"Windless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him swaying a little, and looking about him at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady stars overhead, until the windless cold began to touch him through his clothes on the bare skin. Even in his bemused ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Night windless, except few occasional gusts. Stars veiled. Grand zodiacal light (now the regular ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... sent out a big boom of logs with a hired stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves before the break came, six feet on the ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from my sleep. The sun was still high—the air lulled and windless. Then through the shafts and down the hill there glided in that clear waking daylight, a grisly shape like that which I have heard our maidens say the witch-hags, sometimes seen in the forest, assume; yet in truth, it seemed neither of man nor woman. It turned its face once towards ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... lowing in the afternoon when milking-time draws nigh: but it was ever shriller than the one, and fuller than the other; for it changed at whiles, though after the first sound of it, it did not rise or fall, because the eve was windless. You might hear at once that for all it was afar, it was a great and mighty sound; nor did any that hearkened doubt what it was, but all knew it for the blast of the great war-horn of the Elkings, whose Roof lay up Mirkwood-water next to the Roof of ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... the deserted street, treading on air. It was a bland summer night, windless, moon-washed, odorous with garden-scents; the moon, nearing its full, was a silver egg set on end—("Leda-hatched," he termed it; "one may look for the advent of Queen Heleine ere dawn"); and the ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... worse in the afternoon. The quiet sun blazed down through the clear windless air and made a furnace of our hole in the sand. And all about us were the explosions of rifles and yells of the Indians. Only once in a while did father permit a single shot from the trench, and at that only by our best marksmen, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... again! What stress of pilgrimage Through roaring waterways and cities of men, What sojourn among folk beyond the ken Of mortal seafarers in homelier seas, More trodden lands! Sure, none had earned his ease As he, that windless morning when he drew Near silent Ithaca, gray in misty blue, And wondered on the old familiar scene, Which was to him as it had never been Aforetime. Say, had he but had inkling That in this hour all that long wandering Of his was self-ensured, had he been bold To plan and ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... morning I strolled about the picturesque point. It was a windless, hazy day. An early frost had already clothed a number of the trees with their gorgeous autumnal mantles, the forerunners of Indian summer, the most glorious season of ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... blue of the sky and the brown of the wood, there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... with undesirous eyes To what may lie beyond it. Sets your star, O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night, Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar, Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light, Returning, shall give back the golden hours, Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places, And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers, The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-faces O heart, in ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... had been clear, warm and windless. Even so we suffered severely with the cold; since the chilled air, of course, rolled down the hillsides into the hollow along the bed of the brook, till the valley was filled with thick mist and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... it lit the little boat, and it did something more—it revealed a thickening of the atmosphere. They were running into a sea fog, one of those thin white fogs that come down in the Mediterranean on windless days. The blinding glare ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... and round the corner, immediately in front of them was the long reach of deep water up which, even when the tide was at its lowest, an ocean-going steamer could penetrate if it knew the windings of the channel. To-day, in the windless, cold calm of mid-winter, though the sun was brilliant in a blue sky overhead, an opaque mist, thick as cotton-wool, lay over the surface of the water, and, taking the winding road through the woods, which, following the estuary, turned the point, they presently ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... calm and windless, but now it seemed as if a sharp breeze was setting in toward the doomed house, fanning the flames and making them roar, while overhead, and rapidly increasing in volume, floated a huge cloud of smoke, spreading and spreading ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... off by the water's edge on a tour of the pools. They were three in number; sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the forest protecting these windless sheets of water; perhaps it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred the imagination. Who knows? The spirit of the scene was there. The spirit of deep and unalterable peace. The peace ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... was one of quiet beauty; there was a clear sky and a windless air; the banks of the river—high and dense masses of vegetation— glowed with colour; the broad sweep of water was like a sheet of molten silver and shimmered and eddied to the play of the gleaming paddles. As they moved easily and swiftly along, the paddlemen, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... it." How had she guessed? It was delicious, at any rate, to know that she thought of him; and Taffy felt how delicious it was, while he fitted and hammered the shoe on Aide-de-camp's hoof, she standing by with a candle in either hand, the flame scarcely quivering in the windless night. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... station on the top of the long slope and close under the bluff, not only shone abroad from every window like a place of festival, but from the great chimney at the west end poured forth a coil of smoke so thick and so voluminous, that it hung for miles along the windless night air, and its shadow lay far abroad in the moonlight upon the glittering alkali. As we continued to draw near, besides, a regular and panting throb began to divide the silence. First it seemed to me like the beating of a heart; and next it put into my mind the thought of some giant, smothered ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... glow of pious eve and me, Lost moments, thick as clouds of summer flies, Specks of old time, which else one could not see, Made manifest in the windless calm, arise. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... softly thy strings, Musician, The minutes mount to hours; Frost on the windless casement weaves A labyrinth of flowers; Ghosts linger in the darkening air, Hearken at the open door; Music hath called them, dreaming, ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... sunshine beryl-bright And windless; yea, think as I might, I could not say, Even to within years' measure, when One would be at my side ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... smooth and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes, beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our feet. A little way down, where the lake narrowed, we saw Laura and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... In the waiting windless dark, Lewis Stillman pressed into the building-front shadows along Wilshire Boulevard. Breathing softly, the automatic poised and ready in his hand, he advanced with animal stealth toward Western, gliding over the night-cool concrete, past ravaged ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... holding her breath. It was a silent night, windless and calm. The trees had no voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer musical with the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it were not, murmured so softly that these two could not hear it where they stood. And now, in this dark silence, they heard a faint sound. It was surely ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... whole days under the leafy covert of the forest with our books and music. This occurred during those rare days in this country, when the sun mounts his etherial throne in unclouded majesty, and the windless atmosphere is as a bath of pellucid and grateful water, wrapping the senses in tranquillity. When the clouds veiled the sky, and the wind scattered them there and here, rending their woof, and strewing its fragments through the aerial plains—then we rode out, and sought new spots ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... went out to Smolny. Going up the long wooden sidewalk from the outer gate I saw the first thin, hesitating snow-flakes fluttering down from the grey, windless sky. "Snow!" cried the soldier at the door, grinning with delight. "Good for the health!" Inside, the long, gloomy halls and bleak rooms seemed deserted. No one moved in all the enormous pile. A deep, uneasy sound came to my ears, and ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... I had followed at his heels. But now from somewhere among the broken ground immediately in front of us there came one last despairing yell, and then a dull, heavy thud. We halted and listened. Not another sound broke the heavy silence of the windless night. ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... a jam had occurred at this point, and cakes of ice were up-ended in snow-covered confusion. After several hard falls, Smoke drew out his candle and lighted it. Those in the rear hailed it with acclaim. In the windless air it burned easily, and he led ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... a calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the last suggestions of the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,—all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... a vast shower-bath, over the deserted town. The night was dark and windless: the street lit glimmeringly from end to end, lamps, house-windows, and the reflections in the rain-pools all contributing. From a public-house on the other side of the way, I heard a harp twang and a doleful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stood wide open, for the day was hot and windless. Archie went softly in. He fell on his knees by his dying wife, he folded her to his heart, he whispered into her fast-closing ears the despairing words of love, reawakened, when all repentance was too late. He called ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas of the life ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... cried a voice, and Kalman began to sing. He had a beautiful face with regular clean-cut features, and the fair hair and blue grey eyes often seen in South Eastern Russia. As he sang, his face reflected the passing shades of feeling in his heart as a windless lake the cloud and sunlight of a summer sky. The song was a kind of Hungarian "Young Lochinvar." The soldier lover, young and handsome, is away in the wars; the beautiful maiden, forced into a hateful union with a wealthy land owner, old and ugly, stands before ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... patch of floor in front of him lay cross-bars of sunlight, which flowed in through the casement window. The sky overhead was cloudless, while the murky belt on the horizon was not visible from the cottage door. In the windless calm no leaf seemed to stir in the forest around. The cottage clock in the corner ticked the passing moments; the wild cry of the "curry fowl" was heard now and again from the lake; there was no other sound in the ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... The woman took refuge in a clump of bamboos and pulled down one of the bamboos to conceal herself. The Mahommedans surrounded the clump but when they saw the one bamboo which the woman held shaking, while all the rest were still—for it was a windless night—they concluded that it was an evil spirit that they were pursuing and ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... the windless road Spake each to one another, "Whence came that blood upon your hand No other hand may cover?" "From breaking of a woman's heart, Brother, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... brains were full of battle, they were made Of virtue, brave men; now in their brains shudder Minds that cringe like children burnt with fever. Often they stood to face the enemies' ranks All upright as a flame in windless air, Wearing their arm and the bright skill of swords Like spirits clad in flashing fire of heaven; And now in darken'd rooms they lie afraid And whimper if the nurse moves suddenly.— Ah God, that such an irresistible fiend, Pain, in the beautiful housing of man's ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... rain, pouring out of a windless sky, and spattering up from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in another world—where one did have interviews. How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, nothing alive ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... into a garden all of faint-hued flowers. There bloomed no scarlet here, nor blue, nor yellow; but white and lavender and purest purple. Here, also, like torches of the sun, stood poplars each by each in the windless air, and the impenetrable darkness of ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... silent. Every one had long since gone to bed, and not a sound was to be heard. The night was almost windless too, and not even the murmur of the waves in the Bay of St. Ia, which could be faintly heard outside, reached him. He felt himself ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... aristocracy of genius. To find the just word for all our emotions, to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative, to feel that it is our lot to keep life's gladdest promises, to see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as stars in a windless pool—these, indeed, are no ordinary pleasures. Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with bitteress. We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer for our rare adventure. We have been permitted ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the report. Revolver shots had of late cracked ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... I feel around my heart the flush Of that calm, windless morning, glorified With summer sunshine brilliant and intense! A tiny boy, scarcely ten summers old, Along blue Esk, under the whispering trees, And by the crumbling banks, daisy-o'ergrown, A cloudless, livelong day I trode with one Whose soul was in his pastime, and whose skill Upon its shores ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... midsummer instead of late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn grass-plot near the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... shops boomed out the fire alarm, and almost at the the same instant a red glow, capped by a rolling nimbus of sooty oil smoke, rose to beacon the destruction already begun in the shop yards. And while the roar of the siren was still jarring upon the windless night air, the electric-light circuits were cut out, leaving the yards and the Crow's Nest in darkness, and the frantic battle for the trains to be lighted only by the moon and the lurid glow of destruction spreading slowly under ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... and pointed to the crest of the hill they had just descended. Above the pines circling the lower slope above the bare ledges of rock and outcrop, a column of thick black smoke was rising straight as a spire in the windless air. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The clouds have broken and the heavens burn To hollow highways, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ever saw her by night. Her hour is the fulness of the sun's flood-tide: she comes in the dead hush and white flame of windless noons,—when colors appear to take a very unearthliness of intensity,—when even the flash of some colibri, bosomed with living fire, shooting hither and thither among the grenadilla blossoms, seemeth a spectral happening ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... overgrown, Of all the former flowers that kissed your feet Remains a poppy, pallid from the heat, A wild poppy that the wild winds have sown. Alas! the rose forgets your hands of rose; The lilies slumber in the lily bed; 'Tis only poppies in the dreamy close, The changeless, windless garden of the dead, You tend, with buds soft as your kiss that lies In over happy dreams, upon ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... of waiting. Gradually got known that we shan't land to-day, though it is possible still we may to-night. Torrid, windless day, and very hot work 'mucking out' and tramping round with the horses, which we did all the morning, and some of the afternoon. News sent round that we had captured Cronje and 5000 prisoners; all the ships dressed ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... laughter alongside brought Venner and his guests to the rail in haste, and gone to the windless heavens was their ennui. A gleaming, gold-tinted creature, a miniature model of Aphrodite surely, arose from the blue sea and climbed nimbly into the main channels and thence to the deck, where little pools of water dripped from the radiant figure. She shook her small ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... greener than the downs which they had come over, and greener yet amidmost, from the watering of a stream which, all beset with willows, wound about the bottom. Sheep and neat were pasturing about the dale, and moreover a long line of smoke was going up straight into the windless heavens from the midst of a ring of little round houses built of turfs, and thatched with reed. And beyond that, toward an eastward-lying bight of the dale, they could see what looked like to a doom-ring of big stones, though there were no rocky places in that land. About the cooking-fire ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... patient with you? You! My sun and moon! My basketful of flowers! My money-bag of shining dreams! My hours, Windless and still, of afternoon! You are my world and I your citizen. What ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Doctor Frank was powerless. Destiny lost no time either—the revelation came the very next evening. Kate and Eeny had been to St. Croix, visiting some of Kate's poor pensioners, and evening was closing in when they reached the Hall. A lovely evening—calm, windless, still; the moon's silver disk brilliant in an unclouded sky, and the holy hush of eventide over all. The solemn beauty of the falling night tempted Kate to linger, while Eeny went on to the house. There was a group of tall pines, with a rustic bench, near the entrance-gates. ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... promised well for the enterprise—nearly windless, and what little breeze stirred came from a point or so west of north; a sky of lead-blue, faintly star-dotted, and no moon; a still sea for the small craft, the motor-launches and the coastal motor-boats, whose work is done close ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... peak of some isolated mountain at daybreak, when the night mists first rise from off the plains, and watch their white and lake-like fields, as they float in level bays and winding gulfs about the islanded summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating surface parts and passes away, and down under their depths the glittering city and green pasture lie like Atlantis,[31] between ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the midst of the vast jungles that cover Borneo, serving to keep the atmosphere cool and prevent air currents from ascending in these windless tropics. We were almost exactly on the equator, at an elevation of about 100 metres. In January there had been little rain and in daytime the weather had been rather muggy, but with no excessive heat to speak of, provided one's raiment is suited to the tropics. ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... gay voice died in the distance. Only now and then, when the horses' feet fell in unison, there drifted after them the note of a violin—like a wind at night in an old casement. And then the three riders were presently aware of being quite alone on a windless waste, with a sentinel yucca standing on a distant height here and there between them and the descending moon, and distant groups of mesquite wreathing themselves in the silver mist of early morning. It had been a little past midnight when ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... were scrub pines in which Judith had made a camp. The snow had thickened until Doug could see scarcely ten feet ahead. He was utterly weary and very cold. He knew that he ought to go into camp for the night but he could not. He tied the horses beneath the trees, a grateful, windless haven to the poor brutes, and went slowly on ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... in the habit of a novice walked the path alone, moving slowly across the stripes of sunlight and shadow which inlaid the gravel with equal bars of black and reddish gold. There was a smell of autumn on the windless air, bitter yet sweet; the scent of dying leaves, and fading flowers loth to perish, of rose-berries that had usurped the place of roses, of chrysanthemums chilled by frost, of moist earth deprived of sun, and of the green moss-like film ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hills of silver and emerald sloping down to the valley miles away, where the village clustered about the great old parish church; the smoke from a hundred chimneys, in purple spirals, rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... skyrocket whizzed by above us and buried its hissing head in the river to the north. One or two more fell at a distance of several hundred yards, and in the southern part of the city flames from several houses shot up into the quiet, windless night. ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... very bright and fair, with a keen, windless frost that made the snow crisp and pleasant to ride over, hindering one in no way. And there was the sun shining over all in a way that made the cold seem nought to me, so that I had known nothing more pleasant than this English winter, having ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... months there was a great tranquillity and hushed joy in this hard life. A tender magic breathed in the colour and music of the forest, in its long pauses of windless day-dreaming, in its breezy frolic with the sunshine. The trees and boulders were kindly; and the turf reminded her of her mother's bosom. About her refuge the wild flowers grew in plenty—primrose ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... them stretched the Bush, an ocean of tree-tops, as level as the windless sea, and over this green expanse shadows of fleecy clouds chased each other. Presently Jim discovered a brown space in the distance, and detected a thin column of smoke rising on occasions between the vagrant winds. He called Burton's attention, and Mike turned ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... along the ridge of the hill, a giant causeway, the broken land of the open heath falling away sharply to left and right. It was windless. The sky was covered, and the atmosphere, though not foggy at this height, was thick as with smoke; so that the road, with its long avenue of sparse-set lamps—dwindling in the extreme distance to faintest sparks—was as a pale bridge thrown across the void of black unsounded space. All, save ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... I write. In the afternoon I do other things. The weather is not cold—it is dry and sunshiny—windless. I take long walks over the hills and far away. Some of it is desolate country where the boxed pines have fallen, or where an area has been burned but one comes now and then upon groves of shimmering and shining young trees,—is there any tree as beautiful ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... stirred in the windless night? The lake, under which lay the fire-blackened ruins of the house where the first Desire Michell flung open an awful door that her vengeance ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... horizon ran a chain of those sharp, low summits, irregularly jagged against the pale blue. From several of the summits rose streamers of murky vapor; and one of these, darker and more abundant than the others, spread abroad at the top on the windless air till it took the shape of a colossal pine-tree. To the girl the sight was portentous. It filled her with apprehension, and she would have liked to avoid this unfamiliar-looking region. But, seeing that Grom was filled with interest at the novel phenomena before ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... holiday. Returning on Thursday afternoon, she found the house locked. She remembered that this was "make-up day" at the weekly which took most of her father's work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a beaming, windless afternoon. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... those were the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock-face. As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... the boy's shoulder was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the stillness from somewhere below, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... almost every clear windless night, but the buzz of propellers, that often went on for hours, and the dull boom of bombs exploding far away had never caused anything more than ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,—each life complete in itself: why not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it. Knowles—that old sceptic—believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... The day was windless and no leaf moved on any tree. There must be some animal among the shrubs that covered the embankment, some large animal, since its movements caused so much commotion; for, as she watched, first one bush and then another stirred ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... enjoyed a picnic so much! It was a perfect autumn evening, windless and frosty, with a dead black sky and a tiny rim of new moon like a thumb-nail paring. We had our eggs and bacon, washed down with tea and condensed milk, and followed by bread and jam. The little fire burned blue ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... That, reef protected, lay At anchor, where the palm-trees Infringe upon the bay. The windless air was heavy With cinnamon and rose, The midnight calm seemed ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... weary hounds at last retire, Windless, displeased, from the fruitless chase, When the sly beast tapished in bush and brier, No art nor pains can rouse out of his place: The Christian knights so full of shame and ire Returned back, with faint and weary pace: Yet still the fearful ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... their accustomed stillness. But the Indians sat more still than any of them. They seemed strangely at home in the silence, these wild men of the woods. Motionless they sat, as a group of trees on a windless day, or as a tranquil pool unstirred by the smallest breeze; silent, as if they were themselves a part of Nature's own silence rather than of the family of her ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... us down to the boat, and we were presently afloat on the beautiful broad stream, Dick driving the prow swiftly through the windless water of the early summer morning, for it was not yet six o'clock. We were at the lock in a very little time; and as we lay rising and rising on the in-coming water, I could not help wondering that my old friend the pound-lock, and that of the very simplest and most rural kind, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... IN the windless September dawn a voice went singing, a man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the elan of it all told he was young, jubilant, and ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... now reduced to less than half its full dimensions—stole ghostlike above the horizon; and by her wan light we saw that a host of soft, fleecy clouds—shaped like the smoke belched from the mouth of a cannon upon a windless day—were mustering their squadrons in the eastern quarter; and we knew them for the welcome trade-cloud, the sure indication that the breeze we now had would ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... profound as death, if death Be visited by stealthy dreams; A vagrant note from soundless themes That ring the comet-paths of space, Seemed vibrant in the windless air That trembled with its presence there. Out beyond the nameless place Where neither fields nor clouds exist, Grey from the background of the mist, I saw three vague forms drawing near. My sense recoiled ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... grieve in secret, Those who bear the sorrows of earth, The deep unappeasable longings Which beset them with throngings and throngings, (As, on a windless night, Through the fold of a dark mantle furled, Gleams on our world, world after unknown world) Give them peace, Wide as the veil that hides God's face, The pure plenitude of space, In which our universe is but a glittering crease,— ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen—a Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes all her days ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mother when her young child calls Hearkens to that, and hath no other care: So Thetis, from her green and windless halls Rose, at the first word of Achilles' prayer, To comfort him, and promise gifts of fair New armour wrought by an immortal hand; Then like a silver cloud she scaled the air, Where bright the dwellings of ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... and all other eyes followed it. The heaven was clear as the deep sea, a gorgeous blue. But as the words came from her, so a small mist was born in the sky, wheeling and circling like a ball, although the day was windless, and rapidly growing darker and more compact. So dense had it become, that presently it threw a shadow on part of the sacred circle and soothed it into twilight, though all without where the people stood was still garish day. And in the ball of mist ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... windless and mild. Sir Roger's asthmatic and rheumatic afflictions were quite safe in the warm atmosphere. Moonlight flooded everything with its misty glory, stars spangled the sky, music came softened by distance from the ball-room—all was conducive to love and to love-making. Sir Roger Trajenna, ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... been constructed in Holland which lights 450 lamps, earning about twelve per cent. interest on the capital invested. Of course it is necessary to keep an oil-motor to provide for windless days or nights and also to keep a reserve of electrical power on hand, but this is but another evidence of the practicality and the extreme cleverness of the Dutch. The cows that browse around the windmills of Schiedam are of the same spotted black and white variety ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... her lee rail under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and when the breeze came screaming through the fog or rain they ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Tom returned to the first line he was put on sentry duty. It was one of those silent, windless, starless nights, when under ordinary circumstances a solemn hush prevails. Even the trenches were silent that night. On both sides the guns had ceased booming; it seemed as though a truce had been agreed upon, and yet the air was ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... duty of the author to make some examination of the music of this first lyric drama. But here we unfortunately find ourselves adrift upon a windless ocean. We are driven to the necessity of deducing our information from the results of analogical reconstruction. Nothing indeed can be more fascinating than the attempt to arrive at a comprehension of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... word: see M. for M. iii. 1. 124, "To be imprisoned in the viewless winds." The word is obsolete, but poets use great liberty in the formation of adjectives in -less: comp. Shelley's Sensitive Plant, 'windless clouds.' See note, l. 574. charming-rod: see note, l. 52: also l. 653. rout, a disorderly crowd. The word is also used in the sense of 'defeat,' and is cognate with route, rote, and rut. All come from Lat. ruptus, broken: ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... and tired as she was, she lay thinking long in the silence. It was a strangely windless night, but her thoughts went whirling as though on wings of wind. Thoughts of fate, thoughts of scepticism jostled each other: pictures came; she saw the apple tree breaking through Lashnagar; she saw a landslide many years ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... a hot, windless day in London, in early September. Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... that Berneck, a little town twelve miles from Baireuth on the Hof road, will do; and that Friday, probably early, will be the day. Wilhelmina, accordingly, is on the road that morning, early enough; Husband with her, and ceremonial attendants, in honor of such a Brother; morning is of sultry windless sort; day hotter and hotter;—at Berneck is no Crown-Prince, in the House appointed for him; hour after hour, Wilhelmina waits there in vain. The truth is, one of the smallest accidents has happened: the Generals ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... where the dry Gray shocks stand peaked and withering, half concealed In the rough earth, the orange pumpkins lie, Full-ribbed; and in the windless pasture-field The sleek red horses o'er the sun-warmed ground Stand pensively about in companies, While all around them from the motionless trees The long clean ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... attended by a great throng, till he gains the country of the Syrians. Then he sends away his retinue, and stays alone in a grove, hidden from human eyes. Here is a lofty tree, blossoming bright above all other trees, and on this tree the Phoenix builds his nest, on a windless day, when the holy jewel of heaven shines clear. For he is fain by the activity of his mind to convert old age into life, and thus renew his youth. He gathers from far and near the sweetest and most delightsome plants and leaves, ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey |
