"Sombre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lonely New England life, with its religious theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by the poet. There was in creed and purpose the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... beatin' it," she said with a sombre frown. She was plainly in no sunny mood. "'f all th' hunk jobs I was ever on, this is th' hunkest. I'm told off 't watch a gang of crooks, and after I've lost a night's sleep doing it, it turns out 't's a nice, jolly fam'ly party!" ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the place of doom, my blood turned to tears by its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity, and despair, I had happened in some glade upon a merry party of roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my sombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in the playful assault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had I been, and what had I seen to make such a dull ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... sallow countenance of the sick woman stood out like a figure of Christ imperfectly gilded and fixed upon a cross of tarnished silver. The flickering rays shed by the blue flames of a crackling fire were therefore the sole light of this sombre chamber, where the denouement of a drama was just ending. A log suddenly rolled from the fire onto the floor, as if presaging some catastrophe. At the sound of it the sick woman quickly rose to a sitting posture. She opened ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... peered down into the shadows. A soft murmur of rushing water came up. How like strange distant voices calling him to go back or go on, or warning him, or giving mystic portent of something that would happen to him there! A cold chill crept over him and he seemed enveloped in a sombre menace of the future. But he shook it off. He had many battles to fight, not the least of ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had left it. Who he might ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... never sombre. She always seemed to remember, even in her bright ribbons and silks, the days of her girlhood, when half the young men in the county were wild about her. When she moved she wafted towards you a perfume of ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... spade, he took her from the wall, and looked from his door into the wood, pondering where her grave should be. A whitebeam at a little distance made a vivid conflagration of green amid the sombre boles of the pines. Pinewoods rely on their undergrowth—bracken and whortleberry and occasional bushes—for their spring illuminations, and the whitebeam shone as bright in that wood as ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... evening sun as though weary of the quiet scene, gathered all his truant rays out of the tree tops and from the purple mountain summit, and sunk to rest behind the sombre clouds that twilight spread across the sky. Then Fifine who longed to be alone, kissed her father good-night and retired to her own little room, after telling the servant to light a lamp and take her father ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... the western boundary of Waveland, was a lovely inland lake, by the margin of which Clemence had been accustomed to spend many sad hours, since she had become a resident of the little village. A narrow foot-path, that led through the sombre woods, brought her to a sheltered spot upon the sloping shore, where she often came alone to pass an idle hour. She had come to regard this place as her own peculiar property, for no one had ever come here to interrupt her, or claim any portion ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... shadows crept up the mountain peaks that stand up like grim giants away off in the East, and twilight began to throw its grey mantle over the lake; still he was alone. The darkness began to gather around him; the forests along the shore to lose their distinctness and to stand in sombre and shadowy outline above the water; still no prospect of relief presented itself. The twilight faded from the West, the stars stole out in the heavens, the milky way stretched its belt of light across ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... deserts. When the swallows fly homeward, he will come again, not without the third and fourth volume, which he here promises to the Pantagruelists, merry knaves, and honest wags of all degrees, who have a wholesome horror of the sadness, sombre meditation and melancholy of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... first glimpse of Lake Ida. In the cleft of a huge, gaunt, bare hill, divided as if by a giant hand, lay a large black sheet of ice. No ray of sunshine ever struck it from autumn until spring, and it seemed impossible to imagine our venturing to skate merrily in such a sombre looking spot. But New-Zealand sheep farmers are not sentimental I am afraid. Beyond a rapid thought of self-congratulation that such "cold country" was not on their run, they did not feel affected by its eternal silence and gloom. The ice would bear, and what more could skater's heart ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... tould me I must shpake a pace, I tried to kape a cheerful face, Though obvious lack of matther I was mournin'! But, oh sombre-faced JOHN MORLEY! Ye desired to help me surely, When ye went for Tipperary widout warnin'! Though your tale could scarce be boulder, Yet my hits straight from the shoulder Will make ye mourn the hour that ye were born in. And I think ye'll have a notion Ye were wrong to cross ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... for me at least, the face of more than one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening, through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of any country town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scattered high walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest the infinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the crowd. In the distance were Talana Hill, where the first battle of the campaign was fought; the lofty Drakensberg where more than fifty years before the early Boer Voortrekkers had their first glimpses of fair Natal, while to the south were the hills of Ladysmith of sombre history. There in the midst of bloody battlefields, and among several thousand men who sought the blood of the enemy, Kruger, the man of peace, implored Almighty God to give strength to his burghers. It was a ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... each other in Western Asia annihilated all the hopes of the Jewish race for a terrestial kingdom, and cast it back on religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion. The establishment of the Roman empire exalted men's imaginations, and the great era of peace on which the world was entering gave birth to illimitable hopes. This confused medley of dreams found ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached,—what "The Fancy" would call an "ugly customer."] The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same deep inevitable eye, the same look,—as of thunder asleep, but ready,— neither a dog nor a man to be ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... the storm from Tintagel to Clovelly? Soon this also bade fair to be a storm, for the rain began to tumble out of the sky, rather than fall, as if an army of people stood throwing down water by the bucketful. I revelled in it, and in the sombre scenery, where sharp rocks stood out like bones through the tattered green coats of soldier-mountains. All the world was gray or gray-green, save for a patch of purple heather here and there, like the stain ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... mark upon his genius—upon his most beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he was not the man of a sombre parti-pris whom M. Montegut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but little direct ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... voices of the stars and to love and understand the lowliest things that God has made, bore him straight to the heart of England as surely as it swept his name into the holy of holies of artistic France, spoke to Russia's sombre soul and temporarily revolutionised the literature of the United States. His work belonged to no "school," and its charm was not due to "style"; therefore his books lost little in translation, for true genius speaks to every man in ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Ballads Satirical, Polemical, and Political, and even Devotional and Doctrinal, of as early date as many of the songs inspired by the spirit of Love, War, and Romance. Among them they represent the diverse strands that are blended in the Scottish character—the sombre and the bright; the prose and the poetry. The one or the other has predominated in the expression of the genius of the nation in verse, according to the circumstances and mood of the time. But neither has ever been really absent; they are the opposite sides ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... was already fading into the sombre shadows of night, when two travellers might have been observed swiftly—at a pace of six miles in the hour—descending the rugged side of a mountain; the younger bounding from crag to crag with the agility of a ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... applied a match to the sombre pile. A fiery tongue thrust itself out here and there, then suddenly the whole fabric burst into flames, blazing and crackling beautifully. This was a signal for the boys to join hands and dance around the burning barrels, which they did shouting like mad creatures. When the ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a folding stool and a deal table, which latter serves me alternately for a toilette, to write upon, or to hold the Queen's dessert—there being no receptacle in the kitchen or elsewhere wherein to put it. I laugh at all this ... and amidst all the sombre occurrences which have befallen us, I console myself with my own reflections. I imagine that fortune may take a good turn, and I calmly and trustfully wait for those consolations which are powerful to assuage all my trouble."[38] "Action ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... this time that he, in accord with the chrysalid tendency manifested by most other millionaires, discarded his long-followed sombre method of life, and invested himself with a gaudy magnificence. On Fifth avenue, at Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets, he built a spacious brown-stone mansion. In reality it was a union of two mansions; ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... managing very nicely," Isabelle said, contentedly, as Tony, with a sombre face and averted eyes, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were gray—a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow in the padded chair. His right hand—the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar—rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of this engagement was sombre, magnificent, and unique. The day was perfectly clear, and you could see right down the coast as far as Sedd-ul-Bahr. There the warships of the first division were blazing away at Aki Baba and the hills around it, covering their summits with a great white cloud of bursting ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tell, that he was seeking Katherine as eagerly as he had sought herself; but with what a different object! The sight of De Burgh was as the thrust of a poisoned dagger through the delicate veins and articulations of her moral system. To see the dark face and sombre eyes she had loved so passionately—had!—still loved!—was almost physical agony. It was as if some beloved form had been brought back from another world, but animated by a spirit that knew her not, regarded her not at all. Oh, the bitterness of such an estrangement, of ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... of one husband and the wedding of another, and even that was so short as to be barely decent. Six months—yet in that space of time much might happen—things undreamed of and undesired—slow tortures carefully measured out, punishment sudden and heavy! Wrapped in these sombre musings I walked beside him in profound silence. The moon shone brilliantly; groups of girls danced on the shore with their lovers, to the sound of a flute and mandoline—far off across the bay the sound of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... know his fate before he reached Viola's home. When midway the bridge he pulled his reins and the horse stood still. The dark waters of the small river swept on beneath them. Night had just begun to spread out her sombre wings, bedecked with silent stars. Just in front of them, as they looked out upon the center of the river, the river took a bend which brought a shore directly facing them. A green lawn began from the shore and ran back to be lost in the ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was I—the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals," all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... tone at first, before she was more than chilled by his sombre and imperious gravity, before her mother supported him unrelentingly and galled and exasperated her by persecution, he might have attracted, fascinated, conquered. As it was, she jeered ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... had noiselessly followed his father, lifted his sombre, serious looks to Harold as he thus spoke; and when Harold turned away, he said to Sweyn, timidly, "He, at least, is ever good ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our hero, as he sprang away from the gasping beast. The next moment he had disappeared in the dense, dark wood. Ah! how sheltering, how kindly, seemed that sombre sanctuary, with its dark grey tufts beneath his feet, and the thick, dusk-green branches of the fir and pine! The gloomy background seemed to invite him further into the heart of its shade and silence. No bird whistled through ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... herself, whilst aloud she murmured: "I thought that you would like them. Your room has such a gloomy, sombre air, and a few roses seem to diffuse some of the sunshine on ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... O sombre heart of earth and swoln with grief, That in thy time wast as a bird for mirth, Dim womb of life and many a seed and sheaf, And full of changes, ancient heart of earth, From grain and flower, from grass and every leaf, Thy mysteries and thy multitudes ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... glittering rays of the sun, and the other side harmonising with the more louring portion of the heavens. Below us, and to the left, showed the still blue of a pond where it lay surrounded with pale-green laburnums—its dull, concave-looking depths repeating the trees in more sombre shades of colour over the surface of a hillock. Beyond the water spread the black expanse of a ploughed field, with the straight line of a dark-green ridge by which it was bisected running far into the distance, and there joining ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... sit down with you, Ursula; for, after all, reading godly books in dingles at eve is rather sombre work. Yes, I think I will sit down with you;" and I sat ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... reaches my years the fear of criticism might prevent him from indulging his fancy. I am not afraid of that. I am decidedly for pleasing color combinations in dress. I like to see the women's clothes, say, at the opera. What can be more depressing than the sombre black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions? A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... all things with its yellow haze, and is burning to brightest gold the reddish tinge in the girl's hair as she moves with dallying steps through the green fields. She is dressed in a white gown, decked with ribbons of sombre tint, and wears upon her head a huge poky bonnet, from which her face peeps out, half ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... colors seem rather out of place in the family which contains also our sombre Blackbirds, but before the leaves have fallen both kinds of Orioles and their families start for Mexico and Central America, where such tropical hues seem more in keeping, and where many members of the family are quite as brilliant as those we see ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... stricken down by a long and painful illness. When he rose from it and, as a convalescent, took his first walk into the country, he was astonished to find that the beautiful Umbrian landscape which he had always so enjoyed, seemed to him cold, discolored, and sombre. A natural effect of illness, one may say. Yet it more often happens that when a convalescent returns to fresh air and the beauty of the earth, his pleasure in them is heightened. At all events Francis was vividly impressed with the nothingness of nature, as compared ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... this the scene was most deceptive. Neither peace nor loneliness lurked amid those sombre rock shadows; over all was the dominance of men—primitive, fighting men, rendered almost wholly animal by the continued hardships of existence, the ceaseless struggle after gold. The vagrant trail, worn deep between ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... his glass and turned it toward the island. The sombre shades of twilight had already gathered over the scene; but he saw through them quite distinctly a boat pulled by four men, while a fifth sat in the stern holding the tiller. The steersman kept the small island between them and the vessel ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... gentleman's residence, built of variegated uneven stones, black and grey and white, which seemed to be chiefly flint; but the corners and settings of the windows and of the door-ways, and the chimneys, were of brick. There was something sombre about it, and many perhaps might call it dull of aspect; but it was substantial, comfortable, and unassuming. It was entered by broad stone steps, with iron balustrades curving outwards as they descended, and there was an open area round the house, showing that the offices were ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... spot where we now sit The grandest tomb a woman ever had; All sombre tints I deem would be unfit; For never have ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... might have known, or should have known the antecedents of my personages. I must let them understand how it came to pass that so pretty, so pert, so gay, so good a girl as Mary Lovelace, without any great fault on her part, married a man so grim, so gaunt, so sombre, and so old as Lord George Germain. It will not suffice to say that she had done so. A hundred and twenty little incidents must be dribbled into the reader's intelligence, many of them, let me hope, in such ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut from a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the basin, and a few stone lanterns—so called from their form, and not their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for wicks—are the sole occupants of the place. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to the king, which is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of English history is in the seventh century—a late dawn, dark and sombre, without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous with that light which never was on sea or land—thronged with heroic ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... into a stately room packed with masterpieces of art; gleaming marbles and sombre bronze in groups of bewildering beauty, with every inch of wall-space crowded with canvases in massive gold frames glowing with the soft ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... strongly built man, with thick hair crowned by a little jockey cap, and was enveloped in a kind of overcoat which might have been black once but which was now of a greenish hue, the result of the inclemency of the weather; he gnawed his heavy moustache in silence and turned sombre, uneasy looks on all, including his companion in misfortune. He wore hobnailed shoes and carried a stout cudgel. He was more like a piece of the human wreckage one sees in the street corners of great cities than ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... and moving, as that experienced by those who love and follow Art. She, Archaeology, is, for those who know her, full of such emotion; garbed in an imperishable glamour, she is raised far above the turmoil of the present on the wings of Imagination. Her eyes are sombre with the memory of the wisdom driven from her scattered sanctuaries; and at her lips wonderful things strive for utterance. In her are gathered together the longings and the laughter, the fears and ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... aboriginal Indian. This child of nature appears to materialize with remarkable facility, and, having apparently doffed his characteristic phlegm in the happy hunting grounds, enters with extreme zest on the lighter gambols which sometimes enliven the sombre monotony of a seance. Almost every Medium keeps an Indian 'brave' in her cohort of Spirits; in fact, there is no Cabinet, howe'er so ill attended, but has some Indian there. It is strange, too, that, as far as I know, departed black men, who might be supposed to be ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... habitations, and implements, so picturesque and unique, as well as the gallant gentlemen in the costume of that picturesque age, it seems almost to border on romance. But there is a dark side to the picture. The sombre veil of uncertainty hangs over the fate of two entire colonies, which, if lifted, would consecrate this spot to the extremes of suffering and bloodshed. It was, no doubt, better to have these scenes buried in oblivion, and for ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... taking advantage of the effects to be derived from impure hues, as Poussin did in his "Deluge." In this work, neither black nor white, blue, red, nor yellow appears; the whole mass being, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This absence of colour, however, is a merit, and not a fault. Vandyke employed such means with admirable effect ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... is, whether he has succeeded in writing a book which will be readable by the class for whom he intends it. To make a lively and entertaining narrative for children, with such unmalleable material as is presented by the sombre, stern, and rigid characteristics of the Puritans and their descendants, is quite as difficult an attempt as to manufacture delicate playthings out of the granite, rocks on which New ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noon! and not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the vaporous day, Dull on the windless waters falls the pallid ray. So slumb'ringly the glassy ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... severely plain in its simplicity: the snow-white kerchief, crossed in front and made fast behind; the under-petticoat of gray homespun, just showing the black hose and buckled shoes beneath; and the over-dress of sombre black or dark brown, puffed out a little over the hips in the pannier fashion, but without any pretence at following the extravagances of the day. The sleeves buttoned tightly to the lower arm, though wider at the cuff, and rose high upon the shoulder with something of a puff. It was ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of the year clothes itself in gay colors, it is deemed an evidence of immaturity for women in the fall time of life to sport crimson and scarlet and orange. Sober grays (which mean old, mature), quiet brown, and even sombre blacks, are rather what are looked for. To dress young when people are old, deceives no one. There is a beauty of age as well as a beauty of youth. Those who live to be old have had their share of the former: why should they seek to deprive ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bank, very far off, a cock crew. Swaying lightly under their feet, the raft floated on toward a point where the darkness dissolved into lighter tones, and the clouds took on themselves clearer shapes and less sombre hues. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... upon the horizon when the girl reached the ford. The rift in the woods, which formed a wagon trail, was very narrow, and even though the sun had not yet set, the spot was dark and sombre by reason of the wall of pine trees which lined it ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... was very narrow—the houses so close together that a donkey loaded with brush-wood could hardly scrape through—and so steep that he had hard work to get a foot-hold on the smooth, worn stones serving to pave it. The buildings were all of that sombre gray stone so picturesque in paintings, and so pleasant for the eye to rest on, yet withal suggesting no brilliant ideas of cleanliness or even neatness. The houses were rarely over two stories in hight, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... blessed Sabbath, was to become his wife. The sight of her perfect loveliness, arrayed in a white dress, emblem of purity and innocence, filled his heart with rapture; and as he clasped her in his arms, every sombre feeling vanished away. It is not our intention to describe the simplicity of the marriage ceremony, or the happiness which filled Philips Grey's heart during that Sabbath morning, while sitting in the church by the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... air, and began to examine into farming matters from sheer necessity, though she never rode out or personally superintended as at former times. One Friday evening in August she walked a little way along the road and entered the village for the first time since the sombre event of the preceding Christmas. None of the old colour had as yet come to her cheek, and its absolute paleness was heightened by the jet black of her gown, till it appeared preternatural. When she reached a little shop at the other end of the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... was too bright to last. The sun sank swiftly, the celestial fires paled, the purples grew faint and died, and, where they had been, night trailed her sombre plumes ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... shone forth brightly on the little settlement: the woods were alive with song-birds, numbers of which came fearlessly flying up as if to ascertain what the strangers had been about. Their notes were very sweet, though their plumage was somewhat sombre. They seemed especially anxious to make the acquaintance of Fanny and Emma Morley, who were standing at the porch of their cottage watching them, and surprised at the bold way in which they approached. First one came hopping up, and then another, and when the young ladies ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting, jostling pebbles. And, moreover—? There was no breeze. That was it! What a vast, still place it was, a monotonous afternoon slumber. And the sky open and blank, except for a sombre veil of haze that had gathered ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... other stories in this book. There is that screaming farce called "The Suicides in the Rue Sombre." Now, then, you Magazine zealots, speak up and tell me truly: is there anything too difficult for you in this? If so, the psychology of what is called "public taste" becomes a subject not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... seem to favour that gaudy implement. And it must be owned that even before the "twopence-coloured" gentry came among us from distant parts, we, the natives, had been side-tracking from the exclusive use of the old-fashioned sombre flies into the occasional use of gayer yet still modest "fancies." Of specific Spey hooks in favour at the present time the following is, perhaps, a fairly correct and comprehensive list: purple king, green king, black king, silver heron, gold heron, black dog, silver riach, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... of truth, its personages are so human, that I could delightfully persuade myself that it was all true, and that I had really shared, with a sometimes quickened pulse, the strange fortunes of the sombre young hero. But—fantasy! That is to show the strings and give away the whole game. However, if you can forget that, the coils of an admirably woven intrigue will grip your attention and sympathy throughout. The central figure is one Jaques, who comes to town ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and stained, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... feminine curiosity, but the furniture itself was so unique that the most prosaic articles assumed a surprising interest. There were no modern designs to be seen here, no cream enamelled bedroom suites, no green wood chairs, nor cosy corners. Everything belonging to the house was of a sombre grandeur which belonged to another country than our own. Sideboards and cabinets of carved Indian wood blocked up the roadway, and made black patches against the oak-panelled walls; overmantels of the same ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ripe dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight would give him the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... managed. But there is a want of individuality among the connoisseurs clustered round Phidias, and the frieze itself is very inaccurately coloured. The Greek boys who are riding and leading the horses are painted Egyptian red, and the whole design is done in this red, dark blue, and black. This sombre colouring is un-Greek; the figures of these boys were undoubtedly tinted with flesh colour, like the ordinary Greek statues, and the whole tone of the colouring of the original frieze was brilliant and light; ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... lines of that eager face; The collarless neck and the coal-black paws And the bit grasp'd tight in the massive jaws; The delicate curve of the legs, that seem Too slight for their burden—and, O, the gleam Of that eye, so sombre and yet so gay! Still away, my lithe ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... then received, and, considered from this point of view, the careless attitude of the American people toward General Grant's administration, when in 1871 it obtained the reversal of Hepburn v. Griswold by appointments to the bench, assumes a sombre aspect. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... in those early days found it difficult to live up to Miss Joe Hill's transcendental code she gave no sign of it. She laid aside her mildly adorned garments and enveloped her small angular person in a garb of sombre severity. Even the modest bird that adorned her hat was replaced by an uncompromising band. She foreswore meat and became a vegetarian. She stopped reading novels and devoted her spare time to essays and biography. In fact she and Miss Joe Hill became one and that one ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... and their insulation from the world, through the crystal medium of this stranger's character. In remembering him in connection with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outreness, of the rest of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things returned pretty much to their old fashion; ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he suggested, after watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch of dazzling white skin and soft shadow above the sombre line of her shoulders. Her wrap had slipped down to her elbows. "You'll have all the town coming out presently. I'll wait ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... his lips and drank before replying, and as he did so his customary grave composure became apparent, making Tommy wonder if his senses had tricked him. He looked at the lad with sombre eyes as he set down the glass. His brother's letter was still ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... had everything I needed. The room was a huge four windowed affair, furnished with a canopied bed and a mahogany wardrobe as big as a small house. The nights still being chilly, a roaring wood fire had been built, adding a note of cheerfulness to an otherwise sombre apartment. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... Cuthbert had to witness while still endeavouring to retain the possession of his faculties sufficiently to enable him to duck and back away if somebody suddenly asked him what he thought of the sombre realism of Vladimir Brusiloff. It is little wonder that he tossed in bed, picking at the coverlet, through sleepless nights, and had to have all his waistcoats taken in three inches ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... my landing the charge was made over to me; and on the following day my predecessor, Mr. Macdonald, took his departure, leaving me to the fellowship of my own musings, which for a time assumed but sombre hues; but I was then young, and the hopes and aspirations of an ardent mind threw a halo around the gloomy path that lay before me, and resting upon the bright spots that glimmered in the distant background, concealed from my view the toils and miseries I had to experience ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... chasm in the early morning. The sky was overcast and threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than this ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... through which we passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Roseate or sombre your humour as you patrol the reefs, it is liable to be changed in a flash into clashing tints by inadvertent contact with a warty ghoul of a sea-urchin, a single one of whose agonising spines never fails to bring you face to face with one of the vividest realities of life. A slim but ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy. Purely and delightfully humorous ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... resembling the ruddy, soft, and melancholy hues of autumnal foliage; while these hues were further deepened by a richly carved ceiling of ebony, which, not reflecting but absorbing light, allayed the sunny radiance beneath, and imparted a sombre yet brilliant effect to the pictured walls, and glossy draperies, of the spacious apartment. Above the rich and lofty mantelpiece hung one of the last portraits of himself painted by the venerable Titian, and on the dark pannels ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... absorption of all things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre character ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... scrap of black ribbon here and there. Their silent sympathy, expressed with girlish shyness, was evident, though their snow-white dresses were in striking contrast to the colour of their carriage and of the horses, and the sombre black of the rest of the funeral party. As we saw the solemn procession and heard the clank of the horses' hoofs, we were suddenly reminded of that journey in July, 1913, when we met that poor wandering young family ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... dangerous to show oneself or to call the deity's attention to one's existence. Despite the attempts made to change this day to one of 'joy,' as Isaiah would have it,[617] the Hebrew Sabbath continued to retain for a long time as a trace of its origin, a rather severe and sombre aspect. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... sister, come instead, And drape the world in mourning; let the owl, Who is thy minister, scream from his tower And wake the toad with hooting, and the bat, That is the slave of dim Persephone, Wheel through the sombre air on wandering wing! Tear up the shrieking mandrakes from the earth And bid them make us music, and tell the mole To dig deep down thy cold and narrow bed, For I shall lie within thine ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... hidden lakes has its own character and therefore its own charm. One is bright and friendly, with wooded hills around it, and silver beaches, and red berries of the rowan-tree fringing the shores. Another is sombre and lonely, set in a circle of dark firs and larches, with sighing, trembling reeds along the bank. Another is only a round bowl of crystal water, the colour of an aquamarine, transparent and joyful as the sudden smile on the face of a child. Another is surrounded by fire-scarred ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... voix qui vibraient sous le ciel Se tait: les rossignols ailes pleurent le frere Qui s'envole au-dessus de l'apre et sombre terre, Ne lui laissant plus voir que ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in November—and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys—a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Black wainscoting glimmered up to the ceiling, in small ebony panels; a cheerful clump of wax candles on the tea-table; many old portraits, some grim and pale, others pretty, and some very graceful and charming, hanging ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... is generally harsh, elaborate and abrupt; often strained into unnatural energy or condensed into factitious conciseness. The chief excellence of Alfieri consists in powerful delineation of dramatic character. In his Filippo he has represented, almost with the masterly touches of Tacitus, the sombre character, the dark mysterious counsels, the suspensa semper et obscura verba, of the modern Tiberius. In Polinice, the characters of the rival brothers are beautifully contrasted; in Maria Stuarda, that unfortunate queen is represented unsuspicious, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... careless glance conveyed just such a tinge of critical surprise as the occasion called for: he toyed with a slender tortoise-shell paper-cutter. The pendulum of the sombre, costly grandfather clock behind him swung tolerantly, silently; the murmur of the bank beyond them was utterly lost behind the heavy double doors and forgotten behind the bronze velvet curtains. The president's voice sounded on—he seemed to ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Mr. Spedding's, that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE), after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its tragedies ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... November—and the Glen is all grey and brown, except where the Lombardy poplars stand up here and there like great golden torches in the sombre landscape, although every other tree has shed its leaves. It has been very hard to keep our courage alight of late. The Caporetto disaster is a dreadful thing and not even Susan can extract much ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... divan, her knees clasped around with her arms. And again was Platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably contracted downward, toward the bridge of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... but little sun, and we know ourselves, in its absence, how sombre existence becomes. Their complexions too, were very sallow, and their deportment struck us as sadly sober. A few of the women might possibly have been called pretty, notably two of their number, who possessed clear pale skins, good features, blue eyes, and lovely fair hair, which they ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... is a distinct word etymologically, but the phrase "from side to side," as used by Comus, might well imply that the valley as well as the stream is here referred to. 'Bosky,' bushy. The noun 'boscage' jungle or bush (M.E. busch, bush, bush). 'See Tennyson's Dream of F. W. 243, "the sombre ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... aftermath of her madness, for into the minds of the mad creep strange sights and sounds, and this place, and the people amongst whom she sojourned, the Ghost-people, the grey Dwarf-people, the Dealers in dreams, the Dwellers in the sombre forest, might well open new doors in such a soul as hers. Or perhaps she was still mad. She did not know, she did not greatly care. All she knew was that her poor heart ached with love for a man who was dead, and yet whom she could not find even among the dead. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—here and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne |
