|
|
|
More "Shimmer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured voice with the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes look dreamily out over the undulating sand-dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken shimmer of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It is very still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the perambulator, has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a story of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... faintest idea why I told you all this," said Lloyd at last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so highly. It was what lifted me out of ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... himself, straightened himself up, and endeavoured to throw off the sense of drowsy weight which increased upon him. He could not do so; he walked with bent back, and crept, as it were, over the iron land which radiated heat. A shimmer like that of water appeared in front; he quickened his pace, but could not get to it, and realized presently that it was a mirage which receded as he advanced. There was no pleasant summer twilight; the sunset was succeeded by an indefinite gloom, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... in the northern summer, But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep, And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer, Red sunrise, smites ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... things, it contains a great many light threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but which are apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle them. These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner—almost, as one might say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more to the surface ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... right over all these palaces into the golden mirror of the Bosphorus. Soon this golden mirror changes into a mirror of bronze, the sun disappears, and the tranquil oval of the sea borrows a metallic shimmer from the dark-blue sky. The kiosks fade into darkness; the vast outlines of the Rumili Hisar and the Anatoli Hisar stand out against the starry heaven; and excepting the lamps lit here and there in the khans of the foreign merchants ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... task-work nor slavery; and even 'the rough places will be made smooth, and the crooked things will be made straight,' and distasteful work will be made at least tolerable, and hard burdens will be lightened, and the things that are 'seen and temporal' will shimmer into transparency, through which will shine out the things that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between the metals! The newcomer has but ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Before them, bathed in a pale amethyst haze that thickened to purple at the far-off edge of the world, lay the bad lands resplendent under the hot glare of the sun in vivid red and black and pink colouring of the lava rock. Everywhere the eye met the flash and shimmer of mica fragments that sparkled like the facets of a million diamonds, while to the northward the Bear Paws reared cool and green, with the grass of the higher levels reaching ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... the loggia went gaily. Not many courses; much fruit; a shimmer of tea-roses before the guests; and the scent of roses blowing ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passed it; then she came to the Thayer house. Before that lay the garden. The ranks of pease and beans were in white blossom, and there was a pale shimmer as of ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes again. A vision of Solomon in all his glory swept across her. Even to Walton had spread rumors of the immense fortunes acquired in the China and India trade, and the gold of Cathay seemed to shimmer over the form before her, so strong, so able to contend with, and compel, if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... thing hoped for that they are precious—the very opals of the soul. By our hopes are we saved. There is many a thing we could do better without than the hope of it, for our hopes ever point beyond the thing hoped for. The bow is the damask flower on the woven tear-drops of the world; hope is the shimmer on the dingy warp of trouble shot with the golden woof of God's intent. Nothing ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... to limp, for his stiff boots galled his feet. His senses were blunted by the hot sand which filled his eyes and ears and nostrils, and there was a shimmer over all the broad landscape. When he shook his hair from his forehead, the dust floated slowly down and settled in a ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... had fallen aside a little, disclosing a shimmer of purple garment and flashing emeralds. She looked barbaric, her raven brows knit. It might have been Cleopatra commanding the instant death ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... summer days, Old meadows, green with grass, and trees That shimmer through the trembling haze And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... fathers. I fight well singly." Long they contended which first of the two the encounter should venture, Proving the perilous journey. Bele at last took his helmet, Shaking two lots therein. Watched by the stars Thorstein saw by their shimmer His was the lot first appearing. A blow from his javelin of iron Cleft the huge bolts and strong locks. He descended. Did any one question What was revealed in the cavern, then was he silent and shuddered. Bele at first heard strange music. It rang like ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... the Residence of Rabat I stood looking out between posts festooned with gentian-blue ipomeas at the first shimmer of light on black cypresses and white tobacco-flowers, on the scattered roofs of the new town, and the plain stretching away to the Sultan's ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... olives, Amor—amor—amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... vernal arches, where a murmurous rustle seemed to whisper, "Stay!" along shadowless sweeps, where the blue turned to gold and dazzled with its unsteady shimmer; passed islands so full of birds they seemed green cages floating in the sun, or doubled capes that opened long vistas of light and shade, through which they sailed into the pleasant land where summer reigned supreme. To Sylvia it seemed ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... friends. She knew that people were craning from far seats. Her bulk and her shadow effaced the man beside her. He seemed to cower a little. At eight the show began, and Mrs. Egg felt darkness as a blessing, although the shimmer from the screen ran like phosphorus over the bald head, and a flash of white between two parts of the advertisement showed the dark ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... owing to the sluggishness with which the head yards had been swung, but she was already coming to, and a few seconds later her jibboom was pointing straight for the middle of the passage, with the Heads looming up on either hand, black as ebony against the faint shimmer of starlight on the waters of the lagoon beyond. Gurney and Saunders now came aft and proceeded to complete the hoisting of the second quarter boat; and seeing that Grace seemed to know pretty well what she was ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... the level of the sea, row out a mile from the beach. Eastwards a bank of red vapour shuts in the sea, the wavelets—no larger than those raised by the oar—on that side are purple as if wine had been spilt upon them, but westwards the ripples shimmer with palest gold. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... many another proud savage, showed small sign of succumbing to civilization. There seemed scarce any mark of human habitation. The life of the people, where there were people, must have been back from the banks. The river itself was empty. Nowhere was there wreath of smoke or shimmer of sail. Just the wild beauty of the shores, the noble expanse of the stream, the cloudless blue of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... kept green by sprinkling. If a section of it gives up the struggle, the tray may be replaced with a fresh one. From time to time a blush of tiny pink flowers runs over the wall. There seems to be no season for the blossoms, but whenever the sun shines, this delicate shimmer of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... animal infusions show this fluorescence. The crystalline lens of the eye exhibits the effect in a very striking manner. When, for example, I plunge my eye into this violet beam, I am conscious of a whitish-blue shimmer filling the space before me. This is caused by fluorescent light generated in the eye itself. Looked at from without, the crystalline lens at the same time is ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... wilderness was floral, The sea a bath of wine to the laughing swimmer; Dawn was a flaming fan; dusk was a glimmer Like undersea where sly dreams haunt the coral. The garden sang of fame when the golden shimmer Of sun glowed on the proud leaves of the laurel,— But time and love fought out their ancient quarrel; The songs are fainter ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... long before Charity's; she was newer to the game. During a dark scene she surrendered the field and decamped. But Cheever and his wife both caught the faint shimmer of her respectable robe as it floated from the rail and vanished in the curtains. It was like ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... building, the tallest of the group. They went in a compact wedge formation and shot swiftly down along the wall of the invisible cone until they were directly over the low building nearest the Ancient Mariner. There was a sudden shimmer in the air. In an instant, the ships were through and heading toward the Ancient Mariner at a ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... pleasantness of the wide, cool piazza, with its flowers and vines and gay awnings; the charm of the summer morning, not yet dulled by wear and tear of the day; the steady, deliberate dash of the waves on the beach below; the play and shimmer of the big, quiet water, stretching out to the edge of the world; all this filled their minds, rested their souls. There was no need for words. The Bishop sighed comfortably as he pushed his great shoulders back against the cool wicker of the chair and swung one long leg across the ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... light,—feeling the necessity of the surface waters or the shallow depths with their limpid glades—and this light, spreading over the white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious shimmer of mother-of-pearl. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... information, and yet hardly what I wanted. He was an eccentric man, a devil-worshipper, and rumoured to have the power of the evil eye. I could believe the young lady's eyes, when endowed with that cold, grey shimmer which I had noticed in them once or twice, to be capable of any evil which human eye ever wrought; but still the superstition was an effete one. Was there not more meaning in that sentence which followed—"He had theories of the power of ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ha'ntin' about. Things comes their way; they has luck. They've done crope about forty rods when the ghost heads for 'em. They can easy tell he's comin', for the fire eyes shows all the time an' not by fits an' starts as former. As the bloo shimmer draws nearer they makes out the vague shadows of a man on a hoss. Son, she's shore plenty ghostly as a vision, an' Enright allows later, it's no marvel the ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... dust and waste-papers from my office, there seems to be the same complete disregard of fitness. The other evening, in leaving my rooms, I brushed against a portly person in the half-light of the corridor. There was a shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes as) costly stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by nodding plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... a high hill; the ocean lies at its feet. From Moyne House one can see the shimmer of the great Atlantic as it dances beneath the sunbeams or lashes itself into furious foam under the touch of the north wind. The coastguard station, too, stands out, brilliant in its whitewash, a ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... curiosity satisfied, he fell back into his old shimmer of content and walked along, hearing Paul's voice only as one of the morning sounds of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... moment the moon showed a slender rim above the horizon and threaded the darkness with a faint shimmer ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... world of light and shimmer! The couch is the yawl of the Africa. The persistent chambermaid is ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... positive they had not come as far south as Athabasca Landing. Boulain—Boulain—The name repeated itself over and over in his mind. Bateese shoved off the canoe, and the woman's paddle dipped in and out of the water beginning to shimmer in moonlight. But he could not, for a time, get himself beyond the pounding of that name in his brain. It was not merely that he had heard the name before. There was something significant about it. Something that made him grope back in his memory of things. ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... found the Assyrian pursuing a course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed, a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly, the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in self-complacence; ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent thoughts across ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... carriage had driven away, the Godmother appeared. Once more she touched her godchild with her wand, and in a moment she was arrayed in a beautiful dress that seemed as though it had been woven of moon-beams and sunshine, so radiantly did it gleam and shimmer. She put her arms round her Godmother's neck and kissed and thanked her. "Goodbye, childie; enjoy yourself, but whatever you do, remember to leave the ball before the clock strikes twelve," the Godmother ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea—alone as I thought at first, in the twilight—I became aware that the garden had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... dark eyes had a momentary flicker of resentment. Most young men looked at her, but Mr. Beechtree at the lake, with his melancholy brooding eyes. Henry liked handsome young women well enough, but he admired scenery more. The smooth shimmer of the twilight waters, still holding the flash of sunset, the twinkling city of lights they were swiftly leaving behind them at the lake's head, the smaller constellations of the lakeside villages on either hand—these made ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... upon the lagoon and upon a flight of flamingoes winnowing above the mirror-like surface, and, as though the situation were not deadly and desperate enough, the shimmer of light and water has, even in that brief glance, brought a spot in front of his eyes, at the moment when, if ever, his sight should be at its clearest and quickest. The odds against him are indeed terrible. He can hardly hope to come through; yet to his ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... glad of her assistance in all such matters. However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying. All that was the prosy part of shopping. It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace. So the girl went on her usual way, finding life a little dull, a little tiresome, and most people rather stupid, but everything on the whole much as usual, if her head only would not ache so; ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... things, my friend, when you know that they are useless?" she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light, the shimmer of which was like the last ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... than the gems piled round gilded seat; Thy cheeks are softer than the silks that shimmer at my feet, And purer heart than thine in ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... world around them, in the soft shimmer of the crescent moon, became an enchanted region, the land that never was on earth or sea, the land of love, in which all that dwell therein move in the glamour of the sacred Fire ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... orbs that glistened like diamonds, wonderfully and purely white. Saturn, distinct among all the heavenly bodies, throbbed with a van-colored changing glow like a bulbous opal, and about it, with a strange shimmer, visibly ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... "swift lightnings" flashed against the sunlight from women's hair. He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for access ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... green shimmer lay to his left. Somehow he found himself reluctant to turn and face it. That would commit him ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... pen in her right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. A sudden uneasiness seized ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... came in myriads and in millions, in billions and tens of billions, men and women and children, kings and priests and beggars, all wearing the garments of their age and country. They came like an ocean-tide, and their floating hair was the foam on the tide, and their eyes gleamed like the first shimmer of dawn above the snows. They came for hours and days and years and centuries, they came eternally, and as they came every finger of that host, compared to which all the sands of all the seas were but as a handful, was pointed at her, and ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... a bride! Such a marvel of grace! In a shimmer of rainbows and gossamer lace; No wonder the groom dropped his diamond-dust ring, Which a little elf-usher ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... for books and matters of art and little social luxuries were wanting, such as I had all my life been accustomed to, and such as filled Mme. Ricard's own rooms. However, this first evening I could hardly see how the rooms looked, for the lining of humanity which ran round all the walls. There was a shimmer as of every colour in the rainbow; and a buzz that could only come from a hive full. I, who had lived all my life where people spoke softly, and where many ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... was about four, and the ultimate darkness of the night was past. There was a faint shimmer of light in the hall, but the study doorway yawned impenetrably black. Everything was still except the faint creaking of the stairs under Mr. Bunting's tread, and the slight movements in the study. Then ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... thou pure of heart, Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou see In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side, To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand, Saying, 'It is so clear!'—and lo! ere long, Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings, Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm, Its depths grew still, that there thy form ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... through it low voices inside, heavy thuds; and felt at every blow a slight vibration of the ground under her feet. She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and saw nothing in the darkness but the expiring glow of the torch she had thrown away and the sombre shimmer of the lagoon bordering the opaque darkness of the shore. Her strained eyeballs seemed to detect mysterious movements in the darkness and she gave way to irresistible terror, to a shrinking agony of apprehension. Was she ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... and stepped out on to the balcony. The air in the great silent room behind him stifled him, and even the night breeze, as it touched his cheeks, seemed to burn with fever. He stood there motionless, his arms folded, gazing fixedly into the half-darkness. A pale, watery moonlight cast an unearthly shimmer over the shadowy world before him, brightened every here and there by the will-o'-the-wisp fire points which marked the presence of the camped thousands waiting silently for his word. Only one spot—it seemed like a black stain—remained in absolute gloom, and it was thither ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... next morning, he saw Daisy and Wee floating down the river in their boat. "Bless me! here's company," said the sun, and began at once to make them welcome in his most charming manner. He set the waves to sparkling with a sudden shimmer; he shot long rays of light through the dark hemlocks, till they looked like fairy trees; he touched Daisy's hair and it turned to gold; he chased away the shadows that lurked among the hills; he drew up the misty ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... creeping softly out; and I followed, to find that the darkness was as black as inside the tent; that the fire-flies had ceased to shimmer and flash about the low trees, and that the fire was so nearly out that there was nothing ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and tossing and reiterating of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... it willed. The mother-of-pearl shimmer of evening was turning the headlands to mist, and the air smelled of cedar and pine. Tiny waves lapped complainingly on the sides of our rocking canoe. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... had those thousand pretty movements, those nameless graces of manner, those wavering shades of expression, that irresistibly enchained the eye and the imagination,—true Frenchwoman as she was, always in one rainbow shimmer of fancy and feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April days which give you flowers and rain, sun and shadow, and snatches ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... mountain of "Two Leaves" is all a-shimmer with the coming day. Thatched roof and bamboo grove are daintily etched against the amber dawn. Lights begin to twinkle and thrifty tradesmen cheerfully ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... flowers. There was a strange simplicity, too, about her dress—a plain, tight-fitting, tight-sleeved dress of unrelieved black, her only adornment being some bands of big blue beads worn loosely round the neck. The black figure, in this shimmer of rose-pink and gold and flowers, was effective enough; but even the finest of pictures or the finest of statues has not the subtle attraction of a graceful carriage. Macleod had never seen any woman walk as this woman walked, in so stately and yet ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... light grew and grew, and slowly from the ground rose a frost-covered woman, her glittering icy hair flowing to her waist, the blue light about her causing her garments of frost to glance and shimmer and ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... an angle into the pools and eddies of the Water. Moreover, he saw about the place whence came the cries torches moving swiftly hither and thither; so that he looked to hear of new tidings, and stayed his feet and looked keenly about him on every side; and just then, between his rough path and the shimmer of the dancing moonlit water, he saw the moon smite on something gleaming; so, as quietly as he could, he got his target on his arm, and shortened his spear in his right hand, and then turned sharply toward that gleam. Even therewith up sprang a man on his ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... wild Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level distance the hazy shimmer of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... moved far forward when his quick sight picked out the shimmer of a woman's hair, like spun gold, about amidships in the rank of deck-chairs. He made sure it was Miss Searle; and it was. She sat alone, with none near her, her head resting against the back of the chair, her face turned a trifle forward; so that ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... love, Through the cautious lattice, Wondering why the stars above All are blinking at us; Wondering if his eyes from there Catch the moonbeam's shimmer As it lights the robe I wear ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... like visions; but I have always been taught that their spell lay in our innate sense that they were ourselves, as we really are. The wine of great truth is at first the most heady of all, making its revelations shimmer. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... emerged upon clear ground, when, bearing away to the eastward round the foot of the hill which they had that day ascended, they groped their way cautiously over the unfamiliar ground until, in the course of about half an hour, they caught the dim shimmer of starlight upon water, and, between them and it, a group of dark, shapeless blotches which, upon their nearer approach, they identified as the hovels constituting the fishing village which they had seen during the day from ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... peculiar quality of thickening a few yards from its source, and it was this that produced the effect of misty, veiled distances. As we walked, the seven columns of rays streaming down from the crystalline globes high above us waned steadily; the glow within the chamber lost its prismatic shimmer and became an even grey tone somewhat like moonlight in a ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... peculiar soft tones of tan and bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the wonderful blues and greens of the water. No one can do justice to the glory of that. Sky-blue, sea-blue, the shimmer of peacocks' tails and the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their madonnas, ever blend and ever change. Trees there are few, the graceful silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps of live oaks, and on the coast road to San Diego ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... O'Beirnes were after playin' a dirty thrick." At this Nicholas's experience was like that of a desert traveller who should see a mirage of palms and pools grow swiftly before his delighted eyes into a substantial oasis, and then anon, or ever he could approach it, shimmer back, with all its sheen and shade, into mocking illusion again. For thus did it fare with his hopes as his grandfather talked of renouncing Mr. Polymathers's bequest. Moreover, the grounds which the old man alleged ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... and sage brush along their trail, and only here and there in scanty patches any of the rich, nutritious bunch grass which the roving animals so eagerly sought. The day had been hot and almost cloudless. The shimmer of heat along the lazy roll of the land to the south had often baffled their blinking eyes. But now the sun was well to the west, and the refraction seemed diminishing, and away over to the northeast a dull-colored ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... "I got a shimmer of the youth," said the grey-brown handed and complexioned Annette P——, as she glanced up from her coarse sewing, with such a look as probably a captive casts who has glanced out of his prison into a freer and more beautiful state of existence; ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... large vegetable garden through which Maya was flying. The trees were long past flowering, but the little bee still remembered them in the shining glory of countless blossoms, whiter than light, lovely, pure, and exquisite against the blue of the heavens. The delicious perfume, the gleam and the shimmer—oh, she'd never forget the rapture of it as long as ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... followed did not pass as quickly as before for Billy Boyle, nor did raking the range with his riders bring quite as keen a satisfaction with life. Always, when he rode apart in the soft haze and watched the sky-line shimmer and dance toward him and then retreat like a teasing maid, his thoughts wandered from the range and the cattle and the men who rode at his bidding and rested with one slim young woman who puzzled and tantalized him and caused him ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... cut off four slices and buttered them to an equal thickness and then more slowly put a long silver spoon into the jam. I even paused to admire in Judy's mirror over the table the effect of the cascade of lace that fell across my arm and lost itself in the blue shimmer of old Rene's masterpiece of a negligee, then deep down I buried the spoon in the purple sweetness. I had just lifted it high in the air when out of the lilac-scented dark of the garden came ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a musing boy, I stood beside Thy starlit shimmer, and asked my restless heart What secrets Nature to the herd denied, But might to earnest hierophant impart; When lo! beside me, around and o'er, Thought whispered, 'Arise, O seeker, and ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... uttering these words in a tone of perfect respect, Farrell committed an astonishing offense against the laws that separate servitor and employer. He caught the shimmer of a wink upon Harry's eye, and he had the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... stood temptingly half open; no creature was to be seen—no sound to be heard. Rose's heart throbbed fast; the mysterious stillness of the night, the ghostly shimmer of the moonlight, the mystery and romance of her adventure, set every pulse tingling, but she did not hesitate. Her slippered feet crossed the hall lightly; she was beside the green door. Then there was another pause—a moment's breathless listening, ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the embarrassing predicament which was hers. So complete, indeed, seemed her abstraction that Maitland caught himself questioning the reality of her.... And well might she have seemed to him a pale little wraith of the night, the shimmer of grey that she made against the shimmer of light on the water,—a shape almost transparent, slight, and unsubstantial—seeming to contemplate, and as ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... himself rushing along at a tremendous speed, and short, sharp commands rang in his ears, which instantly engrossed all his attention. To his eyes the sky looked black as ink, except for a dark-blue unearthly shimmer that now and then flared up from the north, trembled, and vanished. By this unsteady illumination it was possible to catch a momentary glimpse of a head, and a peak, and the outline of a mountain. The small sail was double-reefed, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... She got up and kissed Effi. "You are a child. Beautiful and poetical. Nothing but fancies. The reality is different, and often it is well that there should be dark instead of light and shimmer." ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... anchor up," he repeated harshly. "We'll go under the engine." The sudden jarring of the Gar's engine sounded muffled in a shut space like the flushed heart of a shell. The yacht moved forward, with a wake like folded gauze, into a shimmer of ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Cove lay a-shimmer under the slanting rays of the sun. A wealth of racing white cloud filled the dome of the summer sky, speeding under the pressure of a strong top wind. Even the harsh world of Labrador was smiling under the beneficence of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... must be remembered that the world in which the shop-girl follows her occupation is a world of externals. The fortunes, talents, tastes, eager human effort spent in shop-window displays on Fifth Avenue, the shimmer and sparkle of beautiful silks and jewels, the prestige of "carriage trade," the distinction of presence of some of the customers and their wealth and their freedom in buying—all the worldliness of the most moneyed city of the United States here perpetually passes before ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... the hay fields waved unmown in the soft summer air, which, though sparing no breath for the hot and dusty traveler, was yet strong enough to sweep over the tall grasses in long, undulating waves that made them shimmer in the sunlight. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... there was a flash of something white amidst the pale green shimmer of the flood. Ida rose, but her companion beckoned ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... know, those gray old wives, The sights we see in our daily drives: Shimmer of lake and shine of sea, Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It wasn't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake Glide through ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the same there was a fascination about her, as about a fairy maiden. There was a yellow shimmer about her light hair; azure flames flashed from her blue eyes. These flames drew a magic circle about her, and the dozen young men who had strayed inside the circle flocked round her aunt the evening in ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... satin skirts in both hands and stepped lightly across the pavement. Tavernake stood on one side to let her pass. She seemed to him to be, indeed, a creature of that other world of which he knew nothing. Her slow, graceful movements, the shimmer of her skirt, her silk stockings, the flashing of the diamond buckles upon her shoes, the faint perfume from her clothes, the soft touch of her ermine as she swept by—all these things were indeed strange to him. His eyes followed her with ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the Marlborough Steel Works. Outdoors the sun beat fiercely upon the heads of toiling men and horses while the heat waves danced with a dazzling shimmer along the brick pavements. Indoors there was the steady thud of the engine, and the great hammers clanked and the belts swept through the air with a deafening whirr, while the workmen drew blackened hands across their grimy foreheads and John Randolph gave a sigh of longing for ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... into betraying riffles. But invariably those Indians twisted the canoe into a new course ten feet before we reached one of the obstructions, whose existence our dazzled vision could not attest until they were actually below us. They saw those rocks, through the shimmer ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... more unhappy than before, turned so that she might not see Nancy, nor note the shimmer of ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... roads, first under overhanging greenery and then, almost suddenly, remote, in blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dome mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like rolling hillocks; but here and there a little white streak showed that the snow ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... tropical. Strangely that wonderful hot day of the 'fifties rose up in Clarke's imagination; the sense of dazzling all-pervading sunlight seemed to blot out the shadows and the lights of the laboratory, and he felt again the heated air beating in gusts about his face, saw the shimmer rising from the turf, and heard the myriad murmur ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... shining obliquely into the room, and through the window Peter saw the familiar slopes of the Park, sleeping mistily under its shimmer. He could also see the furniture of the room with tolerable distinctness—the old balloon-backed chairs, a four-post bed in a sort of recess, and a rack against the wall, from which hung some military clothes and accoutrements; and the sight of all these homely objects reassured him somewhat, and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... swiftly with a lapwing's flight, Backward she hurried to the little spring, Led by a power that knoweth not the night, But flies through darkness with unerring wing; And so e'er morning shimmer'd in the East, She clasp'd her dead babe ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... subjects and neither knows what on earth the other is driving at, there is bound to be a certain amount of mental confusion: but at this point Jno. Peters, though still not wholly equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, began to see a faint shimmer of light behind the clouds. In a nebulous kind of way he began to understand that the girl had come to consult the firm about a breach-of-promise action. Some unknown man at Ealing West had been trifling with her heart—hardened lawyer's clerk as he was, that poignant cry "I'm not engaged!" ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... future. It shall be my ambition to enlarge the oasis round my house, and to give it the lordly shade of fine trees. My turf, though Provencal, shall be always green. I shall carry my park up the hillside and plant on the highest point some pretty kiosque, whence, perhaps, my eyes may catch the shimmer of the Mediterranean. Orange and lemon trees, and all choicest things that grow, shall embellish my retreat; and there will I be a mother among my children. The poetry of Nature, which nothing can destroy, shall hedge us round; ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... quickly, then at longer intervals. At last the members of the chorus dropped away one by one to occupations of their own. The girl still sat at the piano, her head thrown back idly, her hands wandering softly in and out of melodies and modulations. Watching her, Orde finally saw only the shimmer of her white figure, and the white outline of her head and throat. All the rest of the room was gray from the concentration of his gaze. At last her hands fell in her lap. She sat looking straight ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... out of bed in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... subconscious instinct suddenly leaped into warning life. Without any actual perception of what it might mean, he felt the thrill of imminent danger, connected it with that soft footfall behind him, and swung round in time to seize a deadly uplifted hand which seemed to end in a shimmer of dull steel. His assailant flung himself upon Lutchester with the lithe ferocity of a cat, clinging to his body, twisting and turning his arm to wrest it free. It was a matter of seconds only before his intended victim, with a fierce backward twist, broke the ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are drinking deep of the delights of this mellow afternoon. On either side of our trail lie yellow harvest fields, narrow, like those of eastern Canada, and set in frames of green poplar bluffs that rustle and shimmer under the softly going wind. Then on through scrub we go, bumping over roots and pitching through holes, till we suddenly push out from the scrub, and before us lie the Marshes. There they sweep for miles away, with their different grasses waving and whispering under the steady blowing ...
— Beyond the Marshes • Ralph Connor
... cherish, savage while so tender, Do the lilies perish mourning their lost splendor? Does the diamond shimmer brightlier that eternal Time makes nothing dimmer ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... trying them upon her in my mind, I decided that her gown should be of a delicate pink, and should be made of some frail, beautiful material which would float about her like gossamer when she moved, and shimmer like the light of dawn upon the dew. You know the sort of gown I mean: one of those gowns upon which a man is afraid to lay his finger-tips lest the material melt away beneath them; a gown which, he feels, was never ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Our table was set out on the terrace, overlooking the Dnieper, with the music and stir of people in the distance. An irresponsible joy filled my heart as I looked down at the black, winding river with its shadowy banks and the fantastic shimmer of lights on the water. The city lights crowded down to the very water's edge; then the drifting red and green lights of steamers and ferry-boats moving on the black, magic stream, and beyond, the flat plain, silent and mysterious, with, over the horizon rim, the ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... round a point, I heard a rustle and a rush of something coming, and the bowsprit of a large sloop glided into view close by me. She was painted in stripes of all colors above her green bottom. The shimmer of the water shook the reflection of her hull, and made the edges of the stripes blend together. It was as if a rainbow had suddenly flung itself down for ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... mercury shimmer of glass Over these daguerreotypes The balloon-like spread of a skirt of silk emerges With its little figure of flowers. And the enameled glair of parted hair Lies over the oval brow, From under which eyes ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... on the mantel, dropped his forehead upon it and stood so, the wonderful glowing colors of the painting seeming to shimmer on his bronze hair. At last, at the sound of Jonas's footstep in the hall, he lifted his head, turned off the light above the painting, crossed to his desk and, dropping the still unopened envelope into a secret drawer, locked it and put the key ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... gleam, glow, shimmer, flame, gleaming, illumination, shine, flare, glimmer, incandescence, shining, flash, glistening, luster, sparkle, flicker, glistering, scintillation, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... my pans of golden cream, Set in a silver shining row, Swam in my eyes like the shimmer and sheen Of arms ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of ideas and wit, but—a Heine of action—the fantasy of personal adventure, and—when audacity has been crowned by empery—of dramatic surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... after uttering these words in a tone of perfect respect, Farrell committed an astonishing offense against the laws that separate servitor and employer. He caught the shimmer of a wink upon Harry's eye, and he had the audacity to ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... brighter than the gems piled round gilded seat; Thy cheeks are softer than the silks that shimmer at my feet, And purer heart than thine in woman's breast hath ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... streets and wide pavements of Boonville, and the corner drug stores with their shining soda fountains and grape-juice bottles. Think of sitting out on that bluff on a warm evening, watching the broad shimmer of the river slipping down from the sunset, and smoking a serene pipe while the local flappers walk in the coolness wearing crisp, swaying gingham dresses. That's the kind of town we like to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... recalled the faint odors she had inhaled in Farnham's house; they seemed to her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance of the spring; the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... upon its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... mould above the rose; yet how he draws the rose! The brazen arrogance of pomp, the pearl on a woman's neck, the shimmer of a breaking bubble, the wrinkles in a baby's foot, the beauty of life, the pathos of life, the irony and the lust of life,—he has painted them all, as he saw them all, in the phantasmagoric Procession of Being betwixt ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... noticed Judith as she came forward to speak to her old friends. Her dress, a shimmer of white and gold, might have been wished on her by a fairy godmother, a thing of ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... completed; and when they passed out from the coppice into the whiter air, behold! the wild March skies had parted somewhat, and there was a shimmer of silver sunlight along the broad highway between the hedges. It was an auspicious omen—or, at least, their full hearts may have thought so; and then, again, there was a wedding chorus all around them from the birds—from the bright-eyed robin perched on the crimson ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... gliding around all the time, till our arms got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours—three hours—just gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear, a body don't know what real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain he ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't stand it to look around ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the starlight of the East, with white flocks scattered on the down. The breath of winds that come and go, the bleating of the sheep, with now and then a tinkling bell, and now and then the voice of an awakened shepherd, is all that breaks the deep repose. Overhead shimmer the bright stars, and low to west lies the moon, not pale and sickly (he dreams) as in our North, but golden, full, and bathing distant towers and tall aerial palms with floods of light. Such is a child's vision, begotten by the music of the symphony; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... desire to see him, she yet had an instinct to postpone the encounter. She was almost minded to return. But she went on. The town was really very near. The illuminated clock of the Town Hall had dominion over it; the golden shimmer above the roofs to the left indicated the electrical splendour of the new Cinema in Moorthorne Road next to the new Primitive Methodist Chapel. He had told her about that, too. In two minutes, in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... panels. Nothing had been moved or changed: the inlaid cylinder fall desk with its garlands of painted flowers on the light waxed wood stood at the left, the pole screen with the embroidered bouquet was before the fire blind, the girandoles, scrolled in ormolu and hung with crystal lusters, held the shimmer of golden reflections ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... eight miles wide. He was still on the Home ranch. A few miles to the south he could just make out the line of wire fence that separated it from the third division; and to the north, seen faint and blue through the haze and shimmer of the noon sun, a long file of telegraph poles showed the line of the railroad and marked Derrick's northeast boundary. The road over which Presley was travelling ran almost diametrically straight. In front of him, but at ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... he repeated harshly. "We'll go under the engine." The sudden jarring of the Gar's engine sounded muffled in a shut space like the flushed heart of a shell. The yacht moved forward, with a wake like folded gauze, into a shimmer of formless ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... porch she paused and looked behind her. High overhead sailed the moon, a day or two past the first half. There was a tremulous movement in the leaves of the maples along the sidewalk, producing an indistinct, vibratory shimmer and shadow. By contrast the patches of darkness were jet black; the overhanging portico of the house was as yawning as a cavern. She listened, stood, her head bent slightly forward, listening. Not a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... village or solitary farm, is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green leaves,—between the uneven tufts of grass, the dainty "ragged robin" sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against masses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry,—the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... to sing midnight matins, but still dreaming. Ford's dip was softer now, as though he feared to disturb that vibrant drowsiness; but when, later, capes and coves began to define themselves through the gray gloaming, and, later still, a shimmer of saffron appeared above the eastern summits, he knew it was time to think of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... flush, halo, glory, nimbus, aureola. spark, scintilla; facula; sparkling &c v.; emication^, scintillation, flash, blaze, coruscation, fulguration^; flame &c (fire) 382; lightning, levin^, ignis fatuus [Lat.], &c (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion [Brit.], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor^, fulgidity^; dazzlement^, resplendence, transplendency^; luminousness &c adj.; luminosity; lucidity; renitency^, nitency^; radiance, radiation; irradiation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Most merrily had the easterly wind and a following sea brought us down. Now we drew near the rocks, where at high tide the land drops sheer to the water. In the dry sunshine, such a sparkle was on the waves, such a shimmer on the high red cliffs, that it was hard to follow Uncle Jake when he said, as if he revered the place, "'Tis an ironbound show! 'Tis a shop! Poor devils, what gets throwed up here! But I know where ther's some fine copper bolts ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... panes, through which the sun darts, launches into the obscurity its shower of rays and a portion of the nave glows like a luminous glade. A vast rosace behind the choir, a window with tortuous branchings above the entrance, shimmer with the tints of amethyst, ruby, emerald and topaz like leafy labyrinths in which lights from above break in and diffuse themselves in shifting radiance. Near the sacristy a small door-top, fastened against the wall, exposes an infinity of intersecting moldings similar to the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... of Toledo had charge of the ceremony. Never was there a simpler royal wedding in all the annals of Spanish history: there was no throng of gay nobles, there were none of the customary feasts or tournaments, there was no military display, no glitter of jewels, no shimmer of silks and satins, but all was quiet and serious, and the few guests at this solemn consecration seemed impressed with the dignity of the occasion. The pathway of the young princess was not all strewn with roses, however, as her marriage ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the object itself. An engraving or photograph after such a picture as the Louvre "Pastoral Symphony" fails utterly to convey the sense of exhilaration one feels in presence of the actual painting, simply because the tonic effect of the colour is wholly wanting. The golden shimmer of light, the vibration of the air, the saturation of atmosphere with pure colour are not only ingredients in, but are of the very essence of the creation. It has been well said that almost literally the chief colour on Giorgione's ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... More I learned from her diary. This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought by ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... blood-red upon the lagoon and upon a flight of flamingoes winnowing above the mirror-like surface, and, as though the situation were not deadly and desperate enough, the shimmer of light and water has, even in that brief glance, brought a spot in front of his eyes, at the moment when, if ever, his sight should be at its clearest and quickest. The odds against him are indeed terrible. He can hardly ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... sitting with the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the Kuntsevo park—one half of its brilliant disc obscured with grey, subluminous cloud, and the other half sending forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion could be seen projecting above a ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... alone, the Milky Way is one of the most delicately beautiful phenomena in the entire realm of nature — a shimmer of silvery gauze stretched across the sky; but studied in the light of its revelations, it is the most stupendous object presented to human ken. Let us consider, first, its appearance to ordinary vision. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... I not, there, a white shimmer? Something with pale silken shrine? No; it is the column's glimmer, 'Gainst the ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... pretty actresses have drunken, worthless husbands, paid comfortable salaries to shut their eyes and keep out of the way," added Mrs. Laurance, lengthening the range of her opera glass, and levelling it at a group where the shimmer of jewels ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... interest. It seemed, however, as if Lord Darcy were accustomed to be overlooked, for he showed no signs of annoyance; on the contrary, his face brightened, and he looked at the pretty scene with sparkling eyes. The room was full of a soft rosy glow, the shimmer of silver and crystal was reflected in the sheet of mirror, and beneath the garlands of flowers the young faces of the guests glowed with pleasure and excitement. He looked from one to the other—handsome Max, dandy Oswald, Robert with his look of strength and decision; then to the girls—Esther, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... The headland outside Havre is composed of ochreish rock which appears in patches where the grass will not grow. The heights are occupied by no less than three lighthouses only one of which is now in use. As the ship gets closer, a great spire appears round the cliff in the silvery shimmer of the morning haze and then a thousand roofs reflect ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... looked so much the boy, so much the culprit caught stealing apples and up for sentence, that Norma Pelton's gratitude took courage. She came across to him and held out both hands, the shimmer of tears still in the ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... of the picnic was a glorious one. Peggy called it a "blue day" because the sky was so blue. It was a deep blue, and there were great fleecy clouds floating about. The blueberries were the most wonderful blue, two shades, dark and light, with a shimmer to them, and Peggy's blue frock seemed a part of all the brightness of the day. Alice had on her yellow frock, and Diana was in green, and Clara in pink. It was almost too beautiful a day for them to stop and pick berries, Peggy thought; but ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White
... herself, swaying and bending with much grace and dignity. It was the strangest thing for Anthony to find himself here, a raven among all these peacocks, and birds of paradise; and he wondered at himself and at the strange humour of Providence, as he watched the shimmer of the dresses and the sparkle of the shoes and jewels, and the soft clouds of muslin and lace that shivered and rustled as the ladies stepped; the firelight shone through the wide doorway on this glowing movement, and groups ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... homeward through the Gates. The little breeze that had danced all day out on the larger lake had gone to sleep here in the shelter of the islands, and Algonquin lay as still as a golden mirror. A faint shimmer of colour was spread over it like a shining veil. It was scarcely discernible where the crystal water lay motionless, but as the Inverness sailed across the delicate web it broke into waves of amber and lilac and rose. The little islands did not seem to touch the water ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... satisfied, he fell back into his old shimmer of content and walked along, hearing Paul's voice only as one of the morning sounds ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... gain the freedom of a Singing Prisoner, and enable a Scheherazade to postpone from night to night her hour of death, are one and all pervaded by the same eternal magic. Pain, grief, terror, care, and bondage are all forgotten for a time when lakes of gems and enchanted waterfalls shimmer in the sunlight, when Rakshas's palaces rise, full-built, before our very eyes, or when Caballero's Knights of the Fish prance away on their magic chargers. "I wonder when!" "I wonder how!" "I wonder where!" we say ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a sense ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... movement of warning, she threw her entire weight upon the sash in a last endeavour to close the window, but the man's upraised arm held both her weight and it, as if its muscles had been rods of steel. Gwen saw a long knife in his free hand,—saw the light shimmer along its blade, saw him raise it aloft to plunge it into her bosom, yet made no movement to withdraw beyond his reach and uttered no cry for help. It seemed to her that all this was happening to another and that she herself was only a fascinated spectator. She was wondering ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Titan Goblet, like the visioned future which glows before the sight of happy youth, and then vanished. The gold rim vanished also; still there appeared to be no disposition among the party to leave the scene. Twilight began to shimmer, and now the stars trembled forth from the dusky sky. At last night settled on the landscape, and the girls expressed a wish to see the hollow lighted up with torchlight. Scattering ourselves amongst the trees of the bank, some ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... him something for short," Marny retorted. "Feudels-Shimmer was what they called him in Rosengarten—Wilhelm Feudels-Shimmer. I tried all of it at first, then I bit off the Shimmer, and then the Wilhelm, and ran him along on Feudels for a while, then it got down to Fuddles, and at last to Fiddles, and there it stuck. Just fitted him, too. All he wanted ...
— Fiddles - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Or, Seymour again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was even less when the moon was unveiled, the shifting shimmer of the clouds falling away from the great sphere of pearl, gemming the night with an incomparable splendor. It had grown almost as light as day, and the sheriff ordered the pace quickened. Along a ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... these lines, Here on my knees, with feeble, fumbling hand. Look! in yon mountain cleft a radiance shines, Gleam of a primrose — see it thrill, expand, Grow glorious. Dear God be praised! it streams Into the cabin in a gush of gold. Look! there she stands, the angel of my dreams, All in the radiant shimmer aureoled; First as I saw her from my bed of pain; First as I loved her when the darkness passed. Now do I know that Life is not in vain; Now do I know God cares, at last, at last! Light outlives dark, joy grief, and Love's the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... say these things, my friend, when you know that they are useless?" she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light, the shimmer of which was like the last ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... seemed as if it were part of her; I do not mean so much in the fit of it, as in the complete suitableness of it and her. Her head was bent down over a book, and I could not see her face at first—only her hair, which was neither light nor dark, but had a kind of golden shimmer. Her hat lay beside her on the seat. Flora ran down the walk with a glad cry of "Annas!" and then she stood up, and ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... they came, and what were the thoughts behind the bright eyes which waked from sleep and stared for an instant, as his lamps pried under the great quaking canopies: and more than all he enjoyed arriving at his own gate, seeing the pale shimmer of his marble statues against backgrounds of ivy and ilex, and drawing in the sweetness of his orange blossoms and roses. Because he never tired of these things the two months at Stellamare, often spent alone except for servants, were the best months of his year. Through ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... And Summerlee, too, there he was with his short briar between his thin moustache and his gray goat's-beard, his worn face protruded in eager debate as he queried all Challenger's propositions. Finally, there was our host, with his rugged, eagle face, and his cold, blue, glacier eyes with always a shimmer of devilment and of humor down in the depths of them. Such is the last picture of them that I ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of finer cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the complexion of wealth—that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... she wore the lovely black lace shawl, sometimes the creamy white embroidered silk one, and always the delicate coral and silver jewelry. Yet she couldn't possibly have known from the pale image that stared back at her from the dim shimmer of the drawing-room mirrors, how exquisitely lovely she was, not even when the Major bent over her hand and said, as he had said so often to ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... his eye would light on the grim black pile of L'Etat, lying out there in the silvery shimmer like some great monumental cairn, a rough and rugged heap of loneliness and mystery—the grimmer and lonelier by reason of the twinkling brightness of its setting. And then his thoughts would play about the lonely ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... and in the fond and vain superstition, which was but a spirit called from the deeps of an unfathomable and mighty love. And afar was heard the breaking of the lake in upon the shore—no other sound! And now, among the unwaving pines, there was a silver shimmer as the moon rose into her empire, and deepened at once, along the universal scene, the loveliness ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of it. Looking across the fields in our rear (rather longingly) I had the happy distinction of a discoverer. What I saw was the shimmer of sunlight on metal: lines of troops were coming in behind us! The distance was too great, the atmosphere too hazy to distinguish the color of their uniform, even with a glass. Reporting my momentous "find" I was directed by the general to go and see who they were. Galloping ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... the long soft curves of budding womanhood. Her face was sweet rather than beautiful, but an artist would have revelled in the delicate strength of the softly rounded chin, and the quick bright play of her expression. Her hair, of a deep rich brown, with a bronze shimmer where a sunbeam lay athwart it, swept back in those thick luxuriant coils which are the unfailing index of a strong womanly nature. Her deep blue eyes danced with life and light, while her slightly retrousse nose and her sensitive ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the ball to-night, All in a shimmer and silken sheen. She glides down the stairs like a thing of light, The ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... bright points, with larger lights in constellations outside, while masts and funnels ran up, faintly indicated, into the gloom above. She scarcely moved to the lift of the languid swell, but as the undulations passed there was a pale-green shimmer about her waterline that magnified the height to her topmost deck. She looked unsubstantial, rather like a floating fairy palace than a ship, and as the noisy launch drew nearer Jake gave his ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as tulip beds. The matinee audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures—indeed, any effect of line whatever-and there was only the color of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... plains, for their long southward journey preparing. In croaking flocks gather the cranes, and choose with loud clamor their leaders. The breath of the evening is cold, and lurid along the horizon The flames of the prairies are rolled, on the somber skies flashing their torches. At noontide a shimmer of gold through the haze pours the sun from his pathway. The wild-rice is gathered and ripe, von the moors, lie the scarlet po-pan-ka,[BF] Michabo[85] is smoking his pipe,— 'tis the soft, dreamy Indian Summer, When the god of the South[3] as he flies from Waziya, the god of the Winter, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... line of stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion. Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a sharp blow from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried across the splintered stump ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... unquestionably many would follow his example. But the urbanite has taught himself to doze upright. You may see many of us, standing dreamily before Chestnut Street show windows in the lunch hour, to all intents and purposes in a state of slumber. Yesterday, in that lucid shimmer of warmth and light, a group stood in front of a doughnut window near Ninth Street: not one of them was more than half awake. Similarly a gathering watched the three small birds who have become a traditional window ornament on Chestnut Street (they have recently moved from ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the plumed black top and along the swelling branches decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass. It was very witch-like, of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a bit of a bride! Such a marvel of grace! In a shimmer of rainbows and gossamer lace; No wonder the groom dropped his diamond-dust ring, Which a little elf-usher just caught with ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... nimble voice tripped on an E flat, and, missing the staccato step, rolled helplessly down in a legato flood of melody; whereupon, with an impatient grimace she shut her eyes, weary of watching the wave-shimmer that almost dazzled her. After a few seconds, when she opened them, there stood just on the edge of the cliff, as if poised in air, a woman whose face and form were as sharply cut in profile on the azure sea and sky as white cameo features on black ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... there rose the terraces of the amir, all glowing in the sunlight, with all its countless houses and cavern-openings and arching trees and pointing pyramids. Above was the canopy of heaven, no longer black, no longer studded with stars or glistening with the fitful shimmer of the aurora, but all radiant with the glorious sunlight, and disclosing all the splendors of the infinite blue. At that sight a thrill of joy passed through me. The long, long night at last was over; the darkness had passed away like some hideous dream; the day was here—the long day ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... unanimous silence as the great globe slipped into the sea—down and down until the last reflection of the morning sun ceased to shimmer from its surface. Drum after drum was played out, till the first mate held his hand ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... how the battle turned. Toward night of that memorable day, the clouds of smoke lifting, revealed the French army in full and disastrous retreat. Rothschild took in the situation at once. True to his instincts, he saw in that awful carnage only the shimmer of his gold. Chance had overcome the most heroic valor, the most stubborn resistance, the best laid plans, and once more declared in the Hebrew's favor. He dashed into Brussels, whence a carriage in ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... pale amethyst haze that thickened to purple at the far-off edge of the world, lay the bad lands resplendent under the hot glare of the sun in vivid red and black and pink colouring of the lava rock. Everywhere the eye met the flash and shimmer of mica fragments that sparkled like the facets of a million diamonds, while to the northward the Bear Paws reared cool and green, with the grass of the higher levels reaching almost to the ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... is!" Madeline strained her gaze on the dark blot, and it seemed to float in the atmosphere, to have no clearly defined margins, to waver and shimmer, and ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... my excuse: "Even bubbles have their use. They are perfect while they live, And their short career may give, As they shimmer, and are flown, ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... shimmer! Let the wind blow! All is a notion—What do we know? Let the moon glimmer! Let the stream flow! All is but ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... beyond its first quarter, was growing brighter, and a strange and mysterious shimmer was over everything as though the heat of the day were rising to give welcome and ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... break off their conversation. When they reached the 'Bassin de Neptune' they left the Park, turning down the Trianon Avenue, in the growing dark, till they saw to their right, behind its iron gates, the gleaming facade of the Petit Trianon; woods all about them, and to their left, again, the shimmer of wide water. Meanwhile the dying leaves, driven by the evening wind, descended on them in a soft and ceaseless shower; the woods, so significant and human in their planned and formal beauty, brought their 'visionary majesties' ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moon; and even the brilliant starlight of summer in Hellas is an uncertain guide. Democrates knew he was traversing a long avenue lined by spreading cypresses, with a shimmer of white from some tall, sepulchral monument. Then through the dimness loomed the high columns of a temple, and close beside it pale light spread out upon the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... then to the wonderful Yo Semite Valley,—itself a stupendous miracle of nature, with its Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of perpendicular height,—but a valley of streams, of waterfalls from the torrent to the mere shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet, or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with nothing at the base but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and at last plunge into the blue Merced that ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... of the sun, in the silver shimmer of the moon, the Jungfrau beckons, the Jungfrau calls! "Come," she seems to say, "come nearer! Come up to the heights! Come close to the running waters! Come." And that invitation falls on no unwilling ears, but in to the Grindelwald and to the Lauterbrunnen and up to Muerren go those who love the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... glimmer Like a butterfly; In golden light, or dimmer, Your triolet should glimmer, Tremble, turn, and shimmer, Flash, and flutter by; Your triolet ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... resting upon her left hand, the pen in her right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... trespassers; among the copses below anyone might freely wander. In places it was scarcely possible to make a way for fern, bramble, and underwood, but elsewhere mossy tracks led one among hazels or under arches of foliage which made of the mid-day sky a cool, golden shimmer. One such track, abruptly turning round a great rock over the face of which drooped the boughs of an ash, came upon a little sloping lawn, which started from a high hazel-covered bank. The bank itself was so shaped as to afford an easy seat, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... days of April had passed and there was still no sign of spring, we began to grow impatient. How often I watched the hedges around the Michailoffsky Palace, knowing that the buds would there first swell! How we longed for a shimmer of green under the brown grass, an alder tassel, a flush of yellow on the willow wands, a sight of rushing green water! One day, a week or so later, we were engaged to dine on Vassili Ostrow. I had been busily occupied until late in the afternoon, and when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... along the ground, and sighed long and strangely in the dry clusters of heather. The moon was full, but so densely beclouded that only a pale hazy shimmer hovered over ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Sometimes the stream flows silently, though it may be with power; at other times it finds a voice by which the air is possessed and thrilled. The old stained walls, the rugged ladders by which the folk descend to their boats, are washed by the clear, pure waters; the shimmer of water enters the dwelling-rooms and is reflected on the ceilings, a fluctuating quiver of light, moved by every breeze that ruffles the surface of the stream. The small gardens are green to the edge of the walls that drop sheer to ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... see you standing before me. You yourself—the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... idea, and we walked toward the village which then—they were early days!—looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine above its gray thatch and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... rigging and loosened the sails. Then the captain from his bridge called out, "Hoist the anchor!" Then the great iron hooks that held the ship fast were lifted up, a cannon sounded a final farewell. Robinson stood on the deck. He saw the great city shimmer in the sunshine before him. Very fast now the land was being left behind. It was not long until all that could be seen of his native city was the tops of the highest towers. Then all faded from sight. Behind, in front, right and left, he saw nothing ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... now nearly five miles long, and composed of great masses of men joined together by thinner lines. Behind and near to the flanks were large reserves. From the ridge they looked dark blurs and streaks, relieved and diversified with an odd-looking shimmer of light from the spear-points. At about ten minutes to six it was evident that the masses were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about and before their ranks. Scouts and patrols scattered themselves all over the front. Then they began to cheer. They were ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Shimmer of rose and pearl, Sheen on an opal sky; Day's crimson banners unfurl, Purple-pleached shadow-gleams die; Dawn flowers bourgeoning fair, Meads with the dawn-dews wet; Rare is the morn—ah, rare! But in the heart, ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... terraces and gardens. She was a little alarmed by his white face and sunken eyes; but she accepted his reassurances without question—she would have disbelieved anything which did not fit in with her plans. And now, as they gazed out upon that beauty under the soft shimmer of the moonlight, her heart suddenly expanded in tenderness. "I am so happy," she murmured, slipping ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... and there a tower or tall building, that stood up for an instant against the sky and then swam slowly out of sight, of the creaking of my sculls in the ungreased rowlocks, and, above all, the white shimmer of the moon following my boat as ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... revestir clothe, robe. revuelto, -a agitated, restless, disordered, topsy-turvy, winding, wrapped, clad. rey m. king, monarch. rezar pray, recite. rezo m. prayer, devotions. rico, -a rich, abundant, plentiful, fine. ridculo, -a ridiculous, strange, absurd. rielar shimmer, glisten. rienda f. rein; a —— suelta at full gallop. riesgo m. danger. rifar raffle, bid. rigidez f. rigidity. rgido, -a rigid, severe, rigorous. ro m. river, stream. riqueza f. richness, riches, wealth. risa ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... grew, and slowly from the ground rose a frost-covered woman, her glittering icy hair flowing to her waist, the blue light about her causing her garments of frost to glance and shimmer and radiate sparkles ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... up with Jacky Hart that night, getting to the Cove at dark, when the sea was a shimmer of fairy tints and the boats were coming in from the fishing grounds. Jacky greeted her with a wonderful smile, and later on she found herself watching alone by his bed. The tiny lamp on the table burned dim, and outside, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and mamma was generally glad of her assistance in all such matters. However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying. All that was the prosy part of shopping. It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace. So the girl went on her usual way, finding life a little dull, a little tiresome, and most people rather stupid, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... their saws in the tops of the trees and the promise of one of the hottest days of the season danced in the shimmer of haze over ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... in the day, and the township had lain drowsing in its dust under the shimmer of a great yellow sun till this astonishing invasion struck it, and startled it from its accustomed lethargy. There was a rush to windows and doors, men fell over each other struggling from Harvey's bar, a sudden ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... he saw a beauty so glorious that he closed his eyes involuntarily and still he saw the vision in the dull-green gown, with the scarf of old gold about her dazzling white shoulders. And there were two lights, the barbaric red of the jewels in her hair, and the black shimmer of her eyes. He drew back a step more. It was a picture to be looked ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... sitting alone in the moonlight, and heard some one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange-groves, and from them came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like sunlight; large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to shimmer with a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave, and above it floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had that deep, mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the Florentine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... this garden of flowers. There was a strange simplicity, too, about her dress—a plain, tight-fitting, tight-sleeved dress of unrelieved black, her only adornment being some bands of big blue beads worn loosely round the neck. The black figure, in this shimmer of rose-pink and gold and flowers, was effective enough; but even the finest of pictures or the finest of statues has not the subtle attraction of a graceful carriage. Macleod had never seen any woman walk as this woman walked, ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... was almost as joyless and as solitary as his own, he would wait with her till the long line of canoes passed by, so that she could see the bronzed, half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of the fish as they were swept up by the deadly net, and hear the warning cry from the torch-bearers, as in the depths beneath they saw the black shadow of a prowling shark rushing to seize the net, or perchance ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... with shimmer and shade, Now high, now low, that firelight played, On tree-leaves wet with evening dews, On ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... leisure which is part of the mission of a good cigar. The pleasantness of the wide, cool piazza, with its flowers and vines and gay awnings; the charm of the summer morning, not yet dulled by wear and tear of the day; the steady, deliberate dash of the waves on the beach below; the play and shimmer of the big, quiet water, stretching out to the edge of the world; all this filled their minds, rested their souls. There was no need for words. The Bishop sighed comfortably as he pushed his great shoulders back against the cool wicker of the chair and swung one long ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... The mystery consists solely in how these elements can be so combined as to acquire the transcendent properties of life. Moreover, to the investigator it is not a question of by what means matter dead—without the shimmer of a vital quality—became either slowly or suddenly possessed of the properties of life. Enough for us to know that whatever the power that wrought the change, that power was competent, as the issue ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... Assyrian pursuing a course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed, a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly, the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in self-complacence; she had won ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... sent his mournful cry across the tree-tops, and was answered. Frogs added the booming of their tireless throats. A young moon slipped across an eastern mountain, and livened the creek into a soft shimmer wherein long shadows quavered. The more distant line of mountains showed in a mist of silver, and the nearer heights in blue -gray silhouette. A wizardry of night and softness settled like a benediction, and from the dark door ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the seaward side there would not be heard, on such nights, the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to shimmer toward the horizon. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... eyes divine were shot with light Like flashes in a northern night, Magnetic gleam that wrought a spell On whom its star-like shimmer fell— A spell of ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... remote, in blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dome mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like rolling hillocks; but here and there a little white ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... interesting and fascinating than ever. Still she had those thousand pretty movements, those nameless graces of manner, those wavering shades of expression, that irresistibly enchained the eye and the imagination,—true Frenchwoman as she was, always in one rainbow shimmer of fancy and feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April days which give you flowers and rain, sun and shadow, and snatches of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of gray silk. The sun, pale and without rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched, yellow faces were like the faces of bilious invalids. Captain MacWhirr ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... dawn, a rosy light, broke in the eastern sky, a tremulous, golden shimmer was on the lake as the sunbeams touched it. The forest birds awoke and began to sing; they flew from branch to branch; the flowers began to open their "dewy eyes," the stately swans came out upon the lake, ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... fellow, with long gliding steps, ragged and reluctant, and, without a word or a look, launched himself out into the cold, and sped away he knew not whither. As he left the door, the only suspicion of light was the dull and doubtful shimmer of the snow that covered the street, keen particles of which were blown in his face by the wind, which, having been up all night, had grown very cold, and seemed delighted to find one unprotected human being whom it might badger at its own bitter will. Outcast Shargar! Where he spent the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Faith from the wedding of Knowing and Loving shall purely be born, And the Child shall smile in the West, and the West to the East give morn, And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn, Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the answer from 'Volaterrae.' They could see the shimmer of bronze armour in the beech crotch, and the friendly flash of the ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... house look good to you?" He cocked a thumb toward the dwelling of the Home Farm in a flat space beyond the creek. It was the house of dull red brick, broad, low, square fronted, with many windows, the house in a green setting to which they had gone so many years before. Heat waves made it shimmer. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... "The Banks of the Cree." We did not come at once to the river; but from House o' Hill (delicious name!) we plunged into a wild, forgotten paradise. The road lay under an arbour of trees like an emerald tunnel, with a break here and there in the green wall to show a blue shimmer of mountains and hills in the distance. We seemed to have slipped into the hole leading to fairyland and pulled the hole in after us; but I knew I was not going to enjoy getting there as much as if my gray bonnet and coat had been on the front seat instead of ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... silent, while the splendour in the west blazed and spread till it challenged the oncoming shadow in the north; and the near hills grown magically ethereal, stood in a shimmer of gold, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green leaves,—between the uneven tufts of grass, the dainty "ragged robin" sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against masses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry,—the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to conceal the shy confidences of young lovers,—and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... he proposed Malmaison, and the directions were transmitted into the ivory mouth-piece beside her. At the moment when the day was most threatened it had shown a new and most promising development. Over the grey dress Mrs. Grove wore a cloak with a subdued gold shimmer, her hat was hardly more than the spread wing of a bird across the pallor of her face, and the deep folds of the gloves on her wrists emphasized the slender charm of her arms. No young—younger woman, he decided, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... colors the knight never saw before. Some of them seem to be made of hammered gold, and some of silver; some have stamens of precious stones, and some look like clear crystal, blood- red, deep purple, or orange, as if they were cut from solid gems; some of them have petals like flames, that shimmer and glow and are reflected by the others; the leaves are all glistening emerald and they are sprinkled with pearls like drops of evening dew. The stems twine about like serpents, and they seem to the knight ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... they had passed a turn in the street, and there was only sandy earth and dust-colored walls and a yellow glare above them, where a moment ago had been a shimmer of sunset's gold. ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea between the cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think it's just flightiness—and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study." She glanced tentatively at Selden's motionless ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... difficult passage, in the midst of which her nimble voice tripped on an E flat, and, missing the staccato step, rolled helplessly down in a legato flood of melody; whereupon, with an impatient grimace she shut her eyes, weary of watching the wave-shimmer that almost dazzled her. After a few seconds, when she opened them, there stood just on the edge of the cliff, as if poised in air, a woman whose face and form were as sharply cut in profile on the azure sea and sky as white cameo features ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... under the loggia went gaily. Not many courses; much fruit; a shimmer of tea-roses before the guests; and the scent of roses blowing in ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glowing in the sunlight, with all its countless houses and cavern-openings and arching trees and pointing pyramids. Above was the canopy of heaven, no longer black, no longer studded with stars or glistening with the fitful shimmer of the aurora, but all radiant with the glorious sunlight, and disclosing all the splendors of the infinite blue. At that sight a thrill of joy passed through me. The long, long night at last was over; the darkness ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but ere was something incongruous about that—as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... we saved. There is many a thing we could do better without than the hope of it, for our hopes ever point beyond the thing hoped for. The bow is the damask flower on the woven tear-drops of the world; hope is the shimmer on the dingy warp of trouble shot with the golden woof of God's intent. Nothing almost sees ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... had lost a petal another box was brought to Miss Sterling's door. Her fingers quivered with hope as she untied the ribbon. The address was in the same firm, open hand. A shimmer of gold met her first glance, but the scrap of white she had longed for was missing. Without doubt the pilferer had thwarted her again. She put the yellow beauties into water with half-hearted pleasure. Why couldn't Miss Sniffen let her have her own! She pounded the air with her ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... before he had taken half-a-dozen steps; and for an hour he lay still and rested. It was like a taste of heaven, just to be able to hold his neck straight. The sun had risen by the time he was ready to try it again, and through the trees he saw the shimmer and sparkle of the Glimmerglass. He heard the wind talking to itself in the branches overhead, and the splashing of the ripples on the beach; and he staggered down to the margin ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... savage while so tender, Do the lilies perish mourning their lost splendor? Does the diamond shimmer brightlier that eternal Time makes nothing dimmer of its ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the year puts on, When failing leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... journey's end. In those moments—with the waters of the Bay beneath him, and beyond the beautiful view of the distant islands like shapeless sea monsters guarding the approach, with the mountains capped by Vesuvius, and the towns gleaming white under the shimmer of the lazy smoke wreaths—he felt the reality of life. But it was not his own life spent in a vain chase after glory, a struggle for something he could not have defined, now that he knew it was to end in nothing; no, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... The world around them, in the soft shimmer of the crescent moon, became an enchanted region, the land that never was on earth or sea, the land of love, in which all that dwell therein move in the glamour of the ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... vain for that," said Ben, pointing out the orb of evening, with its pale-yellow light peeping over the tall tree-tops, and irradiating the scene with its pensive shimmer. ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... fairest green, and in the middle of the island the Blue Flower was growing, wondrous tall and dazzling, brighter than the sapphire of the sea. Then the call of the distant trumpet came floating across the water, and while it was sounding a shimmer of fog swept over the island and I could see ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... one great curve. The Cardinal mounted to the tip-top limb of the ash and looked around him. There was never a fairer sight for the eye of man or bird. The mist and shimmer of early spring were in the air. The Wabash rounded Horseshoe Bend in a silver circle, rimmed by a tangle of foliage bordering both its banks; and inside lay a low open space covered with waving marsh grass and the blue bloom ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... solitary in the midst of crowded Paris, was possessed by one thought, one image impossible to drive away, one name which murmured eternally in his ears—Marsa; Marsa, who was constantly before his eyes, sometimes in the silvery shimmer of her bridal robes, and sometimes with the deathly pallor of the promenader in the garden of Vaugirard; Marsa, who had taken possession of his being, filling his whole heart, and, despite his revolt, gradually overpowering all other memories, all other ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... his mind, and things wonderfully concrete and woefully incongruous—hunting scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the glittering of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a fleeting shimmer of glistening test-tubes, long rows of book-lined shelves, the throb of machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment of forgotten song, faces of dear women and old chums, a lonely watercourse amid upstanding peaks, a shattered boat on a ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... painfully from her sleeves. All about her was the ever recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no favor,—the bees and flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and the kingbird in the poplars, the smell of strawberries, the motion of lush grass, the shimmer of corn-blades tossed gayly as banners in a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... blaze, gleam, glow, shimmer, flame, gleaming, illumination, shine, flare, glimmer, incandescence, shining, flash, glistening, luster, sparkle, flicker, glistering, scintillation, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... first composer who appreciated the genius of the instrument, discovered its latent tone colors and developed its resources to their full capacity for artistic beauty and expression. Chopin was the first to make the pianoforte both shimmer and sing. Rubinstein said that the art of music could go no further than Chopin and called him the pianoforte bard, rhapsodist, mind and soul. "How he wrote for it I do not know, but only an entire passing over of one into the other could call such music into ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... you have come to see otherwise, else as my guest on this happy occasion, I should not permit myself to apply to you so personal a remark. And, gentlemen," the Colonel swelled visibly, but those nearest him caught the shimmer of a suspicious moisture in his eyes, "I am in a position to-night—this night whereon you have added to my happiness by your presence at this board—to repeat now what I said fourteen years ago in this very room: I consider myself honored in that ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... because, though burned with the desire to see him, she yet had an instinct to postpone the encounter. She was almost minded to return. But she went on. The town was really very near. The illuminated clock of the Town Hall had dominion over it; the golden shimmer above the roofs to the left indicated the electrical splendour of the new Cinema in Moorthorne Road next to the new Primitive Methodist Chapel. He had told her about that, too. In two minutes, in less than two minutes, she was among houses again, and approaching the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... foot-lights. The lanterns are trailed forward before they are put out; from the break of the poop we watch the vivid shifting patch of deck that each lights up on its way. The stars are very sharp in the vast violet dome above our masts; they shimmer on the sea; and our trucks describe minute orbits among the stars, for the trades have yet to fail us, and every inch of canvas has its fill of the gentle steady wind. It is a heavenly night. The peace of God ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... new to me. Our table was set out on the terrace, overlooking the Dnieper, with the music and stir of people in the distance. An irresponsible joy filled my heart as I looked down at the black, winding river with its shadowy banks and the fantastic shimmer of lights on the water. The city lights crowded down to the very water's edge; then the drifting red and green lights of steamers and ferry-boats moving on the black, magic stream, and beyond, the flat plain, silent and mysterious, with, over the horizon rim, the thunder and clang ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... younger than Maria had ever seen him. There was the humidity of youth in his eyes, the flush of youth on his cheeks, the triumph of youth in his expression. Harry Edgham, in spite of lines on his face, in spite, even, of a shimmer of gray and thinness of hair on the temples, looked as young as youth itself, in this rejuvenation of his affection, for he was very much in love with the woman whom he was to marry. He had been faithful to his wife while she lived, even the imagination ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... silken mantle that had been about her below stairs and he saw now that she was a vivid, exotic shimmer of gauzy green against the saffron veil that fell from her henna hair. There was barbaric beauty in her, in the bold, painted face, the bare, gold-banded arms, the slender, sinuous lines, and there was barbaric splendor in the heavy jewels ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to do so, unquestionably many would follow his example. But the urbanite has taught himself to doze upright. You may see many of us, standing dreamily before Chestnut Street show windows in the lunch hour, to all intents and purposes in a state of slumber. Yesterday, in that lucid shimmer of warmth and light, a group stood in front of a doughnut window near Ninth Street: not one of them was more than half awake. Similarly a gathering watched the three small birds who have become a traditional window ornament on Chestnut Street (they have recently ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... intentions apparently unshaken. Their front was now nearly five miles long, and composed of great masses of men joined together by thinner lines. Behind and near to the flanks were large reserves. From the ridge they looked dark blurs and streaks, relieved and diversified with an odd-looking shimmer of light from the spear-points. At about ten minutes to six it was evident that the masses were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about and before their ranks. Scouts and patrols scattered themselves ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... rich and rainy nights, When like a legion leap the lights And take the town with gold; Of taverns quaint where poets dream, Of cafes gaudily agleam, And vice that's overbold; Of crystal shimmer, silver sheen, Of soft and soothing nicotine, Of ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... young woman with a body generous as that of a chiefess and more wonderful, as she came upon us, across the wet sand, in the shimmer of the moonlight. Even the haole sailormen made pause of silence, and with open mouths stared upon her. Her walk! I have heard you talk, O Kanaka Oolea, of the woman Helen who caused the war of Troy. ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... years, and in the fond and vain superstition, which was but a spirit called from the deeps of an unfathomable and mighty love. And afar was heard the breaking of the lake in upon the shore—no other sound! And now, among the unwaving pines, there was a silver shimmer as the moon rose into her empire, and deepened at once, along the universal scene, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bower and up the steep bank until they emerged upon clear ground, when, bearing away to the eastward round the foot of the hill which they had that day ascended, they groped their way cautiously over the unfamiliar ground until, in the course of about half an hour, they caught the dim shimmer of starlight upon water, and, between them and it, a group of dark, shapeless blotches which, upon their nearer approach, they identified as the hovels constituting the fishing village which they had seen during the day from the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... see it—and usually he didn't. Altogether, he was a very impractical person. He must have made a feeble sailor—a regular fool as a look-out—and the wonder is that he lost only one leg during his deep-sea career. He looked at the skipper with that calm, far-away shimmer in his eyes, combing his thin whiskers with his fingers. He did not speak. His wooden leg was ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... race. It is of a mud-grey colour, this desert that calls to them, and as even as a lawn. As far as the eye can reach, no change is seen in it, and it is gloomy under a still gloomier sky. It has almost the shimmer of something humid, but its immense surface is all made of dry mud, broken and marked ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Kirkstone as he had seen her in the inspector's office. He recalled vividly the slim, golden beauty of her, the wonderful gray of her eyes, and the shimmer of her hair as she stood in the light of the window—and then he saw Shan Tung, effeminate, with his sly, creeping hands and his narrowed eyes, and the thing which McDowell had suggested rose up before him ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... mere presence that, unless you're watched, you'll do something desperate in the wild desire to break the monotony. Well, I drank deep of that life," Constance looked dreamily over the stretch of meadow and pine-edged woods, all dazzling with a shimmer of icy snow, "before I ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... increased, and it seemed to Otter that the mist was somewhat thinner than was usual at this hour, though as yet it hung densely between them and the mountain snows. Now he could trace the walls of the amphitheatre, now he could see the black shimmer of the water beneath, and distinguish the glitter of many hundreds of upturned eyeballs as they glared at him and beyond him. The silence grew more and more intense, for none spoke or moved: all were waiting to see the dawn ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... was the lowland of the Camber marshes, with the bluffs of Rye and Winchelsea, and the line of cliffs behind them. On the larboard bow rose the great white walls of Folkestone and of Dover, and far on the distant sky-line the gray shimmer of those French cliffs for which ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as the great globe slipped into the sea—down and down until the last reflection of the morning sun ceased to shimmer from its surface. Drum after drum was played out, till the first mate held his hand ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... nakedness;—and a trembling seized him,—and a ghastly fear. For there was not any ground,—neither beneath him nor about him nor above him,—but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,—with a shimmer of shed teeth strown through the drift of it, like the shimmer of scrags of shell in the wrack of ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... glorious that he closed his eyes involuntarily and still he saw the vision in the dull-green gown, with the scarf of old gold about her dazzling white shoulders. And there were two lights, the barbaric red of the jewels in her hair, and the black shimmer of her eyes. He drew back a step more. It was a picture to be ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... was in the door. The polished boards of the long ballroom lay gleaming with ghostly shimmer in the fading light. The pictures on the walls seemed to stare at the two intruders with cold displeasure. Cherry shivered slightly as the chill struck her. It seemed to her as if these stately knights and dames themselves must surely come down from their frames at such ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... ceremony. Never was there a simpler royal wedding in all the annals of Spanish history: there was no throng of gay nobles, there were none of the customary feasts or tournaments, there was no military display, no glitter of jewels, no shimmer of silks and satins, but all was quiet and serious, and the few guests at this solemn consecration seemed impressed with the dignity of the occasion. The pathway of the young princess was not all strewn with roses, however, as her marriage seemed to enrage her degenerate brother ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the waves that dimple and slide, Slide and shimmer and shine, Under her fairy-slippered ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... lower front windows, a little woman stood looking out and speculating on the extreme solitariness of the situation. She had nobody to communicate her sentiments to, or she could have been eloquent on the subject. The golden glow and shimmer of the setting sun all over the wide landscape, it may be said with truth, she did not see; to her it was nothing but "sunshine," a natural and necessary accessory of the sun's presence, when clouds did not happen to come over the sky. I think ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... after starting, and only wakened when the sun was high in the heavens. But he found himself whirling along at a good rate, with the greenish shimmer of the peaceful ocean waves spread beneath him far beyond his ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... buttered them to an equal thickness and then more slowly put a long silver spoon into the jam. I even paused to admire in Judy's mirror over the table the effect of the cascade of lace that fell across my arm and lost itself in the blue shimmer of old Rene's masterpiece of a negligee, then deep down I buried the spoon in the purple sweetness. I had just lifted it high in the air when out of the lilac-scented dark of the garden came ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... beings stretched upon the floor, often fifteen to twenty, some clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately. Their bed was a litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. There was little or no furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any shimmer of habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. Theft and prostitution form the chief means of subsistence of this population. No one seemed to take the trouble to cleanse this Augean stable, this Pandemonium, this tangle of crime, filth, and pestilence ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... swung, but she was already coming to, and a few seconds later her jibboom was pointing straight for the middle of the passage, with the Heads looming up on either hand, black as ebony against the faint shimmer of starlight on the waters of the lagoon beyond. Gurney and Saunders now came aft and proceeded to complete the hoisting of the second quarter boat; and seeing that Grace seemed to know pretty well what she was about with the ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... their Bedouin owners, who had just arrived from the interior, bringing native goods, with dried fruits, to market, forming an assembly such as can only be found on the borders of the desert, and which, indeed, would be utterly out of place except beneath the glow and shimmer of an ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... mystery consists solely in how these elements can be so combined as to acquire the transcendent properties of life. Moreover, to the investigator it is not a question of by what means matter dead—without the shimmer of a vital quality—became either slowly or suddenly possessed of the properties of life. Enough for us to know that whatever the power that wrought the change, that power was competent, as the issue proves. But that which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... plumage was as white as the snow, new fallen on the mountains. And right behind it, in pursuit, hurtled a huge black thing, fully as large and just as swift; a tremendous black crow, so black that its sides gave off a greenish shimmer. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... sides were clothed with shattered pine trees, heavy with snow, and I went down once more by that astounding mountain road from Granezza to Marostica, with the Venetian Plain and all its cities spread out beneath my feet, and Venice herself on the far horizon, amid the shimmer of sunshine on the distant sea. I stood again on the bridge at Bassano, looking up the Val Brenta, with Monte Grappa towering above me on my right hand, and then turning south-eastward across the level plain I heard again the rushing waters of the Piave and, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... who set those pretty pearls in line, * And filled thee full of whitest chamomile and reddest wine? Who lent the morning-glory in thy smile to shimmer and shine * Who with that ruby-padlock dared thy lips to seal-and sign! Who looks on thee at early morn with stress of joy and bliss * Goes mad for aye, what then of him who ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Devil himself might have envied. But the man he looked at slept heavily on. And then—God! I feel the agony I felt in my dream then now!—then I saw the great yellow hand, with the great evil eye upon it, lifted murderously, and the bright steel it held shimmer as the assassin turned again and bent his yellow face down closer to that other face hidden from me in the shadow—the girl's face, that I knew was ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... rising plains. But the interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between the metals! The newcomer ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... one from the sleeve of his baize jacket, where by chance it had strayed and caught—for the fair owner liked to visit the greenhouse— and hold it admiringly and enthusiastically up in the morning sunlight, and I remember the golden shimmer it had in it, for he called my attention to it. A French writer's words seem to meet its description better than my own: "Non pas rouges—Mais blonde avec des reflets dors, on delicatement se jouait ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... imagine classic antiquity full of this wonderful blond colour of marbles; arrangements of palest lilac, green, rosy yellow, and a white shimmer. Colours such as we see on water at ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... tension—every faculty strained to breaking; the buzz of a fly is a roar to me. I build up these towering castles of emotion in my soul, castles that shimmer in the sunlight: ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Amor—amor—amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... which the sun darts, launches into the obscurity its shower of rays and a portion of the nave glows like a luminous glade. A vast rosace behind the choir, a window with tortuous branchings above the entrance, shimmer with the tints of amethyst, ruby, emerald and topaz like leafy labyrinths in which lights from above break in and diffuse themselves in shifting radiance. Near the sacristy a small door-top, fastened against the wall, exposes an infinity of intersecting ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... her hands into her lap and tilted her head back, looking at the blank white shimmer ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mountain-side they looked and saw death pursuing death. They saw Morrison climbing higher and higher, saw him strain his eyes ever ahead, never behind, saw them rest on two figures, saw Morrison crouch behind a rock and a shimmer of light creep along the barrel of his levelled rifle. The eyes seemed eager as they rested on another figure above him that stretched forth a steady hand; saw jets of flame spring from two guns. Then they gleamed with a brighter light as they saw the rifle fall from Morrison's hand; ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... few women up or down the river was living that June at the Custer Trail. She was Margaret Roberts, the wife of the Eatons' foreman, a jovial, garrulous woman, still under thirty, with hair that curled attractively and had a shimmer of gold in it. She was utterly fearless, and was bringing up numerous children, all girls, with a cool disregard of wild animals and wilder men, which, it was rumored shocked her relatives "back East." She ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... and dropping to the four corners in half transparent tapestry. Beneath the roof, the half light shines upon a stage of fresh and fragrant flowers, up-bearing a long, high coffin. White lace of pure silver pendant from the border throws a mild shimmer upon the solid silver tracery hinges and emblazonings. A cross of lilies stands at the head, an anchor of roses at the foot. The lid is drawn back to show the face and bosom, and on the coffin top are heather, precious flowers, and sprigs of green. This catafalque, or in ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... out of Gibraltar, he and Grace were strolling the deck. He was happy, she in deep despair. Down at the other end of the deck-house, leaning over the rail, smoking viciously, was Hugh, alone, angry, sulky. It was a beautiful night, cool and crisp, calm and soft. A rich full moon threw its glorious shimmer across the waves, flashing a million silvery blades along the watery pavement that seemed to lead to the end of the world. Scores of passengers were walking the deck, and all were ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to stretch up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it became the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess coming toward him in a golden shimmer. ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... affected by the constant presence of the sea. This is possible in a big island if it is far enough away from the rest of the world, Iceland, for example, but it is inevitable in a little one. The sea is always present with Manxmen. Everything they do, everything they say, gets the colour and shimmer of the sea. The sea goes into their bones, it comes out at their skin. Their talk is full of it. They buy by it, they sell by it, they quarrel by it, they fight by it, they swear by it, they pray by it. Of course they are not conscious ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... this Titan Goblet, like the visioned future which glows before the sight of happy youth, and then vanished. The gold rim vanished also; still there appeared to be no disposition among the party to leave the scene. Twilight began to shimmer, and now the stars trembled forth from the dusky sky. At last night settled on the landscape, and the girls expressed a wish to see the hollow lighted up with torchlight. Scattering ourselves amongst the trees of the bank, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... in the extreme warmth of her island home she sat amid the trees, and it was allowed to fall away in rippling waves—to what then am I to liken it? It was transcendently beautiful. I think that I can feel its appearance. It must have looked like the sun's shimmer on the sea-foam from which rose Aphrodite; or like the glint from Cupid's golden arrow-heads as, later, sitting by the side of Aphrodite, he floated along the shores of queenly Hellas, in gleeful mischief shooting landward and piercing many a heart. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but which are apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle them. These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner—almost, as one might say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... house, and to give it the lordly shade of fine trees. My turf, though Provencal, shall be always green. I shall carry my park up the hillside and plant on the highest point some pretty kiosque, whence, perhaps, my eyes may catch the shimmer of the Mediterranean. Orange and lemon trees, and all choicest things that grow, shall embellish my retreat; and there will I be a mother among my children. The poetry of Nature, which nothing can ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... and placed it on the divan near her. She sat cross-legged, leaning back on her arms, in the blue shimmer of her embroidered robe and with the tawny halo of her unruly hair about her face which she raised to mine ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... own rightful throne was occupied by a stranger—what cared she for the blinding shimmer of a crown? Ah, it troubled her not that she was poor, and possessed not even the means of bestowing presents upon her favorites and friends. But she felt happy in her poverty, for she was free to love whom she would, to raise to ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... fruit-trees, with the river winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level distance the hazy shimmer of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... from sleep; a dream influence lingered with him, a vision of a cloistered enclosure, a dream in which all his senses, now assailed by the sights and smells and sounds of a troop-ship, drew in again the familiar things; he beheld the red tiles a-shimmer above the yellow stone; the aromatic scent of budding eucalyptus was in his nostrils, the sound of the young laughter of women in his ears. He sat up, gazing uncertainly at the dark, crowded space, the narrow stairway, the ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... in a splendour that transfigured the eternally white mountain-crest to a mighty shimmer of rose and gold, he turned at last and looked down at the white face pillowed upon his arm. The eyes were closed. The ineffable peace of Death seemed to dwell upon the quiet features. She had lain so for a long time, and he had ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... otter's skin, And about their bodies the sacks were tied, and they carried their harps within, With stitches of silver and golden thread each case for a harp was sewed; And, beneath the embroidery gleaming red, the shimmer ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... I battled round a point, I heard a rustle and a rush of something coming, and the bowsprit of a large sloop glided into view close by me. She was painted in stripes of all colors above her green bottom. The shimmer of the water shook the reflection of her hull, and made the edges of the stripes blend together. It was as if a rainbow had suddenly flung itself down for me ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... a white shimmer?— Something with pale silken shine? No; it is the column's glimmer, 'Gainst the gloomy hedge ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... substance there is, is "too coherent"—it is too clearly expressed in the first thirty seconds. There you have the "whole fragment," a translucent syllogism, but then the reality, the spirit, the substance stops and the "form," the "perfume," the "manner," shimmer right along, as the soapsuds glisten after one has finished washing. Or we might say that his substance would have been worthier, if his adoration or contemplation of Nature, which is often a part of it, and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... the life and movement of the atmosphere. Perugino's greatest gift to Art was this power of rendering the magic of the sun-warmed air and the sense of illimitable distance. He gave to his landscapes space and depth, the gentle stir of wind, and the golden shimmer of sunshine. Signorelli also learnt this power of presenting the life of hill and tree and sky, and some of his effects of distance have the space and grandeur almost of Nature herself. He also, like Perugino, could detach his figures ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... and in view of an amphitheater of mountains 2,400 feet high. On the west are rocky peaks of great size; on the north lofty summits clothed with low trees; on the east a broad beach with a road track, and covered with pumice stones, which shimmer through the leafy screen of the bushes; on the southern side rise volcanic cones behind a forest flat. Such is the majestic frame that incloses this vast sheet of water whose roaring tempests ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... where a man was swimming hard for life. Brought almost close to him by his powerful glass, Mark could nearly make out the agonised look upon the swimmer's face, as, at every stroke, he made the water shimmer in the moonlight; and every moment as his forehead grew wet and his hands clammy, the midship, man expected to see the waves close over the ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... Tom, almost screaming. "Why, that must mean the stake yonder; that must be the mark." And he pointed to the oaken stick with its red tip blazing against the white shimmer ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... of the green shimmer lay to his left. Somehow he found himself reluctant to turn and face it. That would commit him ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... half of its brilliant disc obscured with grey, subluminous cloud, and the other half sending forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth—one ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... than an hour's tramp. They followed the riverside; all the while Gertrude kept walking a little behind the others. Her fancy had begun to play around the red glow of the sunset, which flamed now above the river, now above the strand. Gray alder and green birch were enveloped by the shimmer, flashing red one instant, the next taking on ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Hanny, she was really enchanted. The room full of people, smiling and happy, the changing figures, the light airy dresses, the shimmer of silks, the cloudlets of lace, the soft flying curls, for so many people wore ringlets still, the happy smiling faces, and the throb of the music was intoxicating. It was a strange, delightful world that she had gone into with her first long gown ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... had crossed it. A gap in a hedge made by a bull that morning, had removed the last screen. — Lady Euphrasia's window was so neglected and dusty, that it could reflect nothing more than a dim bluish shimmer. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... constellations outside, while masts and funnels ran up, faintly indicated, into the gloom above. She scarcely moved to the lift of the languid swell, but as the undulations passed there was a pale-green shimmer about her waterline that magnified the height to her topmost deck. She looked unsubstantial, rather like a floating fairy palace than a ship, and as the noisy launch drew nearer Jake gave his ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... I got a glimpse of sunlight and open sky and knew that Evarin had stepped through into somewhere and was gone. The banging on the door sounded like a whole regiment of Spaceforce out there. I dived toward the shimmer of little stars which marked Miellyn's tiara in the darkness, braving the black horror hovering over her, and touched rigid girl-flesh, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... risen when she came; and she sat a long time in the cavern, listening to the murmur of the river, flowing under the glacier at her feet. Slowly the dawn began, and again she seemed to see the shimmer of a face—such a face as one sees in the coals of a dying fire. Then the full sun came over the eastern mountain, and the guide heard a woman's cry. There before her was Charles Knollys! The face seemed hardly pale; and there was the same faint ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... with copperas, aniline, and indigo. Then she took bunches of the colours that went together best and made bouquets for the big vases. They were pretty in the daytime, but at night you could watch them sparkle and shimmer forever. ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the rugged and stony summits, as it dispersed gradually in the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... of light and shimmer! The couch is the yawl of the Africa. The persistent chambermaid is the ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... settled himself in his blankets and tried to sleep. In five minutes he was sitting up, staring into the blue-gray shimmer of the moonlight, straining his ears, watching and listening intently. Nothing was in sight. The browned and broken flanks of the Panamint hills lay quiet and familiar under the moon. The burro moved its head with a clinking ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... quinine, which causes all the tissues of the body to be more or less fluorescent. All animal infusions show this fluorescence. The crystalline lens of the eye exhibits the effect in a very striking manner. When, for example, I plunge my eye into this violet beam, I am conscious of a whitish-blue shimmer filling the space before me. This is caused by fluorescent light generated in the eye itself. Looked at from without, the crystalline lens at the same time is seen ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... seemed, however, as if Lord Darcy were accustomed to be overlooked, for he showed no signs of annoyance; on the contrary, his face brightened, and he looked at the pretty scene with sparkling eyes. The room was full of a soft rosy glow, the shimmer of silver and crystal was reflected in the sheet of mirror, and beneath the garlands of flowers the young faces of the guests glowed with pleasure and excitement. He looked from one to the other—handsome Max, dandy ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... little ray of light, like a tiny star which shone as on immeasurable heights to show where life was. As she travelled deeper and deeper, it was a wonder to see how far that little ray penetrated down and down through gulfs of darkness, blue and cold like the shimmer of a diamond, and even when it could be seen no more, sent yet a shadowy refraction, a line of something less black than the darkness, a lightening amid the gloom, a something indefinable which was hope. The rocks were more cruel than imagination could conceive,—sometimes ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... Outshone by the shimmer of the orphreys and the stones, the costumes of the other judges appeared darker and discordant. The black vestments of secular justice, the white and black robe of Jean Blouyn, the silk symars, the red woollen mantles, the scarlet chaperons ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... up at her. She had not spoken since he left the barn. The soft and continual shimmer of the dying lightning showed a marble face high against the black sky of the opposite quarter. Bathsheba was sitting almost on the apex of the stack, her feet gathered up beneath her, and resting on the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... and, indeed, she and Johnny were preternaturally quiet until things had been cleared away and the taffy could be started. When it was on the stove, there was at least ten minutes of whispering while they watched the black molasses shimmer into the first yellow rings. Then Johnny, in a low voice, talked for a good while of something he called "Philosophy"—which seemed to consist in a profound disbelief in everything. "Take religion," said Johnny. "I'd like to discuss it with you; ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Despond, while, beyond that again the heavy smoke of the city of Destruction and the town of Stupidity shuts in the whole horizon. And then, when you turn your back on all that, in favourable states of the weather you can see here and there the shimmer of that river over which there is no bridge; and, then again, so high above the river that it seems to be a city standing in heaven rather than upon the earth, you will see the high towers and shining palace roofs and broad battlements of the New Jerusalem itself. ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... on the hill-top, the sun shining on her face. In her hand was the lilac sunbonnet, making a splash of faint pure colour against the blonde whiteness of her dress. Ralph could just catch the golden shimmer of her hair. He knew but he could not see how it crisped and tendrilled about her brow, and how the light wind blew it into little cirrus wisps of sun-flossed gold. The thought that for long he should see it no more was even harder than parting. It is the hard things ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... one day beyond its first quarter, was growing brighter, and a strange and mysterious shimmer was over everything as though the heat of the day were rising to give welcome and fuse itself ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... level of the sea, row out a mile from the beach. Eastwards a bank of red vapour shuts in the sea, the wavelets—no larger than those raised by the oar—on that side are purple as if wine had been spilt upon them, but westwards the ripples shimmer with palest gold. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Cecil, who flies out, beautiful as a fairy, in a shimmer of white and pale blue, her waving hair like ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... world's harmony, Born of light, the darkness broken, In the dawn of things to be. Power crowned— Earth around Like a sun-song rolled the sound. Mute they wander. Sweet strains ending— Eye nor tongue dares yet the lending Speech to thought. But lo! quick blending, All things speak! They sound and shimmer, Bloom in fragrance, ring and glimmer, Tint and tone combining, nearer, Meet as one-with all their thinking In one beauty, higher, clearer,— Heaven itself ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... air was some relief. As Noel had fled from him, having uttered her news, so did he fly from her. The afflicted walk fast. He was soon down by the river, and turned West along its wall. The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water. A cruel night! He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a spasm of realisation. He seemed to see his dead wife's face staring at him out of the past, like an accusation. "How have you cared for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... immense shoulder of rock, it emerged upon a long and comparatively level ridge of land that rolled in gentle undulations down into a wide park-like valley set out with clumps of birch and poplar, with here and there the shimmer of a lake showing between the yellow and brown of ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... green by sprinkling. If a section of it gives up the struggle, the tray may be replaced with a fresh one. From time to time a blush of tiny pink flowers runs over the wall. There seems to be no season for the blossoms, but whenever the sun shines, this delicate shimmer of bloom appears. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... fabrics, and mamma was generally glad of her assistance in all such matters. However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying. All that was the prosy part of shopping. It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace. So the girl went on her usual way, finding life a little dull, a little tiresome, and most people rather stupid, but everything on the whole much as usual, if her head ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... took no notice; a star came into it and looked him in the face from under the shadow of the great floating shelf of the water-lily leaves; and then came the blue of the dawn, the widening round him of the growing light, the shimmer of the early midsummer morning, long, long before those hours which men claim as the working day. That sudden bursting forth of life and colour startled him in the midst of his dreams, and he went home and stole into the sleeping, darkened house, where by dint ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... The shimmer that lives and moves over yonder dry fallow, as if ten thousand million fairies were fanning themselves with midges' wings, fatigues the eye with a notion of unnecessary exertion. Wiser seems yon glassy pool, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... office of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... all the nights I have ever seen I think this one excels. The moon is overhead and at the full, casting her mellow light around, suffusing with a soft glory the heavens above, and lending to the dancing, foaming waves a silvery shimmer. Jupiter is on the western horizon, fading out of sight, but how lustrous! Lyra, Arcturus, Aldebaran, seem of gigantic size. All sails are set, and a fair, balmy wind from the sweet south makes the Belgic glide through ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... faster. Desperately, she lifted one foot and tore her shoe off, then the other. She half overbalanced, and catching at the arras to save herself, it fell with a rustling sound. She craved for darkness; when she ran there was a pale shimmer of night—but the aperture of an arch tempted her. She ran and sprang, upwards, in a ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... was a flash of something white amidst the pale green shimmer of the flood. Ida rose, but her companion beckoned her to sit ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... way was that in the noontide halt, just as the shimmer of the Lake of Galilee met their eyes, under a huge terebinth-tree, growing on a rock, when all, except Sigbert, had composed themselves to a siesta, there was a sudden sound of loud and angry altercation, and, as the sleepers started up, the Emir was seen grasping ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inwardly as I noticed her check the horse several times and scan a wayside bush, or stretch of snake fence. We were approaching the limits of town, and had found nothing; a slow rain was falling, and the shimmer on bushes and fences made it difficult to see objects plainly. Several times I had asked her to stop the horse, or drive close the fields when I was sure of a moth or caterpillar, though it was very late, being close ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... shiradzu, ko shiradzu, it attacked the rise by first running away from it up a stream into the mountains; a bit of the wisdom of the serpent that enabled it to gain much height on the bend back. Trees vaulted the way tapestrying it with their leaves, between which one caught peeps at the sea, a shimmer of blue through a shimmer of green. The path was strung with pedlars and pilgrims; the latter of both sexes and all ages, under mushroom hats with their skirts neatly tucked in at the waist, showing their leggings; ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... and amethyst, And meads of gleaming green, Rose the island of Hy Brasail With a shimmer ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... to deadly white. His eyes, fixed upon the floor, caught the rich shimmer of her skirts as she moved towards the door; a moment and she was gone, leaving the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... up higher, the heat waves began to shimmer and the landscape to blur before his eyes; and then an automobile came thundering up behind him and halted on ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... silence save for the subtile running of their chains. He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her ankles gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the road turned westward, and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly over her hair and touched ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... his ancient and shrivelled lean hand resting on the sole and supporting his chin, as he looked through the iron stainchers abroad on the ocean that was sleeping in a blessed tranquillity around, all glowing and golden with the shimmer of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... house windows shone rosy in the sunset, Herr Haase could see upon the lower balcony the shimmer of a white frock and a face that peeped and drew back. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... portion of the British support trench a few of a line of stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion. Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a sharp blow from a walking-stick. The ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... her little life was almost as joyless and as solitary as his own, he would wait with her till the long line of canoes passed by, so that she could see the bronzed, half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of the fish as they were swept up by the deadly net, and hear the warning cry from the torch-bearers, as in the depths beneath they saw the black shadow of a prowling shark rushing to seize the net, or perchance the outrigger of the canoe, in ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... companions' revels in which he would sometimes indulge with the maddest debauchery as if to kill his own thoughts, he would escape to wander in the majestic ruins of the Coliseum and see the magic Italian moonlight shimmer through its broken arches, or stroll on the lonely Campagna till his clothes were drenched with dew. No fear of the deadly Roman malaria could check his restless excursions, for, like a fiery horse, he was irritated to madness by the inaction of his life. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... from the last stone. He began to hurry again, clambering recklessly over boulders, or through the underbrush where the sides of the stream were steep. When the upper cascade came in sight his heart leaped, for there he caught the fleeting shimmer of a skirt and the gleam ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... into the saddle and shading his eyes with his hand scanned the plain, but only the warm shimmer of sun-heated earth appeared. Nothing living could be seen. What ought he to do about it? Was there any way he might find out the owner and restore ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint spectres of its furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge curtained bed, and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel with something of the shimmer ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... tall, stacklike granaries. There were a few other ships in the air at the fifty-thousand-foot level, and below, swarms of small airboats darted back and forth on different levels, depending upon speed and direction. Far ahead, to the northeast, was the shimmer of the Red Sea and the hazy bulk of Asia ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... desired, and waiting, after all, would not be a martyrdom. His mood unloosed his tongue and made him eloquent as he described his experiences in trout-fishing. His words were so simple and vivid that he made his listeners hear the cool splash and see the foam of the mountain brooks. They saw the shimmer of the speckled beauties as they leaped for the fly, and felt the tingle of the rod as the line suddenly tightened, and hear the hum of the reel as the fish darted away in imagined safety. Burt saw his vantage—was not Amy listening with intent eyes and glowing ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... idea why I told you all this," said Lloyd at last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so highly. It was what lifted me out of ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... herself,—something of her faculty of putting on different aspects under different lights. John and his wife had studied their picture at all hours of the day: they had seen how it looked when the morning sun came aslant the scarlet maples and made a golden shimmer over the blue mountains, how it looked toned down in the cool shadows of afternoon, and how it warmed up in the sunset, and died off mysteriously into the twilight; and now, when larger parlors were to be furnished, the picture was still the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship—the Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked music—music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst of death, and the spirit that ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... head, and started to rise, but his shield was failing. Suddenly, he became aware of the overheating generator pack. Something was decidedly wrong. He reached for his own hand weapon, still searching for his attacker. At last, he noticed a slight shimmer, dead ahead. He pointed ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... as much in the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the rugged and stony summits, as it dispersed gradually in the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... curves of budding womanhood. Her face was sweet rather than beautiful, but an artist would have revelled in the delicate strength of the softly rounded chin, and the quick bright play of her expression. Her hair, of a deep rich brown, with a bronze shimmer where a sunbeam lay athwart it, swept back in those thick luxuriant coils which are the unfailing index of a strong womanly nature. Her deep blue eyes danced with life and light, while her slightly retrousse nose and her ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... and varnished and packed them. Think of the airy streets and wide pavements of Boonville, and the corner drug stores with their shining soda fountains and grape-juice bottles. Think of sitting out on that bluff on a warm evening, watching the broad shimmer of the river slipping down from the sunset, and smoking a serene pipe while the local flappers walk in the coolness wearing crisp, swaying gingham dresses. That's the kind of town ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... upper-river craft. Until this year he was positive they had not come as far south as Athabasca Landing. Boulain—Boulain—The name repeated itself over and over in his mind. Bateese shoved off the canoe, and the woman's paddle dipped in and out of the water beginning to shimmer in moonlight. But he could not, for a time, get himself beyond the pounding of that name in his brain. It was not merely that he had heard the name before. There was something significant about it. Something that made him grope back in his ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the mist was somewhat thinner than was usual at this hour, though as yet it hung densely between them and the mountain snows. Now he could trace the walls of the amphitheatre, now he could see the black shimmer of the water beneath, and distinguish the glitter of many hundreds of upturned eyeballs as they glared at him and beyond him. The silence grew more and more intense, for none spoke or moved: all were waiting to see the dawn break upon the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... a splendour that transfigured the eternally white mountain-crest to a mighty shimmer of rose and gold, he turned at last and looked down at the white face pillowed upon his arm. The eyes were closed. The ineffable peace of Death seemed to dwell upon the quiet features. She had lain so for a long time, and ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... speaking thus, one of the brethren rose up with a cry, and, shading his eyes with his hand, pointed into the west. Far away in the shimmer of the sea and the clouds they perceived an outline of land, and they changed their course a little to come to it. The wind carried them bravely on, and they began to distinguish blue rounded hills ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... beautiful hair in the world," says he, touching with gentle, reverential fingers the silken coils that glint and shimmer in the sunlight. "And it is a name that ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... her eyes again. A vision of Solomon in all his glory swept across her. Even to Walton had spread rumors of the immense fortunes acquired in the China and India trade, and the gold of Cathay seemed to shimmer over the form before her, so strong, so able to contend with, and compel, if need ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... deck. He was happy, she in deep despair. Down at the other end of the deck-house, leaning over the rail, smoking viciously, was Hugh, alone, angry, sulky. It was a beautiful night, cool and crisp, calm and soft. A rich full moon threw its glorious shimmer across the waves, flashing a million silvery blades along the watery pavement that seemed to lead to the end of the world. Scores of passengers were walking the deck, and all were happy, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... a beacon and a vane. Great stones arranged as seats around the beacon, and in the foreground. Farther back the outer fjord is seen, with islands and outstanding headlands. The open sea is not visible. It is a summer's evening, and twilight. A golden-red shimmer is in the air and over the mountain-tops in the far distance. A quartette is faintly heard singing below in the background. Young townsfolk, ladies and gentlemen, come up in pairs, from the right, and, talking familiarly, pass out beyond the beacon. A little after, BALLESTED ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... the dew is on the clover, And the night-hawk whirls in circles overhead; When the cow-bells melt and mingle In a softened, silver jingle, And the old hen calls the chickens in to bed; When the marshy meadows glimmer With a misty, purple shimmer, And the twilight flush is changing into shade; When the firefly lamps are burning And the dusk to dark is turning,— Then the bullfrogs chant ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... riding high and calm in the purple sky, and Harpswell Bay on the one hand, and the wide, open ocean on the other, lay all in a silver shimmer of light. There was not a sound save the plash of the tide, now beginning to go out, and rolling and rattling the pebbles up and down as it came and went, and once in a while the distant, mournful intoning of the whippoorwill. There were silent lonely ships, sailing slowly to and fro ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I saw the end of the lake was closing in, there were woods and forests now upon its margin; a few more strokes of the paddle and we were in shade, heavy, cool shade, where the water gleamed with a bronze shimmer. Narrower still the lake end became, the margins drew together, and with a swift push forwards, like the bolt of a rabbit to its hole, our boat shot forwards into a little tunnel of darkness before us over which the ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... from burning red to deadly white. His eyes, fixed upon the floor, caught the rich shimmer of her skirts as she moved towards the door; a moment and she was gone, leaving the two men facing ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... dry and dusty, but after living here one grows to love the peculiar soft tones of tan and bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the wonderful blues and greens of the water. No one can do justice to the glory of that. Sky-blue, sea-blue, the shimmer of peacocks' tails and the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their madonnas, ever blend and ever change. Trees there are few, the graceful silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... saddle and shading his eyes with his hand scanned the plain, but only the warm shimmer of sun-heated earth appeared. Nothing living could be seen. What ought he to do about it? Was there any way he might find out the owner ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... round off the Slough of Despond, while, beyond that again the heavy smoke of the city of Destruction and the town of Stupidity shuts in the whole horizon. And then, when you turn your back on all that, in favourable states of the weather you can see here and there the shimmer of that river over which there is no bridge; and, then again, so high above the river that it seems to be a city standing in heaven rather than upon the earth, you will see the high towers and shining palace roofs and ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... was round me; it hummed up from the streets, it boomed down from the spires. I became a part of it, and so forgot it. To Effie there were ever stealing rumors of yet a world beyond, of courts and coronets, of satin shimmer and glitter of gems, but they glanced off from me,—and other than thus I have never yet found that great world that used to lie over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... she that her own rightful throne was occupied by a stranger—what cared she for the blinding shimmer of a crown? Ah, it troubled her not that she was poor, and possessed not even the means of bestowing presents upon her favorites and friends. But she felt happy in her poverty, for she was free to love whom she would, to raise ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... goodly sight. His thick black hair was worn in a fringe of wavy locks that rested lightly on his flaring collar. His leathern doublet fitted close to his slight, strong figure, and through its slashed sleeves there was a shimmer of fine silk. In his right hand he held his plumed sombrero against his breast; his left rested carelessly on the hilt of ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... surface, and the occasional little sprouts of sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes, halting at every rise, and peering backwards with ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... drive through the great prairie, which resembles the fertile meadow land along the Connecticut River. We stop a few moments near a picturesque little church of gray unpainted wood, and look off over the verdant fields to the point where a distant shimmer of water catches the eye, and the hills bound the picture. Near at hand, on the right, the trunk of an aged apple tree, "planted by the French", shows one green shoot; and about the church are Lombardy poplars, which, though good sized trees, are perhaps only ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest; and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun. A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime because ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... whose entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, wearily languorous, expressing bodily fatigue and the discouragement of passion. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... a ball-dress," he scoffed, and pointed a finger at Susanna's snowy confection of tulle and satin and silver embroidery, all a-shimmer in the artificial moonlight of the electric lamps, against the background of southern garden,—the outlines and masses, dim and mysterious in the night, of palms and cypresses, of slender eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, magnolias, of orange-trees, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... brush along their trail, and only here and there in scanty patches any of the rich, nutritious bunch grass which the roving animals so eagerly sought. The day had been hot and almost cloudless. The shimmer of heat along the lazy roll of the land to the south had often baffled their blinking eyes. But now the sun was well to the west, and the refraction seemed diminishing, and away over to the northeast a dull-colored cloud seemed slowly rising beyond the ridges. It was this that Sergeant Bruce ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... vacant air diagonally above him, a sort of shadowy shimmer seemed to concentrate itself, which was rapidly resolved into color and form. It was much as if some unseen artist had swept a mass of mingled hues on a canvas and then had worked them with magical speed into a picture. There appeared a breadth of rolling country, covered ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... glow, shimmer, flame, gleaming, illumination, shine, flare, glimmer, incandescence, shining, flash, glistening, luster, sparkle, flicker, glistering, scintillation, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... as he had seen her in the inspector's office. He recalled vividly the slim, golden beauty of her, the wonderful gray of her eyes, and the shimmer of her hair as she stood in the light of the window—and then he saw Shan Tung, effeminate, with his sly, creeping hands and his narrowed eyes, and the thing which McDowell had suggested rose up before ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... of the vine upon the trellis stirred in the evening breeze, making a shimmer of perfume and color about her, like a suggestion of an aureole; and in the arbor, as in one of those homely shrines which everywhere make part of the Venetian life, she seemed aloof as some ideal of an earlier Christian ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... frigate Ocean Pride was skimming across the Atlantic like a veritable sea-bird. She was bound for the lone Bermudas, and the night was a heavenly one. So no wonder that, as the two young sailors leaned over the bulwarks and gazed at the moonlit water that seemed all a-shimmer with gold, their thoughts went back to their homes ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... stretched upon the floor, often fifteen to twenty, some clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately. Their bed was a litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. There was little or no furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any shimmer of habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. Theft and prostitution form the chief means of subsistence of this population. No one seemed to take the trouble to cleanse this Augean stable, this Pandemonium, this tangle ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... to the castle in her dress of tow, and at the gate she grasped the second bead in her fingers, repeating the charm. This time the pale yellow of the daffodils seemed to have woven itself into a cloth of gold for her adorning. It was like a shimmer of moonbeams, and her hair held the diamond flashings of a ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... over the awful tide of intervening years—so full, and yet so short—I seem to see the shimmer of her golden hair—an aureole of light blazing on the borders of boyhood: "For this, and all thy bounties, our Father, we ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... Ann Elizabeth was the sun, the sky, the west wind, and the shimmer of spring—all gone into the making of her a rosebud off the stock of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... piles of twisted and pictured desert stone. In the other direction an irregular streak of light green trailed along, marking the winding of the river bound by twisted cottonwoods and vivid patches of corn fields. Through the shimmer of the heat far off, fifty miles distant, were flung up against a turquoise sky the peaks of the San Francisco mountains, across the front of which a trailing cloud had begun to form. On a slightly rising ledge of rock stood the mission buildings, and through the clear still air, ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... lost a petal another box was brought to Miss Sterling's door. Her fingers quivered with hope as she untied the ribbon. The address was in the same firm, open hand. A shimmer of gold met her first glance, but the scrap of white she had longed for was missing. Without doubt the pilferer had thwarted her again. She put the yellow beauties into water with half-hearted pleasure. Why couldn't Miss Sniffen let her have her own! She pounded the air with her little ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... words of our language have been unhappily banished. It is not that these words lose their lustre, as many words lose it, by hackneyed use and common handling; the process is exactly opposite; by not being used enough, the phosphorescence of decay seems to attack them, and give them a kind of shimmer which makes them seem too fine for common occasions. But once a word falls out of colloquial speech its life is threatened; it may linger on in literature, but its radiance, at first perhaps brighter, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... picturesque beauty, there is nothing to surpass it. On every hand the eye is arrested with charming landscapes, and looking across the several points of the township you have dwellings, grain fields, herds of cattle, and wood. Beyond you catch the shimmer of the water. Again you have clumps of trees and cultivated fields, and behind them another stretch of water, and so on as far as the eye can reach. The whole course of the bay, in fact, is a panorama of rural beauty, but the old homes that were ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... of both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as a whole; and he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in a picture of all the good impulses of the human ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... an inheritance, will you wantonly cast it away? With such a goal in prospect, will you suffer yourself to be turned aside by the sheen and shimmer of tinsel fruit? With earth in possession, and Heaven in reversion, will you go sorrowing and downcast, because here and there a pearl or ruby fails you? Nay, rather forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those which are ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... sky over the mountain of "Two Leaves" is all a-shimmer with the coming day. Thatched roof and bamboo grove are daintily etched against the amber dawn. Lights begin to twinkle and thrifty tradesmen cheerfully ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... always shuddered when I passed the door. But on this Easter morning, it had rained early, and when the sun came out in full splendor, the old church with the gray sloping roof, the high windows and the tower with the golden cross glistened with a wondrous shimmer. All at once the light which streamed through the lofty windows began to move and glisten. It was so intensely bright that one could have looked within, and as I closed my eyes the light entered my soul and therein everything seemed to shed brilliancy and perfume, ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... what would happen. So we done it. We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our arms got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours—three hours—just gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear, a body don't know what real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain he ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't stand it to look around on them ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you she was very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together." My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory—I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They had worked for beauty, for ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... of wet, yellow sand, on which the sun was shining. There was a smooth white boulder standing quite alone, on which the girls seated themselves. The tide was still going out; and the low wash of waves sounded pleasantly in their ears as they advanced and then receded. A shimmer of silvery light played upon the water, and a rosy tinge began ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... ploughing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of gray silk. The sun, pale and without rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched, yellow faces were like the faces ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the gentle slopes and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between the metals! The newcomer has but a theoretical ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... that in a few moments the moon had crossed it. A gap in a hedge made by a bull that morning, had removed the last screen. — Lady Euphrasia's window was so neglected and dusty, that it could reflect nothing more than a dim bluish shimmer. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the sun shimmer! Let the wind blow! All is a notion—What do we know? Let the moon glimmer! Let the stream flow! All is but motion ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... In that neighbourhood the wastes of Donegal take on an aspect which recalls, though upon quite a different key in colour, the inimitable beauty of those treeless North-western highlands of Scotland, upon which Nature has lavished all the wealth of her palette. Vast spaces of brown and red and gold shimmer away under the softly luminous mountain atmosphere to the dark blues and purples of the hills. We passed Glen Veagh again, but from quite a different point of view, which gave us a beautiful picture of Lough Veagh in its length, and of the smiling pastoral ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the words Where she had paused to do the Sister's hest: "Cum gloria suscepisti me." She kissed The blazoned leaf, thanks nestling at her heart, That now, at last, no duty disallowing, Her loosened soul out through the sunset bars Might float, and catch heaven's crystal shimmer. But scarce Had meditation smoothed the wing of thought Before the hangings of the door were parted With yet a further summoning. From a Triton That spouted in the court her three-year boy, Who thither had climbed, had fallen, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... seemed only more strikingly interesting and fascinating than ever. Still she had those thousand pretty movements, those nameless graces of manner, those wavering shades of expression, that irresistibly enchained the eye and the imagination,—true Frenchwoman as she was, always in one rainbow shimmer of fancy and feeling, like one of those cloud-spotted April days which give you flowers and rain, sun and shadow, and snatches of bird-singing all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... why I told you all this," said Lloyd at last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so highly. It was what lifted me out ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... brief glimpses I had as my captors hurried me toward the landing incline, I was aware of something very strange about this flyer. It was all dead black, a bloated-bellied black bird. The moonlight struck it, but did not gleam or shimmer on its black metal surface. The cabin window-portes glowed with a dim blue-gray light from inside. But as I chanced to gaze at one a green film seemed to cross it like a shade, so that it winked and its light was gone. Yet a hole was there, like an eye-socket. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is in clever contrast to the silver shimmer of her hairs. How anomalous are life and art! How unconscious is this old lady of the narrow escape she is making from perpetuation! Doubtless she works afield beside that old Jacques Bonhomme, and drinks sour wine or Normandy cider ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... little they grew plainer to us, and the home ranch, hitherto merely a brown shimmer in the distance, began to take on definition as the group of buildings, windmills, and corrals we knew. Miniature horsemen could be seen galloping forward to the open white plain where the herd would be ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... he turned, what he saw was the gun cabinet with a shimmer of light on the barrels. Then he knew. He selected his favorite Colt and drew it out. It was loaded, and the action in perfect condition. Many and many an hour he had practiced and blazed away hundreds of rounds of ammunition with it. It responded to his touch like a muscular ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... owed her every possible reparation, he was resolved to shield her womanly pride from any additional wounds. He withdrew his encircling arm, released her hand, walked to the end of the aviary, and stood watching the shimmer of the fountain, where two of the ring-doves held their wings aslant to catch the spray. After some moments she joined him, and laid her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... like to look at the massive headland from the level of the sea, row out a mile from the beach. Eastwards a bank of red vapour shuts in the sea, the wavelets—no larger than those raised by the oar—on that side are purple as if wine had been spilt upon them, but westwards the ripples shimmer with palest gold. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... man disposed his tray on the counter. It was packed with more gold watches, adding to the extraordinary glitter and shimmer of the shop. He chose a small watch from ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... was generally glad of her assistance in all such matters. However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying. All that was the prosy part of shopping. It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace. So the girl went on her usual way, finding life a little dull, a little tiresome, and most people rather stupid, but everything on the whole much as usual, if her head only would not ache so; ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... more than half the road. My ear had been alert for the sound of pursuit, but the bush was quiet as the grave. The man who rode my pony would find him a slow traveller, and I pitied the poor beast bucketed along by an angry rider. Gradually a hazy wall of purple began to shimmer before me, apparently very far off. I knew the ramparts of the Rooirand, and let my Schimmel feel my knees in his ribs. Within an hour I should be ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... charm of the good Mother herself,—something of her faculty of putting on different aspects under different lights. John and his wife had studied their picture at all hours of the day: they had seen how it looked when the morning sun came aslant the scarlet maples and made a golden shimmer over the blue mountains, how it looked toned down in the cool shadows of afternoon, and how it warmed up in the sunset and died off mysteriously into the twilight; and now, when larger parlors were to be furnished, the picture was still ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... round harvest moon in the sky, and the hills were bathed in a kind of spectral splendour—a faint and filmy shimmer of silver that left the outlines of objects blurred and elusive, though the scene as a whole emerged clearly for the eye. The wind was sighing drowsily across the moors, while high on the rugged cairns on the hill-tops it was wuthering mournfully ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... moths also, but I smiled inwardly as I noticed her check the horse several times and scan a wayside bush, or stretch of snake fence. We were approaching the limits of town, and had found nothing; a slow rain was falling, and the shimmer on bushes and fences made it difficult to see objects plainly. Several times I had asked her to stop the horse, or drive close the fields when I was sure of a moth or caterpillar, though it was very late, being close the end of August; ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... forbade the idea. I noticed, too, that she seldom looked behind her—rarely to right or left. Once the ride down which she passed was carpeted not with green, but with the silvery, sheeny leaves of some creeping plant that in the distance had a shimmer like that of water at evening. As she trod this, with her face to the low sun, her tall grey figure had a pure air that for the moment startled me—she looked unearthly. Then I swore in scorn of myself, and at the next corner I had my reward. She was no longer walking on. She had stopped, I ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... of the sun is produced by the rapid vibrations of the rays; the twinkle of the distant star, the waves of the ocean when ruffled by the winds; the shimmer of the moon on its crested surface; the brain in thinking; the mouth in talking; the beating of the heart; all, alike, obey the one grand and ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... array of birds'-nests. There is something in the very make of a bird's-nest which rouses thoughts of blue or red-spotted eggs, of callow young birds, with their large hungry eyes and beaks, or of twittering fledglings, training for a shimmer life of pleasure. To see, instead of these, their silent empty habitations, extended in a long row, would be enough to make any one dull and sad. So Roger found. He kicked them into a heap under a tree, and thought that they would make a fine crackling fire. He ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... miracle, always the same, always different. The sun slipped down behind the distant hills, the clouds turned purple in the Western hill tops, fading toward the zenith to an orange that turned to azure as she watched. The lake beneath painted the picture again, with an added shimmer, a more mysterious glow. Little fish flashed like flecks of gold from the water, dropping back in a shower of amethyst. Belated dragon flies darted home. And the young girl watching, listening, waiting, felt ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... into the stilly woods, And know all the flowers in their sweet, shy hoods, The tender leaves in their shimmer and sheen Of darkling shadow, diaphanous green, 10 In those haunted halls where my footstep falls, Like one who enters cathedral walls, A spirit of beauty floods over me, As over a swimmer the waves of the sea, That strengthens and glories, refreshens and fills, 15 Till ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... close clasp of hands they parted. Gordon Leigh walked sadly between the royal lily-rows, hoping that the future would redeem the past; and the old man sat alone in the serene, silent night, watching the shimmer of the moon on the marble that covered ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... work strong, that you should paint the matt so that it will just yield, and only just, and that with difficulty, to the scrub; and, before you use this tool, just pass the finger, lightly, backwards and forwards over the matted surface. This will take out a shimmer of light here and there, according to the inequalities of the texture in the glass itself; the first touches of the scrub will not then look so startling and hard as if taken out of the dead, even matt; ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... assume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral variation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that supports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly devoted to expressing the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... but fell before he had taken half-a-dozen steps; and for an hour he lay still and rested. It was like a taste of heaven, just to be able to hold his neck straight. The sun had risen by the time he was ready to try it again, and through the trees he saw the shimmer and sparkle of the Glimmerglass. He heard the wind talking to itself in the branches overhead, and the splashing of the ripples on the beach; and he staggered down to the margin and ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more picturesque then, crowning the rocky ridge, with straggling lanes and wynds dropping steeply down into the valley—opening here and there a glimpse of the green country and the shimmer of the Firth—while on the edge of the hill, from all the high windows, the wide landscape softened into distance on every side, into the far-off broken ranges of mountains and cloudy rolling vapours, and the far-retiring sweep of a horizon traversed by all the lights and all the storms—a ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... gleaming eyes, warm graspings from outstretched hands. And well windeth the river into grim old caves, and even the merriest boat that King Cole ever launched flitteth by the dark doors, intent only on the brilliant chateaux, that shimmer above in the gorgeous sunlight of a brave Espagne. But laughing imps, with flying feet, venture singly into these realms of the Unknown. Bright streameth the light there from carbuncles and glowing rubies; but of the melodies that there bewilder them, no ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... while closer at hand broad, irregular wastes of blackness sailed over the dry plateau as the clouds that caused them drifted across the dazzling face. Harsh and unlovely as were the surroundings by day, they lost something of their asperity under the softening shimmer of that mystic light. Far down by the stables she could hear the ringing watch-call of the sentries proclaiming half-past twelve o'clock and all well, and then—and then as a cloud floated away and the bright beams poured down in unhindered radiance, she became aware of a form enveloped in ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... I have ever seen I think this one excels. The moon is overhead and at the full, casting her mellow light around, suffusing with a soft glory the heavens above, and lending to the dancing, foaming waves a silvery shimmer. Jupiter is on the western horizon, fading out of sight, but how lustrous! Lyra, Arcturus, Aldebaran, seem of gigantic size. All sails are set, and a fair, balmy wind from the sweet south makes ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... had been swung, but she was already coming to, and a few seconds later her jibboom was pointing straight for the middle of the passage, with the Heads looming up on either hand, black as ebony against the faint shimmer of starlight on the waters of the lagoon beyond. Gurney and Saunders now came aft and proceeded to complete the hoisting of the second quarter boat; and seeing that Grace seemed to know pretty well what she was about with ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... visions; but I have always been taught that their spell lay in our innate sense that they were ourselves, as we really are. The wine of great truth is at first the most heady of all, making its revelations shimmer. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... in civilian dress stood in earnest talk with the superintendent of the railway, a knot of curious citizens surrounding them, eager to pick up any point with reference to the troops or their transportation. Expectant eyes were cast towards the east where the towers of the great bridge loomed in the shimmer and glare of the hot noontide. "She ought to be here now," said the railway-man with an impatient snap of his watch-case. "What keeps No. 5, Gus?" he asked ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the study of English institutions was no part of his mission. On the other hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no movement but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the United States, where doubtless he should find himself soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not an important question and that happiness was an unscientific term, such as a man of his education should be ashamed ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... was a good deal darker than it had any right to be at this hour, and the sudden fall of the breeze and a persistent shimmer of lightning supplied her with the explanation. When she reached Forty-seventh Street, the break of the storm was obviously a matter of minutes, so she decided to ride across to the elevated—it was another mile, perhaps—rather ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Singing Prisoner, and enable a Scheherazade to postpone from night to night her hour of death, are one and all pervaded by the same eternal magic. Pain, grief, terror, care, and bondage are all forgotten for a time when lakes of gems and enchanted waterfalls shimmer in the sunlight, when Rakshas's palaces rise, full-built, before our very eyes, or when Caballero's Knights of the Fish prance away on their magic chargers. "I wonder when!" "I wonder how!" "I wonder where!" we say ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... their carriage had driven away, the Godmother appeared. Once more she touched her godchild with her wand, and in a moment she was arrayed in a beautiful dress that seemed as though it had been woven of moon-beams and sunshine, so radiantly did it gleam and shimmer. She put her arms round her Godmother's neck and kissed and thanked her. "Goodbye, childie; enjoy yourself, but whatever you do, remember to leave the ball before the clock strikes twelve," the Godmother ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... started out to explore. I wanted to observe some musk-rat hotels down in a big marsh, and the Norseman was fishing. The attorney was content to sit on a log by the shores of the lake, smoke lazily, and watch the sun shimmer through the lifting fog. He saw a canoe approaching from across the lake. He gazed vacantly at it, when it grew strange and more unlike a canoe. The paddles did not move, but the phantom ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... not certain that she had ever been in their house. He could see her plainly now—she stood clasping white gloves with firm, pink hands; her gaze was lowered upon the uneven flooring of the porch. He could see the soft contour of her chin, a shimmer of warm, brown hair. She was crisply fresh, incredibly young in the group of gaunt, worn forms; her ruffled fairness was an affront to the thin, rigid shoulders in rusty black, the sallow, deeply-bitten ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green leaves,—between the uneven tufts of grass, the dainty "ragged robin" sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against masses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry,—the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to conceal the shy confidences of young ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of faces, you could have the full effect of costume,—rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable. Everything was fresh, spotless, and in tune. It scarcely needed music to resolve all the incessant waver and shimmer into a dance; but the music came, and, like sand-grains under the magnet, the beautiful atoms swept into stately shapes and tremulous ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and this shimmer of sentiment, with which the science and the popular sense have united in investing the peasant wars, I go on to divest these wars of this deceptive appearance and show them up in their true light,—that they were at bottom a reactionary movement, which, fortunately ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... tens of billions, men and women and children, kings and priests and beggars, all wearing the garments of their age and country. They came like an ocean-tide, and their floating hair was the foam on the tide, and their eyes gleamed like the first shimmer of dawn above the snows. They came for hours and days and years and centuries, they came eternally, and as they came every finger of that host, compared to which all the sands of all the seas were but as a handful, ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... inhaled in Farnham's house; they seemed to her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance of the spring; the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... By the shimmer of blue under the beeches Roy knew that summer—"really truly summer!"—had come back at last. And summer meant picnics and strawberries and out-of-door lessons, and the lovely hot smell of pine-needles in the pine-wood, and the lovelier cool smell of moss cushions ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... seems to glimmer? Her white robe's glancing hues? No,—'twas the column's shimmer ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the hills veils of smoke like lace. Hideous sounds tortured the air—crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when, on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers, and the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery, showered them, drowned them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... His throat tightened a second, so that he had to clear it. All he knew then was that her brother was striding away, having muttered something about the need to see after unshipping Kala Khan, his Arab mount, which was aboard the train. There was a sort of shimmer between Skag's eyes and Ian Deal's vanishing legs that made them seem lifted out of all proportion. Then Carlin caught his arm, carried him forward and to her at the same time, as ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... filled the whole Temple. His eyes gazed from the Altar to the glittering gold curtains behind it. The reflection from the coals, and the playing of the blue and purple smoke on the golden sheets, caused them to sheen and shimmer until they faded entirely away into the blue and purple maze that filled ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... hand before creeping softly out; and I followed, to find that the darkness was as black as inside the tent; that the fire-flies had ceased to shimmer and flash about the low trees, and that the fire was so nearly out that there was nothing visible ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... sepulchral voices being the proper furniture of the "tapestried chamber," and not wax candles, to the tune of sunlight and bright eyes and dancing feet and rustling silks and gauzes and laughing voices, and all the shine and shimmer and flaunting flutter of a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... he shook himself, straightened himself up, and endeavoured to throw off the sense of drowsy weight which increased upon him. He could not do so; he walked with bent back, and crept, as it were, over the iron land which radiated heat. A shimmer like that of water appeared in front; he quickened his pace, but could not get to it, and realized presently that it was a mirage which receded as he advanced. There was no pleasant summer twilight; the sunset was succeeded by an indefinite ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... Fire" thus hovered vaguely in a shimmer of general emotional tensity, and thus abruptly crystallized itself about a chance phrase and the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely spring, always ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the members of the chorus dropped away one by one to occupations of their own. The girl still sat at the piano, her head thrown back idly, her hands wandering softly in and out of melodies and modulations. Watching her, Orde finally saw only the shimmer of her white figure, and the white outline of her head and throat. All the rest of the room was gray from the concentration of his gaze. At last her hands fell in her lap. She sat looking ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... glance at him; there was an ineffable shimmer in her long-lashed eyes; she made a comical little grimace. "I've said the last word between me and him," she answered. "I got a humble letter from him yesterday begging my pardon for what he'd tried to do, and saying he'd behave ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... flashed upon him, a red shimmer passed before his eyes. Gazing at it more intently, he saw that it emanated from a young girl in a red frock who had just come out from the house, and was then standing ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... the long day endeth, As the cool of night descendeth His last strength thy lover spendeth in returning to thy breast, Where beneath the Babul nightly, While the planets shimmer whitely, And the fire-flies glimmer brightly, thou shalt give him love ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... triolet should glimmer Like a butterfly; In golden light, or dimmer, Your triolet should glimmer, Tremble, turn, and shimmer, Flash, and flutter by; Your triolet should ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... briar between his thin moustache and his gray goat's-beard, his worn face protruded in eager debate as he queried all Challenger's propositions. Finally, there was our host, with his rugged, eagle face, and his cold, blue, glacier eyes with always a shimmer of devilment and of humor down in the depths of them. Such is the last picture of them ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Now, in the shimmer and sheen that dance on the leaf of the lily, Causing the bud to explode, and gilding the poodle's chinchilla, Gladys cavorts with the rake, and hitches the string to the lattice, While with the trowel she digs, and gladdens ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... yet risen when she came; and she sat a long time in the cavern, listening to the murmur of the river, flowing under the glacier at her feet. Slowly the dawn began, and again she seemed to see the shimmer of a face—such a face as one sees in the coals of a dying fire. Then the full sun came over the eastern mountain, and the guide heard a woman's cry. There before her was Charles Knollys! The face seemed hardly pale; and there was the same faint smile—a smile like ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... speed closer to 400 miles per hour, the speed of a jet. There was no reason to believe they weren't jets. The jets appeared to have a skipping motion because Arnold had looked at them through layers of warm and cold air, like heat waves coming from a hot pavement that cause an object to shimmer. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... lifted her white satin skirts in both hands and stepped lightly across the pavement. Tavernake stood on one side to let her pass. She seemed to him to be, indeed, a creature of that other world of which he knew nothing. Her slow, graceful movements, the shimmer of her skirt, her silk stockings, the flashing of the diamond buckles upon her shoes, the faint perfume from her clothes, the soft touch of her ermine as she swept by—all these things were indeed strange to him. His eyes followed her with rapt interest as ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... sitting at the window, with his ancient and shrivelled lean hand resting on the sole and supporting his chin, as he looked through the iron stainchers abroad on the ocean that was sleeping in a blessed tranquillity around, all glowing and golden with the shimmer of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... day—I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I turned—I don't know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its depths— through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and deepening ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... pillows, and then sat by the window, from which—because the lamp that tired his eyes had been turned very low—I could see the shimmer of stars on the dark breast of the inlet, which was wrapped in shadow, and a broad band of silver radiance grow wider across the heights of snow, until Grace came in softly with more blossoms from ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... begun to limp, for his stiff boots galled his feet. His senses were blunted by the hot sand which filled his eyes and ears and nostrils, and there was a shimmer over all the broad landscape. When he shook his hair from his forehead, the dust floated slowly down and settled in a scorching ring ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... half-way between the level of the valley and the overhanging brae where the advance-guard stood halted. It was not an inviting picture. The dust and vapour seemed unable to face the perpendicular violence of the midday sun; the only perceptible movement in the middle distance was the shimmer of the atmosphere, squirming as it were under the relentless heat; while the great pall of dust and smoke, as if ashamed to raise its head, mushroomed out against the hillsides with ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... singing. The singing and the recurrent splash grew louder, filled the silence of the river, grew softer; and presently the receding oars flashed again, below the island. But not until the last glint was lost in the shimmer of the water, the last sound had died out of the summer night, did the Brazilian begin to unfold ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Holy Writ, "There was no more spirit in her;" and she said, "Behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard." Both without and within, the spirit of beauty dominates The Mother Church, from its mosaic flooring to the soft shimmer of ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. A sudden uneasiness seized him. His brain was crowded with unwilling ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... glossed thee o'er with transcendent splendour, the radiance of honour, the force of glory, the dream of hanging my heart upon these held me in bonds. The day-sun of worldly honours, which, with the clear refulgence of its shimmer, shone bright upon my head with the vain delight of its rays, penetrated through my head into the deepest recess of my heart. That which there watched darkly sealed in the chaste night, that which unconscious ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... midnight matins, but still dreaming. Ford's dip was softer now, as though he feared to disturb that vibrant drowsiness; but when, later, capes and coves began to define themselves through the gray gloaming, and, later still, a shimmer of saffron appeared above the eastern summits, he knew it was time to think of a ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... as my excuse: "Even bubbles have their use. They are perfect while they live, And their short career may give, As they shimmer, and are flown, ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... night grew The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth Fell in ashen folds about the hills, Like hooded virgins, pulling their cloaks about them... There must have been a spent moon, For the Tall One's veil held a shimmer of silver... ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... the run of the jam-closet and then discovered that the latter's lips bore evidence of petty larceny, or would regard himself as almost criminally negligent if he placed a priceless pearl necklace where an ignorant chimney-sweep might fall under the hypnotism of its shimmer, will calmly allow a condition of things in his own brokerage or banking office where a fifteen-dollars-a-week clerk may have free access to a million dollars' worth of negotiable securities, and even encourage the latter by occasional "sure" tips to ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... diary. This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... ploughed fields, a whole world of wild birds and insects seemed to have imparted a sense of movement and life to what only a few days ago had been a land of desolation, a country silent and winterbound. Colour was asserting itself in all manner of places—in the green of the sprouting grass, the shimmer of the sun upon the sea-stained sands, in the silvery blue of the Braster creeks. Lady Angela drew a long breath of content as we paused for a moment at the summit of ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no favor,—the bees and flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and the kingbird in the poplars, the smell of strawberries, the motion of lush grass, the shimmer of corn-blades tossed gayly as banners in a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... landing, first as a glimmering shadow under the reflection of the elms; then as a vague ill-defined form above the River's glassy surface; finally as a wide, low, T-shaped platform wharf, reaching its twenty feet from the grassy banks to shimmer in the heat above ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... was great, the light was almost blinding, while the shimmer upon the baked surface, added to the swaying of one's feet in soft places, gave rise to the idea that the mighty beast was still breathing, and that ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dome mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like rolling hillocks; but here and there a little white ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... that aggressive vitality with which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... drinking in the maddening perfume of her glorious hair, so perilously near his own face. The shimmer of her shoulders, the adorable curves of that enticing scarlet mouth murmuring so near his own, and yet so far away, in this soul-racking game of make-believe, stirred his blood as nothing else had done ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... her feet and made her way nearer to the mass of crumpled coaches that reared up black against the shimmer of the starlit sky. No one took any notice of her; all who were unhurt were working to save and help those who had been less fortunate, and every now and then some broken wreck of humanity was carried past her, groaning horribly, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... hand, then, come with me By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . . Look how the long volutes of foam unfold To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . . Take my hand, Do not remember how these depths are cold, Nor how, when you are dead, Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head. You lean your face upon your hands and cry, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... little brother opened his eyes and looked about him: and on all sides he saw nothing but the radiance and shimmer of all sorts of white and yellow objects. He took about a dozen of the little things and hid them ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... change of society is the light coin of "small talk" that breaks with chink and shimmer the heavy bills of large denomination, that else would overwhelm social conversation with ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... carriage. Two very charming ladies, an unprejudiced observer might have pronounced them. A little precise in their elegance, perhaps, but pleasant to look upon, especially Aunt Caroline, from head to foot a shimmer of silver gray. Aunt Caroline was Mrs. Millard, the widow of an army officer, and Charlotte had expected to like her best; but after all, Aunt Virginia, who was only Miss Wilbur, ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... cigar stand and soda fountain was gone. He saw instead a heavy, cruel, jowlish face, with eyelids hooded down over the eyes, and a square thrusting chin buttressed on a mass of jaw and suetty cheek that glistened with an oily shimmer. The jaw quivered a little as though with some intense suppressed emotion. The man was completely absorbed in his task. The thick lower lip lapped upward over the mouth. On the cheekbone was a deep red scar. Aubrey felt a pang of fascinated amazement ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... and rainy nights, When like a legion leap the lights And take the town with gold; Of taverns quaint where poets dream, Of cafes gaudily agleam, And vice that's overbold; Of crystal shimmer, silver sheen, Of soft and soothing nicotine, Of wine ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... wilt down in a minute after Chateau-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... speaker's lithe form straightened and her gaze went off to the left. "Here they come!" she said, and out where Camp Street emerges, a glint of steel, a gleam of brass, a swarming of the people that way, and again a shimmer of brass and steel, affirmed her word that the long, plumed, bristling column had got back to the arms of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... shores of silver sand and slopes of fairest green, and in the middle of the island the Blue Flower was growing, wondrous tall and dazzling, brighter than the sapphire of the sea. Then the call of the distant trumpet came floating across the water, and while it was sounding a shimmer of fog swept over the island and I could see ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... beauty so glorious that he closed his eyes involuntarily and still he saw the vision in the dull-green gown, with the scarf of old gold about her dazzling white shoulders. And there were two lights, the barbaric red of the jewels in her hair, and the black shimmer of her eyes. He drew back a step more. It was a picture to be ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
