"Sunless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variously great, Guide, guardian, instructor of the State— Quick to discern and zealous to correct The faults which mar the public intellect From where of Siskiyou the northern bound Is frozen eternal to the sunless ground To where in San Diego's torrid clime The swarthy Greaser swelters in his grime— Beneath your stupid nose can you not see The dunce whom once you dandled on your knee? O mighty master of a thousand schools, Stop teaching wisdom, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... youthful hearts were bleak and bare, That not a germ had ever flourished there, Unless perchance the night-shade of despair, Which blooms amid the sunless wilderness. ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... the result of his experiments in one of the heaviest folios of the day. And for all these purposes the gem itself could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a somewhat similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice which he found in a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded in all points with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The critics say that, if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldness of the ice. The lord ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there were fewer inhabitants in that locality than any other; the discharge of the gun would mean an immense volume of smoke and gas, likely to prove disagreeable for days. Nobody cared to live near the contact, because of its queer, sunless conditions. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do suffer fullest ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... door or gap opening upon darkness. There was something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment, windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a millionnaire would ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the only homage which Milton paid to Italian beauty. The susceptible poet, who in the sunless north would fain have "sported with the tangles of Neaera's hair," could not behold Neaera herself and the flashing splendour of her eye, unmoved. Milton proclaims (Defensio Secunda) that in all his foreign tour he had lived ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... generations.... You are like someone who awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountains—in a sunless universe. You are not alone in it. You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and purposes.... ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... poor who, year in and out, never get beyond the crowded city, with the exception of dragging themselves and their children now and then to the parks on holidays or hot summer evenings. The majority, especially the inhabitants of the East of London, never get away from the sunless alleys and grimy streets in which they exist from year to year. It is true that a few here and there of the adult population, and a good many of the children, have a sort of annual charity excursion to Epping ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... on you—silent tears to weep, And patient smiles to wear through suffering's hour; And sunless riches, from affection's deep, To pour on broken reeds a wasted shower! And to make idols, and to find them clay, And ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... whose consciousness still is confined within narrowest limits. Would Carlyle have desired to exchange the magnificent sorrow that flooded his soul, and blossomed so tenderly there, for the conjugal joys, superficial and sunless, of his happiest neighbour in Chelsea? And was not Ernest Renan's grief, when Henriette, his sister, died, more grateful to the soul than the absence of grief in the thousands of others who have no love to give to a sister? ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... would drop the book to his chest and gaze reflectively at the ceiling, for, all the time he had been reading, one-half of his brain had been steadily pursuing a separate course of inquiry of its own; and while the other half had wandered pleasantly through deep and sunless gulches or had clambered on the back of a surefooted bronco up precipitous mountain-slopes, the mental picture he conjured was in the nature of a double exposure, for ever there loomed a dim figure of a mysterious anti-aircraft gun. He took up the book for about the tenth time ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... Rhodope, as story tells— The bright unearthly nymph, who dwells 'Mid sunless gold and jewels hid, The lady ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the West, the West! We alone have the key to the West, and we must bravely unlock the portals; we can buy no lamp that will banish the night. We have always kept our time by the sun. When we pass through the gates of this dying day, we shall pass into a sunless land, and for us there shall be no more time, a ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... an afternoon which had a fungous smell out of doors, all being sunless and stagnant overhead and around. The various species of trees had begun to assume the more distinctive colours of their decline, and where there had been one pervasive green were now twenty greenish yellows, the air in the vistas between ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... trench-sweepers. Men passed on their business; a squad with a captured machine-gun which they tested in a sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition; long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown sunless walls. One understood after a while the nightmare that lays hold of trench-stale men, when the dreamer wanders for ever in those blind mazes till, after centuries of agonizing flight, he finds himself stumbling out ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England, where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind between February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet, chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer, scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September, small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's atmospherical delinquencies. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... dear,' said Mary, with a great light in her eyes, and the rest of her face as still as a sunless pond, 'you don't think of the sin of it. I know you are only talking, but some things oughtn't ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Khubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea." ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... plebes, Merriwell and Hodge had been assigned to the "cock-loft" of the third division, which meant the top floor on the north side of the barracks—the sunless side. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... to the bulk of mankind. Sorrowfully but with full conviction, did he submit to the irrevocable law; wherein he once again gave proof of his piety and his virtue. He retired into himself, and there, in a kind of sunless, motionless void, became still more just, still more humane. And in each succeeding century do we find a similar ardour, self-centred and solitary, among those who were wise and good. The name of more than one immovable law might change, but its infinite part remained ever the same; and ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... filled with such dark and deadly hatred. She abhorred him,—it is not too much to say that. The packet of treasured letters written in New York so long—oh, so long ago! it seemed—became the one spot of sunshine in her sunless life. She read them until the words lost all meaning—until she knew every one by heart. She looked at the picture until the half-smiling eyes and lips seemed to mock her as she gazed. The little turquoise broach with the likeness, she wore in her bosom night and ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... announced his departure, he arrived at length, and with him his man of business. Lady Joan's heart gave a small beat of pleasure at sight of him, then lay quiet, sad, and apprehensive: the cold proper salute he gave her seemed, after the life she had of late been living, to belong rather to some sunless world than the realms of humanity. He uttered one commonplace concerning his father's death, and never alluded to it again; behaved in a dignified, recognizant manner to the laird, as to an inferior to whom he was under more obligation than he saw how to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... no! thou place of sanctities! a ray has from thee gone, Dearer than noontide's gorgeous light, or Sabbath's music tone; A spirit! whose bright ark is far beyond the clouds and waves, Albeit there is a sunless gloom on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where we all went together every Sunday morning, assembling first at school for that purpose. The earthy smell, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black and white arched galleries and aisles, are wings that take me back and hold me hovering above those days in a half-sleeping ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... of Pelias, farewell where thou dwellest in sunless dwelling within the mansions of Pluto. And let Pluto know, the God with ebon locks, and the old man, the ferryman of the dead, who sits intent upon his oar and his rudder, that he is conducting by far the most excellent of women in his two-oared boat over the lake of Acheron. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... a most forlorn and dejected looking creature that stood in the great square that sunless morning, peering into the mists which had absorbed the carriage. The solitude of vast untrodden forests breeds not that vacant sense of desolation which we children of nature feel in the crowded haunts of men. Face after face, form after form, ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... one of those bleached men that you find on the office floor of department stores. Grey skin, grey eyes, greying hair, careful grey clothes—seemingly as void of pigment as one of those sunless things you disclose when you turn over a board that has long lain on the mouldy floor of a damp cellar. It was only when you looked closely that you noticed a fleck of golden brown in the cold grey ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... there was to come a change. No longer need the carefully sponged and darned black alpaca gowns flaunt their wearers' poverty to the world, and no longer would they force these same wearers to seek dark corners and sunless rooms, lest the full extent of that poverty become known. It had taken forty years of the most rigid economy to save the necessary money; but it was saved now, and the dresses were to be bought. Long ago there had been enough for one, but neither of the women had so much as thought of the possibility ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... such, it is thoroughly false and vapid, and very far inferior to the tones of the same kind given by Claude. The reddish brown in the foreground of the Fall of Carthage, with all diffidence be it spoken, is, as far as my feelings are competent to judge, crude, sunless, and in every way wrong; and both this picture and the Building of Carthage, though this latter is far the finer of the two, are quite unworthy of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic rugs. The drawing-room expected to be the dining-room also, and faintly breathed the staleness of the meals served in it. If the front windows often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows had no air but that of the sunless spaces which successive architectural exigencies had crowded with projecting cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement skylights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages and the stairs were never visible except after dark; even then the foot ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... globe—it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... central Figure, and both the background of the Old Testament and the foreground of the New become dull, sunless, colourless. Reinstate that central Figure, and book after book, roll after roll, volume after volume, becomes bright, ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... gently buoyed along, now almost lifted up and borne away on the strong wings of the rushing wind. Great soft flakes of snow were falling, and yielding up their heavenly purity at the first touch of earth, and the dull sunless day, weary of its own existence, was with seeming relief dying into night. Rose walked very fast without being aware of the fact. It is a peculiarity of windy weather that it begets a mental exaltation, in which even the clumsiest body ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... answer, and Ezra closed the door behind him. The gloom and the almost vault-like odors of the chamber struck upon him with a cold sense of solitude and age. They answered to the thoughts that filled him—the thoughts of his uncle's lonely and sunless life. ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... into the air its breath, which, though sunless, was hot and arid, smote witheringly upon him. They anointed his body, placed the stylus in his hand, and led him into ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... set forth under the familiar image of the coming of God in a tempest. Before it bursts, and simultaneous with the prayer, the "earth rocks and quivers," the sunless "pillars of the hills reel and rock to and fro," as if conscious of the gathering wrath which begins to flame far off in the highest heavens. There has been no forth-putting yet of the Divine power. It is but accumulating ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... hoarfrost on my chain: The Bear, that prowled all night about the fold Of the North-star, hath shrunk into his den. Scared by the blithesome footsteps of the Dawn, Whose blushing smile floods all the Orient; And now bright Lucifer grows less and less, Into the heaven's blue quiet deep-withdrawn. Sunless and starless all, the desert sky Arches above me, empty as this heart 10 For ages hath been empty of all joy, Except to brood upon its silent hope, As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now. All night ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... TARTARUS, a dark sunless waste in the nether deeps, as far below earth as heaven is above it, into which Zeus hurled the Titans that rebelled against him; the term was subsequently sometimes used to denote the whole nether world and sometimes the place ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is the central myth. The light is, indeed, cold—mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until the evening; ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... steep-to coast, and as we tramped over the rich red soil we had the bright blue sea beneath us on our left, and the dark and almost silent bush on our right. I say 'almost,' for although in these moist and sunless seaboard tracts of what we Australian-born people call bush, and English people would call wood or forest, there was no sound of human life, there was yet always to be heard the thump, thump of the frightened scrub wallaby, and now and again the harsh, shrieking note of the great white ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... on the sunless side Of a romantic mountain, forest crown'd Beneath the whole collected ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... came with war-whoop, following each other, like a thread, Through the long labyrinth of trees, in sunless archway spread; Their gnarled trunks in shadowy lines rose dimly, few by few, Mail'd in their ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... seed all viewless fell Within the mellow soil to dwell,— Silent the fall as that of pebbles Cast in oblivion's sunless well. ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... the swift ravages of illness she received a positive shock as she looked at him; she had visualized him during these latter days as she had last seen him, brown, vitally robust, the embodiment of lean, clean strength. Now sunless inaction had set its mark in his skin which had already grown sallow; his eyes burned into her own, his hand fell weakly to the coverlet as she removed her own, his fingers plucking nervously. And yet she summoned a ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Where the dead, cheerless moon rode neighbouring by— And in the midst a silent tarn there lay, A narrow pool, cold as the tide that flows Where monstrous bergs beyond Varanger stray, Rising from sunless depths that no man knows; Thither as clustering fireflies have I seen At fixed seasons all the stars come down To wash in that cold wave their brightness clean And win the special fire wherewith they crown The wintry heavens in frost. Even as a flock Of falling birds, down to the pool they ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... and pennant That never a wind may reach, They float in sunless waters Beside a sunless beach. Their mighty masts and funnels Are white as driven snow, And with a pallid ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... It was a sunless day, with grey clouds hanging over a dull green marsh, streaked with channels of green water. The air was still and heavy with the scent of may and meadowsweet and ripening hayseed. They drove as far as the edges ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... A dreary sunless December day had drawn to a close, prematurely darkened by a slow drizzling rain, that brought the gloom of early night, where sunset splendours should have lingered, and deepened the sombre desolation that mantled the parsonage. In anticipation ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... calmly sinking To a sunless deep sea cave, Folding hands, and kindly thinking Of the friend you tried to save? Will you let your sweet breath pass On the arms of children bending, Gazing on the sea of glass, Where the lovelight ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... save the people, O God of mercy, when? Not kings alone, but nations? Not thrones and crowns, but men? Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they: Let them not pass, like weeds, away— Their heritage a sunless ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... your happiness does not abate, but increase by change of states. Dawn, my own darling, I saw your mother last night in my dreams. She brought to you a blue mantle, which signifies rest and protection, a rest not of this world. She enfolded you in it, and as you passed through the dark, sunless places of earth, the mantle grew brighter and brighter, until its color almost dazzled the human eye. There were many who could not gaze upon it, and turned away. Others stood until the blinding effect ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... poor lawyer's hapless passion like the late season known as the Indian summer after a sunless year. He affected to be older than he was, to have the right to befriend Dinah without doing her an injury, and kept himself at a distance as though he were young, handsome, and compromising, like a man who has happiness to conceal. He tried to keep his little attentions ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the chief with emphasis when this was translated; "tell the young Kablunet with the hard fist, that the sunless time would come and go, and the sun-season would come again, before he could go over half my lands. Besides, I have more important work to do. I must first go to Poloeland, to kill and burn and destroy. After that I ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... through, though in ordinary winter weather he was hardy enough to dive in the ice-holes. The stock of meal fell low, and when spring tarried famine drew very near. Such a spring no man living remembered. The snow lay deep on the shore till far into May. And when the winds broke they were cold sunless gales which nipped the young life in the earth. The ploughing was backward, and the seed-time was a month too late. The new-born lambs died on the fells and there fell a wasting sickness among the cattle. Few salmon ran up the streams, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... had finished, they shook their heads and clung together. A chill wind from space seemed to be blowing through the room, whispering of time's vagaries, and how space had different clocks, and how the affairs of men were swept by time and chance down to a sunless sea. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... to attempt to describe the boundless difference that we discovered between the manners and sentiments of these people and ourselves. Some of our sages endeavoured to account for it upon philosophical principles, and attributed much to the climate of those dark, watery, and sunless regions in which they were bred and born: 'for,'said they, 'how can men living surrounded by water, and who never feel the warmth of the sun, be like those who are never a day without enjoying the full effulgence of its rays, and do not even know what the sea means?' But ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Edmund's, and act there the same night; and Friday I shall just get to London in time for my dinner, and the next morning I go down to Birnham.... The air of St. Leonard's, though you call it cold and sharp, was mild compared with the raw, sunless climate I have since enjoyed at Lynn and Yarmouth; a bracing climate always suits me better than a relaxing one.... I cannot, however, agree with you that there is more "excitement" in rehearsing every morning, and sitting in a dull, dirty, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Sunless climes are warmed to verdure by the sun's returning ray, Windless wastes are waked to gladness when reviving ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... the Algonquins who surrounded them, dwelt in a region of sunless, tangled forests; and all the wars we waged for the possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi were carried on in the never-ending stretches of gloomy woodland. It was not an open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, between the boles ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... strewn like a monstrous Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow. On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand could wrest a sustenance. Only the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... cavern, under dark ribs of sounding stone, and up rough glens and torrent-beds, among the sunless roots of Ida, and to the edge of the eternal snow, went they, the hunter and the hunted, while the hills bellowed ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... are dark enough now—it is an almost sunless September, and yet they see nothing of the figure. To Honor has come an additional trouble—the engagement between her brother and Belle Delorme is broken off. Poor little Belle goes about like a ghost; her miserable eyes, which go so far to contradict ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... had searched for years. And she was still searching for him when he had met her that night on the Transcontinental! For it was she—Marge O'Doone, the mother, the wife, into whose dark, haunting eyes he had gazed from out the sunless depths of his own despair! Her mother. Alive. Seeking ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... on the water. They drifted down happily with the stream till they came within the shadow of the bridge, when they at once began to work their way up a piece to get a fresh start for a sunlight sail. Finsen knew just how they felt. His own room looked north and was sunless; his work never prospered as it did when he sat with a friend whose room was on the south side, where the sun came in. It was warm and pleasant; but was that all? Was it only the warmth that made the birds break into song when the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Three. Four. Slowly the pitiless waves came crashing down on the sand. They were so mighty, so unrelenting in their grim beauty. If one must be drowned, it would have been better to die in a sunless sea, not in the gorgeousness of a day like this. Five. Six. Then Theodora sprang forward with a little, low, choking moan. The seventh wave washed up at her very feet the form of her husband, still breathing and with Mac's body ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,— Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... every day for half an hour into the dirty and sunless courtyard. But he dreaded that half-hour. It stirred a vain longing for light. And the rough and insolent fellow-prisoners with whom he was brought in contact! He preferred to be alone in his ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... Followed the plunging ploughshare of hewn pine, And closed, as when deep sleep subdues man's breath Lips close and heart subsides; and closing, shone Sunlike with many a Nereid's hair, and moved Round many a trembling mouth of doubtful gods, Risen out of sunless and sonorous gulfs Through waning water and into shallow light, That watched us; and when flying the dove was snared As with men's hands, but we shot after and sped Clear through the irremeable Symplegades; And chiefliest when hoar beach and herbless cliff ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... necessary to adopt, namely, the way of London, in order to inform his father of his movements and to make one or two business calls. The afternoon was passed in attending to these matters, the night in speeding onward, and by the time that nine o'clock sounded next morning through the sunless and leaden air of the English Channel coasts, he had reduced the number of miles on his list by two hundred, and cut off the sea from the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... flooding of the three decks of a frigate, as a man-of-war's-man, White-Jacket most earnestly protests. In sunless weather it keeps the sailors' quarters perpetually damp; so much so, that you can scarce sit down without running the risk of getting the lumbago. One rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was driven ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to Stinking Lake and sleep.... And wake with the faint stench of sulphur in his throat.... And see the worm-like leeches unfolding in the shallows, and the big, reddish water-lizards, livid as skinned eels, wriggling convulsively toward their sunless lairs.... ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the house of the other, Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne. She is of a different type from her sister-in-law, being a devout Roman Catholic, and since the terrible affliction of two years ago has concerned herself more deeply than ever in the affairs of her religion. She lives in a gloomy little house in a sunless Kensington by-street. Only my Cousin Rosalie was at home. She gave me tea made with tepid water and talked about the Earl's Court Exhibition, which she had not visited, and a new novel, of which she had vaguely heard. I tried in vain to infuse some life into the conversation. I don't believe ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament, turned alternately to and from the South, in which from time to time the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood—our GERMAN infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that is to say "high politics," has with great resolution been prescribed (according to a dangerous healing ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... O restless sleep! O silence of the sunless day! O still ravine! O stormy deep! Give up your prey! Give ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... same impulse and the same thought, they looked ahead of them. Half a mile farther on the mountains closed in until the gorge between them was dark and sunless. ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... accomplished hoard, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the floor of the valley itself, shone with a brilliant glare, even in the half light of the sunless day. They were not covered with soil, but seemed rather to be almost entirely metallic, copper in color. The whole visible landscape was devoid of any sign of vegetation, nor was there a ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... little wind upheaves, And makes a sudden rustling there, And then they drop their play, Flash up into the sunless air, And like a flight of silver leaves Swirl ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs. Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts. Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling down the long dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... clouds that rake the mountain summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land! ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... die away into infinite distance. Two great characteristics, he tells us, of his opium dreams were a deep-seated melancholy and an exaggeration of the things of space and time. Nightly he descended 'into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that he could ever reascend.' He saw buildings and landscapes 'in proportion so vast as the human eye is not fitted to receive.' He seemed to live ninety or a hundred years in ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... dreamed he saw a broad and pleasant land, With cities, gardens, groves and fruitful fields, Where bee-fed flowers half hide the ripening fruits. And spicy breezes stir the trembling leaves, And many birds make sweetest melody, But bordered by a valley black as night, That ever vomits from its sunless depths Great whirling clouds of suffocating smoke, Blacker than hide the burning Aetna's head, Blacker than over Lake Avernus hung; No bird could fly above its fatal fumes; Eagles, on tireless pinions upward borne, In widening ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... Woods of Wytham, Now so far, so far from me, Where I roam in memory; 'Mid the leaves, or flashing by them, Like sunshine to glorify them, On my sunless heart gleams she. ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... sunny and sunless windows: put into the boxes for the shady windows plants which run to foliage, and into those for the sunny windows plants from which you expect blossom. For blossoms, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and blind, Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God; High-heartedness to long repulse resign'd, Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod The sunless skyless streets he could not see; By those faint feet ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... was a dull cloudy sunless day, and every countenance was overcast with gloom. We had not seen the Emperor for a week, and we were all anxious to observe the change that the horrible tidings of his destination had made upon ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... dark, in Fifty-four, To welcome Fifty-five. 'God knows,' said he, 'if another year I'll any better thrive. I was born for light, I live in the sun, Yet in, darkness, and sunless, I'm passing on, And the world?—Hurrah! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... young as well as with the old, with the women as well as with the men, with the little children as well as with those who are stricken in years. The merchants grind us down, and we must needs do their bidding. The priest rides by and tells his beads, and no man has care of us. Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning, and Shame sits with us at night. But what are these things to thee? ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... she said hasty farewells, but when she had gone rapidly and almost blindly down the stairway, and was at the front door, she found him beside her. He got into his fur-collared coat, picked up his hat, and they descended to the sidewalk together, in the colourless, airless, sunless light of the ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... of the lark ne'er floats To this region of sunless cloud; Nor hath eagle bird the silence stir'd, With ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... the sunless April day, Thy early smile has stayed my walk; But midst the gorgeous blooms of May, I passed thee on ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... summoned from a sunless and airless den at the back of his principal's office. The two men appended their signatures to the document; the clerk added his in witness of the genuine nature of those signatures. It was an affair of two minutes. The clerk ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... colour, the bigness of life. For there was a black spot on the sun—humanity, God's mistake in the great plan of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the cold of the sunless places in the golden ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars,[164] Or when they climb the sky or when they sink! Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn[165] Co-herald! wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life's young dream to learn is an ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... is life when only shadows fall! Oh! what is love, when love is past recall! My laurel wreath unto the winds I fling, For worldly praise I never more will sing. Oh! tears, what do you here—keep back, I say, Each human life must know a sunless day." ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... sunless day was fast closing, and the portentous heaven gave promise of a stormy night. Thick, black layers of shapeless cloud hung over the whole firmament, save at the western point; and here lay a streak of pale, yellow light, enclosed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... sedentary employment; perhaps the stimulus it communicated to her mind counterbalanced the inaction it imposed on her body. She changed, indeed, changed obviously and rapidly; but it was for the better. When I first saw her, her countenance was sunless, her complexion colourless; she looked like one who had no source of enjoyment, no store of bliss anywhere in the world; now the cloud had passed from her mien, leaving space for the dawn of hope and interest, and those feelings rose like a clear morning, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... surer, trustier passion lies In sisters' hearts than lovers' cheeks illumes. Man worships and forsakes; and as he flies From flower to flower their beauty he consumes; Then leaves the wasted heart and faded flower To die forgotten in their sunless bower. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... blinded by passion. He was frozen by the mist, the anaemic lying, "the sunless phantom Ideas." With his whole being he reached upwards to the sun. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy with which he was surrounded, or for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by what gate ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... upon the idea of progress. To be sure, clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... by side with the unfolding of new and healthy powers in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The great South American lizards grow strong and splendid in hue amid the rank freedom of pampas or forest; but their poor relatives in the sunless caves of Transylvania grow milky white, flabby, and stone-blind. The creatures in the Kentucky caves are all aborted in some way or other; the birds in far-off islands lose the power of flight, and the shrivelled wings gradually ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... have told you already, that, now Bobby is gone, there's nothing to keep me here, and I'm following my own idea of letting the whole blasted thing slide. I only worked this racket for the sake of him. I'm sorry for him, but I suppose the poor little beggar couldn't stand these sunless, God-forsaken longitudes any more than I could. Besides that, as I didn't want to trust any lawyer with my secret, I myself had hunted up some books on the matter, and found that, by the law of entail, I'd have to rip up the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... we, "when our feet draw near The river dark with mortal fear, And the night cometh, chill with dew, O Father, let Thy light break through! So let the hills of doubt divide— So bridge with faith the sunless tide— So let the eyes that fail on earth On Thine eternal hills look forth; And, in Thy beckoning angels, know The dear ones ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... sat around the fire and talked. Although it was June, it had been a sunless day of arid east wind, and Lady Agatha, who always snatched at the least excuse for a fire because it was so beautiful, had ordered one to be lit. The three long windows were open beyond the red leather screen that ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Where sunless rivers weep Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a charmed sleep: Awake her not. Led by a single star, She came from very far To seek where shadows are ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... destiny hereafter. What is a man whose whole life has been one long thought about money-making, or about other objects of earthly ambition, or about the lusts of the flesh, and the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life, to do in heaven? What would one of those fishes in the sunless caverns of America, which, by long living in the dark, have lost their eyes, do, if it were brought out into the sunshine? A man will go to his own place, the place for which he is fitted, the place for which he has fitted himself by his daily life, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... harmonious strings, In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, From Dian's circle light and near, Onward to vaster and wider rings, Where, chanting through his beard of snows, Majestic, mournful Saturn goes, And down the sunless realms of space Reverberates the thunder of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... receptacles for prisoners of state. Dethroned monarchs and fallen statesmen would not have needed to remonstrate against a domicil so spacious, so deeply secluded from the world's scorn, and so admirably in accordance with their thenceforward sunless fortunes. An alcove here might have suited Sir Walter Raleigh better than that darksome hiding-place communicating with the great chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end of which he meditated upon his "History of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of shapes called Life, with shadows behind and before— Shadows voiceless as Death, and dark as the sunless tomb,— Shapes whose anguish and strife seem a glimpse of Hell's grim shore— Shadows that gave them life and shadows that hail them home. Great is the hour, O Soul, and great is the wonder to see! Thou art alone with God as he writes on the future's page Two words in letters of fire—(one Doom,—one ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... for her, and, above all, to see that she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. He thought of that forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed it together, Cosette and he; he thought of what the weather had been, of the leafless trees, of the wood destitute of birds, of the sunless sky; it mattered not, it was charming. He arranged the tiny garments on the bed, the fichu next to the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, and he looked at them, one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll in her arms, she had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... along the gloom and saw They had hewn the drawbridge down into the river. It roll'd as black as death; and that same tide Which, coming with our coming, seem'd to smile And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest, Ran sunless down, and moan'd against the piers. But o'er the chasm I saw Lord William Howard By torchlight, and his guard; four guns gaped at me, Black, silent mouths: had Howard spied me there And made them speak, as well he might have done, Their voice had left me ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... cypress-tree, Thy sister sees those eyes o'erflow, And fondly waits for thee; That still she hears the young birds sing, And sees the chaplet wave, Which every morn thy light hands bring, To dress her early grave; And in a brighter, purer sphere, Beyond the sunless tomb, Those virtues that have charmed us here In fadeless ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... that they are social outcasts, but is there no intercession to be made for them—no excuse to be pleaded? Alas! the poor wretches would storm the kingdom of peace by the inspiration of the enemy. Let us try to understand George Galbraith. His very existence the sense of a sunless, dreary, cold-winded desert, he was evermore confronted, in all his resolves after betterment, by the knowledge that with the first eager mouthful of the strange element, a rosy dawn would begin to flush the sky, a mist of green to cover the arid waste, a wind of song to ripple the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... some days in calling upon the worthy frauen who made these alluring offers. The visits were full of profit to the student of human nature, but profitless otherwise. I was ushered into low, dark chambers, small and dreary, looking towards the sunless north, which I was assured were delightful and even elegant. I was taken up to the top of tall houses, through a smell of cabbage that was appalling, to find empty and dreary rooms, from which I fled in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Satorians rediscovered the space drive, but by this time, living on the new planet had changed them physically. They were somewhat smaller than the Nansalians, and lighter in color, for their world was always sunless. The warm rays of the sun had tanned the skins of the Nansalians to ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... an inexpressibly lonely place, as Mrs. Sharpe saw it. A long stretch of bleak, desolate, windy road, a desolate, salty marsh, ghostly woods, and the wide, dreary sea. Over all, this afternoon, a sunless sky, threatening rain, and a grim old pile of buildings ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... god, Theseus in some far city doth recline: Lost is the Horse of Night that erstwhile trod My hall; the god-like shapes that once were mine Call to me, "Mother save us ere we die, Far from thy arms beneath a sunless sky." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... ice-clad regions of the sunless north recline the heroes of Ouida, rose-scented cigars in their mouths; themselves gloriously indolent and disdainful, but perhaps huddled a little too closely together on account of the limited accommodation. ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... battle. The latter armed themselves with clubs about four feet long, one inch in diameter at the handle, two inches in diameter at the farther extremity, and made of a wood similar to the dense tropical lignum-vitae (almost an inconceivable growth in that comparatively sunless region); and, for additional weapons, behind natural and artificial barriers they heaped piles of lava-blocks, sharp, jagged, and weighing each from one to five pounds. The invaders had a few very flimsy bows, scarcely six arrows ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... for quite a while when he went to sleep, but regardless of how long he'd slept, it was going to go on being night a good deal longer. The last time he had bothered to check—which, Barney decided on reflection, might be several months ago now—the sunless period had continued for better than fifty-six hours. Not long before dropping on the bed, he was standing in front of the big clock while the minute hand on the hour dial slid up to the point which marked the end of the first year in Earth time he ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... unfathomable sorrow. He swam on, and heard at last the splash of the waves on the shore. His feet touched bottom. He slipped and slid among large slimy stones, worn incredibly smooth by their age-long washing in this sunless place. He struggled forward breast-deep, waist-deep, knee-deep, in the black water. He reached dry ground, crawled upwards till he felt the boulders no longer damp, and knew that he lay above the reach of the tide. He unbound the bundle from his head, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... city as yet does not boast a single inn where a well-to-do traveler can find the surroundings to which he is accustomed at home. To Lucien's just-awakened, sleep-dimmed eyes, Louise was hardly recognizable in this cheerless, sunless room, with the shabby window-curtains, the comfortless polished floor, the hideous furniture bought second-hand, or ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... beer measure. The woman rose as Robert entered, and courtesied very humbly to the young barrister. She looked about fifty years of age, and was dressed in rusty widow's weeds. Her complexion was insipidly fair, and the two smooth bands of hair beneath her cap were of that sunless, flaxen hue which generally accompanies pink cheeks and white eyelashes. She had been a rustic beauty, perhaps, in her time, but her features, although tolerably regular in their shape, had a mean, ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate! I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people. Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for flirtation, gondolas ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... smoke curling up from his cigar, he slipped back into the world of his active being, and made no effort to obscure the faces that looked upon him. They were those of his mother and sisters, thought of whom carried him to the northern island, now grim, cold, and sunless beneath its lowering sky. These relatives still lived where his boyhood had been passed, a life strangely unlike his own, and even alien to his sympathies, but their house was still all that he could call home. Was it ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... cry of the dew-washed meadow begging for a wee rainbow at every grass-tip, of the forest begging a burst of fire at the end of each gloomy avenue; that cry which mounts to the sky through me is so greatly the cry of all that feels itself in disgrace, plunged in a sunless pit, deprived of light without knowing for what offence; is the cry of cold, the cry of fear, the cry of weariness, of all that night disables or disarms; the rose shivering alone in the dark, the hay ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on Before the ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... sea. It was changeful and changeless. He thought he knew its effects by heart, but it had always new ones in reserve to surprise and delight him. He declared it at last to be inexhaustible. It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the least particle. He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which shine with ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... lap, On sunless mountain high above the pole; With ice for sheets, and lightning for a cap, And tons of loadstones weighing on his soul; And eye out-stretched upon some vasty map Of uncouth worlds, which ever onward ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of these horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned for good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so strangely and so ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... are any more likely to meet danger in this canon than we are out of it," said I; "but it's one of the most dismal and sunless places I ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... the tie bored her, and the attractions of society once again proved too great. Hence for the past nine years—Gabrielle being at school, first at Eastbourne and afterwards at Amiens—she had amused herself and left her husband to his dry-as-dust hobbies and the loneliness of his black and sunless world. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... A pale, cold atmosphere closed round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the wheel chair—the phantom because of which that other phantom was traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... important matters to arrange—very important for Hennard. He was much fuddled when he left Downey's, the night was cloudy, and consequently he had wandered round and round till he was completely lost. He slept under a tree (a cold, miserable sleep it was), and in the sunless morning he set out with little certainty to find his "pal." After some time he stumbled on the trail that led him to the boys' camp. He was now savage with hunger and annoyance, and reckless with bottle assistance, for he carried a flask. No longer avoiding ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... distance we floated down stream, until we entered the marshy lake in which the Euphrates disappears. Beyond this we came to a desolate, wooded, sunless spot; there we landed, Mithrobarzanes leading the way, and proceeded to dig a pit, slay our sheep, and sprinkle their blood round the edge. Meanwhile the Mage, with a lighted torch in his hand, abandoning his customary whisper, shouted at the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... restless couch They hear their own hearts beat. Now Gebir breathed Another air, another sky beheld. Twilight broods here, lulled by no nightingale Nor wakened by the shrill lark dewy-winged, But glowing with one sullen sunless heat. Beneath his foot nor sprouted flower nor herb Nor chirped a grasshopper. Above his head Phlegethon formed a fiery firmament: Part were sulphurous clouds involving, part Shining like solid ribs of molten brass; For the fierce ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... that the schooner had in years gone by got embayed in this ice when it was far to the southward, and had in course of time been built up in it by floating masses. For how old the ice about the poles may be who can tell? In those sunless worlds the frozen continents may well possess the antiquity of the land. And who shall name the monarch who filled the throne of Britain when this vast field broke away from the main and started on its stealthy ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... retreat is equally difficult, as now I had no water in tanks or otherwise between this and Fort Mueller, and not a horse might ever reach that goal. I am again seated under the splashing fountain that falls from the rocks above, sheltered by the sunless caverns of this Gorge of Tarns, with a limpid liquid basin of the purest water at my feet, sheltered from the heated atmosphere which almost melts the rocks and sand of the country surrounding us—sitting as I may well declare ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... all she was worth in an honest effort to make up the hour that Shanley had lost in the snowdrifts of Marshall Pass. Presently she heard the muffled roar of the train on a trestle, and a moment later saw the Salt Lake Limited swallowed by the Black Canon, in whose sunless gorges many a driver died before the scenery settled after having been disturbed by the builders ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... see you. Our Lady of Jokes, and in this cold, sunless street we grin, we smirk, we leer a salutation to your photograph and the phrase beneath it that laughs mockingly ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... especial beauty. The country was flat and uninteresting about here, and needed the glory of its summer verdure to brighten and embellish it. But Mr. Fenton did not give much thought to the scenes through which he went at this time; the world around and about him was all of one colour—the sunless gray which pervaded his own life. To-day the low dull sky and the threatening clouds far away upon the level horizon harmonised well with his own thoughts—with the utter hopelessness of his mind. Hopelessness!—yes, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... by toppling convent crowned,[az] The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrowned, The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep, The tender azure[46] of the unruffled deep, The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,[ba] The vine on high, the willow branch below, Mixed in one mighty scene, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... bird of which weird things are told; for they say it is not really a creature of this living world, but a night wanderer from the Land of Darkness. In the Meido its dwelling is among those sunless mountains of Shide over which all souls must pass to reach the place of judgment. Once in each year it comes; the time of its coming is the end of the fifth month, by the antique counting of moons; and the peasants, hearing its voice, say one to the other, 'Now must we sow the rice; for the Shide-no-taosa ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... meet in fight Fleetfoot Achilles. And she heard the voice, And all her heart exulted, for she weened That she should on that dawning day achieve A mighty deed in battle's deadly toil Ah, fool, who trusted for her sorrow a dream Out of the sunless land, such as beguiles Full oft the travail-burdened tribes of men, Whispering mocking lies in sleeping ears, And to the battle's travail lured ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... great. But for the discomfort that we endure from the sun's rays we are more than amply compensated by the pleasure that the recollection brings us in winter, when the north wind is moaning through the sunless woods and the dreary fog hangs over the cities. When I again reached the Dordogne there was no longer any road, but only a rough path through high bracken, heather and broom. Snakes rustled as I passed, and hid ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... human, for to be human is to be sad. That men and women should be so warped and twisted by the pressure of the years out of semblance to themselves; that circumstances should so wall in their lives with insurmountable cliffs of granite facts, compelling them to tread the sunless gorge; that the coldness of death alone could open the door ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... mountains, wreathed with dancing mists; low-browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, sitting in meditation beneath a burden of glacier-ice that thickens every year; and mountains of fair aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is blackened with this year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires. The drip from it seeps away through slopes of unstable gravel and dirt, till, at the appointed season, the whole ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... cold, and the rider was buttoned up to the throat. The air was damp; a dense veil of vapor lay on the valley and hid half the fells; the wintery dawn, with its sunless sky, had not the strength to rend it asunder; the wind had veered to the north, and was now dank and icy. A snow-storm ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally, to descend into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I should ever re-ascend. Nor did I, even by waking, feel that I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... spring; doubtless it pleased her to make the circling ripples, and watch them glitter like gems. She knelt down by the brink, and played there like a child, dabbling her long tresses in the water, and flinging them loose again to see the water drip from the ends, like a string of pearls in the sunless light. ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... time because she wanted to walk without hurry, and to ponder. The morning, though imperfect and sunless, had in it some quality of the spring, which the buoyant youth of Rachel instantly discovered and tasted in triumph. Moreover, the spirit of a festival was abroad, and visible in the costume and faces of passers-by; and it was the first festival of the year. Rachel responded to it eagerly, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... cunning finger finely twined The subtle thread that knitteth mind to mind; There that strange bridge of signs was built where roll The sunless waves that sever soul from soul, And by the arch, no bigger than a hand, Truth travell'd ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good things they had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of needy children, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up again and again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the little hungry creatures went prowling after scattered hedge-nuts or ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... with Nick till her tired brain reeled. She was not exactly frightened by this new element that had come into her life. The very fact of having something definite to look forward to was a relief after dwelling for so long in the sunless void of non-expectancy. But she was by no means sure that she welcomed so violent a disturbance at the actual heart of her darkened existence. She could not, moreover, wholly forget her fear of the man who had saved her by main force from the fate ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain. The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... mechanic, among a number of others, at work on a house a little way from my office, who always appeared to be in a merry humor; he had a kind word and smile for every one he met. Let the day be ever so cold, gloomy, or sunless, a happy smile danced on his cheerful countenance. Meeting him one morning, I asked him to tell me the secret of ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... o' doors indoors, and eating mutton instead of thistles for drenched stinging-nettles, yclept trees; for block-tin clouds; for butlers' pantry seas, and garret-conceived lakes; for molten sugar-candy rivers; for airless atmosphere and sunless air; for carpet nature, and cold, dead fragments of an earth all soul and living glory to every cultivated eye but a routine painter's. Yet the man of many such mediocrities could not keep the pot boiling. We suspect that, to those who would rise in life, even ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... thy martial footsteps fall— Thine arms shall hang, dull trophies, on the wall— Fallen the stem of Troy! Thou go'st where slow Cocytus wanders—where Love sinks in Lethe, and the sunless air Is dark to light ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... a dark chateau Stands ever open to me, In far ravines dream-waters flow, Descending soundlessly; Above its peaks the eagle floats, Lone in a sunless sky; Mute are the golden woodland throats Of the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... our sunshiny homes on the shore, We heed not how wildly the billows may roar; We smile at our firesides, happy and free, While the rich-freighted argosy founders at sea! Though wrapped in the weeds of her widowhood, pale,— Though life seems all sunless and dim through the veil That drearily shadows her sorrowful brow,— Is the cause of her country less dear to her now? Does the patriot-flame in her heart cease to stir,— Does she feel that the conflict is over for her? Because the red war-tide has deluged her o'er,— Has wreaked ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston |
