"Shapeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... smooths the troubled seas; Before the chattering swallow builds her nest, Or fields in spring's embroidery are dress'd. Meanwhile the tainted juice ferments within, And quickens as its works: and now are seen A wondrous swarm, that o'er the carcase crawls, Of shapeless, rude, unfinished animals. No legs at first the insect's weight sustain, At length it moves its new-made limbs with pain; Now strikes the air with quivering wings, and tries 400 To lift its body up, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... foetus, even the genital organs, whilst there was yet scarcely any trace of the liver. And indeed at the period when all the parts, like the heart itself in the beginning, are still white, and except in the veins there is no appearance of redness, you shall see nothing in the seat of the liver but a shapeless collection, as it were, of extravasated blood, which you might take for the effects of a contusion ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... that inward and social reorganization which it is the main object of these Anticipations to display. I have sought to show that in peace and war alike a process has been and is at work, a process with all the inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force, whereby the great swollen, shapeless, hypertrophied social mass of to-day must give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized, educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republic dominating the world. It will be ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... minster tottering to its fall, Though to the passing crowd its hues are spread, A dull mosaic, yellow, green, and red, Viewed from within, a radiant glory shows When through its pictured screen the sunlight flows, And kneeling pilgrims on its storied pane See angels glow in every shapeless stain; So streamed the vision through his sunken eye, Clad in the splendors of his morning sky. All the wild hopes his eager boyhood knew, All the young fancies riper years proved true, The sweet, low-whispered words, the winning glance From queens of song, from ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... existing for others, laughing with others! There were miles between himself and Fenmarket. Life! what was life? A few moments of living and long, dreary gaps between. All this, however, is a vain attempt to delineate what was shapeless. It was an intolerable, unvanquishable oppression. This was Love; this was the blessing which the god with the ruddy wings had bestowed on him. It was a relief to him when the coach rattled through Islington, and in a few minutes had landed him ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Carey, excitedly, and, forgetting all about the messiness of the great wet shapeless-looking mollusc, he used both finger and ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... Thus, in his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men, with their interests, their faculties, their desires, and their possessions, under the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the subject may be, they themselves have no voice in it—the prince judges for them. The nation is just a shapeless mass, of which the prince is the soul. In him resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of all organisation, of all progress; on him, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... into the garden, and, taking the queen's arm on one side and Mary Seyton's on the other, he hurried them away quickly to the lake-side. When passing through the doorway Mary Stuart could not help throwing an uneasy look about her, and it seemed to her that a shapeless object was lying at the bottom of the wall, and as ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Jeanne exclaimed: "We have forgotten Massacre!" They stopped, and, getting down, Denis ran to fetch the dog, while Rosalie held the reins. He presently reappeared, carrying in his arms the shapeless and crippled animal, which he placed at the feet of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and violent noises were heard outside the door, and rising above all the voice of Costal. The door was suddenly burst open, and the Indian rushed into the middle of the room, holding in one hand a bloody dagger, while the other was enveloped in a shapeless mass of what seemed to be cloth. The latter was serving him for a shield against the attack of several guerilleros, who ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... Dr. Burnell to this paper, we read: "As I several times in 1866 visited the ruin referred to, I may be permitted to say that it had become merely a shapeless mass of bricks. I have no doubt that it was originally a vimana or shrine of some temple; there are some of precisely the same construction in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... counting on St. Louis. The center of the old city is one big shapeless blob of a dead area; so nice and cold that St. Louis has reversed the usual city-type blight area growth. Ever since Rhine, the slum sections have been moving out and the new buildings have been moving in. So with the dead area and the brand-new, wide ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... nothing to be seen on the way but a shapeless mass of snow struggling with bowed head against the storm, wading deep in the loose drifts, wading seemingly at haphazard—and trailing after it an indefinable bundle of white—dead white. Behind, a human being drags along, holding on for ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... sky, from age to age Who rul'st the world by reason; at whose word Time issues from Eternity's abyss: To all that moves the source of movement, fixed Thyself and moveless. Thee no cause impelled Extrinsic this proportioned frame to shape From shapeless matter; but, deep-set within Thy inmost being, the form of perfect good, From envy free; and Thou didst mould the whole To that supernal pattern. Beauteous The world in Thee thus ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture"? Of sculpture in general, it may be observed that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This, at least, is the general opinion. But, always excepting the Venus ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... them—neat brown—paper parcels, bulky parcels, shapeless parcels, tissue-paper parcels, large and small, dainty and the reverse, boxes, envelopes, and a mysterious pyramid covered with a sheet, over which Pam mounted jealous guard. Betty had just time to arrange the ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... more resembled the white-washed room at the station. Bertie was presenting her with a rose instead of a ring, while she was trying to conceal 'neath the folds of her bridal dress her feet encased in shapeless Balmorals. Then Colonel Rolleston suddenly appeared and forbade the ceremony to proceed, while the bridegroom seemed to have changed into Fane, and Bertie, as best-man, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... breakfast-time arrived there was no perceptible change in the aspect of the weather, which remained stark calm; while the heavy pall of cloud that had shrouded the night sky had thinned away to a kind of dense haze in the midst of which the sun throbbed—a great shapeless splotch of misty light that, notwithstanding its partial veiling, still contrived to impart a scorching quality to ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... them, silent, immense, clad in her dark purple silk gown spread over a great hoopskirt. A real lace collar lay softly over her enormous, billowing shoulders; real lace ruffles lay over her great, shapeless hands. Her face, the delicacy of whose features was veiled with flesh, flushed and paled. Not even flesh could subdue the sad brilliancy of her dark-blue eyes, fixed inward upon her own sad state, unregardful of the ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... into the office together and Fred received his clothing duly marked with his name and ward. But his shoes were withheld and in their place he was given a pair of mismated slippers which proved too large. Harrison handed him two rag strips with which he tied them on. Looking down at the shapeless, flapping footgear, Fred Starratt felt his humiliation to be complete. He walked slowly back ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... rolled back from it and came to his feet in one swift, wary motion, his eyes on it and his knife already in his hand. As he did so the water went past below them with a thunder that deafened. Logs and trees shot past, boulders crashed together, and things could be seen surging in the brown depths; shapeless things that had once been woods goats and the battered gray bulk of a unicorn. He saw it all with a sideward glance, his attention on ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... light of the lamps on either side, she might have been asleep, so motionless she lay; but, whenever Eugene turned a timid glance upon her rigid features, he saw that she seemed ever and ever to be looking away from him, and far out upon the black and shapeless masses of the woods through which ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... the boy, as Elsie was cautiously advancing towards the mysterious object. The girl stood still, and hesitated a moment, while a vague dread crept over her. What was it that lay there in the bleak, cold twilight, so still and shapeless, and yet with such an awful suggestion of life about it? She was lost in bewilderment when the boy's voice ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... intuition that saved him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Ilse's terror at the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... to Rome, where, before he was twenty-five years old, he sculptured the grand Pieta, or Dead Christ, which is still in St. Peter's; and of his return to Florence, where he foresaw his David in the shapeless block of marble, and gained permission of the commissioners to hew it out,—the David which stood so long under the shadow of old gray Palazzo Vecchio, but ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... cast upon the westward-facing escarpments behind us, have both disappeared together. Impenetrable gloom lurks beneath the faces of the cliffs, the mournful howl of the coyotes comes across the plain, and their slinking forms emerge from the shadow of the rocks. There is a shapeless heap, the carcass of some dead mule or ox, some jetsam of the desert, lying near at hand, at which my horse was uneasy as I drew rein in contemplation, and which explains the nearness of the beasts of prey, and the long line of zopilotes, or buzzards, which I had ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... foul or shapeless as you say, Or worse; for that he clownish seems to be, Rough, satyr-like, the better he will play, And manly looks the fitter are for me. His frowning smiles are graced by his beard, His eye-light, sun-like, shrouded is ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey, A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare, The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair, Makes haste to clutch the beast. Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day, Till lies the beast, a shapeless carcass there! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... which I stand, instead of being what it has often been represented to be, is but a shapeless mass of earth 205 feet high, occupying a village square of 1310 feet. It is sufficiently wasted by time to give full scope to the imagination to fill out or restore it to almost any form. One hundred years ago, some rich citizen constructed steps up its side, and ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... and maid had been of a depreciatory nature, not as concerned her own attire—that was as perfect in its way as Rosalind's own—but with reference to the home-made dresses of the vicar's daughters, which seemed to have suddenly become clumsy and shapeless when viewed in the mirrors of this elegant bedroom. She was in arms at once on her friends' behalf, and when Peggy's dignity was hurt she was a formidable person to tackle. In this instance she fixed her eyes first on the maid, and then on Rosalind herself with a steady, disapproving ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... Almo, two huge shapeless masses of ruins may be seen above the vineyard walls: that on the left is said to be the tomb of Geta, the son of the Emperor Severus, who was put to death in his mother's arms by order of his unnatural brother. Geta's children and friends, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and Ransom had thrown himself at his feet, he saw that he yet lived, and lived triumphantly. Ransom could not have told more; it was for others to see and point out the smile that sweetened the wan lips, and the passion with which he held against his breast some sodden and shapeless object which he had rescued from those awful depths, and which, when spread out and clean of sand, betrayed itself as that peculiar article of woman's clothing, a ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... the army. We passed through great herds of camels, some with small children perched on their backs, who joggled about like sailors on a storm-tossed ship, as the camels made away from the cars. There were villages of the shapeless black tents of the nomads huddled in among the desolate dunes. We picked up a Turk deserter who was trying to reach our lines. He said that his six comrades had been killed by Arabs. Shortly afterward we ran into ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... seen to the utmost advantage. There, dressed in the vast, shapeless coat which drapes itself about him as he gesticulates, his neck free from the cravat which puts modern Europeans in the pillory, and allowing himself greater space than at his concerts—there, and there alone, is Delsarte ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... second, being internal, contains the seed of the future within itself. After the period of materialist effort, which held the soul in check until it was shaken off as evil, the soul is emerging, purged by trials and sufferings. Shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc., which belonged to this time of effort, will no longer greatly attract the artist. He will endeavour to awake subtler emotions, as yet unnamed. Living himself a complicated and comparatively ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... been without damage to Flume Valley stock. For two valuable steers had been shot, and so wounded that they had to be killed, while several calves were trampled on and crushed into shapeless masses. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... punitive expedition had departed, leaving the Silent Pools to their silence. The houses of the village had been destroyed and trampled out. The sward lay covered with shapeless remains, and scarcely had the last of the expedition departed, staggering and half drunk with the delirium of their deeds, than from the blue above, like a stone, dropped ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... before noon, Jack and I brought our sextants on deck with the object of measuring his meridian altitude above the horizon; but we were only able to obtain a very approximate and wholly useless result, for, when we came to try, we found that the sun appeared in our instruments merely as a shapeless glare of light, while the horizon was wholly indistinguishable. Then, by imperceptible degrees, the sun, like the horizon, became obliterated, and the atmosphere stealthily darkened, as though a continuous succession of curtains of grey gauze were being interposed between us and the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... The railway porters and some rayahs were lying on the platform in the enjoyment of their midday slumbers, their heads and faces carefully wrapped up in their capotes, while their bare, bronzed shanks and huge feet, in shapeless red shoes, projected in what seemed absurd disproportion to the rest of their bodies. I must make an exception. There was one wide-awake individual awaiting us, the owner of the horses. He was no sooner paid for the hire of his animals than, tying them fast, he went into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant trash," "impertinent puppy," and "audacity of impudence;" and other samples from the polemical vocabulary of the personage who, by the irony of fate, filled the Chair ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... symmetry of the Chopin phraseology are internal; it must be delivered in a flowing, waving manner, never square or hard, yet with every accent showing like the supple muscles of an athlete beneath his skin. Without the skeleton a musical composition is flaccid, shapeless, weak and without character. Chopin's music needs a rhythmic sense that to us, fed upon the few simple forms of the West, seems almost abnormal. The Chopin rubato is rhythm liberated from its scholastic bonds, but it does not mean anarchy, disorder. What ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... was strolling in a jardin franais; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowded with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of medieval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the French say) descended ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... himself company, but he stopped when he heard me, and, to tell the truth, I was glad of it, for his playing was uncanny. Sometimes I met him shambling along the brink of the Cliffs—a grotesque little figure, with his old shapeless hat, his huge coat flapping behind him, and the mighty blackthorn he carried—he knew the ground so well that he walked as if he could see (indeed, he saw more than I could, for while to me the breakers were only streaks of light, he spoke as ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... often frames short, hurried sentences such as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or with recollections of terror. The final impression that Frankenstein leaves with us is not easy to define, because the book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet when all its faults have been ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... We sit without our coats; Our cuffs are moist and shapeless, No collars binds our throats. We carry huge umbrellas On Broad Street and on Wall, Oh, how thermometers go up! And, oh, how ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... the club-men of St. James's Street, or Pall Mall, in London! Look at yonder prematurely old man, doubled up with work, and leaning on a rude stick more crooked than himself, slowly trudging to the club-house, in a shapeless hat like an Italian harlequin's, or an old brown- paper bag, leathern leggings, and dull green smock-frock, looking as though duck-weed had accumulated on it—the result of its stagnant life—or as if it were a vegetable production, originally ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... the light streamed unbrokenly through the wood. And then it could be seen that the yellow mass of undergrowth HAD moved with the passage of another figure than his own. For ever since he had entered the shade, a woman, shawled in a vague, shapeless fashion, had watched him wonderingly, eagerly, excitedly, gliding from tree to tree as he advanced, or else dropping breathlessly below the fronds of fern whence she gazed at him as between parted fingers. When he wheeled she had run ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... this barren matter, these shapeless sketches! Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... in action. Shortly after this bombardment started, the German trenches were covered by a great cloud of smoke and dust and a pall of green lyddite fumes. The first line of German trenches, against which the fire was directed, became great shapeless furrows and craters filled ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... shapeless, bulky at her feet and she could not see Mr. Stewart. Instead here was a reeling vision of running slaves of a form lifted and borne in, and then nothing but a sinking away of self amid the world-shaking roar of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... She thrust out a shapeless, swollen foot, encased in a monstrous, untended shoe, the dry, raw leather of which showed white on the edges ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... distance before him. The view of the forests and mountains was cut off on every side, and nothing presented itself to the eye but the dim forms of the rocks and trees which were near. These, too, were indistinct and shapeless. The ground was soon entirely covered, and all hope of finding the path entirely disappeared. Forester went back then a short distance, endeavoring to retrace his steps. He followed the foot-prints a little way, but all traces of them were soon obliterated. When he found that the ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... dripping from the elm tree, and flowing in torrents past the house; they would listen to it pounding overhead and streaming off the roof before their faces. They were dry, quite dry! All their belongings were dry—their shoes were not mildewing, their books were not getting soft and shapeless, their bed-clothing would be ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... tokens of the Alien murderers: the floor, once bright with polished stones of the mountain, and strewn with sweet-smelling flowers, was now as foul as the den of the man-devouring troll of the heaths. From the fair-carven roof of oak and chestnut-beams hung ugly knots of rags and shapeless images of the sorcery of the Dusky Men. And furthermore, and above all, from the last tie-beam of the roof over the dais dangled four shapes of men-at-arms, whom the older men of the Wolf knew at once for the embalmed ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... head slick and shiny, like a lake, with a stray bristle or two, which stood for trees. In the middle of her back stood Fuji, the great mountain, with numberless little Fujis to keep company. Many winding paths ran down kitty's legs to queer, shapeless shrines, and it was only when Yuki Chan had insisted on making a curious old pine-tree with twisted limbs of kitty's short and stubby tail that trouble ensued, and she had been requested by her mother to take her honorable little body to ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... outstretched form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,—a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... exclusively to the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still[13] erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... "I regret to admit the fact, but I am a fat, shapeless, freaky-looking old woman. Ordinarily that doesn't worry me in the least. After fifteen years in the tropics one doesn't worry about how one looks. It has been a long time since I've given it a thought. But now—Well, it's different. Seeing that picture. ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... returned from Paris with an order from the King for the revision of my sentence. Fresh witnesses were heard. Patience did not appear; but I received a note from him containing these words in a shapeless hand, "You are not guilty, so don't despair." The doctors declared that Mademoiselle de Mauprat might be examined without danger, but that her answers would have no meaning. She was now in better health. She had recognised her father, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face. It was a gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate's, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes I looked. On the surface ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... girl did at that moment. At the same time though she appeared serious and melancholy, and, I think, a little out of humour too, while her hat, which was too large for her, had, from the wet, become quite shapeless, and appeared pressed down over her face, so that I could not forbear laughing, in spite of everything, though at the moment I ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... formed here and there pyramids; and at their base he laid earth, and planted the roots of rose bushes, the Barbadoes flower fence, and other shrubs which love to climb the rocks. In a short time those gloomy shapeless pyramids were covered with verdure, or with the glowing tints of the most beautiful flowers. The hollow recesses of aged trees, which bent over the borders of the stream, formed vaulted caves impenetrable to the sun, and where you might enjoy coolness during the heats of the day. That ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the whole idea of the creation. He was gazing into a void—was it not rather a condition of things inappreciable by his senses? A strange feeling came over him as of looking from a window in the wall of the visible into the region unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore terrible, wherein wander the things all that have not yet found or form or sensible embodiment, so as to manifest themselves to eyes or ears or hands of mortals. As he gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of the ships of chaos, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... sordid did he look to me, sulking there, his mottled double-chin crowded out upon his stock, his bow-legs wide to cradle the huge belly, his small eyes obstinately a-squint and partly shut, which lent a gross shrewdness to the expanse of fat, almost baleful, like the eye of a squid in its shapeless, jellied body! ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... I never saw the Britannia after I stepped from her deck back to the small steamer that had taken us to her. "How little I thought" (were the last lines of his first American letter), "the first time you mounted the shapeless coat, that I should have such a sad association with its back as when I saw it by the paddle-box of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... define Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness? Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine, Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express; But though we cannot thee to aught compare, A thousand things to thee may likened ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... She did not look more than five years old, if as much, but what her natural figure was like, it would have been hard to say, for she had apparently two, if not three dresses, one above the other, and over these a thick red woollen shawl wound round about her, so that the little body presented a shapeless appearance, as, with its small feet shod in thick, nailed mountain-shoes, it slowly and laboriously plodded its way up in the heat. The two must have left the valley a good hour's walk behind them, when they came to the hamlet known as Dorfli, which is situated half-way up the mountain. ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... celebrity!—weariness, vacuity, and utter deadness of spirit. The cup has been so highly flavored that life is absolutely without savor or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity. She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and dreary; mere shapeless, colorless, level monotony to her. Poor woman! what a fate to be condemned to, and yet how she has been envied, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... phase of his life, however, was the outcome of much that was turbulent and shapeless in his first youth. He seemed to himself to have passed through Oxford under a kind of eclipse. All that he could remember of two-thirds of his time there was an immoderate amount of eating, drinking, and sleeping. A heavy animal existence, disturbed by moments of unhappiness ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hurried liquid overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless bag that ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Discophorae; next, and the Ctenophorae highest. The fact that these animals have no popular names shows how little they are known. It is true that we hear some of them spoken of as Jelly-Fishes; but this name is usually applied to the larger Discophore, when it is thrown upon the beach and lies a shapeless mass of gelatinous substance on the sand, or is seen floating on the surface of the water. The name gives no idea of the animal as it exists in full life and activity. When we speak of a Bird or an Insect, the mere name calls up at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... shapeless wrapper they could watch the most appealing of dramas, that of a woman inspired by a genuine passion. Were she La Torpille, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, or Madame de Serizy, on the lowest or highest rung of the social ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... The shapeless old hat once off, he did not find it easy to put it on again, and, as Mrs. Dayton leaned forward with extended hand, he stopped to tuck the battered bundle of felt into his pocket before clasping the bit of dainty kid she held out ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the lamp was filtering in past them, and her eyes were slowly growing accustomed to the gloom. There was something lying on the floor, in the middle of the room, that was bulky and shapeless and unfamiliar. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... sheepskin coats, waiting for a job. If we hire one of them, we shall find that they all belong to the ancient Russian Artel, or Labor Union, which prevents competition beyond a certain point. When the price has been fixed, after due and inevitable chaffering, one lomovoi grasps his shapeless cap by its worn edge of fur, bites a kopek, and drops it in. Each of the other men contributes a marked copper likewise, and we are invited to draw lots, in full view, to determine which of them shall ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... huddled, shapeless mass on his tossed cushions, sat gnawing his finger-tips and staring with dull eyes into vacancy. All passion had died from him and suddenly he had grown very old, though the indomitable spirit knew no added touch ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... stones, and the world is God's quarry. The stones for the temple were cut out of the great rock in the dark underground cavern. They were rough and shapeless. Then they were dressed into form, and this required a great deal of cutting, hammering, and chiselling. Without this stern, sore work on the stones, not one of them could ever have filled a place in the temple. At last when they were ready they were lifted out of the dark quarry and ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... molasses flit before my hunger-distorted vision as I sit outside until he gets them ready. In ten minutes John calls me in. On a tin plate, that looks as if it has just been rescued from a barrel of soap-grease, reposes a shapeless mass of substance resembling putty-it is the " Melican plan-cae; " and the Celestial triumphantly sets an empty box in front of it for me to sit on and extends his greasy palm for the stipulated price. May the reader ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of colours across the track becomes a shapeless clump and then draws out into a long string. "What's that in front?" yells someone at the rails. "Oh, that thing of Hart's," says someone else. But the Oracle hears them not; he is looking in the mass of colour for a purple cap and grey jacket, with black arm bands. He cannot ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... under and through an extended cirrhus cloud of dirty saffron. The scenery could not be viewed through it—mere red blotches and blurs. It was so heavy that it served for darkness. Men saw each other dimly at the distance of ten feet, and mounted officers and couriers went by, dun and shapeless, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... by the conflagration. Nor can they be sunk. For they are provided with air chambers in various parts, each separate from the others, so that if the boat were bruised and jammed by violent concussions, up to her utmost capacity of receiving injury, the shapeless mass would still float upon the sea, and hold up with unconquerable buoyancy as many as could cling ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... avalanches, a form wriggled out into the moonlight and fell with a dusty thud at my feet, mowing and chopping at the air with its aimless claws. I started back with a sudden jerk of my pulses. The thing was horrible by reason of its inarticulate voice, which issued from the shapeless folds of its writhings like the wet gutturizing of a back-broken horse. Instinct with repulsion, I stood a moment dismayed, when light flashed from an open doorway a dozen yards further down the street, and a woman ran ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... passing through the press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging himself with voluminous food, and daily fattening his cooped-up capon. The temporary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings through this shapeless mass. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... them at once, with the crushing effect of a hundred steam pile-drivers; and for the next few minutes his panicky rage expended itself in treading the two bodies into a shapeless mass. Then he slowly backed off down into the water where the weedy growths were thickest, till once more his whole form was concealed except the insignificant head. This he reared among the swaying tufts of the "mares' ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... I discovered an opening large enough to crawl through, scarcely rustling the concealing leaves, and resting flat on the opposite side while I surveyed the prospect. I was not far now from the south wall of the stable, which loomed black and shapeless against the sky. Not a movement revealed the whereabouts of the guard, and, with the girl's description to guide me, I concluded the fellow would be stationed at the other extremity of the building. Convinced as to this probability I dragged ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... hand, and several men followed her. She approached the unsuspecting youth, and, while his soul was devoutly engaged in prayer, she raised the fatal axe, and, with one blow, severed his skull, and the men with their clubs beat his body into a shapeless mass." ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... conveniently be called 'The Military Soudan,' stretches with apparent indefiniteness over the face of the continent. Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts, and silts among the dark rocks of the hills, exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit; only it is a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... one of their chief strongholds. The last of the Pasi lords of Ramkot, Raja Santhar, threw off his allegiance to Kanauj and refused to pay tribute. On this Raja Jaichand gave his country to the Banaphar heroes Alha and Udal, and they attacked and destroyed Ramkot, leaving it the shapeless mass of ruins which it now is." Similar traditions prevail in other parts of Oudh. It is also recorded that the Rajpasis, the highest division of the caste, claim descent from Tilokchand, the eponymous hero of the Bais Rajputs. It would ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... become resolved into the same sort of protoplasm as the Earth Giants. He lay, a little heap, incredibly small, incredibly distorted. Flesh without bones, shapeless lumps of flesh where arms and legs and body frame ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... to shun observation; for she is cloaked and close hooded. Not enough to ensure disguise, though she may think so. The most stolid slave on all Colonel Armstrong's plantation, could tell at a glance whose figure is enfolded in the shapeless garment, giving it shape. He would at once identify it as that of his master's daughter. For no wrap however loosely flung over it, could hide the queenly form of Helen Armstrong, or conceal the splendid symmetry of her person. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... myself. I waited my time. When it came, I dealt him such a blow that he reeled away, and before he could recover I took him by the back of his neck and flung him from me across the table which our struggle had already half upset. He lay there, a shapeless mass, surrounded by broken glass, streaming wine, a little heap of flowers from the overturned vase. Then the hubbub of the room was suddenly stilled. A dozen hands ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for her. Then the moving man came up with a number of our belongings and we forgot her in the general turmoil and misery that ensued. Bump—bump—up the narrow stairs came our household goods and gods, and were planted at random about the floor, in shapeless heaps and pyramids. All were up, at last, except ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... we entered, save the sky in the great windows, blue and glowing. Then we saw the Scholars who sat around a long table; they were as shapeless clouds huddled at the rise of [-the-] {a} great sky. There were {the} men whose famous names we knew, and others from distant lands whose names we had not heard. We saw a great painting on the wall over their heads, of the twenty illustrious ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... discussion. The road was already palpably thickening under their feet. Hale's arm was stiffened to his side by a wet, clinging snow-wreath. The figures of the others were almost obliterated and shapeless. It was not snowing—it was snowballing! The huge flakes, shaken like enormous feathers out of a vast blue-black cloud, commingled and fell in sprays and patches. All idea of their former pursuit was forgotten; the blind rage and enthusiasm that had possessed them was gone. They dashed ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... woman, worn and broken, her rough hands made shapeless by toil, may seem to have no claim to beauty as the word is commonly understood. Sleepless nights, perchance, have dimmed her eyes, suffering and sacrifice have seamed and marked her face, but those to whom she has given ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... The result was a shapeless, bright, and silvery-gray lump which very much resembled silver-ore. I looked at the mass thoughtfully for some time: an idea germinated, and there and then I planned a new amusement which became our most delightful pastime during those last ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... began to turn over the pages, he could see that the interior had not been better taken care of than the exterior. Colored prints had originally ornamented the precious work; they were almost effaced. The yellow parchment had been torn in places. Indeed, it was a shapeless ruin which the curious nobleman examined, however, with the greatest care, while Ribalta made up his ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in Lawson. For one thing, he had grown fat. In place of the lean young man I had known, I saw a heavy, flaccid being, who shuffled in his gait, and seemed tired and listless. His sunburn had gone, and his face was as pasty as a city clerk's. He had been walking, and wore shapeless flannel clothes, which hung loose even on his enlarged figure. And the worst of it was, that he did not seem over-pleased to see me. He murmured something about my journey, and then flung himself into an arm-chair and looked out of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... took in the fact at once that all her clothes were old, shabby, and exceedingly well cut. Her hat was a shapeless soft felt with no trimming, save a rather ragged cord, and she wore it turned down all round. It had once been brown, but was now a mixture of soft faded tints like certain lichens growing on a roof. Her covert coat, rather too big, and quite nondescript in colour, ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... bed sat a woman, clad in the shapeless dress of black serge, and wearing the widely projecting white bonnet and cape, black veil, white band across the brow, and beneath the chin, which compose the attire of a sister de bon secours. She was one of that community of self-abnegating women, who, bound ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... observed, "something simply slick about all these old quatrangleses," crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always returned to his exile's room, where he now began to hear the new voice of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn't care whether he ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Kantor's face, as she knelt there in the shapeless cotton-stuff uniform of poverty, through the very tenement of her body, a light had flashed up into her eyes. She drew her son closer, crushing his puny cheek up against hers, cupping his bristly little head in her by ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... straightened up expectantly, shading his eyes, and never losing sight of the object. It moved, grew larger, darker, more real—yet how it crawled, crawled, crawled toward him. It seemed as if the vague, shapeless thing would, never take form, never stand out revealed against the sky so he could determine the truth. He had forgotten all else—the silent desert, the blazing sun, the burning wind—all his soul concentrated on that speck yonder. Suddenly it disappeared—a swale in the ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... with make-up tins and pots. His dresser hurls himself on the basket, as though he owed it a grudge. He tears off the lid. He dives head foremost into a foam of trousers, coats, and many-coloured shirts. He comes to the surface breathless, having retrieved a shapeless mass of stuff. He tears pieces of this stuff apart, and flings them, with apparent malice, at his chief, and, somehow, they seem to stay where he flings them. The chief shouts from a cloud of orange wig and patchwork shirt for a soda-and-milk, and from some obscure place ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... cold season they froze so hard that they could be used only after being thawed by the fire, and in summer they could be preserved only by keeping them on ice; and if, during the thawing process, they were placed too near the fire, there was danger that they would melt into a shapeless and useless mass. They cost from three to five dollars per pair, which was very high for an article so perishable in ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... one of the Stellar-Vedo spreads. I ought to know, I've tried my hand at writing enough of them. Only this Steena was no glamour babe. She was as colorless as a Lunar plant—even the hair netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast and I never saw her but once draped in anything but a shapeless and ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... at its side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there complete in size and colour,—its stamens full-grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can; but ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell on his feet among the other men, still ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... soon became, and deservedly, a favourite in the Highlands, it unhappily was used as a single belting in exposed places near farm houses and steadings. The consequence, as every one who travels through the Highlands must be painfully conscious of, has been trees shapeless and crooked, giving no shelter, and unpleasing in view. A ludicrous illustration of this may be seen from the Highland Railway between Forres and Dunphail, the larches having grown up zig-zag, according as the several winds happened ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... immense pillar of smoke rose, in a vertical direction, at some distance northeast of New Castle, for a while, and the sky was absolutely blackened by this huge cloud; but a light, northerly breeze springing up, it gradually distended, and then dissipated into a variety of shapeless mists. About an hour after, or probably at half past five, innumerable large spires of smoke, issuing from different parts of the woods, and illuminated the flames that seemed to pierce them, mounted the sky. A heavy and suffocating canopy, extending to the utmost ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... globular Form, but, upon his nearer Approach, looked like an unbounded Plain, is natural and noble: As his Roaming upon the Frontiers of the Creation between that Mass of Matter, which was wrought into a World, and that shapeless unformed Heap of Materials, which still lay in Chaos and Confusion, strikes the Imagination with something astonishingly great and wild. I have before spoken of the Limbo of Vanity, which the Poet places upon ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Hottentot girl, as lightly clad as was compatible with propriety. Her face was dirty brown, her mouth large, her nose a shapeless elevation with two holes in the front of it. Her head was not covered, but merely sprinkled with tight woolly knobs or curls the size of peas. Each knob grew apart from its neighbour knob, and was surrounded, so to speak, by ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... it support; after noon, or as soon as it has been fertilized by the female bees, that are its chief benefactors while collecting its abundant pollen, the lovely petals roll up, never to open again, and quickly wilt into a wet, shapeless mass, which, if we touch it, leaves a sticky blue fluid on ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... his race was run! For you how many a widow drops a tear, In silent anguish, on her husband's bier! 'Is it then Thine, Almighty Power,' she cries, 'Whence tears of endless sorrow dim these eyes? 30 Is this the system which Thy powerful sway, Which else in shapeless chaos sleeping lay, Formed and approved?—it cannot be—but oh! Forgive me, Heaven, my brain is warped by woe.' 'Tis not—He never bade the war-note swell, 35 He never triumphed in the work of hell— Monarchs of earth! thine is the baleful deed, Thine are the crimes for which thy subjects bleed. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... foul with cinders and cast-off things, and jagged, half-buried things with shapeless edges, and there was a huge angel with a hammer building in plaster and steel. I wondered what he did in that dreadful place. I hesitated, then asked him what he was building. "We are adding to Hell," ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... one part live the grimy-faced workers, their sagging, shapeless women and their litters of children. Their windows open upon broken little streets and bubbling alleys. Idiot-faced wooden houses sprawl over one another with their rumps in the mud. The years hammer away—digesting the paint from houses. The years grind away, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... had regained the meeting of the ways. Something was approaching along the main tunnel. He took the wisest course, and crouched within the shelter of the side gallery. A crimson pointed snout, a huge paddling foot, and a dark shapeless mass passed in quick succession before his eyes, and vanished ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... forty feet long, and twenty feet round at the thickest part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing, like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the blow-holes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head measured ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... would understand the Gaelic legend of Far Goila, the gaunt Man of Hunger who goes touring up and down the land in times of famine bringing luck to those who feed him. Even his taste for cheese was returning. The holocaust of the morning filled him with bitter regret. As for his feet, they felt shapeless and huge and fungus-like and full of burning needles. Oh, for the sandals of power of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of another presence grew steadily. I increased my pace, and after some time came to a slight ridge, crossed it, and turned sharply, regarding it steadfastly from the further side. It came out black and clear-cut against the darkling sky; and presently a shapeless lump heaved up momentarily against the sky-line and vanished again. I felt assured now that my tawny-faced antagonist was stalking me once more; and coupled with that was another unpleasant realisation, that I had lost ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow length came lines of patient little donkeys with jangling necklaces, led by wild-looking men from the farm-lands and the desert, and women muffled and shapeless, with only their bare feet showing, who looked at him curiously or meaningly from over the protecting cloth, and passed on, leaving him startled and wondering. He began to find that the books he had brought wearied him. The sight of the type alone was enough to make him close ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... scientist can excuse on the ground of poetical license. "The poetry of this excellent author," says Dana, "is good, but the facts nearly all errors—if literature allows of such an incongruity." Think of coral-animals as being referred to as shapeless worms that "writhe and shrink their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions"! These deep-sea builders manufacture or secrete from their own bodies the coral substance out of which the great reefs ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... in a greenish-black swallow-tail coat, a neckcloth, once white, and a pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are, by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants upon ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a great high shapeless cap, made of a goat's skin, with a flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the sun from me as to shoot the rain off from running into my neck, nothing being so hurtful in these climates as the rain upon the ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... store the intruder had to set the figure mirrored by a great cheval-glass—the counterfeit of a jaded shop-girl in shabby, shapeless, sodden garments, her damp, dark hair framing stringily a pinched and haggard face ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... me to get into that thing?" Copper said distastefully as she prodded the shapeless green coveralls with a bare toe. She eyed the helmet, gloves and boots ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... just then and presently the tug was close alongside, pitching her bows out of the slow swell, while a great mass of timber wonderfully chained together surged along astern, the dim, slate-green sea washing over it. A shapeless oil-skinned figure stood outside her pilot-house, balancing itself against the heave of the bridge, which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... faces. It was a thing monstrous, possessing none of the forms familiar to the eye, yet not devoid of a hint of some new unknown form. On a thin tortuous little branch, or rather an ugly likeness of one, lay crooked, strange, unsightly, shapeless heaps of something turned outside in, or something turned inside out—wild fragments which seemed to be feebly trying to get away from themselves. And, accidentally, under one of the wild projections, they noticed a wonderfully sculptured butterfly, with transparent wings, trembling ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... rooms were added to the ground-floor back by the simple expedient of tacking long spruce rafters to the roof, making a second roof over the old one, leaving the old roof with boards and shingles still on it. Thus there grew a roof above a roof,—a shapeless void of a dark attic,—and below, the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... was conclusive evidence that we were upon the right track. A little farther on, was a piece of marshy ground, and here we made a startling discovery. In the soft soil, several foot-prints could be plainly distinguished. Some were coarse, shapeless impressions, precisely such as would be made by the rude moccasins worn by Arthur and Johnny. Others were the prints of naked feet, and some of these were of far too large a size to be made by either of the three. This discovery affected us for the moment like an electric shock, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... with all possible speed to reach the screen before my touch could soil the down on their exquisite wings. I stumbled, and fell, so suddenly, there was no time to release them. The black one sailed away with a ragged wing, and the yellow was crushed into a shapeless mass in my hand. I was accustomed to falling off fences, from trees, and into the creek, and because my mother was an invalid I had learned to doctor my own bruises and uncomplainingly go my way. My reputation was that of a very brave little ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... take him to the ends of the earth, and who would be ready to go the moment when he was called on! Money to a man who has no wife, no children, no interests outside the sacred circle of the Church! Brother, do you see the dust and dirt and shapeless marble chips lying around your statue there? Cover that floor instead with gold, and, though the litter may have changed in color and form, in my eyes it would ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... so because she had been the cause of the misfortune. As we were examining the shapeless lump of metal, she said, "It's like a little lump of silver that Miss Blomfield has hanging to her watch chain;" which determined me to have a hole made through the remains of my flat iron, and ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... ones, the difference is the same in the two countries. In England theatres, towers, temples, all marks of Latin civilisation, had been erected, but not so numerous, massive, or strong that the invaders were unable to destroy them. At the present time only shapeless remnants exist above ground. In France, the barbarians came, plundered, burnt, razed to the ground all they possibly could; but the work of destruction was too great, the multitude of temples and palaces was more than their strength was equal to, and the torch fell from ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... taking rest, We must still the wild storm breast, We must build through mist and night, Thou hast seen the quenchless Light, While we hew the shapeless stone, Thou hast bowed before the Throne, While we tread the chequered floor, Thou hast ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... sting. Tomorrow she will be all over patches, red and white; itching—there is nothing to describe the itching. It is beyond words. Next day her face will begin to swell, and in two days more—the School Birthday, my dear—she will be like nothing human, a mere shapeless lump of pain and horror. She will not sleep by night or rest by day. She will go home to her parents, and they will not know her, but will think we have sent them a smallpox patient ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... hand under his arm as we went up the stairs, for his knees were trembling under him. Twice as we ascended Holmes whipped his lens out of his pocket and carefully examined marks which appeared to me to be mere shapeless smudges of dust upon the cocoa-nut matting which served as a stair-carpet. He walked slowly from step to step, holding the lamp, and shooting keen glances to right and left. Miss Morstan had remained ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust Upon unstaid perverseness! now ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the untimely ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... GORMFLAITH out. After a moment's interval two elderly women, one a little younger than the other, enter by the same door: they wear black hoods and shapeless black gowns with large sleeves that flap like the wings of ungainly birds: between them they carry a heavy cauldron of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... in within a hundred yards from the entrance. It was no longer an abandoned mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground. Mr. Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... watching them as a dog watches its master's coat, was a girl of some undeterminable age,—perhaps of ten or twelve years. She wore a shapeless stout gingham garment, her shoes were many sizes too large for her, and the laces were dangling. Her nerveless hands and long arms sprawled in her lap as if they had no volition in them. She sat with her head slightly drooping, her knees apart, ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... recrystallize anew. But if the Polycystine urn be broken, no inorganic agency can build it up again. So far as any inherent urn-building power, analogous to the crystalline force, is concerned, it might lie there in a shapeless mass forever. That which modeled it at first is gone from it. It was Vital; while the force which built the crystal ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the roll off into dim distance of the splendid vehicle, watched by the crowd that have gathered round it, till it is lost from their sight. A steam-coach, with its disgusting, hissing, sputtering, shapeless, lifeless engine, ought to be ashamed of itself, and would probably blush for its appearance, if it were not for the quantity of brass that goes to its composition. On the above-mentioned bright day in June, only two passengers go out from the inside of the Celerity. The outsides, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... sun rose brightly, and its gleam Fell on that hapless bed, And tinged with light each shapeless beam Which roofed the lowly shed; When, looking up with wistful eye, The Bruce beheld a spider try His filmy thread to fling From beam to beam of that rude cot; And well the insect's toilsome lot Taught Scotland's ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... meliorates all things. Why, my lord, round Mardi itself is all the better for its antiquity, and the more to be revered; to the cozy-minded, more comfortable to dwell in. Ah! if ever it lay in embryo like a green seed in the pod, what a damp, shapeless thing it must have been, and how unpleasant from the traces of its recent creation. The first man, quoth old Bardianna, must have felt like one going into a new habitation, where the bamboos are green. Is there not a legend in Maramma, that his ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... open a door as she spoke, and there, in a reclining chair at the further end of the room, we caught a glimpse of a figure all lumped together, huge and shapeless, with tails ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was a good deal taken with a noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at Bourges, who on one occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her on sociology until she was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes, his shapeless greatcoat, his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac felt her fascination, but cared nothing for her, since his love was ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... entry of the outcasts into the promised land. Tired, travel-stained, and worn come the fair-haired crowd of men and women and many children, eating all manner of strange food while they rest, and speaking all manner of strange tongues, carrying the most uncouth shapeless boxes that trunk-maker of Bergen or Upsal can devise—such queer oval red-and-green painted wooden cases, more like boxes to hold musical instruments than for the Sunday kit of Hans or Christian—clothing ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... to the village, and the boy said good-night, passing through a white gate to a cottage unseen at that late hour of the evening. Near midnight I left my stuffed birds, with their fixed and upturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumps of massive dark of Clayton the stars were detaching their arrows, for the night was clear and frosty at last. Sirius, pulsing and resplendent, seemed nearer and more vital than anything ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... forced to stop, blinded by a flood of tears. For a minute he beheld himself crushed, lying in fragments at the foot of a high mountain, his shapeless remains gathered up in a barrow, and brought back to Tarascon. Oh, the power of that Provencal imagination! he was present at his own funeral; he heard the lugubrious chants, and the talk above his grave: "Poor Tartarin, pechere!" and, mingling with the crowd of his ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... door of Emily's state-room, and was about to open it, when, with a noise louder than the crashing of the thunderbolt, the starboard boiler exploded, and the Chalmetta lay a shapeless wreck ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... betray her heart, and be certain of safety. Can wine match that for joy? She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe. Any wish to be enfolded by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her own, the familiar the stranger—an utter stranger, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Coyote is a shapeless, senseless, wriggling, and—to every one but its mother—a most uninteresting little lump. But after its eyes are open, after it has developed its legs, after it has learned to play in the sun with its brothers, or run at the gentle call of its mother when she ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... good sketch of the group. They appeared to stare at me occasionally with some little astonishment, stretching up their immense heads and looking around; but finding all still (I suppose they considered me a mere rock), they composed themselves to sleep again. They are the most shapeless creatures about the body. I could not help comparing them to an over-grown maggot, and their motion is similar to that insect. The face bears some rude resemblance to the human countenance; the eye is large, black, and expressive; ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... comes down the area steps, and enters. His clothes are of the familiar colourless, shapeless kind one sees at street corners; he would be a pleasant-looking young fellow enough were it not that his face is abnormally lined, and pinched, and weather-beaten. He shambles in, with the intense weariness of a man who has for hours ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... that bear the most ambitiously beautiful names. To any one who has studied London, such a title as 'Paradise Court' conjures up a dark fetid alley, with untidy fat women gossiping in it, untidy thin women quarrelling across it, a host of haggard and shapeless children sprawling in its mud, and one or two drunken men propped against its walls. Thus, were there an official nomenclator of streets, he might be tempted to reject such names as in themselves signify anything beautiful. But his main principle would be ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... volcano in its changed condition. The loud detonations which resembled the discharges of a gun-boat mortar were no longer heard, and the upper part of the crater and cone had in a great measure disappeared, leaving a shapeless and unsightly hole much larger than the former crater, in which large tree-tops were swaying to and fro in the gurgling mass, forty feet below—the whole appearance bearing testimony to the terrible nature of the convulsion which wrought such destruction. Lieutenant Doane, in his official ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... intelligence of the highest importance to communicate, which was, that on his estate in Africa, there was a large cavern, in which was stored an immense treasure. This treasure consisted, he said, of vast heaps of golden ingots, rude and shapeless in form, but composed of pure and precious metal. The cavern, he said, which contained these stores, was very spacious, and the gold lay piled in it in heaps, and sometimes in solid columns, towering to a prodigious height. These treasures had been deposited ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... were the meeting-place of storms and the confluence of shouting seas. A man ran before him whose bratta on the wind roared like fire, and there was a sound of voices calling and acclaiming, and a noontide darkness descended upon him and accompanied him as he went, and all became obscure and shapeless, and all the ways were murk. And the mind of Laeg, too, was disturbed and shaken loose from its ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... rest. By heaven, I'll brave this business out! Shall they Say at Ravenna that Count Lanciotto, Who's driven their shivering squadrons to their homes, Haggard with terror, turned before their eyes And slunk away? They'll look me from the field, When we encounter next. Why should not I Strut with my shapeless body, as old Guido Struts with his shapeless heart? I'll do it! [Offers, but shrinks back.] 'Sdeath! Am I so false as to forswear myself? Lady ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... however, under such disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the bed, which, in the indistinct light, presented to her eyes only a shapeless object; but in a moment more she saw that the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... slightest movement was torture, and yet he held out his arms to her for a loving embrace, and, though it made him shut his eyes and groan, he drew her pretty head down, and kissed her cheeks and hair. He was now a heavy man, of almost shapeless stoutness, but in his youth he must have resembled his handsome son. Silvery locks flowed round his well-formed head, but a habit of drinking wine, which, in spite of the gout, he could not bring himself to give up, had flushed his naturally good features, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hit me!" cried Esau, struggling wildly to escape; and the next moment, as they swayed to and fro, I heard a strange crushing sound, and on looking to see the cause, there lay Mr Dempster's beautiful guinea-and-a-half hat crushed into a shapeless, ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn |
