"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sunlight twinkle on the wheel-spokes. The narrow tires sunk slightly in the yielding shingle fragments. Brittle! Brittle! Brittle! the sound said to Bobby. Above all things he loved to watch the gossamer-like wheels, apparently too light and delicate to bear the weight they must carry, flying ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... as I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through, To catch some golden cord that I saw gleaming Like gossamer against ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... like the misleto, and never on the ground; the seeds are furnished with many long threads on their crowns; which, as they are driven forwards by the winds, wrap round the arms of trees, and thus hold them fast till they vegetate. This it very analogous to the migration of Spiders on the gossamer, who are said to attach themselves to the end of a long thread, and rise thus to the tops of trees or buildings, as ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... handsome and stately, in characteristic elegance of attire and manner both. Her white morning dress floated off in soft edges of lace from her white arms; a shawl of precious texture was gathered loosely about them; on her head a gossamer web of some fancy manufacture fell off on either side, a mock covering for it. She came up to Daisy and kissed her, and then examined into her various arrangements, to see that she was in all respects well and properly cared for. Her mother's presence made Daisy ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... old and wistful Drifts my dream. Petal-patined the dream, white-mistful As the dew-sweet haunt of the dim whitebeam Because of memory, a little wind ... It is the gossamer-float of the butterfly This drift of dream From the sweet of to-day to the sweet Of days long drifted by. It is the drift of the butterfly, it is the fleet Drift of petals which my noon has thinned, It is the ebbing out of my life, of the petals of days. To the years, other ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... sun sent a pale shaft, tinctured with lustrous green, through the hemlock shades. This shaft of light moved over the forest floor, grew ruddy, spied out a secret sparkle hidden in a fallen leaf, shone on twisting threads of gossamer-like lines of running silver on which the gloom was threaded, and, last of all, blazing in the face of that fascinating dryad, caused her to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... violinist, and Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,—wandering in Europe with hope of meeting you,—yet met. This contumacy of mine I shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn.—Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... put their April raiment on; And those eternal forms, Unhurt by a thousand storms, Shot up to the height of the sky again, And danced as merrily as young men. I saw them mask their awful glance Sidewise meek in gossamer lids; And to speak my thought if none forbids It was as if the eternal gods, Tired of their starry periods, Hid their majesty in cloth Woven of tulips and painted moth. On carpets green the maskers march Below May's well-appointed arch, Each star, each god; each grace amain, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... silver, and above it, set upon her dark hair, a little circlet of gold, in which shone a single gem that looked like a ruby. Thus attired, although her stature is small, her appearance was very dignified and beautiful, especially as the gossamer veil added mystery to ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... I got two "Dumb-Belles." For Aunt Eunice and Aunt Clara, maiden sisters of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an assorted cargo of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... amongst the things to be expelled from earth by the perfected man of the future, then a great charm and element of interest will be lost to nature. Though loving them, I cannot, of course, feel the same degree of affection towards all the members of so various a family. The fairy gossamer, scarce seen, a creature of wind and sunshine; the gem-like Epeira in the centre of its Starry web; even the terrestrial Salticus, with its puma-like strategy, certainly appeal more to our aesthetic feelings than does the slow heavy Mygale, looking at a distance of twenty ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... the earth-life! On pearly wings of gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our heaven-heart; ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... very interesting to know whether the gossamer threads thrown out by these insects are in an excited state of electricity: their divergent state would seem to imply they were; for there seems to be no other natural cause which could prevent them from coming together, especially before the insect had left its resting-place. If electric, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand—and the milk was cold and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... by the way, right out of the midst of his intoxication. One of the great flies now came flying past Count Hamilcar with softly buzzing wings. He went "brrr" with his lips and smiled a really cheerful smile as he watched how this queer bundle of gauzy wings and golden gossamer floated deliriously through the sunshine. "Mad with life," he thought, "if all this only has some object. At any rate there is more chance for meaning than for the lack of it, although—if I am a digit in the great calculation, then to be ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished, when ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... cleaned, and for years the spiders held undisputed possession, weaving their webs without fear of molestation, until every nook and corner was filled with their tapestry, and from ceiling and rafter hung long festoons of gossamer threads that swayed back and forth in the breeze. It was a place much visited by tourists, and a trip to San Francisco was not considered complete without visiting this "Cobweb Museum," a name bestowed upon it by its ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... men have compressed (through generations of circumstance), from small complications, simplicity. Being out in all weathers, and rolling about so, how can they stand upon trifles? Solid stays, and stanchions, and strong bulwarks are their need, and not a dance of gnats in gossamer; hating all fogs, they blow not up with their own breath misty mysteries, and gazing mainly at the sky and sea, believe purely in God and the devil. In a word, these sailors ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the dots for his eyes and mouth. The latter was ready for immediate work, given only the impulse. As he sank slowly, head downwards, the impulse was supplied. Out from his neck there floated two sprays of gossamer network, of such delicate texture, such dainty tracery, that nothing but the gentle laving of water could have unravelled them and left them whole. Through them the water flowed, and with it came the dim consciousness ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... over everything carefully twice, rejecting, trying to shake off the bonds of custom and get down to primitive needs. At last we made a judicious selection. Everything old or worn was left; everything merely ornamental, except good lace, which was light. Gossamer evening dresses were all left. I calculated on taking two or three books that would bear the most reading if we were again shut up where none could be had, and so, of course, took Shakspere first. Here ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... opened one day when a large and fashionable crowd had gathered at Lady Dalton's garden-party. Philippa was, as heretofore, the belle, looking more than usually lovely in a light gossamer dress of white and pink. She was surrounded by admirers. Lord Arleigh stood with a group of gentlemen under ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... have come to greatness. No man realized more clearly the importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that: he looked into the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend, by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble, miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... "sentiment is the life and soul of poetry and art." Perhaps this statement may help us here. Pure poetry is the perfection of prose, or prose idealized. "It is a dream drawn from the infinite, and portrayed to mortal sense." It takes a great mind, a great genius to weave into a gossamer web, complete and perfect in every part, a story, a tale, an idea, which alike charms the mind, enthralls the sense, and enchains the spirit. Poetry is the perfection of language. It is not a mere mechanical contrivance of words, but a glorious picture in which the outward execution is lost ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... it. H lne seemed to him a girl, a frail girl. How could he ever have thought this Woman worldly! Her fragrance reached him. It was a fragrance that had no weight, but it bound him—bound him hand and foot in its gossamer web. He felt that he ought to struggle, but that he did not wish to. He waited for H lne ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... gossamer-barred arch of light, a black figure was projected, and swelled as it neared in silent approach. It came through the last portiere, on into the circle of light, and stood, a turbaned negro, bowing ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... not August now; the summer was past, yet the weather was fit for the height of summer. Warm, spicy, dry air, showing misty in the distance like a gossamer veil, and near by a still glow over everything. The two young people wandered over the bridge and slowly mounted the bank among the oaks and beeches, keeping in the shade as much as might be. There was a glorious play of shadow and sunlight all over the woodland; ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... gasped in wonder to witness one of Her Majesty's judges forsake— on very insufficient provocation—the gossamer of recreative conversation, to upraise a few monumental, I may say memorable, judgments on the subject of lithography. Now, there are many red rags in the various arts with which to encompass the discomfiture ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... tried to look and feel at home. Within a month of Bruce's manipulation this excellent and gifted young man, this truly gracious light in the youthful band of confessors, was seated, talking to a fascinating young danseuse who wore a gossamer dress, behind the scenes of a petty London theatre. Bruce looked on with a smile, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the armed fleet, that royally Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite Some city, or invade some thoughtless realm, Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks, Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf, Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed In trappings of the battle-field, are whelmed By whirlpools, or dashed dead upon the rocks. Then stand the nations still ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... simple. She had on what is called a gossamer, which covered her from neck to toe, and on her head a hat wrapped all about ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... daughters of the house. When it came to Delphine's he gently drew her light shawl from her shoulders, spread it over the keyboard, and then played through it, his fingers, with every tone they produced, coming in touch with the gossamer-like fabric, still warm and hallowed for him from its contact ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... clear its closes were,— As if the hand of Music through The sombre robe of Silence drew A thread of golden gossamer: So sweet a flute the fairy blew. Like beggared princes of the wood, In silver rags the birches stood; The hemlocks, lordly counsellors, Were dumb; the sturdy servitors, In beechen jackets patched and gray, Seemed waiting spellbound all the day ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... brilliant complexion and imperial proportions. It is Juno and Arachne. The divine orbs of the goddess turned haughtily upon me, but did not see me,—looked through and beyond me, as if I had been nothing but gossamer, feathers, air; and the little black, bead-like eyes of the insect pierced me maliciously an instant, as the barouche dashed past, and disappeared in the Rue de Rivoli. I was humiliated; I felt that I was recognized,—known as the rash youth who had just called at the Hotel de Waldoborough, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and stuck my head into the night. The fog had crept to the edge of the track, a gossamer mist through which houses and trees and cattle could be seen dim in the moonlight. The noise continued—not a mutter, but a steady rumbling flow as solid as the blare of a trumpet. Presently, as we ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of the summer nights. Occasionally a villager used to visit the scene of their gambols in order to catch if it were but a passing glance of the tiny folks, dressed in their vestments of green, as delicate as the thread of the gossamer: for well knew the lass so favoured, that ere the current year had disappeared, she would have become the happy wife of the object of her only love; and also, as well ken'd the lucky lad that he too would get a weel tochered lassie, long ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... its weight in gold. Body, all cut in pieces, and nailed to poles, had long ignominiously withered in the wind; perhaps it was now only buried overnight for the nonce? Being dug up, or being cut down, and put into the balance, it weighed—less than was expected. It was as light as gossamer, said pious rumor, Had such an excellent odor too;—and came for a mere nothing of gold! This was Adalbert's first miracle after death; in life he had done many hundreds of them, and has done millions ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... fell upon my knees in the customary manner; perceiving which, the beautiful being motioned for me to rise, and with the most unassuming grace received my burden. As she unfolded the lace from its silken cover a cry of delight escaped her, and shaking out its gossamer folds she threw it over her head. With all the care I could use I had laid bare the block of ice, which shone like silver in the moonbeams, and now with a sudden blow of my dagger I cleft the ice, and lifted out the wreath, ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... but Lady Susan was sure that if she had had as many boys, instead of one son and four daughters, she should have been worn out. Lorimer was a dear, affectionate fellow. Those he loved could guide him with a leash of gossamer, but young men in his position were exposed to so many temptations! There ensued a little sighing over the evils of wealth; and to see and hear the two ladies, no one would have thought that Julia Poynsett had married a young man for love—Susan Lorimer ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rendered it a most efficient instrument in the preservation of the Union, But, sir, if the fact were otherwise— if all the teachings of experience were reversed—better, far better, a rope of sand, aye, the flimsiest gossamer that ever glistened in the morning dew, than chains of iron and shackles of steel; better the wildest anarchy, with the hope, the chance, of one hour's inspiration of the glorious breath of freedom, than ages of the hopeless bondage and oppression ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... mountain relatives. Although they may live on the nectar of flowers, they have no objection to the tiny insects they find among their petals, or which fly through the air, while many devour as titbits the minute spiders which weave their gossamer webs among the tall grass ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... of interlaced undergrowth parted like gossamer before it. Small trees went down and the tallest bushes were trampled flat; the stoutest creepers broke ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... is usually very large, it naturally follows that an umbrella is a convenient companion. A gossamer for a lady and a mackintosh for a gentleman, and heavy shoes, and coarse, warm and comfortable clothing ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... bee, buzzing about in the air, For once be not busy, a moment pray spare, And tell me, pray tell me, how honey you make From the flowerets of garden, soft meadow, and brake. You rise with the sun, and your gossamer wing Bears you swiftly away where the heather-bells spring; Whence you come heavy laden with nectary spoil, For the sweet winter stores ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... climbing pines, while as the brightness increased we could see the torrent, whose voice now almost drowned the clash of couplings and the clamor of wheels, frothing green and white-streaked among mighty boulders in the gorge below. Then as we swung giddily over a gossamer-like timber bridge, the walls of quartz and blue grit fell back on either hand; and, for the first time, I gazed in rapt silence upon the cold unsullied whiteness of eternal snow, undefiled from the beginning by any foot of man. It stretched in a glimmering saw-edge high ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Winstanley seems to us to have realised that it was the ignorance of the many that, in truth, maintained the privileges of the few; that the masses themselves forge the fetters for their own enslavement, which, though apparently as strong as iron bands, are, in truth, but things of gossamer, easily to be broken by those who themselves have forged and who themselves still ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... and the peerless Chaoukeun, seated in a massive car of gossamer richly studded with the eyes of live humming-birds, drawn by twelve beautiful blue load-stars, presented by the heavenly bodies to the brother of the sun ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... a fantasy, an absurdity, a dream charged with purpose; it has wit and humour, and some deep feeling covered with the gossamer of irresponsibility; it is an act of rebellion, an edged complaint, a protest touched with flame.... There are epigrams and sentences that read like a sob or a stab."— ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... the ground and adjusting it without help, but obtaining aid for the raising of the second. One man carried a sack suspended by his teeth, and another, taking one in his arms, turned repeated somersaults as he held it, apparently with as much ease as if his weight of flesh had been only so much gossamer and his load ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... too often come to the same conclusion herself, and has sometimes forgotten her high destination, in the meridian of her glory. We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as a mere Rosy Melindi—who are always fishing for pretty complements —who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language, but poor and barren in sentiment. Beset, as she has been, by the intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden, and the artful—no wonder she has sometimes folded her wings in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road for me ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... that they could get up lace so cheap that the people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry bushes with it to keep off the insects. Spider-webbing is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric. Sixteen square yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce! If the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island plantations could have been shut into that dressing-room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... up we shall find them Among mosses old and dry; From gossamer threads that bind them, They will start like the butterfly, All winged: so we went forth seeking, Yet still they have kept unseen; Though we think our feet have been keeping The track where they have been, For we saw where their dance went ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... as they walked, the little space between them was hung with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter, binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There he stopped abruptly; ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... that before parting with the bird Carlos had plucked from its shoulders the long gossamer-like feathers that distinguish the heron species. These he ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the hawthorn, the first spike of meadow grass, the first song of the nightingale, the green ear of wheat. I spoke it with the ear of wheat as the sun tinted it golden; with the whitening barley; again with the red gold spots of autumn on the beech, the buff oak leaves, and the gossamer dew-weighted. All the larks over the green corn sang it for me, all the dear swallows; the green leaves rustled it; the green brookflags waved it; the swallows took it with them to repeat it for me ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... go my way," remarked Mr. Carlyon, and Elizabeth nodded; and then Dinah fetched her a light gossamer scarf, which she ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... old earth renews her youth With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze. How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth, While all is fresh as in the early days! What simple things be these the soul to raise To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat, With nameless ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... entering a fashionable drawing-room, Mr. Tiffany Carrack, in the very blossom of full dress; his hair in glossy curl, with white neckcloth and waistcoat of the latest cut and tie, coat and pants of the purest model, pumps and silk stockings; bearing in his hand a gossamer pocket-handkerchief, which he shook daintily as he advanced, and filled the room with a strange fragrance. With mincing step, just dotting the ground, his whole body shaking like a delicate structure in danger every moment of ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... watchful days Omega and Thalma went often to the Mirror and gazed into it in search of vapor clouds. And more than once those gossamer-like formations appeared over different parts of the world to gladden their hearts only to fade away before their vision. The reflections of those embryo clouds became less frequent as the days wore on. Omega and Thalma knew that they had no right to hope for the ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that to marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could imagine. But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of her gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and ruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it impossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the misty October morning was spreading up slowly from the east, the delicate hoar frost of autumn was lying like a filmy veil of silvery gossamer over the furze bushes and rough grass around the camping-place, before the pair of pleasure-seekers returned. By that time, however, Tonio was sleeping soundly beside the piebalds in shelter of a tumble-down wall, with the monkey ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... known Or dreamed of under the sun Were brought and displayed at the royal throne, And put by, one by one Till a graybeard monster came to the King— Haggard and wrinkled and old— And spread to his gaze this wondrous thing,— A gossamer ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... lord?" she whispered, as she gazed up through the darkness. "I have the silken thread as fine as gossamer, the cotton thread, the twine, the rope, the beetle ...
— Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit • S. M. Mitra and Nancy Bell
... a divinely inspired needle, and others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary's exclamations of delight and longing ranged from ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Gossamer scruples fell between Thee and this that might have been; Now the clinging cobwebs grow; Ah! the saddest loss is this, A good ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... great white peak shining ethereally at its northern end. Dark pines rolled about it, growing smaller and smaller up the hillside until they dwindled with spires clean cut against the azure into a gossamer filigree. Between them and the water stupendous forest shrouded all the valley, save where an oblong of pale verdure ran back from the fringe of boulders and was traversed by the frothing streak of a river whose roar came up hoarsely across the ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... give a very dextrous turn of the hand and the finest of these threads are used in some of the fabrics which they weave. I often wondered how they could prepare these delicate, strong, linen-like threads that are as fine as gossamer. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to interrupt me. If you snap the golden threads of thought, they will float away on the air like gossamer threads, and I shall never ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Prime Minister, "the idea of his presuming to tell your Gossamer Majesty that he can hear the bark of the ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... downwards, on the wings of the wind from one parish to another. It is said that if the wind falls they can unfurl more sail, or furl if it rises. In any case, these wingless creatures make aerial journeys. When tens of thousands of the used threads sink to earth, there is a "shower of gossamer." On his Beagle voyage Darwin observed that vast numbers of small gossamer spiders were borne on to the ship when it was sixty miles distant ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... shattering of a dream of personal election to happiness—a late blossoming happiness and hence the more entrancing, the more pathetic. That any hope of the dream's fulfilment was fragile as glass, lighter than gossamer, the veriest shadow of a shade, her natural diffidence and sane sense, alike, convinced her. For this very cause, the dream being of the sweetest and most intimate, how gladly would she have cherished the enchanting ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... words left her lips, the moon shone out from behind the clouds above the dark forest. There was a fragrance of lilies all about her, and a gossamer gown floated around her, whiter than the whiteness of the fairest lily. It was fine, like the finest lace that the frost-elves weave, and softer than the softest ermine of the snow. On her long golden hair ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... springs; Nae mair the grove with airy concert rings, Except, perhaps, the robin's whistling glee, Proud o' the height o' some bit half-lang tree: The hoary morns precede the sunny days, Mild, calm, serene, wide spreads the noontide blaze, While thick the gossamer waves wanton in the rays. 'Twas in that season, when a simple bard, Unknown and poor, simplicity's reward, Ae night, within the ancient brugh of Ayr, By whim inspired, or haply prest wi' care, He left his bed, and took his wayward rout, And down by Simpson's[60] wheel'd ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. The Campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery grasses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of passion and of peace. The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. His doom is endless change. The tired, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... little Kitty Spruce being permitted by her mother to peep at the 'new lady' through the staircase window, could only draw a long breath and ejaculate: "Oh! Ain't she lovely!" while she followed with eagerly admiring eyes the gossamer trail of Maryllia's white gown on the soft turf, and strained her ears to catch the sound of the sweet voice which suddenly broke out in a ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... been the poorer. Every tunnel that pierces a mountain; every bridge that spans a river; every building whose turrets pierce the sky; every invention that lifts a burden from the shoulders of humanity; every reform that gilds the world with the glow of hope, was preceded by a wish whose gossamer strands were woven in a human brain. The Red Cross of today is but a dream of Henri Dunant ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... listening ear like a part of the music to which they kept time. They saw a multitude of people, and exchanged the compliments of the evening, yet these people made no more impression upon their thoughts than gossamer would ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... completely veils from view; the spray becomes very delicate and abundant, from top to bottom, hanging over, and revolving around the torrent, till it becomes lighter and more evanescent than the whitest fleecy clouds of summer, than the finest attenuated web, than the lightest gossamer, constituting the most airy and sumptuous drapery that can be imagined. Yet, like the drapery of some of the Grecian statues, which, while it veils, exhibits more forcibly the form beneath, this does not hide, but exalts the effect produced by ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... passionately. "It is true, that before you returned, and while I was reckless because I believed you despised me, I trifled away more time there than I should. But Miss Marchmont, in reality, is as indifferent towards me as I towards her. I am not bound to her by even a gossamer thread." ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... price at which those articles could be purchased, and always with the utmost delicacy with which such traffic could be conducted. Men conveyed themselves to government for a definite price—fixed accurately in florins and groats, in places and pensions—while a decent gossamer of conventional phraseology was ever allowed to float over the nakedness of unblushing treason. Men high in station, illustrious by ancestry, brilliant in valor, huckstered themselves, and swindled a confiding country for as ignoble motives as ever ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... manner, the which, having called forth the startling declaration from manoeuvering mothers, and languishing daughters, that "Mr. Clarence Delwood would look farther than Boston for a bride." So they had folded their gossamer wings with resignation, receiving his polite attentions with pleasure, yet never being able to penetrate the reserve which hung around him. To say that our hero was handsome, would be saying but little, for one often meets with such; but with the almost feminine pensiveness which characterized ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... accounting of unrivaled adventures. In Aladdin's car, however, there was one man who did not join in the fellowship, for he was too sick. He had been a big man and strong, but he looked like a ghost made of white gossamer and violet shadows. His own mother would not have recognized him. He lay back into the corner of a seat with averted face and closed eyes. The more decent-minded endeavored, on his account, to impose ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... two men tilted their chairs against the little porch in front of Peter Giles' log cabin, and puffed their pipes in silence. The panorama spread out before them showed misty and dreamy among the delicate spiral wreaths of smoke. But was that gossamer-like illusion, lying upon the far horizon, the magic of nicotian, or the vague presence of distant heights? As ridge after ridge came down from the sky in ever-graduating shades of intenser blue, Peter Giles might have told you that this parallel system of enchantment was only "the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... after years when he grew into glorious manhood he was generally acknowledged to be the handsomest man in the Province of Ontario, but to-day—his first day in these strange, new surroundings—he was but a wee, brown, lovable bundle, whose tiny gossamer hands cuddled into his father's palm, while his little velvet cheek lay rich and russet against the pearly ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... the moon glimmered across the water and folded the land in a gossamer veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desire to go ashore that had seized upon him the night before, reasserted its influence. The face of Millie Stope floated about him like a magical gardenia in the night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressure ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody. The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been published. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... speaking, perhaps, it could not be called litter, and Mrs. Verner and her French maid would have been alike indignant at hearing it so classed. Robes of rich and rare texture; silks standing on end with magnificence; dinner attire, than which nothing could be more exquisite; ball dresses in all sorts of gossamer fabrics; under-skirts, glistening with their soft lustre; morning costumes, pure and costly; shawls of Cashmere and other recherche stuffs, enough to stock a shop; mantles of every known make; bonnets that would send ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... as though in some strange relation to his words, the storm of whirling snow-flakes suddenly ceased. The thin veil passed away from overhead like gossamer. They saw a clear sky. They saw, even, the gleam of reflected sunshine, and as the mist lifted, the country above and beyond unrolled itself in one grand and splendid transformation scene: woods above woods; snow-clad peaks, all glittering with their burden of icicles and snow; and ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the delay was Natasha's skirt, which was too long. Two maids were turning up the hem and hurriedly biting off the ends of thread. A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and Sonya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Their white gossamer dresses, floating lightly around them as they glide silently along, give them a resemblance to sylphs, or wood-nymphs, all the more as ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... is no longer that of a man either despairing or fatigued. On the contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... he explains to the kindergartner what he is inventing, and for what purpose; he weaves gossamer threads of fancy about the objects constructed, or describes the forms of beauty and knowledge ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... splendidly; till one fine morning the tree took it into its head to grow, and it grew and grew until it was so high that I climbed up to Heaven on it. There I looked down, and saw a lady in a white gown spinning sea-foam to make gossamer with. I went to take hold of it, and snap! the thread broke, and I fell into a rat-hole. There I saw your father and my mother spinning; and as your father was clumsy, lo and behold, my mother gave him such a box on the ear, that it made his ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... with a delicate dancing glister. It was the month of voyaging spiders. Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Mrs. Horn, with a thin gossamer shawl about her shoulders, would come down from her bedroom above and join her husband. Then young Oliver himself would come bounding in, always a little late, but always with his face aglow and always bubbling ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... upturned in the lamplight, was smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer; his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... roses scattered; the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown on the threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle down and dandelion down, the brown down of the goat's-beard; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores twirling aslant—the wind carries them all on its back, gossamer web and great heron's vanes—the same weight to the wind; the drops of the waterfall blown aside sprinkle the bright green ferns. The voice of the cuckoo in his season travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the most distant hill, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded sunshine flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's breast, was imitating ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... Nature far away, as a cold abstraction akin to death; yet half unconsciously the scene imprinted itself upon his senses, and long afterward he recalled distinctly the pale grayish-blue of the zenith shading into the rare, cold tint of green, and that again barred over with light gossamer clouds, beneath which lay the glowing bands ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... W.H. CONANT, Gossamer Rubber Co., Boston, Mass.:—"I have read the book with great pleasure and it produced a vivid reminiscence of the striking events in base ball, so full of interest to ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb circled ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... day that The Gates was published, Yvonne came down late to breakfast, a gossamer study all filmy lace, with the morning sun in her hair. The windows were open, and a hint of spring lent zest to every joy, the loamy fragrance of nascent plant life stealing into the room from ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a child once who knew every inch of them as well as ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... that stupendous business. Stupendous indeed; with which all Germany has been in travail these sixteen months, on such terms! And in verity has got the thing called "German Kaiser" constituted, better or worse. Heavens, was a Nation ever so bespun by gossamer; enchanted into paralysis, by mountains of extinct tradition, and the want of power to annihilate rubbish! There are glittering threads of the finest Belleisle diplomacy, which seem to go beyond the Dog-star, and to be radiant, and irradiative, like paths ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... what a baby thinks? Who can follow the gossamer links By which the manikin feels his way Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind, and wailing, and alone, Into the light of day?— Out from the shore of the unknown sea, Tossing in pitiful ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... You may, for instans, call a coronet a coronal (an "ancestral coronal," p. 74) if you like, as you might call a hat a "swart sombrero," "a glossy four-and-nine," "a silken helm, to storm impermeable, and lightsome as the breezy gossamer;" but, in the long run, it's as well to call it a hat. It IS a hat; and that name is quite as poetticle as another. I think it's Playto, or els Harrystottle, who observes that what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Confess, now, dear Barnet, ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... himself by the heiress. Poor Polly's eyes kept wandering towards them, and (I suppose, because I had heard so much about her) so did mine. It was only a quiet dinner-party, and Miss Chislett had brought out her needlework, some gossamer lace affair, and Leo leant over the sofa where she sat, playing with the contents of her workbox. Polly's eyes and mine were not the only ones turned towards them. Ours was not the only interest ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... through the dew-bespangled gossamer of the turnip field, heard with pleasure from Dye that the adjoining field, which sloped down to the valley, had been fixed upon for the holding of the Sassiwn. On the flat at the bottom the carpenters were already at work at a large ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... my love, with perfect faith— Am I not as the floating gossamer, Steering through ether on thy guiding breath? Am I not as the clay within thy hand, Taking the shape and image of thy thought? Heed not these idle tongues, that launch their doubts In erring love against thy watchful care. That which thou doest I accept with joy; I wait ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... sprite, full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads—"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists: but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the devil! Horrible! What possible connexion can there be between those beautiful Valenciennes, those splendid Mechlins, those exquisite Brussels points, and his cloven-footed majesty? Is Haarlem a city of idolaters? Are all these gossamer oblations an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the garden his little men he sent, Up and down and in and out unceasingly they went; Here they stole a blossom, there they pulled a leaf, And bound them up with gossamer into a glowing sheaf. Petals of the pansy for little velvet shoon, Silk of the poppy for a dance beneath the moon, Lawn of the jessamine, damask of the rose, To make their pretty kirtles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman, delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief crossed on ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... blazingly glorious sensotheaters, cafes, gymnasiums, dancing salons, amusement rides and hypnodream houses, crowding every main thoroughfare with their fantastically ornate architecture, were—when you thought about it—designed to trap people's minds, keep them from thinking of anything but a gossamer, useless pursuit of personal pleasure. And wasn't the design faulty when everyone was bored, when some chose Departure and others sank to the unnatural practice of protection to ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... this spot into the distance at every hour of the day and season of the year. But the fairest time of all on the Steiger was at sunset, on clear autumn days, when the scene close at hand, where the threads of gossamer were floating, was steeped in golden light, the distance in such exquisite tints-from crimson to the deepest violet blue, edged with a line of light-the Saale glimmered with a silvery lustre amid its ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... half-hidden by all sorts of dainty little conspiracies of lace and lawn. Youth, enchanting, self-absorbed, important, had coolly taken possession of the hall, as it does of everything, for its own happy plans, and something of the gossamer beauty of it seemed to be clouding older and wiser eyes to-night. Sidney found her eyes resting upon Barry's big, shapely hand, as he leaned forward, deep in conversation with Dr. Brown, in the chair ahead, and she was conscious ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... is a soft and a delicate thing; Ah! the heart is a lute with a thrilling string; A spirit that floats on a gossamer's wing!" ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was indeed ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... too late to change, and she caught up a scarf of gossamer and twined it round her neck to serve ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of the gossamer, the cobwebs which may be seen in large quantities on the furze bushes; and so of King Oberon ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories would have ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... crowded room, she had never seemed more exquisite, nor more desirable. She was dressed all in white, with arms and shoulders bare, her fair hair dressed in the quaint mode of the moment with a high comb and a multiplicity of curls. She had a bunch of white roses in her belt and carried a shawl of gossamer lace that encircled her shoulders, like a diaphanous cobweb, through which gleamed the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... bloom Looks up to the sun, may a soul find room For a measure of awe at the wondrous birth Of one more treasure to this glad earth." Said he: "Whenever a dewdrop clings To a gossamer thread, and glitters and swings, Deep in humility bow your head To a thing for a ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... are any who are influenced by this? Puff. O Lud, yes, sir! the number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. Sneer. Well, sir, the puff preliminary. Puff. O, that, sir, does well in the form of a caution. In a matter of gallantry now—Sir Flimsy Gossamer wishes to be well with Lady Fanny Fete—he applies to me—I open trenches for him with a paragraph in the Morning Post.—"It is recommended to the beautiful and accomplished Lady F four stars F dash E to be on her guard against that dangerous character, Sir F dash G; who, however pleasing ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... (grandparent, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, grandchild) are considerably narrower; those in the third degree are very narrow indeed. Proceeding outwards, the connections soon become thinner than gossamer. The person represented by any one of these counters may be taken as the subject of a pedigree, and all the counters connected with it may be noted up to any specified width of band. In this book one of the counters is supposed to represent a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose name appears in ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... water are the greenness of the grass, the size of the trees, the nature of the plants, reeds, rushes, brambles, willows, poplars, &c. Some discover water by putting out dry wool under a bowl at night. So too, if you see at sunrise a cloud [or gossamer, 'spissitudinem'] of very small flies. A mist rising like a column shows water as deep below as the column ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... satin; the suspension-straps are clumsy cables compared with her delicate silk fastenings. Where shall we find in the Penduline's mattress aught to vie with the Epeira's eiderdown, that teazled russet gossamer? The Spider is superior to the bird in every way, in so far as concerns ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... ran from the place and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic. Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was nearly six months before I heard ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... — 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... panted, crashed and shook with its energies. It glimmered all over with the bright, hairy gossamer of the tow, which wound thinly through systems of fast and slow wheels. Between them the material was lashed and pricked, divided and sub-divided, torn and lacerated by thousands of pins, that separated strand from strand and shook the stuff to its integral fibres ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... woven of silver and gold and silk and linen. They are used by the women as head dresses and scarfs and rich men use them for turbans. Sometimes an Indian noble will have seventy or eighty yards of this delicate gossamer wound about his head and the ends, beautifully embroidered, with long fringes of gold, hang gracefully down ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... pleased and some troubled at this speech, but they all prepared to escort the prisoners to the nearest edge of the island. The rain was pouring down in torrents, and umbrellas were unknown; but all of them, both men and women, slipped gossamer raincoats over their clothing, which kept the rain from wetting them. Then they caught up their sharp sticks and surrounding the doomed captives commanded them to march ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... Senator, who, having just graduated, felt adventurous, and determined to cross the plains. Like the rest, he arrived in a somewhat dilapidated condition, with elbows out, and a hat the very counterpart of Sam Weller' s "gossamer ventilation," which, if you remember, "though not a very handsome 'un to look at, was an astonishin' good 'un to wear!" I must confess that he became ragged clothes the best of any one I ever saw, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... a technicality and fall down, it looks like amusement ahead, and if a District of Columbia rule, or martial law, or tocsin of war is the result, Gov. Murray is a good style of war governor. He isn't the kind of a man to put on his wife's gossamer cloak and meander over into Montana. He would give the matter his attention, and you would find him in the neighborhood when the national government decided to sit down on disorderly conduct in Utah. The first lever ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the mask, and show its meaning and fitness for Prospero's purposes. Why is Prospero so disturbed at the reminder of so paltry a plot as that of Caliban and his associates? Is it likely that these drunken fellows could frame any plot that would be but as gossamer before his art? Is it natural that so low a creature as Caliban should show more intelligence than Stephano and Trinculo in disregarding Ariel's 'stale' set to catch them? How do you explain his superior caution? Describe the device employed by Prospero ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... reached Victor's kingdom, and the people shouted "Long live the Queen!" Blanche veiled her face and trembled; for Victor whispered in her ear that the shouts were for her. And as the people saw her beautiful face through her gossamer veil, they cried all the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... yet strong enough to sweep off the tops of the billows when it caught them well abeam, carrying the spindrift away to leeward and scattering the surge with its blast as it transformed it into fairy-like foam bubbles and wreaths of gossamer spray. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... misfortune that befell me long ago, and a wish I had for happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words; but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... sheer force, crushing down beneath his chariot wheels their mountainous and howling ridges into one level plain of foaming water. Our chainplates, strong fastenings, and clenched bolts, drew like pliant wires, shrouds and stays were torn away like the summer gossamer, and our masts and spars, crackling before his fury like dry reeds in autumn, were blown clean out of the ship, over her bows, into ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the gradual dawn prevails Where softly-burning fires appear, Making to tremble all those veils Of grey and golden gossamer. ...
— Chamber Music • James Joyce
... gastronomists complain of heaviness in London after eating a couple of mutton-chops? Do not respectable gentlemen fall asleep in their arm-chairs? Are they fit for mental labor? Far from it. But look at the difference here: after dinner here one is as light as a gossamer. One walks with pleasure, reads with pleasure, writes with pleasure—nay, there is the supper-bell going at ten o'clock, and plenty of eaters, too. Let lord mayors and aldermen look to it, this fact of the extraordinary increase of appetite in Belgium, and, instead of steaming to ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stream that at once dissolves and melts into space, where the myriad transparent, furious wings weave a tissue throbbing with sound. And this for some moments will quiver right over the hive, with prodigious rustle of gossamer silks that countless electrified hands might be ceaselessly rending and stitching; it floats undulating, it trembles and flutters like a veil of gladness invisible fingers support in the sky, and wave to and fro, from the flowers to the blue, expecting ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... gloves, she seized the bell-knob, and rung violently. During the few moments she waited for admission, her foot, clad in white satin, beat the threshold with a light, but restless motion. Her brocade-robe about which costly laces hung in gossamer clouds, rustled down in rich folds to the marble floor of the vestibule, while with every pulsation of her heart, and movement of her body, gems flashed out in the moonlight. Long, shining curls, slightly tossed by the night breeze, floated down over her cheeks and bosom, half concealing the rare ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... should establish its own instead: An assemblage of things so adjusted and built up as that they may easily be rearranged or completely demolished as occasion may require, or a whole plan or scheme consisting of many parts so connected as to create a gossamer-thread of mutual independencies. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... what a green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust |
