"Featureless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men must sympathise. The quest at once of local colour and cosmopolitanism is not at all self-contradictory. The truest cosmopolitanism goes with the intensest local colour, for otherwise you contribute nothing to the human treasury and make mankind one vast featureless monotony. Harmonious diversity is the true cosmopolitan concept, and who will not applaud this desire of Edinburgh to range itself again amongst the capitals of culture? Why should it take its tone from ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... invisible personage kept his place, until, even with the constant fancy that he was there looking over my shoulder, and so close that there was always a risk of contact, I grew to disregard him. All day long he watched the pen travelling over the paper, all day long I was aware of him, featureless, shadowy, expressionless, with a vague cheek near my own. During the brief interval I gave myself for luncheon he stood behind my chair, and, being much refreshed and brightened by my morning's work, I mocked ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... strength to keep him from bolting when in it. Even at the start of the journey he was as nearly unmanageable as any beast could be, and always liable to bolt from sheer excess of spirits. He is more sober now after three weeks of featureless Barrier, but I think I am more fond of him than ever. He has lost his rotundity, like all the other horses, and is a long-legged, angular beast, very ugly as horses go, but still I would not change him ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... glorious days Bones had driven the regular service between Lynhaven and Bayham Junction, where the lines met. He had come to know every twist and turn of the road, every feature of the somewhat featureless landscape, and the four passengers who travelled regularly every day except Sundays—there was no Sunday service—were now so familiar to him that he did not trouble to take ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... looks a tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord K.'s small and featureless map. I do not speak for myself for I have so far only examined the terrain through a field glass. I refer to the tone of the sailors, which strikes me as being graver and less irresponsible than the tone of ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... her eyes sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the House, perhaps on this Iwa and Iemon San." Iemon fairly roared as he sprang up from the tub—"What! You noisy slut! Is this Iemon to go without food because the hotoke dislikes the smell of eels?... Jinzaemon, can you cook eels?" Imaizumi had sought the ro[u]ka. His round featureless face showed his fright and indecision before this critical quarrel of husband and wife. Of all involved in the plot he was the most unwilling in performance of his role. But he answered according to rote—"Iya! Iemon Uji, the office of ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... with the fundamental style of the church. Other chapels, less distinguished, which have been added from time to time, line the nave both north and south, and all are excrescent to the original plan. Of the exterior, only the facade retains its primitive character. The side-walls, "entirely featureless," as has been well said, "reflect only the various periods of the chapels which have been added to the Cathedral," and the apse was re-built in 1671, in a ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... miasma, were considered such an adequate defence against hostile attack, that forts were deemed unnecessary in a locality where 87,000 soldiers and sailors died in the Government Hospital during the space of twenty years. Batavia proper is a commonplace city of featureless streets, brick-walled canals, and ramshackle public buildings, but the residential town of Weltevreden, suggesting a glorified Holland, combines the quaint charm of the mother country with the Oriental ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Gospel, and of the universal praise which shall one day rise to Him that was slain. 'This company of brethren praising God in the tongues of the whole world represented the whole world which shall one day praise God in its various tongues' (Bengel). Pentecost reversed Babel, not by bringing about a featureless monopoly, but by consecrating diversity, and showing that each language could be hallowed, and that each lent some new strain of music to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... hideous. For a breathing space Sermaise kept his feet, his outspread arms making a tottering cross. It was curious to see him peer about irresolutely now that he had no face. Francois, staring at the black featureless horror before him, began to choke. Standing thus, with outstretched arms, the priest first let fall his hands, so that they hung limp from the wrists; his finger-nails gleamed in the moonlight. His rapier tinkled on the flagstones with the sound of shattering ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,—as ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... two adjacent side chapels had domed roofs representing the firmament. Beneath the pulpit stood a small harmonium. At the opposite end of the church was a high gallery holding more chairs. The mean, featureless windows were filled with glass half white, half staring red dotted with yellow crosses. Round the walls were reliefs of the fourteen stations of the Cross in white plaster on a gilt ground framed in grey marble. From ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... scared to turn around, but finally Jones and Lloyd came running over, and I got up enough nerve to look. There was nothing there, but on the sand, paralleling mine, were footprints. At least I think they were footprints. Twice as long as mine, and three times as wide, but kind of featureless because the sand's loose and dry. They doubled back on themselves, spaced considerably ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... are lives in which the main preoccupation is to get through time. There are others in which it is to find time for all that has to be got through, and most men, in different periods of their lives, are acquainted with both extremes. With some, time is mere duration, a blank, featureless thing, gliding swiftly and insensibly by. With others every day, and almost every hour, seems to have its distinctive stamp and character, for good or ill, in work or pleasure. There are vast differences in this respect between different ages of history, and between different generations ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... clothes cleaned—Neel felt a little more sure of himself. No one had stopped him or even noticed him. The lobby had been empty and the automatic elevator left him off at the right floor when he gave it Hengly's name. Now, facing the featureless door, he had a sharp knife of fear. It was too easy. He reached out slowly and tried the handle. The door was unlocked. Taking a deep breath, he opened it and ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... to be able to converse with her, yet something like conversation had been taking place. It had come to him, too, that she had a mind, and now that he really looked at her he saw that the face was intelligent. Yesterday that face had been no more to him than a smudge, without character, and almost featureless, while to-day.... ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... continues through pleasant country over Crockham Hill to Edenbridge (28 m.) on the small river Eden. Although the immediate surroundings are dull and featureless this is a good centre from which to explore the district eastwards to Hever, Penshurst, and Tonbridge. One mile out of the town we bear left and, in another three, cross the Kent Water into Sussex. In 7-1/2 miles the road passes over the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... very thing the want of which mars the pleasantly flowing but somewhat featureless octosyllables of his French models. In the famous passage[117] where he has been thought to reflect on Wolfram, he certainly praises other poets without stint, and shows himself a generous as well as a judicious critic. How Hartmann von Aue hits the meaning of a story! how loud and clear rings ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... a book far removed from the ordinary mass of featureless fiction. There is no gainsaying the strength of characterization and the command of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the fact that Tandy's Castle—or more briefly and familiarly Tandy's—for all its commonplace outward decency of aspect did not enjoy an unblemished moral or social reputation. The house—a whitewashed, featureless erection—was planted at right angles to the deep sandy lane leading up from the shore, through the scattered village of Deadham, to the three-mile distant market ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... that lady, as formed from Esther's letter. The only person in sight was an elderly woman, sitting in a wagon with mail bags piled around her. Two hundred would have been a charitable guess at her weight; her face was as round and red as a harvest-moon and almost as featureless. She wore a tight, black, cashmere dress, made in the fashion of ten years ago, a little dusty black straw hat trimmed with bows of yellow ribbon, and faded black ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Livorno; and Ouida hard by, at Bagni di Lucca. She died in one of these same featureless streets of Viareggio, alone, half blind, and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the first ten years of her life had been in a lovely Scottish village, within three miles of the sea on one side and less than three miles from the hills on the other; and the dull, unvaried level, the featureless aspect of her present home, might well ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... ship was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth, silver-pink exterior was featureless. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... now seen how varied and how striking are the surface characters of fabrics as expressed by the third dimension, by variation from a flat, featureless surface, and how all, essential and ornamental, are governed by the laws of geometric combination. We shall now see how these ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... it is in the rarer bursts. Excitement helps us in the one; nothing but dogged principle, and close communion with God, 'mounting on wings as eagles,' will help us in the other. But we may have Him with us in all the arid and featureless levels across which we have to plod, as well as in the height to which we sometimes have to struggle upwards, or in the depths into which we have sometimes to plunge. If we have the life of Christ within us, then neither the one nor the other ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... was needed than Ringan or I could have given, for the lift of the ground gave us our direction, and there was the sound of a falling stream. To an upland-bred man mist is little of a hindrance, unless on a featureless moor. ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... a pound of beef is often easily bitten to the bone: sometimes, in fact, it is all bone and gristle, and the ravages of cooking minimise its bulk in a disheartening way. One and a half pound of bread is more than the third of a big loaf, but minus butter it makes a featureless repast. Breakfast and tea without butter and milk does not always ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... (at about the middle point) by a strange narrow gut or gully, up which the railway once ran to Montauban. No doubt there are places in the English chalk counties which resemble this sweep of country, but I know of none so bare or so featureless. The ground is of the reddish earth which makes such bad mud. The slopes are big and gradual, either up or down. Little breaks the monotony of the expanse except a few copses or sites of copses; the eye is always ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... thought from which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of May woods. She was a woman now, with a trained mind which took in the saddening significance of these lives, not so much melancholy or tragic as utterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored. They weighed on her heart as she walked and drove about the lovely country they spoiled ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the college choir who were to entertain the party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth, such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was helping him to receive. The guest of the evening ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... made its slow way through the featureless country, past rubble heaps which had once been the habitations of men and women, splintered trunks of poplar avenues, great excavations where shells of an immense caliber had fallen long ago and the funnel shapes of which were now overgrown with ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... imagination. This inn, apparently, was to be classed among such frauds. It did not in the least, externally at least, fulfil Renard's promises. He had told us to expect the marvellous and the mediaeval in their most approved period. Yet here we were, facing a featureless exterior! The facade was built yesterday—that was writ large, all over the low, rambling structure. One end, it is true, had a gabled end; there was also an old shrine niched in glass beneath the gable, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... he lifted his head and looked above him, he gasped. They were there, too, tiny, featureless dots of white, like nothing so much as holes in a black wall, in the smoke-drift that ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... monotonous as much of 'Le Reve' is, the music is alive. In its strange language it speaks with the accent of truth. Here at any rate are none of the worn-out formulas which have done duty for so many generations. In defence of Bruneau's work it may be urged that his dreary and featureless orchestration, so wholly lacking in colour and relief, may convey to some minds the cool grey atmosphere of the quiet old Cathedral town, and that much of the harshness and discordance of his score is, at all events, in keeping with the iron tyranny of the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... how indiscriminate lovers are in their attachments; they love all, and turn blemishes into beauties. The snub-nosed youth is said to have a winning grace; the beak of another has a royal look; the featureless are faultless; the dark are manly, the fair angels; the sickly have a new term of endearment invented expressly for them, which is 'honey-pale.' Lovers of wine and lovers of ambition also desire the objects of their affection in every form. Now here comes the point:—The philosopher too is a lover ...
— The Republic • Plato
... as these, there is little more distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Phoenician "worlds" was the southern one, extending sixty miles from Carmel to Joppa—a tract from which the Phoenician character was well nigh trampled out by the feet of strangers ever passing up and down the smooth and featureless region, along which lay the recognised line of route between Syria and Mesopotamia on the one hand, Philistia and Egypt on ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the communicator. Lanko dropped into the pilot seat, glanced at the screens, and moved controls. In the viewscreen, the sea tilted, drew farther away, then became a level, featureless blue expanse. ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... know, it is obvious that it ought to be possible, sooner or later, to formulate these standards at least to some extent, and that to do so must at last be the business of the court. It is equally clear that the featureless generality, that the defendant was bound to use such care as a prudent man would do under the circumstances, ought to be continually giving place to the specific one, that he was bound to use this or that ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... of depicting character. This peculiarity consists in the capacity of representative scenes expressing the play of emotion. However unnatural the positions may be in which he places his characters, however improper to them the language which he makes them speak, however featureless they are, the very play of emotion, its increase, and alteration, and the combination of many contrary feelings, as expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare's scenes, and in the play of good actors, evokes even, if only for a time, sympathy with the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... flotilla—mother-ship, tugs and all—was out to sea long before the dawn. You would have liked the picture: the immense stretch of the grayish, winter-stricken sea, the little covey of submarines running awash, the gray mother-ship going ahead, as casually as an excursion steamer, into the featureless dawn. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... it had risen from. There it was astir with crawling white filaments, knotted confusedly at one spot in the north-west, whence came a sibilant murmur like the hissing of many snakes. Desert as I call it, it was not entirely featureless. Its colour varied from light fawn, where the highest levels had dried in the wind, to brown or deep violet, where it was still wet, and slate-grey where patches of mud soiled its clean bosom. Here and there were pools of water, smitten into ripples by ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... It had been a cold rain, and the snow had crept downward on the heights, and had even powdered the pines of the Cubly. The clouds were sweeping low in the west. Towards Geneva the lake was mere wide and featureless space—a cold and misty water, melting into the fringes of the rain-clouds. But to the east, above the Rhone valley, the sky was lifting; and as Julie sat down upon a midway seat and turned herself eastward, she was met by the full and unveiled glory of the higher Alps—the Rochers de Naye, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... us directly towards the heart of Russia. Thirty years ago there were but about eight hundred miles of railroad in the country; to-day there are twenty thousand and more. On this trip one passes through scenery of the most monotonous and melancholy character, flat and featureless, made up of forests of fir-trees, interspersed with the white birch, and long ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow; Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer; ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... silent egg which moves one's deeper emotions—something solemn in its embryotic inertia, something awesome in its featureless immobility. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the centenary of an event of supreme importance in the annals of music. To-day just one hundred years ago was born at Leipzig Richard Wagner, king of the music-drama, who towers above all other operatic composers like some lofty mountain rising from the midst of a dull and featureless plain. Such a colossal revolution as was effected by Wagner in Art can hardly find a parallel in any walk of life. What, in brief, was the scope of Wagner's reforms? To answer this question it is necessary to glance at the state in which the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... when Enlil became the head of the pantheon; but the existence of his myth is conjectural.(1) In a later age we can trace the process in the light of history and of existing texts. There Marduk, identified wholly as the Sun-god, conquers the once featureless primaeval water, which in the process of redaction has now become the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... arrange his thoughts; and after such arranging the words came of themselves. But as he looked at Shorty, this did not happen to him. There was not a line of badness in the face; yet also there was not a line of strength; no promise in eye, or nose, or chin; the whole thing melted to a stubby, featureless mediocrity. It was a countenance like thousands; and hopelessness filled the Virginian as he looked at this lost dog, and his ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... am he for whom the entire world is searching, whom none has ever seen, whom none can recognise!... I am Crime incarnated!... I am Night!... No human sees my face, because Crime and Night are featureless!... I am illimitable Power!... I am he who mocks at all the powers, at all the efforts, at all the forces!... I am master of all, of everything; of all times and seasons.... I am Death!... Bobinette, thou hast ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... her helpless charge in the perambulator beside her. I instantly recognized the infant—a popular organism known as "Baby Buckly"—the prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood. Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in its present repose it looked moist and shiny from ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... wounded of the war: And the first had lost his eyes; And the second went on wheels and had No legs below the thighs; And the face of the third was featureless, And his mouth ran cornerwise. So I made a rhyme about each one, And this is ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... wraiths had vanished, they crawled slowly southwards across the rich golden sand of the lower Sudanese desert. It was pleasantly bracing and clear in the early desert morning, and Mac felt light-hearted and happy, as he gazed across the distant featureless dunes of sand. Successfully accomplishing a non-stop run of twenty miles in an hour and a half, they arrived at Shellal, a village of a few mud huts and a station, a jetty with a steamer or two, which took travellers farther to the south, to Wadi Haifa ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... pneus, but as the country changed we picked it up again. We were among trees now, and the mountain sides were green with oak and poplar, though as we dropped the landscape darkened into desolation. The bleak corner of the world towards which we were speeding had that formless, featureless look which one sees on common faces, as if it had been shaken together carelessly by the great Creator ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "corner post," at Flint's right, was a type of blond stupidity, huge of body, with a bull throat and a round, featureless face. You looked in vain to find anything significant in this fellow beyond his physical strength, until your glance lingered on his eyes. They were pale blue, expressionless, but they hinted at possibilities ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... forest shut the roadside in On either hand, and 'mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds, or flapped amongst the flames,— Vultures and kites and crows,—with brazen plumes And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts, Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths, Hungering, but hard to fill,—all swooping down To gorge upon the meat of wicked ones; Whereof the limbs disparted, trunks and heads, Offal and marrow, littered all the ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... voice she lent a careless ear; Her hand within his rosy fingers lay, A chilling weight. She would not turn or hear; But with averted face went on her way. But when pale Death, all featureless and grim, Lifted his bony hand, and beckoning Held out his cypress-wreath, she followed him, And Love was left forlorn and wondering, That she who for his bidding would not stay, At Death's first whisper rose ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... at Dudley Port, in the dusk of a February afternoon, half-a-dozen people waited for the train to Birmingham. A south-west wind had loaded the air with moisture, which dripped at moments, thinly and sluggishly, from a featureless sky. The lamps, just lighted, cast upon wet wood and metal a pale yellow shimmer; voices sounded with peculiar clearness; so did the rumble of a porter's barrow laden with luggage. From a foundry hard by came the ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... right on the curve. He could see the massive hull of the cruiser plainly now. It was almost featureless until, as he watched, several sections ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... surroundings curiously in the shadowless light that filtered through the shifting roof of fog. Foolishly, I expected to discover Incan artifacts. The crumbled red stones should have warned me. They were, I think, harder than metal, yet they had been here long enough for the elements to erode them into featureless shards. Had they been of earthly origin they would have antedated Mankind—antedated ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog, that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... them, we set our faces towards the Southern Cross. Half way through the night we halted, and resting for a while, again pushed on, but this time due east. Dawn found us eagerly looking round for a change in the landscape if a featureless chaos of tumbled sand is worthy of such a name? but I, at any ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... forms are found—Synnet, Signet, Signate, which may be proper derivatives of signum, and thus make this trumpet call 'a signal,' instead of 'a sounding'; or (which is as likely) may be corruptions, perhaps of the somewhat featureless form 'Synnet,' caused by a misunderstanding of the ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... than a pale, featureless oval to him in the gloom, but he could divine from the vibrations of her voice that she was as ecstatic as a young maid at ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... thoroughly satisfied—Uthwart quite perversely at ease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings—and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they scarcely know whither finally, among the featureless villages, the long monotonous lines of the windmills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking the [230] roads through the snow which covers the endless plain, till they come in sight at last of the army in motion, like machines moving—how little it looked on that endless plain!—pass ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... desks, what were they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker. From the towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes, intensifying the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the room would be but a featureless prison-limit. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Pantheon facade, or Michel Angelo's figures, Or, at a wish, when I please, the Alban hills and the Forum,— But that face, those eyes,—ah, no, never anything like them; Only, try as I will, a sort of featureless outline, And a pale blank orb, which no recollection will add to. After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it; I have had pain, it is true: I have wept; and so ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women—her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—be symbols,—featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... amongst monotonous, drab towns without character or amusements. She had kept her eyes open. She had seen that it was from the denizens of the dull streets in these towns that the quack religions won their recruits. Mme. Dauvray's life had been a featureless sort of affair until these experiments had come to colour it. Madame Dauvray must at any rate preserve the memory of ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... and here a good deal of ground is tilled, though in September, when no crop is visible, one scarcely notices the fields, since they are entirely unenclosed, mere strips on the veldt, a little browner than the rest, and with fewer shrublets on them. But the landscape remains equally featureless and monotonous, redeemed only, as evening falls, by the tints of purple and violet which glow upon the low ridges or swells of ground that rise in the distance. Vryburg is a cheerful little place of brick walls and corrugated-iron roofs; Mafeking another such, still smaller and, being newer, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... truly delightful! Mountains and passes, valleys and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages and rice swamps; poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples, prostrate Buddhas, strings of straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey, featureless streets, and quiet, staring crowds, are all jumbled up fantastically in my memory. Fine weather accompanied me through beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa, where I ate my lunch in the street to avoid the innumerable fleas of ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... white, had some plot among themselves, and worked zealously to make them seem so to her. It was easy to make these last days happy for the simple little soul who had always gathered up every fragment of pleasure in her featureless life, and made much of it, and rejoiced over it. She grew bewildered, sometimes, lying on her wooden settle by the fire; people had always been friendly, taken care of her, but now they were eager in their kindness, as though the time were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... 'copter descend. The waste was featureless, then and for a seemingly interminable time afterward. Then his estimated position matched the site of the static-earth-shock-concussion-wave-occurrence. There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was different from any other ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... differs little from the rest of the Tigris valley, the same level plain of loam and mud, a strip of two or three miles nearest the river highly irrigated, and at this season, green with young corn and barley; further afield the bare, brown, featureless desert stretching out endlessly in every direction. Dawn and dusk transform this shadowless wilderness into a land of the most wonderful colour and atmosphere, but throughout the heat of the day the glare and dust ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... his politest phrases; laughed, but not too loudly, at the little sparkles of wit, accepted with naive delight her comments on the skill in driving that a boy of his age could show. For five minutes or so they ran quietly and steadily along a featureless road through barren pastures. There was time enough for his plan to blossom, for Oldport was nearly thirty miles away, and there intervened a village through which to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands. The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme; and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with it all is well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It introduces, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the featureless wild land, palmetto scrub stretching away into eternity. A few yards off rises the inevitable ruined koubba[A] with its fig-tree: in the shade under its crumbling wall the buzz of the flies is like the sound of ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... stopped short and stared. A dim, distorted something was peering at him from over the top of a big boulder. It was moving—it nodded at him. Then he indistinctly recognized it as a tall, conical hat. There seemed a sort of featureless face below it. ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps blazed along ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the morning star Hang'd at mid-day, their traitor of the dawn The clamour'd darling of their afternoon! And that same head they would have play'd at ball with And kick'd it featureless—they now would crown. ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... made itself felt, as a gentle persistent sound might have done: a flat, almost featureless scene—a little village church with cottages and gardens clustering about it, straggling away from it, by copses and meadows in which winter had left only the tenderest shades of the saddest colours. The winding river brightened the dull picture with broken glints ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... hallway to the front door, opening it and gazing out upon a fog-filled corridor that was papered in embossed leatherette, one speckled incandescent bulb lighting it sadly. There was something impregnable, even terrible to her in the featureless stare of the doors of three adjoining apartments. She tiptoed, almost ran, poor dear! with the consciousness of some one at her heels, back to the kitchen, where at least was the warm print of the cat's presence; fell to knitting ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst |
