"Greyness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was looking rather glumly out of a window at the broad playing fields which, in the greyness of a rainy day, seemed as deserted as myself. From my place I could see nearly all the red-brick wall that surrounds Kensingtowe grounds; I could see the iron railings which, at long intervals, break the monotony of the wall. Now the railings of Kensingtowe, like all places ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... now completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we had been told it would be very cold. Then we said goodbye to our sisters ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... of a country woman. The thin, high-bridged nose, the fallen cheeks, the shadows under eyes gloomy and retrospective—these were marks of the town; above all, perhaps, that sallow greyness of the skin ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... semblance of a man; but its unique characteristic was its awful greyness. It had the greyness of a rain cloud, yet rather that of a column of smoke. And from the centre of the dimly defined head, two eyes—balls of living fire—glared out ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... delighted to say that we have arrived, and see our dear Florence—the Queen of Italy, after all . . . A comfort is that Robert is considered here to be looking better than he ever was known to look—and this, notwithstanding the greyness of his beard . . . which indeed, is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. This greyness was suddenly developed—let me tell you how. He was in a state of bilious irritability on the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven—these will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odour of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind greyness with ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... remark, but sat a long time, absently gazing over the low-lying sweep of country which gradually melted into a greyness that looked ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... brightness, just as Mrs. Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance, the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle—until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... getting dark rapidly; the lights of Dover twinkled through the greyness. Micky stood and watched till they could no longer be seen. He was chilled to the bone in spite of his warm coat; he turned the collar up round his throat and thrust his hands ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... East, which of you holds your head highest this side of Suez. All you western nations are to us a peck of dust outside our palace gates. Listen, dear one. We can leave, if you will, to-night, and top the clouds before sunrise. And I promise you this," he went on, "when you pass from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting sunshine of the East, you will not care any longer about these people who go about the world on all fours. Day by day you will know what life and love mean. ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The greyness had rolled away now, and the evening grown exceptionally lovely, with clear skies overhead and great banks of pearly tinted clouds on the horizons. Where should she go? Only two ways lay open. Either she must follow Diana and Stanley up the valley, or she must stroll down to the temple ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... his anger to a greyness ill to behold, for for three thousand years he had tried to destroy that line and still its melody ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... firmness and immobility of marble, and seemed as cold; his delicately-formed lips, when he was not speaking, closed habitually, as changelessly still as if no breath of life ever passed them. There was not a wrinkle or line anywhere on his face. But for the baldness in front, and the greyness of the hair at the back and sides of his head, it would have been impossible from his appearance to have guessed his age, even within ten years of ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... it will do you good. There are hot scones in that dish," Pixie said quietly. The greyness of the street seemed to have entered the room—to have entered her heart. It was all grey. ... "We knew, of course, that you must like it, when you ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... dimly-lighted thoroughfares; ammunition vans stood at every street corner; guns rattled along drawn by straining horses, the sweat steaming from the animals' flanks and withers; an ambulance party sped through the greyness of the foggy morning, accompanied by a Red Cross lorry piled high with chests and stretcher poles, and soldiers in files and fours, in companies and columns, were in movement everywhere—their legions ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... right and left, up the glen and down it. There was no one to be seen. The sun had fallen by this time beneath the rim of the hills; a greyness of twilight was spread over the whole scene, and under the trees the dusk of night was already silently ousting the day. He turned once ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... some hours, with only the voice of the little rill, and some hares and a pheasant for company. The sun was gone down behind the black wood on the farther cliffs of Bagworthy, and the russet of the tufts and spear-beds was becoming gray, while the greyness of the sapling ash grew brown against the sky; the hollow curves of the little stream became black beneath the grasses and the fairy fans innumerable, while outside the hedge our clover was crimping its leaves in the dewfall, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... head into a shape like that of the chief; the young savage who makes marks on himself similar to the scars carried by the warriors of his tribe (which is probably the origin of tattooing); the Highlander who adopts the plaid worn by the head of his clan; the courtiers who affect greyness, or limp, or cover their necks, in imitation of their king; and the people who ape the courtiers; are alike acting under a kind of government connate with that of Manners, and, like it too, primarily beneficial. For notwithstanding the numberless absurdities into which this copyism ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Robert is considered here to be looking better than he ever was known to look. And this notwithstanding the greyness of his beard, which indeed is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. This greyness was suddenly developed; let me tell you how. He was in a state of bilious irritability on the morning of his arrival ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... where the air had been baked all day between white walls, it came in whiffs and pulses, like a distant music. Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was already sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging skyward through the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inward gladness of a princess when she has come into view of a desired kingdom—whether it shall endure or be destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon the prince reciprocating and making ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... that all her hints were taken with infinite precaution. Once on the horse he tried to sit up straight, but found the effort too great in his weary and bruised condition. He leaned forward over the saddle peak, and rode away in the luminous greyness towards the desert. The horse went quietly, as if affected by the mystery of the still hour. Horse and rider disappeared. The Arab boy wandered off in the direction of the village. But Domini remained looking after Androvsky. She saw nothing but the grim palms and the spectral atmosphere ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... at about three o'clock in the afternoon, just when it was getting dusk and the distant smokepall of the Five Towns was merging in the general greyness of the northern sky, Vera was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room of Stephen Cheswardine's newly-acquired house at Sneyd; Sneyd being the fashionable suburb of the Five Towns, graced by the near presence of a countess. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... spiritual ideas in sensuous form. He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks an appeal to sense has interest for him. How could such an one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is satisfied in seeing the sensuous elements escape from his conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again into the fire of colour. To the Greek ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... just at my feet fingering their heads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses built with grey bricks, seems less ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... another. Then, turning on his thoughts, he dismissed them. They were the morbid feverish fancies of an exceptional, of a terrible night. He opened the window quietly so as not to awaken his wife. And in the melancholy greyness of the dawn he looked down into the street and wondered what ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... with her, willingly enough, after I had kissed him. He didn't resent Susie's manner at all. As I watched he stopped after going a few yards, and looked out at sea, beyond the entrance of the cove. Everything was disappearing in a dull greyness that was beginning to blot out the rocky cliffs, and he turned to ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... part of the troublesome Road was thus deceived; at length the Openings among the Trees grew larger, the Air seemed thinner, it lay with less oppression upon us, and we could now and then discern tracks in it of a lighter Greyness, like the Breakings of Day, short in duration, much enlivening, and called in that Country Gleams of Amusement. Within a short while these Gleams began to appear more frequent, and then brighter and of a longer continuance; the Sighs that hitherto filled the Air ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the child feared? He guessed, and marvelled that a child should understand the strange thing that was about to happen up there on the hill. The knowledge of Death was shining instinctively in the child's eyes. She was part of the stillness and greyness that was creeping over ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... at eleven," she said, and was instantly surprised to find that her voice rang with new life, new interest. The greyness seemed to lift from the view that stretched beyond the window; she even looked for the sun in ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw off a burden grown unendurable. But it was fastened immovably—his responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic shift ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dank afternoon, early in November. The wintry sunshine, in fitful gleams, pierced the greyness of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... middle of the afternoon the whole fleet lay to for ten minutes, the troops standing to attention on every ship. The vessels rolled heavily to the rushing silent seas, the troops with grim faces swayed in their long lines on the careening decks. There was no colour to the scene but grey. The greyness, the vast space, the haunting notes of the "Last Post" echoing along the troopdecks, the lonely body deserted on the wide sea, left a deep impression on those light-hearted adventurers. Death! And to be buried ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... quick, short breathing. It seemed strangely impossible to sleep against such odds. They saw the lines of the face grow sharper and whiter, the dark eye-sockets sink to a curious roundness, a greyness gather about the mouth. There were times when they looked at each other in the last surmise. Yet the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... were quick laying the table. Charolais kept up a running fire of questions as he did it; but Lupin did not trouble to answer them. He lay back, relaxed, drawing deep breaths. Already his lips had lost their greyness, and were pink; there was a suggestion of blood under the skin of his pale face. They soon had the table laid; and he walked to it on fairly steady feet. He sat down; Charolais whipped off ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... of the leading Destroyer leaned across the bridge-rails and stared round at the ring of barren islands encircling the great expanse of water into which they had passed, the naked, snow-powdered hills in the background: at the greyness and desolation of earth and sky ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... with the tyranny of the west wind upon the bare brow of the coast. Most of these trees stood back a little from the margin of high tide, reluctant to see themselves in the water, for fear of the fate of Narcissus. But where that clandestine boat had glided into gloom and greyness, a fosse of Nature's digging, deeply lined with wood and thicket, offered snug ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... sound of her voice the man quickly arose and, going over to the tepee, he parted the blankets and held them open. And even as she passed out the greyness of dawn was replaced by silver, and silver by pink tints which lighted up the pale green of the sage brush, the dwarf shrubs and clumps of Buffalo grass around them as well as the darker green of the pines and hemlocks of the foothills in ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple—his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the greyness came back. ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... they turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... greyness had been stealing across the old officer's face, and Mrs. Holl was terrified at seeing him suddenly fall forward ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... daughter, and his old mother is furious; and Brandon, they say, wants to cut Ronder's throat. Ronder! Mrs. Combermere paused, partly to get her breath, partly to enjoy for an instant the shining, glittering grass, dotted with figures, stretching like a carpet from the vast greyness of the Cathedral. Ronder! There was a remarkable man! Mrs. Combermere was conquered by him, in spite of herself. How, in seven short months, he had conquered everybody! What an amusing talker, what a good preacher, what a clever ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... down. Then Sabre saw what was coming at him—saw it at a clap and never had remotely dreamt of it; saw it like a tiger coming down the street to devour him; saw it like the lid of hell slowly slipping away before his eyes. Saw it! I was watching him. He saw it; and things—age, greyness, lasting and immovable calamity—I don't know what—frightful things—came down on his face like the dust of ashes ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Koshin is situated in the middle of the village, in a court opening upon the main street. A very old wooden temple it is, unpainted, dilapidated, grey with the greyness of all forgotten and weather-beaten things. It is some time before the guardian of the temple can be found, to open the doors. For this temple has doors in lieu of shoji—old doors that moan sleepily at being turned upon their hinges. And it is not necessary to remove one's shoes; ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... leave boat, the ship of heart's desire for many men. Clouds of smoke, issuing defiantly from her funnels, were immediately swept sideways by the wind and beaten down by the rain. The smoke ceased to be smoke, became a duller greyness added to the greyness of the air, dissolved into smuts and was carried to earth—or to the faces and hands ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... the earth is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... him to do. His executors would do the rest. He had no farewell-letters to write. He had no friends with whom he was on terms of valediction. There was nothing at all for him to do. He stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live in England? ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... walls of Pont l'Eveque stand out against the clear sky of morning, a light mist girdling the basement of the walls. Had we been a smaller and swifter company, we should have arrived an hour before the first greyness shows the shapes of things. But now, alas! we no sooner saw the town than we heard the bells and trumpets calling the townsfolk and men-at-arms to be on their ward. The great guns of the keep roared at us so ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... and the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green, and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... had grown compassionate as she watched him, for there was a suggestive greyness in his face. It was evident to her that he was ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow specks of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the black sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a silver-greyness of stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night and the sea. Helena found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry, as she saw the sea, when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily with ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... last Black Bart preferred to stay in the room, crouched in front of her and blinking at the fire, as if he knew that each time his master would return to the fire. Then, why leave the pleasant warmth for the chilly greyness of the day outside? ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... of the house, which nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not—that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!" There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial love and reverence ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... proportion as in born criminals; that is, criminaloids never manifest the aggregate of physical and psychic peculiarities which distinguish born criminals and the morally insane. On the other hand, we find in criminaloids certain characteristics, such as premature greyness and baldness, etc., which are never exhibited by the born criminal. The real distinction between the criminaloid and the born criminal ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... hand above her without turning her head, and it shone pale in the mist, an eerie beacon, and thus the boat passed from view in the greyness, though as the paddles dipped for the start the song still rung ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... spidery legs, wearing a ghostly, diaphanous skirt. Her upper body resembled a ball lying on a high little table. She looked at him temptingly and sympathetically, with an amorous smile, which the fog contorted into an insane expression. Kohn disappeared immediately in the greyness. She groaned and then ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... shutters gave the room a curious, eerie look of desolate greyness. But Sylvia's eyes, already accustomed to the half-darkness next door, ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... in Venice,—that supreme moment when the magical flush of light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all covered with clinging green and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... trying to see. The gloom had gathered more closely in, and round her the veil of vapour from the horses' steaming cruppers hung heavily in the misty air. In front of her the straight lines of a few fir trees stood out dense and black against the greyness beyond, and between these lines purple tints of various tones and shades mingled one with the other, merging the horizon line with the sky. Here and there a more solid black patch indicated the tiny houses of the hamlet of Le Crocq far down in the valley below; from some of these houses small lights ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... given for decoration without fear that its beauty would be disgraced. He is the one man alive who can cover twenty feet of wall or vaulted roof with decoration that will neither deform the grandeur nor jar the greyness of the masonry. Mural decoration in his eyes is not merely a picture let into a wall, nor is it necessarily mural decoration even if it be painted on the wall itself: it is mural decoration if it form part of the wall, if it be, if I may so express myself, a variant of the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... that he wouldn't stand it, and so frothing away his energy along the line of least resistance. But never before had he been quite so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday dinner may have had its share in his despair—and the greyness of the sky. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable frustration as a business man as the consequence of his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after that—— Perhaps she might have reason to repent when it was too late. And destiny, as I have already intimated, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... flies will come streaming in from the garden as soon as the light comes, following the scent of blood. No, not there, a little to the right, he heard her crying, and, finding a piece of linen and a hammer and some nails, he went out into the greyness still undisturbed by the ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him, perhaps as much as I did. And I knew that he wandered to and fro at home, meeting her thoughts with his. I brought her back as soon as I could. Gabriel met us at the station; the engine shrieked, as I did in my heart. It was a strange mingling of the Heaven of my life with the sordid greyness of the world. I saw at once that there was a change; I had parted them and taught them what each was worth ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... room Wonder was sleeping peacefully again, but at the chill hour when watchers blow out the night-lights, and a dreary greyness comes like a fog through the curtains, Antony and Beatrice fell into each other's arms in ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... we catch for once the long stretch of the desolate Valley of Bastan, with the windings of the road reaching backward and downward along the hills. It is over while we look; the fog writhes and twists down and all is greyness again. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... plain below them was richly wooded, and was tinted by the young tender hues of the earliest summer, for all the trees of the wood had donned their leaves except the cautious ash, which here and there gave a soft, pleasant greyness to the landscape. Far away in the champaign were spires, and towers, and stacks of chimneys belonging to some distant hidden farm-house, which were traced downwards through the golden air by the thin columns of blue smoke sent up from the evening ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... even those whom she does not convince. It is curious to read this book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,—or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?—which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great doctrines ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of labour. The toilsome day begins with the task of scraping the chin and contemplating, as the process goes on, a face that day by day grows older and more weary. No race that shaves can shirk the sense of passing time, or be unaware of the approach of wrinkles, of "crow's-feet," of greyness. Shaving is the most melancholy, and to many people the most laborious of labours. It seems, therefore, more plausible (if less scientific) to look on the beard as a penalty for some ancient offence of our race, than to say with Mr. Grant Allen, and perhaps other disciples of ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the book," he continues, "and I believe a month's mental labour at the present time would do me up." The weather in particular affected, him. For years he had been accustomed to sun- warmed Spain, and the gloom and greyness of England ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... make him the happiest of men,—as he certainly would have thought himself for a time, had she consented to put him in possession of her large income. He had therefore padded himself with more than ordinary care,—reduced but not obliterated the greyness of his locks,—looked carefully to the fitting of his trousers, and spared himself those ordinary labours of the morning which might have robbed him of any remaining ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... fairest of all fair places, Sweetest of all sweet towns! With the birds and the greyness and greenness, And the ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... nothing, but into the sallow greyness of his face there crept a dark flush, that faded presently and left his colour more grey ...
— When William Came • Saki
... of weather seemed to combine to part the schooner from her convoy. As before, the fog fell, only to be succeeded by squally rain-showers that cut out the vista into a checkerboard pattern of visible sea and impenetrable greyness. Before evening the Laughing Lass, making slow way through the mists, had become separated by a league of waves from the cruiser. One glimpse of her between mist areas the Wolverines caught at sunset. Then wind and ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was so much changed that he had some difficulty in making his way. The vivid colours of the earth were all gone, and in place of them was the painful greyness of the dead trees, and the yellow of the parched soil. Nothing was overthrown in ruin, but all stood dead in its place. The shapes of men and animals only lay strewn upon the earth. The human beings were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers wet, the little, rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The larks quivered their song up into the new sunshine, and the country was so glad. It was a violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the town. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... his hair blowing away from the top of his head, and hanging down, like the tresses of a Rhine-maiden over one shoulder. So Mr Holroyd was commissioned to put that little affair in hand at once, and when the greyness had been attended to, and Georgie had had his dinner, there came hot towels and tappings on his face, and other ministrations. All was done about half past ten, and when he came downstairs again for ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court, and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that I first heard that mischievous ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... saw him. He came out on the edge of the ruddy ring of light and stood peering around at the woods where already a vague greyness was revealing ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... right, far away by Basel [beyond which the Swiss mountains close the scene], a still larger train of war- geared humanity, two hundred thousand strong, is discernible. It has already crossed the water, which is much narrower here, and has advanced several miles westward, where its ductile mass of greyness and glitter is beheld parting into six columns, that march on in flexuous ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... asleep, I slung my lantern over my arm and scampered off to the Rat Hole to yarn with the twins, making what speed I could in the fog and untimely dusk, and happy, for the moment, to be free of the brooding shadow in our house. The day was not yet fled; but the light abroad—a sullen greyness, splashed with angry red in the west, where the mist was thinning—was fading fast and fearfully. And there was an ominous stirring of wind in the east: at intervals, storm puffs came swirling over the hills from the sea; and they ran off ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... head felt too full of confusing thoughts to make it possible to go to bed at once. She knelt on a box that stood in the window, fastened back the lattice, and, leaning on the sill, looked out into the night. The greyness of evening was falling over everything, but it was not nearly dark yet, so that she could see the windings of the chalky road which led down to the valley, and the church tower, and even one of the ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... does the blueish grey eye see badly in the day-time and well in the night? A. Because greyness is light and shining in itself, and the spirits with which we see are weakened in the day-time ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was—attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... and the splendid and thrilling notes of his fine voice. He defended himself at once from the charge of undue partiality with strong passion and deep emotion, which lie hidden beneath his deep reserve. With a face ghastly almost in its greyness, in its deepening glows and manifest passion, he repudiated the charge of unfairness; he vehemently struck his hand on the order paper which he held, and as he neared to the end of his little speech there was a ring in his voice dangerously near a sob or a tear. It is on such occasions that ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... ground-scrub. Above them were stretches of saffron-coloured hollyhocks, a flood of colour, and with these as sisters, evening primroses, a great abundance. Lilac and crimson grasshoppers rushed over them, jumping into the air and into vision, a puff of bright colour—then subsiding into the greyness of the dust as they alighted and the sombre wing-cases closed over their little glory. On the ground when waiting to spring, these grasshoppers looked as if made of wood: they looked like displaced chessmen of ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... waved his stick and jumped up—that's what he did; and he ninety-seven years and nine weeks! Talk about greyness! ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... natural cheerfulness relieve the greyness of the situation, and at times one can almost hear the ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... heartrending agony,—a mass of enormous billows rolling steadily on together hurled themselves like giant assassins upon the frail and helpless vessel and engulfed it—it disappeared with awful swiftness, like a small blot on the ocean sucked down into the whirl of water—the vast and solemn greyness of the sea spread over it like a pall—it was a nothing, gone into nothingness! I watched one giant wave rise in a crystalline glitter of dark sapphire and curl over the spot where all that human life and human love had disappeared,—and then—there ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... he came back, the greyness all gone from his face, though his eyes still glittered with the dry, hard light of starvation. He went back to the chair near ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... back-street stillness; taxis hum past on their way to the West End, and engender a longing for renewed acquaintance with the normal world and the normal devil; from the ward window I can see the towers of Parliament as they stretch up through the London greyness. For an Englishman just returned from a foreign battlefield to his own capital it should be an inspiring view, that of the Home of Government, wherein the Snowdens, Outhwaites, Ponsonbys, and Sir Vested Interests, talk their hardest for the winning of the war by one side ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... twilight of a narrow and incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking down into the court, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious, soigne and artistic. Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung over the muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists and radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something that roused imagination, that stirred her senses here—the vital ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into mere blue shimmer ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... "Daily News," in Chicago, but they did not hold his attention. Now, these things were like grey clouds hovering along the horizon of a clear day. They threatened to cover and obscure his life with chilly greyness. He tried to shake them off, to forget and brace up. Sometimes he said to ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... happened that on this morning my thoughts were tinged with a certain greyness. A chapter in my life that had been both bitter and sweet was closing, and already I saw myself once more an Ishmaelite ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... who had ridden her was lying on his back at the edge of the cornfield, and the greyness of his face told ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... captain, a day or two after his daughter's return, strolled slowly down towards the harbour. It was afternoon, and the short winter day was already drawing towards a close. The shipping looked cold and desolate in the greyness, but a bustle of work prevailed on the Conqueror, which was nearly ready for sea again. The captain's gaze wandered from his old craft to the small vessels dotted about the harbour and finally dwelt admiringly on the lines of the whaler Seabird, which had put in a few days before as the result ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... common-room encounters, Carmichael used to fling himself out into the east wind and greyness of Edinburgh, fuming against the simplicity of good people, against the provincialism of his college, against the Pharisaism of his church, against the Philistinism of Scottish life. He would go down to Holyrood and pity Queen Mary, transported ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... and crystal, added a more lustrous sheen to the crimson petals, like fringed velvet, of a bowl of exquisite deep-red carnations, and flickered gaily on the bright neck of a gold-foiled bottle which twinkled in the midst of the cool greyness of a pail ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... I awoke. The mist, which for a week had hung in grey clouds around the mountains, had now vanished, and the first object which met my eyes through the open door of the tent was the great white cone of Villuchinski gleaming spectrally through the greyness of the dawn. As the red flush in the east deepened, all nature seemed to awake. Ducks and geese quacked from every bunch of reeds along the shore; the strange wailing cries of sea-gulls could be heard from the neighbouring coast; and from the clear, blue sky came down ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... trembled right up to the shoulder. The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all the fulness of its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate, smooth, pearly greyness of light, in which the town lies steeped during the early hours, into sharp-cut masses of black shade and spaces of hot, blinding glare. Three long rectangles of sunshine fell through the windows of the sala; while just across the street the front ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... clattering on the cobble-stones. The men were up—they should have been up an hour now—but no sounds of activity came from the barns. The yard was in stillness, a little mist floating against the walls, and the pervading greyness of the morning seemed to be lit up by the huge blotches of yellow lichen that covered the slated roofs of barns and dwelling—the roofs were all new, having only for a year or two superseded the old roofs of ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... a wound that Finn and the Fianna were as if they had lost their wits. And when Etain of the Fair Hair came to the bed where Osgar was lying, and saw the way he was, and that the great kinglike shape he had was gone from him, greyness and darkness came on her, and she raised pitiful cries, and she went to her bed and her heart broke in her like a nut; and she died of grief for her ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... will cry for gains Upon the blue and brazen sky. The precious venom in my veins To-morrow will be parched and dry. To-morrow it shall be my goal To throw myself away from me, To lose the outline of my soul Against the greyness of the sea. ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... there, hour after hour, now flung aloft until the whole ocean to the limits of the horizon lay spread around us, anon sweeping down the back of some giant billow until it seemed that the boat was about to plunge to the ocean's bed, and the passage of every hour was marked by an increasing greyness and haggardness in the faces of my companions, while a more hopelessly despairing ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... see Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the haar, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there, shrouded in the heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that before many hours our eyes would ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... array of umbrellas, a broken mortar-board and a tattered and scattered Principia, seemed dim and dull in contrast with the luminous stir of the early March evening outside. An unusual sense of the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life of all studious souls came, and went in his mind. He took the "lines," written painfully over three pages of exercise book, and obliterated them with a huge G.E.L., scrawled monstrously across each page. He heard ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, ... those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... churchyard, and all the graves of the drowned flickered round their feet in the gusty greyness. They passed Jack Pringle's grave, where the "Kindly Light" lay in the stone. When they gained the church Sir Graham saw that the door was set wide open to the night. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... to confide it to some friend, some mature and brilliant woman who knew the world and understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was worthy of pride. She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought romance at the price of esteem and of peace. Then suddenly the whole matter slipped into ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... growing light, passing another farm-house presently and another unfriendly dog. The greyness in the east became tinged with rose. Birds sang and fluttered. A rabbit hopped nimbly across the road ahead of them and disappeared, with a taunting flick of his little white tail, in the bushes. Further on a chipmunk chattered ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history. In the old buildings, and their straggled frontage, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... has saved a competence, lays his worn tools before Priapus the Garden- Keeper. Heracles and Artemis receive the aged soldier's shield into their temples, that it may grow old there amid the sound of hymns and the dances of maidens.[23] Quiet peace, as of the greyness of a summer evening, is the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... this period was an old man in appearance, though by no means an old man in years, being hardly more than fifty. Why he should have withered away, as it were, into premature greyness, and loss of the muscle and energy of life, none knew; unless, indeed, his wife did know. But so it was. He had, one may say, all that a kind fortune could give him. He had a wife who was devoted to him; he had a son on whom he doted, and of ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... that I can afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if the old all-papal paradise had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool. and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... greyness seemed to have lifted from the man at the desk. The brown flecks in the eyes seemed to spread and engulf the surrounding colourlessness. His face, too, took on a glow that seemed to come from within. It was ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land; not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky—the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... brief half-hour of evening, the time of day when the magic of Japan is at its most powerful. All that was cheap and sordid was shut out by the bamboo fence and wrapped away in the twilight mists. It was a half-hour of luminous greyness. The skies were grey and the waters of the bay and the roofs of the houses. A grey vapour rose from the town; and a black-grey trail of smoke drifted from the dockyards and from the steamers in the harbour. The cries and activities ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... found him overcome with grief—the gay, handsome Major Harper! steadfast neither in good nor evil. He sat, his head bent, his hair falling disordered, its greyness showing, oh! so plain. Plainer still were the wrinkles which a life of smiles had carved only the deeper round the mouth—token of how near upon him was creeping a desolate unhonoured age. By his side, talking softly, with his hand in hers, lay the crippled sister, perhaps the only ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... receded. The night began to pass. There came a faint greyness before the window. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its grave in ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... merits further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this one, but none of them compares with it in quality. His earlier books were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the same artistic completeness ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... and sparkling esplanade the Siwanois had now seated himself. For a while, straining my eyes where I lay flat among the taller fringing ferns, I could just make out a blot in the greyness where he sat upright, like a watching catamount ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... tray softly on the table. His face was immutable, aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey under the skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a slight sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight greyness as an ash or a corruption, in the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... he was only conscious of greyness and the noise of winds and waters, but presently a black daub seemed to hover for a second somewhere on the verge of his world, to hover and disappear. He wondered what it was. A smut, perhaps. He rubbed his face. The daub returned. It ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... already put on the coffee. He was wearing his robe and the pinched greyness of his face told Corinne he had been up half the night. He poured coffee for her, smiling wanly. "If I have any commitments today, Corinne, will you please see that ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... day ripened; and, as the dull sun crept out from behind the greyness, and revealed the frost in the air, the temperature dropped lower and lower. And the animal world peeped furtively out upon the strange sight of creatures like themselves toiling at the command of beings whose voices had not even the power to smite the mountainsides ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... was rapidly coming to a stop. Larry gripped the table, struggling to hold firm to his reeling senses. This soundless, grinding halt! His swaying gaze strayed from the mirror. Outside the glowing bars he could now discern the luminous greyness separating. Swift, soundless claps of light and dark, alternating. Daylight and darkness. They had been blended, but now they were separating. The passing, retrograding days—a dozen to the second of Larry's consciousness. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... now to a finish, but the upshot is sure to be a finish. Their anticipations of an unclouded dawn, when the present night has worn itself into the streaky greyness of morning, are certain to come to pass. The ordeal which we are undergoing is tremendous, but at any rate the nation and its allies will emerge from it rejuvenated under the spell of the present magicians, as the old ram emerged lamb-like and frisky from Medea's cauldron. That, in brief, would ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of the forest, With thy pine-leaf hat and moss-cloak, Dress thou now the woods in linen, And the wilds a cloth throw over. All the aspens robe in greyness, And the alders robe in beauty, Clothe the pine-trees all in silver, And with gold adorn the fir-trees. 160 Aged pine-trees belt with copper, Belt the fir-trees all with silver, Birch-trees with their golden blossoms, ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... greyness silvers everything,— All in a twilight, you and I alike —You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone, you know),—but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking from ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... mystic greyness, hard like steel and transparent like glass, began to reveal strange vistas among the ancient trees, the fire died down. The shack was a heap of ashes and pulsating, scarlet embers, with here and there ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Kabardian pipe. He was wearing a shaggy Circassian cap and an officer's overcoat without epaulettes, and he seemed to be about fifty years of age. The swarthiness of his complexion showed that his face had long been acquainted with Transcaucasian suns, and the premature greyness of his moustache was out of keeping with his firm gait and robust appearance. I went up to him and saluted. He silently returned my greeting and emitted an immense cloud ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... at twilight, 5 Bringing the fields benediction And the hills quiet and greyness, Are my ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... clumps of a willowy shrub from which hung, like grapes, clusters of white waxen blooms. The light too had changed; gone were the dancing, sparkling atoms and the silver had faded to a soft, almost ashen greyness. Ahead of us marched a rampart of coppery cliffs rising, like all these mountainous walls we had seen, into the immensities of haze. Something long drifting in my subconsciousness turned to startled realization. The speed of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt |
