"Dim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pulse anxiously and exchanging looks of intelligence. At the foot of the bed stands a woman about fifty years of age, her hands clasped, her eyes raised to heaven, in an attitude of resigned grief: this woman is the queen, No tears dim her eyes: her sunken cheek has that waxen yellow tinge that one sees on the bodies of saints preserved by miracle. In her look is that mingling of calm and suffering that points to a soul at once tried by sorrow and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is something like a dim bloo light movin' across the plains. Now an' then, two brighter lights shows in spots like the blazes of candles; them's the fire eyes the locoed cowboys tells of. Whatever it is, whether spook or Greaser, it's quarterin' the ground like one of these ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... better than any detail of his own personal affairs; for years now he had lived in spirit with Washington, through all the hours of the Mount Vernon day; his life was ruled by one great ghost, so that everything actual was comparatively dim. Boyson too, a fine soldier and a fine intelligence, had a mind stored with Washingtoniana. Every now and then he and the curator fell back on each other's company. They knew well that the others were not worthy of their opportunity; although ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by the bedside, where the faded moon Made a dim silver twilight, soft he set A table, and, half-anguish'd, threw thereor A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet. * * * * * "While he, from forth the closet, brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the stress of danger and the shadow of death, became children once again. The very real emotions that they had experienced were forgotten, or at any rate sank into abeyance. Now they thought, not of separation or of the dim, mysterious future that stretched before them, but only of how they should ford the stream and gain its further side, where Rachel saw her father, Tom, the driver, and the other Kaffirs, and Richard saw his horse which he had ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... Sam, and quickly they were on the alert. The Indian's quick ear had detected a low-flying flock, and so, before they were seen in the dim morning light, they were heard. On they came, little dreaming of danger now that they were so far away from civilisation, and so they flew not a hundred feet above this hidden ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... had stood the candle on the floor; and, as it gave a very dim light, Sam was obliged to go down on HIS knees before he could see whether it really was his own hat or not. It was a remarkably small corner, and so—it was nobody's fault but the man's who built the house—Sam and the pretty housemaid ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Wolfgang thought: "If only it were over!" He felt bored. And his soul had never soared there as when the little bell rang when the monstrance had been raised, when he had smelt the odour of incense before dim altars. ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and, therefore, durable; the adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are only superficial dies, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of former lustre; but the discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature; they pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... tripped along with no sort of misgiving. Duncan was by no means so sure. He had received geography lessons, in which he had been told how many hundred miles long Scotland was, and he had a sort of dim suspicion that London must be farther off than Elsie thought; but he did not feel ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... that, though the four knights wist nothing of it, they advanced not a furlong for all their haste. But towards nightfall there appeared close ahead a blaze of windows lit and then a tall castle with dim towers soaring up and shaking to the din of minstrelsy. And finding a great company about the doors, they lit down from their horses and stepped into the great hall, Sir Dinar leading them. For a while their eyes were dazed, seeing that sconces flared along the walls and the place was full of knights ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... into the main street, and Julian stopped the first empty cab that passed. As he sat opposite to her, his eyes, in spite of himself, kept straying to her face. Gazing at her, Casti's eyes grew dim. He forced himself not to look at her again till ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted, unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more have given names to than to the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... can read this in its connection with what goes before and what follows without feeling that a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon the mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the light of his day and the guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner stars. The conception of a poem in which Dante's creed in politics and morals should be picturesquely ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... his outline lost in the deep shadows of the vine, was old Uncle Tim, while, upon the floor at his side lay little Tim, his grandson. The boy lay so still that in the dim half-light he seemed a part of the floor furnishings, which were, in fact, an old cot, two crippled stools, a saddle, and odds and ends of broken harness, ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... afterward. The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at concealment except in the neutral tints, which made it look like a natural growth of the dim, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... its first stage to Moret, I chatted with Rudolph and Blumenfeld after the latter's wife had retired, and as we sat in the dim light of the corridor of the sleeping-car smoking cigarettes, ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... being more improbable than another. Will you have it sent? It is dear, half-a-guinea; un recit trop graveleux pour etre recommande aux dames. My most affectionate compliments, and so adieu. My eyes grow too dim to write, but are ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... pool, from which the small voice had sounded, appeared now a dim light, a beautiful goldfish lifted its head out of the water, opened its round mouth, and said, in a scarcely audible tone,—for a real fish finds it difficult to speak, because it has no lungs,—that George's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... up and shook myself. Then I took a turn around the room. The two girls were breathing gently; I could scarcely hear them. I walked to the door and looked out into the hall. There was a dim light burning there. The door of the nurse's room stood open. I went quietly to it and looked in. She was breathing heavily and muttering ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... almost as busy with the French Revolution as with her mantua-maker. For she had found in her father's library many books not for convent-shelves; and she had become a Girondin. She found memoirs, histories, and tales of that delectable period, then not so dim with time but that the figures of it were more than tragic shadows; and for a week there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the Revolution, her own great-uncle ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... not have been as it had been between us. Very likely we both in our hearts preferred to rest in memories, not to spoil our thoughts by disappointment, to be always to one another just what we had been as we rowed together that last afternoon at Artenberg, when the dim shadow of parting did no more than deepen our affection and touch ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... he dashed into the dark hut, to find that the rush of wind from the suddenly opened door had started the embers in the middle of the floor flickering in a dim lambent flame, just enough to show him that the barrel table had been knocked over, the boxes used for seats driven here and there, the bed occupied by his cousin dragged away, the boards lifted, and the earth underneath it torn up, while Abel was lying face downward close up to the remains ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... is in vain to deny it. I could feel my heart beating audibly when I beheld them, as if they were unsubstantial visitants, whose appearance I expected the grave would have interdicted from my eyes for ever. It was a dim, bitter, wintry day, and showers of sleet were drifting heavily on the fierce and angry wind, soaking the man's garments through and through, and sweeping aside the thin habiliments of the female, as though they would tear them from her slender form, and leave it a prey to the keen wrath ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for decency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground that they spoil each other; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... door was blistered and had peeled off in huge mis-shapen patches; the door-step was almost worn in two; the windows were dim with the ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... and Biorn harped on the thing, as boys do, and one night about the midsummer time her hour came upon Katla and she spoke without their seeking. There in the dim hut with the apple-green twilight dimming the fells Biorn stood trembling on the brink of the half-world, the woman huddled on the floor, her hand shading her eyes as if she were looking to a far horizon. Her body ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close proximity; although, if you continue to advance, they toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably through even an English winter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Lucy's fascinated gaze looked afar she was stunned at the vast, billowy, bare surfaces. Every green cleft was a short canyon running parallel with this central and longer one. The dips and breaks showed how all these canyons were connected. They led the gaze away, descending gradually to the dim purple of distance—the bare, rolling ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, — Emerald twilights, — Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within The wide ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... a murderer? worse than a murderer? as much worse as the soul is better than the body? If ardent spirits were nothing worse than a deadly poison—if they did not excite and inflame all the evil passions—if they did not dim that heavenly light which the Almighty has implanted in our bosoms to guide us through the obscure passages of our pilgrimage—if they did not quench the Holy Spirit in our hearts, they would be comparatively harmless. It is their moral effect—it is ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... open, and there in the dim interior of the cabin the light was reflected from a pair of spectacles. There, too, were the whiskers and gray hair. The old man seemed to be asleep in his chair right near the porthole. The stoker cocked his revolver and held it ready ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... was an Italian palace of freestone; vast, ornate, and in scrupulous condition; its spacious and graceful chambers filled with treasures of art, and rising itself from statued and stately terraces. At their foot spread a gardened domain of considerable extent, bright with flowers, dim with coverts of rare shrubs, and musical with fountains. Its limit reached a park, with timber such as the midland counties only can produce. The fallow deer trooped among its ferny solitudes and gigantic oaks; but, beyond the waters of the broad and winding lake, the scene became more ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... The fires burned dim. One by one Thayendanega's heathens stalked away to his lodge, until the council was finally brought to a close; a deep silence came over the encampment, as if all, save that white face which I could see just beneath ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... "swans" in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness: there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan, its own white image in the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... on a bath robe and stepped out into the aisle of the car. Then he and Daddy Bunker and the porter stood there in the dim light. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... trouble, and it is well worth while to pay, if possible, a little extra for books well printed, especially in the case of those who read much. When reading sit erect, with the back to the light, so that it falls over the shoulder. Too fine work, dim light, wrong diet, and want of exercise produce the dull and strained eye, which eventually becomes seriously diseased. Opening the eyes under cold water will help to strengthen them, and massaging the muscles of the eye by passing ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... osier and weed ponds; and to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins. Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though their lives were content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... daybreak of the 12th the whole fleet stood into Gabarus Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the little Louisbourg peninsula. The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly. It looked mean, squat, and shrunken in the dim grey light of early dawn. But it looked hard enough, for all that. Its alarm bells began to ring. Its signal cannon fired. And all the people who had been living outside hurried ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... this scene the attic was supposed to be lighted by one small candle, and consequently the stage was very dim. ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth, appears rough and diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear of tropical size. The sweet fern and indigo in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools seen through ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... love the ship," she said, "And I do love the sea; But wae to the dim mariners That naewhere ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... The inequality of income distribution is one of the most extreme in the world. The government and international donors continue to work out plans to forward economic development from a lamentably low base. Government drift and indecision, however, have resulted in low growth in 2002-03 and dim ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... grimly through subsistence farming and petty trade. The government has not been able to meet its financial obligations to the International Monetary Fund or put in place the financial measures advocated by the IMF. Although short-term prospects for improvement are dim, improved political stability would boost Zaire's long-term potential to effectively exploit its vast wealth ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... mill-pond like a diamond set In the streamlet's emerald edge; And over the stream on the gradual hill, Its headstones glimmering palely white, Is the graveyard quiet and still. I wade through its grasses rank and deep, Past slanting marbles mossy and dim, Carven with lines from some old hymn, To one where my mother used to lean On Sunday noons and weep. That tall white shape I looked upon With a mysterious dread, Linking unto the senseless stone The image of the dead— The father ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... forward to rush the breach that had been created. They were wild with the ardor of battle. As it happened, a part of the gray line which had held the adjacent trenches, knowing the peril, had thrown themselves, in the dim dawn of the morning, across the newly made breach, and when they found the colored troops rushing in they nerved themselves anew to the contest. I may say to you calmly, after thirty odd years of experience with the negro race, that it was well for the town of Petersburg that morning that that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... actors were at their indolent best, and the half-lit stage was full of a dim, suggestive beauty, which entirely disappeared by the time the scene-painter, the lime-light man, and the stage-carpenter had done their work. Often at rehearsal, words would give her the shock of truth that in performance would just puzzle her by their banality; voices would seem ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... surrounded by mountains, sleeps tranquilly in the stillness of the elements, as if it had not joined the chorus of the tempest on the night before. As first rays of dawn appear in the eastern sky and awaken the phosphorescent myriads in the water, long, grey shadows appear in the dim distance, almost on the border of the horizon. They are shadows of fishermen's boats at work drawing in ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt, While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh; As by degrees The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt, And the stars can chaff The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... between me and that sacred memory that methought had been branded into my very soul, there always rises the vision of a girl, tall and slender as the lilies, clad all in white as they. She stands between me and memory, and mine eyes grow weary and dim trying to see beyond that vision, recalling to my mind the picture of that Cross, the thorn-crowned head, the pierced hands and feet. She stands between me and memory, and with laughing eyes defies me not to see her, and I look and look, and the vision of the Cross grows more faint, and she stands ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... dogs, in their dim, inarticulate, brilliant, and heroic- worshipping ways misappraising humans, dogs think of their masters, and love their masters, more than the facts warrant. "Master" means to them, as "Mister" Haggin meant to Jerry, a deal more, and a great deal more, than it ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... were bona fide habitues of the place and so were the two other waterside characters I could faintly discern in one of the dim corners. Meantime a man ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Jeff Poindexter waited up for his employer. Jeff expected him by nine-thirty at the latest; but it was actually getting along toward ten-thirty before Jeff, who had been dozing lightly in the dim-lit hall, oblivious to the fanged attentions of some large mosquitoes, roused suddenly as he heard the sound of a rambling but familiar step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... any of the printed groups, and there isn't a person in the dim background who isn't visibly trying to be vivid; if it is a crowd of ten thousand—ten thousand proud, untamed democrats, horny-handed sons of toil and of politics, and fliers of the eagle —there isn't one who is trying to keep out of range, there isn't one who isn't plainly meditating a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her weary head was on her pillow, and the dim grey light of the summer night showed the quiet peace and calmness that had settled on her ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... turned out. The hours passed slowly on, but no sound was heard. Then, in the dim morning light, a pirate fleet of eight prahus was seen, lying at a distance of half a ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... and ran around the corner of the corral to a point where he could see the dim outline of the range against the western sky. The next moment his voice rose upon the night air, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and looked at his visitor. He was very puzzled. Some dim sense of foreboding was beginning to steal ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... recognised as the renegade's son—a stray bullet had pierced his body as he sat crouching in terror in his father's house, and another had wounded his mother as she fled up the mountainside, for in the excitement and in the dim morning light it was impossible for the attacking party to tell ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride, could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized, and bore him with them through the mist. Down a dim avenue, through lanes and alleys white with fog, they moved, and if they spoke their voices were dull as the vapour which shrouded them. At last in front, a bank of masonry and earth cut by a massive iron ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... in the chamber: dim And distant from each other burned the lights, And slumber hovered o'er each lovely limb Of the fair occupants: if there be sprites, They should have walked there in their sprightliest trim, By way of change from their sepulchral sites, And shown themselves as ghosts of better taste ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a kind of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... visit to the church, for on the first Sundays of his stay the days had been lowering, and Mr Inglis read prayers in the dining-room; and now that the lad followed his cousins out of the bright sunshine, through the old porch, and into the dim venerable-looking building, everything struck him as being so very different from what he had been accustomed to see in London. Here there were the bare whitewashed walls, with the old tablets upon them, and here and there ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... there on the steps, under the shadow of the dark building, thinking of many things, and feeling very happy and peaceful, until a long, shrill sound from the north told of the coming of the 9.48 train; then he made his way back to Masters, up the dim stairs, and into his room, where Dickey Sproule lay huddled in bed reading The Three Guardsmen by the screened light ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... should assuredly have to yield the palm for wisdom to the eagle. For we men cannot see things far removed from us nor yet things that are very near us, but all of us to a certain extent are blind. And if you confine us to the eyes alone with their dim earthly vision, the words of the great poet will be very true, that a cloud as it were is shed upon our eyes and we cannot see beyond a stone's cast. The eagle, on the other hand, soars exceeding high in heaven to the very ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... his sparse, grizzled mustache seeming actually to bristle. By the dim light of a lantern held near him his aspect was terrifying. A gash on his forehead had streaked one side of his face with blood, while his eyes, beneath their shaggy thatch of brows, appeared to blaze like live ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... postage was twenty-five cents and the postal service extremely primitive—when no house was comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated churches—when candles and oil lamps were the only means of "lighting up," and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns—when women spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished was done at the hardest—when in our country a young girl might almost as reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... deede, Vnkindly left him in that monstrous hell, And fled vnto Alfonso with greate speede, To him their Chieftaines mightines they tell, And how much valure on his soule doth feede, That if preuention, not his actions dim, Twill be too late to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... hear the voice of Bertie speak these words. Things grew confused; I wavered as I stood, lifted my hand to my head; the face of Christian Garth grew large and dim, then faded utterly. I knew no more until I found myself seated on a coil of rope, leaning against the bulwark, while a young girl stood beside me, fanning and bathing my face, and offering ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... memorials of the past: to confront them as crumbling ruins gave him no pleasure, and, as he used to say, he "hated the smells." It was this instinct which, in his visits to the cathedrals, prompted him to stand as far back as possible while the Mass was being said. To see in the dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests describing perfunctorily ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... back at a brisk pace, by common and park, not loitering to look at anything, though the glades and hills and hollows were lovely in that dim half-light which is the darkness of summer. The new moon hung like a silver lamp in mid-heaven, and all the multitude of stars were shining around and above her, while far away in unfathomable space, shone the mysterious light which ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Germany. The picture of the great crowd of people gathered at little tables around the band-stand, whole families together; of a tiny boy baby, just able to toddle around, being dragged about by an enormous St. Bernard dog, whose chain the baby tugged at most valiantly; the long dim avenues under the trees where an occasional young couple lost themselves from fathers and mothers; the music; the cheerful beer-drinking; the general air of rosy-cheeked contentment has formed in my mind a most agreeable recollection ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... God must touch our hearts; our consciences must amend of themselves, by the aid of our reason, and not by the decay of our appetites; pleasure is, in itself, neither pale nor discoloured, to be discerned by dim and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... dimmer, presently flickered out. We were in darkness—all the train was in darkness—we were alone in France, wrapped in war and moonlight, half real beings who had been adventuring together, not for hours, but for years. The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one position and another uneasily, and suddenly said that if it would not derange monsieur too much, she would try to sleep on his shoulder. It would not derange monsieur in ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... step. But the wise woman never even looked about: she kept walking on steadily, the same space as before. Little Obstinate thought for certain she would turn; for she regarded herself as much too precious to be left behind. But on and on the wise woman went, until she had vanished away in the dim moonlight. Then all at once the princess perceived that she was left alone with the moon, looking down on her from the height of her loneliness. She was horribly frightened, and began to run after the wise woman, calling aloud. But the song she had just heard came back to the sound ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... a grief—I feel, in sooth, It rends my soul, it quells my tongue; It dims the sunshine of my youth, But, oh, it will not dim it long! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... from his habit of playing, in the dim twilight, Scotch airs without sharps or flats, but with sudden turns and trills, had become the terror of several quiet suburban squares, was here about to be heard in his own defence, when the proceedings were interrupted by strains of a German Band that had taken ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... lasted till winter. The hooting of an owl made him start; one had frightened him as a boy so that he ran home to his mother—she died thirty years ago. The smell of ripe corn filled the air; it would soon be cut and garnered. He could see the dim outlines of his house, all dark and cold; no one he loved was beneath the roof. The lighted window in Saunders' cottage told where a man hung between life and death, but love was in that home. The futility of life arose before this ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... it was Henrietta. She promised to call for you at half-past twelve: you were to take her to lunch. It was twelve o'clock when you were fool enough to mix yourself up with this infernal machine, and it probably is half-past twelve by now. Your past life rises before you, accompanied by dim memories of your grandmother. You are wondering how much longer you can bear the strain of this attitude, and whether after all you do really want to see the man in the next street but two, when the girl in the exchange-room calls up to know if ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... In so doing, being portly, he lost his balance, which necessitated putting a palm to the floor to maintain his equilibrium. As he did so he felt something soft and thick and wet beneath his fingers. He raised his open palm before his eyes in the dim light of the corridor and peered at it. Then he gave a little shudder, for even in the semi-darkness he saw a dark red stain upon his hand. Leaping to his feet he hurled his shoulder against the door. Herr Skopf is a heavy man—or at least he was then—I have not seen him for several ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears and immense twelfth-cakes, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... officers competing and "giving it a good college try" no matter how inept, or clumsy they may be. But they take a pretty dim view of the leader who perennially acts as if he were afraid of a sweat or a broken thumb. In team sports, developing around interorganized rivalry, the eligibility of an officer to participate among enlisted men is a matter of local ground rules, or special regulations. There ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... contained leaves of white paper for memoranda, and upon the first leaf was the name "Halpin Frayser." Written in red on several succeeding leaves—scrawled as if in haste and barely legible—were the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while his companion continued scanning the dim gray confines of their narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water from ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... bounteous gifts We recognize the monarch (for what seems To thousands opulence, is naught to him), So you, ye heavenly Powers, are also known By bounty long withheld, and wisely plann'd. Ye only know what things are good for us; Ye view the future's wide-extended realm, While from our eye a dim or starry veil The prospect shrouds. Calmly ye hear our prayers, When we like children sue for greater speed. Not immature ye pluck heaven's golden fruit; And woe to him, who with impatient hand, His date of joy forestalling, gathers death. Let not this long-awaited ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... around him with eyes that resented scanty measure, even a sleepy glance sufficed to show much more than he wished to see. Both sky and sea were overcast with doubt, and alarm, and evil foreboding. A dim streak lay where the land had been, and a white gleam quivered from the sunrise on the waves, as if he were spreading water-lilies instead of scattering roses. As the earth has its dew that foretells a bright day—whenever the dew is of the proper sort, for three kinds are established ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... above a door crashed shut. Close to its final scene drew the drama at Baldpate Inn. Mr. Magee knew it, he could not have told why. The others seemed to know it, too. In silence they waited while the hermit scurried along his dim way preparing the meal. In silence they sat while Miss Norton and her mother descended. Once there was a little flurry of interest when Miss Thornhill and Hayden met at the foot of ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... York, but of cultured Boston Neal wrote at that date: "The Exchange is surrounded with booksellers' shops which have a good trade. There are five Printing Presses." Succeeding years did not change the luck of the craft in Boston, nor dim its honors, still wealth and love poured in on its members. The names of Henchman and Hancock show the opulence; while Knox, in war and love alike prospered, winning the wealthy "belle of Massachusetts" for his bride, and winning equal glory with his ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... warrior points to a dim speck far over the prairie toward the land of the Bannocks. A white man would have scarcely noticed it; or if he had, would have thought it only some wandering deer or antelope. But the Indians, glancing at the moving object, have already recognized it as a horseman coming straight ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... themselves to the heart of Mary or of Jesus or to both together.[5354] In this way, besides the narrow devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... shook far more violently than Bias would have believed possible in her weak condition. At the same time she pressed her lips so tightly together that her toothless mouth deepened into a hole, and her dim eyes shone with a keen, menacing light. For some time she found no reply, though strange, rattling, gasping sounds escaped her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whispered Jimmie, and they listened, but the only sound they heard was made by a bird winging its way through the dim upper light. Then, in a ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... must listen to me. I am going to say something which will startle you. All these quiet years, all the time which has gone by and left only a dim memory of a certain man to you, have been spent by me smothering down regrets, stifling my youth, crushing what would have made me joyous and womanly—for Philip Arnold has not been remembered at all dimly by me, father, and when ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... as they advanced and although the light was dim Dorothy thought they looked like big kettles turned upside down. Just beyond this place a jumble of huge, jagged rocks lay scattered, rising ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... eighteen inches to the moon's diameter, more detail might have been inserted, but this, at the expense of distinctness, would have detracted from the value of the map for handy reference in the usually dim light of the observatory, without adding to its utility in other ways. Every named formation is prominently shown; and most other features of interest, including the principal rill-systems, are represented, though, as regards these, no attempt is made to indicate all their ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... day was bright and clear, and the sea was reasonably calm. For the first time he was up earlier than Miss Earle, and he paced the deck with great impatience, waiting for her appearance. He wondered who and what she was. He had a dim, hazy idea that some time before in his life, he had met her, and probably had been acquainted with her. What an embarrassing thing it would be, he thought, if he had really known her years before, and had forgotten her, while she knew who he was, and ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... hand my footsteps led. No more the dim unreal past I tread. O thou whose breathing form was once so dear, Whose cheering voice was music to my ear, Art thou not with me as my feet pursue The village paths so well thy boyhood knew, Along the tangled margin of the stream Whose murmurs blended with thine infant dream, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was dumfounded, and my mind was haunted by dim visions of strange adventures. I seemed to see before me one of the evil genii of the Thousand and One Nights, one of these dangerous and crafty creatures whose mission it is to drag men down to unknown ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... earth on which it shines; not that flashy circle which the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall, to show how scarcely visible mites may be magnified; but a soft and steady illumination that does not dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from year to year. The earth becomes more and more thickly dotted with these permanent ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... at him her soft eyes became dim with tears. She knew that the words which she had spoken, the words which she had repeated as they were spoken by the lady whom she had met the previous night, had awakened many memories within him. She too had her memories. She knew that there ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... the family (one evening only, and at that time), they were lodging somewhere near Lincoln's Inn, on the western side (I forget the street), and were evidently in uncomfortable circumstances. The father and mother were both living; and I have some dim recollection of the latter's invalid appearance. The father's senses had failed him before that time. He published some poems in quarto. Lamb showed me once an imperfect copy: the Sparrow's Wedding was the title of the longest piece, and this ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... swift ponies, mad with excitement, on came the surging crowd, led by the majestic figure of the big chief, jogging straight on at the slow, characteristic amble of the Indian pony, his war-bonnet trailing to the ground. From far and near, up and down the valley, dim, ghostly, shadowy horsemen came darting to join the array. Close behind Red Dog some rabid warrior began a wild war chant, and others took it up. Somewhere along the throng a tom-tom began its rapid, monotonous thump, and here, there, and everywhere the rattles played ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... vespers, in the dim twilight of the chapel, she flung back her cape and hood, with the tears raining from her eyes and her voice gushing and throbbing with the melancholy music, while the nuns paused in their singing, appalled by the religious ecstasy of ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... somewhat under an eclipse. But in her past she has undying fame. You of New England and her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness. The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Out in the dim and dreamy distance rose A spectral range of alp-like scenery— Mountain on mountain, far as eye could see, Their foreheads white and hoar ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... deserted. He had been suffering greatly from thirst, even more than from hunger. To stay still might seal his fate. Onward, therefore, he pushed. At length, however, from want of food and water, his strength failed him. His sight grew dim, and, fainting, he fell on the ground. How long he had lain there he knew not, when he heard a strange, deep-toned, sonorous voice. Languidly he opened his eyes, and saw standing over him a tall Indian, of dignified appearance and full costume ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... all the honours was being celebrated. For myself, I was really so engrossed by my narrative, and so excited by the "ponche," that I saw or heard very little of what was passing around, and have only a kind of dim recollection of being seized by the hand by "Feargus," who was Beamish's brother, and who, in the fullness of his heart, would have hugged me to his breast, if I had not opportunely been so overpowered as to fall senseless under ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... a wild, black kind of night, and the weirdness of it showed up as I passed from light to light or crossed the mouths of dim alleys leading Heaven knows to what infernal dens of mystery and crime even in this latter-day city of ours. The moon was up as far as the church steeples; large vapoury clouds scudding across the sky between us and her, and a strong, gusty wind, laden with big raindrops snarled angrily round ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Unlike, but like the raven's ravening croak. Not till her breath of being could aspire Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found Our common brotherhood in sight and sound: When mellow rang the name Napoleon, And dim aloft her young Angelical waved. Between ethereal and gross to choose, She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved. They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun Behind o'ershadowing foemen: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it all is!" he at length resumed, as though starting from a reverie. "This past fortnight seems already as dim and vague to me as the recollection of something that happened long years ago. I never believed myself capable of such follies. Tell me frankly." He leaned towards Constance, gazing at her in an amused, confidential way. "Could you have imagined that I should ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... and were received as fellow men, such was the genius of Courtney's friendship. A railway man looked in. The collector's dim office became awake ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... happiness enough merely to breathe so near each other. The sun left the distant fields and hills; soft twilight stole through the woods, down the gap, and over the plain; the grass lost its green; the wall of trees grew dark and dusky; and very faint and dim showed the picture that was so bright a little while ago. As they sat quite silent, listening to what nature had to say to them, or letting fancy and memory take their way, the silence was broken—hardly ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... no mind to be left to the Major's company, and a sort of wish to be near my friend, I went with him. I believe it is not correct to admire Bath Abbey, but for all that 'the lantern of the west' has always seemed to me a grand place; as for Derrick, he had a horror of a 'dim religious light,' and always stuck up for his huge windows, and I believe he loved the Abbey with all his heart. Indeed, taking it only from a sensuous point of view, I could quite imagine what a relief he found his weekly attendance here; by contrast ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... possessed naturally the needed knack, but he deserved praise for his sticking at it so loyally. He had no surety that he would ever be of use to his college, and, indeed, with the advent of Thor, his hopes grew dim, yet he plugged on, in case old Bannister might sometime need him—and yet, but for Theophilus, he would not have summoned the courage to tell! To the surprise and delight of the Coach and Captain, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... village street. Men whom he knew stopped it to speak to him. Children playing the last of their games in the fading light paused to stare at him. Father Moran, returning to his presbytery, waved his hand and shouted a greeting. He passed the last house of the village, and could see the fishing-boats, dim and naked-looking, riding at their anchors in the bay. Out beyond them, grim and terrible in the twilight, lay the hulk where the ice for fish-packing was stored. The thick stump of her one remaining mast made a ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... The dim starlight was shining faintly through the cracks of the outlaw's future home when the old man showed ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... veiled the sky during the early part of the night, had now broken and dispersed, the stars shone out and disclosed the outline of surrounding objects, assuming in the dim light all manner of fantastic forms. A cool wind, the forerunner of morning, swept across the valley, bringing pleasant refreshment to the heated soldiery, as they leaned upon their muskets and waited the orders of their chief. On either hand videttes were advanced, keeping vigilant watch. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... mention of his appalling loss. To those who did speak of it he returned no word or glance. With fumbling, thick, and nerveless fingers he took up the purple-lettered ribbon of his trade. He fixed his dim eyes on market reports and dictated notes and orders, but it was a poor show. Even those who hated him as a gross, unlovely character were shocked at his shrunken form, his grayed and grizzled cheek. When death deals a blow like that the defeated ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... envelop'd well his form, Folded the blanket well, tucked it carefully over head and carefully under feet, And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited, Ending my strange vigil with that, vigil of night and battlefield dim, Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth responding), Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd, I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... unlike Phillips, strikes us as a man who really read and enjoyed poetry. Phillips is more the slipshod bibliographer and cataloguer, collecting names and titles; Winstanley is the amateur literary historian, seeking out the verse itself, arranging it in chronological order, and trying, by his dim lights, to pass ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... had occurred. As she concocted these documents between her naps she could never remember in her whole life any such night of mirth and minstrelsy, and not one pang of conscience interfered, to cloud the present joy nor dim that ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... only for a little time. The Thin Woman spoke to them curiously about the moon, and, indeed, she might speak with assurance on that subject, for her ancestors had sported in the cold beam through countless dim generations. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... laughing flame, Filling the room with a mysterious haze, Which rolls and writhes along the shadowy air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let me clutch that limb— Oh, devil! It breaks to ashes in my grasp! What ghost ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... has sounded from the ancient sanctuary, and all the forms of the valley are dim in the dusk, the silence is broken again by a very quiet little bell, which might be called the fairies' angelus if it did not keep ringing all through the spring and summer nights. It is like a treble note of the piano softly touched. It steals up from amongst the flags, hyacinths, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... clover-hay, and are as good and wholesome. In New York it is so different, especially if one has no home life; you breathe a different atmosphere from us in more respects than one. This fragrant old barn appears to me more of a sanctuary than some churches in which I have tried to worship, and its dim evening light more religious." "According to your faith," I said, "no shrine has ever contained so precious a gift as ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... not always because it has been touched by a divine flame. There are other powers than God's at work in this universe. Doctor Parkhurst's explanation of the Scripture text is not sufficient. He acknowledges only a part of the truth. The candle is giving already a dim and lurid light. Man is blindly worshiping, groping in the dark, bowing to imaginary deities, the products of his own imagination, the work ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... which Shakya Muni attained to his supreme enlightenment; for it is not in another body in the future existence, but in this very body that one had to get enlightened. And mind is pure and bright in its nature like a mirror, but the dirt and dust of passions and of low desires often pollute and dim it. Therefore one should dust and wipe it from time to time in order to ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... stood, suddenly, the sound of hoofs at a gallop on the drive, and my husband threw himself off at the door and tore through the hall to his room; and in the certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an instant, stood dim and remote. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears,—all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Victoria in her age, and how much I dreaded being led up to her by a majestic lord-in-waiting; she sate there, a little quiet lady, so plainly dressed, so simple, with her hands crossed on her lap, her sanguine complexion, her silvery hair, yet so crowned with dim history and tradition, so great as to be beyond all pomp or ceremony, yet wearing the awe and majesty of race and fame as she wore her plain dress. She gave me a little nod and smile, and began at once to talk in the sweet clear voice that was like the voice of a child. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... played a chief part having come to an end, the drop-curtain must be lowered, amid a flourish of trumpets and the illuminations of an apotheosis, to allow the actors a little breathing-space. Half a century rolls by, during which we have a dim perception of the subdued crash of falling empires, and of the trampling of armies in fierce fight; then the curtain rises on an utterly different drama, of which the plot has been woven behind the scenes, and the exciting motif ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... central and important book, which they valued because it had awakened them and given them strength. The English critics, when at last they found there was such a book, were content to laugh at its exaggerated sentiment. In truth, as Carlyle has well said, "'Werther' expressed the dim-rooted pain under which thoughtful men were languishing." Europe responded to "Werther," because, even in its sentimental languishing, it expressed this pain. America was finding another method of expressing her ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... sailing a boat are childish. Tacking is like washing, merely a dim possibility of their very distant future. It's a sailing wind if behind; otherwise it's a case of ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton |
