"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... felt in the pocket that contained the matches, ran over the part I was to perform, and pressed my gun firmly, to be sure there was no mistake. My position was that of kneeling directly under the jack, which I was to light at the word. The night was clear, moonless, and still. Nearing the middle of the lake, a breeze from the west was barely perceptible, and noiselessly we glided before it. The guide handled his oar with great dexterity; without lifting it from the water or breaking the surface, he ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... A fall would have been a real calamity, as nobody would ever have found me or even looked for me on that lonely coast. I therefore sat down where I was, on the corals where they seemed least pointed. I did not succeed at all in making a fire; the night was quite dark and moonless, and a fine rain penetrated everything. I have rarely passed a longer night or felt so lonely. The new day revived my spirits, breakfast did not detain me long, as I had nothing to eat, so I kept along the shore, jumping and climbing, and had to swim through several lagoons, swarming, as I heard ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of no use starting until the twilight had darkened into a cloudy, moonless night; so, after our seven o'clock supper, we adjourned into the verandah to watch F—— make a large round ball, such as children play with, out of the scraps of worsted with which I had furnished him. Instead ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trembled, for they were few, and the prolats many. Already were arising loud and disheveled orators, inciting the millions to arise against their masters. The aristos were few, but they were not helpless. In the blackness of a moonless, clouded night there was a whispering of many wings, and from dark shapes that loomed against the dark sky, great beams swept over the tented fields where the prolats lay huddled and sleeping. And when the red sun circled the ice-chained earth he found in his path heaps of dust ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... made, and one dark moonless night in September a long procession of boats floated silently down the river. In one of the boats sat Wolfe, and as they drifted slowly along in the starlight in a low voice he repeated Gray's poem called an Elegy in a ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... along the coast, often at the very edge of the high, precipitous cliffs, with no more between it and the rocks far beneath than a low wall. It was a road of dangerous curves and corners which needed careful negotiation even in broad daylight, and this was a black, moonless and starless night. But Copplestone had impressed upon his driver that he must get to Scarhaven as quickly as possible, and he and his companion were both so full of their purpose that they paid no heed ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... botany. God makes flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could see, it would be the ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... not inclined to argue about the matter. He sat silent, watching star after star shine out of the moonless sky. After a long silence ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... short. Her hair, naturally wavy, flowed completely over her shoulders; her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... sea. You finally cannot resist the drawing power of the water, and you will be dragged down and drowned. So be very careful! When you are flying high it is often difficult to know where the land ends and the sea begins, especially on moonless nights. But you can always be certain of one thing: if there are no sounds below you—hoofs, voices, wheels, wind in ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... her close; the moonless skies Shed little light; the fire was dead. Soft pity filled her youthful eyes, And many ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... night should be dark. This took several days, but at last we knew that the next night she would not rise until between 9 and 10 o'clock, which would give us nearly two hours of the dense darkness of a moonless Summer night in the South. We had first thought of saving up some rations for the trip, but then reflected that these would be ruined by the filthy water into which we must sink to go under the fence. It was not difficult to abandon the food idea, since it was very hard to force ourselves ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... The bailiff and the broker's man were as well known as the butcher and the baker to the noisy children who played upon the waste ground in front of the parlor windows. Solvent tenants were disturbed at unhallowed hours by the noise of ghostly furniture vans creeping stealthily away in the moonless night. Insolvent tenants openly defied the collector of the water-rate from their ten-roomed strongholds, and existed for weeks without any visible means of procuring ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... wandering young family of fugitives from the Natives' Land Act. A sharp pang went through us, and caused our heart to bleed as we recalled the scene of their night funeral, forced on them by the necessity of having to steal a grave on the moonless night, when detection would be less easy. Every man in this country, we thought, be he a Russian, Jew, Peruvian, or of any other nationality, has a claim to at least six feet of South African soil as a resting place after death, but those native outcasts, who in the country ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... clear, moonless, starry night, cold after the rain, but the easier to walk in. The wind now and then breathed a single breath and ceased; but that breath was piercing. He buttoned his coat, and trudged on. The hours went and went. He could not be far from Cairncarque, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now to be perceived through frosted glass. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of a leeward shore" they were doomed to experience during a moonless and starless night. They reduced their sails to a few yards of canvass, and lowered their yards on deck. The waves, that rolled the vessel with irresistible force, threatened to swallow them up; a tremendous sea carried ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... the moonless, starless night, with my eyes still full of the light indoors; and our hands meet blindly before exchanging a pressure. She says good-evening and I kiss her without answering. I am afraid of betraying my ill-humour; I feel that I am hard and spiteful, but I hope that the mood will pass; and my ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... of labor had been expended in building this curious place under a low hill. Yet the original builders had figured that their time so spent would yield large returns. This part of the Florida coast lay conveniently near to Cuba. On moonless nights a small sailing craft would put in along the coast, laden with smuggled Havana cigars. There being no safe place along the shore in which to store the cigars, this place, hidden well in a ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... was moonless, but the bright starlight brought all objects into plain relief against the dark rocks. Taking position on the slope several rods above the beach, Omega and Thalma watched the lake eagerly, but nothing disturbed its mirror-like surface. ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... a regular business, enormously profitable. Moonless and cloudy nights were of course the most favorable times for eluding the blockade; but the swift steamers, sitting low in the water and painted a light neutral tint, could not easily be detected by day at a little distance, especially as they burned smokeless ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Mall Drake was smitten by a sudden impulse. The fog had cleared from the streets; he looked up at the sky. The night was moonless but starlit, and very clear. He lifted the trap, spoke to the cabman, and in a few minutes was ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... the Pound as quickly as his shaking knees would let him; but quicker still she slid away, and when he came where she had been the place was as empty as the sky in its moonless season. He called and ran about and called again; but he got no answer, nor found what he sought. All that night he spent in calling and running to and fro. What he did on Sunday you may know, and I may know, but he did not. On ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... impatience of a man That's new come home, who having long been absent With haste runs over every different room In pain to see the whole. Thrice happy meeting! Nor time nor death shall part them ever more. 'Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... towards the window. This was a moonless night, and little enough illumination entered ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... commoners he was known as well by that name as by the one his parents had given to him. But he appeared less and less in public. He began to neglect his practice; he resigned from his club; he avoided the company of his former associates, taking his walks at night alone, even though the sky was moonless, storms were threatening, and the cut-throat crew were abroad that made life at some hours and in some quarters of the city not of a pin's fee in value. His housekeeper told a neighbor that on some nights he paced the floor till dawn, and that now and again he would mutter ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... beginning of her voyage, rude Boreas kindly retired, and spicy breezes from Africa rippled the sea with just sufficient force to intensify its heavenly blue, and fill out the great square-sail so that there was no occasion to ply the oars. One dark, starlight but moonless night, a time of quiet talk prevailed from stem to stern of the vessel as the grizzled mariners spun long yarns of their prowess and experiences on the deep, for the benefit of awe-stricken and youthful shipmates ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... after supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would keep it steaming all night. But she would soon have done work. The moment ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... seemed to be true, for the next moment the group turned, and began to retreat along the road, moving briskly out of our sight. We were left in the thick gloom of a moonless evening and the peaceful ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the country-side had started on his hardest race: little less than three leagues and back, which he reckoned to accomplish in two hours, though the night was moonless and the way rugged. He rushed against the still cold air till it felt like a wind upon his face. The dim homestead sank below the ridges at his back, and fresh ridges of snowlands rose out of the obscure horizon-level to drive past him as the stirless ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... insight growing, it was held, as the time of admission came near. Before the final act there came a period of fasting, then a march from Athens to Eleusis along the sacred way, which was studded with shrines; then a search for the lost goddess in the dark of a moonless night on the plains of Eleusis, and then at last admission to the brightly-lighted building. Here all the arts were enlisted to furnish a spectacle of unparalleled magnificence, during which the candidate was allowed to touch and kiss certain sacred objects of a simple ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... warm dusk, moonless, windless. The sounds of the village street came in—laughter, a touch at a piano, a chiming clock. Bights starred and quickened in the blurred houses. Footsteps echoed on the board walks. The gate opened. The gloom ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... of the broadsides rolled and stormed To the Sally hid from view Under the tall liana'd boughs Of the moonless ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... buzzards on a fence as they sat along the sidewalk near the hotel smoking their cigarettes. The wind had fallen, leaving a peace in the ears like the cessation of a hateful turmoil. There was the promise of a cool night in the unusual clearness of the stars. Morgan rode away into the moonless night, leaving the town to take care of its own ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... days, waiting for a propitious, moonless night and roaming singly round the outskirts of the park. Once Beautrelet saw the postern. Contrived between two buttresses placed very close together, it was almost merged, behind the screen of brambles that concealed it, in the pattern formed by ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... round the corner of the screen found that 'twas closed, and yet I could have sworn I saw the latch fall to its place as I walked towards it. Then I dashed forward, and in a trice had the door open, and was in the street. But the night was moonless and black, and I neither saw nor heard aught stirring, save the gentle sea-wash on Moonfleet ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... now crossing a shaft of light flung on the water from some lamp or fire, now blending with the ghostlike shadows which lay in the moonless night. It passed out of the town itself, and edged into the shade of the forest that swept continuously for so many leagues ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... horse from its aggregate bets, and arrange the remainder in a line of perhaps five figures. Whereupon the betting-men grow seedier and more seedy; some of the more mercurial go off in a fit of apoplectic amazement; some betake themselves to Waterloo Stairs on a moonless night; some proceed to the Diggings, some to St Luke's, and some to the dogs; some become so unsteady, that they sign the wrong name to a draft, or enter the wrong house at night, or are detected in a crowd with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... and silently; one by one the fires are extinguished, and the plain is wrapped in the gloom of a moonless night. The swan utters its wild note, the gruya whoops over the stream, and the wolf howls on the ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... nearly eight o'clock. The night was pitch-dark, the sky star-studded and moonless. It was freezing hard, the keen air stung our faces, the tiniest twig was finger-thick with hoar-frost, and the grass crunched under our feet at every step. I went ahead as guide, and in five minutes we arrived at the dock, where Joe, the boat out, cushioned and trim for the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed her with enlacing arm. The canal below them lay in moonless shadow, barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola-music came from far off, carried upward on ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... and on for what seemed an interminable distance. It was quite moonless and only a few stars twinkled here and there through a veil of light clouds that had drifted up with the sunset. The grass underfoot was black, the sea was nearly as dark, and the inland ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... all but the craft to which Kantos Kan belonged were either destroyed or captured. His vessel was chased for days by three of the Zodangan war ships but finally escaped during the darkness of a moonless night. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This custom, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, which was mild enough, not so much to look with scientific ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... breast, he asked a fellow-officer to return it to her. About midnight the tide began to ebb, and two lanterns were hung as a sign from the masthead of the Sutherland. Instantly all the ships glided silent as the great river down with the tide. The night was moonless. Near the little bridle path now known as Wolfe's Cove the ships draw {270} ashore. Sharp as iron on stone a sentry's voice rings ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... billows, until he fell asleep. When he awoke all was quiet. The gust had passed away, and only now and then a faint gleam of lightning in the east showed which way it had gone. The night was dark and moonless; and from the state of the tide Sam concluded it was near midnight. He was on the point of making loose his skiff to return homewards, when he saw a light gleaming along the water from a distance, which seemed rapidly approaching. As it drew near ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... breaking wave, A faint light in a moonless sky: A voice that from the silent grave Sounds sad in one long bitter cry. I know not, sweet, where you may stand, With shining eyes and golden hair, Yet I know, I will touch your hand And kiss your lips somewhere— Somewhere! Somewhere!— When the summer sun is fair, Waiting me, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... every son and saint of Thine Along the glorious line, Sitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet We'll hold communion sweet, Know them by look and voice, and thank them all For helping us in thrall, For words of hope, and bright examples given To show through moonless skies that there is light ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... low tones, and then fell silent. The night had come, starless and moonless, favorable to the designs of Tandakora, but they felt intense satisfaction, nevertheless. It was partly physical. Robert's making of an easy road to the water, the coming of the pigeons, to be eaten, apparently sent by Areskoui, and the ease with which they believed they ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... between their population, originally composed of all the cleverest scoundrels of Europe, and the barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was at the time quiet, and still is, I believe, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... undertakings; or he searched islands for treasure, fished in still lagoons and dozed day-long on warm white sand. Of deep-sea fishings he heard tell, and mighty silver gatherings of the mile-long net; of sudden perils, noise of breakers on a moonless night, or the tall bows of the great liner taking shape overhead through the fog; of the merry home-coming, the headland rounded, the harbour lights opened out; the groups seen dimly on the quay, the cheery hail, the splash of the hawser; the trudge up ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... manner of its occurrence. To Angele's mind—what there was left of it—the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion. No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded too well for any other supposition. One moonless night, Angele, arriving under the black shadow of the pear trees a little earlier than usual, found the apparently familiar figure waiting for her. All unsuspecting she gave herself to the embrace of a strange pair of arms, and Vanamee arriving but a score of moments later, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... gathering swiftly, investing the world with its legion of gloom; and in the shadow of the great Castle of Caylus, rising like a rock itself out of the solid rock behind Lagardere, the moat was soon very dark indeed. There was little light in the moonless sky; there came none from the castle, which in its dim outline of towers and battlements might have been the enchanted palace of some fairy tale, so soundless, so lightless, so unpeopled did it seem. There was a faint gleam discernible ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... said Pauline. "No, don't open the window. Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night—stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... dark, the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight, I am sitting by the camp-fire's fading cheer; Oh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill, And the breakers in the bay are moaning drear. The toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed, And I alone a weary vigil ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... and around them. One ruby-red spot shone upon the road, but no number-plate was visible within the dim ruddy halo of the tail-lamp which cast it. The car was open and of a tourist type, but even in that obscure light, for the night was moonless, an observer could hardly fail to have noticed a curious indefiniteness in its lines. As it slid into and across the broad stream of light from an open cottage door the reason could be seen. The body was hung with a singular loose arrangement of brown holland. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... purposes, and the rascally Lascar who runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me. There is a trap-door at the back of that building, near the corner of Paul's Wharf, which could tell some strange tales of what has passed through it upon the moonless nights." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... very slowly, because the machine had to contend against the force of gravity; but as the weight of the car diminished the higher we ascended, our speed gradually augmented, and we knew that in the long run it would become prodigious. The night was moonless, and a thick mantle of clouds obscured the heavens; but the planet Venus was now an evening star, and after attaining a considerable height, we steered towards the west. Our course took us over the metropolis, which lay beneath us ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... This latter appears to be the literal meaning, though there can be no question, as is seen by a comparison with the Syriac, that the period of the full moon is referred to. No doubt it was because travelling was so much more safe and easy than in the moonless nights, that the two great spring and autumn festivals of the Jews were held at the full moon. Indeed, the latter feast, when the Israelites "camped out" for a week "in booths," was held at the time of the "harvest moon." The phenomenon of the "harvest moon" may be briefly explained ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... a boy am, who By moonless nights have swerved; And all with showers wet through, And e'en with cold ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... a dark, moonless night, only tempered by the reflections of furnace fires among the hills. Dennis thought they were northern lights. The lane was cool, and fresh and damp, and full of autumn scents of fading leaves, and toadstools, and Herb Robert and late Meadow Sweet. And ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... this woman says, "My days were sunless and my nights were moonless, Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, If you loved me not!" And I who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, Who am mad to lay my spirit ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... slowly round till he could see her face, still and pale and cold, almost, it seemed to him, luminously white in the heavy darkness of the moonless hour. ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow canon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was out late," she says, "in soft, moonless summer nights, I used to light a lantern, and going down to the water's edge take my station between the timbers of the slip, and with the lantern at my feet sit waiting in the darkness, quite content, knowing my little star was watched for, and that the safety of the boat depended in a great ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... hands reddening the shafts of the shovels. Every now and again one or another of them, choked with the dust, went to get a draft of lukewarm water from the scuttlebutt. But no one stayed over long on these excursions. The breeze had blown up into a gale. The night overhead-was starless and moonless, but every minute the black heaven was split by spurts of lightning, which showed the laboring, dishevelled ship set among great mountains ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to reach the heart ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Collingwood writes (without, if I remember right, having seen it himself) in his charming book, A Naturalist's Rambles in the China Seas. Our friend described the appearance as that of a sea of shining snow rather than of milk, heaving gently beneath a starlit but moonless sky. A bucket of water, when taken up, was filled with the same half-luminous whiteness, which stuck to its sides when the water was drained off. The captain of the Indiaman was well enough aware of the rarity of the sight to call all the passengers on deck to see what they would never see again; ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the stars which crusted a moonless sky, the vast stretches of billowing sand glimmered faintly golden as a phosphorescent sea. And among the dimly gleaming waves of that endless waste the motor tossed, rocking on the rough track like ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hair and lids thy kisses die away Through all my being their strange echoes thrill And from the body's flowery mysticism I draw the last white honey. What is thine ill? What wouldst thou more of that great symbolism? Beyond this ultimate moment nothing lies But moonless cold and ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... and residence in the scrub was lighted brightly in the midst of the 'close', solid blackness of that moonless December night, when the sky and stars were smothered and ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white, A million moons in the dark green ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... to the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, the night being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and the hour ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... for a vigorous defense, the Prince of Orange, on a dark and moonless night, entered the city quietly, and went to the Hotel de Ville, where his confidants had everything ready for his reception. There he received all the deputies of the bourgeoisie, passed in review the officers of the paid troops, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... strain of the Tsigane musicians, as they swayed to and fro in their red coats on the bandstand, floated towards the dome through the heavy summer air. In the near distance the fantastic shapes of chimney-cowls raised themselves against the starry but moonless sky, and miles away the grandiose contours of a dome far greater than Hugo's—the dome of St. Paul's—finished the prospect in solemn majesty. It was a scene well calculated to intensify a man's emotions, especially when a man stands to view it, as Hugo stood, on a lofty ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... deaf with age; A garden of moonless trees Would answer not though she should cry ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... resound, The words accursed of comfortable men,— 'For ever'; and infinite glooms intolerable With spacious replication give again, And hollow jar, The words abhorred of comfortable men. You the stern pities of the gods debar To drink where he has drunk The moonless mere of sighs, And pace the places infamous to tell, Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes, Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness are He knows the perilous rout That all those ways about Sink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk. And if his sole and solemn term thereout He ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... had it not been for the moonless dark of it, you might have seen the same laborer who had been so concerned with tape-measures and distances near the Treasury Building, a long shallow basket stoutly woven of willow on his arm, making secretly for the mouth of the drain that once witnessed the investigations ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... much better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; the other sat upright, keeping guard over the camp. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... a sign to the deaf and dumb driver of the carriage, whom he touched on the arm. The latter dismounted, took the leaders by the bridle, and led them over the velvet sward and the mossy grass of a winding alley, at the bottom of which, on this moonless night, the deep shades formed a curtain blacker than ink. This done, the man lay down on a slope near his horses, who, on either side, kept nibbling ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... themselves to Master Richard. Of the interior state of his soul I cannot even think without terror and confusion. Compared with the darkness of it, the other nights, he said, are but as clouds across the sun on a summer's day compared with a moonless midnight in winter. He had suffered a shadow of it before, when he was entering the contemplative state, or the prefect Way of Union. Now it fell upon him. Before I tell you how it came, I must tell you that this night, as he explained it, takes ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... Light blazes up, and every black rock and frowning cliff stands out in the brilliant glare. The contrast is sublime beyond imagination. It is as if a man had seen the hills and trees of this earth only in the dim outline of a moonless night, and they should, for the first time, be revealed to him in the gushing glory of the morning sun. But the greatest wonder in this region of the cave, is Mammoth Dome—a giant among giants. It is so immensely ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... passed through it that the military was approaching. Pandemonium seemed suddenly to have broken loose, and shouts, and yells, and oaths arose from five thousand throats, as the men sprung behind their barricades. It was a moonless night, but the stars were shining brightly, and, in their light, the sheen of nearly a thousand bayonets made the street look like a lane of steel. The Twenty-seventh Regiment of National Guards, led by Colonel Stevens, had been sent from the City Hall, and their regular ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... lay drawn up in line along the low marshy shores of the mighty river. The sun sank a glowing red ball beneath the line at which the blue waters of the gulf and the blue arch of heaven seemed to meet. The long southern twilight gradually deepened into a black, moonless night. The cries of frogs and seabirds, and the little flashes of the fireflies, were silenced and blotted out by the incessant roar and flash of the tremendous mortars that kept up their deadly work. Suddenly ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... of the next dance, Lenox sought and found Honor Desmond, silently offered his arm, and led her through the verandah out into the starshine,—which is a reality in India, on moonless nights. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... came, a moonless night, a dark night. Quasimodo fixed his gaze in vain upon la Esmeralda; soon she was no more than a whiteness amid the twilight; then nothing. All was effaced, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... this moonless, starless, sky-beclouded night, you shall soon be driven. May it faintly prefigure the unending blackness of that eternal night you have chosen as your future portion. As you have willfully, voluntarily, and most wickedly called it down upon ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... where they actually had the audacity, as Josephus assures us, to press into the temple,—and whom should they choose for operating upon but Jonathan himself, the Pontifex Maximus? They murdered him, gentlemen, as beautifully as if they had had him alone on a moonless night in a dark lane. And when it was asked, who was the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... appearance as they wound up the hill, each one carrying a tiny pine-tree, the top of which was encircled with a diadem of flame, beautifully lighting up the darker verdure beneath, and gleaming like a spectral crown through the moonless, misty evening. We could not help laughing at their watchwords. They ran in this wise: Shorge Washingtone, James K. Polk, Napoleon Bonaparte! Liberte, egalite, fraternite! Andrew Jacksone, President Fillmore, and Lafayette! I give them ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... that the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... moonless, but studded with such pure and such glowing stars that the country could be seen spreading far away beneath a soft bluish radiance. Already at twenty minutes past eleven Marianne found herself on the little bridge crossing the Yeuse, midway between ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... drone, but Blood Royal. How it was capped, and how desperately they worked to feed and double-feed the now swarming Oddities, lest any break in the food-supplies should set them to instituting inquiries, which, with songs about work, was their favourite amusement. How in an auspicious hour, on a moonless night, the Princess came forth a Princess indeed, and how Melissa smuggled her into a dark empty honey-magazine, to bide her time; and how the drones, knowing she was there, went about singing the deep ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... bellowing of the bull-voiced mimes, Terrible; firs bowed down as briars or palms Even at the breathless blast as of a breeze Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And raiment ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and less than ten feet long. There, on the face of that precipice, one hundred miles from the nearest settlement, all through the lonely watches of the night, the strong-hearted wife, with tear-dimmed eyes, hung over the sufferer. Many a silent prayer in the weary hours of that moonless night did she send up to the Father of mercies. Many a plan for bringing succor or for alleviating pain on the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... it, And the moonless dark, When I sat in sorrow Over Sigurd; Better than all things I deemed it would be If they would let me Cast my life by, Or burn me up As they ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... days I have been laid up by the vagaries of an English spring, and during those days there have been developments, the true and sinister meaning of which no one can appreciate save myself. I may say that we have had cloudy and moonless nights of late, which according to my information were the seasons upon which sheep disappeared. Well, sheep have disappeared. Two of Miss Allerton's, one of old Pearson's of the Cat Walk, and one of Mrs. Moulton's. Four in ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first looked, and the sands which were marked by my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of those ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no recollection more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky. But of L——, the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade myself that every line and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot I have since beheld, even though borne in upon the heart by the association of ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... abetted her flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky, moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp—the only living thing in sight. It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in front of her, waiting for her, who had driven so fast—too ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... sledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own path. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for some almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... dark and moonless, with a heaviness in the air which was oppressive. Campbell had to grant men and horses a breathing period. He put out pickets, leaving the rest of them to lie with their mounts saddled and to hand. Drew loosened the girth, stripped off saddle and blanket, and wiped down the sweaty back ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... were needed, and they strengthened their hearts for the daring attempt, waiting patiently for the afternoon to wane and die into the night, which, arrived moonless and starless and heavy with dark, as they had hoped and predicted. Just before, a little spasmodic firing came from the besiegers, but they did not deign to answer. Instead they waited patiently until the night was far advanced and then ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... vision, and had made A mystical impression on my mind; For clouds lay o'er the ocean of my thoughts In vague and broken masses, strangely wild; And grim imagination wander'd on 'Mid gloomy yew-trees in a churchyard old, And mouldering shielings of the eyeless hills, And snow-clad pathless moors on moonless nights, And icebergs drifting from the sunless Pole, And prostrate Indian villages, when spent The rage of the hurricane has pass'd away, Leaving a landscape desolate with death; And as I turn'd me to my vanish'd dream, Clothed in its drapery of gloom, it rose ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... but a distinguished adherent of the King, one Captain Crawford of Jordanhill, resolved to make an attempt to take it. There was only one access to the castle, approached by 365 steps, but these were strongly guarded and fortified. The captain took advantage of a misty and moonless night to bring his scaling-ladders to the foot of the rock at the opposite side, where it was the most precipitous, and consequently the least guarded by the soldiers at the top. The choice of this side of the rock was fortunate, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... an ajouti—which is a small, pig-like animal—and, half of it having been given to the Indians, we were cooking the other half upon our fire. There is a chill in the air after dark, and we had all drawn close to the blaze. The night was moonless, but there were some stars, and one could see for a little distance across the plain. Well, suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weary I betook me straight To longed-for sleep, and I did dream and dream Through all that dolourous storm; though noise of guns Daunted the country in the moonless night, Yet sank I deep and deeper in the dream And took my fill of rest. A voice, a touch, 'Wake.' Lo! my wife beside me, her wet hair She wrung with her wet hands, and cried, 'A ship! I have been down the beach. O pitiful! A Spanish ship ashore ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... was still delight, Quiet as a street at night; And thoughts of you, I do remember, Were green leaves in a darkened chamber, Were dark clouds in a moonless sky. Love, in you, went passing by, Penetrative, remote, and rare, Like a bird in the wide air, And, as the bird, it left no trace In the heaven of your face. In your stupidity I found The sweet hush after a sweet ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... the marques despatched secretly a veteran soldier who was highly in his confidence. His name was Ortega de Prado, a man of great activity, shrewdness, and valor, and captain of escaladors (soldiers employed to scale the walls of fortresses in time of attack). Ortega approached Alhama one moonless night, and paced along its walls with noiseless step, laying his ear occasionally to the ground or to the wall. Every time he distinguished the measured tread of a sentinel, and now and then the challenge of the night-watch going its rounds. Finding the town ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... THE night was moonless, but there was that soft diffused light in the air invariable in June, except on the cloudiest of evenings. There was just enough of it to enable us to see our way as we strolled towards Mannering's house. When we reached it everything appeared still. All the windows ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... earnestness with which we labored was worthy of the great things we meant to achieve. Whether the results were commensurate with our efforts I cannot say. I only know that Frieda's cheeks flamed with the excitement of reading English monosyllables; and her eyes shone like stars on a moonless night when I explained to her how she and I and George ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... as big around as a barrel of black-eyed peas and as loose as the wrapper of a two-for-fiver. I don't mind telling you that I was not touring among the Antipodes when the burglar-proof safe of the Farmers' National Bank of Butterville, Ia., flew open some moonless nights ago to the tune ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... now, funerals, dogs and kuruma are prohibited. The iron lanterns of the shrine and galleries and a hundred more in the pine tree-studded approaches are undoubtedly "a most magnificent spectacle at full tide on a moonless night"; but what of the subservience to the profitable foreign tourist seen ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... sat afterward in the little square, tree-chequered, that lay before their inn. Miguel had procured a lute from the innkeeper, and he strummed idly as these two debated together of great matters; about them was an immeasurable twilight, moonless, but tempered by many stars, and everywhere they could hear an ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... of the moonless if starry night, lights from windows shone vividly. This was no dark or lonely scene, nor even a silent one. Briarmains stood near the highway. It was rather an old place, and had been built ere that highway was cut, and when a lane winding up through fields was the only path conducting ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... reasons then, the moonless sea midnight was just the time to escape. Hence, we suffered a whole day to pass unemployed; waiting for the night, when the star board-quarter-boats'-watch, to which we belonged, would be summoned on deck at the eventful eight of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... course he should pursue with her. And through all the debate Love stood off but a little way—a strong temptation, the stronger of a gleam of policy behind. At the very moment he was most inclined to yield to the allurement, a hand very fair even in the moonless gloaming was laid softly upon his shoulder. The touch thrilled him; he started, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... moonless winter nights and stare up at the stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... fell quiet. A black moonless sky brooded above the dying camp fires. Not until this wild world of swamp and Indian seemed asleep did the man in the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... bright Sun was extinguished, and the Stars Wandered all darkling in the eternal space, Rayless and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the Moonless air. Morn came and went, and came and brought no day! And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation, and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... on proceeding, however, against the Carcini in whose keeping the robbers had deposited their booty, they encountered trouble. Finally one night, led by deserters, they scaled the wall at a certain point and came dangerously near perishing on account of the darkness,—not that it was a moonless night but because it was snowing fiercely. But the moon shone out and they made themselves absolute masters ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... living, but their pleasure was in war; Triumphs and hatred followed: I myself Bore, men imagined, no inglorious part: The gods thought otherwise, by whose decree Deprived of life, and more, of death deprived, I still hear shrieking through the moonless night Their discontented and deserted shades. Observe these horrid walls, this rueful waste! Here some refresh the vigour of the mind With contemplation and cold penitence: Nor wonder while thou hearest that the soul Thus purified hereafter ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor |
