"Lambent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hecatomb Marking the path of some Titanic will. Many a night and day they Southward drove. Sometimes at midnight round them all the sea Quivered with witches' oils and water snakes, Green, blue, and red, with lambent tongues of fire. Mile upon mile about the blurred black hulls A cauldron of tempestuous colour coiled. On every mast mysterious meteors burned, And from the shores a bellowing rose and fell As of great bestial gods that walked all night Through some wild hell ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the fantastic tricks played at times upon some body of worshippers, where light to the church is admitted through stained glass windows? A lambent red flame lighting up the hair of a man's head, while at the same moment his beard is blue and luminous. Over the shoulders of another, the purple mantle of royalty seems about falling, investing him for a moment with regal splendors, while perhaps the cadaverous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... straight each tongue of flame Through cloud and breeze unwavering came, And darted to its place of rest On some meek brow of Jesus blest. Nor fades it yet, that living gleam, And still those lambent lightnings stream; Where'er the Lord is, there are they; In every heart that gives them room, They light His altar every day, Zeal to ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... the moonlight steered ominous black triangles, circling us, leading us, sheering across bow and flashing wake, all phosphorescent with lambent ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes. But he was never sure if from her heart Or from the rosy sunset came the flush. Again she thanked him, while again he stood Bewildered in her beauty. Not a word Answered her words that flowed, folded in tones Round which dissolving lambent music played, Like dropping water in a silver cup; Till, round the shoulder of the neighbouring hill, Sudden she disappeared. And he awoke, And called himself hard names, and turned and went After his horses, bending too ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it. The strong interest that notices things was absent from him. Would it ever be ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... her hand, and stood up, facing him. Her countenance, turned to the light, shone like a white flame; it was tensely aquiver with passionate earnestness, lambent with the flowering of her body, of dim desire, the heritage of flesh. She spoke in a voice that startled Gordon by its new depth, the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... special clearing lighted by the moon and countless anchoridae tied by their legs in festoons, a procedure which causes them to open and shut their lambent eyes very rapidly, and gave a quaint cinema effect to the scene. After counting the courses up to twenty-seven I lost as each was accompanied by a new brand of island potion. Fortunately we ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... at the waves which shone with sparkling phosphorescent light. An almost imperceptible breeze had sprung up, and the way made by the vessel as she passed through the water was indicated by a stream of what appeared lambent blue flame. ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith, as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing us from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house of Brentham, who laughed occasionally, even before his angelic jokes were well launched. His lambent flashes sometimes even played over the cardinal, whose cerulean armor, nevertheless, remained always unscathed. Monsignore Chidioch, however, who would once unnecessarily rush to the aid of his chief, was tumbled over by the bishop with relentless gayety, to the infinite ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... a most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote, although he wrote chiefly in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the Dullness of the late Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, seem'd like a thin Veil not to hide, but to heighten the Beauty which it cover'd; her Night-gown hanging loose, discover'd her charming Bosom, which cou'd bear ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... polo with unexpected results, for it beat by two goals to one that very terrible polo corps the Lushkar Light Horse, though the latter had four ponies apiece for a short hour's fight, as well as a native officer who played like a lambent flame across ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... lambent glow leaped again into Moira's eyes. He had noticed her—particularly. "Do you like my hair done ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... whereof at the time she seemed to take no note, always remained fixed in the mind of Cicely: the cold expanse of snow, the inky trees, the hard sky, the lambent beams of the moon, the dull glow of the torches caught and reflected by her jewels and her lover's mail, the midwinter sound of birds, the barking of a distant hound, the black porch of the church that drew nearer, the little oblong mounds which hid the ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... many life atoms in molecular motion. It requires no adept knowledge, but simply the natural gift of a good clairvoyant subject to see them passing to and fro, from man to objects and vice versa like a bluish lambent flame. Why, then, should not a broom, made of a shrub, which grew most likely in the vicinity of the building where the lazy novice lived, a shrub, perhaps, repeatedly touched by him while in a state of anger provoked by ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the eastern plain a white mist stretched like a lake. But where the distant peak of Zagros serrated the western horizon the sky was clear. Jupiter and Saturn rolled together like drops of lambent flame about ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... were already arrayed: the snowflakes, conflicting with the baffling wind as they descended, "tormented all the air,"—and, to the eye of one looking upwards, seemed to cross—thwart—and mazily interweave with each other as rapidly as a weaver's shuttle, and with the lambent scintillating lustre of fire-flies: and the plashes or shallow pools of water, which were frequent in this part of the heath amongst the excavations from which peats had been dug, now began under the sudden breaking up of the frost to give way beneath their warm covering of snow to ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... which, I must add, never seemed to me to mean, or, at least, to reveal, anything. He was a great reader of mystical books, and yet the man's nature seemed cold. It was sunshiny, but not sunny. His intellect was rather a lambent flame than a genial warmth. He could make things, but he could not grow anything. And when I came to see that he had had more than any one else to do with the education of Miss Oldcastle, I understood her a little better, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Mrs. Gleason could not be so ungrateful as to refuse, though she ventured to reiterate the warning, breathed by the feverish couch of her child. This warning Miss Thusa endeavored to bear in mind, and illumined the gloomy grandeur of her legends by some lambent rays of fancy—but they were lightning flashes playing about ruins, suggesting ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... yellow skull stood out; the ribs of the skeleton. Two tiny, fiery eyes glimmered at the base of the antennae—two minute jewelled sparks of glowing, lambent fire. They seemed to be watching her, ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... and Tyler). "Mr. Fessenden at that time," said Mr. Davis, "was not only a young man of eminent ability and attainments, but he was warm-hearted, frank, honorable, eminently conscientious. His health was then good, and he was always bright and genial: sometimes he showed the lambent play of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... and compromise and temporize and discretionize and all the other "izes" by which the politicians were hedging right and wrong and somehow euchring the many in the interests of the few and transforming democracy into plutocracy. Besides, memory that merged to conscious realization was playing in lambent flames through his whole being round the form of the figure against ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale lambent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... added that he, Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously he resented that this old man should take advantage ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... isthmus of the guarded Neck was hidden by the outlying cliff. In the south-western angle of this cliff, about midway between the summit and the sea, was an arch, which vomited a red and flickering light, that faintly shone upon the sea in the track of the boat. The light was lambent and uncertain, now sinking almost into insignificance, and now leaping up with a fierceness that caused a deep glow to throb in the very heart of the mountain. Sometimes a black figure would pass across this gigantic ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... proprietor of this brochure? She had read it surely with care. She must have cherished it, or why identify it as her own? Perhaps she was a lover of old books; it could not be that she was a lover of cruel stories. Those eyes were made for throwing forth the lambent light of affection and love; how unlike to the staring blood-shot orbs of that Jane Grierson on that terrific woodcut! Yet, true to the nature of my species, at least my sex, I found in the grim pamphlet that inexpressible something which recommends coarse recitals of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... hands seemed to be ablaze, and left their impress on the doors and handles. It blazed for a while after I had touched it, but soon went out, and no smell or trace remained. I have seen my own hands covered with a lambent flame; but nothing like this I ever saw.... The lights were preceded by very sharp detonations on my chair, so that we could watch for their coming by hearing the noise. They shot up very rapidly from ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... brightness. And as the lines grew visible they resolved themselves into the semblance of a great and terrible face, the countenance of a man of heroic size with long hair. There was no suggestion of a body, only that majestic head crowned with hyacinthine locks and limned in lambent fire. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... humour flickers over this page like lambent flame; yet he was serious at heart without a doubt, and his whirling words rouse an echo in many a breast to this day. But both Shakspere and Lamb had their higher moments. Turn to "Cymbeline," and observe the glorious triumph of the dirge which rings like the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength. Rent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibers of a perennial endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or, rather let me say, rising, to repose, finishes the infallible luster of its crystalline beauty, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... crowd your finely-fibred frame 25 All living faculties of bliss; And Genius to your cradle came, His forehead wreathed with lambent flame, And bending low, with godlike kiss Breath'd in a more celestial life; 30 But boasts not many a fair compeer A heart as sensitive to joy and fear? And some, perchance, might wage an equal strife, Some ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of flame was round her waist; every limb was bathed in lambent light; all the multitudinous life of the autumn sea, stirred by her approach, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... ripping, roaring storms, flurries of ice, snow and sleet, shot through and through by balls of lambent flames in unguessable numbers. Eery lights which struck the surface of the Earth, bounded away and, half a mile or so from the surface again, burst into flaming pin-wheels, like skyrockets of ancient times. Strange lights, causing weird effects, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... roof, marches before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth, which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... water. The eastern sky blooms into vivid pink from the reflection of this fiery incandescence, which fades only to give place to the leaping brightness of phosphorescent waves, and the nightly pageant of tropical skies ablaze with lambent flames of summer lightning. Morning reveals the dark forests of mysterious Borneo, rolling back to the misty blue of a mountain background. The pathless jungles of teak and iron wood, inextricably tangled by ropes of liana or ladders of rattan, latticed with creepers and wreathed with clambering ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... he smiled down. "Some are merely lenses to see with and some are stars. Of the star kind, a few are lustrous and miraculous, and control destinies. I think yours are like that. One can flash lambent fire and the other can soften like the petals of a black pansy—it has just that touch of inky purple—and in their range are ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... how it was that the Count de Cabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs-beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I had ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... out to the world the good news that God is Love, declares that 'this is the message' which he has to tell, that 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.' So the light of righteousness, as well as the lambent flame of love, burn together on that central fire of the universe. We must not so conceive of the love of God, as to darken the radiance of His righteousness, or to obscure the brilliancy of that pure light which tolerates ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the Autocrat Has writ in Stars the fiery Idem Stat, Lettered the Riddle in the Lambent Suns - rather write than read a Book ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... science, for the scene was horrible and weird, suggestive to the Baggara—chiefs and Mullahs—of magic in its most awful guise. For as they stood spellbound there by the strange light which played about as if some hissing, fiery dragon were flickering its lambent tongue in and out of its glistening jaws, not only were the faces and busy hands of the Hakim and his assistants seen moving rapidly, but directly after there, in a faint glare, was the bare ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... twitched, slow colour mounted in his face, the light in his eyes was lambent. He found himself looking deep into other eyes that were like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge and resurge of feeling for which there was no name. Aware that they revealed more than ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... constitution. His face was round, flat, pale, with small features; mouth beautifully shaped; hair, bright-brown and wavy; and such a pair of eyes as are rarely seen in the human or any other head,—intensely blue, with a gentle and lambent expression, yet wonderfully alert and engrossing: nothing appeared to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the infirmities of your aged parent." While the breast of Arthur was animated with such sentiments, and dictated a conduct like this, the priests were employed in the mournful preparations. The altar was made ready; the lambent fire ascended from its surface; the air was perfumed with the smoke of the incense; the fillets were brought forth; and the sacred knife glittered in the hand of the chief of the Druids. The bards had strung their harps, and began the song of death. ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a lambent flame with power to make clean and bright ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... June atmosphere, under the great arc-lamps which seemed suspended in the mild lambent air, the branches of the trees lining the Boulevards showed brightly, delicately green; and the tints of the dresses worn by the women walking up and down outside the cafes and still brilliantly lighted shops mingled luminously, as on a ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... one of his own outpourings of genius, a poem called "The Tigress," in which someone, presumably the author, described the torments involved in his adoration of a feminine person with "jetty brows and lambent eyes," whose kiss was like "a viper's sting" and who had, so to speak, raised the very dickens with his feelings. He read it with passionate fervor, and Captain Dan, listening, decided that the Tigress must ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of wit he indisputably was, whatever more amongst the wittiest of men. His speech, and manner of being, played everywhere like soft brilliancy of lambent fire round the common objects of the hour, and was, beyond all others that English society could show, entitled to the name of excellent, for it was spontaneous, like all else in him, genuine, humane,—the glittering ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... eruption one of the ships burst into a mass of flames, whilst the rest became lighted up by the glare, and were soon adding to the conflagration—the fire racing up their masts and rigging, and showing them against the black waters like vessels of lambent flame. ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... great bother finding so many.—I'm obliged to make the retainers come by all manner of accidents; and I should never have finished the job if I hadn't thought of setting the castle on fire. 'And now forked tongues of liquid fire, and greedy lambent flames burst forth from every window of the devoted edifice. The devouring element——.' That's the best passage in the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... bore down upon him, felled him, o'er him where he lay Raised a knife to seek his life-blood. Then there came a thought to stay All his angry, murderous impulse, caused the knife to shuddering fall: "He's her father; love your en'mies; 'tis 'our God' reigns over all." At midnight, lambent, lurid flames light up the sky with fiercest beams, Wild cries, "Fire! fire!" ring through the air, and red like blood each flame now seems; They faster grow, they higher throw weird, direful arms which ever lean About ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... quite as though it understood my words or the gesture of menace. The cilia fluttered about its spherical body. Bands of lambent color flashed. I could not rid myself of the curious certainty, that it was ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... gives zest to enjoyment when the heart is buoyed—as what youthful heart is not?—by the sweet potency of woman's love. Fatigue, hunger, thirst, disease, and poverty are only trifles that are laughed at, so long as there is seen in the background of it all the lambent light of tender eyes speaking, as nothing else can, the language of the devoted heart. For many of his brother officers, men with families, or already, advanced in years, this American invasion was a dreary reality, made up ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... directed their eyes to the quarter pointed out, and thought they could perceive something like a vessel. Gradually the gloom seemed to clear away, and a lambent pale blaze to light up that part of the horizon. Not a breath of wind was on the water—the sea was like a mirror—more and more distinct did the vessel appear, till her hull, masts, and yards were clearly visible. They looked and rubbed their ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and often with the inarticulate mystic speech of Music: such was the element they now lived in; in such a many-tinted, radiant Aurora, and by this fairest of Orient Light-bringers must our Friend be blandished, and the new Apocalypse of Nature ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the silent night, The winking stars soft peeping in his room, While at his hand the dreamy, lambent light Just lit his book and left all else in gloom. His study walls evanished, and in mist He saw the maid whose dead ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... had wit—rarely sharp to hurt, yet quick to search out forgivable weakness. The laughter of her mind played like lambent flame over all about her, and from all about her arose answering laughter. Yet she was never the centre of things. This she would not permit. The large house, and all of which it was significant, was her father's; and through it, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... ground of all his being Was the polar power of contrast, For his thought, to music wakened By the touch of Northern Saga, Vibrated melodious longing, Toward the South forever tending. In his eye the lambent fire, Of his thought the glint, showed kinship With the free improvisator In the land of warmth and vineyards. And his swiftly changing feeling And his all-consuming ardor, That could toil the livelong winter Till caprice the fruit ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... sphere some six feet in diameter made up of lenses. It encloses a space in the center of which is a ball of the phosphorescent stone. During the day the rays of the sun are concentrated upon this ball of stone, and at night the stored-up sunlight is radiated into lambent phosphorescent light. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... with all the forms and observances, so far as the disadvantages of her surroundings would permit. It was some time in the last summer, that he had made up a definite judgment in the premises under which he commenced his lambent action. During the autumn he often met King at her father's, and the young men occasionally made up small parties with Julia and Nell or some other young ladies for rides and excursions. Towards winter, King was less at Newbury; and as winter approached, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... club-footed; far from it. He was bony and rugged and homely, with a big mouth, and wide ears, and a form stooped with labor. He had fine, lambent, gentle eyes which lighted up his face when he smiled, as Lincoln's illuminated his. He was not ugly. In fact, if that quality which fair ladies—if they are wise—prize far more than physical beauty, the quality called charm, can with ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... an acre of plate glass under the Royal arms on Mr. Eglantine's shop-window; and at night, when the gas is lighted, and the washballs are illuminated, and the lambent flame plays fitfully over numberless bottles of vari-coloured perfumes—now flashes on a case of razors, and now lightens up a crystal vase, containing a hundred thousand of his patent tooth-brushes—the effect of the ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... consummation! Every trait so true, and so touching—and yet lightened by the fearless innocence which goes playfully to the brink of the grave, and that pure affection which bears the unstained spirit, on its soft and lambent flash, at once to its source in eternity.". . . In the same letter he told him of his having been reading the Battle of Life again, charmed with its sweet writing and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... very difficult, in the tropic dust, to follow what exactly happened next. For the next few minutes black-back was here, there, and everywhere, leaping and dodging in and out like a lambent flame. The human eye could scarcely follow him, but the human ear could hear plainly the nasty, dog-like snarling and the snap ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... fault with his diplomacy, there is in all alike the same constant and remarkable play of a bright and penetrating intellectual light, coloured by a humour that is now and then a little sardonic, but more often is genial and lambent. There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and bouquet ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... this explanation when, with a shower of sparks and a mighty crash, the heavy roof fell. A lambent flame burst from the furnace; grew brighter, until the clouds became rose-tinted; a glory as brilliant as short-lived, for soon the blaze subsided, the glow swiftly faded, and the sky ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Rouen; Irving draws "A Royal Poet," Longfellow discusses "The Trouveres," or "The Devotional Poetry of Spain." It is delightful to trace the charming resemblance between the books and the writers, widely different as they are. There is the same geniality, the same tender pathos, the same lambent humor, the same delicate observation of details, the same overpowering instinct of literary art. But Geoffrey Crayon is a humorist, while the Pilgrim beyond the Sea is a poet. The one looks at the broad aspects of English life with the shrewd, twinkling eye of a man of the world; the other ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... then all tame and passive as she could wish, whilst her freedom raised no other emotion but those of a strange, and, till then, unfelt pleasure. Every part of me was open and exposed to the licentious courses of her hands, which, like a lambent fire, ran over my whole body, and thawed all coldness as ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... vipers that are wreathed around her arms, and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears, nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light, as with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather a celestial glory than a light—an emanation that penetrates the grossest body with more subtilety than the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... on the mantel-piece. The library was a room apart from the festivities. A soft, rose-colored darkness pervaded the room. Presently a darker shadow tiptoed over the threshold. He turned, and the shadow approached. Madame's gray eyes, full of lambent fires, looked ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sweeter smiles betray'd. Conscious awhile with throbbing heart he strove, Spread his wide arms, and barter'd life for love!— Now rocks on rocks, in savage grandeur roll'd, Steep above steep, the blasted plains infold; The incumbent crags eternal tempest shrouds, And livid light'nings cleave the lambent clouds; 50 Round the firm base loud-howling whirlwinds blow, And sands in burning eddies ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... that the first portion of the heavy inflammable air, resulting from the passage of steam over heated charcoal was loaded with fixed air (CO2), but that in the course of the process this disappeared, the remaining air (CO) burning with a lambent flame. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... lunged from the trail above, tore the rope from his hand and crashed down the hillside, snorting. Something was threshing about the trail and coughing horribly. Pete would have run if he had known which way to run. He had seen two lambent green dots glowing above him and had fired with that quick instinct of placing his shot—the result of long practice. The flopping and coughing ceased. Pete, with cocked gun poked ahead of him, struck a match. In its pale flare he saw the long ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... I drink wine from the hand of Ul-Jabal. My knees totter beneath the weight of my lean body. Daggers of lambent fever race through my brain incessant. Some fibrillary twitchings at the right angle of the mouth have also ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... observance to which he could not give some spiritual significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... emigrant wagon, behind whose tailboard she was gravely trotting. She was a half-broken colt—in which character she had at different times unseated everybody in the train—and, although covered with dust, she had a beautiful coat and the most lambent gazelle-like eyes I had ever seen. I think she kept these latter organs purely for ornament—apparently looking at things with her nose, her sensitive ears, and sometimes even a slight lifting of her ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... juxtaposition, kaleidoscopic, labyrinth, lacerate, lackadaisical, lacrimal, laity, lambent, lampoon, largess, lascivious, laudable, laudation, lavation, legionary, lethargic, licentious, lineal, lingual, literati, litigious, loquacity, lubricity, lucent, lucre, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... mouth when Ratsey lifted the latch and led me into the inn parlour. It was a low sanded room with no light except a fire of seawood on the hearth, burning clear and lambent with blue salt flames. There were tables at each end of the room, and wooden-seated chairs round the walls, and at the trestle table by the chimney sat Elzevir Block smoking a long pipe and looking at the fire. ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... Always it had been gold which inflamed the human mind to endure to the uttermost. His imagination went back, and he saw the desperate influx heading for California, for Australia, for South Africa, that mob of adventurous spirits for whom there burned nightly over the hills the lambent promise of the morrow, strengthening and invigorating to further effort. He saw this mob lose itself in forest, mountain, plain and canyon, a wild-eyed herald of civilization. He saw roads and bridges, farms and villages take form along the trail it traversed, till, ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... This unity of longitudinal extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand—the unity of a number of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour—that is precisely the unity of Getting Married. A jumble of ideas, prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at once lose the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... for the first time that hot evening in March, with the golden lambent light pouring down through the valley, making it in verity a "shell of gold," sitting in Indian chairs on the terrace, with the perfume of roses and jasmines all around us, the valley of the Oreto, Palermo, Sta. Catarina, Monreale,—all were but parts of a dreamy vision, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... jovial roaring tone, Like one rebuking half in jest— Yet ah! I wish there could be shewn The wisdom that it hath exprest— Or sinking to a lambent glow, Its arched and silent cavern seems A magic glass whereon to shew, And shape anew, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... pictures of the great Admiral's exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career, from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into a Hero for the notice, however stolid his brain, however ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and of the strict rights and wrongs of things—at least if they are not very bad," I interpolated, thinking of Mr. Rampant—"than people who can smile and look pleasant at everything and everybody like Lucy Lambent, who goes on calling me darling when I know I'm scowling like a horned-owl. Nurse says she's the 'sweetest tempered young lady she ever did know!' Aunt Isobel, ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fantastic, of human and brute features in a chase—a boar-chase in front, and a stag-chase on his left hand. These, as they rose fitfully in bright masses of color and of savage expression under the lambent flashing of the fire, continued to excite his irritable state of feeling; and it was not for some time that he felt this uneasy condition give way to exhaustion. He was at length on the very point of falling asleep, or perhaps had ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... said Amelia firmly. Her eyes were suffused, and yet lambent. The light in them seemed to be drinking up their tears. Her steps, she knew, were set within a shining way. At the door only she paused and fixed him with a glance. "Enoch," said she threateningly, "whose cows were them you ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... matches, as he clung to the pony's bridle. Not nearly so bright as the lambent phosphorescence from the fireflies which flickered across our path, the puny light of the match was sufficient for the guide to pick up the ribbon-like path, and once more we were on our ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... near to the principal heap of mingled treasure and ruin, heavily squatted on the very summit of the pile, was such a creature as no words could depict—of a ghastly color, bulky and malformed, furnished with three burning eyes that turned now green, now red with lambent flame, and great shapeless limbs, which it uplifted one after the other, striking awkward, pawing blows at the bell! It seemed to the horrified onlookers to be the very demon of greed defending its spoil. Blank sank ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... day, as they hurriedly combed The Rolls for what few cattle remained on the lower range, the cowmen turned their eyes to the river and to the canyons and towering cliffs beyond, for the sheep; until at last as they sat by the evening fire Creede pointed silently to the lambent flame of a camp fire, glowing like a torch against the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... a fiery hand that, hovering in the air, pointed lambent finger at gaping Lewin and at each of ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... fly,—Green or otherwise—nor particle of solid opaque matter floating in it. 'Tis, indeed, pure optic illusion on the Widow's part, illusion born, perchance, partly of fear, partly of pique. There is nothing, my dear paternal Uncle, but one lambent, feverish fire, deliciously attractive, even in its angry heat, fascinating even whilst phlogistic, shooting out from every part of it, in all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... foxes were on display at the Tokyo exhibition of 1890. Phosphorescent foxes often appear in the old coloured prints, now so rare and precious, made by artists whose names have become world-famous. Occasionally foxes are represented wandering about at night, with lambent tongues of dim fire—kitsune-bi—above their heads. The end of the fox's tail, both in sculpture and drawing, is ordinarily decorated with the symbolic jewel (tama) of old Buddhist art. I have in my possession one kakemono ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... me of a story—" He chuckled and chuckled, his lambent eyes suffused with mirth; and slipping his arm through the pivot-sleeve of Lord Alderdene's shooting-jacket, hooking the other in Siward's reluctant elbow, and driving Mortimer ahead of him, he went garrulously away ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... visitors to vary his solitary night-watch; for it would not do for him to fall asleep, since the fire should be refreshed as often as every twenty minutes. We ascended the hillock to the top of the kiln, and the marble was red-hot, and burning with a bluish, lambent flame, quivering up, sometimes nearly a yard high, and resembling the flame of anthracite coal, only, the marble being in large fragments, the flame was higher. The kiln was perhaps six or eight feet across. Four hundred bushels of marble ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... how often have I stood on the deck of a ship watching with wonder and awe the stars overhead, and the sea-fire below, especially in the foaming, silvery wake of the vessel, where often suddenly appear globes of soft and lambent light, given out perhaps from the surface ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... proportioned, deep-bosomed, long-limbed, with the fine hands and feet of the true mountaineer. The thick dusk hair rose up around her brow in a massive, sculptural line; her dark eyes—the large, heavily fringed eyes of a dryad—glowed with the fires of youth, and with a certain lambent shining which was all their own; the stain on her cheeks was deep, answering to the ripe red of ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... wings past her upon the gale. The lightning, which till now had shaken quivering lances of flame across the black water, a flash, then darkness, then again a flash, now became continuous, playing in lambent flames amid the blackness, lighting up the wild turmoil of wind and wave and cloud. The thunder rolled without pause,—overhead, around, beneath them. Crash! boom! crash! And all the while the water hissed past them; all the while the wind ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both vigorous, both determined, there was yet a ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart, burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in;" but all is consecrated, earnest, rapturous, in the feeling ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... to rain down from heaven as thick as hail, not one of them would fit it.'—Yorick's last breath was hanging upon his trembling lips ready to depart as he uttered this:—yet still it was uttered with something of a Cervantick tone;—and as he spoke it, Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a moment in his eyes;—faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which (as Shakespeare said of his ancestor) were wont to set ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... fires— Ablaze by night with lunar beams, With lambent lustre on its streams, And golden glories round ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... is needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time. They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use in France, dwelling upon those villages and cross-roads ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the halls of numbered dead Where lambent lights and crystal dews Invoke the ghouls to guard each tomb That vandals of the sobbing night, When hell-winds stir the conquered dead, And thunder shook the mourner's pews, Giant cavalcades of marshalled Doom March thro' the phosphorescent ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... glittering, flashing, brilliant, twinkling, coruscant, glistening, lambent, scintillant, glistering; spirited, vigorous, impassioned, bright; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sun of victory, born In my life's unclouded morn, In my lambent sky of love, May your growing glory prove Sacred to your consecration, To my heart and to my nation. Sun of victory, may you be Sun ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... style, Irving has no superior, perhaps no equal, among the prose writers of America. If Hawthorne excels him in variety, in earnestness and in force, he is, perhaps, inferior to Irving in facility and grace, while he can make no claim to that genial, lambent humour which beams in almost every page of Geoffrey Cravon. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... of the sun in flesh and hair. One was grizzled about the temples, and one was a smooth-cheeked youth. The roster of their familiar names seemed to her as precious as a rosary. They watched her, feeling her beauty as keenly as if it were a pain, and answering every lambent motion of ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... morning now broke; and, in a few minutes, the prison shook, and the Genius appeared. He was visible by a lambent light that played around him; and HAMET starting from the ground, turned to the vision with reverence and wonder: but as the Omnipotent was ever present to his mind, to whom all beings in all worlds are obedient, and on whom alone ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... shown the least sign of concern. The Chief seized her by the shoulder and shook her roughly, ordering her to come with him. She did not understand his language, but his meaning was obvious. She looked up and stared straight into his one open eye. In her own eyes shifted the dangerous, lambent flame of a beast at bay, and for a moment she was on the point of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... down weeping; the women of the queen came to her, she stroked their hair, and fragrance passed into it. She was made nurse to the queen's child, fed him with her finger, and in the night-time, by means of a lambent flame, burned away his impurities. She then turned herself into a swallow and flew around the house, bewailing her fate. The queen watched her operations, and being alarmed cried out, and so robbed her child of immortality. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of thine eyes, (Oh still, celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... bold, He seized a goblet and a knife of gold, And suddenly from their seats the guests upsprang, The vaulted ceiling with loud clamors rang, The archer sped his arrow, at their call, Shattering the lambent jewel on the wall, And all was dark around and overhead;— Stark on the door ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... your wife. She will make you forsake me, or—she will do me a fatal mischief. Oh, I shiver whenever she comes near me. Ah, if you had seen her eyes as I saw them through her mask to-night. They were lambent flames! How they glared on ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the darkness of our age; fild wid the pure end lambent flame of science, burning with the gorrgeous scintillations of divine litherature—a monumintum, in fact, are perinnius, bound in pink calico, ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... true to say that no reader who wishes to realize once for all the great qualities of French prose could do better than turn straight to the Lettres Provinciales. Here he will find the lightness and the strength, the exquisite polish and the delicious wit, the lambent irony and the ordered movement, which no other language spoken by man has ever quite been able to produce. The Lettres are a work of controversy; their actual subject-matter—the ethical system of the Jesuits of the time—is remote from modern interests; yet such is the brilliance ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... last, was her determination to pity Mr. Bounderby. There were occasions when in looking at him she was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, 'Alas, poor Yorick!' After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully cheerful, and would say, 'You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful to find;' and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr. Bounderby bore up as he did. One idiosyncrasy for which she often apologized, she found it ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... attorney's board alert she sate, Not legal mistress: he with other men Once sought her hand, but other views were then; And when he knew he might the bliss command, He other blessing sought without the hand; For still he felt alive the lambent flame, And offer'd her a home,—and home she came. There, though her higher friendships lived no more, She loved to speak of what she shared before - "Of the dear Lucy, heiress of the hall, - Of good Sir ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... of copper in spirits of wine. Light the solution, and it will burn with a beautiful emerald green flame. Pieces of sponge soaked in this spirit, lighted and suspended by fine wires over the stage, produces the lambent green flames now so common in incantation scenes; strips of flannel saturated with it, and applied round copper swords, tridents, &c., produce, when lighted, the flaming swords and fire forks brandished by the demons in such scenes; indeed, the chief consumption of nitrate ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... her tones, and the lambent fluidity of her transitions, if I may be allowed the phrase, were made by her art quite subservient to the expression, and owed their chief value to the share they bore in producing it. Possibly there was a little too much of the dramatic ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... veiled allusion, for I saw her bite her lip and again the lambent flame leaped up in her eyes. But it died as suddenly as it had come, and in another instant the old tantalising smile was playing about the corners of her mouth. In the smoky interminable depths of the Solomon Island jungle ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... was hot again. The new-born brimstone butterflies were upon the wing, a flutter of lambent green. They were of the time, and young. They must live all winter and waken every sunny day till next spring—the ambassadors of this ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... sweet and still; the moonlight shining over the scarcely stirring waters of the bay. Before her rose the vast bulk of the Castello dell' Ovo, a huge mass of black shadow against the silvery sea and the lambent sky: then far away throbbed the dull orange lights of the city; and beyond these, again, Vesuvius towered into the clear darkness, with a line of sharp, intense crimson marking its summit. Through ...
— Sunrise • William Black |
