"Unearthly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lids to drive that mote, Which vexed the eastern azure of his eye, Out of his vision; and stared down again. Yet stood the youth there, ruddy in the flare Of his vast shield, nor spake, nor quailed, gazed up, As one might scan a mountain to be scaled. Then, as it were, a voice unearthly still Cried in the cavern of his bristling ear, "His name is Death!" ... And, like the flush That dyes Sahara to its lifeless verge, His brows' bright brass flamed into sudden crimson; And his great spear leapt upward, lightning-like, Shaking a dreadful thunder in the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... sat talking about the people, and the dark scenes around us, the quiet of the night was broken by a wild wailing cry from the villages around, long-continued and unearthly. We were informed that one of the wounded men, carried home from the battle, had just died; and that they had strangled his widow to death, that her spirit might accompany him to the other world, and be his servant there, as she had been here. Now their dead bodies ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... it is true, saw such a sky—but in a gifted trance it is such as would alone be seen, acknowledged, and remembered as of a heavenly vision. All the colouring was like it, rich and glorifying and unearthly, and imitative of the sanctifying light in old cathedrals. The sky was of very mixed tones and hues of green. The entire scene of the vision was thus hemmed in with the light and glory of holiness, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... faculties? It clearly appertains not to the table of human knowledge, for it treats not of objects discoverable within the field of human observation. 'No,' will you say? 'but its knowledge is superhuman, unearthly—its field is in heaven.' My friends, the knowledge which is not human, is of slippery foundation to us human creatures. Things known, constitute knowledge; and here is a science treating of things ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a man distracted by acute pain; yet anxious to develop in his memory the proceedings of the foregoing day. The inmates, however, were startled from their sleep by a shriek, or rather a yell, so loud and unearthly that in a few minutes they stood collected about his bed. It would be impossible, indeed, to conceive, much less to describe, such a picture of utter horror as then presented itself to their observation. ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... diffused light takes color from moss and foliage, and pervades the place like a faint, greet-tinted mist, the theatrical fire of fairyland. The suggestion of mystery and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times is intensified by this unearthly glow. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... doubt as to the author of this startling break in the mountain stillness. It was their own burro that had given out the unearthly roar, and they were confident of being close upon the trail of the two men who were making off with the gold. But a moment later, round the corner in front of them, the donkey's head came into view, his long ears flapping, as if training ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... hear them, but the tethered swans and geese heard, and a magnificent chorus rose from the water. Then, far away as fairyland, faintly out of the sky, came a new murmur—not the martial clangor of wild geese, but something wilder, more exquisitely unearthly—nearer, nearer, enrapturing its weird, celestial beauty. And now, through the blue, with great, snowy wings slowly beating, the swans passed over like angels; and like angels passing, hailing each other as they winged their way, drifting on broad, white pinions, they called, ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... comforters. Preparing hot dinners, it seems, is not working on the Lord's Day when it is for the preacher; though to save a field of corn, which is in danger of being spoiled if left out, as in some seasons, would be a shocking desecration of that day. Yet, to observe the abstracted unearthly carriage of these men, who seem "conversing with the skies" while walking the streets, one wonders at the contrast of such burly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the crone eagerly clutched and stuck into her pocket. The firm ring now opened; but as the young man started off, the crone called after him: "Ay, run, run thy ways, thou Devil's bird! To the crystal run—to the crystal!" The squealing, creaking voice of the woman had something unearthly in it, so that the promenaders paused in amazement, and the laugh, which at first had been universal, instantly died away. The student Anselmus, for the young man was no other, felt himself, though he did not in the least understand these singular phrases, nevertheless seized ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... painted lights striking full on her broad, intellectual forehead and large grey eyes, shining too in a patch of crimson above her heart. Lost in thought and perfectly still, she looked strange thus, almost unearthly, so much so that the impressionable and imaginative Godfrey, seeing her suddenly from the shadow, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... ghostly twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon us. In this purplish light Wolf Larsen's face glowed and glowed, and to my excited fancy he appeared encircled by a halo. We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement. The sultry heat had become unendurable. The sweat was standing on my forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose. I felt ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... into the valley in the rear of the troops, about a half a mile west of them. They soon massed in great numbers, and rapidly closed every avenue of escape, riding in bands and giving vent to the most horrid war-whoops and unearthly yells as they ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the act of handing a glass of champagne to the favored Overtop, when an unearthly shriek was heard, which startled the steadiest nerves. This shriek was repeated three times in quick succession, and seemed to come from the sidewalk in front of the house. There was a general rush to the window; but Wilkeson, Overtop, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... And daily from her cheek, the glow Departed, and her virgin brow Was curtained with a mournful gloom,— A shade prophetic, of the tomb; And her clear eyes, so blue and bright, Shot forth a keen, unearthly light, As if the soul that in them lay, Were weary of its garb of clay, And prayed to pass from earth away; Nor was that prayer vain, for ere The frozen monarch of the year, Had blighted, with his icy breath, A single bud in summer's wreath, They shrouded her, and made her grave, ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It seemed ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the horizon, setting in a roseate sky over a lagoon of jade. There is not a ripple. The tide is very low. Sea birds fleck with white the vast fields of mud. The peacefulness of it all under such unearthly beauty is almost disquieting. ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Hartz Mountains and the genii of the Black Forest, which Christianity had not been able entirely to exorcise, were transferred to the wild mountains and dark caverns of the Old Dominion, and the same unearthly visitants which haunted the old castles of the Rhine continued their gambols in some deserted cabin on the banks of the Sherandah (as the Shenandoah was then called). Since these men left their fatherland, a great Literature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... was on the bank, and stood exposed to the enemy's fire. With something that was like a laugh and yet had an unearthly quality about it, he threw his helmet off and stood bareheaded in the golden sunlight. 'En avant, messieurs!' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... earth. They were a species of arborescent yucca, then unknown to botanists. Many of them were forty feet in height; and their thick angular branches, and terminal fascicles of rigid leaves, outlined against the sky, formed a singular, almost an unearthly spectacle. It was unlike any other vegetation upon earth, more resembling a grove of cast-iron than ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... sleep; And yet, I must have slept, it seems; For, suddenly, I woke to hear A strange voice singing, shrill and clear, Down in a gully black and deep That cleft the beetling crag in twain. It seemed the very voice of dreams That drive hag-ridden souls in fear Through echoing, unearthly vales, To plunge in black, slow-crawling streams, Seeking to drown that cry, in vain ... Or some sea creature's voice that wails Through blind, white banks of fog unlifting To God-forgotten sailors drifting Rudderless to death ... And as I ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... and seas. His Nereids had human feet, not fishy tails like our mermaids; and if centaurs and satyrs and some other creatures of his imagination showed something of the beast within the man in their visible shape, they had little about them of the mysterious or the unearthly. It would be a great mistake to regard all these creatures as mere impersonations or abstractions. If "a pagan suckled in a ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... that Mahaud will not wake?" "Her eyes are closed as now my fist I make; She is in mystic and unearthly sleep; The potion still its power o'er her must keep." "But she will surely wake at break of ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... this time to rummage in the wood-shed for bones. We did not know how the attack began, but suppose Dinah spied him from above, and made a flying leap, lighting most unexpectedly to him upon his back, for we heard one unearthly yell, and out rushed Bruno with his unwelcome burden, her tail erect, her eyes two balls of fire, and every cruel claw, each one as sharp as a needle, buried deep in the poor dog's flesh. How he did yelp!—ki! ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... the Jains set the highest value on Tapas, but chiefly as a purification of the soul and a means of obtaining an unearthly state of pure knowledge[165]. In theory the Buddha rejected it; he taught a middle way, rejecting alike self-indulgence and self-mortification. But even Pali Buddhism admits such practices as the Dhutangas and the more extravagant sects, for instance in Tibet, allow monks to entomb themselves ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the crank, and the thing gave just one unearthly, agonizing groan and, I imagined, rolled its eyes back, and gasping for ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... couldn't. Finally Lester rose and excused himself. He and Jennie were going farther up the Nile in the morning—toward Karnak and Thebes and the water-washed temples at Phylae. They would have to start at an unearthly early hour, and he ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... was dying. Louder rose the fierce, whining yell, and its note was full of ferocity and triumph, while the hoarser cries of the white men became fewer and lower. Now Dick really saw dusky figures leaping about between him and the train. Something uttering a shrill, unearthly cry of pain crashed heavily through the bushes near him and quickly passed on. It was a wounded ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... to the horizon a solid pile of unearthly clouds came up from the southeast; their bodies were singularly and unnaturally black, and mottled with copper-color, and hemmed with a fiery yellow. And these infernal clouds towered up their heads, pressing forward as if they all strove for precedency; ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... its lambent flame, till it blazed up with a broad, red light, that, shedding a weird splendor upon all around, and lending a supernatural effect to the room's deep shadows, the picture's funereal aspect, and the unearthly pallor of the boy's countenance, startled our eyes like the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... poured in. There was activity everywhere. Water was laid on, and the men got the privilege of taking shower-baths, beside the dusty roads. Bands played; pipers retired to the woods and practised unearthly music calculated to fire the breast of the Scotsman with a lust for blood. We had rifle practice on the marvellous ranges. We had sham battles in which the men engaged so intensely that on one (p. 017) occasion, when the enemy met, one over-eager ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... longer might my plaid avail, Back to my lonely home retire, And light my lamp, and trim my fire; There ponder o'er some mystic lay, Till the wild tale had all its sway, And, in the bittern's distant shriek, I heard unearthly voices speak, And thought the wizard-priest was come To claim again his ancient home! And bade my busy fancy range, To frame him fitting shape and strange, Till from the task my brow I cleared, And smiled to think that I ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... better than Diana just how much Uncle Abe had to do with the storm, was not much disturbed by this. She slept the sleep of the just and weary, and was roused at an unearthly hour ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... flush of the cheeks; and the lips were dark with the sickly darkness of death. He lay on his back continually, apathetic and listless, his eyes closed. Now and again he opened them, and their vacant brilliancy was almost unearthly. He seemed to see horrible things, impossible to prevent, staring in front of him with the ghastly intensity ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... pure are the pleasures of piety, Drawn from the fountain of mercy and love; Endless, exhaustless, exempt from satiety, Rising unearthly, and soaring ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... not," bawled back the Russian officer. "Why should he be on deck at this unearthly hour of the morning? And if you do not instantly sheer off, I will give orders to my men to open fire upon you! What do you want? and what do you mean by sheering up alongside me in ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... soft unearthly light, like the purple of another world; touched here and there by a fairy gold; silent as dreams, majestic as visions, overwhelming as reality itself, Kate gazed on ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... into the moonlight, came the troop of Phantom Cats. This time they were led by a fierce, black Tomcat. As they came nearer they chanted with unearthly screeches:— ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... young and old, of ministers, of peers without peerages, and peerages without peers, for so the Revolution of July had ordered matters. Among a host of adventurers and journalists, in fact, Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a few paces away among the crowd. He went towards this grotesque object to see it better, half-closing his eyes with ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of their number who had entered the control building now stood shivering outside it, unable to force themselves inside again. There was a vast, detached stillness about the spaceport. It seemed the more unearthly because of the thin music of wind in the ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... been as that of low and distant thunder, into the louder rumbling of a storm which had drawn nearer and was spending its fury within the city's streets themselves. Just at this moment there arose the sound of some gigantic loaded thing, passing with unearthly noises, and high above it ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word, And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be. Come when his task of fame is wrought, Come with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought, Come in her crowning hour, and then Thy sunken eye's unearthly light To him is welcome as the sight Of sky and stars to prisoned men; Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land-wind, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl: The flash of that dilating eye Reveals too much of times gone by; Though varying, indistinct its hue, Oft with his glance the gazer rue, For in it lurks that nameless spell, Which speaks, itself ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... shone black against the fire. His head was high, his mane flying. Behind him the fire flared and the valley-wide column of smoke rolled majestically upward, and the great monuments seemed to retreat darkly and mysteriously as the flames advanced beyond them. It was a beautiful, unearthly spectacle, with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... is the third?" I asked as we stood gazing across the unearthly-looking reaches of white sand far down the blue sweep of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... only English servants that are punctual. And they don't understand luncheon, you know—they can't make out our eating at this sort of hour. You know they always dine so beastly early. Do you remember the sort of time they used to dine at Baden?—half-past five, half-past six; some unearthly hour of that kind. That 's the sort of time you dine in America. I found they 'd invite a man at half-past six. That 's what I call being in a hurry for your food. You know they always accuse the ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... that flamed out from the merry pine-torch; he didn't wonder that half the Eastern world worshiped fire. He adored it—blessed, blessed fire—the sign of God, the beacon of the human. Hark! What half-human—or rather wholly inhuman—sounds are these that alternate in unearthly measure? Surely animal nature has no voice so strident, vengeful, odious. Can it be animals of prey? No. The Virginia forests are dangerous only in snakes. Snakes? Ah, yes! He shrinks into shadow against the oak at this suggestion; snakes? the deadly moccasin, that prowls ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... but whither, who can tell? They hardly think of the whither; but go like sleep-walkers, shaken out of one land of dreams, only to find themselves in another and stranger one. All around is fantastic and unearthly; now each man starts as he sees the figures of his fellows, clothed from head to foot in golden filigree; looks up, and sees the yellow moonlight through the fronds of the huge tree-ferns overhead, as through a cloud of glittering ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the necessary amount of essence to carry him on to Salon. Meanwhile the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide clambered back to his seat, took the child on his knees, and commiserated it profoundly. Sitting there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in the midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and barren wilderness, attired in his shaggy goat-skin cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date Robinson Crusoe dandling ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... praise. Mine art may haply reproduce that wealth Of brilliant hues—the dusk hair's glimmering gold, The auroral blush, the bare breasts shining white Where the babe's warm rose-face is pressed against That fount of generous life; but ah! what craft May paint the unearthly peace upon her brow, The holy love that from her dark moist orbs Beams with no lesser glory than the eyes Of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... said, "He is with me now," the old woman had glanced round as if afraid of seeing some unearthly presence. At the last sentence she rose—for she had been kneeling by the girl—with a shake of her head, and went outside the screen, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... enough—more than enough—of pitiless publicity, for one old rock whose only offense had been to be lifting its head above the water on a December day in 1620. But no—just as the mind of man takes a singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder—now carefully mended—was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy imaginable—in which canopy, to complete the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... vanguard, with lighted torches, preceded it; it was surrounded by special attendants, and was followed by detachments of night-patrols on foot and mounted. The size and shape of this structure, which was escorted with such pomp and precaution—the silence that prevailed—the unearthly hour, all helped to give an air of mystery to the proceedings. At last, having passed through the principal thoroughfares, it arrived at the Champ de Mars, where it was placed in an enclosure prepared for ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... In the Suit of Feathers, for instance, the fairy wears a hideous mask and a wig of scarlet elf locks: the suit of feathers itself is left entirely to the imagination; and the heavenly dance is a series of whirls, stamps, and jumps, accompanied by unearthly yells and shrieks; while the vanishing into thin air is represented by pirouettes something like the motion of a dancing dervish. The intoning of the recitative is unnatural and unintelligible, so much so that not ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... perceived that it was a marriage-festival. The procession was led by a long orang-outang of a man, in a straw hat and white dimity bobcoat, playing on an asthmatic clarionet, from which he contrived to blow unearthly sounds, ever and anon squeaking off at right angles from his tune, and winding up with a grand flourish on the guttural notes. Behind him, led by his little boy, came the blind fiddler, his honest features ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... cruiser lying in wait for the two globular vessels. Looking through an extraordinarily powerful telescope with the eyes of their prisoner, they saw them approach, all unsuspecting. DuQuesne recognized all five persons in the Skylark and Dunark and Sitar in the Kondal; such was that unearthly optical instrument and so clear was the impression upon the mind before him. They saw the attack and the battle. They saw the Skylark throw off her zone of force and attack; saw this one survivor standing directly in line with a huge projector-spring, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... this movement as to have already ordered the head of the frigate to be turned in its former course, when, struck by the unearthly cry of the last tones uttered by his commander, he bent his head, and beheld the venerable seaman driven through the air, his hat still waving, his gray hair floating in the wind, and his eye set in the wild look ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... great slimy coils of weed had trailed, like them eight-armed squids that clutch men and drag 'em down. As we came nigher, the very sun clouded over, and all was chill, and gray, and dismal, and the wreck itself looked so unearthly, with no sign or sound of life about it, that I guess I wasn't the only one who felt queer when we ran alongside ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Milton. It requires little imagination to transform the uncouth rocks all around the throne, into attendant demons. Indeed, throughout the cave, Martin's pictures are continually brought to mind, by the unearthly effect of intense gleams of light on black masses of shadow. In this Council Chamber, the rocks, with singular appropriateness, change from an imitation of Gothic architecture, to that of the Egyptian. The dark, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... unearthly hour of a March morning and the first thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "Venezia!" and I was startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags, and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of men in hotel caps yelling: "Danieli!" "Britannia!" ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Rosenblatt disappeared, and they could hear him battering at the door. Old Malkarski laughed a wild, unearthly laugh. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made the lantern jump and tremble! "I shall wake ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... breakfast at an unearthly hour and went off early. Weather seems to make no difference to him, but he will be ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... I ever experienced in America. Last year at this time I was upon the Catskill Mountains, and was aroused at an unearthly hour by the discharge of a cannon, whose reverberation was something appalling, and made me doubt if I was not shot. The hotel was graced with the presence of some thirty or forty children, whose fond ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... the crystal moon encompassed by golden bands, crossing and intersecting one another like those of a sidereal sphere, gleamed as with an inward and unearthly light, swinging slowly upon ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Sproul arrived at the town office next morning in a frame of mind distinctly unamiable. Though his house was far out of the village, the unearthly racket of the night had floated up to him—squawking horns, and clanging bells, and exploding powder. The hundred cannons at sunrise brought a vigorous word for each reverberation. At an early hour Hiram Look had come over, gay in his panoply as chief of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... of the shot was followed by an unearthly scream from the tree, and Phil and Dave saw the wild animal slip down from a branch and then try to regain its footing. Then Dave caught up one of the rifles and blazed away, and the beast dropped to the ground, where it twisted and snarled and yelped in a fashion that served to drive ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... with the artist. Let him feel strongly, and see raptly—that is, in complete detachment. Let him cast this, his rapt vision and his intense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that form will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation too rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a "sense of beauty." But let the artist aim direct ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... child is perfectly beautiful," said she; "to-morrow I mean to dress her up and have her likeness taken." I asked her to get me up in bed and let me take her a minute. She objected, and I urged her a good deal, till at last she consented. The moment I took her I was struck by her unearthly, absolutely angelic expression; and, not having strength enough to help it, burst out crying bitterly, and cried all the afternoon while I was ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... river-gods of the unplaying fountain. I stand in the black night of the old cedar's shade. On any other day no possible consideration would have induced me to venture within the jurisdiction of its inky arms after nightfall; to-day, I feel as if no earthly or unearthly thing would have power to scare me. How long I stay, I do not know. Now and then, I put up my hands to my face, to ascertain whether my cheeks and eyes feel less swollen and burning; whether the moist and searching night-air is restoring me to my own likeness. At length, I ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... and rifles in the hands of all parties, the Japs being still covered; while beyond, at sea, the two boats cleaving the water, their objective point the shadowy schooner, looking like a phantom ship, made a picture of weird excitement in an unearthly setting. The seconds seemed like hours. The row-boat was nearer the schooner and was traveling fast, but the launch was speeding even more rapidly, throwing up a high wave at the bow. It looked as though both boats would reach the schooner's side ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... which he said constantly—for he carried his beads loose in his trousers' pockets that he might tell them as he walked the streets—transformed themselves into coronals of flowers of such vague unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and odourless as they were nameless. He offered up each of his three daily chaplets that his soul might grow strong in each of the three theological virtues, in faith in the Father Who had created him, in hope ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... alone with the emperor. In summer, often at the unearthly hour of six in the morning! The meal is a substantial one, American and English, rather than Continental in fashion, and she is apt to declare that it is the only time throughout the entire day when she is able to discuss matters of a private or domestic character with her husband. The imperial ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the rocks there," Mr. Hastings observed. "I think that she wants to sail you over to Misery Island. We get some unearthly meal there at ten o'clock and come back by moonlight. It is a sort of torture which we always inflict upon our guests. My wife and I will follow in ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had the talk with Lolita again in the room with the curtains. It was nine when he set out for the short-cut under the moon, dazed by his increasing torture. The brilliant disk, blurring to the eye, showed the mountains unearthly plain, beautiful, and tall in the night. By-and-by a mule fell and could not rise, and Genesmere decided it was as well for all to rest again. The next he knew it was blazing sunshine, and the sky at the same time bedded invisible in black clouds. And when his hand reached ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... should buy it if the price was five shillings,' said Williams; 'but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it. I can't conceive why. It's a wretched engraving, and there aren't even any ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... with a thud. Also from behind it a most unmistakable human grunt emanated, the sort of involuntary notice a person gives when he has the wind suddenly knocked out of him. Then right in my ears there sounded the most weird, unearthly cry that I ever heard; it was positively uncanny. A cold chill went through ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... Davis sang no discordant strain, nor did his pen trace one angry word. On the contrary, he summoned his whole energies to the task of harmonising the jarring elements around him. His inspiration rose to that unearthly height, whereon guidance becomes prophecy. Great, strong and unselfish convictions, entertained holily and uttered sincerely, are assurances of new creations, pledges of the destiny to which they tend. In this spirit, spoke and sang Thomas Davis during ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... unearthly chorus of yells behind him had not even startled the boy or caused him to cease his efforts until he had completed what he had set out to do. This finished, Tad turned a smiling face to the three brown-faced young men who were regarding ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... touched with an unearthly glory that daunts the mind!" Then her expression changed. "But the sight is too overpowering to talk about. I would have been more useful had I looked for smoke, as ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... a dream-picture he saw the figure of a girl standing on the steps of the terrace in front of the hotel. The searchlight discovered her and lingered upon her. She stood in the brilliant line of light, a splendid vision of almost unearthly beauty. Her neck and arms were bare, curved with the exquisite grace of a Grecian statue. Her face was turned towards the light—a marvellous face, touched with a faint, triumphant smile. She was dressed in a robe of pure white that fell around ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... on any other part of the road. The end of the convent, overhanging the northern brow of the gorge, and looking like a mass of that ferruginous and melancholy rock which gave the whole region so wild and so unearthly an aspect, soon became visible, carved and moulded into the shape of a rude human habitation. The last pitch was so steep as to be formed into a sort of stair-way, up which the groaning mules toiled ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... disturb her, Joe," exclaimed Mrs. Abbot; "it's really too bad, at this unearthly hour. Besides, we shall be quite comfortable ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... whose warm head out-flew That sweetest of all songs, that ever new, That aye refreshing, pure deliciousness, Coming ever to bless The wanderer by moonlight? to him bringing Shapes from the invisible world, unearthly singing From out the middle air, from flowery nests, And from the pillowy silkiness that rests Full in the speculation of the stars. Ah! surely he had burst our mortal bars; Into some wond'rous region he had gone, To search for ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... a deep and almost unearthly voice, and with a degree of excitement that was probably increased by the intensity with which the solitary had lately been brooding over his peculiar opinions, and the terrible scenes in which he had so recently been an actor. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... expectation of beholding Dhananjaya. And it came to pass that all of a sudden there blew a wind from the north-east and brought a celestial lotus of a thousand petals and effulgent as the sun. And Panchali saw that pure and charming lotus of unearthly fragrance, brought by the wind and left on the ground. And having obtained that excellent and beautiful lotus, that blessed one became exceedingly delighted, O king, and addressed Bhimasena in the following words, 'Behold, O Bhima, this most beautiful unearthly flower ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain, But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire: Something unearthly, which they deem not of, Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre, Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move In hearts all rocky now the late remorse ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... broke the silence, wild, mournful, unearthly. Meg shivered, and sat up straight. Judy's brow, grew damp, her eyes dilated, her ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... of a tool-car in the subway underneath the cemetery, and the hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche of the tunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it was gruesome and unearthly in the night-quiet. ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the house with its soft movements and tender singing. Lastly, he remembered his strange conviction that somewhere in the great building, possibly in his own corridor, there were other occupants, other life, Beings of unearthly scale waiting the given moment to appear, summoned ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... came to him out of the darkness, and it seemed to him as if the sea and the night and the sky were wailing over the loss of his Sheila. He walked away from the house and up the hill behind. Led by the sound of the pipes, that grew louder and more unearthly as he approached, he found himself at length on a bit of high table-land overlooking the sea, where Sheila had had a rude bench of iron and wood fixed into the rock. On this bench sat a little old man, humpbacked and bent, and with long white hair falling down to his shoulders. He ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... remarked. 'But there is something dramatic in the notion of the ghostly influence making itself felt by the relations in succession, as they one after another enter the fatal room—until the one chosen relative comes who will see the Unearthly Creature, and know the terrible truth. Material for a play, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... got into the saddle again, the enemy began a brisk shelling. The shell skimmed the roofs of the houses, with an unearthly scream; and one struck a chimney which it hurled down with a tremendous crash. In spite of all, however, the streets were filled with young women, who continued to walk quietly, or to trip along ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... rolling towards me I gave a loud shriek of terror. The scene vanished, and I found myself in a wide desert full of barren rocks and high mountains. As I was approaching one of the rocks, in which there was a large cave, my foot stumbled and I fell. Just then I heard a deep growl, and saw by the unearthly light of his own fiery eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang and the rocks echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang towards me. 'Well, masther, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... to mind the general tendency of the natural man to multiply to himself the objects of religious worship, and to create, by the help of superstition, and the delusive workings of the imagination, a variety of unearthly beings whose wrath he must appease, or whose favour he may conciliate; when I reflect how great is the temptation in unenlightened or fraudulent teachers to accommodate the dictates of truth to the prejudices and desires of those whom ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... sir—just through," they replied, staring round in search of the strange, unearthly voice that addressed them; for the absence of his teeth had not at all improved the conversational tones of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... gathered in such a manner is that it be reproduced exactly as first delivered. The man who told a woman that a critic had pronounced her singing "heavenly" had good intentions but he was not entirely accurate in changing to that nattering term the critic's actual adjective "unearthly." The frequency with which alleged statements published in the daily press are contradicted by the supposed utterers indicates how usual such misrepresentation is, though it may be honestly unintentional. The speaker before an audience must be scrupulously correct in quoting. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... now given to the interest of the assembled and distinct crowds that had witnessed these startling incidents. Scarcely had the wretched man gained the protection of the soldiery, when a shriek divided the air, so wild, so piercing, and so unearthly, that even the warrior of the Fleur de lis seemed to lose sight of his victim, in the harrowing interest produced by that dreadful scream. All turned their eyes for a moment in the quarter whence it proceeded; when presently, from behind the groups of Canadians crowning ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... this was an undeniable fact; and since the human mind dotes on objects of wonder, you can understand the worldwide excitement caused by this unearthly apparition. As for relegating it to the realm of fiction, that charge had ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... for gathering of power, no helpless ebb of discouraged recoil; but alike through bright day and lulling night, the never-pausing plunge, and never-fading flash, and never-hushing whisper, and, while the sun was up, the ever-answering glow of unearthly aquamarine, ultramarine, violet-blue, gentian-blue, peacock-blue, river-of-paradise blue, glass of a painted window melted in the sun, and the witch of the Alps flinging the spun tresses of it forever from ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily through the water. Its solemn isolation, its unearthly color, and its flamelike outline fill the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... To mingle with a midnight dream, And have the holy hazel trees To play above me in the breeze, And smell the thorny eglantine; For there the white owls all night long In the scented gloom divine Hear the wild, strange, tuneless song Of faerie voices, thin and high As the bat's unearthly cry, And the measure of their shoon Dancing, dancing, under the moon, Until, amid the pale of dawn The wandering stars begin to swoon. . . . Ah, leave the world and ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies; portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special popularity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... darkened box, with its lonely bouquet of pink roses—lonely to all save him, who alone saw the hand which held them—of Feurgeres in his sanctuary, bending lovingly over that chair, empty to all save him, Feurgeres, with that smile of unearthly happiness upon his lips—calm, debonair and steadfast. This was the man who had trusted me. I ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the boys who thought to snatch up a club as he ran. But now the unearthly sounds came from the rear, instead of ahead of them. The boys wheeled abruptly, only to hear right in front of them a dismaying chorus ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... brute was that! In bulk and height it appeared to be half as big again as any of its tribe which I had known in all my life's experience. It was enormous, unearthly; a survivor perhaps of some ancient species that lived before the Flood, or at least a very giant of its kind. Its grey-black sides were scarred as though with fighting. One of its huge tusks, much worn at the end, for evidently it was ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... should not be surprised to find that art was an expression of the same thing. Anyway, both seem to express emotions different from and transcending the emotions of life. Certainly both have the power of transporting men to superhuman ecstasies; both are means to unearthly states of mind. Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world. Rightly, therefore, do we regard art and religion as ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... and some rays of glory were falling on old Treffy's face as he lay on the bed. They seemed to Christie as if they came straight from the golden city, there was something so bright and so unearthly about them. And Christie fancied that Treffy smiled as he lay on the bed. It might be fancy, but he liked to think ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... of shadowy brown, like distant tree Or far-off hillocks on a moonlight lea. The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold, The viewless dew falls lightly on the wold, The gentle air, that softly sweeps the leaves, A strain of faint, unearthly music weaves; As when the harp of heaven remotely plays, Or cygnet's wail—or song of sorrowing fays That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale, On wings of woven air in some ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... alone remained standing; but at that moment the Englishman rose, and appeared determined to fix Olavida's regards by a gaze like that of fascination. Olavida rocked, reeled, grasped the arm of a page, and at last, closing his eyes for a moment, as if to escape the horrible fascination of that unearthly glare (the Englishman's eyes were observed by all the guests, from the moment of his entrance, to effuse a most fearful and preternatural luster), exclaimed, "Who is among us?—Who?—I cannot utter a blessing while he is here. I cannot feel one. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... fit for all acts of incantation for injuring foes. Such flowers as are possessed of keen energy, as are painful to the touch, as grow on trees and plants having thorns, and as are either bloody-red or black, should be offered to (evil) spirits and unearthly beings. Such flowers as gladden the mind and heart, as are very agreeable when pressed, and as are of beautiful form, have been said, O lord, to be worthy of being offered to human beings. Such flowers as grow on cemeteries and crematoria, or in places dedicated to the deities, should not be ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the ceaseless discharge of heavy guns; the baleful glare of portfires and fireballs flung down the hill by the enemy to enable them more clearly to ascertain our position, and the incessant flash of the cannon, cast a fierce, unearthly light upon the scene. Again, again, and again came the hissing storm of iron, each time with more deadly effect; the ground before and around us was ploughed and gashed by the rushing shot; our men were swept away before it like withered leaves before a hurricane; the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... party of foreigners of this size that had ever honored the village with a visit. And in addition to that we had come at an unearthly hour. ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as "Master Ughtred." "Master" was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the early train from Providence to Boston; and for this purpose rose at two o'clock in the morning. Everything around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken only by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, serene, midsummer's night,—the sky was without a cloud,—the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral lustre, but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... consisted in frightening these spirits away. Usually the priests would make the loudest and most discordant noises possible. They would blow horns, beat upon rude drums, clash cymbals, and in the meantime utter the most unearthly yells. If the noise-remedy failed, they would implore the aid ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... which, like the others, had shown itself as a colored picture moving to and fro upon the darkened wall of the tablinum, vanished. The voice of the great Macedonian sounded hollow and unearthly, but what he said had interested the emperor deeply and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no longer distinguish any sign of a trail; but the breed bent steadily ahead. Once or twice an owl whirred suddenly low over their heads; and somewhere far off a loon guffawed insanely. In the end their guide, to cheer his own soul, lifted up his voice in the strident, unearthly chant of the Crees; and it only needed this to add the last touch of unreality to their eerie journey. They began to feel like spirits after death, hurried in the darkness they knew ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... way his anxiety is caused by the uncertainty that anyone will come to his rescue; while in my case I did not even know there was anyone to come. But when I looked up at the moon and remembered its erratic climate and our wild, unearthly journey, I could not suppress a feeling of satisfaction with my changed condition. If the doctor had only been with me we would have been able to extract considerable comfort from our surroundings. But, as it was, I was very lonesome, and whatever ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... place, I heard the strangest sound coming from the rocks. It was a deep muffled groaning, so eerie and unearthly that for the moment I stood and shivered. Then I remembered my river of yesterday. It must be above this place that it descended into the earth, and in the hush of dawn the sound was naturally louder. No wonder old Coetzee had been afraid of devils. It reminded me ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... won a warmer corner in my heart than others, but they were all superior human beings, godly, unearthly, denizens of a world that had been ages ago and would come back in the remote future when Messiah should ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... discharge the gun in his fall. Thereupon a blood—red glare shot up into the cold blue sky, as if a volcano had burst forth from beneath the mighty deep, followed by a roar, and a shattering crash, and a mingling of unearthly cries and groans, and a concussion of the air, and of the water, as if our whole broadside had been fired at once. Then a solitary splash here, and a dip there, and short sharp yells, and low choking bubbling moans, as the hissing ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... eyes gleamed with an unearthly glare. "Think you I have not thought of that?" he said. "Try and tell of my influence over you, seek to speak one word against me, and mark the result. I defy ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... dead. One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold, had chanced to fall into the grave. This accident had precipitated the closing act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. Guided by the unearthly din, and the broad glare of flames fed with heaps of fat pine logs, the priests soon reached the spot, and saw what seemed, in their eyes, an image of Hell. All around blazed countless fires, and the air resounded with discordant ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... are ordinary people: Charlotte and the Captain ordinary in their good sense and self-control, Edward ordinary in his moral flabbiness and his foolish infatuation. His death, to be sure, is unthinkable for such a man and does but testify to the unearthly attraction with which the girl is invested by Goethe's art. The figure of Ottilie, like that of her spiritual sister Mignon, is irradiated by a light that never was on sea or land. She is a creature ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the face of an unearthly silence from the pit, the real advance began. At first with large intervals between, the bales slowly converged as the circle drew in. At a hundred yards they were quite close together, so that Tyee's order to halt was passed along in whispers. The pit showed no sign of ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... shocked at the change wrought in seven years on Brent's form and features. Always thin, he had now become so attenuated as to have reached almost a point of emaciation,—his dark eyes, sunk far back under his shelving brows, blazed with a feverish brilliancy which gave an almost unearthly expression to his pale drawn features, and his hand, thin, long, and delicate as a woman's, clenched and unclenched itself nervously when he spoke, with an involuntary force of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... occupation of tearing off the rotten flesh of the dead sheep, and swallowing it greedily. Dozens of vultures hovered overhead, and, watching their opportunity, dived down every now and again and tore a piece of flesh from the carcass with their powerful beaks, and then hurried off, making unearthly noises which, joined to the howls of the jackals, made the ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... burgeon, and each wears anew His wonted colours, ere the sun have yok'd Beneath another star his flamy steeds; Thus putting forth a hue, more faint than rose, And deeper than the violet, was renew'd The plant, erewhile in all its branches bare. Unearthly was the hymn, which then arose. I understood it not, nor to the end Endur'd the harmony. Had I the skill To pencil forth, how clos'd th' unpitying eyes Slumb'ring, when Syrinx warbled, (eyes that paid So dearly for their watching,) then ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... evening bells were ringing faintly and mournfully in a church across the harbor. Behind me, in the kitchen, I heard my wife singing. Sometimes now her spirits were fitfully high, and then she would sing the old songs of her girlhood. But even in her singing was something strange, as if a wailing, unearthly cry rang through it. Nothing about her was ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... came quickly toward him, struck Dale as almost unearthly. She was within a few yards of him when she saw him. A rich colour flushed her face as she recognized him ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself again. I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French farmers' girls tugged home at dusk up that ghostly roadway slow-footed, reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love—French lads and sweethearts—down some long obliterated path beside ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... the inn, Waymark walked first with Ida, and Mr. O'Gree followed with Sally. Egger brought up the rear; he had relapsed into a dreamy mood, and his mind seemed occupied with unearthly things. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... said the clerk thickly, and with that a roar of unearthly laughter broke out all around them. Then the now terrified men observed that their boisterous friends were dancing about in glee and each had turned into a leering demon. The house in which they had passed the night had completely disappeared, and the road in which ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... and held together as with a vice; their limbs stiff and rigid or wholly relaxed; their teeth would be set; they would go through the paroxysms of choking and strangulation, and gasp for breath, bringing froth and blood from the mouth; they would utter all sorts of screams in unearthly tones; their eyes remain fixed, sometimes bereft of all light and expression, cold and stony, and sometimes kindled into flames of passion; they would pass into the state of somnambulism, without aim or conscious direction in their movements, looking ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... questioning her and listening with affected interest to her mechanical answers, while trying to fathom those unsmiling, unearthly eyes that looked so ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... least general favourite. It shows youth in a certain inequality, in a slight overdose of ornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere even in Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisite rhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in the dramatists had been snatches ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the next morning I was awoke by a most unearthly sound. It was as if all the cats on all the roofs of Santa Chiara were sharpening their claws and wailing their battle-cries. Presently out of the noise came a kind of music—very slow, solemn, and melancholy. The notes ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... truth, in a world inhabited by the creatures of the imagination of those by whom he is constantly surrounded—a domain in which his views of life and things in general are in a miserable minority—a phantom world of ideal forms and unearthly voices and mysterious sounds, incessantly disputing his authority, and commanding his patients in terms claiming supernatural force to do those things which he orders them to leave undone, and to leave undone those ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... smoking many pipes, all night long, by the bedside of the unearthly being that tossed and panted until it was apparently wearied out. Then we learned by the low, regular breathing ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... but we who know her understand it. She never laughs that unearthly laugh when her heart is at ease. I doubt if you have ever met such a person. I think the world has but one Alice. She is very young, very impressible, and some think very eccentric, very passionate and romantic to frenzy. There is something which impels me to ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... needed than the cold statement of the stages in that great story, of the steps which conducted to the summit of the pyramid only to be descended on the other side. Such a statement is itself the sermon on an earthly glory that was almost unearthly in the vastness of its aims and of its gains, and on a humiliation that restored humanity to reason and reaffirmed the inexorable lesson. As the mere names of battles on the commemorative arch appeal to the memories, the ambitions, and the passions of a military race with a monumental ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... tangible that he may know definitely the point at which they impinge upon his consciousness. In Scott's work the point of contact is made clear: the author brings his atmosphere not from another world but from the past, and with all its strangeness it has no unearthly quality. In general the romance of his nature is rather taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the poems and the novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament; and the surprising thing is that such ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... this handkerchief, which I picked up. I hastened after her to restore it, but before I could overtake them they had rung the bell at your door and were already in the house. I did not like to ring at such an unearthly hour for fear of disturbing you. Yesterday I was so busy I couldn't come; however, here I am at last, and here's the handkerchief." So saying, Lecoq laid the handkerchief on the table, and turned as if to go, when the concierge ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... are any more verses, Uncle Eb, keep them until we've had supper, or breakfast, or whatever you like to call a meal at this unearthly hour. I'm so hungry that I could chew nails!" cried Cyrus, springing from behind the bushes, and reaching the, camp-fire with a ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... and lonely school-room, with one fire for my solace, and one tenpenny dip for my enlightenment. How awful and supernatural seemed every passing sound that beat upon my anxious ears! Everything round me seemed magnified—the massive shadows were as the wombs teeming with unearthly phantoms—the whistle of the wintry blasts against the windows, voiced the half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,— often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched by ghostly ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... danged!" he said as softly as if he were saying something quite different. "Tha' does know how to get at a chap—tha' does! Tha's fair unearthly, ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... made this change to be something so high, disinterested, and superhuman, so removed from all natural and common habits and feelings, that the most earnest and devoted, whose whole life had been a constant travail of endeavor, a tissue of almost unearthly disinterestedness, often lived and died with only a glimmering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... heroically, and won Washington's admiration by their bravery; but the English soldiers acted like cowards. Panic-stricken in the first place, they did not recover from their consternation during the engagement. The unearthly yells of the savages, which they had never heard before, seemed to terrify them even more than the whistling of bullets. They lost self-control, disregarded the orders of their officers, and ran hither and thither like frightened sheep. Sixty-three of the eighty-five English officers were ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked upon the short, straight, grass-grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... remember that they were two to one, and would be unhampered by any feeling of chivalry, if we did come to blows. I made up my mind to try to scare them—and suddenly I raised the most horrible, terrifying, unearthly yell I could think of, and at the same time fired both barrels of one gun quickly in ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... with an unearthly fire burning in his eye. He commenced somewhat calmly, but the smothered excitement began more and more to play upon his features and thrill in the tones of his voice. The tendons of his neck stood ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare, aglow, the openings of the communal houses facing it loomed dark, like the doors of tombs. A ghastly, unearthly silence greeted Trevison's call after the echoes died away; the upper tier of adobe boxes seemed to nod in ghostly derision as his gaze swept them. There was no sound, no movement, except the regular cough of his own laboring ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a power which did not depend upon swords or ships or the natural tools and weapons of men. No, they had strengths which were unearthly, to give them superiority in all but one way—numbers. Though the Foanna had their warriors and servants, as Ross had seen on the beach, they, themselves, were of another race—a very old and dying race of which few remained. How many, their ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... the sighing of the grasses outside and the murmur of the birches in the bluff, until the doleful howl of a coyote stole faintly out of the night. Again the beast sent its cry out upon the wind, and the girl trembled as she listened. The unearthly wail seemed charged with augury, and every ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... little Giles came running back to her, producing unearthly notes on the instrument, and telling her that father had taken the gipsy into his workshop, and said they would teach him bird's songs ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Rupert rose and followed him, his pistol in hand. Count Albert passed through the mighty wall and disappeared in the unearthly light. Rupert followed mechanically. He felt the crushing of the mortar beneath his feet, the roughness of the jagged wall where he rested his ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... those who waited outside as Vengeance enthroned, expectation began to take on a creepy quality. The besiegers were preparing against themselves a host, not of men, but of frightful spectres, of famished maniacs, of unearthly ghouls, who would clutch and tear with claws any man that stood between them and a morsel of food. And the fury of desperation sharpened with each succeeding irony of a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle |
