting melody of the boatmen's song. That was just the way of it on the night when I heard this story; and when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... over the awful tide of intervening years—so full, and yet so short—I seem to see the shimmer of her golden hair—an aureole of light blazing on the borders of boyhood: "For this, and all thy bounties, ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... Titan Goblet, like the visioned future which glows before the sight of happy youth, and then vanished. The gold rim vanished also; still there appeared to be no disposition among the party to leave the scene. Twilight began to shimmer, and now the stars trembled forth from the dusky sky. At last night settled on the landscape, and the girls expressed a wish to see the hollow lighted up with torchlight. Scattering ourselves amongst the trees of the bank, some splinters of the pitch pine were procured, and matches ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... glorious that he closed his eyes involuntarily and still he saw the vision in the dull-green gown, with the scarf of old gold about her shoulders and the skin peering out here and there, dazzling white. And there were two lights, the barbaric red of the jewels in her hair, and the black shimmer of her eyes. He drew back a step more. It was a picture to be ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might assume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral variation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that supports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly devoted to expressing ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... see one straight line of houses there,' I observed, shading my eyes with my hand. 'But it is distant, and the shimmer of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the tissues of the body to be more or less fluorescent. All animal infusions show this fluorescence. The crystalline lens of the eye exhibits the effect in a very striking manner. When, for example, I plunge my eye into this violet beam, I am conscious of a whitish-blue shimmer filling the space before me. This is caused by fluorescent light generated in the eye itself. Looked at from without, the crystalline lens at the same time is ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... white silk and the feather?" asked Merry, delighted with the silvery shimmer of the one and the graceful droop of the other, though both were ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... of bed in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... More I learned from her diary. This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought by ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... figures, a circular convex mirror sparkles on the wall reflecting the backs of the figures. Thin lines delicately repeat the red in the mirror frame, which has a black and red inner moulding. A string of amber beads hangs on the wall, and repeats the shimmer of the bright brass candelabra which hangs aloft, and which is drawn carefully enough for a ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... precisely as our own moon is, by reason of the shimmer of sunlight which they reflect. But as they revolve round their great planet they plunge into his shadow at one part of their course, and so become eclipsed from sunshine and invisible to us. The moment of disappearance can ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seated near the only window of their sordid apartment in the afternoon of a sultry summer day; the sun is shining without with overpowering splendor; a heated vapor rises from the paved streets and seems to shimmer in the breathless atmosphere. Edith had lost all the freshness and roundness of youth; her cheek was deadly white, and her emaciated form seemed to indicate the approach of the terrible disease of which her brother had died. She was sewing industriously, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... she was really enchanted. The room full of people, smiling and happy, the changing figures, the light airy dresses, the shimmer of silks, the cloudlets of lace, the soft flying curls, for so many people wore ringlets still, the happy smiling faces, and the throb of the music was intoxicating. It was a strange, delightful world that she had gone into with her first long gown ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... parsonage, and in my visiting-time I occupy this tower. It is quite deserted when I am away, for I carry the key, and keep it with me wherever I go. I hang it at night where I can see the great shadow wavering on the ceiling above my head, when the jet of gas, trembling in the night-wind below, sends a shimmer of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... herself in a low wicker chair and wiped the dust from her long riding boots with the silk handkerchief she wore loosely tied about her neck. A few moments later her brown eyes were gazing fixedly out at the shimmer of heat which hovered low ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... gay! the wilderness was floral, The sea a bath of wine to the laughing swimmer; Dawn was a flaming fan; dusk was a glimmer Like undersea where sly dreams haunt the coral. The garden sang of fame when the golden shimmer Of sun glowed on the proud leaves of the laurel,— But time and love fought out their ancient quarrel; The songs are fainter now; the lights ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... moonlight, and heard some one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange-groves, and from them came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like sunlight; large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to shimmer with a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave, and above it floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had that deep, mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes, halting at every rise, and peering ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... me, O thou pure of heart, Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou see In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side, To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand, Saying, 'It is so clear!'—and lo! ere long, Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings, Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm, Its depths grew still, that there thy ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the shimmer of sun on bayonets, and he knew now that he would soon reach the German earthworks. His first care after Delaunois left him, had been to destroy the passport that General Vaugirard had given him and there was not ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... than these two, who, from different reasons, had probably never had so real a holiday before. They wandered over the great open tract of land, meeting no one; once they came near enough to the seaward edge to see the distant shimmer of water; once they found themselves in the part where there has been some little attempt at cultivation, and small patches of potatoes struggle for life, and a little railway crosses the sandhills. Twice they came upon the road along which, on ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level distance the hazy shimmer of the lake. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... difference whether fashion is for voluminous, flowing robes, ruffled and covered with ribbons and lace, or the other extreme, those creations of Fortuny, which cling to the form in long crinkled lines and shimmer like the skin of a snake. The Fortuny in question, son of the great Spanish painter, devotes his time to the designing of the most artistic and unique tea gowns offered to modern woman. We first saw his work in 1910 ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... two men stared silently at each other. MacVeigh turned slowly toward the child. She had fallen asleep, and he could see the dull shimmer of her golden curls as they ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... thickened to purple at the far-off edge of the world, lay the bad lands resplendent under the hot glare of the sun in vivid red and black and pink colouring of the lava rock. Everywhere the eye met the flash and shimmer of mica fragments that sparkled like the facets of a million diamonds, while to the northward the Bear Paws reared cool and green, with the grass of the higher levels reaching ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... little alarmed by his white face and sunken eyes; but she accepted his reassurances without question—she would have disbelieved anything which did not fit in with her plans. And now, as they gazed out upon that beauty under the soft shimmer of the moonlight, her heart suddenly expanded in tenderness. "I am so happy," she murmured, slipping an ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... or untrue ones. A wicked person always looks to me like a person in a fog. There have been some people in this room that my father thought very good; but I knew they were very bad. I could hardly see their faces clear. When a person is thinking mistaken or untrue thoughts, I see something like a shimmer of light all around them: it comes and goes, like a flicker from a candle. When you first came in to ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... a section of yellow panes, through which the sun darts, launches into the obscurity its shower of rays and a portion of the nave glows like a luminous glade. A vast rosace behind the choir, a window with tortuous branchings above the entrance, shimmer with the tints of amethyst, ruby, emerald and topaz like leafy labyrinths in which lights from above break in and diffuse themselves in shifting radiance. Near the sacristy a small door-top, fastened against ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea between the cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think it's just flightiness—and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that makes ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... forgotten of the world. Still this soldier held on, saying nothing to his men, writing his intensely practical diary, and trusting as a soldier should to the Deus ex machina who finally allows discipline to triumph. He looked down into the valley, piercing the shimmer of its hazes with his gentle blue eyes, looking to his chief, who had said, "In three days ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... my pans of golden cream, Set in a silver shining row, Swam in my eyes like the shimmer and sheen Of arms and ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... flashed against the sunlight from women's hair. He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for access to ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch, in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit, golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman commingled, far away, with "horns of Elfland faintly blowing." The appeal is made to the primitive, elemental, poetical instinct of mankind; and no detail of realism is obtruded, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... clear in the starlight of the East, with white flocks scattered on the down. The breath of winds that come and go, the bleating of the sheep, with now and then a tinkling bell, and now and then the voice of an awakened shepherd, is all that breaks the deep repose. Overhead shimmer the bright stars, and low to west lies the moon, not pale and sickly (he dreams) as in our North, but golden, full, and bathing distant towers and tall aerial palms with floods of light. Such is a child's vision, begotten by the music of the symphony; and when he wakes from ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... their house. He could see her plainly now—she stood clasping white gloves with firm, pink hands; her gaze was lowered upon the uneven flooring of the porch. He could see the soft contour of her chin, a shimmer of warm, brown hair. She was crisply fresh, incredibly young in the group of gaunt, worn forms; her ruffled fairness was an affront to the thin, rigid shoulders in rusty black, the sallow, deeply-bitten ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... places it was scarcely possible to make a way for fern, bramble, and underwood, but elsewhere mossy tracks led one among hazels or under arches of foliage which made of the mid-day sky a cool, golden shimmer. One such track, abruptly turning round a great rock over the face of which drooped the boughs of an ash, came upon a little sloping lawn, which started from a high hazel-covered bank. The bank itself was so shaped as to afford an easy seat, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... and tens of billions, men and women and children, kings and priests and beggars, all wearing the garments of their age and country. They came like an ocean-tide, and their floating hair was the foam on the tide, and their eyes gleamed like the first shimmer of dawn above the snows. They came for hours and days and years and centuries, they came eternally, and as they came every finger of that host, compared to which all the sands of all the seas were but as a handful, was pointed at her, and every ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... Sunday merriment in the air, and all were intoxicated with spring. The stream flowed glittering through the fields, with a shimmer of heat above. The dancers quickened their pace almost to a run. The lads had pushed their hats back, the sweat stood in beads on their foreheads; the girls smiled with bright eyes, dimpled ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... Snatches and scraps of old-world philosophies and new-world ethics floated through his mind, and things wonderfully concrete and woefully incongruous—hunting scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the glittering of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a fleeting shimmer of glistening test-tubes, long rows of book-lined shelves, the throb of machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment of forgotten song, faces of dear women and old chums, a lonely watercourse amid upstanding peaks, a shattered boat on a pebbly strand, quiet moonlit ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... was the first composer who appreciated the genius of the instrument, discovered its latent tone colors and developed its resources to their full capacity for artistic beauty and expression. Chopin was the first to make the pianoforte both shimmer and sing. Rubinstein said that the art of music could go no further than Chopin and called him the pianoforte bard, rhapsodist, mind and soul. "How he wrote for it I do not know, but only an entire passing over of one into the other could call such music into life." George Sand (Mme. Dudevant) ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... over her eyes again. A vision of Solomon in all his glory swept across her. Even to Walton had spread rumors of the immense fortunes acquired in the China and India trade, and the gold of Cathay seemed to shimmer over the form before her, so strong, so able to contend with, and compel, if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... than ever. Still she had those thousand pretty movements, those nameless graces of manner, those wavering shades of expression, that irresistibly enchained the eye and the imagination,—true Frenchwoman as she was, always in one rainbow shimmer of fancy and feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April days which give you flowers and rain, sun and shadow, and snatches ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea—alone as I thought at first, in the twilight—I became aware that the garden had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague and not very prosperous-looking woman ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... recalled the faint odors she had inhaled in Farnham's house; they seemed to her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance of the spring; the hot air of the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... like a reed in the wind when he danced, she went out on the gallery and seated herself on the low window-sill, where she commanded a view of all that went on in the hall and could look out toward the Gulf. There was a soft effulgence in the east. The moon was coming up, and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across the distant, ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... of the sun, in the silver shimmer of the moon, the Jungfrau beckons, the Jungfrau calls! "Come," she seems to say, "come nearer! Come up to the heights! Come close to the running waters! Come." And that invitation falls on no unwilling ears, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... and vicious creatures who lacked even the sort of tawdry finery that their sisters in western mining camps affect. There was here no shimmer of even the slaziest satin. In dress as in character they ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... unspeakable garishness at which only the superficial observer rejoices. If one examines a little more closely the impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of colours makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former civilisations? Is not everything one sees merely a complex of inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?—a ragged suit of motley for the naked and the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... though little; nay of real sense for the ludicrous, in any form, he had not much for a man of his vivacity; and you remarked that his laugh was limited in compass, and of a clear but not rich quality. To the like effect shone something, a kind of childlike half-embarrassed shimmer of expression, on his fine vivid countenance; curiously mingling with its ardors and audacities. A beautiful childlike soul! He was naturally a favorite in conversation, especially with all who had any funds for conversing: frank and direct, yet polite and delicate ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Loving shall purely be born, And the Child shall smile in the West, and the West to the East give morn, And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn, Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer the dream of ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... fleeing. But all his preparations had not taken into account this newest emergency. He had not steeled himself to watch unmoved the gliding away of a treasure-satchel, apparently moving of its own will; nor the shimmer of two greenish sparks in the air just above it. And, for an instant, the man had to battle against a craven desire ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... her. As if at the sound of her own feet the footfalls came faster. Desperately, she lifted one foot and tore her shoe off, then the other. She half overbalanced, and catching at the arras to save herself, it fell with a rustling sound. She craved for darkness; when she ran there was a pale shimmer of night—but the aperture of an arch tempted her. She ran and sprang, upwards, in a very black, ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... out their nets, of the girls sickling the grass under the olives, Amor—amor—amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... which resembles the fertile meadow land along the Connecticut River. We stop a few moments near a picturesque little church of gray unpainted wood, and look off over the verdant fields to the point where a distant shimmer of water catches the eye, and the hills bound the picture. Near at hand, on the right, the trunk of an aged apple tree, "planted by the French", shows one green shoot; and about the church are Lombardy poplars, which, though good ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... suddenly rising from the neighborhood of the central building, the tallest of the group. They went in a compact wedge formation and shot swiftly down along the wall of the invisible cone until they were directly over the low building nearest the Ancient Mariner. There was a sudden shimmer in the air. In an instant, the ships were through and heading toward the Ancient Mariner at a ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... quicksilver had taken the place of the solid metal. Two smaller electrodes were plunged into the mercury, which gradually curdled and solidified, until it had resumed the solid form, with a yellowish brassy shimmer. ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... say these things, my friend, when you know that they are useless?" she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light, the shimmer of which was like the last vibrations ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... that aggressive vitality with which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys—that of bending others to his will, of dominating them, of making them the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... my young friend," said Aristide, raising his hat, "and here is something to buy a smile with," and, leaving a sixpence on the table to shimmer before the youth's stupefied eyes, Aristide strutted ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... amphitheater of mountains 2,400 feet high. On the west are rocky peaks of great size; on the north lofty summits clothed with low trees; on the east a broad beach with a road track, and covered with pumice stones, which shimmer through the leafy screen of the bushes; on the southern side rise volcanic cones behind a forest flat. Such is the majestic frame that incloses this vast sheet of water whose roaring tempests rival ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... a door on his right, through which we peered into a long, lovely room, gleaming with iridescent hues and sparkling with touches of gold and crystal. The bed was draped with cloudy lace through which a shimmer of pale rose-colour made itself visible, and the carpet of dark moss-green formed a perfect setting for the quaintly shaped furniture, which was all of sandal-wood inlaid with ivory. On a small table of carved ivory in the centre of the room lay ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... vernal arches, where a murmurous rustle seemed to whisper, "Stay!" along shadowless sweeps, where the blue turned to gold and dazzled with its unsteady shimmer; passed islands so full of birds they seemed green cages floating in the sun, or doubled capes that opened long vistas of light and shade, through which they sailed into the pleasant land where summer reigned supreme. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... goodly little thing, It groweth for the poor, And many a peasant blesseth it Beside his cottage door. He thinketh how those slender stems That shimmer in the sun Are rich for him in web and woof And shortly shall be spun. He thinketh how those tender flowers Of seed will yield him store, And sees in thought his next year's crop Blue ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... our mighty mountains and vast sea. If I had not caught sight of the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharus tower, I assure you I should never have made out the Earth at all. But their height and projection, with the faint shimmer of Ocean in the sun, showed me it must be the Earth I was looking at. Then, when once I had got my sight properly focused, the whole human race was clear to me, not merely in the shape of nations and cities, but the individuals, sailing, fighting, ploughing, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... sitting at the window, with his ancient and shrivelled lean hand resting on the sole and supporting his chin, as he looked through the iron stainchers abroad on the ocean that was sleeping in a blessed tranquillity around, all glowing and golden with the shimmer of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... him; there was an ineffable shimmer in her long-lashed eyes; she made a comical little grimace. "I've said the last word between me and him," she answered. "I got a humble letter from him yesterday begging my pardon for what he'd tried to do, and saying he'd behave like a gentleman from ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... phosphorescence, lambent flame. flush, halo, glory, nimbus, aureola. spark, scintilla; facula; sparkling &c v.; emication^, scintillation, flash, blaze, coruscation, fulguration^; flame &c (fire) 382; lightning, levin^, ignis fatuus [Lat.], &c (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion [Brit.], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor^, fulgidity^; dazzlement^, resplendence, transplendency^; luminousness &c adj.; luminosity; lucidity; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and a vane. Great stones arranged as seats around the beacon, and in the foreground. Farther back the outer fjord is seen, with islands and outstanding headlands. The open sea is not visible. It is a summer's evening, and twilight. A golden-red shimmer is in the air and over the mountain-tops in the far distance. A quartette is faintly heard singing below in the background. Young townsfolk, ladies and gentlemen, come up in pairs, from the right, and, talking familiarly, pass out beyond the beacon. A little after, ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the rugged and stony summits, as it dispersed gradually in the increasing ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... above me I feel the rushing, Cool heaven. Behold—I am in front of a Streaming church. Large and quiet it takes me in. Here I shall stay for a while. Immersed in its dreams. Dreams out of gray Silk that does not shimmer. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... into the saddle and shading his eyes with his hand scanned the plain, but only the warm shimmer of sun-heated earth appeared. Nothing living could be seen. What ought he to do about it? Was there any way he might find out the owner and restore ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... continuous; but Huggins caught traces of bright lines on September 2, confirmed on the 9th;[1476] and Copeland succeeded, on September 30, in measuring three bright bands with an acute-angled prism specially constructed for the purpose.[1477] A shimmer of F was suspected, and had also been perceived by Mr. O. T. Sherman of Yale College. Still, the effect was widely different from that of the characteristic blazing spectrum of a temporary star, and prompted the surmise that here, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... good bit, owing to the sluggishness with which the head yards had been swung, but she was already coming to, and a few seconds later her jibboom was pointing straight for the middle of the passage, with the Heads looming up on either hand, black as ebony against the faint shimmer of starlight on the waters of the lagoon beyond. Gurney and Saunders now came aft and proceeded to complete the hoisting of the second quarter boat; and seeing that Grace seemed to know pretty well what she was about with the wheel I left her at it, directing her to steer the ship as nearly as might ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... know, those gray old wives, The sights we see in our daily drives Shimmer of lake and shine of sea, Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It wasn't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake Glide through his ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... stood out in bright relief from a background of mossy tree-trunks and rocks. After an hour's walking, made laborious by the spongy character of the ground,—a mixture of loose soil and decaying vegetation, in which one sank knee-deep,—the gleam of the ice began to shimmer through the trees; and issuing from the wood, the party found themselves in front of a glacier wall, stretching across the whole valley and broken into deep rifts, caves, and crevasses of dark blue ice. The glacier was actually about a mile wide; but as ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... he said, 'that which I never saw before—a vast white bird, with silver wings outstretched, sailing in the everlasting blue. And now it is as though a great fire burnt within my breast. It was but a sheen, a shimmer, a reflection in the water; but now I desire nothing more on earth ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... him on the pillows, and then sat by the window, from which—because the lamp that tired his eyes had been turned very low—I could see the shimmer of stars on the dark breast of the inlet, which was wrapped in shadow, and a broad band of silver radiance grow wider across the heights of snow, until Grace came in softly with more blossoms ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... to postpone from night to night her hour of death, are one and all pervaded by the same eternal magic. Pain, grief, terror, care, and bondage are all forgotten for a time when lakes of gems and enchanted waterfalls shimmer in the sunlight, when Rakshas's palaces rise, full-built, before our very eyes, or when Caballero's Knights of the Fish prance away on their magic chargers. "I wonder when!" "I wonder how!" "I wonder where!" we say as we follow them into the land of mystery. ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... wings and his tail, he looked, bathed in the sunshine, like an angler's glittering tin fish or a waterfly flashing so swiftly over the water that its wings cannot be told from its antenna, which seem to be growing before, behind and on all sides. . . . Quivering in the air like an insect with a shimmer of bright colours, the bustard flew high up in a straight line, then, probably frightened by a cloud of dust, swerved to one side, and for a long time the gleam of his wings could be seen. ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... straightened and her gaze went off to the left. "Here they come!" she said, and out where Camp Street emerges, a glint of steel, a gleam of brass, a swarming of the people that way, and again a shimmer of brass and steel, affirmed her word that the long, plumed, bristling column had got back to the arms of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... herself,—something of her faculty of putting on different aspects under different lights. John and his wife had studied their picture at all hours of the day: they had seen how it looked when the morning sun came aslant the scarlet maples and made a golden shimmer over the blue mountains, how it looked toned down in the cool shadows of afternoon, and how it warmed up in the sunset and died off mysteriously into the twilight; and now, when larger parlors were to be furnished, the picture was still the tower of strength, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... your sash, the sharp narrow print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... light, which was so narrow that in a few moments the moon had crossed it. A gap in a hedge made by a bull that morning, had removed the last screen. — Lady Euphrasia's window was so neglected and dusty, that it could reflect nothing more than a dim bluish shimmer. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... robes of the women clustered together at the points of the wide crescent; white, the glittering byrnies of the warriors standing in close ranks; white, the fur mantles of the aged men who held the central place in the circle; white, with the shimmer of silver ornaments and the purity of lamb's-wool, the raiment of a little group of children who stood close by the fire; white, with awe and fear, the faces of all who looked at them; and over ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... of honor has a rosy cope To shimmer back the tributary stars; And every petal glistens with a hope Where Love hath blossomed in the disk ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... more such incidents before they reached the village where they were to sleep that night; and Weaver lay awake in his downy bed, staring at the faint shimmer of reflected starlight on the carved roof-beams, and meditating soberly on the unexpected, the appalling magnitude of the task he had ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... shallow crease of hills a shimmer of white soon changed to evident houses. We drew ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... in the door. The polished boards of the long ballroom lay gleaming with ghostly shimmer in the fading light. The pictures on the walls seemed to stare at the two intruders with cold displeasure. Cherry shivered slightly as the chill struck her. It seemed to her as if these stately knights and dames themselves ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... low, tawny mass of mountain seemed to shimmer and waver in the hot sun, and as they drew nearer and nearer the mass was resolved into many masses broken into small foothills at the base, through which the Nubian threaded a rapid, circuitous way that led out on a rolling ground. A wide ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... until they emerged upon clear ground, when, bearing away to the eastward round the foot of the hill which they had that day ascended, they groped their way cautiously over the unfamiliar ground until, in the course of about half an hour, they caught the dim shimmer of starlight upon water, and, between them and it, a group of dark, shapeless blotches which, upon their nearer approach, they identified as the hovels constituting the fishing village which they had seen during the day from the top of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... side, her head resting upon her left hand, the pen in her right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. A sudden uneasiness seized him. His brain was crowded with ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... jutting knob of rock, into an arching avenue of trees. It was like dropping into a cool, shadowy bowl, the first shoots and sproutings of baby leaves from the branches casting a delicate tracery of shadow on the golden-green shimmer of the grass. Through an open gate they shot, he close behind, out upon a hard metallic roadway of macadam. Here Mary Louise reined in her horse and Joe ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... he looked at slept heavily on. And then—God! I feel the agony I felt in my dream then now!—then I saw the great yellow hand, with the great evil eye upon it, lifted murderously, and the bright steel it held shimmer as the assassin turned again and bent his yellow face down closer to that other face hidden from me in the shadow—the girl's face, that I knew ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lady, whom, but for her bright face and clear, innocent blue eyes, he would scarcely have known, so complete was the transformation. For a moment Neil felt as if he preferred the old linen, with its puffed sleeves and antiquated appearance, to the shimmer of the fawn-colored satin, with its facings of delicate blue, and the flush of the solitaires; but, as he watched her moving about the elegant rooms and discharging her duties as hostess just as kindly and thoughtfully as she had done at Stoneleigh, where the china was cracked ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... darkness of night, and the illimitable vault above us had become spangled and powdered with stars innumerable of every magnitude, a delicate sheen appeared on the eastern horizon, glowing faintly and softly at first as the tremulous shimmer of summer lightning, but brightening by imperceptible degrees until it revealed a hitherto invisible bank of fleecy vapour lying low along the horizon's margin, the rounded edges of which it daintily ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next day when, in the cold ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... miserably over the silver-gilt rail at friends. She knew that people were craning from far seats. Her bulk and her shadow effaced the man beside her. He seemed to cower a little. At eight the show began, and Mrs. Egg felt darkness as a blessing, although the shimmer from the screen ran like phosphorus over the bald head, and a flash of white between two parts of the advertisement showed the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... van der Weyden of Brabant—river valleys surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows bright with sappy green—is clearly the result of direct Nature study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together." My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory—I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... taper summits Of the trees, all leaf and glitter, Started from the sullen void; And the slopes behind them rising, Graceful-lined in undulation, Glided backwards one by one. Underneath, be sure, was water; And the stream was drawn so truly That it seem'd to break and shimmer, That it seem'd as if cascading ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... quick leaves cast a shimmer of green, Against our whited walls, And in the phlox, the courteous bees, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... came the answer from 'Volaterrae.' They could see the shimmer of bronze armour in the beech crotch, and the friendly flash of ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... one day beyond its first quarter, was growing brighter, and a strange and mysterious shimmer was over everything as though the heat of the day were rising to give welcome and ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... the strangest thing for Anthony to find himself here, a raven among all these peacocks, and birds of paradise; and he wondered at himself and at the strange humour of Providence, as he watched the shimmer of the dresses and the sparkle of the shoes and jewels, and the soft clouds of muslin and lace that shivered and rustled as the ladies stepped; the firelight shone through the wide doorway on this glowing movement, and groups of candles in sconces within the room increased and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the day's climbing, sat chatting or reading. Among them was a young woman who interested Charles-Norton. She was slim and very fair, with hair that lay light upon her head as a golden vapor, and she wore upon her shoulders, negligently draped, a scarf within the white shimmer of which a color glowed like a flame. Beside her nearly always hovered a big young fellow, dark and handsome, but who ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever; its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold, its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference. To-night he saw it a room populous ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... slowly prepared to enjoy myself. I cut off four slices and buttered them to an equal thickness and then more slowly put a long silver spoon into the jam. I even paused to admire in Judy's mirror over the table the effect of the cascade of lace that fell across my arm and lost itself in the blue shimmer of old Rene's masterpiece of a negligee, then deep down I buried the spoon in the purple sweetness. I had just lifted it high in the air when out of the lilac-scented dark of ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the gleaming of his light, His, the all-beautiful, of beauteous face and glance, The changing shimmer like that floats upon the stream, So Agni's rays gleam over ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... seemed of finer cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the complexion of wealth—that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... the mercury shimmer of glass Over these daguerreotypes The balloon-like spread of a skirt of silk emerges With its little figure of flowers. And the enameled glair of parted hair Lies over the oval brow, From under which eyes of ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... with a lapwing's flight, Backward she hurried to the little spring, Led by a power that knoweth not the night, But flies through darkness with unerring wing; And so e'er morning shimmer'd in the East, She clasp'd her dead babe ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... glow, Salamander! Rushingly together flow, Undine! Shimmer in the meteor's gleam, Sylphide! Hither bring thine homely aid, Incubus! Incubus! Step forth! I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the low-hanging, dishevelled tresses of a cloud. He did not, therefore, care to contrast the sky as it now appeared—a muffled, streaming vault, all black, save where, towards the east, the furnaces of Stilbro' ironworks threw a tremulous lurid shimmer on the horizon—with the same sky on an unclouded frosty night. He did not trouble himself to ask where the constellations and the planets were gone, or to regret the "black-blue" serenity of the air-ocean which those white ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... be deep black pitchy night, lighted up only by the pale unearthly shimmer of some foaming wave-crest as it rolled menacingly down upon us, gleaming with phosphorescent light; anon the canopy above would be rent asunder by the vivid lightning-flash, and for an instant the vast whirling forms of the torn and ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... table was set out on the terrace, overlooking the Dnieper, with the music and stir of people in the distance. An irresponsible joy filled my heart as I looked down at the black, winding river with its shadowy banks and the fantastic shimmer of lights on the water. The city lights crowded down to the very water's edge; then the drifting red and green lights of steamers and ferry-boats moving on the black, magic stream, and beyond, the flat plain, silent and mysterious, with, over the horizon rim, the thunder and clang of war. But ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... opened his eyes and looked about him: and on all sides he saw nothing but the radiance and shimmer of all sorts of white and yellow objects. He took about a dozen of the little things and hid ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... important goal than a tiny village or solitary farm, is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green leaves,—between the uneven tufts of grass, the dainty "ragged robin" sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against masses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry,—the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... again to the castle in her dress of tow, and at the gate she grasped the second bead in her fingers, repeating the charm. This time the pale yellow of the daffodils seemed to have woven itself into a cloth of gold for her adorning. It was like a shimmer of moonbeams, and her hair held the diamond flashings of a ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... piazza, with its flowers and vines and gay awnings; the charm of the summer morning, not yet dulled by wear and tear of the day; the steady, deliberate dash of the waves on the beach below; the play and shimmer of the big, quiet water, stretching out to the edge of the world; all this filled their minds, rested their souls. There was no need for words. The Bishop sighed comfortably as he pushed his great shoulders back against the cool wicker ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costume,—rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable. Everything was fresh, spotless, and in tune. It scarcely needed music to resolve all the incessant waver and shimmer into a dance; but the music came, and, like sand-grains under the magnet, the beautiful atoms swept into stately ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... speaking thus, one of the brethren rose up with a cry, and, shading his eyes with his hand, pointed into the west. Far away in the shimmer of the sea and the clouds they perceived an outline of land, and they changed their course a little to come to it. The wind carried them bravely on, and they began to distinguish blue rounded hills and ridges, and a little later green woodland, and still later, on the edge of ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... are self-observance and the Law. Both are quietists, yet in this respect they differ, that the former is the grey quietist, the latter the pearl. The neutral tint is better adapted to the sister in whose eyes all things are Maya — illusion. The shimmer of pearl belongs of right to her whose soul reflects the colour and quiet radiance of a thousand dreams. Compassion urged the one, the love of harmony led the other. How near they were akin! how far apart they have wandered! Yet there has always been this essential difference ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... telling what would happen. So we done it. We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our arms got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours—three hours—just gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear, a body don't know what real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain he ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't stand it to look around on them baking plains; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... black top and along the swelling branches decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass. It was very witch-like, of a witch in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hair in the world," says he, touching with gentle, reverential fingers the silken coils that glint and shimmer in the sunlight. "And it is a name that ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... no glasses, had a season of rare enjoyment. They saw Mercury, with its gleam of white light, and Mars, with its ruddy glow; they saw Regulus come out of the darkening blue on one side of the sun, Venus shimmer and Procyon twinkle near the horizon, and Arcturus shine ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... year, I must be careful to give the latter picture not too small a share. The artist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this view of a rich dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of a hall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vases shimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happy play-world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminently unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of the figures in the foreground. The place is ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James |
