"Sightless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sentence Miss Quincey's MS. had become a sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical way: "Poets ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... move again; the instant his sensitive nostrils touched her still, warm body he knew that. But there had been no killing. That was what baffled Finn, and struck a kind of terror into his heart, to lend poignancy to his sorrow. One more look he gave at his mother's sightless face, this time where it rested on the crook of the Master's arm, and then he sat down on his haunches, and with muzzle raised high poured out his grief in the long-drawn Irish Wolfhound howl; the most ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... with their broadswords? Sang the heroes with their weapons, Sang the eldest, sang the youngest, Sang the middle-aged, enchanted; Only one he left his senses, He a poor, defenseless shepherd, Old and sightless, halt and wretched, And the old man's name was Nasshut. Spake the miserable shepherd: "Thou hast old and young enchanted, Thou hast banished all our heroes, Why hast spared this wretched shepherd?" This is Lemminkainen's answer: "Therefore ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes. Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from the Gospel of St. John, and a sad ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... upon Grim's brow, and his great breast labored. Slowly he stooped down, drew the dead body out of the water, and tenderly laid it across his knees. He stared into the sightless eyes, and murmuring a blessing, closed them. There was a large discolored spot on the forehead, as of a bruise. Grim laid his hand softly upon it, and stroked away ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... will probably live, which seems impossible. She looks like a galvanized corpse—yet must have been a good-looking child. Notwithstanding the nature of her wound, her reason has not gone, and as she sat upright in her little bed, with her head bandaged, and her fixed and sightless eyes, she answered meekly and readily to all the questions we put to her. Poor little thing! she was shocking to look at; one of the many innocent beings whose lives are to be rendered sad and joyless by this revolution. The doctor seemed very kind ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... is a point beyond which hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and Henry had passed that point. He waited patiently till he was naked of scalp and deaf of ear. He endured without repining the bent back, the sightless eyes, and the creaking joints incident to over-maturity. But when he saw a man perish of senility, who in infancy had called him "Old Hank," Mr. Wolfe thought patience had ceased to be commendable, and he abandoned his post of duty ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... lies upon the death-crowned hill, With sightless eyes, gray lips that may not speak. His dead hand holds his shot-torn banner still— Its proud folds pressed against his ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... broad, powerful hands and big feet. He had an enormous nose, shaggy eyebrows and a bristling black moustache. But the one striking peculiarity about him was his missing right eye. The large heavy eyelid was drooped and closed tightly over the sightless socket, which seemed to have sunk deep into his head. This cavern on one side of his face gave to the other eye a strange power. When he looked at you, it gleamed a fierce steady blaze like the electric headlight of an ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... in, and there in his carven chair at the table on which his long white beard flowed, sat my father, Amenemhat, clad in his priestly robes. At first I thought that he was dead, he sat so still; but at length he turned his head, and I saw that his eyes were white and sightless. He was blind, and his face was thin as the face of a dead man, and woeful with age ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... are but the footprints of jealousy and love desired and fulfilled, mark the sands for one little second and then are gone; the desert, where there is no shade, no cool waters, no content, no peace until the wanderer lies still, with sightless ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... heads pillowed peacefully upon their arms as if in sleep. Others have their hard faces half buried in the sand. Others still lie prone upon their backs with bits of seaweed in their hair and their sightless eyes staring ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... goes that a mouse had contracted a sort of friendly sympathy for the hoary-headed, sightless Royal maniac, and paid him such frequent visits, during his long captivity, that it was at length become quite tame, and would submit to be handled by the unfortunate shadow of a great monarch. The King was very much delighted with this friendly little visitant, and its little antics and gambols ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... minutes the particular attitude was a thing of the past, and the worrying thoughts were back upon her with a vengeance. Or, rather, the worrying thought; for her plural number was hypocrisy. She was in for a deadly wakeful night, a night of growing fever, with those sightless eyes expelling every other image from her brain. She was left alone with the darkness and a question she dared not try to answer. Suppose that when those eyes looked upon her that evening at Arthur's Bridge for the first ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... smallest bit of ointment on my right lid and, as I opened wide my eyes, lo and behold! both were stone-blind: naught could I see for the black darkness before them and ever since that day have I been sightless and helpless as thou foundest me. When I knew that I was blinded, I exclaimed, "O Darwaysh of ill-omen, what thou didst fore tell hath come to pass;" and I fell to cursing him and saying "O would to Heaven thou hadst never brought ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... father. The child is carried to the spring, and puts out a groping hand when his father bids him drink. He cannot find the glass, and his father must put it to his lips. He is blind, except to light,—and that only visits those poor sightless eyes to agonize them! Where the water flows off below the basin in a clear jet, the father bathes his boy's forehead, and gently, gently touches his eyelids. But the child reaches out his wasted hands, and dashes the water against his face with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Phoebe rang in the ears of the big doctor as he bent over Mother Bab's sightless eyes and began the tedious operation. His hands moved skilfully, with infinite precision, cutting to the infinitesimal fraction ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... life. It is not well for us who in the beginning came forth with the wonder-light about us, that it should have turned in us to darkness, the song of life be dumb. We close our eyes from the many-coloured mirage of day, and are alone soundless and sightless in the unillumined cell of the brain. But there are thoughts that shine, impulses born of fire. Still there are moments when the prison world reels away a distant shadow, and the inner chamber of clay fills full with fiery visions. We choose ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... after the trees in the little valley had lapsed into silence. The air was filled with a faint, cool, sodden odor, as of stirred forest depths. In those intervals of silence the darkness seemed to increase in proportion and grow almost palpable. Yet out of this sightless and soundless void now came the tinkle of a spur's rowels, the dry crackling of saddle leathers, and the muffled plunge of a hoof in the thick carpet of dust and desiccated leaves. Then a voice, which in spite of its matter-of-fact reality ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... my days sightless, Mary, I knew I could not come to you again; but Heaven has willed it otherwise. It has been a long, long waiting, hopeless till within the last month, and it was only within the past few days that the ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... hands and arms, 65 (Thrust in all senses, all ways, from all sides, Only consenting at the branch's end They strain toward) serves for frame to a sole face, The Praiser's, in the center: who with eyes Sightless, so bend they back to light inside 70 His brain where visionary forms throng up, Sings, minding not that palpitating arch Of hands and arms, nor the quick drip of wine From the drenched leaves o'erhead, nor crowns cast off, Violet ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... mastery in Delhi. The second of these, a ruthless Afghan soldier, had abruptly entered the capital; nor was he ejected from it until he had seized upon the principal jewels, and likewise put out the eyes of the last of the unfortunate family of Afrasiab. Scindiah came to the rescue of the sightless Shah Allum, and though he destroyed his oppressor, only increased his slavery; holding him in as painful a bondage as he had suffered under ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... voices. Aias grudged The vote and wandered brooding, drawn apart From his room-fellows, seeding in his heart Envy, which biting inwards did corrode His mettle, and his ill blood plied the goad Upon his brain, until the wretch made mad Went muttering his wrongs, ill-trimmed, ill-clad, Sightless and careless, with slack mouth awry, And working tongue, and danger in the eye; And oft would stare at Heaven and laugh his scorn: "O fools, think not to trick me!" then forlorn Would gaze about green ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... absolutely sightless for the instant from looking at the flash of the powder, broke into horrible cursing, and ran blindly here and there, colliding with one another and adding to the already great confusion. Their one desire was to lay ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Mall, 'What you do I will do.' So they kissed together, knowing it was a gallows matter, and went in to the dead body of the King. They washed it tenderly, and anointed it, composed the hands and shut down the horrible sightless eyes, then put upon it the only shirt they could find, which (being a boy's) was a very short one. Afterwards came the Chancellor, Stephen of Turon, called up in a great hurry from a merry-making, with one or two others, and took ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... smile crossed the lovely sightless features and even the dulled orbs radiated a little as Henriette excitedly told the details of the proposed trip, ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the swale, under a spruce with low, spreading branches. The look of Pedro quickened Helen's pulse. He was wild to give chase. Fearfully Helen looked where Dale pointed, expecting to see the lion. But she saw instead a deer lying prostrate with tongue out and sightless eyes and bloody hair. ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... heart speaks. In the poet's vision, to blind Homer, falling into the bog, torn by the thorns and thickets and lost in the forest and the night, came the young goddess, the daughter of Light and Beauty, to take the sightless poet by the hand and lead him up the heavenly heights. Sometimes intellect seems sightless and wanders lost in the maze. Then comes the heart to lead man along the upward path. For even in its dreams the heart hears the sound of invisible music. Oft before reason's eye the heart unveils ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... I do not remember having heard mention of as remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the language. Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a curiosity. Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless eyeballs about with delight, as he thundered out these ringing syllables! It seems hard to think of his going round like a hand-organ man, with such music and such thought as his to earn his bread with. One can't help wishing that Mr. Pugh could have got at him ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sightless eyes, that I may never see His own a-burnin' full o' love that must not shine for me. Grandmither, gie me your peaceful lips, white as the kirkyard snow, For mine be tremblin' wi' the wish that he must never know. Grandmither, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... was a camp-stool, and on the camp-stool sat a savage-looking man, dressed in a dark corduroy suit, with a blackened clay pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. His weather-beaten mahogany face was plentifully covered with small-pox marks, and one of his eyes was sightless and white from the effects of the same disease. He rose now, and interposed himself between ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bones everywhere in it. Bones and skulls of droves of cattle on all the strand above the tide mark for many score yards. Their ribs stuck out from the snow everywhere, and the sightless eye sockets grinned at me as I stumbled over them. But I had no time to wonder how they came there, for I must get to the summit before Evan and his men reached it by their way along the cliff. I ate handfuls of the snow and quenched my thirst that was growing on me again, and my strength ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... way to him and clung to his strong arm as if it was her only stay. Paul drew her close, saying wistfully, as he caressed the beautiful sightless face leaning on his shoulder, "Mia cara, would it break your heart, if at the last hour I gave up all and let the word remain unspoken? My courage fails me, and in spite of the hard past I would gladly leave ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the hill in single file....In these intervals we received a tremendous fire of musketry from the ramparts above us. Here we lost some brave men, when powerless to return the salutes we received, for the enemy was covered by his impregnable defences....They were even sightless to us; we could see nothing but the blaze from the muzzles of the muskets....We proceeded rapidly, exposed to the long line of fire from the garrison, for now we were unprotected by any buildings. The fire had slackened in a small degree. The enemy had been partly called off to resist ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... The other was a very different person, far advanced in years, bent almost double, palsy-stricken, her arms and limbs shaking, her head nodding, her chin wagging, her snowy locks hanging about her wrinkled visage, her brows and upper lip frore, and her eyes almost sightless, the pupils being cased with a thin white film. Her dress, of antiquated make and faded stuff, had been once deep red in colour, and her old black hat was high-crowned and broad-brimmed. She partly aided herself in walking with a crutch-handled stick, and partly leaned upon ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rushed to the silence and seclusion of her room, and there could not longer hold back the bursting of her wrath. She went stone-blind in the fury of a passion that had never before showed its power. Lying upon her bed, sightless, voiceless, she was a writhing, living flame. And she tossed there while her fury burned and burned, and finally ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... put in the place of highest power, with full right to exercise that power at will. And when the crucified Jesus went up that Olivet day, before the astonished eyes of the disciples, into the sightless blue, on the cloud, He was received in the upper world by the Father. And He was lifted up into the place of highest honour and greatest power. He sat down at the right hand ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... must excuse me"—here Major Brooks turned as if seeing me with his sightless eyes. "But understand that I like you far better for owning up. There are men—there is a clergyman in our neighbourhood for one—capable of pretending a knowledge of Latin which ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been Milton if he could have acquiesced in an ever so needful Henry Cromwell or Charles Stuart. Never quick to detect the course of public opinion, he was now still further disabled by his blindness. There is great pathos in the thought of the sightless patriot hungering for tidings, "as the Red Sea for ghosts," and swayed hither and thither by the narratives and comments of passionate or interested reporters. At last something occurred which none could misunderstand or misrepresent. On February 11th, about ten at night, Mr. Samuel ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... refers to the blindness, the 'sightless view' of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the 'centre of his sinful earth' in ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... at his shaving, the lather still on his cheek, and they had waved their hands at each other. Instinctively Trina looked up at the flat behind her; looked up at the bay window where her husband's "Dental Parlors" had been. It was all dark; the windows had the blind, sightless appearance imparted by vacant, untenanted rooms. A rusty iron rod projected mournfully from one of ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... obedience of the citizen, but has no power to afford him protection? Is that all that this boasted American citizenship amounts to? Go tell it, sir, to the father whose son was starved at Andersonville; or the widow whose husband was slain at Mission Ridge; or the little boy who leads his sightless father through the streets of your city, made blind by the winds and the sand of the Southern coast; or the thousand other mangled heroes to be seen on every side, that this Government, in defense of which the son and the husband ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty of its fellows. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could be so fast. His wet finger felt not the faintest stir of air, nor was there any movement in the pulses of their hands. No breath! No life! The eyes of the girl were closed. How strangely innocent she looked! Larry's open eyes seemed to be gazing at her shut eyes; but Keith saw that they were sightless. With a sort of sob he drew down the lids. Then, by an impulse that he could never have explained, he laid a hand on his brother's head, and a hand on the girl's fair hair. The clothes had fallen down a little from her bare shoulder; he pulled them up, as if to keep her warm, and caught ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and secretaries—above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The Recits des Temps Merovingiens and the Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers Etat were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... sleeve or a sightless eye Or a legless form I see, I breathe my thanks to my God on High For His watchful care o'er me. And I say to myself, as the cripple goes Half stumbling on his way: I may brag and boast, but that brother knows Why the old flag ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... all my hopes had found a sudden grave. Love makes us blind and selfish: otherwise I had seen Helen's secret in her eyes; So used I was to reading every look In her sweet face, as I would read a book. But now, made sightless by love's blinding rays, I had gone on unseeing, to the end Where Pain dispelled the mist of golden haze That walled me in, and lo! I found my friend Who journeyed with me—at my very side, Had been sore wounded ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... play what he did before—at first. There were no airy cloud-boats, no far-reaching sky, no birds, or murmuring forest brooks in his music this time. There were only the poverty-stricken room, the dirty street, the boy alone at the window, with his sightless eyes—the boy who never, never would know what a beautiful world he ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... only being of the man, of which cornea and retina, fingers and hands, pencils and colors, are all the mere servants and instruments;[50] that manhood which has light in itself, though the eyeball be sightless, and can gain in strength when the hand and the foot are hewn off and cast into the fire; the moment this part of the man stands forth with its solemn "Behold, it is I," then the work becomes art indeed, perfect in honor, priceless in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... was significant. I saw that she understood what it meant, and with constricted heart watched her as she bent over the dying man and gazed into his wide-open eyes, already sightless and staring. Calculation was in her look and calculation only; and calculation, or something equally unintelligible, sent her next glance in the direction of his brother. What was in her mind? I could understand her indifference ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... not flatter myself that I alone possessed that faculty, Prince Koltsoff, if I were you." She leaned forward, her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully seaward. "I also am not sightless." ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... strong practical sense of religion, chiefly manifested in a willing acceptance of the decrees of Providence, I think she did us both good. I wish I could draw you a picture of her coming in at that door, with her all but sightless eyes, the broad borders of her white cap waving, and her hands stretched out before her; for she was more apprehensive than if she had been quite blind, because she could see things without knowing what, or even in what position they ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... for the boat to be sunk by gunfire, but somehow the memory of that stark figure at the helm persisted. Try as he would, he failed to banish from his mind the staring, sightless eyes and ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the temple laid His desperate hands, and in its overthrow Destroyed himself, and with him those who made A cruel mockery of his sightless woe; The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all, Expired, and thousands perished in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... news from Manila. Ship after ship came in, or was towed in, with fighting force sightless, and the work being done by the "black gang" or the idlers, and each with the same report—the gradual dimming of lights and outlines as the night went on, resulting in partial or total blindness by sunrise. And now it was remarked that those who ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... meet them in the world to come? Having hurled from the throne his in-offensive sons, will he be able to declare that he had treated them in a blameless way? He doth not now see with his mind's eye how he hath become so sightless, and on account of what act he hath grown blind among the kings of this entire earth. Is it not because he hath banished Kunit's son from his kingdom? I have no doubt that Vichitravirya's son, when he ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... little shape and a mightless, And the strong men laughed and roared: "Is our father Odin sightless That bade ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... altogether away. There is undoubtedly a force abroad among large masses of people, the force which forms the basis of the principle of public prayer, and I am conscious of it too, only it distresses me; moreover, the worst and most afflicting nightmare I have is the sensation of standing sightless and motionless, but with all the other senses alert and apprehensive, in the presence of a vast and ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and hanging everywhere around, the Strathaivron head was at last produced, Lionel was horribly shocked and disappointed. Was this, then, his trophy that he hoped to have hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... vacant and forlorn, stared, sightless, from their marble walls; the whole sad city taking on the semblance of scattered mounds of dead men's sun-bleached skulls—the casements having the appearance of eyeless sockets, ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... grow sightless. The dull, little, trivial street has palled upon his view. He sees a crowd gathering at a corner and making ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... of strength and vigour, and the concentration of my views upon one object, gradually brought back my old passion, which at length became as firmly established as it was before. The elasticity of my original feelings being thus restored, I ventured, alone and sightless, upon my dangerous and novel course; and I cannot look back upon the scenes through which I have passed, the great variety of circumstances by which I have been surrounded, and the strange experiences with which I have become ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... said, As thou hast carved me, such am I. Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine, And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky, Joined notes of Death and Life till night's decline Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... faces with a cold hue, ghostly, and deathlike. The Baron had a reputation as a swordsman, had stood face to face with an antagonist many times before, and more than once had seen his adversary turn sightless eyes to the morning sky. It was therefore, perhaps, only natural that he should have contemplated his encounter with the Englishman with equanimity. At the same time Ellerey's determination to settle the quarrel at once and by moonlight may have had the effect of making him more cautious ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... after wiping her sightless eyes with the corner of her white apron—"we were all, as you will understand, happy enough, and looking forward shortly to the birth of the child, when, one afternoon, while my master and mistress were out driving, and I was looking through the rails of the garden gate for the carriage—for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... by these, in vain thy muse appears To breathe her ardours in our souls; In vain to sightless eyes, and deaden'd ears, Thy ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... no reply, but bowed his head. At the end of some moments, from his sightless eyes there fell ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled, and a deep hollow in ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... features the image of manly beauty,—the other, of feminine grace and gentleness; but to each of whom, alas! was allotted a sad privation. While the bright eyes of Reason are full of piercing and restless intelligence, his ear is closed to sound; and while Faith has an ear of exquisite delicacy, on her sightless orbs, as she lifts them towards heaven, the sunbeam plays in vain. Hand in hand the brother and sister, in all mutual love, pursue their way, through a world on which, like ours, day breaks and night falls alternate; by day the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... the other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them into ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... through the wall, and the ceiling above him split across. Then he plunged through the window, and staggered across the lawn with his burden—falling beside it at last, spent and breathless, his throat parched with smoke, and his eyes almost sightless. But he picked himself up presently and went back. All the rooms were blazing now. The side verandah had not yet caught, and on it he saw an old oaken chest that did double duty as a seat and as a wardrobe for Bob's spare clothes. The sight brought ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... our life is Memory: We walk upon a narrow path between Two gulfs—what is to be, and what has been, Led by a guide whose name is Destiny; Beyond is sightless gloom and mystery, From whose unfathomable depths we glean Chaotic hopes and terrors, dimly-seen ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... Child, the sightless Boy, It is the triumph of his joy! The bravest Traveller in balloon, Mounting as if to reach the moon, Was never half ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... muscles seemed bound in fetters of steel. In all his after life he was not to forget the picture of that hideous figure, sitting there in the tomb-like grey. The face was bloated and soft and flabby, beardless and putty-like; the lips thick and colourless; the eyes wide, sightless and glassy. The black hair was matted and plastered close to the skull, as if it had just come from the water. The clothes that covered the corpse were wet, slimy and reeking with the odour of stagnant water. Huge, stiff, puffy hands extended over the ends of the chair's ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered charges—one ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... in the provinces, except that such were better obtainable in Paris. Antoine looked down upon this wreck of his son that lay before him, and the wreck, not appreciating that he was a surgical triumph, kept sobbing, kept weeping out of his sightless eyes, kept jerking his four stumps in ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... choosing of the Forty and of the Acolytes is arranged. 'When one of the Forty dies,' replied the Owl, 'which happens only at very long intervals, for they belong to the race of Struldbrugs, several worshippers who have become bald, old, nearly sightless, with other worshippers' still young and strong, are paraded before the Thirty-nine. And they generally choose the old men, or, if not, the young men who come from a strange land in the North, where ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... followed her; she still leading him by the hand, like a child. Like a child, or rather like a blind man, he sat down in the chair which she placed for him. His eyes did not move from her face; but they looked almost like sightless eyes. Hetty stood before him, with her hands clasped tight. Neither spoke. At ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... Glenn struggled to an upright position and his sightless eyes were fixed upon his child. "Wouldst thou desecrate the holy of holies, the altars ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... office."[4] Thus my Lady, nor yet moved she her look from its fixed attention after than before these words of hers. As is he who gazes and endeavors to see the sun eclipsed a little, who through seeing becomes sightless, so did I become in respect to that last fire, till it was said, "Why dost thou dazzle thyself in order to see a thing which has no place here?[5] On earth my body is earth; and it will be there with the others until our number corresponds with the eternal purpose.[6] With their two garments ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... direct violence. She could only shut her eyes and ears and lips. Fresno found many opportunities to approach her, sometimes in Durade's presence, the gambler being blind to all but the cards and gold. At such times Allie wished she was sightless and deaf and feelingless. But after she was safely in her room again she told herself nothing had happened. She was still the same as she had always been. And sleep obliterated quickly what she had suffered. Every day was one nearer to that fateful and approaching moment. And when that moment ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... bound all the worlds together in its wonderful circle of life. One root it sent deep down into the sightless depths of Hel, where the dead lived; another it fastened firmly in Joetunheim, the dreary home of the giants; and with the third it grasped Midgard, the dwelling place of men. Serpents and all kinds of worms gnawed continually at its roots, but were never able to destroy them. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... that withered tongue Could tell us what those sightless orbs have seen— How the world looked when it was fresh and young And the great deluge still had left it green; Or was it then so old that history's pages Contained no ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... breast. The face above her seemed carved in stone, pale, bloodless, calm; it was set, as the girl realised in a moment of terror and agony, in a repose that would never be broken. The large, dark eyes, still open, gazed past her, sightless, changeless. Fear, her fear of him, her awe, her oppressed terror fell from her, giving way to an infinite regret, a sorrow, a sense of loss that rushed over her, filling every cell, every atom of her being. She, the unwilling, the reluctant, ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... was now radiant, while her sightless eyes sparkle with enthusiasm. Dorette looked placidly pleased, Larry kindly sympathetic, while Camille showed her delight in her rattling tongue and eager gestures. "We must tell Joyce," she cried, squeezing Dodo's arm in a vain effort to express all she felt. "She ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... years, had more regular lineaments, but she too was worn with suffering, and her sightless eyes made it more distressing to contemplate her. She spoke cheerfully, however, and laughed with joy in Fanny's happiness. Barfoot pressed both her hands with ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Carrados's sightless eyes had the one quality of concealing emotion supremely. "Oh," he commented softly, "always; and it was quite a saying, was it? And why was it ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... his nose, ears, hands and feet, and sent to Dehli. Death came to his relief upon the road, it is believed by his being hanged upon a tree 3rd March, 1789, and the mangled trunk was sent to Dehli, where it was laid before the sightless monarch, the most ghastly Nazar that ever was presented ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... beautiful in a shadowy, spiritual way. The blind, of all their sufferings, often feel most keenly the impossibility of knowing whether the truth is told them about their own looks; and he who will try and realize what it is to have been always sightless will understand that this is not vanity, but rather a sort of diffidence towards which all people should be very kind. Of all necessities of this world, of all blessings, of all guides to truth, God made light first. There are many ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the story o'er and o'er; It was his full heart's only lore: A prophet on the Sabbath-day Had touched his sightless eyes with clay, And made him see who had been blind. Their words passed by him like the wind, Which raves and howls, but ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... been born blind. It had worried his father and mother greatly, for they knew when he grew to manhood he would not be able to hunt and support himself. They hoped as he grew older he might yet receive his eyesight, although both eyes were white and sightless. At last when he became seven or eight years of age his ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... with awe of such despair, All living things give room, They flit before his sightless glare As horrid shapes, that loom And shriek the curse that bids him bear The symbol of ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... man lay on the floor, his dark face twisted up, his sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, his temple crushed as with a hammer. Clutched tight in one stiff hand was an automatic. On his chest ...
— A Scientist Rises • Desmond Winter Hall
... repulse the Greeks That moment, and to drench his sword in blood. Then, under shelter of a spreading beech 820 Sacred to Jove, his noble followers placed The godlike Chief Sarpedon, where his friend Illustrious Pelagon, the ashen spear Extracted. Sightless, of all thought bereft, He sank, but soon revived, by breathing airs 825 Refresh'd, that fann'd him gently from the North. Meantime the Argives, although press'd alike By Mars himself and Hector brazen-arm'd, Neither to flight inclined, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... yearning with the chill of despair. He went in again, and put his right hand on the latch of the door to close it—but he did not close it: he was arrested, as he had been already since his loss, by the invisible wand of catalepsy, and stood like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding open his door, powerless to resist either the good or the evil ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... tears And blood prolifically spilled, homes lordless, And homeless lords! The mass must always suffer That one should reign! the collar's but newly clamp'd, And nothing but the name thereon is changed— Master? still masters! mark you not the red Of shame unutterable in my sightless white? Still hear me, Cromwell, speaking for your sake! These fifteen years, we, to you whole-devoted, Have sought for Liberty—to give it thee? To make our interests your huckster gains? The king a lion slain that you may flay, And wear the robe—well, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... scared by his threats, started to walk away in the slow, halting way of the sightless, and attracted Great Night Moth's attention. He picked up his new gun and while all were petrified with fear of being the target, he shot the blind man so that his body fell into the oven in which the pig had been baked. The people could only laugh ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... in the dark—deep down in the dark, With the terror of death in each sightless eye, Which tells how hard 'tis to burn and die Down—down in the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... now in the center, where all about him horses were rearing, pawing the air, and falling backward; men were dismounted as if torn from their saddle by the blast of a tornado, while others, shot through some vital part, retained their seat and rode onward in the ranks with vacant, sightless eyes. And looking back over the additional two hundred yards that this effort had won for them, they could see the field of yellow stubble strewn thick with dead and dying. Some there were who had fallen headlong from their saddle and buried their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... was much weaker and more torpid: he spoke not a word, except on the occasion of my question about the Moors, as previously stated, and sate with sightless eyes, lost in himself, and manifesting no sense of our presence, so that we had the feeling of some mighty shade or phantom from some forgotten century being ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... chatters at you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world. There were churches with ugly gashes in them, fresh and smarting still; some had sightless eyes, as of skulls; and there were churches piecemeal and scattered like the splinters of the True Cross. A great foliated arch of travertine would frame a patch of plaster and soiled casement just broad enough for some lolling pair of shoulders ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noted their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole Valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... that Milton arrived in Italy in the spring of 1638. In 1637, the affection which, in the preceding year, deprived Galileo of the use of his right eye, attacked the left also, which began to grow dim, and in the course of a few months became sightless; so that, although Milton has not alluded to this calamity, Galileo had become totally blind at the time ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... privation. Her eyes, large and clear, had a strange quality: extinguished for ever to her, to others they were brilliant. They were mysterious torches lighting only the outside. They gave light but possessed it not. These sightless eyes were resplendent. A captive of shadow, she lighted up the dull place she inhabited. From the depth of her incurable darkness, from behind the black wall called blindness, she flung her rays. She saw not the sun without, but her soul was ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the shimmering wheat that frets the sky, Gold of plenty and blue of hope, I'm seeing it all with an inner eye As out of the door I grope and grope. And I hear my wife and her lover there, Whispering, whispering, round the rick, Mocking me and my sightless stare, As I fumble and stumble everywhere, Slapping and tapping with my stick; Old and weary at thirty-one, Heartsick, wishing it all was done. Oh, I'll tap my way around to the byre, And I'll hear the cows as they chew their hay; There at least there is none to ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... long and lean, with a shock of black hair. Blue glasses concealed one sightless eye. It was the chief sacristan who had thus stolen ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... wind; So that thou hast a clod within thine hand, Life seems eternal, till the crumbling dust Runs through thy clenching fingers, and thy gage Mocks thee up from the mould'ring frame of Earth. There is no mystery like Death; it comes Sightless as the first breath of infant life, And goes to an unsearched Eternity— The End ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... other business in hand that night. Fortune, too, favored them when they arrived at the O'Hara house; for there, leaning on the decaying gate, stood Eileen O'Hara, her face raised to the sky as though seeking in the soft star radiance which fell upon her lids a celestial balm for her sightless eyes. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... rings the woodland loud and long, 5 The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... "Yet—they ne'er have spoke a word! But here's a face at last doth please thee well Yet hath no power to speak, see, sigh or smell, Since tongueless, sightless, breathless 't is—thus I A sorry Fool its needs must e'en supply. And whiles thou doatest on yon painted head My tongue I'll lend to woo thee in its stead. I'll woo with wit As seemeth fit, Whiles there thou sit And gaze on it. Whiles it ye ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol |
