"Sombreness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Harbinger is delicately appreciative. The introductory chapter is one of the softest, clearest pictures I know in literature. His feeling is so deep, and so unexaggerated, that it is a profoundly subtle interpreter of life to him, and the pensiveness which throws such a mellow sombreness upon his imagination is only the pensiveness which is the shadow of extreme beauty. There is no companion superior to him in genial sympathy with human feeling. He seems to me no less a successful man than Mr. Emerson, although ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Nature, contrary to her usual custom of indifference to human suffering, was mourning with him. The sky was overcast, and the sun had ceased to shine. There was a sort of sombreness in the afternoon, which fitted in with his mood. And then something ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... answered with a smile; yet the still sombreness of the woods found a little tremor in ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... replied, mastering herself; "I can understand. There must be much of sadness in such a landscape, only it never comes that way to me. The sombreness and the sternness of it appeal to me, but not ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... breath of this ample spiritual development of the Jews of Arabic Spain reached the Jews living in the Christian countries of Europe. Their circumstances were too grievous, and in sombreness their inner life matched their outer estate. Their horizon was as contracted as the streets of the Jewries in which they were penned. The crusades (beginning in 1096) clearly showed the Jews of France and Germany what sentiments their neighbors cherished towards them. They were the first ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... "From the sombreness of your tone one might fear your news to be of the nature of some catastrophe. What shall it signify that Rabecque eludes your men? He is but a lackey ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... on to Boston, then the most important city on the continent, and the head-quarters of Shirley, the commander-in-chief. The little New England capital had at that time a society which, rich for those days, was relieved from its Puritan sombreness by the gayety and life brought in by the royal officers. Here Washington lingered ten days, talking war and politics with the governor, visiting in state the "great and general court," dancing every night at ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... house! He hurried to the door, opened it; not only the light of the sitting-room streamed into the hall, but the ruddier glow of an actual fire in the disused grate! The familiar dark furniture had been rearranged to catch some of the glow and relieve its sombreness. And his wife, rising from the music-stool, was the room's ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... indefinable impulse, I went immediately up-stairs, and took my stand at the western window of the large room directly over Mrs. Belden. The blinds were closed; the room was shrouded in funereal gloom, but its sombreness and horror were for the moment unfelt; I was engaged in a fearful debate with myself. Was Mary Leavenworth the principal, or merely the accessory, in this crime? Did the determined prejudice of Mr. Gryce, the convictions of Eleanore, the circumstantial evidence ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... is unmistakable. It is, however, not only in the closeness and complexity of texture that we notice Chopin's style changing: a striving after greater breadth and fulness of form are likewise apparent, and, alas! also an increase in sombreness, the result of deteriorating health. All this the reader will have to keep in mind when he passes in review the master's works, for I shall marshal them by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of the house was of the type which, having from the first been massive and richly sombre, had mellowed into a darker sombreness and richness as it had stood unmoved amid London years and fogs. The grandeur of decoration and furnishing had been too solid to depreciate through decay, and its owner had been of no fickle mind led to waver in taste by whims of ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gray light crept through the upper branches of the eastern trees and warned the denizens of the winter wilderness of approaching day, the door-skin flapped aside and a tall figure stepped from the cozy fire-lit lodge into the outer sombreness of the silent forest. It was Oo-koo-hoo. His form clad in fox-skin cap, blanket capote, and leggings, made a picturesque silhouette of lighter tone against the darker shadows of the woods as he stood for a moment scanning the starry ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes. They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. As he entered ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... barely glanced at Kirkwood, but his eyes made no reply, and his lips were resolutely closed. She did not seem offended by this silence; on the contrary, her face was cheerful, and she smiled to herself now and then. One would have imagined that she found pleasure in the sombreness of which ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... this a petty relation. It is a detail in the story of an age of iron succeeding, in a single generation, an age of stone. The splendor of the court and age of Louis XIV was beginning to brighten the sombreness of the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... different as they are in every other feature, are at one. It will be noticed that in each of them the details selected for presentation have been chosen solely for the sake of a common quality inherent in them—the quality of sombreness and gloom in the one case, and the quality of Sabbath quietude in the other—and that they have been marshalled to convey a complete sense of this central and pervading quality. It is commonly supposed ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... atmosphere of the place was expressive of solitude and even of gloom. The imposing evidences of great wealth, written in bold headlines on the massive square architecture of the whole block of huge mansions, only intensified the austere sombreness of their appearance, and the fringe of sad-looking trees edging the road below sent a faint waving shadow in the lamplight against the cold walls, as though some shuddering consciousness of happier woodland scenes had suddenly moved them to a vain regret. The haze of heat lay very thickly ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... fellow of delicate nerves, but because of his very strength, and the power with which he resisted until overcome by numbers, and subjected to treatment which left him insane. His insanity takes the form of harmless delusion, and the absurdity of his ways and talk enables the author to lighten the sombreness without weakening the moral, in a way that ought to win all boys to his ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... bright patches of colour from the foliage on the opposite shore. Here and there a stricken tree was duplicated by a long white image that seemed to point like a finger to the depths below. Apparently there was no current, and this lack of motion, combined with the blackness of the water and the sombreness of the woods, produced an effect in striking contrast with the blue and sunny river he had first crossed, its floating boats and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... from line and mass are emphasized or modified by the management of color in relation to them. The painter in this direction uses the three elements together. Contrast and accent are attributes of color. Dignity and weight, as well as certain emotional qualities, such as vivacity and sombreness, may give the key to the picture in accordance with the arrangement ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... he," said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; "the old house seemed joyous when I was a child. But as I remember it now it ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... furniture. He had his face covered with a transparent black veil, through which might be descried a very long beard as white as snow. He came on keeping step to the sound of the drums with great gravity and dignity; and, in short, his stature, his gait, the sombreness of his appearance and his following might well have struck with astonishment, as they did, all who beheld him without knowing who he was. With this measured pace and in this guise he advanced to kneel before the duke, who, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the hearth-place; his huge arms were bare—for bare-armed he always worked—his black beard was knotted into little curls, his face was so broad that you hardly remarked that his nose was hooked like an owl's beak. And about the man there was an air of sombreness and mystery. He had certain papers on his lectern, and several sheets of the great Bible that he was then printing by the Archbishop's license and command. They sang all together and with loud voices the canticle called 'A Refuge fast ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... sittings commenced, he noticed that her hair was arranged in the fluffy, loose way he had admired so much three years before, giving her face more of the girlish expression it had lost, and a bright ribbon at the throat relieved the somberness of ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various |
