"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... third, going deeper, might, Actaeon-like, surprise the bare soul. A curiously wrought net of gold caught her dark hair in its meshes, and pearls were in her ears, and around the white column of her throat rising between the ruff's gossamer walls. She fingered the racket, idly listening the while for a foot-fall beyond her round of trees. Hearing it at last, and taking it for her brother's, she looked up with a proud and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... annex of a fashionable restaurant practically out of doors—a cool green lawn for a carpet and a fountain playing close at hand. Mary wore a white dinner-gown, gossamer-like and airy. Her rich brown hair was tastefully arranged, her voice had never seemed to him so soft and pleasant. All around was the hum of cheerful conversation. A little world of people seemed to be there whose philosophy of life after all was surely the only ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... looked like a sylph or a dainty shepherdess of Dresden china, and should have been arrayed in gossamer robes, rather than in the deep mourning she affected. Indeed, Lucian considered that such weeds were rather premature, as Mrs. Vrain could not yet be certain that the murdered man was her husband; but she looked so charming ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... chestnuts, but sweeter, more joyous, more full of the promise of perfect things than ever a violin touched by human fingers. Then the thrushes had hopped out on to my dew-spangled lawn, where before the hot sun the grey, gossamer-like mist was vanishing like breath from a mirror; my roses raised their heads, and the breeze from the west—a lazy, fluttering breeze—borrowed their sweetness; my peaches cracked through their full skins upon the wall, and the bees commenced their eternal lullaby ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... let us hasten home," pleaded poor Madge, who felt that this might be her only chance to throw about him the gossamer threads which would draw the cord and cable that could bind him to her. "What is supper to the witchery of such a night ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... of it all! Then on again through a patch of woodland which looked as though a huge gossamer veil had been laid over it. If ever pastelle colors were displayed to perfection Nature here held her exhibition. Soft pinks, pale blues, silver grays, the tenderest greens with here and there a touch of the maple buds' rich mahogany ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no very ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... honeysuckle still flowering at the tops of the hedges, where in the morning gossamer lies like a dewy net. The gossamer is a sign both of approaching autumn and, exactly at the opposite season of the year, of approaching spring. It stretches from pole to pole, and bough to bough, in the copses in February, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... seem a most curious place to choose to live in; but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home, household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did see him, which you ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... edging his way through the crowd, followed by the two candidates. The gentlemen look anxiously good-natured; they walk together to the rostrum, followed by a crowd, measuring their way to the assembly through the darling affections of our free and independent voters. Gossamer citizenship, this! ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... fruit is very like a cherry, though somewhat elongated and having in its upper end a small umbilicus. But mark with what ingenuity the package has been constructed! The outer wrapping is a thin, gossamer-like skin which encloses a soft pulp, sweetish to the taste, but of a mucilaginous consistency. This pulp in turn is wrapped about the inner-seal—called the parchment, because of its tough texture. The parchment encloses ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a hole in the ground with his toe, and looked up, to see a lovely cobweb like a wheel, circle within circle, spun across a corner of the arch over the gate. Tiny drops glittered on every thread as the light shone through the gossamer curtain, and a soft breath of air made it tremble as if about to blow ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... long as he did not attempt to treat her seriously. She had left all that was serious in that other life that had ended with the fall of the safety-curtain on a certain night in England many aeons ago. Her personality now was light as gossamer, irresponsible as thistledown. The deeper things of life passed her by. She seemed ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... and curly, cut very close, and incipient whiskers adorned the outline of his lower jaw. He was dressed in a gray tweed wrapper, with trousers of the Brougham pattern, and he sported a hat—black, but whether beaver or gossamer we are uninformed—high in the crown, but very narrow in the brim, bearing altogether no very remote ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... in a filament of jelly. The lines were destined for his backbone and stomach; the dots for his eyes and mouth. The latter was ready for immediate work, given only the impulse. As he sank slowly, head downwards, the impulse was supplied. Out from his neck there floated two sprays of gossamer network, of such delicate texture, such dainty tracery, that nothing but the gentle laving of water could have unravelled them and left them whole. Through them the water flowed, and with it came the dim consciousness of individual life, the dim instinct ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... other years, old and wistful Drifts my dream. Petal-patined the dream, white-mistful As the dew-sweet haunt of the dim whitebeam Because of memory, a little wind ... It is the gossamer-float of the butterfly This drift of dream From the sweet of to-day to the sweet Of days long drifted by. It is the drift of the butterfly, it is the fleet Drift of petals which my noon has thinned, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... Kargynda turns at bay. Close, Children of the Starlight! close, for the Emerald Throne! Close round the life that closeth your life within the zone! Rests the Golden Circle's glory, rests the silver gleam on her Who shall rein Kargynda's fury with a thread of gossamer. He metes not mortal measure, He pays not human price, Who crowns that life's devotion with the death of sacrifice! Woe worth the moment's panic; woe worth the victory won! But the Night is near the breaking when the Stranger claims ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... she could see the spider-silk cover on the bed. Right in the middle of that sheer, gossamer expanse was a sparkling heap of gems, the dumped contents of some jewel case. Bat had jumped to the foot of the bed and flattened out as cats will, watching those gems, ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... flying from the black tempest screams aloud in their shadowy halls. There, from the high terraces, when the moon is at its full, we see the children of Coradine gathered together, arrayed like no others, in shining garments of gossamer threads, when, like thistle-down chased by eddying winds, now whirling in a cloud, now scattering far apart, they dance their moonlight dances on the wide alabaster floors; and coming and going they pass away, and seem to melt into the moonlight, yet ever to return again with changeful melody and ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... mother, he played one evening the portraits of the two daughters of the house. When it came to Delphine's he gently drew her light shawl from her shoulders, spread it over the keyboard, and then played through it, his fingers, with every tone they produced, coming in touch with the gossamer-like fabric, still warm and hallowed for him from ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... full of warm currents that took you gently forward without entailing the slightest exertion. But Michael's grave and expectant face—that Michael who had been so eagerly kind about meeting his debts for him—warned him that, however gossamer-like his own emotions were, he must attempt to ballast ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... no sound in the sky, Save murmuring fountains that sparkle nigh, And the rustling flight of the evening breeze, Who steals from his nest in the cypress trees, And a thousand dewy odours fling, As he shakes their white buds from his gossamer wing, And flutters away through the spicy air, At sound ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... alas! unstable; And we are all too prone to clutch them fast, Though false, aye, falser than the veriest fable, To which a "thread of gossamer is ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... stately, in characteristic elegance of attire and manner both. Her white morning dress floated off in soft edges of lace from her white arms; a shawl of precious texture was gathered loosely about them; on her head a gossamer web of some fancy manufacture fell off on either side, a mock covering for it. She came up to Daisy and kissed her, and then examined into her various arrangements, to see that she was in all respects well and properly cared for. Her mother's presence made Daisy feel very meek. Her kiss had ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... speaking the last sentence, and looked very human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon, of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary. He glanced towards her again with a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... on the long grass, and the gossamer cobwebs spun in a single night from twig to twig of the rose-trees, glittered ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... went straight at the foundations of Bob's make up, and began to look over boxes of little gossamer shirts and tiny union suits of a fabric so delicately fine that Burns handled a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... two men tilted their chairs against the little porch in front of Peter Giles' log cabin, and puffed their pipes in silence. The panorama spread out before them showed misty and dreamy among the delicate spiral wreaths of smoke. But was that gossamer-like illusion, lying upon the far horizon, the magic of nicotian, or the vague presence of distant heights? As ridge after ridge came down from the sky in ever-graduating shades of intenser blue, Peter Giles ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... homesickness passed through her; she realised that she was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of a young man draped in a long indiarubber gossamer coat fluttering in the wind that pushed him along as he tacked on a southerly course; he bowed and twisted his head to escape the lash of the rain. She watched him till he turned into the lane leading to the house, and then, at a discreeter distance, she watched him through the window at the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... which all Germany has been in travail these sixteen months, on such terms! And in verity has got the thing called "German Kaiser" constituted, better or worse. Heavens, was a Nation ever so bespun by gossamer; enchanted into paralysis, by mountains of extinct tradition, and the want of power to annihilate rubbish! There are glittering threads of the finest Belleisle diplomacy, which seem to go beyond the Dog-star, and to be radiant, and irradiative, like paths of the gods: and they are, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of the Elf-folk went abroad by night to make a soul for the little Wild Thing. And they went over the marshes till they came to the high fields among the flowers and grasses. And there they gathered a large piece of gossamer that the spider had laid by twilight; and the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... form, sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that unnatural light which shines as it were from the tomb. No man could have looked upon them without pity; so attractive, so young, yet so evidently past all ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... passionately that she truly loved me; she implored me to overlook the past, and promised, with solemn appeal to Heaven, that she would renounce the drink from that hour, and give me no more uneasiness. Ay, she promised; a drunkard's promise! Lighter than the lightest gossamer; brittle as the ice of an April morning. I believed her: did she believe herself? I fear not. But the worst was to come, the shadows were deepening, the storm was gathering. A year had passed over our wedded life, when a little girl was given to us. Every cord ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... air above them. Looking up, they saw a dainty green monoplane, with widespread wings and whirring propeller, descending to earth. An instant later the machine had come to a halt on the lawn, alighting as lightly as wind-blown gossamer. In the machine was seated a pretty girl of about Peggy's age, though rather stouter. In harmony with the color of the machine she drove, the newly arrived girl aviator wore a green aviation costume, with a close-fitting motor bonnet. From the beruffled edge of ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... summer was glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded sunshine flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's breast, was imitating the trees, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... that a given thought is not the effect of its antecedent thought, or of some external power? And a diversity of other questions, much more easily put than answered. Descartes, determined as he was to strip off all the garments which the intellect weaves for itself, forgot this gossamer shirt of the "self;" to the great detriment, and indeed ruin, of his toilet when he began to clothe ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to be blown away like gossamer threads. The chain is strong enough to bind life even to the world beyond the grave. Do you always feel ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... by broods of small spiders are sometimes very numerous, and cover everything: they are especially noticeable in hedges, and are one of the causes of what is called in the country 'Gossamer.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... moment the veil lifts,—clean up over your head perhaps, and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... and Sicily, an ethereal veil, a pale, blue gossamer, spreads over the scenery, as if each object had caught some delicate reflection from the blue heavens above; and the golden illumination of this misty veil causes the peculiar charm of Italian sunsets. This effect is generally wanting in the scenery of the Andes near the equator, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... than the interpretation of one's real self instead of the artificial self which traditions, mistaken advisors and our own natural sense of mimicry impose upon us. Seek for originality and it is gone like a gossamer shining in the morning grass. Originality is in one's self. It is the true voice of the heart. I would enjoin students to listen to their own inner voices. I do not desire to deprecate teachers, but I think that many teachers are in error when they fail to encourage ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... was over—the green drop-curtain fell. La Sylphine had smiled and dipped and kissed hands to thundering bravos for the last time that night, and now, behind the scenes, was rapidly exchanging the spangles and gossamer of fairydom for the shabby and faded merino shawl and dingy straw ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... stuff; which accounts for most of it being worn away. The flower or scroll-work is bona fide embroidery, worked through the stuff. The delicate network of fine stitching, which once covered the whole of the background, is for the most part neither more nor less than a floating gossamer of lacework. One cannot deny that that is embroidery, though it has to be said that lace-stitches are ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... which are unheeded by less observant eyes; not forgetting, as they thus reclined, their hands clasped together, to couple each remark with some allusion to his love or some deduction which heightened compliment into poetry. He bade her mark the light gossamer as it floated on the air; now soaring high—high into the translucent atmosphere; now suddenly stooping, and sailing away beneath the boughs, which ever and anon it hung with a silken web, that by the next morn, would ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and good, and claims to be of pure merino-wool. It is of varying thickness, and many ladies, both young and old, are adopting it for combinations; these and one petticoat forming the whole of the clothing. Of course, the thickness of these garments is to be suited to the season, and the gossamer clothing manufactured for the warm season leaves nothing to be desired in its lightness ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... little girls on a beach: "They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun glass—hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit, with such grace and fleetness, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... — 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong such ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... garden his little men he sent, Up and down and in and out unceasingly they went; Here they stole a blossom, there they pulled a leaf, And bound them up with gossamer into a glowing sheaf. Petals of the pansy for little velvet shoon, Silk of the poppy for a dance beneath the moon, Lawn of the jessamine, damask of the rose, To make their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... now; the summer was past, yet the weather was fit for the height of summer. Warm, spicy, dry air, showing misty in the distance like a gossamer veil, and near by a still glow over everything. The two young people wandered over the bridge and slowly mounted the bank among the oaks and beeches, keeping in the shade as much as might be. There was a glorious play of shadow ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... longer that of a man either despairing or fatigued. On the contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... their own adaptation to the characters they had chosen, it was wonderful how lifelike their representations were. Those little fairies in their short skirts of silken gauze, in which golden sparkles appeared as they moved, with their little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked like real fairies. It did not seem possible, when they floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by their filmy, purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... loving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed with occasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a long trill—a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip over metal strings as fine as gossamer threads—describe it how you will, you cannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark's throat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirruping exclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... nice as if done by a spell. The spot was judged proper, and erected in haste Were some well fashioned rooms, which displayed his good taste. Carpet Moths[31] were appointed to stencil the floor, The Clothes Moths[32] with gossamer covered the door; Mahogany[33] and Wainscot[34] were neither deficient In offering their aid, which proved most efficient, While Veneers,[35] both rosy and yellow, were able T'improve, by their help, the decayed supper table. For the crockery, China Mark[36] promised to strive, ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... pounds to begin with," said Rose, placing the gossamer note before her.—Mrs. Myles mechanically took up the money, and played with it as a child plays with a toy, and Rose read the few words that accompanied the gift:—"Grieved to the heart to hear of the illness of her ever dear relative—would be miserable about her ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the draperies of her veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another, as a curiosity, gossamer threads of the Virgin hanging from bushes, holes full of water in the middle of stones, a squirrel on the branches, the way in which two butterflies kept flying after them; or else, at twenty paces from them, under the trees, a hind strode on peacefully, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... breathed a sweet, melancholy tone from below; and they turned and saw it in Luigi's hands, the frosty film of gossamer. He held it up a moment, pressed it to his lips, folded it again into his breast; and if it was plain that somebody had it, it was plainer still that somebody meant to keep it. And then, as if twin stars were bending over him out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in Alaska is usually very large, it naturally follows that an umbrella is a convenient companion. A gossamer for a lady and a mackintosh for a gentleman, and heavy shoes, and coarse, warm and comfortable clothing for both should ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... summons of a little silver gong, brought in the music and retired. Ming-Y took the manuscripts, and began to examine them with eager delight. The paper upon which they were written had a pale yellow tint, and was light as a fabric of gossamer; but the characters were antiquely beautiful, as though they had been traced by the brush of Hei-song Che-Tchoo himself,—that divine Genius of Ink, who is no bigger than a fly; and the signatures attached to the compositions were the signatures of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... us! As you value your comfort, dear reader, never purchase a hard hat. A hard heart may be borne with, but a hard hat—never! And last of all, a hat should be light—yes, the lighter the better—light as a gossamer web, though 'tis a simile that will not bear stretching. You may have the misfortune to be a heavy-headed man, but do not add to it that of being heavy-hatted. Avoid the extremity of suffering; and observe the climax ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... perceiving which, the beautiful being motioned for me to rise, and with the most unassuming grace received my burden. As she unfolded the lace from its silken cover a cry of delight escaped her, and shaking out its gossamer folds she threw it over her head. With all the care I could use I had laid bare the block of ice, which shone like silver in the moonbeams, and now with a sudden blow of my dagger I cleft the ice, and lifted out ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in which she herself had a part. Then, looking up, she saw her husband crossing the street between the two men with whom he had lunched, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... weight of fifteen pounds on every square inch of the surface of our bodies—in other words, we are at all times sustaining a load of between seventy and one hundred tons of it on our persons—yet we do not feel it! Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the lightest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and, at times, scarcely stirs the most delicate flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings round the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. It bends the rays of ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... soldier takes the long, poplar-lined road from —— his heart is stirred with the romance of his mission. It is morning and he is bound for the trenches; the early sunshine is tangled in the branches, and silvery gossamer, beaded with iridescent jewels of dew, hang fairylike from the green leaves. Birds are singing, crickets are thridding in the grass and the air is full of the minute clamouring, murmuring and infinitesimal shouting of little living things. Cool, mysterious shadows ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... before him. Far down in the valley lay a still blue lake with a great white peak shining ethereally at its northern end. Dark pines rolled about it, growing smaller and smaller up the hillside until they dwindled with spires clean cut against the azure into a gossamer filigree. Between them and the water stupendous forest shrouded all the valley, save where an oblong of pale verdure ran back from the fringe of boulders and was traversed by the frothing streak ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... and there is neither house nor other shelter visible anywhere ahead. The peasants' villages are all on the river, and the road leads for mile after mile through fields of wheat and rye. I forge ahead in a drenching downpour that makes short work of the thin gossamer suit, which on this occasion barely prevents me getting a wet skin ere I descry a thrice-welcome mehana ahead and repair thither, prepared to accept, with becoming thankfulness, whatever accommodation ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty miles away the serrated range of the interior stretched across the horizon, its outlines and shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and the openings of the estuary appeared, shining white, like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped clean and sharp out of the body of the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... were very simple. She had on what is called a gossamer, which covered her from neck to toe, and on her head a hat wrapped all ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... hunting spiders are equal to flying, or at least manage to be wafted along by the breeze, when they want to take a trip. The silk these throw out is occasionally called 'gossamer;' it is slight, and not unlike the true gossamer, made by web-spinners of various sorts, which we usually notice in autumn, covering bushes and grassy spaces. The family to which the airy spiders belong is notable, because it contains those species which have a likeness ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Le XIXe Siecle," with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer. Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537—1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels. All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he died—so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... the limbs and of the light draperies suggesting motion and glee. How did he know that some of these were men, and some were women? He had never seen such dresses as they wore, which seemed to be composed of tunics and gossamer veils of blue and red. Yet he did know quite distinctly which were men and which were women, and he knew that it was a marriage scene. The bride wore a wreath of flowers; the bridegroom carried a sheaf or garland of fruit or grain, which seemed to be ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... out of the blackness and stopped beside the cab. She was swathed in a long gossamer, and hooded. The carriage lamps gleamed strong against the ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... critics and burlesquing their rubber stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wagner; swearing mighty oaths by Mozart, and after him, Strauss—not Richard, but Johann! The Old Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil of gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That Huneker in false whiskers is inimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he is a prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true, half-true and apocryphal; on the other ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... proportions, was halfway hidden by a dress coat of green velvet. This last garment had a sort of navy cut, with standing collar richly laced with silver, gold buttons in a double row of the size of doubloons, with loose sleeves and cuffs heavily laced with silver also. His linen was of the most gossamer fineness, the collar thrown slightly back and confined by a single clasp of rubies the size of beans, while below was a frill of cambric ruffles sparkling with opal studs framed in diamonds. The ruffles, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Stone, that gleamed white in the moonbeam beside a sheet of water, the Mere of the Pucksies. This mere had the mist lying on it more dense than elsewhere. The vapor rested on the surface as a fine gossamer veil, not raised above a couple of feet, hardly ruffled by a passing sigh of air. A large bird floated over it on expanded wings, it looked white as a swan in the moonlight, but cast a shadow black as pitch on the vaporous sheet that covered ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... as Queen of the Fairies. You shall lie on a bed of rose-leaves, and have gossamer, cloudy sort of drapery all around you. Never fear, Nora, you will ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... of both sides extended covered passages, connected with each other; while in the court were laid out several rockeries. In one quarter were planted a number of banana trees; on the opposite stood a plant of begonia from Hsi Fu. Its appearance was like an open umbrella. The gossamer hanging (from its branches) resembled golden threads. The corollas (seemed) to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... elegancies of French toilet,—our houses filled with a thousand knick-knacks of which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young American bride is often ushered into her new home. Her wardrobe all gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a museum of elegant and costly gewgaws; and amid the whole collection of elegancies and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... are made of the gossamer, the cobwebs which may be seen in large quantities on the furze bushes; and so of King Oberon we ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... earth renews her youth With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze. How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth, While all is fresh as in the early days! What simple things be these the soul to raise To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat, With nameless ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... and gossamer, Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest Mab or King Oberon; or, haply, her His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.— Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy, That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me! And all that world at ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... sundry gossamer fabrics which were dignified by the title of party dresses, and which, with many tears, she had folded away as something she should never need in the country, she exclaimed aloud, "Why, can't I have a party here as well as at home? The house is a great deal larger than the long narrow thing on ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight of the Alps," says Ruskin, "and you find all the brightness of that emotion hanging like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge." Such a result of our examination would but add to our confusion. Ruskin's mind was so permeated with adoration of mountain scenery that his attempts at cool analysis of his own sensations ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... maiden sisters of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an assorted cargo of dry-goods above, and, favored by a pass, and Major ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... gossamer fabrics, the silks and velvets, the jewels, the elegant things from barbaric Russia, the wonders of the Orient, the plainer exhibit of our own land rich in mechanical wonders, the natural products, the sewing-machine that now could do the finest ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child, fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... robe with a large hood. He crushed one of the folds in his hands and was surprised to discover how thin it was and into how small space it could be compressed. Not far away stood several pairs of large slippers of soft black felt. The white robes were also of thinnest gossamer—flimsy stuff that swayed like smoke when ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... turned in their seats, staring in stupid awe at two heads clearly visible in the moonlight that lay like silver gossamer on the dark green sea—two heads where they had expected to find but one. The boatswain, frozen in the forward movement of his swing, glared open-mouthed, speechless; he felt his stiff hair stirring strangely under his hat, a pronounced uneasiness ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Horn, with a thin gossamer shawl about her shoulders, would come down from her bedroom above and join her husband. Then young Oliver himself would come bounding in, always a little late, but always with his face aglow and always ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... "In the glittering gossamer of its fantastic buildings, tens of thousands of grey people, like patches on the ragged clothes of a beggar, creep along with weary faces and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... hear this "Raphael of Music" at the piano, so many and so eloquent have been the descriptions given of his playing. It is easy to fancy him sweeping the ivory keys with his gossamer touch that enveloped with ethereal beauty the most unaccustomed of his complicated chromatic modulations. We can feel his individuality pulsating through every tone evoked by those individualized fingers of his as they weave measures for sylphs of dreamland, or summon to warfare heroes ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... morning rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, Ulysses put on his shirt and cloak, while the goddess wore a dress of a light gossamer fabric, very fine and graceful, with a beautiful golden girdle about her waist and a veil to cover her head. She at once set herself to think how she could speed Ulysses on his way. So she gave him a great bronze axe that ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... false veneer of civilisation peeled off long ago," the Maluka said, adding, with a sly look at my discarded gloves and gossamer, "It's wonderful how quietly ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... their gardens, farms and their appurtenances, ponds screaming with dog-defying geese, and barnyards commingling all the mixed noises of their live stock together. Encampments of ants dressed out in uniforms quite unlike those worn by the Formicary legions in Italy; gossamer cradles nursing progenies of our Cisalpine caterpillars, and spiders with new arrangements of their eight pairs of eyes, forming new arrangements of meshes, and hunting new flies, are here. Here too, once again, we behold, not without emotion, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down, down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a faint silver gossamer at your feet, is to feel that you are living in one of the old woodcuts which illustrate Shakespeare's "Midsummer ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... rough hand opened, and the tiny insect, spreading its gossamer wings, buzzed away into the bright atmosphere, where it ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... unsatisfactory pageant. The solid barriers which were to imprison the vast threatening elements of religious animosity and dynastic hatreds, and to secure a peaceful future for Christendom, melted into films of gossamer, and the great war of demons, no longer to be quelled by the commonplaces of diplomatic exorcism, revealed its close approach. The prospects of Europe grew blacker ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... me from Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... his sort here," the girl remarked; "his soul would fit in a flea-track." She spied the Bronco Kid sauntering back towards her and joined him. He leaned against the wall, watching the gossamer thread of smoke twist upward from his cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the surroundings, and showing no hint of the emotion he had displayed two ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... anything at the root of anything except Self? You moth, you butterfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you understand the incalculable value of Self—of that which is all to me and nothing to you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and to me nothing? You are so young—you still believe in things, and interests, and good and evil, and love and hate, truth and ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... a doubt weighing upon his spirit, Felix longed to tell his mother all. The slight cloud that had arisen of late years between them was so gossamer-like yet, that the faintest breath could drive it away. Though her boy was not the brilliant genius she had secretly and fondly hoped he would prove, he was still dearer to Felicita than ought else on earth or, indeed, in heaven; and her love for him was deeper than she ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... of his own; but he left her eyes exposed, saying, "I must be able to see them, you know." As he fastened the curtains of the cap under her chin, he received a flashing answer from the eyes that would have warmed him had he been clothed in gossamer and the mercury ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... light on the wings shifting INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came to all at the same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise act with one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings, deer, gossamer spiders, winged ants) the same. Whatever explanation of these facts we favor—whether the possession of swifter and finer means of external communication than we can perceive, or whether a common and inner sensitivity to the genius of the Tribe (the "Spirit of the Hive") or to the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Through the open hall door, at the head of the flight of marble steps, servants in livery were seen receiving the shawls and hats of the guests, as carriage after carriage deposited its brilliant contents at the house of the financier. Mingled with the black coats of the gentlemen, and the gossamer attire of the ladies, were seen the brilliant uniforms of officers of the army and navy. The crowd poured into the magnificent ball room, where, flanked by her husband, and by the indefatigable Monsieur Charmant, the lovely hostess received her guests with an elegance ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... across the climbing pines, while as the brightness increased we could see the torrent, whose voice now almost drowned the clash of couplings and the clamor of wheels, frothing green and white-streaked among mighty boulders in the gorge below. Then as we swung giddily over a gossamer-like timber bridge, the walls of quartz and blue grit fell back on either hand; and, for the first time, I gazed in rapt silence upon the cold unsullied whiteness of eternal snow, undefiled from the beginning by any foot of man. It stretched in a glimmering saw-edge high above us athwart ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the craft, the power, and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... was short, and three stubborn warts, of the size of peas, stuck to its left side. Her waist might have been admired in the fifteenth century; but it was some nine inches too short by as many too broad, to elicit the admiration of the gallants of the present age, who rave, and go distracted about gossamer divinities scarcely six inches in circumference. She was about four feet four in stature, and her foot would have crushed Cinderella, and used her slipper for a thumb-cot. Such was Mary Madeline Mumbles in her eighteenth year, and never was child ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... produced by the ironworkers of Frankfort needed strength rather than skill in their manipulation. Between the Italian method and the German was all the contrast that exists between the catching of salmon with a delicate line and a gossamer fly, or clubbing the fish to death as did the boatmen at that fishery called the Waag down the Rhine ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... so much noise," said his mother, "or you will wake the tiny creature. We may lose her if we are not careful. The slightest breeze would waft her far away. She is as light as gossamer." ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... reclining on pillows scarcely whiter than herself, Rose Lincoln examined and found fault with a thin gossamer fabric, none suited for any one to wear in a cold wintry night, and much ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... was given at the White House by President Tyler, in honor of the birthday of his eldest granddaughter. Dressed as a fairy, with gossamer wings, a diamond star on her forehead, and a silver wand, she received her guests. Prominent among the young people was the daughter of General Almonte, the Mexican Minister, arrayed as an Aztec Princess. Master Schermerhorn, of New York, was beautifully dressed as an Albanian ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... for my life, for my breath, for the boon of being alive to-night; thanks from my heart for these! Hear, east and west, oh, hear. It is the eternal God. This silence murmuring in my ears is the blood of all Nature seething; it is God weaving through the world and me. I see a glistening gossamer thread in the light of my fire; I hear a boat rowing across the harbour; the northern lights flare over the heavens to the north. By my immortal soul, I am full of thanks that it is I who ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... influenced by this? Puff. O Lud, yes, sir! the number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. Sneer. Well, sir, the puff preliminary. Puff. O, that, sir, does well in the form of a caution. In a matter of gallantry now—Sir Flimsy Gossamer wishes to be well with Lady Fanny Fete—he applies to me—I open trenches for him with a paragraph in the Morning Post.—"It is recommended to the beautiful and accomplished Lady F four stars F dash E to be on her guard against that dangerous character, ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... seen Irene Lawrence in the carriage and on horseback; but as she stepped into the room now, and stood there rather surprised, she might have been a daughter of Juno. Tall, slender, arrowy straight, but lithe and faultlessly rounded, her fleecy white shawl like a gossamer web falling off her shoulders, her haughty carriage, her wealth of purple-black hair coiled about her shapely head, a hundred times handsomer than any artifice of dressing, her brilliant complexion, her large eyes with their long sweeping lashes ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... flung across his brows to shield his eyes, for the light outside the sill seemed dazzling after the semidark of the flat, he scanned first the opposite roof edges, a whole story higher than he, where sparrows were alighting, and where smoke plumes curled like veils of gossamer; next he ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... angles, to disperse And multiply the figures, as I walk Naked between my succubae. My mists I'll have of perfume, vapour'd 'bout the room, To lose ourselves in; and my baths, like pits To fall into; from whence we will come forth, And roll us dry in gossamer and roses.— Is it arrived at ruby?—Where I spy A wealthy citizen, or [a] rich lawyer, Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow I'll send a thousand pound to ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... meaning clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... gully called "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs." They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along their sides ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... beeches, as I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through, To catch some golden cord that I saw gleaming Like gossamer against the ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... horse nearer to this gesticulating, screaming grey object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb circled and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and the peerless Chaoukeun, seated in a massive car of gossamer richly studded with the eyes of live humming-birds, drawn by twelve beautiful blue load-stars, presented by the heavenly bodies to the brother of ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... gold hung by scarlet cloth from the swords of state;... hatchets of the same were intermixed with them; the breasts of the Ochras and various attendants were adorned with large stars, stools, crescents, and gossamer ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... tortures of a hat, but it is a great thing to have them. Teresa, a sweet round purse of blue leather, of the size to hold a five peseta piece; Micaela, a handkerchief with lace on the edge, and me an embroidered veil like a gossamer. What did we care that Her Majesty the mother would have sent us away if she could? She had not enough Spanish to make us understand what we did not wish to understand, and at last she saved her breath for another day. But by that ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... favourite shirt for many moons, Soft, silken, soothing and of tenderest tone, Gossamer-light withal. The Subs., my peers, Envied the garment, ransacking the land To find a shirt its equal—all in vain. For, when we tired of shooting at the Hun And other Batteries clamoured for their share And we resigned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... the steps of the piazza, she turned and looked up. Mrs. Delano was leaning against one of the pillars, watching her departure. Vines of gossamer lightness were waving round her, and her pearly complexion and violet-tinted dress looked lovely among those aerial arabesques of delicate green. The picture impressed Flora all the more because it was such a contrast to the warm and gorgeous styles of ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... her own brilliant complexion and imperial proportions. It is Juno and Arachne. The divine orbs of the goddess turned haughtily upon me, but did not see me,—looked through and beyond me, as if I had been nothing but gossamer, feathers, air; and the little black, bead-like eyes of the insect pierced me maliciously an instant, as the barouche dashed past, and disappeared in the Rue de Rivoli. I was humiliated; I felt that I was recognized,—known as the rash youth who had just called at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... speak, knowing that his words would only alarm the fox; then in a few minutes he saw the dog-fox look over his shoulder, and then he trotted off as lightly as a gossamer veil blown in the wind, and, in a minute or two more, back he comes with his vixen and the cubs all around him. Seeing the dog-fox thus surrounded by vixen and cubs was too much for Mr. Tebrick; in spite of all his philosophy a pang of jealousy shot through him. He could see that ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... cleverly hinged door, which the owner of the nest can shut with its claw when it leaves home; the Pirate, which makes a leafy raft, and skims along the water after the insects which suit its taste; the Gossamer spider, which rises so high in the air, and floats at its ease in its own balloon—and Epeira, the Garden spider, whose beautiful web, covered with dewy diamonds, we have all seen, laid like some fairy lacework, over the hedges, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... saloon never allowed the place to be cleaned, and for years the spiders held undisputed possession, weaving their webs without fear of molestation, until every nook and corner was filled with their tapestry, and from ceiling and rafter hung long festoons of gossamer threads that swayed back and forth in the breeze. It was a place much visited by tourists, and a trip to San Francisco was not considered complete without visiting this "Cobweb Museum," a name bestowed upon it by ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... pump failed; he invented a waterproof composition—there was fourteen weeks of drought; he sold his patent for two-and-sixpence, and had the satisfaction of walking home for the next three months wet through, from his gossamer to his ci-devant Wellingtons, now literally, from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human reason could not withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed by the sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the magic of Goliah. How did ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of water are the greenness of the grass, the size of the trees, the nature of the plants, reeds, rushes, brambles, willows, poplars, &c. Some discover water by putting out dry wool under a bowl at night. So too, if you see at sunrise a cloud [or gossamer, 'spissitudinem'] of very small flies. A mist rising like a column shows water as deep below as the column rises ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... with easel and umbrella on his arm, climbed the hill slowly and with frequent pauses to turn and admire the landscape. It was the freshest of spring mornings: the short turf was beaded with dew, the furze-bushes on either hand festooned with gossamer and strung with mimic diamonds. As he looked harbourwards, the radiance of sky mingling with the glitter of water dazzled and bewildered his sight: below, and at the foot of the steep woods opposite, the river lay cool and ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wind, for in it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from their places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... not that o'ercast thy gentle mind, For dreams are but as floating gossamer, And should not blind or bar the steady reason. And alchemy is innocent enough, Save when it feeds too steadily on gold, A crime the world not easily forgives. But if Rosalia likes not the pursuit Her sire engages in, my plan shall be To lead him quietly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... and I retiring brushed Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face, And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed; He should to antenatal night retrace, 70 And hide his elements in that large womb Beyond the ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... prosperous and sunshine, and what Captain Beaufort would call plain sailing. To Ballymahon the first stage. Do you remember Ballymahon, and the first sight of the gossamer in the hedges sparkling with dew, going there packed into the chaise with your four sisters and me to see the museum of a Mr. Smith, who had a Cellini cup and a Raphael plate, and miniatures of Madame de Maintenon, and wonders ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... keep up a dizzy reel, And the grasshopper, perched upon his blade, Loud drones his fairy threshing-wheel:— Hour when some poet-wit might feign The drowsy tune of the throbbing air The weaving of the gossamer In secret nooks of wood and lane— The gossamer, silk night-robes of the flowers, Fluttered apart by amorous morning hours. Yea, as the weaving of the gossamer, If truly that the mystic golden boom, Is the strange rapture of my hidden loom, As I sit in the light of the thought of ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... addressed to various individuals of the other sex, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that Johnny's affectations are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. Take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray corners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading. For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life—then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,—wandering in Europe with hope of meeting you,—yet met. This contumacy of mine I shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn.—Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you did not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... they had been winding steadily down to the sea. And presently they caught sight of the boat, riding at anchor near the landing place, with a little skiff drawn up on the sand. Of course you know that the boat was a scallop-shell, with sails of gossamer; but Sara had been expecting an ordinary boat, and she was perfectly delighted. Of course it was large enough to hold Sara, as well as the rest of the party; but just barely. And the sailors were no larger ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... we must weave some garments for our queen. No lighter gossamer was ever seen Than spider web woven by fairy hands To wear when dancing ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... yoke; The best, and foremost in the cause of virtue, To death, by sword, by prison, or the halter: His sacrifice now stands the only bar Between the wanton cruelties of war, And our much-suffering soldiers: yet, when weigh'd With gratitude, for that he sav'd thy life, These things prove gossamer, and balance air:— Perversion monstrous ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air, So many fathom down precipitating, Thou'dst shiver'd like an egg: but thou dost breathe; Hast heavy substance; bleed'st not; speak'st; art sound. Ten masts at each make not the altitude Which thou hast perpendicularly fell: Thy life ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... late to change, and she caught up a scarf of gossamer and twined it round her neck to serve ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... respects his music represents the romantic spirit in its fairest bloom. Not even yet has full justice been done him—although his fame is growing—since he is often considered as a composer of mere "salon-pieces" which, though captivating, are too gossamer-like to merit serious attention. Chopin was a life-long student of Bach; and much of his music, in its closeness of texture, shows unmistakably the influence of that master. Together with Schumann, he broke away from the strict formality ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Bird-like in her love of individual freedom, the last woman in the world to be bullied in her affections, she keenly appreciated the niceness of his attitude. She did this consciously, but deeper than all consciousness, and intangible as gossamer, were the effects of this. All unrealizable, save for some supreme moment, did the web of Daylight's personality creep out and around her. Filament by filament, these secret and undreamable bonds were being established. They it was that could have given ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... ends behind—with deep falling mantles over dresses never cognizant of crinoline: gentlemen, with cocked-hats, their bag-wigs and ties appearing behind; and beneath their puce-coloured coats, delicate silk tights and gossamer stockings were visible, as they trod the mossy lawn of the Palace Gardens at Richmond, or, followed by a tiny greyhound, prepared for the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton |
