"Lambent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trumpet and drum, but in silence, they came— Their paths were illumed by their torches' mild flame, Whose soft lambent streams by love's glory were lit; And where fairy knights and bright elves used to flit Across the wan world when the lights quivered dim, These watched at the grave, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even of Wordsworth an effect ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows. Ghost rains sweep down, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pine and palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, grown gray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... much as you do in dealing with nature; you are to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balked by what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rank contemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritual flames that play about ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... of night Round us pours a lambent light, Light that seems but just to show Breasts that beat, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... and opened it, and so to the front door. My hands seemed to be ablaze, and left their impress on the doors and handles. It blazed for a while after I had touched it, but soon went out, and no smell or trace remained. I have seen my own hands covered with a lambent flame; but nothing like this I ever saw.... The lights were preceded by very sharp detonations on my chair, so that we could watch for their coming by hearing the noise. They shot up very ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... not a prude, but was chaste. She was not a devotee, but was pious. He discerned in her at the same time a spirit elevated, yet not narrow; lofty and dignified sentiments, and deeply rooted principles; virtue without rigor, pure and lambent as flame. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Harrison and Tyler). "Mr. Fessenden at that time," said Mr. Davis, "was not only a young man of eminent ability and attainments, but he was warm-hearted, frank, honorable, eminently conscientious. His health was then good, and he was always bright and genial: sometimes he showed the lambent play of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... hurriedly combed The Rolls for what few cattle remained on the lower range, the cowmen turned their eyes to the river and to the canyons and towering cliffs beyond, for the sheep; until at last as they sat by the evening fire Creede pointed silently to the lambent flame of a camp fire, glowing like a torch against the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... there was no such pause; for the embers in the furnace were at a white heat, and flashes of lambent flame were leaping out of the chimney top, and vanishing in the dark clouds overhead. A dozen bars of glowing steel had been drawn simultaneously from the charcoal, and thrice as many massive hammers were forging them into the rude shapes of weapons on ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... delicate, lovely—as no work of human hands could be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range of the Rockies. Far to the north, standing aloof from the range, loomed up the grand black bulk ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... looking up suddenly, "perhaps to you, too, Nature has opened her sky picture page by page! Have you seen the lambent flame of dawn leaping across the livid east; the red-stained, sulphurous islets floating in the lake of fire in the west; the ragged clouds at midnight, black as a raven's wing, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... burned houses, and shops, and churches to the very ground. The lambent flames still played about the heaps of burning ruins, but the fury of the conflagration had abated through lack of material upon which to feed itself. Victory remained finally with those who had worked so well to keep the foe in check, and keep in safety ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in the Roman military phrase—'Yes, testudine et facie;' and immediately after added, 'Ready for the enemy, and in battle array.' His powers of mind were (if I may be allowed that expression) smouldering away in their ashes; but every now and then some lambent flame, or grand emanation of light, shot forth to make it evident that the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... along through the soft, lambent air, everything he passed appealed to his heart and imagination. Each of the small, yet dignified, eighteenth-century houses, which add such distinction and grace to each Surrey township—Epsom, Leatherhead, Guildford—gave him a comfortable feeling of his country's well-being, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... and shook hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both vigorous, both determined, there was yet a fine line of distinction between them. On ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... more shall I drink wine from the hand of Ul-Jabal. My knees totter beneath the weight of my lean body. Daggers of lambent fever race through my brain incessant. Some fibrillary twitchings at the right angle of the mouth ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the sun was hot again. The new-born brimstone butterflies were upon the wing, a flutter of lambent green. They were of the time, and young. They must live all winter and waken every sunny day till next spring—the ambassadors of this summer ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, seem'd like a thin Veil not to hide, but to heighten the Beauty which it cover'd; her Night-gown hanging loose, discover'd her charming Bosom, which cou'd bear no Name, but Transport, Wonder ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... leagues on their starboard hand. The only incident of the voyage was a sudden severe hurricane, a brief summer tempest which raged throughout one night and terrified a good many of the voyagers, whose superstitious fears were only allayed when they saw the lambent flames of the light of Saint Elmo playing about the rigging of the Admiral's ship. It was just the Admiral's luck that this phenomenon should be observed over his ship and over none of the others; it added to his prestige as a person peculiarly ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... her that season the Firefly, and many misinterpreted her illy suppressed excitement and the scrutiny of those lambent eyes sending out their flame signals in search of answering lights. Even her secretary did not know that the dark shadows which ringed them were not due to the balls and other frivolities in which she was so conspicuous; but to complicated and dangerous schemes ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... presence and sternly handsome, entered the room. She wore robes—robes; not clothes—ample and fluent. In her eye could be perceived the lambent flame of genius and soul. In her hand was a green bag of the capacity of a bushel, and an umbrella that also seemed to wear a robe, ample and fluent. She accepted ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... stationers, for yeomen, stood prepar'd, And Herringman was captain of the guard. The hoary prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd; At his right hand our young Ascanius sate, Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state: His brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace, And lambent Dulness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Sworn by his sire a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true Dulness would maintain; And, in his father's right, and realm's defence, Ne'er to have peace with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... tawny, and others had tints of the sun in flesh and hair. One was grizzled about the temples, and one was a smooth-cheeked youth. The roster of their familiar names seemed to her as precious as a rosary. They watched her, feeling her beauty as keenly as if it were a pain, and answering every lambent ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of flame was round her waist; every limb was bathed in lambent light; all the multitudinous life of the autumn sea, stirred by her approach, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... anything more grand could not be conceived. One moment everything was of a velvety blackness, then in an instant came the flash, the sky seemed to be opened to display the glories beyond of golden mountain, vivid blue sea, and lambent yellow plain. In the twinkling of an eye the sky closed again, and the darkness was more dense than before, while, as Mark sat thinking of the wonderful contrast between lying in his bed at home in ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... about an acre of plate glass under the Royal arms on Mr. Eglantine's shop-window; and at night, when the gas is lighted, and the washballs are illuminated, and the lambent flame plays fitfully over numberless bottles of vari-coloured perfumes—now flashes on a case of razors, and now lightens up a crystal vase, containing a hundred thousand of his patent tooth-brushes—the effect of the sight may be imagined. You don't suppose that ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that scene whereof at the time she seemed to take no note, always remained fixed in the mind of Cicely: the cold expanse of snow, the inky trees, the hard sky, the lambent beams of the moon, the dull glow of the torches caught and reflected by her jewels and her lover's mail, the midwinter sound of birds, the barking of a distant hound, the black porch of the church that drew nearer, the little oblong mounds which hid the bones of hundreds who in their day ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... was that the Count de Gabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs,—beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I knew I wanted to marry her, when I saw her. I love her passionately," and he threw a pebble in the water farther than he had yet; "but she is so pure, so delicate, that when I approach her, in spite of my besottedness, my love grows lambent. That's not like me, you know," with great vehemence. "Will she ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... yeomen stood prepar'd, And Herringman was captain of the guard. The hoary prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd. At his right hand our young Ascanius sate, Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state. His brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace, And lambent dulness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Swore by his sire a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true dulness would maintain; And, in his father's ...
— English Satires • Various
... stand, The thunderbolt of Indra's hand; And Siva's trident, sharp and dread, And that dire weapon, Brahma's Head. And two fair clubs, O royal child, One Charmer and one Pointed styled— With flame of lambent fire aglow, On thee, O Chieftain, I bestow. And Fate's dread net and Justice' noose That none may conquer, for thy use:— And the great cord, renowned of old, Which Varun ever loves to hold. Take ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant luster of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the fantastic tricks played at times upon some body of worshippers, where light to the church is admitted through stained glass windows? A lambent red flame lighting up the hair of a man's head, while at the same moment his beard is blue and luminous. Over the shoulders of another, the purple mantle of royalty seems about falling, investing him for a moment with regal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... indeterminate forms gliding ghost-like toward the water, which was evidently the recognised drinking place for most of the game in the neighbourhood. And at length, when I had been standing there for about twenty minutes, two pairs of lambent orbs loomed up through the long grass, and Thunder and Juno came wriggling apologetically to my feet, having apparently made their way back to the spot where they had deserted me, and tracked me ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... youthful. She dresses with a taste that must always make her conspicuous wherever she may be. You could not enter a room in which she was without seeing her, for her glance has a strange power that irresistibly draws your glance to it, though her eyes are lambent rather than brilliant, and if large, rarely opened to their full extent. Her complexion is dark; that is, in comparison with her daughter's, which is of a marble-like purity. But it has strange flushes in it, and at times seems ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... some Titanic bloom, The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core, Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or, Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor, By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore, A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb, The stranded driftwood ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... soil to stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... box-bordered paths, and entirely cut off from the lake winds, which are apt to have an easterly sharpness in them. On this piazza sat Sibyl and Graham Marr, and the two listeners above caught fragments of their poetical conversation. "I say, Bessie, do you know what a 'lambent waif' is?" whispered Hugh. "What a calf that Marr is! How can Sibyl listen to him? He has ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... desire more. For the conception of the Universe involved must surely exclude the real being, or even the real existence, of anything but God. Matthew Arnold never committed himself to Pantheism, nor, indeed, to any other theory of the Universe. For his delicate humour and lambent satire always had in view simply the practical object of clearing a plain way for the good life through the "Aberglaube" of theology. His description of God as "the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness," might seem, in fact, the negation of Pantheism, because, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... Patent Office there are no monopolies in this country, and there never can be. Ah, but what is that I see on the far horizon's edge, with tongue of lambent flame and eye of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... special clearing lighted by the moon and countless anchoridae tied by their legs in festoons, a procedure which causes them to open and shut their lambent eyes very rapidly, and gave a quaint cinema effect to the scene. After counting the courses up to twenty-seven I lost as each was accompanied by a new brand of island potion. Fortunately we were seated ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... horrible and weird, suggestive to the Baggara—chiefs and Mullahs—of magic in its most awful guise. For as they stood spellbound there by the strange light which played about as if some hissing, fiery dragon were flickering its lambent tongue in and out of its glistening jaws, not only were the faces and busy hands of the Hakim and his assistants seen moving rapidly, but directly after there, in a faint glare, was the bare torso ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... soon recover from it—he has taken our breath away and leaves us gasping. No smoke nor cinders there. Pure, white, hurtling, formless flame; very fire crystal, we cannot make spires nor waves of it, nor divide it, nor walk on it, there is no question about singeing soles of feet. It is lambent annihilation. ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... career of America's first successful man of letters. For, strangely enough, he had succeeded in making a good living with his pen. More than that, his natural and lambent humor, his charm and grace of style, and a literary power at once broad and genuine, had won him a place, if not among the crowned heads, at least mong the princes of literature, side by side with Goldsmith and Addison. Thackeray called him "the first ambassador whom the New World of letters ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... stars! so eloquently bright, Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night, While half the world is lapp'd in downy dreams, And round the lattice creep your midnight beams, How sweet to gaze upon your placid eyes, In lambent beauty looking from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the love which is their crown. The same Apostle, who has thus the honour of ringing out to the world the good news that God is Love, declares that 'this is the message' which he has to tell, that 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.' So the light of righteousness, as well as the lambent flame of love, burn together on that central fire of the universe. We must not so conceive of the love of God, as to darken the radiance of His righteousness, or to obscure the brilliancy of that pure light which tolerates ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... other domesticities around Clapham Common on a slightly higher scale; for there are roads and roads of uniform houses at rents of L60 and L70 per annum, and here, too, sweetness and (pardon the word) Englishness spread their lambent lustre. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... these tokens of victory, he asked, with a lambent smile, and what he intended to be an elegant and condescending composure, "Your name, sir, if I mought take ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... round the mournful beauty played Of lambent light and purple shade, Lost on the fixed and dumb despair Of frozen earth and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... how often have I stood on the deck of a ship watching with wonder and awe the stars overhead, and the sea-fire below, especially in the foaming, silvery wake of the vessel, where often suddenly appear globes of soft and lambent light, given out perhaps from the surface of some ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... he read into the silent night, The winking stars soft peeping in his room, While at his hand the dreamy, lambent light Just lit his book and left all else in gloom. His study walls evanished, and in mist He saw the maid whose dead ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... Where's young master?" came out of the darkness. And now as Dick grew a little calmer, he fancied he saw pale lambent flashes of light on the water a little ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... a curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it. The strong interest that notices things was absent from him. Would it ever ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... was the enchanted boy now welcomed by the waiting train outside! They pressed lovingly around him; they played with his golden curls; they fanned him with their delicate wings; they looked down into the lambent depths of his clear blue eyes, and saw his pure spirit within so free from guile; they touched with their tender fingers his poor little thin white neck and breast, and felt his heart beating fast and faster ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... darted from it and alighted upon one of the foremost ships, a dazzling lightning stroke a mile in length, at whose touch the metallic sides of the car curled and withered and, licked for a moment by what seemed lambent flames, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... while the sea all about the burning hull shone like a pool of molten gold in which strange shapes moved and the shadows of living things were to be seen. Now licking the quivering masts, now blown aside in tongue-shaped jets, the lambent flame spurted from every crack and crevice, leaped up from every port-hole of that splendid steamer. I saw that her minutes were numbered, and I said that before the dawn broke she would sink, a mass of ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... Devotional Poetry of Spain." It is delightful to trace the charming resemblance between the books and the writers, widely different as they are. There is the same geniality, the same tender pathos, the same lambent humor, the same delicate observation of details, the same overpowering instinct of literary art. But Geoffrey Crayon is a humorist, while the Pilgrim beyond the Sea is a poet. The one looks at the broad aspects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... seen on her lip, her brow darkens, her dark orbs flash as of fire,—all the heart-burnings of a soul stung with shame are seen to quicken and make ghastly those features that but a moment before shone lambent as summer lightning. He pauses as with a look of withering scorn she scans him from head to foot, raises covertly her left hand, tossing carelessly her glossy hair on her shoulder, and with lightning ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... stars! Light, the revealer of dread beauty's face! Weaving whereof the hills are lambent clad! Mighty libation to the Unknown God! Cup whereat pine-trees slake their giant thirst And little leaves drink sweet delirium! Being and breath and potion! Living soul And all-informing heart of all that lives! How can we magnify ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... we saw it for the first time that hot evening in March, with the golden lambent light pouring down through the valley, making it in verity a "shell of gold," sitting in Indian chairs on the terrace, with the perfume of roses and jasmines all around us, the valley of the Oreto, Palermo, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the confusion clouding his thoughts, he both foreglimpsed humiliation and was dimly aware of a personality of force and charm: of a well-poised figure cloaked in a light pongee travelling-wrap; of a face that seemed to consist chiefly in dark eyes glowing lambent in the shadow of a wide-brimmed, flopsy hat. He was sensitive to a hint of breeding and reserve in the woman's attitude; as though (he thought) the contretemps diverted and engaged her more than he did who was ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... object to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it would suit my ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... roaring storms, flurries of ice, snow and sleet, shot through and through by balls of lambent flames in unguessable numbers. Eery lights which struck the surface of the Earth, bounded away and, half a mile or so from the surface again, burst into flaming pin-wheels, like skyrockets of ancient times. Strange lights, causing weird effects, but producing no damage at all, save to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... captain's life and of bringing off that "cursed nice little cannon." He gloried over it many a time to himself, and often of late took the medal of honor from its imitation-morocco case, and read the inscription by the light of his flickering candle. The embossed silver words seemed to spread a lambent glow over all the squalid little cabin—seemed almost to set it on fire! More than once some irrepressible small boy, prowling at night in the neighborhood and drawn like a moth by the flame of Dutton's candle, had set his eye to a crack in the door-panel ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to hurt, yet quick to search out forgivable weakness. The laughter of her mind played like lambent flame over all about her, and from all about her arose answering laughter. Yet she was never the centre of things. This she would not permit. The large house, and all of which it was significant, was her father's; and through it, to the last, moved his heroic figure—host, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... with some degree of nervousness that the travellers drew near to the bridge. The sun had dipped behind the blue hills of the west, and the pale, lambent glow of the evening star shot athwart the sky, ere the bridge was reached. While it was yet twilight in the uplands, it was night here. The hollow sounds of the horse's feet on the bridge chilled the hearts of the occupants ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... less remarkable than the forms. When the light of day warms them with its gorgeous glaze, the buildings wear the brightest hues of red concrete, like a certain house near Prince's Gate, set off by lambent lights of lively pink and balas-ruby, and by shades of deep transparent purple, while here and there a dwarf dome or a tumulus gleams sparkling white in the hot sun-ray. The even-glow is indescribably lovely, and all the lovelier ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... he saw the wild forms, and the melee, little less fantastic, of human and brute features in a chase—a boar-chase in front, and a stag-chase on his left hand. These, as they rose fitfully in bright masses of color and of savage expression under the lambent flashing of the fire, continued to excite his irritable state of feeling; and it was not for some time that he felt this uneasy condition give way to exhaustion. He was at length on the very point of falling asleep, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the wine-cup full and full Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup; Let now all mortal men take up The drink, and a long, ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... other rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the first portion of the heavy inflammable air, resulting from the passage of steam over heated charcoal was loaded with fixed air (CO2), but that in the course of the process this disappeared, the remaining air (CO) burning with a lambent flame. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... movement on the part of the midshipman, and Murray saw the calm sea agitated, and faint flashes of phosphorescent light appear, while directly after it was as if something made a rush; the depths grew ablaze with pale lambent cold fire, and Roberts gave vent to an ejaculation expressive of ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... of Time the Autocrat Has writ in Stars the fiery Idem Stat, Lettered the Riddle in the Lambent Suns - rather write than read a Book ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously he resented that this old man should ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the dead wood everywhere The insects ticked, or bored below The rotted bark; and, glow on glow, The lambent fireflies here and there Lit ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... a moment wondering, if she could, without screaming or scratching, seem aware of Diva's presence. Then she soared, lambent as flame. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... difficult, in the tropic dust, to follow what exactly happened next. For the next few minutes black-back was here, there, and everywhere, leaping and dodging in and out like a lambent flame. The human eye could scarcely follow him, but the human ear could hear plainly the nasty, dog-like snarling and the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... was lambent. "Yes," she said, "that sweet Anna she's very intric-ate." Hilary flamed and caught his breath, but she met his eyes with the placidity of the ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... she will make you break your oath. She is your wife. She will make you forsake me, or—she will do me a fatal mischief. Oh, I shiver whenever she comes near me. Ah, if you had seen her eyes as I saw them through her mask to-night. They were lambent flames! How they glared on ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... though she ventured to reiterate the warning, breathed by the feverish couch of her child. This warning Miss Thusa endeavored to bear in mind, and illumined the gloomy grandeur of her legends by some lambent rays of fancy—but they were lightning flashes playing about ruins, suggesting ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... where Friendship's fixt star beams a mellow'd Ray; 50 Where Love a crown of thornless Roses wears; Where soften'd Sorrow smiles within her tears; And Memory, with a Vestal's meek employ, Unceasing feeds the lambent flame of Joy! No more thy Sky Larks less'ning from my sight 55 Shall thrill th' attund Heartstring with delight; No more shall deck thy pensive Pleasures sweet With wreaths of sober hue my evening seat! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... unsubstantial, was a temple lit by bale-fires that shone wanly at its base. It was merely a building superimposed upon a skyscraper, but in the dark there was no skyscraper, and the amazing structure hung there lambent, silent, enigmatic, a Wagnerian temple in ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... with a smooth, glossy hide of a very light chocolate colour—except along the belly and on the inner side of the thighs, where the hair was milk-white—and long, sharp, gracefully curving horns. We were so close to him that we could even distinguish the greenish lambent ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer? Or of the o'er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion, "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and with the lambent flame of genius, playing round each object, lights up the universe in a robe of its own radiance? Sir Walter has no voluntary power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those of habit or of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... was set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent light played. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the diffused lights of some nebulae concentrate themselves into a sun. That sun, like the star that led the wise men from the East, and finally stood over one poor house in an obscure village, will shine lambent above, and will pass into, the humblest heart that opens for it. They who can say, as we all can if we will, 'My God,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hour. Sometimes a crow would caw, to hear strange sounds go past, like an old watchman's rattle moved one cog. The stars became bright, however, and the moon was new, and when Phoebus came to a large cleared opening in the pines, the lambent heavens broke forth and bathed the sandy fields with silver, and showed a large, high house at the middle of the clearing, with outside chimneys, one thicker than the other, and a porch of two ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... sweeter smiles betray'd. Conscious awhile with throbbing heart he strove, Spread his wide arms, and barter'd life for love!— Now rocks on rocks, in savage grandeur roll'd, Steep above steep, the blasted plains infold; The incumbent crags eternal tempest shrouds, And livid light'nings cleave the lambent clouds; 50 Round the firm base loud-howling whirlwinds blow, And sands ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... which defied time and space, come silently to me, breathing inspiration that may not be spoken, healing the madness of despair and leaving to me in the midst of anxiety a peace which was wholly unaccountable! In the lambent flame of the rough stone fireplace, in the darkness between Hamilton's hut and mine, through which I often stole, dreading what I might find—everywhere, I felt and saw, or seemed to see, those gray eyes with the look of a startled ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... treasure and ruin, heavily squatted on the very summit of the pile, was such a creature as no words could depict—of a ghastly color, bulky and malformed, furnished with three burning eyes that turned now green, now red with lambent flame, and great shapeless limbs, which it uplifted one after the other, striking awkward, pawing blows at the bell! It seemed to the horrified onlookers to be the very demon of greed defending its spoil. Blank ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... coming, we are coming! not as comes the tempest's wrath, When the frown of desolation sits brooding o'er its path; But with mercy, such as leaves his holy signet-light upon The air in lambent beauty, when the darkened storm is gone. We will vote for Birney, We will vote for Birney, We're for Morris and for Birney, And for Freedom ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... slept on. The stout woman removed a shell comb from her back hair and composed herself for deeper slumber. Jessica presented to my lambent gaze a visage which besought unspoken sympathy, and mutely breathed a protest against travel in general and this phase of it in particular. Jessica in the "still small hours" was never really gay. It was dimly comforting to one of my companionable nature to turn from ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... bolt-heads on lofty vessels, raised on mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories. Duff had grown superstitious; he came out of the inn door sidewise, that he might always see that moon over his right ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... with another, and still another. Then Mr. Abercrombie was prevailed upon to read one of his own outpourings of genius, a poem called "The Tigress," in which someone, presumably the author, described the torments involved in his adoration of a feminine person with "jetty brows and lambent eyes," whose kiss was like "a viper's sting" and who had, so to speak, raised the very dickens with his feelings. He read it with passionate fervor, and Captain Dan, listening, decided that the Tigress must be ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... chamber-door, All to devour the infant Heracles. They, all their length uncoiled upon the floor, Writhed on to their blood-feast; a baleful light Gleamed in their eyes, rank venom they spat forth. But when with lambent tongues they neared the cot, Alcmena's babes (for Zeus was watching all) Woke, and throughout the chamber there was light. Then Iphicles—so soon as he descried The fell brutes peering o'er the hollow shield, And saw ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... juxtaposition, kaleidoscopic, labyrinth, lacerate, lackadaisical, lacrimal, laity, lambent, lampoon, largess, lascivious, laudable, laudation, lavation, legionary, lethargic, licentious, lineal, lingual, literati, litigious, loquacity, lubricity, lucent, lucre, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... hid it. The king had made of this tree a pillar to support his house. Isis sat down weeping; the women of the queen came to her, she stroked their hair, and fragrance passed into it. She was made nurse to the queen's child, fed him with her finger, and in the night-time, by means of a lambent flame, burned away his impurities. She then turned herself into a swallow and flew around the house, bewailing her fate. The queen watched her operations, and being alarmed cried out, and so robbed her child of immortality. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... lights began to reappear. Glowing in fantastic forms they seemed alive with lambent fire. As the boys gazed at each other they could see that their features were tinted with the weird ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... head and shoulders. It was a beautiful night; the air sweet and still; the moonlight shining over the scarcely stirring waters of the bay. Before her rose the vast bulk of the Castello dell' Ovo, a huge mass of black shadow against the silvery sea and the lambent sky: then far away throbbed the dull orange lights of the city; and beyond these, again, Vesuvius towered into the clear darkness, with a line of sharp, intense crimson marking its summit. Through the perfect silence ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale lambent nimbus round her head. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ran back to our shuddering hearts from sympathy. Then, as he read on and painted the king and murderer together, while his voice waxed stronger and fuller, we saw Clarian step forward to the salver and busy with its lambent flame, till it blazed up with a broad, red light, that, shedding a weird splendor upon all around, and lending a supernatural effect to the room's deep shadows, the picture's funereal aspect, and the unearthly pallor of the boy's countenance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... were alone, she and I, I stood a moment where they had left me, my hands pinioned behind me, and the cord which the executioner had held trailing the ground like a lambent tail. Then I went slowly forward until I stood close before her. Her eyes were on my face, still with that same ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... cloud, much darker and more descending than the others, which obscured the firmament, spread over the zenith, and based itself upon the horizon to leeward. Oswald's eye had been fixed upon it but a few seconds, when he beheld a small lambent gleam of lightning pierce through the most opaque part; then another, and more vivid. Of a sudden the wind lulled, and the Circassian righted from her careen. Again the wind howled, and again the vessel was pressed down to her bearings by its force; again another flash of lightning, which was followed ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... arm of Fate, the arm of Right, And Vishnu's arm of awful might: That, before which no foe can stand, The thunderbolt of Indra's hand; And Siva's trident, sharp and dread, And that dire weapon Brahma's Head. And two fair clubs, O royal child, One Charmer and one Pointed styled With flame of lambent fire aglow, On thee, O Chieftain, I bestow. And Fate's dread net and Justice' noose That none may conquer, for thy use: And the great cord, renowned of old, Which Varun ever loves to hold. Take these two thunderbolts, which I Have got for thee, the Moist and Dry. Here ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... theirs? It matters not; for I Am but a leaf cast on the whirling tide, Without a hope or wish, except to die. But truth, asserted once, must still abide, Unquenchable, as are those fiery springs Which day and night gush from the mountain-side, Perpetual meteors girt with lambent wings, Which the wild tempest tosses to and fro, But cannot conquer with the force it brings. Yet I, who ever felt another's woe More keenly than my own untold distress; I, who have battled with the common foe, And broke ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... time, and passed the day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth, which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... You stay here." Sandy had left his rifle at the cabin when he carried Grit out, now he spun the two cylinders of his Colts, lowered himself into the split, holding on to the vine, looking straight into Grit's lambent eyes. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... now broke; and, in a few minutes, the prison shook, and the Genius appeared. He was visible by a lambent light that played around him; and HAMET starting from the ground, turned to the vision with reverence and wonder: but as the Omnipotent was ever present to his mind, to whom all beings in all worlds are obedient, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... the homestead, now an irregular heap of smouldering ashes over which stray lambent flames flickered and danced, served to shed sufficient light to show where two still figures lay under the shelter of Dudgeon's rackety old buggy, thrown over on its side. The trooper's horse, tethered to a tree, pawed the ground impatiently as it champed its bit, while its master, ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... the side of the Shepherd-King, but in answer to His cry for help He came down riding upon a cherub, flying on the wings Of wind; the Holy Spirit had been in the world from the earliest days of prayer and inspired speech, but He came down from the throne to sit on each bowed head in lambent flame. So Christ is with us all the days, yet He comes. He will come at last to receive His own to Himself, and to judge the world; but He comes in dark and lonely hours that we may not ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... Oecolampadius began to introduce novelties into the church service with caution, Erasmus saw these innovations with alarm. Especially the fanaticism of Farel, whom he hated bitterly. It was these men who retarded what he still desired and thought possible: a compromise. His lambent spirit, which never fully decided in favour of a definite opinion, had, with regard to most of the disputed points, gradually fixed on a half-conservative midway standpoint, by means of which, without ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Live to comfort the grey hairs, and to succour the infirmities of your aged parent." While the breast of Arthur was animated with such sentiments, and dictated a conduct like this, the priests were employed in the mournful preparations. The altar was made ready; the lambent fire ascended from its surface; the air was perfumed with the smoke of the incense; the fillets were brought forth; and the sacred knife glittered in the hand of the chief of the Druids. The bards had strung their harps, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... humour flickers over this page like lambent flame; yet he was serious at heart without a doubt, and his whirling words rouse an echo in many a breast to this day. But both Shakspere and Lamb had their higher moments. Turn to "Cymbeline," and observe the glorious triumph of the dirge which rings like the magnificent ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... literally, the hand of help. For the Canon never wasted a gesture. There was no detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... reader is probably acquainted with Thorwaldsen's three-fold analogy,—the clay model, the Life; the plaster cast, the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection,—and it seemed to be made good by the spirit that was kindling up these imperfect features, like a lambent flame. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'Ethics of the Dust,' wh'h I devoured with't pause, and intend to look at ag'n, is a most shining Performance! Not for a long while have I read anything tenth-part so radiant with talent, ingenuity, lambent fire (sheet—and other lightnings) of all commendable kinds! Never was such a lecture on Crystallography before, had there been nothing else in it,—and there are all manner of things. In power of expression I pronounce it to be supreme; never ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... soil is sand, yet everlasting life with those I love; give me a lodge in some vast wilderness hallowed by children's laughter; give me a cave in the mountain crag to house those dearest to my heart; give me a tent on the far frontier, where, by the lambent light of their mother's eyes, I may watch my children grow in grace and the truth of God, and I'll build a heaven grander, nobler, sweeter than was ever dreamed of by the gross materialists ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
