"Formless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he vanished on his scrawny steed up the Paria Canyon. All the day long we watched and waited for his triumphal return with the longed-for supplies at his back, but the sun departed without his approach and the twilight died into that mystery which leaves the world formless against the night. And still we had faith in the stranger's story. Early the next morning Prof., Clem, and I started on his track thinking we would soon meet the train. It led us up the valley of the Paria, between the great cliffs ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... than the Persean sword They cut away no formless monster's head, But one, whose gentleness did well accord With death, as life. The ancient harps have said, Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord: If Love impersonate was ever dead, Pale Isabella ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... which her guests presently made their way, and where they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle. Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose, empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... tumbler, watching little bubbles, revelling in what remained of his exquisite faculty of minute sight—with a feeling of great peace; and thought prayerfully; lost himself in a kind of formless prayer without words—lost himself completely. It was as if the wished-for dissolution were coming of its own accord; Nirvana—an ecstasy of conscious annihilation—the blessed end, the end of all! as ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... The illusion of the great sun; the illusion of the shadow-casting hills; the illusion of waters, formless and multiform; the illusion of—Nay, nay I what impious fancy! Accursed girl! yet, yet! why should he curse her? Had she ever done aught to merit the malediction of an ascetic? Never, never! Only her form, the memory of her, the beautiful phantom of her, the accursed phantom of her! What was ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... it was," I went on. "A formless apparition, not exactly white or black, and huge and unknown of likeness. The Indians were frightened by a manner of unearthliness about the thing, and the brother-in-law fell on his knees and began to pray. 'It is the devil,' he murmured to Rafael. 'He will eat us, or carry ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields, set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of mountains. This was a country ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom he imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names, which we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his building also. Some ruins, lying beyond Abydos, are too formless to do more than indicate the site of some of his structures. He enlarged the temple of Harshafitu and that of Osiris at Heracleopolis, and, to accomplish these works the more promptly, his workmen had recourse for material to the royal towns of the IVth and XIIth dynasties; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... indicated by their initials and nicknames, the rough ridicule and the biting innuendo, were telling in their day, but the lampoons have perished with their objects. The local celebrity of Sir Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the Tailor, has vanished, and Defoe's hurried and formless lines, incisive as their vivid force must have been, are not redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the few bright epigrams ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... my zoophilists, a vast but formless class of people, both in and outside of the other classes mentioned, and one which includes every man, woman and child with any fondness for wild life, from zoologists to tourists. There are higher considerations, never to be forgotten. But let me first press the point ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... peoples has its tyranny been, that laws have again and again been passed to check it; punishments have been devised to frighten off men from indulging it; whole classes have been put into dull and formless costumes to crucify it. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... of the school period comes the dawn of the process of adolescence, and the simple egotism, the egotistical affections of the child begin to be troubled by new interests, new vague impulses, and presently by a flood of as yet formless emotions. The race, the species, is claiming the individual, endeavouring to secure the individual for its greater ends. In the space of a few years the almost sexless boy and girl have become consciously sexual, are troubled by ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... scientists. Thus they tell us that the account given us in Genesis of the Creation is certainly wrong. That man was not created as man, but that he has grown to be what he is through a series of stages. According to Professor Haeckel, the pedigree of man is as follows:—1. Monera—formless little lumps of mucus matter supposed to be originated by spontaneous generation. 2. Amoebae—a little piece of protoplasm enclosing a kernel. 3. Synamoebae—a collection of Amoebae. 4. Planaeada. 5. Gastraeada, ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would have him by the throat, and pluck him, strangling and screaming, from his sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at times very strange: at times they were almost formless, he would be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than a certain hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on every detail of circumstance, as when once he supposed he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dream of wanderings in thick pathless forests, an endless search for something lost: an eternity of vague formless dreams. Searching searching, and finding nothing: an infinite sorrow for something ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... loving. More beautiful than starlight is the face of the lover when the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance (which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, what for him in the motion of waters? ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... it increasingly clear to the American people that dangers within are less to be feared than dangers from without. If, therefore, a solution of this problem of idle men and idle capital is the price of preserving our liberty, no formless selfish fears can stand in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... body to win another by work, too feeble in mind, even if he had had the knife, to contrive that it should serve its one purpose. He was a shattered, bewildered, lonely old man; yet he desired to live: he waited for something of which he had no distinct vision—something dim, formless—that startled him, and made strong pulsations within him, like that unknown thing which we look for when we start from sleep, though no voice or touch has waked us. Baldassarre desired to live; and therefore he crept out in the grey light, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... men, who make comprehensible to the latter the utterances of the gods; the demons, he thinks, are servants of the gods and execute their will. They make visible to men in works and words the invisible and inexpressible things of the gods; the formless they reveal in forms and they reveal in concepts what transcends all concepts. From the gods they receive all the good of which they are capable, partially or according to their nature, and share it again with the races that stand ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... function of the interplanetary being. It is composed of substance termed matter, which substance is the aggregation of countless atoms, which science has not, and never can, resolve into their individual selves. These atoms are rings of the atomless ether, which, thus differentiated from the formless ether, become centers of force, the center of such force being a vacuum within the atomic ring—a center so small that a microscope with lens one thousand times as powerful as the most perfect modern instrument would fail to reveal it. These atoms ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly; Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Nicholas; apart from the expression, or as it seems to me want of expression, the modelling of the head is not only poor but very poor. The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose is entirely wanting in that play of line and surface which an old man's nose affords; no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely as nature has made it, but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as that in Rembrandt's younger portrait ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... indications in the civilization of the Greeks. It is mainly in connection with the two gods Apollo and Dionysus that the phenomena in question occur; gods whose cult was introduced comparatively late into Greece and who brought with them from the north something of its formless but pregnant mystery; as though at a point the chain of guardian deities was broken, and the terror and forces of the abyss pressed in upon the charmed circle of Hellas. For Apollo, who in one of his aspects is a figure so typically Hellenic, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... we feel to be so much more real than our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which to many minds will seem uncalled for and ridiculous. I mean the experiment of trying to visualize, by an arbitrary exercise of fancy, the sort of form or shape which this formless and shapeless thing may be ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Mission buildings. What memories had already gathered about these! What experiences lay behind the men and women who lived there! What a land was this she had chosen to make her dwelling-place—a land formless, mysterious, terrible, ruled by witchcraft and the terrorism of secret societies; where the skull was worshipped and blood-sacrifices were offered to jujus; where guilt was decided by ordeal of poison and boiling ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... of him. And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... the Providence that orders the creation of to-day engraved in every stony feature of their obsolete organisms. We have broken into that mysterious chamber, the chosen studio of the Infinite Artist, where, beneath its marble or crystalline dome, he fashions the embryo from its formless fluids. And as we turn reluctantly away, the accents we have once already heard linger with us: "In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... have suspected the workings of that brain by a look at Dirty Fingers on the porch of his Good Old Queen Bess. He was a great soft lump of a man, a giant of flabbiness. Sitting in his smooth-worn, wooden armchair, he was almost formless. His head was huge, his hair uncut and scraggy, his face smooth as a baby's, fat as a cherub's, and as expressionless as an apple. His folded arms always rested on a huge stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enormous watch-chain made from beaten nuggets of Klondike ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... there must be those not wholly captured on the one hand by formless superstition; and on the other hand not bound within the tightly narrowed circle of weight and measurement! Surely man must know by now he could not capture the inner meaning of a thing through a description of ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... formless grace This molded outline plays about; A pitying flame, beyond our trace, Breathes like a spirit, ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... proud of him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... efficient European professional standards of technic, which may result in an absolute failure of poetic musical comprehension. These should not be transplanted here from European soil. The other is the non-technical, sentimental, formless species of teaching which can only result in emotional enervation. Yet if forced to choose between the two the former would be preferable since without tools it is impossible to carve anything of beauty. The final beauty of the violin tone, the pure legato, remains in the beginning as in ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... wagon drove up the mountain trail to the house, the hounds came belling joyously to meet them; but no light gleamed cheerfully from the windows; no door was flung gayly open; no little Huldy cried out her glad greeting. Filled with formless apprehensions, Pap climbed over the wheel, lifted Cornelia down, and dreading they knew not what, the two went,—holding by each other's hand,—opened the door, and entered, shrinking and reluctant. They blew the smouldering coals to a little flame, piled on light-wood ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in its struggle against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... so slightly in the Tube. And then he caught a vague, distant uproar. It would have been faint and confused at best but the Tube was partly blocked by Smithers' body, and there were the multiple bends further to complicate the echoes. It was no more than a formless tumult through which faint yells came occasionally. It drew nearer and nearer. Tommy heard Smithers stir suddenly, almost as if he had jumped. Then there were scrapings which could only mean one thing: Smithers was climbing out of the Tube ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... in fitful beauty, Every moment fraught with change, Every break and mystic chasm Opening up a Heaven-range: Now the eastern peaks are kindling Glow as though the Morning's heart Throbbed against them, while the formless Clouds ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... reverie, l'aneantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixe sur des apparitions confuses dans le lointain; and it is those very qualities, still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in the Black Book of Carmarthen, in the Book of Taliesin, in the Red Book of Hergest, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and confusing ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... week-end's dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... a kind of Platonic agnosticism; they offer no solution of the formless mystery; but they seem rather to indicate the hope that, in the multiplying of human relationship, in devotion to all we hold dear, in the enkindling of the soul by all that is generous and noble and unselfish, lies the best hope of the individual and of the ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Responsibility—vast, vague, formless—is yours. Only the fact that you are wholly occupied with the exigence of the moment prevents your understanding of what it is, but it hovers dark and depressing behind your possible failure. You must win. This ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... by which he had entered, and passed outside, hiding again among the trees of the Zocalo. The night was very cold and he shivered once more, as he stood there waiting. The night was so dark that the cathedral was almost a formless bulk. But above it, the light in the slender lantern shone like a friendly star. While he looked the great bell of Santa Maria de Guadalupe in the western tower began to chime, and presently the smaller bell ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight, Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night; Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, Frozen stiff in the ice pack, brittle and bent like a bow; Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust? ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... his senses now became preternaturally acute. His surroundings were no longer dim and formless, rather everything grew inhumanly sharp and vivid. To the end of his life he would preserve an extraordinarily faithful recollection of the room into which Cheniston presently ushered him—the usual hotel bedroom in India, with high green walls, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... astir as if it were one vast wing unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos, which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell. But as it happened nobody was keeping ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... or any one at all. Something was going on, he supposed, but he scarcely troubled himself to wonder what. The girl was doubtless making herself boudoirs or something of the sort in a new part of the house. He closed his eyes entirely, there in the dusky room, and let the web of dreary, gray, formless thought ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Mr. Melcombe saw this haze dissolve itself and retreat; there was light enough to make the paleness whiter, and to show the distinct brown trunk of each pear-tree, with the cushions of green moss at its roots. Formless whiteness and visible dusk had divided themselves into light and shade, then came a shaft of sunshine, the boughs laden with dewy blossom sparkled like snow, and in one instant the oppression of their solemnity was over, and they appeared to smile ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... have led my readers to expect a tolerable weekly entertainment for some time, but I had no plot in mind and I had not the remotest notion as to whither I was going. I struggled on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe, in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked all my characters into such ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... source of all happiness; I am the humbler of all pride; I am omnipresent; I am infinite; I am the Lord of the senses; and my prowess is great. O Brahmana, alone do I set a-going the wheel of Time; I am formless; I am the Destroyer of all creatures; and I am the cause of all efforts of all my creatures. O best of Munis, my soul completely pervadeth all my creatures, but, O foremost of all regenerate ones, no one ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... tremendous. After passages of dark music, in which the formless ugly reigned, occurred the poetic duel between Sordello and Eglamor at Palma's Court of Love. But why all this stress and fury? On the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick riotous orchestration came a disillusioning ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... naught save of wanderings, And this poor bosom's weight. What pang is here, Which all my pressing cannot ease away? Poor heart! poor heart! Oh, I have travelled far, And in the forest's brooding place, or where Night-shrouded surges beat on lonely shores, Have sickened with my deep, dread, formless fears; But, never have I felt what now I feel! Great Spirit, hear me! help ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... in sociology are not dry treatises, based on Blue books and the gathering together of information and statistics from a formless and largely worthless collection of earlier sources. He has approached this question of man in relation to the State in the same generous spirit displayed in his works of fiction; and it is only by using the word "sociology" in its fuller sense ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... cost him many an anxious, given him many a pleasant, hour. For seven years it had continued in a state of irregular, and oft-suspended progress; sometimes 'lying endless and formless' before him; sometimes on the point of being given up altogether. The multitude of ideas, which he wished to incorporate in the structure of the piece, retarded him; and the difficulty of contenting his taste, respecting the manner of effecting this, retarded him still more. In Wallenstein he wished ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... dark when he turned off the main road and started up the long hill toward the Bolton place—not just dark, but a blackness so profound that the mare between the shafts was only a half formless splotch of gray as she plodded along ahead. Even his dread of the place, which formerly had been so acute, did not penetrate the mental misery that wrapped him; he did not vouchsafe so much as one uneasy glance ahead until a glimmer of light which seemed to flash out from the rear ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of white smoke, and brown, springing into quick existence; some expanded to balloon size and swept majestically onward, upward; some, caught in a vortex of madness,—swirling, writhing, darting,—formed devilishly gruesome arabesques that yet were formless; some burst like pon-pons; some released long streamers and darted earthward. Jeb's eyes were held by this appalling grandeur; his soul was chained, numbed, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... and draws to it some floating films from secret canons. Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... 55A shows one of these animals which has just eaten a man. Both figures are so realistic that the intention of the weaver is apparent. In B, D, E, and F, the animal is still realistic, but the man disappears, and in his place is a formless object or straight lines which ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... coach, and feeling that I was unconsciously assuming, in imitation of a humble insect of my childish recollection, that spherical shape which could best resist those impressions, when I perceived that the moon, riding high in the heavens, had begun to separate the formless masses of the shadowy landscape. Trees isolated, in clumps, and assemblages, changed places before my window. The sharp outlines of the distant hills came back as in daylight, but little softened in the dry, cold, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... any recognised religious community, but the members of it had belonged to many—to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came—by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the looseness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness of the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... first like the broken fragments of a many-sided polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable, a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius shoots through it, and its elements rush together and glitter before us in a single translucent drop. It would ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... formless fears for Berna were soon set at rest. She was awaiting me. She looked better than I had ever seen her, and she welcomed me with an eager delight that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... formless garments of these unfortunates made us all wince. But the government's calculation aroused our hot indignation. We were not convicted until Tuesday and our prison garments ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Voice! Minister of God's spirit, who wast sent To wait upon Him first, what time He went Moving about 'mid the tumultuous noise Of each unpiloted element Upon the face of the void formless deep! Thou who didst come unbodied and alone, Ere yet the sun was set his rule to keep, Or ever the moon shone, Or e'er the wandering star-flocks forth were driven! Thou garment of the Invisible, whose skirt Falleth on all things from the lofty heaven! Thou Comforter, be ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... group of sculpture, has been placed, rather unfortunately, in front of the main west portal of the Palace of Machinery. It is by Daniel Chester French, who is generally considered the dean of American sculptors. The Genius of Creation is portrayed as a huge winged figure, enthroned over the formless mass of earth, with head bowed and arms outstretched, calling human life into being. At the two sides a man and a woman, fine strong figures both, stand looking forth, the man courageously, the woman a little more timidly. And at the back, as if to signify the mutual dependence of man and woman, ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... the hamlet three minutes later, she began to recognize that the news must be really serious; and that beneath all her serenity she had been aware of its possibility. So intense now was that anxiety—though perfectly formless in its details—that all other faculties seemed absorbed into it. She could not frame any imagination as to what it meant; she could form no plan, alternative or absolute, as to what must be done. She was only aware that something had happened, and that she would ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... the harbour blended into a close, dark and dead spot, faceless, formless, motionless. Foma went away from the rail and began to pace the ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... fabled world of the East; where for many a year to come they were to divide a monopoly authorised by the Papal Bull of Alexander VI. Before another century closed, their dominion was to be challenged by England grown mighty and by Holland emancipated. As yet, however, men dreamed only formless if gorgeous dreams of what the unknown realms might bring forth. England played no very large part in these early voyages. Christopher Columbus, craving to discover a westerly route to the Indies, and failing of Portuguese support, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... and Juan touched his hat and went sidling off like a crab and then once more the black devil came back to plague him, hissing Money, Money, MONEY! He looked up the street and a plan, long formless, took sudden shape in his brain. There was yet McBain, the horse-leech of a lawyer who had beaten him out of his claim. More than once, in black moments, he had threatened to kill him; but now he was glad he had not. Men even raised skunks, when the ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... is part of my intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits and witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS of decadence—which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine token ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such "household arts" as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her, until she made ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... forces were locked within that formless mass? By what manner of race as yet unborn had its elements been brought together—no, no—would they be brought together? How assume a comfortable mental attitude toward this creation whose present existence so long antedated its ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... casement—the smoke rolled over both the fugitives—a groan, or rather howl, of rage, and despair, and agony, appalled even the hardest on whose ear it came. Morton sprang to his feet and looked below. He saw on the rugged stones far down, a dark, formless, motionless mass—the strong man of passion and levity—the giant who had played with life and soul, as an infant with the baubles that it prizes and breaks—was what the Caesar and the leper alike are, when the clay is without God's breath—what glory, genius, power, and beauty, would be for ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enigmatic. Tacitus and Suetonius saw him already enveloped in the mist of that new spirit which for so many centuries was to conceal from human eyes the wonderful spectacle of the pagan world. Then the mist became a fog and grew denser, until Augustus disappeared, or was but a formless shadow. Centuries passed by; the fog began to withdraw before the returning sun of the ancient culture; his figure reappeared. Fifty years ago, the obscurity cleared quite away; the figure stands in plain view with outlines well defined. I believe that the ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... to the zenith, black with bale, The Gipsies' smoke rose deadly pale; And one wide night of hopeless hue Hid from the heart the recent blue. And soon, with thunder crackling loud, A flash reveal'd the formless cloud: Lone sailing rack, far wavering rim, And billowy tracts of stormland dim. We stood, safe group'd beneath a shed. Grace hid behind Jane's gown for dread, Who told her, fondling with her hair, 'The naughty noise! but God took care Of all good girls.' John seem'd to me Too ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... pity on all men when they come Unto the border haunted of dismay; When that they know not draweth very near— The other thing, the opposite of day, Formless and ghastly, sick, and gaping-dumb, Before which even love doth lose his cheer: O radiant ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... world is alive and athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used—and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown—as unknown as ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... me rolleth a waste of water ... and above me go rolling the storm clouds, the formless dark gray daughters of air, which from the sea in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful, wearisome business. Over the sea, flat ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... until at last the Mayrah became enraged, went to his tribe, and told them of the curiosity of the other tribes as to their bodily forms. The others became as furious as he was; they all burst with rage and rushed away roaring in six different directions, and ever since have only returned as formless wind to be heard but never seen. So savagely the Mayrah howled round the Doolungaiyah's camp that he burrowed into the sand to escape, and his tribe ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... association, are challenged and threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activity of our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient system whose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life with the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either to involve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by some new and probably more elaborate ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Of feature More dark, more dark, more dark than skies, Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise: Darkly wise as a formless fate And if he be great If he be great, then rudely great, Rudely great as a plough that plies, And darkly ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist if ever there was one. I turn to his Land of the Dollar and I find New York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive me for saying that this is simply libellous. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... seaweed. Their drapery of algae hangs in festoons, and if we draw aside these submarine curtains, scenes from a veritable fairyland are disclosed. Deep pools of water, clear as crystal and icy cold, contain creatures both hideous and beautiful, sombre and iridescent, formless and of exquisite shape. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... so well as you think, for when you have this Niafer I shall return to you in the appearance of a light formless cloud, and I shall rise about you, not suddenly but a little by a little. So shall you see through me the woman for love of whom your living was once made high-hearted and fearless, and for whose sake death was derided, and paradise was ransacked: and you will ask forlornly, 'Was it ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... emotion]. Nay, Svanhild, do not jest: behind your scoff Tears glitter,—O, I see them plain enough. And I see more: when you to dust are fray'd, And kneaded to a formless lump of clay, Each bungling dilettante's scalpel-blade On you his dull devices shall display. The world usurps the creature of God's hand And sets its image in the place of His, Transforms, enlarges that part, lightens this; And when ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many- coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... of men's voices and tinkle of working tools suggested that the occupants were busy. The scarcely visible sea made pleasant little kissing murmurs on the lip-edges of the sand, and Nature, drowsing in misty space, seemed no more than the formless void of the traditional beginning ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... simplest living things, the Monera, are nothing more than homogeneous masses of protein substance. "They live, but without organs of life; all the phenomena of their life, nutrition and reproduction, movement and irritability, appear here as merely the immediate outcome of formless organic matter, itself an albumen compound" ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... of Moses, The earliest scribe that we keep: Void was the earth and formless, And dark was the face of the deep, Till God's word flashed in lightning, Beautiful, bountiful, bright, And night was the name of the darkness, And day was the name of ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... very sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge of that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds. No countryside is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but on studying such a map one understands the scheme ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... in its beginning, the Church was soft-bodied and formless in all these respects; but she had within her the power of fashioning to herself a framework suited to her needs, of assuming consistency and definite shape in due time. The old bottles would not serve to hold the new wine, but this did ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... formless uneasiness were graver considerations. He could not but admit to himself that he had by his expressed order placed himself to some extent in Saleratus Bill's power. He did not for a moment doubt the gun-man's loyal intentions. As long as things went well he would ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... for he knew something about navigation. They had taught him the principles of land-surveying at the agricultural college, and this had made his studies easier. When he came back the moon was getting bright, but the haze had thickened on the low ground and the heights behind had faded to a vague, formless blur. The trail of smoke had vanished, there was no wind, and the smooth swell broke against the bows with a monotonous dull roar as the Rio Negro went on. She was alone on the heaving water and steaming slowly, but the ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... alone in the darkness. There was still a chink of light above the sill, a warm, mild glow behind the window; the roof of the cottage and some of the banks and hazels were defined in denser darkness against the sky; but all else was formless, breathless, and noiseless like the pit. Dick remained as she had left him, standing squarely on one foot and resting only on the toe of the other, and as he stood he listened with his soul. The sound of a chair pushed sharply over the floor ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... dreams by night and troubled thoughts by day Disturb the prince and banish quiet sleep. He dreamed that darkness, visible and dense, Shrouded the heavens and brooded o'er the earth, Whose rayless, formless, vacant nothingness Curdled his blood and made his eyeballs ache; When suddenly from out this empty void A cloud, shining with golden light, was borne By gentle winds, loaded with sweet perfumes, Sweeter than spring-time on this earth ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... even another lost soul. And then the panics of which there have been no records and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die in mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of a formless past—except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from which one wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the long ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to which he unconsciously extended his rambles, were entirely lost upon the abstracted wanderer. Grand old trees, romantic walks, delicious flowers, had no existence for him; the whole world was one great, hueless, formless void, in which he beheld nothing but the spectral image mirrored ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this publication of myself.—After ten or twelve weeks I think I shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... In fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a musical genius. He had taken no lessons and yet his manipulation of the keys was marvellous, but all by ear. Chords, arpeggios, diminished sevenths, modulation, expression, all were mixed up in formless melody. The boy knew nothing, but felt everything. In Von Barwig's experience it had generally ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... his foolish labours in the cool of the evening. They sat together, hand in hand, under the mulberry tree, at the coming of the dusk, and as the ugly walls about them became obscure and vanished into the formless world of shadows, they seemed to be freed from the bondage of Shepherd's Bush, freed to wander in that undisfigured, undefiled world that lies beyond the walls. Of this region Mary knew little or nothing by experience, since her relations had always been ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... most exciting practice-race between three of the canoes, the Lirongs, with the main mass of the Tinjar people, came down the broad straight reach. It was that most beautiful half-hour of the tropical day, between the setting of the sun and the fall of darkness — the great forest stood black and formless, while the sky and the smooth river were luminous with delicate green and golden light. The Lirongs were in full war dress, with feathered coats of leopard skin and plumed caps plaited of tough rattan, and very effective they were as they came ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... ago made himself responsible for the first feeble utterances of an orchestra that tried to say something for itself, divined the possibilities of expression in varying combinations of tone-quality and gave vigorous impulse to the germ of the symphony already existing in the formless instrumental preludes and interludes of his predecessors among opera-makers. His revelation of the charm that lies in exploring the resources of instrumentation led to ever increasing demands on the ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... request, Urgent as 'twere of instant life and death, That I should call ye here. What care can move Such anxious thought in her, on this the eve Of the high festival herself has founded, I know not, but 'twould seem the very air Is full of floating rumours, vague alarms, Formless suspicions which elude the grasp, Unspoken presages of coming ill Which take no shape. For whence should danger come? We are at peace with all. Our former foe Is now our dearest friend; the Prince Asander, Though of a hasty spirit and high temper, Dwells in such close, concordant harmony ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is a part of the day's unity. At evening, nature is absorbed by another experience. She dislikes to explain as much as to repeat. It is conceivable, that what is unified form to the author, or composer, may of necessity be formless to his audience. A home-run will cause more unity in the grand stand than in the season's batting average. If a composer once starts to compromise, his work will begin to drag on HIM. Before the end is reached, his inspiration has all gone up in sounds pleasing to his audience, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him, formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... for life Forgets to live; and next him Lust of Fame, Nobler Aruparaga, she whose spell Beguiles the wise, mother of daring deeds, Battles and toils. And haughty Mano came, The Fiend of Pride; and smooth Self-Righteousness. Uddhachcha; and—with many a hideous band Of vile and formless things, which crept and flapped Toad-like and bat-like—Ignorance, the Dam Of Fear and Wrong, Avidya, hideous hag, Whose footsteps left the midnight darker, while The rooted mountains shook, the wild winds howled, The broken ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... iron mixed with our black lead but nothing to hinder its crystallisation. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless diamond, though they would be HHH pencils to purpose, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has played ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... stupendous sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, Him contains, Even to the least up-groping atom. His The impulse and the ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... A shape of the sea-mist, A shape of the brumal Rain, and the darkness Fearful and formless; Day dawns and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... feature More dark, more dark, more dark than skies, Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise: Darkly wise as a formless fate. And if he be great, If he be great, then rudely great, Rudely great as a plough that plies, And ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished courts and unroofed galleries ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... first brief order, one by one undoing the buttons of her dress, laying bare her poor chest, all flat and formless as a child's. A momentary gentleness came over him as he adjusted the tubes of his stethoscope and began the sounding, backwards and forwards from heart to lungs, and from lungs to heart again; while the Old Lady looked on as merry as Destiny, and nodded her head and smiled, as much ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... no other way of cultivating us. A formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted World. What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, so long ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... gesture, quick and spontaneous, meant nothing to Florrie, nothing to Galloway, and a very great deal to Virginia Page. For it was essentially protective; it served to emphasize in her own mind a fear which until now had been a mere formless mist, a fear for her frivolous little friend. Galloway's whole being was so expressive of conscious power, Florrie's of vacillating impulsiveness, that it required no considerable burden laid upon the imagination to picture the girl coming if he called . . . if he called with the look in his ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... camping-ground after a ride of three hours and thirty minutes ( nine miles), we crossed two short divides, and descended the Wady el-Kusayb, which gives a name to "Sharp Peak." Here a few formless stone-heaps and straggling bushes represented the ruins, the gardens of palms, and the bullrushes of the Bedawi shepherd lads.[EN20] Our tents had been pitched in the rond-point of the Wady Surr, which before had given us hospitality (February 19th), on a Safh or high bouldery ledge of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless shadow. She wished— ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... round, and they have a vision of the world beyond. But the others labour in vain; for the mortal steed, if he has not been properly trained, keeps them down and sinks them towards the earth. Of the world which is beyond the heavens, who can tell? There is an essence formless, colourless, intangible, perceived by the mind only, dwelling in the region of true knowledge. The divine mind in her revolution enjoys this fair prospect, and beholds justice, temperance, and knowledge in their everlasting essence. ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes? Such things ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... cliffs, long slopes of moor, and spurs of mountain-range. Oh, those smooth white walls and ceilings! If there had but been a print—a stain of dirt—a cobweb, to fleck their unbroken ghastliness! They stared at me, like grim, impassive, featureless formless fiends; all the more dreadful for their sleek, hypocritic cleanliness—purity as of a saint-inquisitor watching with spotless conscience the victim on the rack. They choked me—I gasped for breath, stretched out my arms, rolled shrieking on the floor—the narrow ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the observing-chair a long time,' he answered. 'And when I walk home afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there, but cannot see, as one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only reveals a very little of itself. That's partly what I meant by saying that magnitude, which up to a certain point has grandeur, has ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy |
