"Viewless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night, at nine years old, he feels himself "a trouble to the peace" that dwells among the moon and stars overhead; and when he has appropriated a woodcock caught by somebody else, "sounds of undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale, he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external things which a position ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... and before I could master the impulsive emotion, the room-door was thrown furiously open, and in reeled Arthur Rushton—pale, haggard, wild—his eyes ablaze with horror and affright! Had the ghost of Duncan suddenly gleamed out of the viewless air I could ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... the light of midday; and the strength Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass, Green from the soil of carnage, waves above The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came, And faded like a wreath of mist at eve; Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air, It heralded its millions to their home, In the dim land ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... silently a-singing, and might any moment vanish and release their huge bodies into primal sounds; that the stones in the road, the peaked hills, the very earth herself might alter in shape before his eyes: on the other hand, that the viewless forces of life and death might leap into visibility and form with the calling of their names; that himself, and Skale, and Mrs. Mawle, and that pale fairy girl-figure were all enmeshed in the same scheme ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... inspires this last remark is the fact that the Demon Cat is said to have made its appearance again, after many years of absence. This is a truly horrific apparition, and no viewless specter such as the invisible grimalkin that even now trips people up on the stairs of the old mansion which President Madison and his wife, Dolly, occupied, at the corner of Eighteenth Street and New York Avenue, after the White House was burned by the British. That, indeed, is altogether ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... of man, whereover The years have woven a viewless veil, If thou wert verily man's lover What did thy love or blood avail? Thy blood the priests mix poison of, And in gold ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... of Mr. Robert Montgomery's descriptions. We have a shipwrecked sailor, who "visions a viewless temple in the air"; a murderer who stands on a heath, "with ashy lips, in cold convulsion spread"; a pious man, to whom, as he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shrouds that night! It is an old, old tale. I heard it through A Wind whose ancestor it was that blew Ulysses' ship across the purple sea Back to his people and Penelope. We Clouds pick up strange tales, as far and wide And to and fro above the world we ride, Across uncharted seas, upon the swell Of viewless waves and tides invisible, Freighted with friendly flood or forked flame, Knowing not whither bound nor whence we came; Now drifting lonely, now a company ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... scarcely half an hour after the sail had been hoisted, the rowers became inactive, reclining on their benches, and, making an eye-shade with their hands, pointed out to each other a white spot which appeared on the horizon as motionless as a gull rocked by the viewless respiration of the waves. But that which might have appeared motionless to ordinary eyes was moving at a quick rate to the experienced eye of the sailor; that which appeared stationary upon the ocean was cutting a rapid way through it. For ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The viewless spirits of flowers came through the open window into the quiet room; and the winds, which made the curtains tremble, gently lifted the tresses of the sleeping angel. Then the chiming of village bells came and went in pulses of soft sound. How musical they were that morning! How the ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Atlantic, leveled the forests of the new world, and reared in its stead a community of states and nations. Perseverance has wrought from the marble block the exquisite creations of genius, painted on canvas the gorgeous mimicry of nature, and engraved on a metallic surface the viewless substance of the shadow. Perseverance has put in motion millions of spindles, winged as many flying shuttles, harnessed thousands of iron steeds to as many freighted cars, and set them flying from town to town and nation to nation, tunneled mountains of granite, and annihilated space with ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... thy kindred mind The mighty spell of Bonarroti own. Like one who, reading magick words, receives The gift of intercourse with worlds uknnown, 'Twas thine, decyph'ring Nature's mystick leaves, To hold strange converse with the viewless wind; To see the Spirits, in embodied forms, Of gales and whirlwinds, hurricanes and storms. For, lo! obedient to thy bidding, teems Fierce into shape their stern relentless Lord: His form of motion ever-restless seems; Or, if to rest inclin'd his turbid soul, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... me often, teased me, wept; I only smiled, and still I kept Through storm and sun and night and day, My joyous, viewless, faithful way. ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... led upward, until the lightning showed me that, by mistake, I had taken the road to Greifenstein. I turned back, and while feeling my way through the gloom the earth seemed to vanish under my feet, and I plunged headlong into a viewless gulf—not through empty space, however, but a wet, tangled mass which beat against my face, until at last there was a jerk which shook me ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... circumstances as agents whereby to depict the intenseness of the passion of the ten thousand condensed turtle-doves glowing in the bosom of his heroine. Sleep falls upon her eyes; but the "life of death," the subtle essence of the shrouded soul, the watchful sentinel and viewless evidence of immortality, the wild and flitting air-wrought impalpabilities of her fitful dreams, still haunt her in her seeming hours ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... cities, Hell in ships, Hell in hearts of men they knew her, When the dim and delicate fold Of her curtains backward rolled, And to sea, to sea, she threw her In the West Wind's giant hold; And with spear and sword behind her Came the hunters in a flood, Down the oarblade's viewless trail Tracking, till in Simois' vale Through the leaves they crept to find her, A ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... dollar from its lair, Nor Ladies' Lunches at a bit a bite Destroy the health yet spare the appetite, While thrifty sisters o'er the cauldron stoop To serve their God with zeal, their friends with soup, And all the brethren mendicate the earth With viewless placards: "We've ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... that leap, Borne, as though on viewless wings, Down bosky glade and ferny steep To quench their thirst at silver springs, From Cruachan palace through gorse and heather, Raced the Royal Maids together. Since childhood thus the twain had rushed Each ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... ragged woods The roaring Fyers pours his mossy floods; Till full he dashes on the rocky mounds, Where, thro' a shapeless breach, his stream resounds, As high in air the bursting torrents flow, As deep-recoiling surges foam below, Prone down the rock the whitening sheet descends, And viewless Echo's ear, astonish'd, rends. Dim seen, through rising mists and ceaseless show'rs, The hoary cavern, wide surrounding, low'rs. Still thro' the gap the struggling river toils, And still ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bosom slumber'd, The infant, Christ, with sunny brow, The viewless hours have pass'd unnumber'd, Since we adored thy shrine as now; But not the gorgeous sky, Nor the blue expansive sea, To us such beauty could supply, As ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... the undistinguished words it bore upon its wings, delicious tune and passionate meaning, seemed the speech of another planet, an orb of song, the delicate sound lost when at sunset the threaded mist broke up and streamed away in fire, but coming again, as if they were haunted by the viewless voices of the air, when star-beam and haze tangled together at last in the dusk of summer night and found them still rocking on the swell, vainly whistling for the wind, and slowly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... overcharged heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells, whose thunder is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly into a wall, the thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling down a declivity. The air is now glutted and viewless, it is crossed and recrossed by heavy blasts, and the murder of the earth continues all around, deeply and more deeply, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... then with show of skill mechanical, Marvellous as witchcraft he would overthrow That vision with a show'r of notes like hail; Flashing the sharp tones now, In downward leaps like swords; now rising fine Into some utmost tip of minute sound, From whence he stepp'd into a higher and higher On viewless points, till ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... outer world, and his art was the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these; if Shelley on the other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the senses by process of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the moods when the mightiness and wonder of nature had most effectually possessed themselves of his imagination, his mind never moved for very long on these remote heights, apart from the busy world of men, but returned again like the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... power, O hear the Muse's prayer! Swell thy loud lungs and wave thy wings of air; Spread, viewless giant, all thy arms of mist Like windmill-sails to bring the poet grist; As erst thy roaring son, with eddying gale, Whirl'd Orithyia from her native vale - So, while Lucretian wonders I rehearse, Augusta's sons ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... mountain winds; at night it lies entangled in the starlight. Along a thousand imperceptible channels an ideal simplicity from Nature pours down into it, modifying the human passions, chastening, purifying, uplifting. Don't you see? And these sweet, viewless channels—who keeps them clean and open? Why, God bless you——. The ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... before them her protecting shield. In the form of beasts and other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury, tore at the branches of the sylvan dwelling; but a celestial hand was ever interposed, and there was a viewless barrier which they might not pass. Marguerite became pregnant. Here was a double prize—two souls in one, mother and child. The fiends grew frantic, but all in vain. She stood undaunted amid these horrors, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... with their viewless steeds, Riding on where nothing leads; Up to the sky when the earth gets brown— Ever ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ponderous spear, Thou shout'st amid the battle's stound— The armed Sisters hear, Viewless hurrying o'er the ground They strike the destin'd chiefs and call them to ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... the Story Girl in our midst carrying Paddy hugged against her shoulder. Never did April stars look down on a happier band of travellers on the golden road. There was a little gray wind out in the meadows that night, and it danced along beside us on viewless, fairy feet, and sang a delicate song of the lovely, waiting years, while the night laid her beautiful hands ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into her chair and wept bitterly; her husband at last remained silent in a sort of inward, impotent rage of grief. There was their son, alive and in physical health, yet between him and them was a viewless barrier which they could ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... is a magnet-like attraction in These waters to the imaginative power, That links the viewless with the visible, And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond Yon highway of the world my fancy flies, When by her tall and triple mast we know Some noble voyager that has to woo The trade-winds, and to stem the ecliptic surge. The coral groves—the shores of conch and pearl, Where she will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... soon to become fact. We entered the barrack. Beneath its smoky roof-tree was a pervading aroma; near the centre of that aroma, a table dim with wefts of incense; at the innermost centre of that aroma and that incense, and whence those visible and viewless fountains streamed, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of Athens! by the purple sea In far Miletus, when I dreamed of you, Watching the winged ships that invited me To follow their white track upon the blue; 'Twas the desire to mate my lofty soul That drew me ever like a viewless chain Toward Homer's land of heroes, 'til I stole Away from home and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... to whom The world is wrapt in viewless gloom, Can unresisted still impart The fondest wishes ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... sea, held in the grasp of gravitation, "Rise from your bed! Let millions of tons of water fly on the wings of the viewless air, hundreds of miles to the distant mountains, and pour there those millions of tons that shall refresh a whole continent, and shall gather in rivers fitted to bear the commerce and the navies of nations." Gravitation ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... long ridges of the hills and rushing through the pure air of mountain tops; threading the star-beams; bathing themselves from head to foot in an ocean of cool, clean wind; swimming on the waves of viewless currents—currents warmed only by the magic of the stars, and kissed by the burning ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... I may not tell you here of the anxieties and the fears, of the hopes and the self-sacrifices—all, perhaps small in the tangible effect as the widow's mite, yet not the less marked by the viewless angels who go about continually among us—which varied Libbie's life before she accomplished her purpose. It is enough to say it was accomplished. The very day before the fourteenth she found time to go with her half-guinea to a barber's who lived near Albemarle Street, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... air reviv'd her—but again She left not, for the social train, The stillness of her chamber;—ne'er Its threshold pass'd, but on her bier: Spoke but to one who seem'd to stand Anear, and took his viewless hand, To promise, let whate'er betide, She would not be another's bride. Then, pleading as for past offence, Cried out aloud, 'They bore me hence! My feet, my lips, refus'd to move, To violate the vows of love! My sense recoil'd, my vision flew, Almost before I met thy view! Almost ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... die and go "he knew not where," peering into the abyss, the fear strikes him that in the unknown he may be "prisoned in the viewless winds" and blown with restless violence round about this pendant world. A terrible figure! It filled at this time some corner of my brain and would not out. It went with me up and down in ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... by Herschel's theory of the sun. It helped to clarify ideas on the subject. The turbid sense of groping and viewless ignorance gave place to the lucidity of a possible scheme. The persuasion of knowledge is a keen incentive to its increase. Few men care to investigate what they are obliged to admit themselves entirely ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... mortal man than what Eleanor Faversham had attempted? She had gone to see whether she should stand against her rival, and with a superb generosity, unprecedented in her sex, she had withdrawn. The magnanimity of it overwhelmed me. I walked along the street exalting her to viewless pinnacles of high-heartedness. And then, suddenly, the Devil whispered in my ear that execrated word "eumoiriety." It poisoned the rest of the day. It confirmed my conviction of the ironical designs of Destiny. Destiny, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... inseparable from the highest genius, and which degenerates so easily into acute neurosis—that "madness" to which wit is popularly supposed to be so "near allied." Such natures are aeolian harps acted upon, not by "the viewless air," but by a subtler, more impalpable power, which comes none know whence, and goes none know whither—one moment yielding soft melodies as of an angel's lute borne across sapphire seas, the next wailing like some lost soul or shrieking ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... now naturally explained. The man must have possessed the viewless charm which makes the possessor but not his shadow, invisible. He first held it, and afterwards had thrown it away. I looked round, and immediately discovered the shadow of the invisible charm. I leaped up and sprang towards it, and did not ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... to God's abyss, Children whose home is by the precipice. Fear not thy little ones shall o'er it fall: Solid, though viewless, is the ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... diversified. Never since consciousness of time began were two beings born who possessed exactly the same quality of voice, the same precise degree of nervous impressibility, or,—in brief, the same combination of those viewless force-storing molecules which shape and poise themselves in sentient substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to particularize the curious psychology of such existences: at the very utmost it is possible only to describe such impulses and perceptions ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... viewless atoms of the air Around me palpitate and burn, All heaven dissolves in gold, and earth Quivers with new-found joy. Floating on waves of harmony I hear A stir of kisses, and a sweep of wings; Mine eyelids close—"What pageant nears?" "'Tis ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... night. It is a black night. The stars are viewless and the ocean through which the great steel hull is rushing, with only a slight hiss where the sharp cutwater parts the waves, is merely a part of the same gloom. Aloft and on deck the battleship is a part of the night. Below deck all ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... dream of the Northern poets, The braves who in battle die Fight on in shadowy phalanx In the field of the upper sky; And as we read the sounding rhyme, The reverent fancy hears The ghostly ring of the viewless swords And the ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... sat in white and still excitement. She had spoken in the clearest of tones, neither fast nor loud; but her silver accents thrilled the ear. The speed of the current in her veins was just then as swift as it was viewless. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the eyes, Closing fast on summer skies! Woo then not the spirit back, From its lone and viewless track, With the bright things which have birth Wide o'er all the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... with the loathing nausea and shivering dread with which nature struggles ever against death; "I feel it upon me—the Devouring and the Viewless—I shall perish, and without saving her; nor shall even one ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not, Nor magnify the girth of noisy men! Their name is faction, and their numbers few. While everywhere encompassing them stands The silent element that doth not change; That points with steady finger to the Crown— True as the needle to the viewless pole, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... these dumb gestures first the exchange began Of viewless thought in bird, and beast, and man; And still the stage by mimic art displays Historic pantomime in modern days; 360 And hence the enthusiast orator affords Force to ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire again it had been poked—had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so in all ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the mint like gold that chemists make. How hard was then his task! at once to be, What in the body natural we see! Man's Architect distinctly did ordain The charge of muscles, nerves, and of the brain, Through viewless conduits spirits to dispense; The springs of motion from the seat of sense. 'Twas not the hasty product of a day, But the well-ripen'd fruit of wise delay. 170 He, like a patient angler, ere he strook, Would let ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... I hear no rustle of stiff brocade, And I see no face at my library door; For now that the ghosts of my heart are laid, She is viewless for evermore. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... this spire, I discern cultivated fields, villages, white country-seats, the waving lines of rivulets, little placid lakes, and here and there a rising ground, that would fain be termed a hill. On the fourth side is the sea, stretching away towards a viewless boundary, blue and calm, except where the passing anger of a shadow flits across its surface, and is gone. Hitherward, a broad inlet penetrates far into the land; on the verge of the harbor, formed by its extremity, is a town; and over it am ...
— Sights From A Steeple (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... these expressions, applied to the viewless art of literature, must fit it loosely and insecurely at best—does it not seem so? They are words usurped from other arts, words that suppose a visible and measurable object, painted or carved. For criticizing the craft of fiction we have no other language than that which has ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... revere, adore, Bow down and worship each delight in turn, Laugh, wonder, yield, and yearn. But when our trembling kisses dare, yet dread, Even to draw nigh its head, And touch, and scarce with touch or breath surprise Its mild miraculous eyes Out of their viewless vision—O, what then, What may be said of men? What speech may name a new-born child? what word Earth ever spake or heard? The best men's tongue that ever glory knew Called that a drop of dew Which from the breathing creature's ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... anguish I now inflicted on your house? Was your father my only victim? Madeline, have I not murdered her also? Lester, have I not shaken the sands in his glass? You, too, have I not blasted the prime and glory of your years? How incalculable—how measureless—how viewless the consequences of one crime, even when we think we have weighed them all with scales that would have turned with a hair's weight! Yes; before I had felt no remorse. I felt it now. I had acknowledged no crime, and now crime seemed the essence itself of my soul. The ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more dimly deep [Ep. 2. Than the inmost heart of sleep, And tenderer than the rose-mouthed morning's lips; And midmost of them heard The viewless water's word, The sea's breath in the wind's wing and the ship's, That bids one swell and sound and smite 79 And rend that other in sunder ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that lined either shore brilliant boats glided to the rendezvous; some hung with luminous globes of blue and silver, some with lanterns fiery-red, flower-shaped, golden, green, or variegated, as if a rainbow were festooned about the viewless masts. Up and down they flashed, stealing out from dusky nooks and floating in their own radiance, as they went to join the procession that wound about the island like a splendid sea-serpent uncoiling itself from sleep ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... trill of song, as if triumphing in the joyful sight of something that was hidden from my eyes. If I could but have caught and held the secret, how easily it would have solved my own perplexities, how faithfully would I have whispered it in men's ears; but while I wondered, it was gone like the viewless passage of an angel, and left me with my longing unfulfilled, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... art thou nothing? Such thou art as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head: This shade he worships for its golden hues, And makes (not knowing) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... when the rough winds blow! For patience, when our hopes are fading,— When visible things all backward go, And nowhere seems the power of aiding! God still enfolds thee with His viewless hand, And leads ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... cracking report of a shotgun, and they saw the bird collapse in mid-air and sheer downward across the hog-back. But it did not land there; the marksman had not calculated on those erratic gales from the chasm; and the dead pigeon went whirling down into the viewless gulf amid flying vapours ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... O-rio-gu (honourable boiled food); but it never includes, of course, fish, meats, or wine. Clear water is given to the shadowy guest, and is sprinkled from time to time upon the altar or within the shrine with a branch of misohagi; tea is poured out every hour for the viewless visitors, and everything is daintily served up in little plates and cups and bowls, as for living guests, with hashi (chopsticks) laid beside the offering. So for three days the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... burn over them like clear salt water or the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life is the hurt and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of honeycomb on wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees—the stars march slowly from the western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of the heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor—the stars and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and much account—it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if the next green bus that passes should start ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... amidst pastoral scenes, and tended sheep among the green and beautiful solitudes of nature." Sufficiently imaginative, he does not, like his minstrel predecessor the Ettrick Shepherd, soar into the regions of the supernatural, or roam among the scenes of the viewless world. He sings of the mountain wilds and picturesque valleys of Caledonia, and of the simple joys and habits of rural or pastoral life. His style is essentially lyrical, and his songs are altogether true to nature. Several ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the blows of the unseen blades upon the golden armour, but he who wore it took no harm, nor was it so much as marked with the dint of the swords. So while the priests wondered at this miracle the viewless Wardens of the Gate smote at the Wanderer, and the Wanderer smote at them again. Then of a sudden he knew this, that they who barred the path were gone, for no more blows fell, and his ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... fled, Thin as ghosts, on a sky blood-red; Out of the sky the fierce hue fell, And made the streams as the streams of hell. All his thoughts as a river flowed, Flowed aflame as fleet he rode, Onward flowed to her abode, Ceased at her feet, mirrored her face. (Viewless Death apace, apace, Rode behind ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... the occasional crowing of cocks, and the shrilling of cicad[ae]. Even the cicad[ae], however, find these groves too dim, and sing faintly; being sun-lovers, they prefer the trees outside the village. I forgot to say that you may sometimes hear a viewless shuttle—chaka-ton, chaka-ton;—but that familiar sound, in the great green silence, seems an elfish happening. The reason of the hush is simply that the people are not at home. All the adults, excepting some feeble elders, have gone to the neighboring fields, the women carrying their babies ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... and afire, Arching and darkening the darkness with light as of dream or desire. Heaven, in the depth of its height, shone wistful and wan from above: Earth from beneath, and the sea, shone stricken and breathless with love. As a shadow may shine, so shone they; as ghosts of the viewless blest, That sleep hath sight of alive in a rapture of sunbright rest, The green earth glowed and the grey sky gleamed for a wondrous while; And the storm's full frown was crossed by the light of its own ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 225 I tell thee that those living things, To whom the fragile blade of grass, That springeth in the morn And perisheth ere noon, Is an unbounded world; 230 I tell thee that those viewless beings, Whose mansion is the smallest particle Of the impassive atmosphere, Think, feel and live like man; That their affections and antipathies, 235 Like his, produce the laws Ruling their moral state; And the minutest throb That through their frame diffuses ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... visionary fair Repass'd, and viewless mix'd with common air. The queen awakes, deliver'd of her woes; With florid joy her heart dilating glows: The vision, manifest of future fate, Makes her with hope her son's ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... edged with silver sheen From yon clear moon, who in her glassy face Seems to reflect the risings of the place. For on her still, pale orb, the eye may see Dim spots of shadowy brown, like distant tree Or far-off hillocks on a moonlight lea. The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold, The viewless dew falls lightly on the wold, The gentle air, that softly sweeps the leaves, A strain of faint, unearthly music weaves; As when the harp of heaven remotely plays, Or cygnet's wail—or song of sorrowing fays That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale, On wings of ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... the trust you affect in my courage; but I am now on my guard against the cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapor can scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain land. I believe in no races like those which you tell me lie viewless in space, as do gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not its terrors. For the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage—the courage that comes from despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it be, as a sufferer whom ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... or fly,— Such mortal terror at The work of one poor gnat! With constant change of his attack, The snout now stinging, now the back, And now the chambers of the nose; The pigmy fly no mercy shows. The lion's rage was at its height; His viewless foe now laugh'd outright, When on his battle-ground he saw, That every savage tooth and claw Had got its proper beauty By doing bloody duty; Himself, the hapless lion, tore his hide, And lash'd with sounding tail from side to side. ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... conflagration then shoot forth ever and anon those disasterous sparks, which again grow into children, and again awaken to the consciousness of woe, if not of sin. And so the wheel goes evermore round and round, through a measureless viewless eternity. And the charm, the beauty of the world! the fresh bloom of its appearances! Is not everything here again grounded upon that which nature teaches me to loathe and abhor? It is perhaps by this feeling alone, as an invisible inward prompter, that I understand ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... back from the fire and crossed his legs. He leaned forward, gazing at the flames. From the viewless distance came ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs |
