"Starless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yet before I die. Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone, Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me Walking the cold and starless road of Death Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love With the Greek woman. [19] I will rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth Talk with the wild Cassandra, [20] for she says A fire dances before ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... by drop from the bosom of eternity, and when the hammer falls on the brazen bell, the entire universe confirms what it announces. The suns and the worlds mark at this very moment, in the immortal light, the same point of time that is indicated below on earth, some starless night, by the humblest village clock. We must imitate the clock. In full consciousness, through absolute submission, man should make himself the humble instrument of truth, and go through supreme servitude ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... twinkling of distant fires, and the sound of running water fell on her ears, mingling with the persistent noise of the insects, and the faint cries of the birds and frogs. In front, where the road came out from the shadows of the last trees, lay a vast dimness, not wholly unlike another starless sky, stretched beneath the starry sky in which the moon had not yet risen. She set her horse at a gallop and came into the desert, rushing through ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... two months later—by which time the party was drawing near to Santa Rosa, and the great railway survey was approaching completion— that in the dead of a dark and starless night three Indians stealthily approached the surveyors' camp and, having first reconnoitred the ground as carefully as the pitch darkness would permit, made their way, noiseless as shadows, to the tent occupied by young Escombe. The leading Indian ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... four. The afternoon was waning. The thick, woolly gray that surrounded them assumed a more somber shade. Night was coming, pitchy and starless, doubly so for the two lost boys, adrift on the ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... a moment. After the starless darkness and the icy night air, and the fierce silent two hours' race, his senses reeled on sudden entrance into warmth, and light, and the cheery hum of voices. A sudden unforeseen anguish assailed him, as now first he entertained the possibility ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... perpetually from age to age, waves rolling for ever, and winds moaning for ever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening for ever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds for ever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the fisher's hand the keys ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... words were needed, and they strengthened their hearts for the daring attempt, waiting patiently for the afternoon to wane and die into the night, which, arrived moonless and starless and heavy with dark, as they had hoped and predicted. Just before, a little spasmodic firing came from the besiegers, but they did not deign to answer. Instead they waited patiently until the night was far advanced and then they prepared quickly for running the gauntlet, a task that would require ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... starless night of death Our being's brief eclipse, When faltering heart and failing breath ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... along the coast, often at the very edge of the high, precipitous cliffs, with no more between it and the rocks far beneath than a low wall. It was a road of dangerous curves and corners which needed careful negotiation even in broad daylight, and this was a black, moonless and starless night. But Copplestone had impressed upon his driver that he must get to Scarhaven as quickly as possible, and he and his companion were both so full of their purpose that they paid no heed to the perpetual ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... me. I would liken you to a shaft of sunlight, a withering flame—a black flame, if such there be—for your grace and ardour is even as a flame. Your step is laughter and song. Your hair is a torrent of starless night. The sun is your lover, you god. He takes joy in your perfection. Your slender body palpitates with his imprisoned beams. He has moulded your limbs and kissed your smooth skin in the days when you . . . nevermore will you whiten those ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... elapsed before she heard a knock. Mr. Baines had had to arouse his clerk from sleep. Instead of going down to the front-door, Mary threw up the bedroom window and looked out. It was a mild but starless night. Trafalgar Road was silent save for the steam-car, which, with its load of revellers returning from Hanbridge—that centre of gaiety—slipped rumbling down ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... completely, once and for all... And she—who could say that she, knowing what he had done, might not, illogically, come to love him? Perhaps she would devote her life to mourning him. He saw her bending over his tomb, in beautiful humble curves, under a starless sky, watering the violets ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... No more along the shadowy glen Glide the dim ghosts of murdered men; No more the unquiet churchyard dead Glimpse upward from their turfy bed, Startling the traveller, late and lone; As, on some night of starless weather, They silently commune together, Each sitting on his own head-stone The roofless house, decayed, deserted, Its living tenants all departed, No longer rings with midnight revel Of witch, or ghost, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... parted, sweet and calm, That long forgot yet ever haunting psalm Floated from lips that flew to greet me home. A meteor flamed; I woke in rude alarm; Above me orbed the temple's sullen dome; Around me swam the early morning's starless gloom. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... hollow howls of woe, Which, loud resounding through the starless air, Forced tears of pity from mine eyes ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... hope springs up in my heart I will cherish; but I can not believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. And I would rather that every God would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, that that just one soul should suffer eternal agony. I have made up my mind that if there is a God, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That he will forgive the forgiving. Upon that rock ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the light of day to enter into the bowels of the earth. When far down the gallery I instinctively looked back, but the daylight at the end of the long black tube looked like a white globe,—like the moon in a dark, starless sky. Soon the big, black pit yawned before us. Down below I could see the swaying lamps of other miners as they descended the ladder. We reached the stall where Uncle Gaspard worked on the second level. All those employed in pushing the cars were young ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... not hard to guess my task, Although I raised the sash to ask— 'Oh, Father,' cried the boy, 'Oh, come! Quickly with the viaticum! The sailor-man is going to die!' The thirsty silence drank his cry. A starless stillness damped the air, While his shrill voice kept piping there, 'The sailor-man is going to die'— The huge ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... the houses have already closed their wooden sliding doors for the night, so that the streets are dark, and the lanterns of our landlord indispensable; for there is no moon, and the night is starless. We walk along the main street for a distance of about six squares, and then, making a tum, find ourselves before a superb bronze torii, the gateway to ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... knowing? Of what avail could be the melting of the ice about her heart, the loosening of the fetters of her tongue, the quickening of her nature, the miracle vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a reason! Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his burning forehead on his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate soul, that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love him. Far better that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... was passing through the shadows, and suffering in silence the keenest pangs of affliction. Around him the votaries of fashion and wealth were flushed with gayety. Paris was in the ecstasy of Christmastide. But the depths of his soul were starless and chill, and in the midst of all this mirth one heart was tuned to melancholy. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... cautious thread of smoke stole above the rocks, and just as the starless dusk began to deepen into night, a step was heard, slowly climbing upward through the rustling leaves and snapping sticks of the forest. A woman's figure, wearily scaling the hill under a load which almost concealed the upper part of her body, for it consisted of a huge wallet, a rattling ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... star of my days! And when Death's starless night gathers o'er me, Beam brighter than ever adown on my gaze, And light the dark valley ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... sweet indeed; but, ah! how bitter was the awakening. Her castles in the air had all melted into clouds, and here in the very flower of her youth she felt that her life was ruined, and she was as one wandering in a sterile waste, with a black and starless sky overhead. She clasped her hands with a sensation of pain, and a rose at her breast fell down withered and dead. She took it up with listless fingers, and with the quiver of her hand the leaves fell off and were scattered over her white dress in a pink shower. ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... him from scolding me. He carried me back to my dungeon, laid me tenderly on the bed, gave me some medicine, and asked me if there was any thing more he could do. Then he went away, and I was left with my own thoughts—starless as the midnight ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... do; and till it was done nothing could harm him. Therefore it was that, in spite of the prognostications of physicians, he recovered from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of assassins conspired in vain against his life, that the open skiff to which he trusted himself on a starless night, on a raging ocean, and near a treacherous shore, brought him safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle, the cannon balls passed him by to right and left. The ardour and perseverance ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... naturally occur to us. To visit Cuba is not merely to pass over a few degrees of latitude; it is to take a step from the nineteenth century back into the dark ages. In a climate of tropical luxuriance and endless summer, we are in a land of starless political darkness. Lying under the lee of a Republic, where every man is a sovereign, is a realm where the lives, liberties, and fortunes of all are held at the will of a single individual, who acknowledges ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... For shadows gather round, and should we part, A dreary starless night May fill my heart,— Then pause and ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... in a huge fuss. She had got out all our things and hurried them away to a close carriage which was awaiting us. It was still dark and starless. We got along the platform, I half asleep, the porter carrying our rugs, by the glare of a pair of gas-jets in the wall, and out by a small door ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... him into the room the window was wide open to the hot, starless night, but the landlord, though he had left the window open, had drawn the thick curtains across it. That was all right; Chester had no wish to be wakened at five in the morning by the sunlight streaming into the room. He meant to have a really long rest. He was ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... emotions, the dissatisfaction with the present life, the secret yearning for something better, the impulse towards something worse. She sighed furtively, and half-impatiently went outside to tend the evening camp-fire. The blazing branches illuminated the starless summer night, and cast a superb glow over the beautiful half-clothed figure crouching not far from them. Beyond, the dark blue bay ebbed ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... he was sore grieved for the weariness of Deirdre, bowed his head. So they set sail, and through the thick mist of a starless night their galley silently breasted the unseen waves. But when they came north of the long island, they bent to their oars, and as they rowed yet northward Deirdre laughed again for joy, as she listened to the ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm
... notwithstanding the heavy darkness of the starless night, Arthur saw her. She was seated on the stone bench as when last he had spoken with her. In her anguish she sought not to hide her face. She looked at the ground, and the tears fell down her cheeks. Her bosom heaved with the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Southron, "even as the starless night—but yet—if this contrivance of thine should endanger thy safety, fair and no less kind than fair damsel, it were utterly unworthy of me to accept it at ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... orphaned, in the starless night; Alas, for him no cheerful morning's dawn! I wear the ransomed spirit's robe of white, Yet still I hear him moaning, She ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... what succeeds this era joyous, bright? Is it a cloudless eve or starless night? To those who're busied in life's brilliant dawn With gathering flowers that bloom when spring is gone, And, ere their morning sun begins to wane, Add many a link to fond affection's chain, To Heaven's supreme ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... knew why—but I knew darkness then, And saw the stars that hung so still; but when I lay abed the old starless ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... having gone down into a dark corner of the area the Sunday following, she found, as did he, that no stars were to be seen anywhere. After that she believed in his theory of starless sky-spots; starless, but not plain. For in addition to the sun, many other things lent interest to that field of blue—clouds, rain, sleet, snow, and fog, all in their time or season. Also, besides the birds, he occasionally glimpsed whole sheets ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... sea with long silver skewers; wonderful phosphorescence played about beneath us like wraiths of drowned men luring one to destruction; while in the musical lap of the water against the ship's side one almost fancied the sound of Lorelei's singing. And then there were starless nights with only a red moon to shine through cloudy skies; and nights no less beautiful when all the world seemed shrouded in black velvet, when the dusky sea parted silently to let the boat pass ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... satisfied him, and yet he looked at me and hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken on board. An hour later Mr. Blanchard joined us, and was assisted into the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour after that we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and a fresh breeze ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... barefooted in the passage, her ear to the crack; but the breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was black as pitch. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her husband's door—where she stopped again to listen to his breathing—to the top ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in "Hamlet" the stage on which the whole is acted is really the heart of Hamlet, so he makes his visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead, and Hades open beneath his feet. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than they can comprehend the comedies. It needs acquaintance with society and social ways to clear up ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... more than its wonted sternness and pride; and in the eye which glared upon the opposite wall, the light of the waning life broke into a momentary blaze,—that flash, so rapid and evanescent, before the air drinks in the last spark of the being it has animated, and night—the starless and eternal—falls over the extinguished lamp! The hand of the right arm (which was that unshattered by the fall) was clenched and raised; but, when the words which came upon Clarence's ear had ceased, it fell heavily by his side, like a clod of that clay ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the battle of life. Wounded and fallen, trampled in the mire and mud of the conflict, then the ranks closed again and left no place for her. So she crawled aside to die. With a past whose black despair was as the shadow of a starless night, a future which her early religious training lit up with the lurid light of hell, and the strong bands of a pitiless death dragging her to the grave—still she craved, as the awful hour drew near, to see once more the home of her innocent childhood. Not that she ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... The face of heav'n is ravish'd from our eyes, And in redoubled peals the roaring thunder flies. Cast from our course, we wander in the dark. No stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... hence to Cuba is not merely to pass over a few degrees of latitude,—it is to take a step from the nineteenth century back into the dark ages. In the clime of sunshine and endless summer, we are in the land of starless political darkness. Lying under the lee of a land where every man is a sovereign is a realm where the lives, liberties, and fortunes of all are held at the will of a single individual, who acknowledges fealty only to a nominal ruler more than three ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... quit the cave, nor entrust herself to the anchorite, till she had once more seen and spoken to Polykarp. He no doubt knew where to seek her, and certainly, she thought, he would by this time have returned, if the storm and the starless night had not rendered it an impossibility to come up the mountain from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... approached an open window. It was a starless sight, temperately cool, with no air stirring. Below was a garden of some sort, and a flat roof which would be that of the stables, and beyond, abrupt as a painted scene, a black wall of houses stood against a steel-colored, vacant sky, reaching precisely ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... have no connection whatever with the nebula, being, in fact, only a simple continuation over it of the general ground of the Galaxy. The conclusion can hardly be avoided that, in looking at it, we see through and beyond the Milky Way, far out into space, through a starless region, disconnecting it altogether from our system. It is not easy for language to convey a full impression of the beauty and sublimity of the spectacle which this nebula offers as it enters the field of view of a telescope, fixed in right ascension, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... is The human bosom, That ne'er has nursed the sweets Of young Love's blossom! The loveliest breast is like A starless morning, When clouds frown dark and cold, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... that somewhere within the cordon was the leader who heretofore had escaped them, that each man was a link forged in the endless chain which was stretched around the invisible enemy. And, meanwhile, the starless sky and the waiting chain were equally silent and equally freighted with mystery. And the future seemed full of portent ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... not care to go out into the starless night. Perhaps there are those who wait for you, eh? With very ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown
... illumination. And there were the Magellanic clouds, white-looking patches made up of countless stars individually unseen to the naked eye, and nebulae—mists of radiating light—all shining brilliantly and revolving around the starless South Pole. To the northward was the constellation of the Great Bear, which reaches its meridian altitude about the same time as the constellations of the Cross and the Centaur. As the boys looked, stars appeared and disappeared. They were like ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... then was a sound heard among the silent and impassive throng on the river-bank. But when the burning canoe had vanished utterly, when black and starless night fell again on wood and water, the death-wail burst from the Indians with one impulse and one voice,—a people's cry for its lost chief, a great tribe's lament for the strength and glory that had drifted from it, never ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... in Heaven could find a place, Or shame the worshiper bow down, Who meets the Savior face to face, 'Twould be to wear a starless crown." ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... had not taken half-a-dozen paces toward the block, seen dimly against the starless sky, when there was a sharp chink, and ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... wings a slow and watchful flight, His neck is bare, his eyes are bright, His plumage fits the starless night. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... faint light waxes fainter,—it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... feminine statement that the moon, or the want of it, had an effect on frost, nevertheless this apparently innocent remark on Aileen's part recalled to him the fact that the night was moonless—he wondered if the Colonel had thought of this—and he hoped with all his soul that it would prove to be starless as well. "Champney knows the Maine woods—knows 'em from the Bay to the head of Moosehead as well as an Oldtown Indian, yes and beyond." So he comforted himself ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... when Kenelm was standing beside his window looking out into the starless dark, Felicia's special knock sounded hollowly at ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... everything was mournfully sleeping, standing out in strange huddled masses in the dull clear air. The flush of sunset—a hectic flush—had not yet gone, and would not be gone till morning from the white starless sky; it was reflected on the silken surface of the Neva, while faintly gurgling and faintly moving, the cold ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... centre—a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed—a star in an else starless firmament, which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest tracked as a guide or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangled condition was so great a miracle, that, spite of my poor shipmates having perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky was starless, I could not but consider that God's hand was ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... waned and the night was starless when the chimes of San Nicolo told three of the morning in low melodious tones like a voice ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... while upon the firm opacous globe Of this round world, whose first convex divides The luminous inferiour orbs, enclosed From Chaos, and the inroad of Darkness old, Satan alighted walks: A globe far off It seemed, now seems a boundless continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky; Save on that side which from the wall of Heaven, Though distant far, some small reflection gains Of glimmering air less vexed with tempest loud: Here walked the Fiend at large in spacious field. As when ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... all nights—even the starless night before dissolution—must wear away. About six o'clock, the hour which called up the household, I went out to the court, and washed my face in its cold, fresh well-water. Entering by the carre, a piece ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... could do—absolutely nothing. She had given her orders, and they must be obeyed. He returned to the Quai Massena, to the shore of the sea; but he walked nervously now, in a world that, as far as he was concerned, was starless and colorless. He had thought at first, naturally enough, that Hamilton was in some way concerned; but he dismissed that now as wholly unplausible. Instead of running away, in that case, she would have sent for him. It was decidedly ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... about 9.30 P.M., we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor. It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... astonished the others by her rash boldness, her absolute contempt for danger and obstacles, and her strange and adroit strength. She charmed them also by a magic philter which came from her hair, which was darker that a starless night, from her large, black, coaxing, velvety eyes, that were concealed by the fringe of such long lashes that they curled upwards, from her scented skin, that was as soft as rice paper, and every touch of which was a suggestive ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... but absolutely black, as if the sun were instantly eclipsed, or had dropped altogether out of the firmament. Scarce ten minutes after its commencement the obscurity has reached completeness—that of a total solar eclipse or as in a starless night. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... is remarkably difficult of explanation by means of the grindstone theory. This is the existence of vacant spaces—holes, so to speak, in the groundwork of the Milky Way. For instance, there is a cleft running for a good distance along its length, and there is also a starless gap in its southern portion. It seems rather improbable that such a great number of stars could have arranged themselves so conveniently, as to give us a clear view right out into empty space through such a system in its greatest thickness; as if, in ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... well In the dark starless night I lay; And dropping water like a bell, Like a bell ringing far away, Struck liquid notes in monotone,— An echo of a distant bell Tolling the knell of yesterday. Deep down beneath the mossy ground The liquid notes ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... we really romancing, we should here dilate of the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to Baalbek. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, the welkin starless, the night pitch-black, and our poor Dreamer is suffering ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... for some minutes to find the door, and bruising her hands against the wall and oaken chair, she at last found it and thrust it open, the night without was moonless and starless and stormy, and in its unillumined blackness she saw no trace of the little girl. She went out on to the doorstep and listened, but there was no sound. The wind was high; the perfume of the stocks and wallflowers was strong; far away the sound of the river rushing ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... in the house, her face buried in her hands, felt, too, something of this exultation; but she nerved herself to look into the future, and saw it grim and starless. She saw herself the daughter of the convicted thief, the thief who had only narrowly escaped having to stand his trial for murdering her lover; the thief who had shifted the burden of his guilt on to the ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the city. The night was starless, the sea black as ink. Stephanie stood alone in the darkness of her balcony, and listened ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Louis heard Young light sing in the lark. Ere eve it was that other bird, Which brings the starless dark. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... touched by some one who, it appeared, was standing close to me for some seconds; but so occupied was I in gazing at her that I paid no attention to the circumstance. The carriage drove away and disappeared in the thick darkness of a starless night. I turned to re-enter the house, and as I did so, the night lamp of the hall fell upon the features of the man beside me, and showed me the pale and corpse-like face of Fred Hammersley. His eye was ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... no more than sixpence; how could she return with only that humble amount to face Mother Mawks and her vituperative fury? Her throat ached; she was very tired, and, as the night darkened from pale to deep and starless shadows, she strolled mechanically from the Strand to the Embankment, and after walking some little distance she sat down in a corner close to Cleopatra's Needle—that mocking obelisk that has looked upon the decay of empires, itself ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... our while to wait two, or it may be three, turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture. Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Happy ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... horrors of a leeward shore" they were doomed to experience during a moonless and starless night. They reduced their sails to a few yards of canvass, and lowered their yards on deck. The waves, that rolled the vessel with irresistible force, threatened to swallow them up; a tremendous sea carried away the boat which was hoisted up at the stern, and broke in all ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... are writ in gore, Nor written thus in vain— Thy triumphs tell of fame no more, Or deepen every stain: If thou hadst died as Honour dies, Some new Napoleon might arise, To shame the world again— But who would soar the solar height, To set in such a starless night?[ip] ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the night before the wedding hung its cold, starless gloom over the Queen City-hung as the ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... log house by the Spring Waiontha, lantern in hand and my packet tucked beneath my arm, it was twilight, and the starless skies threatened rain. Road and field and forest were foggy and silent; and I thought of the first time I had ever set eyes on Lois, in the late afternoon stillness ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... on at last, black as the brow of a Congo nigger, and starless as a company of travelling actors. I could not remain under the tree all night, that was certain; and so I left it, although I could scarcely see my hand before me. That hand, by the way, still tenaciously grasped the invaluable sixpence. Groping ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... away silently from the kitchen door into the deep murk of a starless night. The moaning of a rising sea upon the outer reefs was the requiem of Sheila's hopes. One thing, she saw clearly, she must do. If she remained and fought for her place with the Balls, she must stand alone. Whether or not she held her place, she must not allow Tunis to be linked ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the solemn Miracle of Life; As one who, wandering in a starless night, Feels momently the jar of unseen waves, And hears the thunder of an unknown sea Breaking ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of the elemental war. The wind blew not with that steadiness which the skill of the sailor and the capacity of the noble ship were competent to meet, but in long and frequent gusts of intermittent fury. Now rose the gallant bark on the waves, as if towering toward the starless sky, in the utter blackness of which the masts were lost; then it sank down into the abyss, the foam of the boiling billows glistening far above, on all sides, amidst the obscurity. What strange and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... no denial, since they loved. Sense, indeed, was wholly put aside, but love has nothing to do with sense, being wholly of the soul. Shaken with wonder, she trembled as she sat in her chair, staring out into the starless night. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... tempests rave, I cannot rest at home, For then the billows deck his grave With flowers of snow-white foam; And here I pray till break of day Beneath night's starless dome." ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... For here the air is horrid with men's groans, The priests who call upon Thy name are slain, Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain From those whose children lie upon the stones? Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom Curtains the land, and through the starless night Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see! If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might Lest Mahomet be ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... discharge their souls, And give them furloughs for the other world; But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand In starless nights and wait the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... in a dark business suit, so he was not likely to be observed from a distance, for it was a starless night. Half way to the end of the great yard he began to wonder if the light he had seen might not ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... encampment; within hail, indeed, but scarcely within sight, for the space where the countess sate commanded little more than protruding crags and stunted trees, and mountains lifting their dark, bare brows to the starless sky. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... minute or two he began to run; for the night air searched his sodden clothes and chilled him. The sky was starless, too, but he saw the dull gleam of the canal, and made for it. Then he followed the towpath southward for half a mile, and came to a bridge, and crossing it found himself upon a firm high-road leading (as it seemed) straight towards ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and starless, and the wind blew raw and bleak as the baronet dashed down the avenue and out into the high-road. He almost wondered at himself for complying with the dying woman's desire, but some inward impulse beyond his ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... lost in the darkness of night, For the moon is swept from the starless heaven, And the latest line of lowering light That lingered on the stormy even, A dim-seen line, half cloud, half wave, Hath sunk into the weltering grave. Castle-Oban is dark without and within, And downwards to the fearful din, Where Ocean with his thunder shocks Stuns ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... in glittering crowds, Gazing all rapt on woman's eloquent face, Nature's most witching and most treacherous page; Or high in mirth with those whose senseful wit Outflashed the rosy wines that warmed its flow, I've held my vigils till the brow of Night Grew pale and starless, and her solemn pomp, Out-glared by day, faded in hueless space. I do repent me of my worship. Night Was given for rest: who breaks this natural law Wrongs body and soul alike. One vigorous hour Of sober day-light thought ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... pleasant impression produced upon the mind of the lonely woman who now owned it, and who hoped to spend here in seclusion and peace the residue of a life whose radiant dawn had been suddenly swallowed by drab clouds and starless gloom. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... over her indeed. She had left all on earth in the thick darkness of a starless spring night, yet all around her was lighted up like a mellow harvest eve, when the sun shines refulgent through masses of golden clouds on the smiling pastures and emerald meadows of the west. She looked up, but she could see no cause for this illumination. She looked down, and her ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... stood faintly outlined in the purple pall of a starless night. Stripped to the very essentials of a battle—"Fighting Order" but carrying the valise on the shoulders and the haversack by the side. Steel helmets, gas masks and one hundred and seventy rounds of ammunition per man; no overcoats; no blankets; simply the rough, ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... woof they are woven by me, But the shadows and coloring rest, mortal, with thee. 'T is thine to cast over those leaves as they bloom, The sunlight of morning or hues of the tomb; Though moments of sorrow to all must be given, There 's a vista of light that leads up to heaven; Nor utterly starless the path thou hast trod, Till thy heart prove a traitor ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... save where The western sky lies glimmering, faint and far, With day's red embers dimly glowing there. Hark! how the wind comes gathering in its course, And sweeping onward, with resistless force, Howls through the silent space of starless skies, And on the breast of the swol'n ocean dies. Oh, though art terrible, thou viewless power! That rid'st destroying at the midnight hour! We hear thy mighty pinion, but the eye Knows nothing of thine awful majesty. We see all mute creation bow before Thy viewless wings, ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... I can foil, but not my friends! Strange allies to his cause! Well, dusk was long My portion; now all gathering storms of hate Are less than naught to me. Six months ago, When here I stood that memorable night, My gloom was starless; now one fiery star Pierces it. And this broken frame of mine Cannot annul that much of victory— The solace born of passion to destroy That shall survive me if indeed I die. Alone my life was lived; if now I go, It is alone into a quiet grave Above whose mound the fairer future days Shall ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... at it's height—how the wind howls, Like an unearthly voice, through these lone chambers! And the rain patters on the flapping casement Which quivers in it's frame—the night is starless— Yet cheerly Werner! still our hearts are warm: The tempest is without, or should be so— For we are sheltered here where Fortune's clouds May roll all harmless o'er us as the wrath Of these wild elements that menace now, Yet ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... silent, starless Night before us, Naked we glide: No hand has mapped the constellations o'er us, No comrade at our side, No ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... rain came—out of season, but no less violent because of that. It rained three days and nights on end—three windless days and starless nights, during which we had to linger alongshore close to the papyrus. In order to keep mosquitoes out we had to light a smudge in the sand-box below. The smudge added to the heat, and the heat drove men to the open air to gasp a few minutes in the rain for breath ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Roxy slept. Finally she could not lie still, and slipped cautiously out of bed, feeling dire need to be abroad, running or riding with all her might. She leaned out of a gable window, courting the moist chill of the starless night. While the hidden landscape seemed strangely dear to her, she was full of unspeakable homesickness and longing for she knew not what—a life she had not known and could not imagine, some perfect friend who called her silently through space and was able to lift her out ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... had passed, and it was now completely night, dark and starless, which made more startling the sudden appearance of several blazing torches, borne by masked and hooded figures attired in black, who struck loud and repeated blows on the gates of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... easy for me to part with you, but so it must be, and therefore you must also submit quietly." Then she passed her golden comb through Elsie's hair and told her to go to bed. But how should poor Elsie sleep this unhappy night? Her life seemed like a dark starless night-sky. ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... del Destino' at the Teatro Malibran. After midnight we walked homeward through the Merceria, crossed the Piazza, and dived into the narrow calle which leads to the traghetto of the Salute. It was a warm moist starless night, and there seemed no air to breathe in those narrow alleys. The gondolier was half asleep. Eustace called him as we jumped into his boat, and rang our soldi on the gunwale. Then he arose and turned the ferro ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... moonless, starless night, with my eyes still full of the light indoors; and our hands meet blindly before exchanging a pressure. She says good-evening and I kiss her without answering. I am afraid of betraying my ill-humour; I feel that I am hard and spiteful, but ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... the coast of Mexico in due time. Nothing of special interest occurred at Acapulco—only some of the Mexican ladies are very beautiful. They all have brilliant black hair—hair "black as starless night"—if I may quote from the "Family Herald". It don't curl.—A Mexican lady's hair never curls—it is straight as an Indian's. Some people's hair won't curl under any circumstances.—My hair won't curl under two shillings. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come into ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of light. The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment. There was no need for Syme to search his memory or the Bible in order to remember ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... alone. His limbs no more their chilly weight sustained, A deathlike torpor o'er his bosom reign'd, His stony eyeballs fix'd in silent trance Met the terrific Spectre's withering glance. And lo! the Phantom waves, with sudden glare, His burning sceptre thro' the starless air! High o'er the bark the booming billows spread, The deafening waves were closing o'er his head; When rushing clouds the towering form involved, And all the vision into air dissolved. Like mist that flits before the solar car, Or the wan splendours of a falling ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... black days, Burr stayed indoors at Richmond Hill. He was afraid to go out, for he knew that popular feeling was, in the main, against him. Dark times for the household gods! At last, one starless, cloudy night, having heard of the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... her in that quiet hour she saw her son as he walked dawn the dark road to Dunmuir. The moon was just rising; the trees on either hand lifted their gaunt branches to a wild and starless sky. Whose face, white as that of a corpse, gleamed from between those leafless stems? Hugo's, surely. And what did he hold in his hand? Was it a knife on which a faint ray of moonlight was palely reflected? He was watching ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... before dawn, Caesar, tired of not sleeping, got up and started to take a walk in the corridor. It was raining; on the horizon, below the black, starless sky, a vague clarity began to appear. Caesar took out his Proudhon book and immersed himself ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the "streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... scent Of Britain, my loved country; and with tears Most eloquent, yet silent, I will bathe Thy honour'd corse, my Nelson, tears as warm And honest as the ebbing blood that flow'd Fast from thy honest heart. Thou, Pity, too, If ever I have loved, with faltering step, To follow thee in the cold and starless night, To the top-crag of some rain-beaten cliff; And, as I heard the deep gun bursting loud Amid the pauses of the storm, have pour'd Wild strains, and mournful, to the hurrying winds, The dying soul's ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... "constellations,'' preserving the memory of mythological heroes and heroines, and perhaps of otherwise unrecorded history. * The tendency of stars to assemble in immense clouds, swarms, and clusters. * The existence in some of the richest regions of the universe of absolutely black, starless gaps, deeps, or holes, as if one were looking out of a window into the murkiest night. * The marvelous phenomena of new, or temporary, stars, which appear as suddenly as conflagrations, and often turn into something else as eccentric as themselves. * The ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... string, Now spreads, like Daedalus, a bolder wing; The verse begins in softer strains to flow, 410 Replete with sad variety of woe. As yet, amid this elemental war, Where Desolation in his gloomy car Triumphant rages round the starless void, And Fate on every billow seems to ride; Nor toil, nor hazard, nor distress appear To sink the seamen with unmanly fear. Though their firm hearts no pageant-honour boast, They scorn the wretch that trembles at his post; Who from the face of danger strives to turn, 420 ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.] |
