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Blackness   /blˈæknəs/   Listen
Blackness

noun
1.
The quality or state of the achromatic color of least lightness (bearing the least resemblance to white).  Synonyms: black, inkiness.
2.
Total absence of light.  Synonyms: black, lightlessness, pitch blackness, total darkness.  "In the black of night"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books



... remarked that Gen. James H. Lane was the most conspicuous figure in the defense of Lawrence. It is proper to pause and consider the character of this man, who shone for a time like a brilliant meteor, and then had his light quenched in the blackness of darkness. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the breaches fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... "Hum! hum!" (the blackness of this man's heart revolted me). "There is no seductive shape that the tempter does not assume, my child. Wit in itself is not to be condemned, although the Church shuns it as far as she is concerned, looking upon it as a worldly ornament; but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... calculation, but at last the three motor boat boys decided that eight feet of line was the proper length. This decided, and accomplished, they carried the log down into the water, and pushed resolutely off into the blackness. ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock

... Gray's Inn Square, with its dusky fringe of plane-trees and its vivid line of lamps, its strip of pavement, and its wall of many-windowed houses under one unbroken roof. Dim lights smouldered in the column of landing windows over every door; otherwise there was no break in the blackness of that gaunt facade. Yet in some dark room or other behind those walls I seemed to see Raffles at work as plainly as I had just heard our natural enemies plotting his destruction. I saw him at a safe. I saw him at a desk. I saw him leaving everything as he had found it, only to steal down ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... he waited, reading titles he found himself unable to lay hold of; and there, while he waited, the threatened rain began, and, ere he was admitted to the inner premises, such a black deluge came pouring down as, for blackness at least, comes down nowhere save in London. With this accompaniment, he was ushered at length into a dingy office, deep in the recesses of the house, where a young man whom he saw for the first time had evidently, while Hector waited ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald

... showed us a long, long, straight passage cut through the mountain, with an oval roof arched like an egg. Except for a few yards ahead, where the way was lit up and the arch of close-set stones glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had a spine made of diamonds, Jonah would have got much the same effect that we did as he wandered about ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... lid, and inside were roses, magnificent, half-opened roses with the dew still on their leaves, the fat green stalks nearly a yard in length—dozens of roses of every colour and shade, from the lustrous whiteness of Frau Carl to the purple blackness of Prince Camille. Claire gathered them in her arms, unconscious of the charming picture which she made, in her simple blue lawn dress, with her glowing face rising over the riot of colour, gathered them in a great handful, and ran ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... filled with shipping that could not bear up against such a tornado. I stood among the anxious multitude, watching the symptoms of the rising storm. We looked intently at the heavens as they gathered blackness, and saw far off toward the horizon the clouds and the waves mingling together into one great vaporous mass. Now and then we were tantalized by brief intervals of bright skies; but they were again quickly ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the object ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... when the little boy that was I was running after the Dunlap girls that blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for Jesse Fancher there ceased, and, as Jesse Fancher, ceased for ever. The form that was Jesse Fancher, the body that was his, being matter and apparitional, like an apparition passed and was not. But ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... to look about. His view commanded a horizon of two or three miles, for he seemed to be near the center of the tableland. Its surface was broken by the hummocks and hollows of the peat, and tufts of white wild cotton relieved the blackness of the gashes in the soil. Sheep fed in the distance, and he heard the harsh cry of a grouse that skimmed the heath. The skyline was clear, and by and by two sharp but ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss

... always bear within ourselves the principle of what we shall be later on, we are always rising higher. Question us on our past, and, like the rocket, we reply that we are going forward, but that our path is illumined only in our immediate neighbourhood, and that the rest of the road is lost in the blackness of night; we no more know from where we came than we know our destination, but we do know that we came from below and are rising higher, and that is all that is necessary to interest us in ourselves and make us conscious of what we are. And who knows but what our ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... blurred picture of Captain Ross high up on the bridge, peering into the moving blackness. How strange that there should be hidden in the convolutions of a man's brain an intelligence that laid bare the pretences of that ravenous demon without. Each of the ship's officers, the commander more ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... to the faint gray light which comes just before dawn, and by it we could distinguish lumps of blackness which as we approached turned into the thatched huts of the villagers. Until we found the main trail into the town we kept close to the bamboo fences of these huts, and then, still keeping in the shadows, we followed the trail until it turned into ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... Virginia knew that these things were not dangerous—that daylight would show them to be only deer-mice, hares, weasels, bats, and owls—nevertheless, they had their effect. For about her was cloying velvet blackness—not the closed-in blackness of a room, where one feels the embrace of the four walls, but the blackness of infinite space through which sweep mysterious currents of air. After a long time she turned sharp to the left. After a long time more she perceived a faint, opalescent glimmer ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... though they have lost their language, and call themselves Germans; but the word Zernevitz, near Dantzic, still attests that the Sclavic language was once common in those parts. Zernevitz means the thing of blackness, as Tzernebock means the god of blackness. Prussia itself merely means, in Sclavish, Lower Russia. There is scarcely a race or language in the world more extended than the Sclavic. On the other side of the Donau you will find the Sclaves ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... may do, whatever he may say, an' whatever he may swear," said the Scotchman to himself, "he is no' like ane of these. Try as he may, he canna descend so low into the blackness o' evil as these sons o' perdition. Although he has done evil beyond a poor mortal's computation, he walks like a king amang them. Even that Blackbeard, striving to be decent for an hour or two, knows a superior when ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton

... stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits. Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely seated beneath the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... in a flood. Stephen's mother could not see in the blackness the bitterness on his face. Above the roar of the waters ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... like aberration of mind, from the grim and horrid topic which he invited, to thoughts of wealth and power and triumph and exulting prophecies of the fame her son should achieve. He looked but on the blackness of the gulf, and shuddered; her vision overleaped it, and smiled on the misty palaces her ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... going down the bank, followed eagerly by the little Sanford, who had also his interest in the arrival of the parcels from London. There came after them presently a lithe young negro boy of fifteen, not yet two years out of Africa. He was clad in nothing but his native blackness, which was deemed sufficient for a half-grown negro in that day. Mrs. Browne had sent black Jocko after the others with orders to bring up her things "without waiting for the gentlemen to get ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... white chief carries an old head on young shoulders," at last he said approvingly. "He speaks truly when he says that the air is thick with danger. When the blackness of night comes, then will come, also, those who make war from behind the trees of the forest. In the darkness, how is the young white and his friends to tell enemies from friends? The jackals will ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... a year that she is gone, and the people whom she used to benefit care no more for her death than for Queen Anne's. We are all selfish: the world is selfish: there are but a few exceptions, like you, my dear, to shine like good deeds in a naughty world, and make the blackness more dismal." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and hardy men, whose contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... was so sombre. Smith's eyes had grown more accustomed to the blackness and he began to distinguish between the various shades of darkness. Once or twice he thought he saw to the side of them another figure, moving or halting as they halted, but when he looked fixedly he could distinguish nothing but the ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... For through the blackness of that night the Irish Parliament always shone like a star. Ireland grew with its growth, and withered with its decay. Precisely as she had more Home Rule she advanced, and precisely as she had less she fell back. But as long as the Parliament existed ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... a small key and entered, holding it back courteously for his three new companions to enter with him. They did so, and he closed the door. At the same moment the light was extinguished in the upper window, and the outside of the house became a mere wall of dense blackness in the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... distractions among the English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... the midst of the storm, into the alternating throbs of blackness and radiance; now the possessor of no more room than what my body filled, and now isolated in world-wide space. And the thunder seemed to follow me, bellowing after ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... not doubt, we had to make against some Government vessel that would follow us. But I found to my surprise that the men on the ship knew nothing of the dangerous position in which they were, and worked with a calm disregard to the blackness of the night, and to the hazard of the moment. Black I did not meet, for they put me into a cabin aft, of which I was the sole occupant; and, being ordered by the man John, who was half-drunk and very threatening, to get below, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton

... would be buried and the world itself would be no more. He looked at the calendar which he had scratched upon the wall. It was the twenty-fourth day of December. He wondered whether God knew what was happening and whether He had planned it. Then he gave up wondering, for behind him, from the blackness of ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson

... light of any kind would be possible; so that if life were conveyed across space, from star to star, upon infinitesimal specks of dust, under the influence of light pressure, as postulated by Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making, pp. 212-30), this life must exist, and in a sense originate, in the blackness of inter-stellar space.[10] And, finally, if life on our globe originated, as many think, in the ocean's depths,[11] this must have been in the densest darkness, since light penetrates but a few fathoms below the surface of the ocean. Below that ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... A mighty gust of wind striking him in mid-air and almost hurling him into the blackness below had caused him to put down as a brace his wounded hind leg. Gasping, trembling, he lay down for a minute on the whitened ties, one leg hanging through. Then he rose and ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux

... path. No trench is too deep for it, no dug-out, unless hermetically sealed, is safe from it. Night and darkness only heighten its effect. It is the only weapon that is as effective in a fog or in the inky blackness of a moonless night as in the most brilliant sunshine. Only the mask and the training that go with it protect. Terror, confusion, lack of ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden

... sun, but by an opaque body, the offspring and satellite of the earth, coming between the earth and sun. And so, when Christian men lose the light of God's face, it is not because there is any 'variableness or shadow of turning' in Him, but because between Him and them has come the blackness—their own offspring—of their own sin. You are not safe if you are outside the light of His countenance. These ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... obscures, empoisons, and contaminates the animal spirits, it is proper afterwards that he should have a bath of pure and clean water, with abundance of whey; to purify, by the water, the feculency of the foul humour, and by the whey to clarify the blackness of the vapour. But, before all things, I think it desirable to enliven him by pleasant conversations, by vocal and instrumental music, to which it will not be amiss to add dancers, that their movements, figures, and agility ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere

... Miss Belvoir. This lady was sitting by the fire, holding a screen. She came forward and greeted them with great cordiality. She was a small, dark, amiable-looking woman about thirty. Her hair and eyes were of a blackness one rarely sees, her complexion was clear and bright, her figure extremely small and trim. Without being exactly pretty, she was very agreeable to the eye, and also had the attraction of looking remarkably different from other people. Indeed her costume was so ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson

... the change having taken place in the night. His beard was filthy with drivel, and the Emperor, moved by his pitiful condition, pardoned him. There was a clergyman of Nottingham whose daughter at the age of thirteen experienced a change from jet-blackness of the hair to white in a single night, but this was confined to a spot on the back of the head 1 1/2 inches in length. Her hair soon became striped, and in seven years was totally white. The same ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... "Glittering laurels":—I must observe that the colour of green suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights.]; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness: these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted; and immediately from a dismantled ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... still kneeling, her hands at her breast, and her eyes, wide and dark, fixed upon the blackness without the open door. I went up to her and took ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... than this dread. I knew that in the struggle which was going on in my frame, I was borne fearfully near the dark gulf, and the thought that, at such a time, both reason and will were leaving my brain, filled me with an agony, the depth and blackness of which I should vainly attempt to portray. I threw myself on my bed, with the excited blood still roaring wildly in my ears, my heart throbbing with a force that seemed to be rapidly wearing away my life, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... you loved me, why did you leave me? I do not comprehend. How could you let me stand in the darkness under your window and then turn away from it into the awful blackness and solitude to ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... her, that she was never happy except with a pencil in her hand. "Show the gentleman, my dear," and out came a book of studios of cubes, globes, posts, etc., while Mr. Mauleverer talked artistically of drawing from models. Next, he observed on a certain suspicious blackness of little Mary's eye, and asked her what she had done to herself. But the child hung her head, and Mrs. Rawlins answered for her, "Ah! Mary is ashamed to tell: but the gentleman will think nothing of it, my dear. He knows that ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... rising, tore the dry leaves from the trees. Kemp, exiled, as it were, from the Pavilion, sat in the big car and watched the gathering blackness. Finally he got out and put up the curtains. Everything would be ready when Dalton came. He knew better, however, than to warn his master. George was apt to be sharp when ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... excited. The night was close, and there were mutterings of thunder at times; the cloud whence they came seemed to her to spread its doleful blackness over this one roof. An impulse seized her; she took paper and sat down at her desk to write. It was a letter to Waymark, a letter such as she had never addressed to him, and which, even in writing it, she was conscious she could not send. Her hand trembled as she filled the pages ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... no choice but to obey, and their attention was soon occupied by the strange sights before them. As one odd figure after another sprang out of the dark into the firelight, capered and pranced, and then disappeared into the blackness again, Ann and Rudolf drew closer together and squeezed hands, very queer feelings creeping up and down their back-bones. The strangest part of it all was that among that crazy company were many whom the children did not see ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels

... perpendicular rain that scratched out the colours of the landscape. The sea was troubled, although no wind blew; it heaved as with an inward unrest. But suddenly there was a great broken sound somewhere in the air; and the next moment a storm came tearing over the face of the sea, covering it with blackness innumerably rent into spots of white. Presently it struck the shore, and a great rude blast came roaring through the grating, carrying with it a sheet of rain, and, catching Florimel's hair, sent it streaming wildly out ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... above the water, awoke answering gleams from its surface. Trembling stripes of light reached down from the shore they had just left; on the other side of the bridge the river lost itself in the blackness of open fields. Thunder rumbled in the distance; they looked over to where the red lights soared. A train with lighted windows rolled between iron arches that seemed to spring up out of the night for an instant, to sink back into darkness again. The thunder grew ...
— The Dead Are Silent - 1907 • Arthur Schnitzler

... not less important awaits her. She has seen the face of the KING, and as the rising sun reveals that which was hidden in the darkness, so His light has revealed her blackness to her. "Ah," she cries, "I am black";—"But comely," interjects the Bridegroom, with inimitable grace and tenderness. "Nay, 'black as the tents of Kedar,'" she continues. "Yet to Me," He responds, "thou art 'comely as the curtains of Solomon!'" Nothing humbles ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor

... that utter blackness which precedes the dawn, Kate and her father reached the mouth ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand

... possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling gait. Judith crowded Dolly close ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... vaguely exhilarated by the not too abstruse music of the posturing fiddlers, his eyes caressed by the soft glow of the Japanese lanterns, strung like antique jewelled necklets against the almost tangible blackness of the night, he found himself listening with an half-malicious amusement to the commonplace of the conversational formulae affected by the young world of society, the well-worn, patched-up questions, the anticipated ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends, was the same author's Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the Ancients, in which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... that my hour had come. At first I did not understand, for I was watching the Senora's face in the moonlight, and to me she looked like an angel. Then I saw, and my senses left me. It was as though hands were stretched up from the blackness to drag me down—yes, I saw the hands. But you saved me, Outram, though that will not help me, for I shall perish in some such way at last. So be it. It is best that I should die, who cannot conquer the evil of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... Freydisa when we stood beneath the light of the friendly stars. "I know nothing; my mind is a blackness." ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... in the blackness, these slippery little savages of Titan, their half naked bodies crowding him and stifling him with their sweaty nearness. Again and again Carr struck out, but it was like fighting a horde of squirming ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent

... blur of sulphurous blackness. The bullets are as thick as if a swarm of leaden locusts had been routed from the foliage, and taken wing hillward. Then behind, through the gaps in the trees, big, whining, screeching swarms of another ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... attacked the Latin influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten. But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr. Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they will point out that the ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... slicing the blackness with an oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and fifty yards. Over the "western" lake—and its inky ripples sparkled somehow ominously. Over the jungle's confusion—and trees, great bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore

... truths, filled the anxious, aching heart with monkish legends of unattested miracles, and in place of the pure worship of God, gives us mummeries nearer akin to pagan rites! I thank God that I am released from my thraldom. I see now the tissue of falsehood so plausible in which all things were wrapped. Blackness and deceit in the garb of truth and purity! And it is horrible, to think that he who so led me astray claims to be my brother! Mary, Mary, how can I tell Mr. Stewart this?—tell him that I have wandered from the true faith—that I have knelt ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to the scene. The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and flutter. The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good. Frogs hold noisy jubilees, ("Anniversary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... from premisses, or by way of causation as effect from cause; but, in either case, necessarily. Inseparable accidents, on the other hand, are attributes universal, so far as we know, to the species (e.g. blackness to crows), but not necessary; i.e. neither involved in the meaning of the name of the species, nor following from attributes which are. Separable accidents do not belong to all, or if to all, not at all times (e.g. the fact of being born, to man), and sometimes are not constant ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... right in the Skipper's eyes. They were sea-blue and blazing with eagerness and with the pitiful glare of madness. Over the clergyman's shoulder the pale painter with his keen eyes swept the bearded face of the Skipper with a rapid and greedy glance. By the time the match dwindled and the blackness closed in again the face was a possession of his memory. He saw it even though it was actually invisible; the rugged features dignified by madness, the clear, blue eyes full of a saddening fire, and—ere the match faded—of a horror of disappointment, the curling brown ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... upon the sward That night, instead of golden— And long the bride's maids wait the lord In the bridal-chamber olden; Ah, well! pale hands unwove the flowers That bound the milk-white forehead— The star has sunk, the red moon glowers Down slopes of blackness horrid. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... came to the top of the low, rolling hill, and ahead in the darkness there gleamed a tiny, wizened light set in a blotch of blackness. Under the great white stars it burned a sickly red and seemed out ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... length. This means that as the planet circles round the sun he turns once. If this is so the sun will shine on one half of the planet, producing an accumulated heat terrific to think of; while the other side is plunged in blackness. The side which faces the sun must be heated to a pitch inconceivable to us during the nearer half of the orbit—a pitch at which every substance must be at boiling-point, and which no life as we know it could possibly endure. Seen from our point of view, Mercury goes through all the phases of the ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton

... be quite deserted. The light from South's window made rays on the fog, but did not reach the tree. A quarter of an hour passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles had not ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... blackness had fallen. The waves came savagely, ill-defined masses let loose from a viewless limbo to work their harm. Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking waters, but more often everything was hidden. The roar of the ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... officer in the American Navy; my mother a Spaniard. She was very beautiful, I always heard; and her miniature, which my father's dying hand placed about my neck, proclaimed her so. A pale, clear, olive tint, eyes of thrilling blackness, long, lustrous hair, and a look of mingled tenderness and melancholy made it, in my thought, the loveliest face that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... and death. It was that which blackened the radiant morning, not the mercifully abrupt cessation of a worn-out life. For Peter death had two sharply differentiated aspects—one of release to the tired and old, for whom the grasshopper was a burden; the other of an unthinkable blackness of tragedy—sheer sharp loss that knew no compensation. It was not with this bitter face that death had stepped into their lives on this clear morning. One could imagine that weary figure glad to end his wayfaring so; one could even imagine those steps to death deliberately taken; and one did imagine ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... necessary, as the tide could not be high enough yet to permit its coming directly across to where we were. We watched its course anxiously. Finally it seemed to be heading toward us, but we were not certain. Then it disappeared altogether and there was nothing but blackness and silence where ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves, and took a walk. We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the blackness of one of these cypress hedges that the thing I'm telling you of happened. The hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw a couple of women's figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead—don't know how they got ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the colour or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... an instant. Even as the dome shattered under the copter's shell and Dark recognized the imminence of death, the groundcar twisted out of control and careened from the highway. He felt it spinning over and over, and then blackness closed ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... A blackness seemed to settle upon Helena—and how cold it was! She shivered. Her dark eyes, wide, tearless now, stared, startled, dazed, at the white face on the pillow crowned with its mass of golden hair. Her sweetness! Her nobleness! Helena's lips half parted and her breath ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... fire. Licking up the curl, the flame gradually leaped from one piece of wood to another until the entire handful was ablaze. The dancing light played upon the three faces and sent a glow out into the surrounding blackness. Harry deposited the burning shavings upon the floor, where the fire was soon transmitted to the larger piece of wood Jack had used ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson

... sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness. A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Riviere made swiftly to the aid of that woman ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... Only in faint lines of light was the blackness of the sky broken, and as she looked out over the trees in the garden below, and down the street, asleep and still, the scene changed, and no longer was she in Yorkburg, but in the little village of Chenonceaux, at the Inn of Le Bon Laboureur. Her friend, Miss ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher

... Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the voice ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... inquiries, but by resolutely prosecuting them. This, it appears to us, is a case of singular interest, and rarely exemplified, if at all elsewhere, in these our days. How has this man, to whom the world once offered nothing but blackness, denial and despair, attained to that better vision which now shows it to him, not tolerable only, but full of solemnity and loveliness? How has the belief of a Saint been united in this high and true mind with the clearness of a Sceptic; the devout spirit of a Fenelon ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... the journey through the valley of humiliation and suffering, when soul lived upon and thought only of self and its escape. Through ages of suffering and loneliness and blackness, my only thought was a constant prayer for absolute non-existence. Within the heart of my tiny soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God. With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... straight at the blackness of the wall, when suddenly a light appeared in it. To his immense surprise, he found himself looking up a kind of long, arched tunnel, at whose farther end a man stood in a boat, a light in his hand. Only for an instant ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... good; With colour and glory and story and song ye are fed as with food: The cold and the heat, The bitter and the sweet, The calm and the tempest fulfil my Word; Yet will ye complain of my two-edged sword That has fashioned the finite and mortal and given you the sweetness of strife, The blackness and whiteness, The darkness and brightness, Which sever your souls from the formless and void and hold ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... it from his packet He pressed the spring switch, and in an instant a brilliant shaft of radiance shot out, cutting the intense blackness like a knife. Mr. Damon flashed ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton

... note-book, and stirs up the cooking-fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day—in the mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you prepare for bed. The pine-cones ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vance like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his interruption—a touch of darkness. He ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... Cutting through the blackness like a scimitar shone a ray of light from above, widening as it descended and ending in a white patch on the floor. It was moved to and fro. Then it disappeared. Another vague creaking sound followed—that ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... came from the north with sleet on its back. Raw shuddering gusts whipped the sea till the ship lurched and men felt driven spindrift stinging their faces. Beyond the rail there was winter night, a moving blackness where the waves rushed and clamored; straining into the great dark, men sensed only the bitter salt of sea-scud, the nettle of sleet and the lash ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson

... abridged, with every muscle and fiber seeming to sag like an ill-supported fence, Fran's thoughts were at the abysmal stage of discouragement. For a time, there seemed in her heart not the tiniest taper alight, and in this blackness, both hope and failure ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... different? Good intentions will never change it. Good desires will never change it. God only can make you ready for that hour. Unless you seek him, you too will take a "leap into the dark"; for you there will be only the "blackness of darkness forever." "If ye will hear his voice, harden not ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor

... himself back again to the side of Francisco, and whispered a warning to him not to move if he valued his life. As Leonard spoke, he noticed that the blackness of the night was turning grey with the light of the unrisen moon. Already her rays, striking upwards, brightened the sky above and the mountains behind, and from them fell a pale reflection, which grew ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... long time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... guide in eye, I took stock of the thing with idle fingers; in the blackness my finger-tips were all the eyes I had for so small a thing. It was about the size of a five-pound butter box, I should say; it seemed as it lay in my hand a sort of an old and polished casket, a thing done with an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... night! To know that death was feasting in that blackness; to feel that vigilance was of no avail; to turn away convulsed from the iron push of the demoniac force which for the time seemed to have taken the place of an atmosphere. Smash! Rattle. Then a wild whistling; a many lashes, that flapped and cracked; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... without attempting to press the matter; and a moment later the car glided away, its lamps gleaming in the rural blackness of the village street. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... earth trembled. A horror of wrath and darkness has overwhelmed the world; and what of the patient choristers now? No longer are their voices heard amid the appalling fury of the hurricane; the sudden lightning-flash reveals nothing in the blackness; the powers of evil have overcome; and the universe has lost its hope. But now there comes a lull; and suddenly—far away, and faint, and triumphant—rises the song of reliance and joy. The demons ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black

... no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of credulity, intoxicated by their ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... the night wore slowly away. The intense impenetrable blackness, the roar and thunder of the sea, the terrible jerking, jolting and hurling beneath them, shook the nerves of the girls, keeping them constantly in a half-dazed condition that perhaps lessened the keenness of their suffering. Harriet and Jane, however, never ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge

... been lighted in his camp, but nevertheless he was not a shadow. That personality, quiet and modest, was so intense, so powerful that it seemed to Harry to become luminous, to radiate light in the blackness of the night. It was imagination, he knew, at work again, but it was Jackson who had ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler

... before her, and her heart ached. Fiercely, despairingly she thought, throwing her soul afar to seek out wisdom and a way of escape for Rames. Presently in the blackness of her mind there arose a plan and, as ever was her fashion, she acted swiftly. Lifting her head she commanded that the doors should be locked and guarded so that none might go in or out, and that those physicians ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard

... for her! and poor Herbert too who would acutely feel this ingratitude. The blackness of it was beyond what Julius thought probable in the lad, and the discussion of it occupied the brothers till they reached the Reynolds colony, where they were received by the daughter-in-law, a much more ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stones. They seemed to lie in a vacuum, in the very hollow of the storm. Around them the clatter, the clang and the uproar were even more terrifying than before because they were now separated from these noises, no longer a part of them. All was blackness, shot through with fire. Haig was no more tortured in his body, except for the sense of being suffocated. He seemed to inhale raw ozone; the air fairly stank with the odors of decomposition; the saliva in his mouth had a peculiar ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... spots of heaven,/More fiery by night's blackness] If by spots are meant stars, as night has no other fiery spots, the comparison is forced and harsh, stars having been always supposed to beautify the night; nor do I comprehend what there is in the counter-part of this simile, which answers to night's blackness. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... through utter darkness. The stream was narrow—so narrow that in the blackness I was constantly bumping first one rock wall and then another as the river wound hither and ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... harvest, mixed with an abundant supply of water, would already have generated the flame-bright liquid which dyes the robes that adorn the throne. The colour of that dye is gay[211] with too great beauty; 'tis a blushing obscurity, an ensanguined blackness, which distinguishes the wearer from all others, and makes it impossible for the human race not to know who is the king. It is marvellous that that substance after death should for so long a time exude an amount of gore which one would hardly find flowing from the wounds of a ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... The wind freshens, the twilight softens the distances, and while the long road behind him still glitters, it grows darker now at every step—like the past, with its retrospections to him who looks back and regrets. It seems to Monpavon that he is walking into blackness. He shivers a little, but does not falter, and continues to walk with erect head and ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... like a man because his shoes were too high-heeled. Excepting when he was with the army, he would never get on horseback. The soldiers used to say that he was more afraid of being sun-burnt and of the blackness of the powder than of the musket-balls; and it was very true. He was very fond of building. Before he had the Palais Royal completed, and particularly the grand apartment, the place was, in my opinion, perfectly horrible, although in the Queen-mother's time it had been very ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans

... cried Achelous, turning toward the hero, while his voice rose till it sounded like the thunder of distant cataracts, and his green garment changed to the blackness of night,—"impertinent stranger! how darest thou claim this maiden,—thou who hast mortal blood in thy veins! Behold me, the god Achelous, the powerful King of the Waters! I wind with majesty through the rich lands of my wide realms. I make all fields through which I flow ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... muttered the explorer, returning from a peep into the foul blackness of a subterranean tunnel, "imagine what took place ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... of fifteen minutes, Hannibal entered. He had the look of one who had passed a sleepless night, and despite the blackness of his complexion, ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter

... Away through the blackness swept the little torpedo-boat, with not a light showing anywhere on board her. The men had even been forbidden to smoke; and the stokers down below put coal on as carefully as though the furnaces were a lady's drawing-room ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... insensible, but I was dead to surrounding objects, dead to the present, dead to the future. The past, the terrible, the inexorable past, was upon me, trampling me, grinding me with iron heel, into the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear, for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful condition, I ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... the breakers on the beach, which had been loud at the mouth of the cavern, began to fade and grow faint, and the tunnel grew dark and cold. Feeling for the wall of the passage with one hand, the youngest son advanced into the blackness. Creatures of the sea, with round shining eyes, stared at him from shallow pools, and now and then his hand, running along the wall, would touch and shake from its place a starfish ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... Then the blackness of the pit arose and filled the heart of Burney. Sucking the corpse of his deceased dudheen, he staggered through his duties with his barrowful of stones and dirt, feeling for the first time that the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry



Words linked to "Blackness" :   pitch black, ebony, achromatic color, coal black, darkness, achromatic colour, jet black, white, soot black, sable, dark



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