Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Gossamer   /gˈɑsəmər/   Listen
Gossamer

noun
1.
A gauze fabric with an extremely fine texture.
2.
Filaments from a web that was spun by a spider.  Synonym: cobweb.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Gossamer" Quotes from Famous Books



... very beautiful, and his affection for her had fought with and triumphed over the cruel opposition of father, mother, and relations, who had other designs. He had made enemies of them all; but he won his wife, and, casting her in the scale, father, mother, and friends were as gossamer. She died two years after the wedding—to the very day. Rich in her love, he had never taken a thought to propitiate anybody, nor to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, and when she suddenly ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... a hat, but it is a great thing to have them. Teresa, a sweet round purse of blue leather, of the size to hold a five peseta piece; Micaela, a handkerchief with lace on the edge, and me an embroidered veil like a gossamer. What did we care that Her Majesty the mother would have sent us away if she could? She had not enough Spanish to make us understand what we did not wish to understand, and at last she saved her breath for ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... merino-wool. It is of varying thickness, and many ladies, both young and old, are adopting it for combinations; these and one petticoat forming the whole of the clothing. Of course, the thickness of these garments is to be suited to the season, and the gossamer clothing manufactured for the warm season leaves nothing to be desired in its ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various

... Clara, maiden sisters of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... were pushed back, and Peter, with this fairy-like creature in a dinner-gown of most fetching pink gossamer clinging to his arm, took to the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... fashion of Cicero's epistolary productions. He talks about the weather, past, present, and to come. He serves up, with piquant sauce, occurrences which he would not have thought worthy of mention at his own breakfast-table. He spins out his two or three facts or ideas into the finest and flimsiest gossamer; or tucks them into a postscript, which alone, with the formula, should have been forwarded. He writes in a large hand, and resorts to every kind of device to fill up his sheet, instead of taking the manly course of writing only so long as he had something to say, or, if nothing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs." They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... lamp in the dewy brake; By the gossamer's airy net; By the shifting skin of the faithless snake, Oh, teach me to forget: For none, ah none Can teach so well that human ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... been a sprite in that place, who could have hopped invisibly to some elevated pinnacle, or have soared on gossamer wings into the air, so as to take a bird's-eye view of the whole scene, he would have noted that while March Marston and the artist were toiling slowly through the Wild-Cat Pass, the solitary hunter before referred to regarded their proceedings with ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... to begin with," said Rose, placing the gossamer note before her.—Mrs. Myles mechanically took up the money, and played with it as a child plays with a toy, and Rose read the few words that accompanied the gift:—"Grieved to the heart to hear of the illness of her ever dear relative—would be miserable about her but from the knowledge ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... notwithstanding the decidedly wintry aspect of the Sierras, the low temperature of the Rockies farther east is unknown; and although there is snow to the right, snow to the left, snow all around, and ice under foot, I travel all through the gloomy sheds in my shirt-sleeves, with but a gossamer rubber coat thrown over my shoulders to keep off the snow- water which is constantly melting and dripping through the roof, making it almost like going through a shower of rain. Often, when it is warm and balmy outside, it is cold and frosty under the sheds, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... old earth renews her youth With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze. How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth, While all is fresh as in the early days! What simple things be these the soul to raise To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat, With nameless ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... lost in thought in the darkening shrine. Then sleep fell on me and in my sleep I dreamed a dream, or saw a vision. For suddenly there stood before me a woman beauteous as myself clad in nothing save a golden girdle and a veil of gossamer. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... fell into a series of fitful dozes. He dreamed the room in which he was sleeping was suddenly transformed into a huge spider web from which there was no escape. And he caught glimpses of Storch himself hanging spider-wise from a gossamer thread, spinning dizzily in midair... He awoke repeatedly, returning as often to the same dream. Toward morning he heard a faint stirring about. But he lay huddled in a pretense of sleep... Finally the door banged and he knew that Storch had left... He let ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... them a short valley led down to Katmai and the sea. The day was bright, the air clear, nevertheless after the guide had stared up at the peaks for a time he shook his head, then reentered the tent and lay down. The mountains were "smoking"; from their tops streamed a gossamer veil which the travelers knew to be drifting snow clouds carried by the wind. It meant delay, but ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... to try on the pretty frock after all," cried the Witch, and drew her up the stairs. Eric followed to the yellow room. "No," said Ivra. But the Witch brought it out and tried to slip it over her head. It was sheerest gossamer web, and shimmered like moonlight. And the little rosebuds seemed to make it belong ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot

... long train sweeping across the hearth where that morning she had knelt in such utter desolation, and where now was lying a bit of blackened paper, which the housemaid's broom had not found when, early in the day, the room was swept and dusted. So Ethelyn's white satin brushed against the gossamer thing, which floated upward for a moment, and then settled back upon the heavy, shining folds. It was Richard who saw it first, and Richard's hand which brushed away the skeleton of Frank's letter from the skirts of his bride, leaving ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes

... 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... hung with woods and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From cockcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... this spot into the distance at every hour of the day and season of the year. But the fairest time of all on the Steiger was at sunset, on clear autumn days, when the scene close at hand, where the threads of gossamer were floating, was steeped in golden light, the distance in such exquisite tints-from crimson to the deepest violet blue, edged with a line of light-the Saale glimmered with a silvery lustre amid its fringe of alders, and the sun flashed on the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... turned on and began to descend in gossamer lances to the mimic flower-beds and gravel walks of the stage. The richly dressed actresses and actors tripped about singing bravely and pretending not to mind it. The King was delighted—his enthusiasm ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... wool in the upper heavens Gossamer wings unfurl; Sailing so high they seem but sleeping Over yon bar ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... she became very restless, and went pecking about with her beak. All at once she spread out her wings, with a sound like a whirlwind, and flew off to bathe in the sea; and then the spiders began to drop from her in all directions on their gossamer wings. The children had to hold fast to keep the wind of the eagle's flight from blowing them off. As soon as it was over, they looked into the nest, and there lay the giant's heart—an ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald

... May-fly comes in, which he generally does in June. Then the Kennet is a lovely and seductive spectacle to the angler. Between the turns of sun and shower the most beautiful delicate insects, frail as gossamer and fair as a fairy, are born, and flit for their hour, and float down the water, soon to be swallowed by the big four-pound trout. He who has no experience of this angling, and who comes to it from practice in the North, at first thinks ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through, To catch some golden cord that I saw gleaming Like gossamer against the autumn blue. ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... surrounding buildings in castellated majesty. It stood in the centre of a spacious lawn, zoned by a girdle of oaks, beneath whose dense shade the dew sparkled even at noonday. Within this zone was a hedge of cedar, so smooth, with twigs so thickly interwoven, that the gossamer thought it a framework, on which to stretch its transparent web in the morning sun. Near the house the lawn was margined with beds of the rarest and most beautiful flowers, queen roses, and all the fragrant populace of the ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... respectable Penniman home at the call of the waiting Wilbur Cowan. Her dark hair was still plainly, though rather effectively, drawn about her small head—she had definitely rebuffed the suggestion of her mother that it be marcelled—but her wisp of a frock of bronze gossamer was revolutionary in the extreme. Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising aplomb, bore the scrutiny of the family ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... ship, the decks were a patchwork of bright, eerie light and black shadow. The bellying sails and the woof of cordage aloft, seemed unsubstantial, like a gossamer weaving. The quiet ship noises, and the subdued murmur of voices ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... morning in late August brings back the thought of Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... main point for notice in the chapter is the purchase of his body for its "weight in gold." Swindling angels held it up in the scales; it did not weigh so much as a web of gossamer. "Had such excellent odor, too, and came for a mere nothing of gold," says Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has been proud of ceasing to invest in relics, its swindling ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... wonder why she doesn't freeze stiff when the thermometer falls to the twenty-above mark. Observe her in a ballroom that is overheated in the corners and draughty near the windows, as all ballrooms are. Her neck and her throat, her bosom and arms are bare. Her frock is of the filmiest gossamer stuff; her slippers are paper thin, her stockings the sheerest of textures, yet she doesn't sniff and her nose doesn't turn red and the skin upon her exposed shoulders refuses to goose-flesh. She is the marvel of the ages. She is neither too warm nor too cold; she is ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... to various individuals of the other sex, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that Johnny's affectations are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. Take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... glass. It was only when I had reached a neighborhood where the houses were few and the gardens many, a neighborhood where the closely-knitted town began to fringe out into country, that I came to the end of my dream. And what was the dream? The slightest of tissues, madam; a gossamer, a web of shadows, a thing woven out of starlight. Looking at it by day, I find that its colors are pallid, and its threaded diamonds—they were merely the perishable dews of that June night—have evaporated in the sunshine; but such as it is you ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... to the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!—Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland

... may seem a most curious place to choose to live in; but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home, household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did see him, which you are not likely to do—only a little ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... falling mantles over dresses never cognizant of crinoline: gentlemen, with cocked-hats, their bag-wigs and ties appearing behind; and beneath their puce-coloured coats, delicate silk tights and gossamer stockings were visible, as they trod the mossy lawn of the Palace Gardens at Richmond, or, followed by a tiny greyhound, prepared for the lazy pleasures ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... mornings in Jamaica, when the sun, appearing through a cloudless and serene atmosphere, illumines with his rays the summits of the mountains, and gilds the leaves of the plantain and orange-trees. The plants are spread over with gossamer of fine and transparent silk, or gemmed with dew-drops, and the vivid hues of industrious insects, reflecting unnumbered tints from the rays of the sun. The aspect of the richly cultivated valleys is different, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... nineteen times did she cast off one of her suits of clothes, till at last she had only her every-day suit left, and he had only his human skin left. Then he threw off his last skin also, and it flew about in the air like a gossamer, whereupon she seized hold of it and threw it into the fire that was burning on the hearth till it was all consumed, and he stood before her no longer a serpent, but a simple Tsarevich. Then they married and lived happily together, but the ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous

... North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns. At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... this thread of gold— 'Tis fine as web of lightest gossamer. And, but there is a spell on't, would not bind, Light as they are, the folds of my thin robe. But when 'twas donn'd, it was a massive chain, Such as might bind ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... whom he misleads—"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists: but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... the other the sweet apple hiding; And that beneath her feet, divinely fair, Fresh flowers sprang forth, the barren sands dividing; Then that, with glad smiles and enticements rare, The three nymphs round their queen, embosoming her, Threw the starred mantle soft as gossamer. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... Here again in other directions we may trace the same essentials: there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. This may be airy, light, and gossamer, or turgid and obscure: it may be commonplace or ponderous. Like Nature, it may have a thousand or a myriad shades to mirror as many moods and tenses. It may have the misty filminess of steam, the limpid deeps of water, or the cold weight and icy ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade Doris away from ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled, and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... on a technicality and fall down, it looks like amusement ahead, and if a District of Columbia rule, or martial law, or tocsin of war is the result, Gov. Murray is a good style of war governor. He isn't the kind of a man to put on his wife's gossamer cloak and meander over into Montana. He would give the matter his attention, and you would find him in the neighborhood when the national government decided to sit down on disorderly conduct in Utah. The first lever to be used will be the great wealth ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... the false veneer of civilisation peeled off long ago," the Maluka said, adding, with a sly look at my discarded gloves and gossamer, "It's wonderful how quietly the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... lifting the heavy corn in either hand, carrying it, as it hung heavily against her, to the cleared space, where she set the two sheaves sharply down, bringing them together with a faint, keen clash. Her two bulks stood leaning together. He was coming, walking shadowily with the gossamer dusk, carrying his two sheaves. She waited near-by. He set his sheaves with a keen, faint clash, next to her sheaves. They rode unsteadily. He tangled the tresses of corn. It hissed like a fountain. He looked up ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... of marble steps, servants in livery were seen receiving the shawls and hats of the guests, as carriage after carriage deposited its brilliant contents at the house of the financier. Mingled with the black coats of the gentlemen, and the gossamer attire of the ladies, were seen the brilliant uniforms of officers of the army and navy. The crowd poured into the magnificent ball room, where, flanked by her husband, and by the indefatigable Monsieur Charmant, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... scattered; the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown on the threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle down and dandelion down, the brown down of the goat's-beard; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores twirling aslant—the wind carries them all on its back, gossamer web and great heron's vanes—the same weight to the wind; the drops of the waterfall blown aside sprinkle the bright green ferns. The voice of the cuckoo in his season travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the most distant hill, and deep ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... Gossamer veils hung everywhere over the level country, big drops fell from the trees on the dry leaves carpeting the ground, and the cold in the woods threatened to paralyze little Maya's wings. No ray of the dawn had as yet found its way between the trees. The air was ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them to the demands of fancy and thought. The nice optics that see what is not to be seen have passed into a sarcastic proverb; yet those are precisely the eyes that are in the heads and brains of all who ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... right shoulder she could see the spider-silk cover on the bed. Right in the middle of that sheer, gossamer expanse was a sparkling heap of gems, the dumped contents of some jewel case. Bat had jumped to the foot of the bed and flattened out as cats will, watching those gems, watching them ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton

... he, with a gesture including his frock coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me a suit of armour. At any rate that's ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron—the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded into ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... high class trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part. He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequered waistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats light as autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with a diamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock

... turned to grope; and I retiring brushed Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face, And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed; He should to antenatal night retrace, 70 And hide his elements in that large womb Beyond ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson

... a world where the wind sweeps clean, Where the smooth-limbed ash to the blue stands bare, And the gossamer spreads her opalled ware— And Jones is catching ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne

... speaking the last sentence, and looked very human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon, of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary. He glanced towards her again with ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... can tell what a baby thinks? Who can follow the gossamer links By which the manikin feels his way Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind, and wailing, and alone, Into the light of day?— Out from the shore of the unknown sea, Tossing in pitiful agony,— Of the unknown sea that reels and rolls, Specked with the barks of little souls— Barks that ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland

... other years, old and wistful Drifts my dream. Petal-patined the dream, white-mistful As the dew-sweet haunt of the dim whitebeam Because of memory, a little wind ... It is the gossamer-float of the butterfly This drift of dream From the sweet of to-day to the sweet Of days long drifted by. It is the drift of the butterfly, it is the fleet Drift of petals which my noon has thinned, It is the ebbing out of my life, of the petals of days. To the years, other years, drifts my dream.... ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... frame-dwelling with portico and verandahs— almost a mansion. The little maize patch, scarcely an acre in extent, is now a splendid plantation, of many fields—in which wave the golden tassels of the Indian corn, the broad leaves of another indigenous vegetable—the aromatic "Indian weed," and the gossamer-like florets of the precious cotton-plant. Even the squatter himself you would scarcely recognise, in the respectable old gentleman, who, mounted upon his cob, with a long rifle over his shoulder, rides ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... spin yarn by the primitive spinner, it was necessary for the fiber to have sufficient length to enable it to be manipulated, drawn over, and twisted by the fingers. It is noted that the yarns for the gossamer-like Dacca muslins of India were so fine that one pound of cotton was spun into a thread 253 miles long. This was accomplished with the aid of a bamboo spindle not much bigger than a darning needle, which was lightly ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... huntsmen of mound-builder days Through jungle and meadow I stride. And the Tiger Tree leaf is falling around As it fell when the world began: Like a monstrous tiger-skin, stretched on the ground, Or the cloak of a medicine man. A deep-crumpled gossamer web, Fringed with the fangs of a snake. The wind swirls it down from the leperous boughs. It shimmers on clay-hill and lake, With the gleam of great bubbles of blood, Or coiled like a rainbow shell.... I feast on the stem of the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay

... shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... genius of American poetic expression, (eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes, and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox publishers—causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial gossamer delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges—lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... turn of the hand and the finest of these threads are used in some of the fabrics which they weave. I often wondered how they could prepare these delicate, strong, linen-like threads that are as fine as gossamer. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody. The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman

... which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before. When she found herself in the midst of the dazzling ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the ties of love are but gossamer threads, which a word may rupture, a breath shake, and even the power of unpleasant associations destroy. Still, is there not one hope,—the hope that this thread, hitherto so blissfully uniting our hearts, subtle ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... Vrain looked like a sylph or a dainty shepherdess of Dresden china, and should have been arrayed in gossamer robes, rather than in the deep mourning she affected. Indeed, Lucian considered that such weeds were rather premature, as Mrs. Vrain could not yet be certain that the murdered man was her husband; but she looked so charming and childlike ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... knick-knacks of which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young American bride is often ushered into her new home,—her wardrobe all gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a museum of elegant and costly gewgaws, and, amid the whole collection of elegancies and fragilities, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Nan reflected that had she cared for him it would have been easy enough to tame him—with his tempestuous love, his savage temper, and his shamefaced "little boy" repentances! A woman who loved him in return might have led him by a thread of gossamer! It was the very fact that Nan did not love him, and that he knew it, which drove the brute in him uppermost in his dealings with her. He wanted to make her care, to bend her to his will, to force from her some response ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... evening dress trimmed with silver, that to Stonor's unaccustomed eyes seemed like gossamer and moonshine. He was entranced by her throat and by the appealing loveliness of her thin arms. "How could I ever have thought a fat woman beautiful!" he asked himself. She talked with her arms and her delightfully restless shoulders. Stonor had heard somewhere that this was ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... The best, and foremost in the cause of virtue, To death, by sword, by prison, or the halter: His sacrifice now stands the only bar Between the wanton cruelties of war, And our much-suffering soldiers: yet, when weigh'd With gratitude, for that he sav'd thy life, These things prove gossamer, and balance air:— Perversion monstrous of man's ...
— Andre • William Dunlap

... this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb—more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... that night, thinking of the coming triumph for the prince he loyally loved. He was up and in the saddle with the first glimmering light of day, and by the time that the rosy glow of dawn was transforming the fair world of nature and clothing it with an indescribable radiance of gossamer beauty, he and the prince were already a mile from the Abbey, galloping along in the fresh morning air with a glad exultation of spirit that seemed in itself like a herald ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... gazed at the scene before him. Far down in the valley lay a still blue lake with a great white peak shining ethereally at its northern end. Dark pines rolled about it, growing smaller and smaller up the hillside until they dwindled with spires clean cut against the azure into a gossamer filigree. Between them and the water stupendous forest shrouded all the valley, save where an oblong of pale verdure ran back from the fringe of boulders and was traversed by the frothing streak of a river whose roar came up hoarsely across the ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another, as a curiosity, gossamer threads of the Virgin hanging from bushes, holes full of water in the middle of stones, a squirrel on the branches, the way in which two butterflies kept flying after them; or else, at twenty paces from them, under the trees, a hind strode on peacefully, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when the magnolia opened. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... too strong to be blown away like gossamer threads. The chain is strong enough to bind life even to the world beyond the grave. Do you always feel kindly ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... there was some plot of De Malfort's contriving—De Malfort, whom she regarded with distrust and even repugnance; for she could recall no sentiment of his that did not make for evil. Beneath that gossamer veil of airy language which he flung over vicious theories, the conscienceless, unrelenting character of the man had been discovered by those clear eyes of the meditative onlooker. Alas! what a man to be her sister's closest friend, claiming privileges by long association, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke they ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... boon of being alive to-night; thanks from my heart for these! Hear, east and west, oh, hear. It is the eternal God. This silence murmuring in my ears is the blood of all Nature seething; it is God weaving through the world and me. I see a glistening gossamer thread in the light of my fire; I hear a boat rowing across the harbour; the northern lights flare over the heavens to the north. By my immortal soul, I am full of thanks that it is I ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun

... had long ignominiously withered in the wind; perhaps it was now only buried overnight for the nonce? Being dug up, or being cut down, and put into the balance, it weighed—less than was expected. It was as light as gossamer, said pious rumor, Had such an excellent odor too;—and came for a mere nothing of gold! This was Adalbert's first miracle after death; in life he had done many hundreds of them, and has done millions since,—chiefly upon paralytic nervous-systems, and the element ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... hopelessly, while the young moon rose higher and higher over the tops of the silvery poplars and young spring slipped about in the lights and shadows, invisible except for perfumed wreathings of gossamer mist. Above, I heard father pacing up and down his rooms, slowly, almost feebly. Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon a table ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... women and children, every one of whom was stretched in various attitudes upon the floor, as peacefully enfolded in the arms of Morpheus, and, perchance, as sweetly dreaming as if resting upon beds of down and pillowed upon fine linen and gossamer lace. ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... save on the occasion of a grand wedding. Mrs. Harrington had done her pleasant work famously. Not a fashionable person among her own friends, or a distinguished one known to bridegroom or bride, had been omitted. Thus the stately church was crowded. Snowy feathers waved over gossamer bonnets; lace, glittering silks, and a flash of jewels were seen on every hand, fluttering in the dim religious light around smiling faces and gracefully ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... now; the summer was past, yet the weather was fit for the height of summer. Warm, spicy, dry air, showing misty in the distance like a gossamer veil, and near by a still glow over everything. The two young people wandered over the bridge and slowly mounted the bank among the oaks and beeches, keeping in the shade as much as might be. There was a glorious ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... as they walked, the little space between them was hung with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter, binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There he stopped abruptly; at ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded sunshine flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's breast, was imitating the ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... such as this say for itself? How can it justify itself before the bar of reason? Do we realize that our neglect has Christ to reckon with? These things of which I have spoken are not the gossamer threads of human speculation; they are the strong cords of Divine truth and they cannot be broken. "You seem, sir," said Mrs. Adams to Dr. Johnson, in one of his despondent hours, when the fear of death and judgment lay heavy on him, "to forget the merits of our Redeemer." "Madam," said the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson

... luring looks more misleading than Taghut;[FN230] and his cheeks shone like the dawn rosy-red and his eyelashes stormed the keen-edged blade: the whiteness of his brow resembled the moon shining bright, and the blackness of his locks was as the murky night; and his waist was more slender than the gossamer[FN231] and his back parts than two sand heaps bulkier, making a Babel of the heart with their softness; but his waist complained of the weight of his hips and loins; and his charms ravished all mankind, even as one of the poets saith in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... gossamer and rubbers, please," when Gertrude was unreasonably provoked she had a habit of snapping out her words even more clear-cut than usual. An instant later she swept forth into the rain only to stop short and hurry in again before the door had swung shut. "We might as well look at the study first," ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... which was light and curly, cut very close, and incipient whiskers adorned the outline of his lower jaw. He was dressed in a gray tweed wrapper, with trousers of the Brougham pattern, and he sported a hat—black, but whether beaver or gossamer we are uninformed—high in the crown, but very narrow in the brim, bearing altogether no very remote resemblance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant frame ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... China, hence its name "Blonde." Some of the finest specimens are in this colour. Afterwards, when the art of bleaching the silk was discovered, it was made in a peculiarly silvery colour, the loosely woven silk being worked in patterns on what appears a ground of gossamer. Black Blonde was afterwards manufactured, the lace being very different to that of nineteenth-century manufacture, the mesh being large and open. This was a favourite lace with the Spaniards for mantillas, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes

... battered and crushed on the white snow, must be the hat of Sir Runan! Who else but the tigerish aristocrat that disdained the homely four-wheeler and preferred to walk five miles to his victim on this night of dread—who else would wear the gay gossamer of July in ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)

... The white gossamer threads blew over the big plain, where the fields full of stubble were already being prepared again for the new seed, and hung around the young girl's face. Rosa had put her prettiest dress on, a light blue summer dress. ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... was as light as gossamer, and his artless manner a triumph of even his incomparable art. Raffles was alive to the danger at last. I saw him refuse more champagne, even as I drained my glass again. But it was not the same danger to us both. Raffles had no reason to feel surprise or alarm ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... heart is a soft and a delicate thing; Ah! the heart is a lute with a thrilling string; A spirit that floats on a gossamer's wing!" ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various

... Costumer's art, or their own adaptation to the characters they had chosen, it was wonderful how lifelike their representations were. Those little fairies in their short skirts of silken gauze, in which golden sparkles appeared as they moved, with their little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked like real fairies. It did not seem possible, when they floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by their filmy, purple wings, ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... own, making them seem different in the transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... bouquet for her," he thought. "Drouet won't mind." He never for a moment concealed the fact of her attraction for himself. He troubled himself not at all about Drouet's priority. He was merely floating those gossamer threads of thought which, like the spider's, he hoped would lay hold somewhere. He did not know, he could not guess, what the result ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... All the saints in the Roman Hagiography cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P——, true to his youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who has the "charity which believeth all, things," though ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... experienced. Her whole being thrilled responsive to the glow. It was as though a door had been opened somewhere above her and she were being drawn upwards by some invisible means, upwards and upwards, light as gossamer and strangely transcendentally happy, towards the warmth and brightness and wonder ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... new, my soul was stilled to that {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished, when my body might almost have been abandoned by ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... the village and up the rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... like a cherry, though somewhat elongated and having in its upper end a small umbilicus. But mark with what ingenuity the package has been constructed! The outer wrapping is a thin, gossamer-like skin which encloses a soft pulp, sweetish to the taste, but of a mucilaginous consistency. This pulp in turn is wrapped about the inner-seal—called the parchment, because of its tough texture. The parchment encloses ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... fish. Spite of all our efforts, he drew nearer and nearer; at length rubbing his fiery flank against the Chamois' gunwale, here and there leaving long strips of the glossy transparent substance which thin as gossamer invests the body ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... tropics to the northward flew Long, angular lines of wild-fowl with a sound Of silken wings. About that time the sun Put forth a shining finger, and did stir The sleeping soil to effort; whereupon The seed made roots like webs of gossamer, Shot up a stem, and flourished leaf and flower. Now look, O sweet! see what your eyes have done With just one ray of their mysterious power Upon the germ of my heart's passion thrown! Through all my frame steal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... speed is simply the fairy rhythm (halted anon by speaking pauses or silences), and the second, a kind of idyll or romance in miniature. It is all a drama of fairy actors, in a dreamland of softest tone. The main figure leads its troop on gossamer thread of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... conduct and noble features, of the Master of Ravenswood. And in this belief Lucy reposed her hope, and went on weaving her enchanted web of fairy tissue, as beautiful and transient as the film of the gossamer when it is pearled with the morning dew and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... may have sought, or shall seek, to interest him occasionally through his profounder affections, I enjoy a privilege of neglecting harsher logic, and connecting the separate sections of these sketches, not by ropes and cables, but by threads of aerial gossamer. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... down the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... these heavy fabrics are costly tissues as fine as spiders' webs, also woven of silver and gold and silk and linen. They are used by the women as head dresses and scarfs and rich men use them for turbans. Sometimes an Indian noble will have seventy or eighty yards of this delicate gossamer wound about his head and the ends, beautifully embroidered, with long fringes of gold, hang gracefully ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... stories against the gods, making light of Zeus himself and of Apollo, and portraying them as birds and beasts. But she wove with marvellous skill; the creatures seemed to breathe and speak, yet it was all as fine as the gossamer that you find on the grass ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody

... streams are suitable for fly-casting and experienced fishermen delight in that method of filling their creel. To cast a gossamer silk line with an alluring fly into the deeper pools and to feel the thrill of a strike as the fly flits over the surface is a joy that far outweighs the less spectacular method of fishing with worm or grub and dragging ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various

... that o'ercast thy gentle mind, For dreams are but as floating gossamer, And should not blind or bar the steady reason. And alchemy is innocent enough, Save when it feeds too steadily on gold, A crime the world not easily forgives. But if Rosalia likes not the pursuit Her sire engages in, my plan shall be To lead him quietly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... with a delicate dancing glister. It was the month of voyaging spiders. Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling



Words linked to "Gossamer" :   veiling, netting, delicate, filament, thin, gauze, fibril, strand



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com