"Brightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the enormous group of moths, which, as I hear from Mr. Stainton, do not habitually expose the under surface of their wings to full view, we find this side very rarely coloured with a brightness greater than, or even equal to, that of the upper side. Some exceptions to the rule, either real or apparent, must be noticed, as the case of Hypopyra. (16. See Mr. Wormald on this moth: 'Proceedings of the Entomological Society,' March 2, 1868.) Mr. Trimen informs me that in Guenee's great work, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... to confess to herself that her aunt was quite right, and that the omission would have been a real unkindness, when she saw how worn and tired the governess looked, and the brightness that flashed over the pale face at sight of her. Mrs. Vincent had been much worse, and though slightly better for the present was evidently in a critical state, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boy, but I'm a long way from where your father was when he penned me that calm note,—lying in the very arms of death at the moment." Noll was silent. "Yes," continued Trafford, "for me there is no brightness beyond the depths of the grave. All is dark,—dark! and so many of my friends have vanished in it,—so many have been lost to me there! Ah, my hope was ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... that Demi was absent when she stole down to join the guests who soon began to flow through the house in a steady stream. The new brightness which touched her usually thoughtful face was easily explained by the congratulations she received as orator, and the slight agitation observable, when a fresh batch of gentlemen approached soon passed, as none of them noticed the flowers she ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... July days, of which he had been an eye-witness, he described to them. Joachim was handsome; he had an elegant countenance with sharp features, and was certainly rather pale—one might perhaps have called him worn with dissipation, had it not been for the brightness of his eyes, which increased in conversation. The fine dark eyebrow, and even the little mustache, gave the countenance all expression which reminded one of fine English steel-engravings. His figure was small, almost slender, but the proportions were beautiful. The animation of the Frenchman expressed ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... of having shown so much of her woe at leaving England. She hoped Anna-Felicitas hadn't noticed. She certainly wasn't going on like that. When the St. Luke whistled, she was ashamed that it wasn't only Anna-Felicitas who jumped. And the amount of brightness she put into her voice when she told Anna-Felicitas it was pleasant to go and discover America was such that that young lady, who if slow was sure, said to herself, "Poor little Anna-R., she's really taking it dreadfully ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... were so bright, as they gazed at each other, that it seemed they might change to stars and wing together away up into the morning. Henry snatched one look at the brightness ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... of happy and fortunate rich people—every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing—was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... calm his burdened, agitated soul. The night had reached that hour preceding dawn When nature seems in solemn silence hushed, Awed by the glories of the coming day. The moon hung low above the western plains; Unnumbered stars with double brightness shine, And half-transparent mists the landscape veil, Through which the mountains in dim grandeur rise. Silent, alone he crossed the maidan wide Where first he saw the sweet Yasodhara, Where joyful multitudes so often met, Now still as that dark valley of his dream. He passed ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... mincing step the fickle Princess came: Th' attending Crowds shout forth her empty name. Strange was her form,—her look, her dress were strange; And yet each moment saw their sudden change. Now her Locks soar aloft, and threat the sky; Now shade the brightness of her rolling eye: Awhile they on her wanton bosom break; Then, upward forc'd, display th' uncover'd neck. Ere the long train could spread its shady folds,— Drawn up,—a knot the alter'd vestment holds. Soon fade the glories of th' enormous Plume; As soon the superseding ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... that Cuthbert, and indeed the great proportion of those present in the Christian host, had seen the enemy in force, and they eagerly watched the vast array. It was picturesque in the extreme, with a variety and brightness of color rivaling that of the Christian host. In banners and pennons the latter made a braver show; but the floating robes of the infidel showed a far brighter mass of color than the ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... half-forgotten strains, dreamily warbled, are oddly mingled with a widely different tune, in a bootless effort at remembrance; but my youth, with its golden promise, which maturer manhood but meagrely fulfilled, turns with the shadowed years veiling its brightness, and looks sorrowfully upon my old age in its solitude and desolation; but my life, with its wasted energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me, darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have been! O Heaven! what bitter ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reason and intellect, is thus seen to be a divine emanation, being related to the universal soul and Intellect. On its way from God to man it passes through all spheres, and every one leaves an impression upon her, and covers her with a wrapper, so to speak. The brightness of the star determines the ornament or "wrapper" which the soul gets from it. This is known to the Creator, who determines the measure of influence and the accidents attaching to the soul until she reaches the body destined for her by his will. The longer the stay in a given ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... not realize to ourselves the intoxication of a life which thus glides away in the face of heaven—the sweet yet strong love which this perpetual contact with Nature gives, and the dreams of these nights passed in the brightness of the stars, under an azure dome of infinite expanse. It was during such a night that Jacob, with his head resting upon a stone, saw in the stars the promise of an innumerable posterity, and the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... this mighty love Mehetabel rapidly became strong, and bloomed. The color returned to her cheek, the brightness to her eye, the smile to her lips, and ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... have guessed many things from the tremor of her voice. Lew Hervey saw enough to make his eyes contract to the brightness of a ferret's as he glanced from the girl to handsome Jim Perris. But the red-headed adventurer was quite blind, quite deaf. No matter how the thing had been done, he knew that the girl and the ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... man—not whose example only, but whose very contact suggests high intent and noble action. All honour to him who brings to a great cause, not alone the dazzling splendour of heroism, but the more enduring brightness of a pure ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able to do ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... rejoiced and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness—he had "sampled" all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were—had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... one or two of the engravings, which he had never forgotten, but the evening was less of a success than usual, and Aurelia doubted whether we would wish for her that day se'nnight. All her dread of him was gone; she knew she had brought a ray of brightness into his solitary broken life, and her mind was much occupied with the means of affording him pleasure. Indeed she might have wearied of the lack of all companionship save that of the young children; and converse with a clever ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I, and yet it is not," he said, shaking his head. "It is my fez, with the ruby clasp, and the embroidery on my state dress; but I do not really look so stiff. Where are the brown cheeks, the brightness of the eyes, the coloring, friend? And—what do I see?—the thing is broken; look here! there is a crack across it that separates the feet of my horse from his body. Therefore thou canst not keep all thy things unhurt in that sack—thou canst not find them ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... looked a little older than when we saw her last at the ranch. The dark shadows round her pretty eyes were darker, and her face looked thinner and paler, while her eyes shone with a feverish brightness. ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... something after all (although not much) to think that you are leaving a brave example; that other literary men love to remember, as I am sure they will love to remember, everything about you - your sweetness, your brightness, your helpfulness to all of us, and in particular those one or two really adequate and noble papers which you have been privileged to write during these last years. - With the heartiest and kindest ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with rust. In a tumbler on a little table at Margaret's head stood the only floral offering that gave a touch of tenderness to the grim scene,—a bunch of home-grown scarlet and white geraniums. Some woman had robbed her wintered room of this bit of brightness for the memory of the dead. The perfume of the flowers mingled heavily with the faint odour which pervades the chamber of death,—an odour that is like the reminiscence ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... But the devotion of Constantine was more peculiarly directed to the genius of the Sun, the Apollo of Greek and Roman mythology; and he was pleased to be represented with the symbols of the God of Light and Poetry. The unerring shafts of that deity, the brightness of his eyes, his laurel wreath, immortal beauty, and elegant accomplishments, seem to point him out as the patron of a young hero. The altars of Apollo were crowned with the votive offerings of Constantine; and the credulous multitude were taught to believe, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... years. Tom was never robust and Death's cold hand closed all too soon a loveable and useful life. Our friendship was close and intimate, such as is formed in the warmth of youth and which the grave alone dissolves. To me, during those short years, it lent brightness and gaiety to existence; and, in the days that have followed, its memory has been, and is now, a ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... red sun is laughing And beaming upon it Through torn fleecy clouds, Like a merry young girl Peeping out from the corn. 260 The cloud has moved nearer, The rain begins here, And the pope puts his hat on. But on the sun's right side The joy and the brightness Again are established. The rain is now ceasing.... It stops altogether, And God's wondrous miracle, Long golden sunbeams, 270 Are streaming from Heaven In ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... Samos, a mathematician of great powers, has left a different explanation in his teaching on this subject, as I shall now set forth. It is no secret that the moon has no light of her own, but is, as it were, a mirror, receiving brightness from the influence of the sun. Of all the seven stars, the moon traverses the shortest orbit, and her course is nearest to the earth. Hence in every month, on the day before she gets past the sun, she is under his disc and rays, and is consequently hidden and invisible. When she is thus in conjunction ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... and the prairie, which rolled back from Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn. It stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... is," she replied, a little shadow of sadness falling across the brightness of her face. "I had no proper clothes when we were married—but nothing! You know perhaps my story. In America, everyone knows everything. It is wonderful. When I ran away to marry Konrad Nirlanger I had only the dress which I wore; even that I borrowed from one of the upper servants, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... drinking from the stream within a few yards of them; but a guttural voice above, a sharp command, sent the man scrambling up the bank of the ravine to join his company. Then, as they boldly advanced, the voices of German troops grew less distinct, and presently, as the light increased in brightness and they gained the very edge of the wood, it was to discover that they had passed through the enemy's lines, and were, it appeared, alone once more ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... to which it is said the widow goes, after she has burned herself to death on the funeral pile of her husband Its palaces are of the purest gold. And such are the quantities of diamonds, and jasper, and sapphire, and emerald, and all manner of precious stones there, that it shines with a brightness superior to that of twelve thousand suns. Its streets are of the clearest crystal, fringed with gold. In the seventh, or the highest of the upper worlds, is the heaven where Brumha chiefly resides. This far exceeds all the other heavens in ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... out into the brightness of the summer day. It occurred to her that she was meeting more people than usual, that most of the shops were shut—of course, it was Sunday! She had not thought of that at all. And now that, too, made her glad. Soon she met a very slender ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... somewhere in the lower thicket seeking a teaberry tonic. Rag was sitting in the weak sunlight on a bank in the east side. The smoke from the familiar gable chimney of Olifant's house came fitfully drifting a pale blue haze through the underwoods and showing as a dull brown against the brightness of the sky. The sun-gilt gable was cut off midway by the banks of brier brush, that, purple in shadow, shone like rods of blazing crimson and gold in the light. Beyond the house the barn with its gable and roof, new gift at the house, stood up like ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... feelings dimly cover, Now us, and now the forms that round us hover; One's feelings by no other are supplied, 'Tis dark without, if all is bright inside; An outward brightness veils my sadden'd mood, When Fortune smiles,—how seldom understood! Now think we that we know her, and with might A woman's beauteous form instils delight; The youth, as glad as in his infancy, The spring-time treads, as though the spring were he Ravish'd, amazed, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Cintre looked at him again, with the same soft brightness. "Are you to be long in ...
— The American • Henry James
... at the appointed time, Enna looking worn, faded and fretful, Dick sad and anxious, poor Molly, weary, exhausted, despairing; as if life had lost all brightness to her. ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... fairies of our dreams, so lovely that it might be doubted whether the painter found his model among the daughters of earth. Passionate lover of form, feast your eye upon the graceful curve of that neck, those shoulders; gaze upon that pure brow where grace and youth preside; bathe your soul in the soft brightness of that blue and limpid glance; bend to taste the perfumed breath of that smiling mouth; tremble at the touch of those blonde tresses, twined in bewildering mazes behind the head and falling over the temples in waving masses; fervent worshipper ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... written with such fine and subtile tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night reveals them. Every man's daylight firmament answers in his mind to the brightness of the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... lesson to woman: Ever remember thy creative power as the mother of the humanity of the future. The sun in thy mansion exerts its highest power. Awake, therefore, O soul, and eclipse not its brightness with thy ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without unduly magnifying his charming genius, it had a natural, fresh, and smiling spirit, which, amid the funereal, theologic gloom, suggests the sweetness and brightness of morning. In its effect it is a breath of Chaucer. When Knickerbocker was published, Joel Barlow's "Hasty-Pudding" was the chief achievement of American literary humor. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were not yet "the wits of Hartford". Those who bore that name ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... bring my body in contact with a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential, and the tube in my hand is brilliantly lighted. In whatever position I may put it, wherever I may move it in space, as far as I can reach, its soft, pleasing light persists with undiminished brightness. ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... they had no priests or temples—these came in later ages, when men thought they had need of others to stand between them and God. But the ancient Aryans saw the Deity everywhere, and stood face to face with Him in Nature. He was to them the early morning, the brightness of midday, the gloom of evening, the darkness of night, the flash of the lightning, the roll of the thunder, and the rush of the mighty storm-wind. It seems strange to us that those who could imagine the one Heaven-Father should degrade Him by making a ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through; and this yet remained to Augustine. Had his wife been a whole woman, she might yet have done something—as woman can—to mend the broken threads of life, and weave again into a tissue of brightness. But Marie St. Clare could not even see that they had been broken. As before stated, she consisted of a fine figure, a pair of splendid eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and none of these items were precisely the ones to minister to a ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so—No help!] a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mused within herself: "Better be first with him, Than dwell where fairer Margaret sits, Who shines my brightness dim, Forever second where she sits, However fair I be: I will be lady of his love, And he shall worship me; I will be lady of his herds And stoop to his degree, At home ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... equally full, it has no reason to complain. Every Saint in heaven will have as much happiness as he can hold.' Mr. Dilly thought this a clear, though a familiar illustration of the phrase, 'One star differeth from another in brightness[840].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the last few hours felt like one born blind, and who suddenly receives his sight. He looks at the brightness of the sun, and the manifold forms of the creation around him, but the beams of the day-star blind its eyes, and the new forms, which he has sought to guess at in his mind, and which throng round him in their rude reality, shock him and pain him. To-day, for the first ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the afternoon; and there would be such a dazzlin' brightness in her eyes, that I used to wonder if it was the fire of immortality a bein' kindled there, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... at him quickly. It was true. The man looked as though he had been suffering. She had not noticed it before. His face had altered—worn a trifle fine; the line from chin to cheek-bone had hollowed somewhat and his eyes held a certain feverish brightness. But although she could see the alteration, it did not move her in the least. She felt perfectly indifferent. It was as though the band of ice which seemed to have clasped itself about her heart when she heard of Michael's marriage ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our cloud ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the breakfast-table; and yet the loud singing of the birds, the brightness of the sunshine, the life and vigor of all things, seemed to make up for the silence of those who were too well ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and shut. A child shouted. In the north east a shining body had come sparkling above the trees—Capella of the brightness of one hundred of our suns, being born into the twilight like a ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... headstones on the river slope come out into view again, for a time, as I wander back down the spiral road toward the town and think on these things; a cloud drifts across the sun and dims their brightness; then the light pours down ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... soul!" The boy at his feet stirred and sighed. "Poor Robin! Tired and sleepy and frightened, art not? Why, dear knave, the jaguar is not roaring for thee!" Bending, he put an arm about the lad and drew him to his side. "I only wait for the brightness to grow," he said. "Do not shiver so! In a little ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls. On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women's hair and struck sparks from their ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... often foretold them what respite they should have from their fits, as sometimes a day or two or more, which fell out accordingly. One of the afflicted said she saw him, in her fit, and was with him in a glorious place which had no candle nor sun, yet was full of light and brightness, where there was a multitude in white, glittering robes, and they sang the song in Rev. 5, 9; Psal. 110, 149. She was loath to leave that place, and said, "How long shall I stay here? Let me be along with you." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... happiness, for a little baby-boy came to them, and he was Edward V. afterwards. He was too little to know anything about his mother's anxiety, and was, I dare say, quite as happy as most babies, and he must have brought some brightness with him ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... excellently, and with a quick, keen, political sense which Eustace had never seen in any other woman. She was handsome in her own refined and delicate way, especially at night, when the sparkle of her white neck and arms and the added brightness of her dress gave her the accent and colour she was somewhat lacking in at other times. Naturally, she was in no want of suitors, for she was rich and her father was influential, but she said 'No' many times, and was nearly thirty before M. de Chateauvieux, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation, knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He told my mother how Mr. Bruce, after examining my brother, had pronounced him to be fully qualified to enter the school; and then my father asked about the fees. The answer he received was, "My dear Mr. Reid, I never take a fee from a minister of religion." And so it came ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... certainly been shown by more than a century of observation, and it is not certain that Canopus has either. From this alone we may conclude, with a high degree of probability, that the distance of each is immeasurably great. We may say with certainty that the brightness of each is thousands of times that of the sun, and with a high degree of probability that it is hundreds of thousands of times. On the other hand, there are stars comparatively near us of which the light is not the hundredth part ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... her work the next morning with a heart that was heavy with dread and nerves that were quivering with fear. The brightness, the beauty, and the joy, of her womanhood, she felt to be going from her as the sunshine goes under threatening clouds. The blackness, the ugliness, and the sorrow, of life, she felt coming over her as fog rolls in from the sea. The faith, trust, and hope, ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... distance from it, tho yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... October day of rare brightness and warmth. I spent the most of it in a wild, wooded gorge of Rock Creek. A tree which stood upon the bank had dropped some of its fruit in the water. As I stood there, half-leg deep, a wood duck came ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... about to keep our thumbs from freezing, we have looked up and seen the northern lights blazing along the sky, the windows of heaven illumined at the news of some great victory, so from beyond this bitter night of abomination a brightness strikes ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... we parted. Already her hair had lost the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and more fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always shall love till I die, was soft and worn. Margaret ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... us, as Americans, to toast the memory of the men who, on this day, pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors for the support of our independence. I therefore propose, 'The memory of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. May the brightness of their fame endure as long as patriotism and the love of freedom burn in the breasts of mankind!'" exclaimed Hand. This was drunk standing, and a short ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... the dilemma in its fullest force," said the priest, speaking as if to the floor. "She has no more place than if she had dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly looked up with a brightness which almost as quickly passed away, and then he looked down again. His happy thought was the cloister; but he instantly said to himself: "They cannot have overlooked that choice, except intentionally—which they have a right to do." He could do ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... Behold the emigrants off and away, clinging to their thread. If the wind be favourable, they can land at great distances. Their departure is thus continued for a week or two, in bands more or less numerous, according to the temperature and the brightness of the day. If the sky be overcast, none dreams of leaving. The travellers need the kisses of the sun, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... emication|, scintillation, flash, blaze, coruscation, fulguration[obs3]; flame &c. (fire) 382; lightning, levin[obs3], ignis fatuus[Lat], &c. (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion[Brit], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor[obs3], fulgidity[obs3]; dazzlement[obs3], resplendence, transplendency[obs3]; luminousness &c. adj.; luminosity; lucidity; renitency|, nitency[obs3]; radiance,, radiation; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... vain was each effort to raise and recall The brightness of old to illumine our Hall; And vain was the hope to avert our decline, And the fate of my ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... gold. Throughout the vast atelier hundreds of shuttles are swiftly plied, and on first entering the eye is dazzled with the brilliance of these broad bands of silk, bright, lustrous, metallic, as if of solid gold. This flash of gold is the only brightness in the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... stormy mood, Nature seemed full of regretful relentings on Monday, and, as if to make amends for her harshness, assumed something of a summer softness. The sun had not the glaring brightness that dazzles, and the atmosphere, purified by the recent rain, revealed through its crystal depths ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... church and in the home, but in the cemetery. The graves of the dead are decked on Christmas Eve with holly and mistletoe and a little Christmas-tree with gleaming lights, a touching token of remembrance, an attempt, perhaps, to give the departed a share in the brightness of ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... will not always make sunshine shine within, and I remember one day when, though our nursery was unusually cheerful, and though the windows were reflected in square patches of sunlight on the floor, I stood in the very midst of the brightness, grumbling and kicking at my sister's chair with a face as black as a thunder-cloud. The reason of my ill-temper was this: Ever since I could remember, my father had been accustomed, once a year, ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... trembling, lest Felicie should be chosen—Lisette was full of triumphant consequence, and assumed an air of indifference—whilst Caliste never raised her eyes from the ground, her long eyelashes resting on a cheek, the brightness of which proclaimed the intensity of ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... handful, bought Lilac Lodge and fitted it up like a little palace, dressed his niece and her daughters like queens, and settled down with them to what seemed about to be a life of glorious and luxurious ease, and in the midst of all this peace and plenty, brightness and hope, the first blow fell. Mrs. Comstock, going to bed at night in perfect health, was found in the morning stone-dead! Of course, as no doctor could give a death certificate when none had been in attendance upon her, the Law stepped in, the coroner held ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... morning we weighed anchor and went to sea. It was a great happiness to get away after this dragging, dispiriting delay. I thought there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the sun, such beauty in the sea. I was satisfied with the picnic then and with all its belongings. All my malicious instincts were dead within me; and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... up the passage; and it is a wonderful one. Dante heard wailings and groans and terrible things said in many tongues. Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were only those "who had lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing but themselves." "Heaven would not dull its brightness with those, nor would lower hell ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... the Rhine at Basle; with him amid the scent of pine-cones, and under the dark green umbrage of forest boughs; with him when he caught his first glimpse of the everlasting mountains, and plunged into the clear brightness of the sapphire lake—the thought of speedy detection and prompt punishment. It was no small pleasure to partake in Violet's happiness, and mark the ever fresh delight that lent such a bright look to Cyril's face; but before Kennedy in the midst of enjoyment, the memory of a dishonourable ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... St. Leo, Caesarius, Bede, and others, declares for three.[16] However, the number was small, comparatively to those many others that saw that star, no less than the wise men, but paid no regard to this voice of heaven: admiring, no doubt, its uncommon brightness, but culpably ignorant of the divine call in it, or hardening their hearts against its salutary impressions, overcome by their passions, and the dictates of self-love. In like manner do Christians, from the same causes, turn a deaf ear to the voice of divine grace in their souls, and harden their ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the gangway (for it was now very dark), when, in an instant, every one of the electric lights in the ship flashed out at their fullest brightness, brilliantly illuminating the deck, and turning night into day for fully a mile round, and, under the clear steely radiance thus unexpectedly furnished him, the king slowly made his way to the ground, mounted his horse ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... with a string? Had she not just laid off, in hot haste, a suds-bespattered apron and the garments of toil beneath it? Had not a towel been but now unbound from the hair shining here under his glance in luxuriant brown coils? This brightness of eye, that seemed all exhilaration, was it not trepidation instead? And this rosiness, so like redundant vigor, was it not the flush of her hot task? He fancied he saw—in truth he may have seen—a defiance in the eyes as he glanced upon, and tardily dropped, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... sickness, glided away two agreeable winters, when the transient gleam of brightness became suddenly obscured, and her prospects involved in ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... shilling, until it shone like a little crown. Heinrich brought a watch-crystal, which his father had given him, and which he considered a wonder of transparent brightness; and Kline, the rich Hoffmeister's son, had brought a paste buckle, made to imitate diamonds, than which, in his opinion, nothing ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... the afternoon and took Mrs. Thayer out driving. She looked superb as she went off, having recovered entirely from her illness. She was in a perfect flutter of happiness and excitement, which gave her a brilliant color, and added to the brightness of her eyes. She was agitated by conflicting influences; on one side, was her brother, determined to separate her from her lover, and justly blaming her course; on the other, was Pattmore, claiming her love, and urging her ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... can't go on like this forever! Flesh and spirit rebel against a lifetime of it! Haven't I paid my penalty? Aren't the lightness and brightness and beauty ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... first to die, and the doctor feared that ere long several others would sink under the disease from which they suffered. A deep gloom settled on most of the crew, but there was light and brightness in old Andrew's cabin, which he endeavoured to shed abroad. That light came from within. It arose from his firm faith in God's loving mercy and protecting providence. "Do not despair, mates," he said, over and over again. "God ...
— Archibald Hughson - An Arctic Story • W.H.G. Kingston
... exceeding in brightness anything he had yet experienced. But with it, to his amazement, there emerged from the blackness a vision that brought life back to him with a shocking thrill. For there, not ten paces distant, was Sunnysides. Only for ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... converse, it should be to learn from each other what good we can and ought to do, and so mingle the brightness of one with the dimness of the other. Our meetings should be such that we should go away feeling that God had been with us and multiplied our blessings. The question should be, 'Brother, can you teach ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... brightest, cheeriest place in all the world. Economy is good in its place, but I believe Satan is even at the bottom of that sometimes, when we drive our boys and girls out from home by saving coal and gas, and shutting the sun out of our houses—they like brightness as well as the birds do. You see you can't tell me anything new on this. I made all these ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... For now the most High seeth that thou art grieved unfeignedly, and sufferest from thy whole heart for her, so hath he shewed thee the brightness of her glory, and the comeliness ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... rocky beds are borne Ere they gush in whiteness; Pebbles are wave-chafed and worn Ere they shew their brightness. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... remembered the shapeliness of the stockinette jerseys smocked and small and clinging that she had worn at school. If these were blouses then she would never be able to wear blouses.... "They're so flountery!" she said, frowning at them. She tried on the rose-coloured one. It startled her with its brightness.... "It's no good, it's no good," she said, as her hands fumbled for the fastenings. There was a hook at the neck; that was all. Frightful... she fastened it, and the collar set in a soft roll but came ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... French names from a remote creole cousin, who proved to be also a kinswoman to Miss Guyosa. It was such a comfort, when Mrs. Frey was kept out late at the office, for the children to have Miss Guyosa come and sit with them, telling stories or reading aloud; and they brought much brightness into her ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... very civil; but there were a good many polite struggles for the exclusive possession of Ellen, whom both parties viewed as their individual right; and her unselfish good-humour and brightness must have carried her over more worries than we guessed at ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... things well known? Things often considered and trite generate disgust; new things lack authority. For, as Pliny says: 'It is an arduous task to give novelty to old things, authority to new things, brightness to things obsolete, charm to things disdained, light to obscure things, credence to doubtful things, and to all ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... to the next overlapping field, and watching again. And whatever object appears must be scrutinized anxiously to see what there is peculiar about it. If a star, it may be double, or it may be coloured, or it may be nebulous; or again it may be variable, and so its brightness must be estimated in order to ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... then, gentle reader, a small but actively formed man, with a face of most unusual and portentous ugliness, an uncouth grin doing the part of a smile; a pair of eyes so small that they would have been invisible, but for the serpent-like vivacity and brightness with which they sparkled from their deep sockets, and a profusion of long hair, coal-black, but lank and uncurled as an Indian's, combed smoothly down with a degree of care entirely out of keeping with ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... I cannot see him to assure him—you will?" she added, looking up at him with a shy brightness in her eye and a flush on ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... may be planted, may vegetate, and throw up a goodly show of leaves and stalks, which may flourish as long as the early rains continue; but, suddenly, the rains cease; the sun comes out in his June brightness; the water-line lowers at once in the soil; the roots have no depth to draw moisture from below, and the whole field of clover, or of corn, in a single week, is past recovery. Now, if this light, sandy soil be drained, so that, at the first start of the crop, there is a ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... was God's light and brightness, in the monk's cell was found that peace, which enables man to obtain ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... It was upon a small table in the rose and gold boudoir. And the sun, shining softly in at the creeper-shaded window, rejoiced in the surpassing brightness and cleanness of the dishes of silver and thinnest porcelain and cut glass. Margaret thought eating in bed a "filthy, foreign fad," and never indulged in it. She seated herself lazily, drank her coffee, and ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... for a few minutes at the back window, to take a last view of the sea. It was a stormy but very beautiful night. The heavens were without a cloud. The full moon cast broken gleams of silver upon the restless, tossing waters, which scattered them into a thousand fragments of dazzling brightness, as the heavy surf rolled in thunder ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... curtains were of that pale sea-green just coming into fashion. 'Very bright and pretty,' Miss Browning called it; and in the first renewing of their love Molly could not bear to contradict her. She could only hope that the green and brown drugget would tone down the brightness and prettiness. There was scaffolding here, scaffolding there, and Betty ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising now in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a moment. But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address myself to you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven's name what is Meniere's Disease? Do ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... witness my disgrace? O, lady, I have suffer'd loss, And diminution of my honor's brightness. You bring some images of old times, Margaret, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... fence which guarded the clearing of the Hermit, he came upon a little open glade carpeted with moss and surrounded by great trees. From the side opposite Ringtail a strange yellow radiance streamed out over the glade. In its brightness a number of rabbits were disporting themselves, jumping about as if in some queer dance, pausing occasionally to stare into the center of that fascinating glow. Now and then one would vanish into the darkness to right ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... a well-defined bridle trail and scarcely slackened their pace as they splashed in and out of the water where the trail crossed and recrossed the creek. One lightning flash succeeded another with such rapidity that the little valley was illuminated almost to the brightness of day, and the thunder reverberated in ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... It 'urts so bad, it does. I'd rather lose me 'usband than me baby, any day." The sun was shining now on a cheek of that terribly patient face; its brightness seemed cruel perching there. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bright light, pretty dresses, laughter and merry voices strangely pleasant after her isolation. At times her thoughts would wander back to the ice-bound canyon and the man who had pitted himself against the thundering river in its gloomy depths. Perhaps the very contrast between this scene of brightness and luxury and the savage wilderness emphasized the self-abnegation he had shown. She knew now that he had toiled beyond most men's strength, when he might have rested, and casting away what would have insured ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... gazed tranquilly around her. She did not feel the least emotion, but considered that it was a mistake not to light the lamps. Their brightness would have given the place a more cheerful look. The gloom even struck her as savouring of impropriety. Her face was warmed by the flames of some candles burning in a candelabrum by her side, and an old woman armed with a big knife was scraping ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... beginning of some reign of enchantment? The culmination of love's dream? Are we waking or dreaming? Can it be possible, that this glorious moonlight, so auspiciously ushering in our honeymoon, is typical and indicative of its endurance, of its unalloyed brightness?" ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... thy tranquil tide, Shed ev'ry grief upon thy rocky side? Or must I rove thy margin, calm and clear, The only agitated object near? Oh! tell me, too, thou babbling cold cascade! Whose waters, falling thro' successive shade, Unspangled by the brightness of the sky, Awake each echo to a soft reply,— Say, canst thou not my bosom-grief befriend, And bid one drop upon my heart descend? When all thy songsters soothe themselves to sleep. Ah! must these aching ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... into consideration the following image which is that of a phoenix, which burns in the sun, and the smoke from which almost obscures the brightness of that by which it is set on fire, and here is the motto which says: Neque simile, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... grace and form of his Italian sonnets. But to the student of history Petrarch has seemed even more important as the reflection, if not the source, of a brilliant intellectual movement, which, taking rise in his century, was to grow in brightness in the fifteenth and flood the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the sun was high, and, fastening the skin coat round my shoulders with a piece of string, I trudged on, rejoicing in the first warmth and brightness I had so far found in Canada. But it had its disadvantages, for the snow became unpleasantly soft, and it was a relief to find that the breeze had stripped the much thinner covering from the first of the swelling rises that ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... We could not explain or justify it to any sad philosopher who might reproach us for unreasoning felicity. We should be defenceless before his arguments and indifferent to his scorn. We should simply ride on into the morning, reflecting in our hearts something of the brightness of the birds' plumage, the cheerfulness of the brooks' song, the undimmed hyaline of the sky, and so, perhaps, fulfilling the Divine Intention of Nature as well as if we chose to becloud ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... set about kindling a fire and getting a meal. In the midst of his task a sudden ruddy brightness fell around him. Lin Slone paused in his work ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... hall Eugenia had thrown herself down on her bed, and was staring out of the windows. She saw nothing of the summer skies outside, or any of all that outdoor brightness. Her gaze ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of the lane, where it met a cross street, and the street lamp flung out an ominous challenge, and, dim though it was, seemed to glare with the brightness of daylight, she faltered for a moment and drew back. She knew where Shluker's place was, because she knew, as few knew it, every nook and cranny in the East Side, and it was a long way to that old junk shop, almost over to the East River, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... honor. He has deposited it safely, where misfortune can not tarnish it, where malice can not blast it. Favored of Heaven, he departed without exhibiting the weakness of humanity. Magnanimous in death, the darkness of the grave could not obscure his brightness. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... every moment; he had drunk a third and a fourth glass, and there was nothing but a mere drain left in the bottle. Already his utterance was thick and incoherent, and his eyes were fast assuming that glassy brightness that is usually the forerunner of helpless intoxication. It was a sight Ephraim could not bear to see. Impelled by that natural, almost holy shame which prompted the son of Noah to cover the nakedness of his father, he motioned to his sister to leave. Then ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... he must cure himself of that unfitness. But though he declared this to himself in one set of half-spoken thoughts, he would also declare to himself in another set, that Lily would have made the whole house bright with her brightness; that had he brought her home to his hearth, there would have been a sun shining on him every morning and every evening. But, nevertheless, he strove to do his duty, and remembered that the excitement of official life was still open to him. From eleven in the morning ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... contrary, Augustine says, in a homily (Serm. contra Judaeos): "The prince of sin overcame Adam who was made from the slime of the earth to the image of God, adorned with modesty, restrained by temperance, refulgent with brightness." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... "cutlery" than anything else, and was received as such amid our rapturous applause. I then ventured to ask the master to ask small and red Dougal what cutlery was; but from the sudden erubescence of his pallid, ill-fed cheek, and the alarming brightness of his eyes, I twigged at once that he didn't himself know what it meant. So I put the question myself, and was not surprised to find that not one of them, from Dougal up to a young strapping shepherd of eighteen, knew what ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... know we whether't shall not be The last to either thee or me? He can at will his ancient brightness gain, But thou and I When we shall die Shall ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... panelled from floor to ceiling with oak which successive generations had obscured by numerous coats of paint. On one side were two windows having an aspect on to New College Lane, and fitted with deep cushioned seats in the recesses. Outside these windows there were boxes of flowers, the brightness of which formed in the summer term a pretty contrast to the grey and crumbling stone, and afforded pleasure at once to the inmate and to passers-by. Along nearly the whole length of the wall opposite ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... heralds of a new vitality swept trumpeting through me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in their train. I had a glimpse.... And my eyes were not dazzled. I yearned and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows. Yes, sorrows! But what noble sorrows they were that I felt awaited me there! I strained at my mysterious bonds. It seemed that they were about to break and that ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... bootmakers, and they fitted the high-arched instep with the elastic smoothness of gloves. The man of the mountain desert dresses the extremities and cares not at all for the mid sections. The moment Doone was off his horse those boots had to be dressed and rubbed and polished to softness and brightness before this luxurious gambler would walk about town. From the heels of the boots extended a long pair of spurs—surely a very great vanity, for never in her life had his beautiful mare, Lou, needed even the ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... gone far when a puff of wind unfolded the cloak, and its brightness shed gleams across the water. The witch, who was just entering the forest, turned round at that moment and saw the golden rays. She forgot all about her daughter, and ran down to the shore, screaming with rage at being outwitted a ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... we mustn't stand out here all night with the wind howling in our ears. Let us try and forget our troubles. What is to be, will be. I am nothing, if not a fatalist." Grace forced herself to smile with her usual brightness, and the two girls entered the house arm in arm, each endeavoring, for the sake of the other ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... vision ranged far to the slowly shifting shore lights. The big steamship had come very close inshore—as witness the retarded speed with which she crept toward her anchorage—but still the lights, for all their singular brightness, seemed distant, incalculably far away; the gulf of blackness that set them apart exaggerated all distances tenfold. The cluster of sparks flanked by green and red that marked the hovering tender appeared to float at an infinite remove, invisibly buoyed upon the bosom of a fathomless ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... she had taken in this little stranger, just because she felt like it; it was a new luxury, a new amusement, that was all. Such a pretty little creature, so soft and young, and with that brightness in her face! Sister Lizzie was light-complected, and this child didn't favour her, not the least mite; yet it was some like the same feeling, as if it were a kitten or a pretty bird to take care of, and ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... absorbed, in reading, a letter, which she hurriedly concealed. She had hardly finished her morning toilette, her maid being still in the next room. At the name—-at the footsteps of Marguerite Vanel—Madame de Belliere ran to meet her. She fancied she could detect in her friend's eyes a brightness which was neither that of health nor of pleasure. Marguerite embraced her, pressed her hands, and hardly allowed her time to speak. "Dearest," she said, "have you forgotten me? Have you quite given yourself up to the pleasures ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sustained. While Europe, during the eighth and ninth centuries, was in total darkness, Ireland alone basked in the light of science, whose lustre, shining in her numerous schools, attracted thither by its brightness the youth of all nations, whom she received with a generosity unbounded. Not content with this, she sent forth her learned and holy men to spread the light abroad and dispel the thick darkness, to establish seats of learning ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... The four rooms became immaculately clean—sweetened up with soap and water, with neat wallpaper, with paint and furniture. Even the dark inner bedrooms contrived to look cozy and warm and inviting. Joe's mother was a true New England housekeeper, which meant scrupulous order, cleanliness, and brightness. The one room exempt from her rule was Joe's. After the first clean-up, his mother did not even try to ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... most curious circumstance is, that it secretes from the skin of its belly, when handled, a most beautiful carmine-red fibrous matter, which stains ivory and paper in so permanent a manner, that the tint is retained with all its brightness to the present day: I am quite ignorant of the nature and use of this secretion. I have heard from Dr. Allan of Forres, that he has frequently found a Diodon, floating alive and distended, in the stomach of the shark; and that on several occasions he has known it eat its way, not only through ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... golden light of the sun had changed to silvery brightness, and the air was cool and bracing, when they rode over the prairie so familiar to the eye of Charles, but which had lost nearly all the features that had been impressed on the boyish mind of William. At a little distance from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... mother ever wore powder in their hair; both their heads were as white as silver, as I can remember them. My dear mother possessed to the last an extraordinary brightness and freshness of complexion; nor would people believe that she did not wear rouge. At sixty years of age she still looked young, and was quite agile. It was not until after that dreadful siege of our house by the Indians, which left me a widow ere I was a mother, that my dear mother's ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... went pale. He hated these words. But he was like a gleaming, bright pebble, something bright and inalterable. He did not think. He sat there in his hard brightness, and did not speak. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... towards the perfection of the situation. She had sometimes fancied, after an unusually wide and vivid flash, that she had really been able to see a wee bit of a way into that Heavenly City which she had been taught was high above her, behind all that sky, in the blinding brightness. ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... and the dying fire to turn homeward through the drifting snow, fearful and furtive glances are cast to where the island looms up like a ghostly sentinel from the sea. Across its high promontory the Northern Lights scintillate and blaze, and out of its moving brightness the terrified fishermen behold the war-canoes of dead Indians freighted with their redskin braves; the forms of c[oe]ur de bois and desperate Frenchmen swinging down the sky-line in a ghastly snake-dance; the shapes and spars of ships long since forgotten from the "Missing List"; and always, ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... arranged in picturesque groups, yet without any aim at effect. Pots, kettles, pans, spits, covers, hooks and trammels of the Elizabethan period, apparently the heirlooms of several intersecting generations, showed in the fire-light like a work of artistry; the sharp, silvery brightness of the tin and the florid flush of burnished copper making distinct disks in the darkness. It was with a rare sentiment of comfort that I sat by that fire of crackling faggots, looked up at the stars that dropped in their light ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... to a wall, and delighting to direct them away to another spot, when a hand has been put out to touch them. That is not how God does. The light that He reveals is steady, and whosoever turns his face to it will be irradiated by its brightness. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this time recalls a suggestion of his own in "Sights from a Steeple": "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." He had the longing which every creative mind must feel, to mix with other beings and share to the utmost the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... wealth, the face and the demeanour of the Golden Dustman were generally unclouded at that meal. It would have been easy to believe then, that there was no change in him. It was as the day went on that the clouds gathered, and the brightness of the morning became obscured. One might have said that the shadows of avarice and distrust lengthened as his own shadow lengthened, and that the night closed around ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... notable attempt at insurrection. But in Connaught, very unexpectedly, as late as the end of August, the flame extinguished in blood in Leinster and Ulster, again blazed up for some days with portentous brightness. The counties of Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon and Galway had been partially organized by those fugitives from Orange oppression in the North, who, in the years '95, '96, and '97, had been compelled to flee for their lives into Connaught, to the number of several thousands. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... waking. I thought I was sitting here in the garden—crying over what I have been telling you—and suddenly an angel stood before me, and bade me weep not. Strange as was his form, and sunny in its exceeding brightness, I was not frightened; for his words were very, very gentle, and his look too full of kindness to give me one thrill of alarm. And he said that what I had longed for so much should be granted; that my father and mother ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... spilled inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or shimmered opalescent-blue. Yet they were reared hazardously one on another, and ever and anon flashing towers and rainbow minarets crumbled thunderously into the flood. By one of the gaps so made lay La Bijou, and about it, saving chechaquos and sick men, were grouped the ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... the prevalent tint of the country. Some ineffectual struggles of the sun shot a ray here and there to salute the peaks of the hills; yet these were unable to surmount the dulness of a March morning, and, at so early an hour, produced a variety of shades, rather than a gleam of brightness upon the eastern horizon. The view was monotonous and depressing, and apparently the good knight Aymer sought some amusement in occasional talk with Bertram, who, as was usual with his craft, possessed a fund of knowledge, and a power of conversation, well suited to pass ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... buffalo-birds followed them. The sun rose over it as over a sea, and the arched aurora rose red above it like some far gate of a land of fire. Here the Sacs and Foxes roamed free; the Iowas and the tribes of the North. It was one vast sunland, a breeze-swept brightness, almost without a dot ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Brightness of my Eyes, Who hath deprived thee of Sense? Oh Heav'ns! He does not hear! O cruel Fate: Ah, 'tis Melissa has given him his Death; And still my Torments to augment She makes me ...
— Amadigi di Gaula - Amadis of Gaul • Nicola Francesco Haym
... "copy" would be to time. The story goes that he always employed the same driver, and that when the man was about to replace the old vehicle with a new one, he suggested to Lemon, with glowing pride at the brightness of the idea, that he should have a figure of Punch emblazoned on the panels. In later years Lemon's son Harry acted as his secretary, and sometimes, though unofficially, as his sub-editor, and generally undertook the "travelling" ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... kept sacred watch. He was not the only great man who has owed much of his greatness to a faithful, self-denying Miriam. Many a man who is now honored in the world owes all his power and influence to a woman, perhaps too much forgotten now, perhaps worn and wrinkled, beauty gone, brightness faded, living alone and solitary, but who, in the days of his youth, was guardian angel to him, freely pouring out the best and richest of her life for him, giving the very blood of her veins that he might have more life; denying herself even needed comforts ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... the three children, and Mrs. Vincent, as she saw them coming, was pleased to see, as she expected, the brightness of Rosy's face reflected ...
— Rosy • Mrs. Molesworth |
