"Voiceless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this picture of the Pilgrims to Emmaus a typical instance of this? Pull the work to pieces; it ought to seem dull, monotonous, voiceless. As a composition it is utterly common: we see a sort of cellar of stone-work, a table facing us, behind which sits Jesus, His feet bare, His lips colourless, His complexion muddy, His raiment of a pinkish grey; He is breaking the bread, while, to His right, an apostle, clutching ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... with one reproachful look On him who bade her go, And scarcely could the patriarch brook That glance of voiceless wo: In vain her quivering lips essay'd His mercy to implore; Silent the mandate she obey'd, And then was ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... began to change towards me. The ease of our intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I grinned, and capered, and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand ways, and knew—with what a voiceless agony!—that I did it all the time. I tried to resign again, and Barnaby talked about "X" and "Z" and "Y" in the New Review, and gave me a strong cigar to smoke, and so routed me. And then I walked up the Assyrian Gallery in the manner of Irving ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and said I could not;—set you down, Your gray eyes wonder-filled beneath that crown Of bright hair gladdening me as you raced by. Another Father now, more strong than I, Has borne you voiceless to your dear ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... promptly taken in the coils of that voiceless beauty whose speaking eye had met his so squarely. The mother had played him false, as she had Jethro—but with Peter these affairs ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... that morning had only begun to form in the void, was grouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were its gravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant with unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms. Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the dawn, were beyond remembrance ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same,—devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy?" One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about balancing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... of trying suspense, when Firmstone's life wavered in the balance, through the longer period of convalescence, he lacked not devotion, love, nor skill to aid him. Zephyr was omnipresent, but never obtrusive. Bennie, with voiceless words and aggressive manner, plainly declared that a sizzling cookstove with a hot temper that never cooled was more efficacious than a magazine of bandages and a ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... parentage. Crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance. A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated and voiceless piano, Falbe had said: "I'm sorry, but I can't do anything with you." As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to emerging ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... desperately, and from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother's confidence. His cruel eloquence brought the poor lady to her feet, and she stood there with clasped hands, petrified and voiceless. Mary Garland quickly left her place, came straight to Roderick, and laid her hand on his arm, looking at him with all her tormented heart in her eyes. He made no movement to disengage himself; he simply shook his head several times, in dogged negation of ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... other, like lovers reunited whose mouths are hungry for the pressure of glad greetings. There are places where the water eddies round and round, where smooth eager lips, rising from the whirlpools, seem as if they reached up for something to kiss, and are sucked down again into the depths with voiceless passion. Foot by foot the water gains on the rocks beside the channels, on the fringes of the boulders, on the stony shores, and covers the stretches ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... again!—living, breathing, quickening with the fire of life undimmed in her. And he had seen the bright colour spreading to her eyes, and the dark eyes widen to his stare; he had seen the vivid blush, the forced smile, the nod, the voiceless parting of her stiffened lips. Then she was gone, leaving the whole world peopled with her living presence and the very sky ringing with the words her lips had never uttered, never would utter while sun and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... mist. Through this veil the pale moon watched the earth with steady gaze. From among the monuments and time-scarred headstones, looming darkly in the forbidding silence, an apparition arose, and to Flea's vivid imagination it seemed as if voiceless gray ghosts were peopling God's Acre on all sides. She recoiled in horror as the strange, ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... hath conquered thee, imperial Night! Thou sit'st alone within her void, cold halls, Thy solemn brow uplifted, and thy soul Paining the space with dumb and mighty thought. The dreary wind ebbs, voiceless, round thy form, Following the stealthy hours, that wake no stir In the hushed velvet of thy mantle's fold. Thy thoughts take being: down the dusky aisles Go shapes of good, and beckoning ghosts of crime, And dreams of maddening beauty—hopes, that shine To darken, and in cloudy height sublime, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... know a green grass path that leaves the field And, like a running river, winds along Into a leafy wood, where is no throng Of birds at noon-day; and no soft throats yield Their music to the moon. The place is sealed, An unclaimed sovereignty of voiceless song, And all the unravished silences belong To some sweet ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... revolution Of women, of women, Shout the revolution For liberty. Rise, glorious women of the earth, The voiceless and the free United strength assures ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... baffled Mary Louise, even while it answered her innermost questionings, and for the moment she was voiceless. "What in the world——!" she said at length and hated herself for the vulgar ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... the dead alone Whose song has told their hearts' sad story,— Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the dead. They looked with horrified awe at the spot where it had taken place. There stood the living combatant, still full of the fire of battle. Him whom he had fought was gone on the winds to the voiceless abodes of the departed, a breath, a shadow, a sudden chill on the cheek and nothing more. For a brief space resuming his old fleshly habitude, with it had come the cholers and hatreds of the flesh and once more ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... of Public Service, or had conferred upon science and the world's work some notable contribution, he would succumb to secret and suppressed grief, and involuntarily there would burst from his soul an expression of aching, voiceless regret that he himself had done so little. And at these times his existence would seem to him odious and repellent; at these times there would uprise before him the memory of his school days, and the figure of Alexander Petrovitch, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... dead alone Whose song has told their hearts' sad story, - Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity. Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards an end of which they cannot be aware. The mind of the reader unites and interprets the letters into continuous thought, though they be voiceless as stones to one another. Even so may our sad and stony identities spell out a world's word which we know not of, by reason of our singularity and isolation. Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually "united ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... not alone as they Who shut in chambers think it loneliness; The silent Ocean, and the starlight bay, The twilight glow, which momently grew less, The voiceless sands, and dropping caves, that lay Around them, made them to each other press, As if there were no life beneath the sky Save theirs, and that their life ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... made their adieux, the three took their departure; though once, despite Joe's objurgations, the Old Un must needs come back to kiss Mrs. Trapes's toil-worn hand with a flourish which left her voiceless and round of eye until the clatter of ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... truth, and tell us quickly," might have been the voiceless cries of those who listened and saw the face and fidgeting form of the speaker. But the words were not spoken, because the people sensed a hovering horror, a dread catastrophe beyond the power of words to express—and so looked at one another in silence, their eyes ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... voiceless desolation the carcajou—it was a female—continued her leisurely way. Presently, just upon the edge of the forest-growth, she came upon the fresh track of a huge lynx. The prints of the lynx's great pads were several ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... effect was obliterated by a stronger one—one which removed the heavy weight of fear which lay upon him, and gave his crushed spirit a most grateful rebound, and filled all his small soul with a deep sense of relief. But he kept prudently still, and ventured no comment. There was a voiceless interval of some duration now, in which no sounds were heard but the beating of the rain upon the panes, the sighing and complaining of the winds, and now and then a muffled sob from Roxana. The sobs became more and more infrequent, and at last ceased. Then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... personality gathers up these many convictions, concentrates them into one focus, and then expresses them. The great man is the one who first expresses what the many believe. He is a voice for the voiceless, and gives in trumpet tones what others ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... are from our looks More plainly to be read, Than thoughts expressed in printed books Whose language oft seems dead, Because it lacks a living form— A voiceless, dull decree That of itself has ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... No voiceless sorrow grieved her mind, No memory her bosom stirred, Nor dreamed she, as she read to two, 'Twas surely three ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... La Marche, [see Note 2], whose whole existence had been spent in the scented atmosphere of Court life, stared at the child in voiceless amazement. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... not, yet comprehended, Is the spirit's voiceless prayer. Soft rebukes, in blessings ended, Breathing from ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... with precedent, with race-custom, with the iron weight called authority. These heavy forces reach their most perfect expression in the absolutely masculine field of warfare. The absolute authority; the brainless, voiceless obedience; the relentless penalty. Here we have male coercion at its height; law and government wholly arbitrary. The result is as might be expected, a fine machine of destruction. But destruction is not a human process—merely a male process ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... plant, of whose loveliness marvellous tales have reached his ears, so did he wait for something entrancing to issue from the sweet twilight sadnesses of her being, the gleams that died into dusk, the deep voiceless ponderings into which ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... sonorous youth whom the claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... of her and of him; for this is the Christmas season,—the time when it is most meet to think of the children and other sweet and holy things. There is snow everywhere, snow and cold. The garden is desolate and voiceless: the flowers are gone, the trees are ghosts, the birds have departed. It is winter out there, and it is winter, too, in this heart of mine. Yet in this Christmas season I think of them, and it pleaseth me—God forbid that I offend with much speaking—it pleaseth ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... his face deepened, and a fine, gleaming sweat started out on his brow. His face contorted in a spasm of voiceless suffering, and he drew a stiff hand down either arm. Howat watched him in a species of strained curiosity, with a suspension of breath. Something, he felt, should be done to relieve the oppression of agony gathering on Felix Winscombe's countenance, but a ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... places almost completely shutting out the light of day. This was not like the other chasm. It was deeper and darker and more sullen. Under its walls the gloom was almost that of night. Its solitude was voiceless; not a bird fluttered or chirped among its rocks; the lowest of whispered words sounded with startling distinctness. Once Rod spoke aloud, and his voice rose and beat itself in the cavernous depths of the walls until it seemed as ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... barred the gate that lets in dream, And he would rather count the perch and bream Than with the current's idle fancy lapse; And yet he had the poet's open eye That takes a frank delight in all it sees, Nor was earth voiceless, nor the mystic sky, To him the life-long friend of fields and trees: Then came the prose of the suburban street, Its silence deepened by our echoing feet, And converse such as rambling hazard finds; 340 Then he who many cities ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... chevalier, came back into the room, carrying in his hands a glass and a pistol, and double-locked the door behind him. Terrified at this spectacle, the marquise half raised herself in her bed, gazing voiceless and wordless. Then the abbe approached her, his lips trembling; his hair bristling and his eyes blazing, and, presenting to her the glass and the pistol, "Madame," said he, after a moment of terrible silence, "choose, whether poison, fire, or"—he made a sign to the chevalier, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to the voiceless dark," and listen to the creaking of the bulkheads and the rippling of the sea alongside as the Snark logged steadily her six knots an hour. I went over my calculations again and again, striving ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... An intense voiceless excitement possessed the players, for the game was a close one, and the stakes were very heavy. They bent eagerly over the board, each watching with feverish anxiety his companion's movements, each casting, now and again, a gloating eye upon the heap of gold and ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... language then; but you do now, dear?" he said, a glad ring in his tones. "And may I tell you that my heart and all its dearest hopes went with those little voiceless messengers? That was Why—" ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the weeds The dull, mean-headed, silent snake, Like voiceless doubt that creeps and breeds; From swamps where sluggish waters take, As lives unblest a passing love, The flag-flower's image in the spring, Or seem, when flits the bird above, To stir within ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago. The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now; The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... mere physical anguish of dying with stern indifference! But death the mystery,—death that, not satisfied with changing our objective, may attack even the roots of our subjective,—there lies the mute, ineffable, voiceless horror before which all human courage is abashed, even as all human resistance becomes childish when measuring itself ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Around, forever stretched the endless sands,—the mystery of life found in the heart of death. That mournful, eternal face gave me a strange feeling of weariness and helplessness. I felt as if I had already pressed eagerly to the other side of the head, still only to find the voiceless lips and mute eyes. Strange tears sprang to my eyes; I hastily brushed them away, and, leaving the Sphinx, mounted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... mute inglorious Miltons, who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher; he forgot the Cromwells, who see the noble vessels of the state floundering upon a sea of confusion, and ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... afraid—not of the present or the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... a turbulence of voiceless rage at myself, at her, at Daniel's treachery, at all the train, at Benton, and again at this damning predicament wherein I had landed. When I was bound to wrest free after having done my utmost, she appeared to be twitting me because I would not submit to farther use by her. I certainly had the ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... lifted from me when I saw his mouth and eyes open wide in a big soundless laugh, which came to an end with a voiceless aho! I gave him another tumbler of wine. Before he took it, he made a wide mouth at me again, and slapped his leg. After drinking, he said, "Poom—what good? They're going to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... less fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood, voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act of breathing ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... with the problem of Nan's yielding to the lure of Bivens's gold the more hideous and hopeless it became. He cursed her in one breath, and with the next stretched out his arms in the darkness in desperate voiceless longing. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the voiceless night; Your path led far away. Did you forget me, Heart's Delight, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... affected, and in what way and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,—in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved,—when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world, and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... women from Axphain and Dawsbergen in this seed circle that made Edelweiss its spreading ground. They were Reds of the most dangerous type—silent, voiceless, crafty men and women who built well without noise, and who gave out nothing to the world from which they expected ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... what generous abnegation, what pity, what righteous wrath does he not know, until the plastic power of fancy moulds out of this poor recluse a man like other men. Amid these visionary sympathies time goes quickly by, and returning to his voiceless dwelling he has stored up such wealth of dreams that he can even endure the supreme test when the lonely man finds himself sitting in the wan light with no one near him to whom he is dear. Of the strength and peacefulness which bring him safely through that hour ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... guard his own life with the inflexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed his skull! The sirens sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this appalling navigator. He evidently wanted to live his whole conception of life. Nothing else would do. And she too was a servant of that life that, in the midst of death, cries aloud to our senses. She was eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... a blood-red, wrathful streak Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur His cruel vigilance and her Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak A hopeless hate that cannot stir, A voiceless hate that cannot speak ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... through dingy London and eat a lonely breakfast in that horrible brick Pump Court? He could scarcely do that. Would he go to Reading by himself? The light of the flowing stream, the secrets of the rushes and murmuring woods died; nature became voiceless. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... happened before—or since—that a celebrated person who had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind him—utterly voiceless, utterly gossipless? And permanently so? I don't believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's. And couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at the ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... here and there, nor swept in vain The dusty haunts where futile echoes dwell,— Then, in a cadence soft as summer rain, And sad from Auburn voiceless, drooped ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the spring evening. Things were there which she could know only through her blood—all the mute patience, all the joy that is half fear, all the age-long dissatisfaction with the merely physical end of love—these were in that voiceless entreaty for happiness; and mingled with them, there were the inherited ideals of self-surrender, of service, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... hauled hundreds of young men with their sweethearts. Ambling slowly along, thinking perhaps of his own youth and of the tyranny of man that had made him a gelding, he knew that as long as the moon shone and the intense voiceless quiet continued to reign over the two people in the buggy, the whip would not come out of its socket and he would ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... the swift blades dip and plash Of unseen rowers; On unknown land the waters dash; Who knows how it be wise or rash To meet the rowers! Premi! Premi! Venetia's boatmen lean and cry; With voiceless lips I drift and lie Upon the ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Grace. The boy and the little lost girl had reached a turn in the road. They looked back to send a voiceless farewell, the child holding trustingly to ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... peace by being turned to day. He watched and waited for something; presently it came. A viewless visitant, welcomed by longing soul and body as the man, with extended arms and parted lips received the voiceless greeting of the breeze that came winging its way across the broad Atlantic, full of healthful cheer for a home-sick heart. Far out he leaned; held back the thick-leaved boughs already rustling with a grateful stir, chid the shrill bird beating its ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... singleness of feeling, until at last a low sound—no intelligible word—came from her throat. The plumed fan dropped the length of its silken cord, and her hands went out for help that should yet be voiceless, assuming everything, expressing nothing. He met her call, as three years later he met, at Zutphen, the agony of envy, the appeal against intolerable thirst, in the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... he spoke with something like to awe, His eyes and much-changed face Admetus saw, And voiceless like a slave his words obeyed; For rising up no more delay he made, But took the staff and gained the palace-door Where stood the beasts, whose mingled whine and roar Had wrought his dream; there two and two they stood, ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... Yon marble minstrel's voiceless stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanished age hath flown, The story how ye fell; Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of glory's light That gilds your ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... pines, those gloomy children of the forest, which shed something of melancholy and somewhat of sternness over the brighter features of an Italian landscape, drooped heavily in the breezeless air. As she came on the border of the lake, its waves lay dark and voiceless; only, at intervals, the surf, fretting along the pebbles made a low and dreary sound, or from the trees some lingering songster sent forth a shrill and momentary note, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paid my visits, made adieus; and after, rode out to the lake by the canal and Bayou St. John. But what a change had taken place since my last ride here, just three days back! then all was torpid, decayed, and dead; the forest was voiceless, and the waters oily and stagnant as though never intended for the use of living thing. On this day all nature appears awakened, as if by magic, and vegetation actually seems to proceed before our eyes; in every dyke ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... point in our upward journey, marking as it did the grimness of the task before us. No civilized man can die in this savage Northland without his grave having a deep meaning for those who come afterwards; and constantly, as we sailed on, these voiceless reminders of heroic bones told their ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... caprices and exactions of the curate and of the officials. With this inefficiency in the lower spheres of power and ignorance and indifference in the upper, with the frequent changes and the eternal apprenticeships, with great fear and many administrative obstacles, with a voiceless people that has neither initiative nor cohesion, with employees who nearly all strive to amass a fortune and return home, with inhabit, ants who live in great hardship from the instant they begin to breathe, create prosperity, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... voiceless dialogue! one scarce might deem, While mute we thus communed in tender fashion, How time slipped by like some seraphic dream Of night, all woven of joy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and wo the chiefs, And wo the bridal bed! And we her steps—for once she loved The lord whose love she fled! Lo! where, dishonour yet unknown, He sits—nor deems his Helen flown, Tearless and voiceless on the spot; All desert, but he feels it not! Ah! soon alive, to miss and mourn The form beyond the ocean borne Shall start the lonely king! And thought shall fill the lost one's room, And darkly through the palace gloom Shall stalk a ghostly thing. [26] ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mate, You speak my mind as yours: Doomed to this voiceless, crippled, corpselike state, Who, dear to famed Amphion, trapped here, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you, circling with sinister squeaking cries;—perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... dream, ye voiceless, slumbering ones, Of glories gained through struggles fierce and long, Lulled by the muffled boom of ghostly guns That weave the music of a battle-song? In fitful flight do misty visions reel, While restless chargers toss their bridle-reins? ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... of the revolution were busily at work, the conservatives were not altogether voiceless; nor were the notes of the romantic lyric silenced. Indeed, men like Hoffmann, Herwegh, and Kinkel could not deny the strong influence of the romantic motives and tones upon much of their best poetry. One lyrist greater than any of them was dominated by the romantic tradition—an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... mild phrase, to admonish, was concealed a cruel exercise of tyranny—it meant to warn a man that he was suspected of treason, and that he had better relinquish the exercise of his burghership. By free use of this engine of Admonition, the Guelf College rendered their enemies voiceless in the State, and were able to pack the Signory and the councils with their own creatures. Another important defect in the Florentine Constitution was the method of imposing taxes. This was done by no regular ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... brave heart need quail at Fortune's mood? Whether the pure intent makes righteousness, Or virtue needs the warrant of success? All this I know: not Ammon can impart Force to the truth engraven on my heart. All men alike, though voiceless be the shrine, Abide in God and act by will divine. No revelation Deity requires, But at our birth, all men may know, inspires. Nor is truth buried in this desert sand And doled to few, but speaks in every land. What temple but the earth, the sea, the sky, And heaven and virtuous ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... sound. From this point on my apprehension grew perceptibly until I grasped the helping hands that were extended to me and, after a few struggles, was, by the aid of those chivalrous youths, drawn in a weak and temporarily voiceless condition to ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... as befitted its noble burden, the train came to rest immediately opposite the battalion. With grave, fascinated, horror-stricken faces the men of the battalion stood rigid and voiceless gazing at that deeply moving spectacle. Before their eyes were being paraded the tragic, pathetic remnants of a gallant regiment, which but a few weeks before had stood where they now stood, vital with life, tingling with courage. At their country's bidding ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... have arisen out of the earth, and was so vast that one might dream that the trumpet of the archangel had been blown, and all the dead of a thousand battle-fields had risen up for one last grand review. And not alone past our doors, but through all the streets near us, the same mighty, voiceless procession moved on; all converging to the quarter where the treasures of the great city lay, heaped up ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the voiceless darkness, of the suddenly helpless and collapsed condition in which I landed on the other side. I groped about for a seat, and finally succeeded in finding one at the extreme ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... with that innocent admiration for his wisdom, which seemed to act like a nerve stimulant. A subtle physician might possibly have reached the conclusion, had he been fully aware of all the circumstances, that Ida, with her radiant superiority, her voiceless but none the less positive self-assertion over her husband, was actually a means of spiritual depression which had reacted upon his physical nature. Nobody knows exactly to what extent any of us are responsible for the lives of others, and how far our mere ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... top of the fences surrounding well-kept gardens, in the first stories of hotels and private dwellings, trailing its slime on velvet carpets as well as roughly boarded floors. And a silence quite as suggestive as the visible desolation was in the voiceless streets that no longer echoed to carriage-wheel or footfall. The low ripple of water, the occasional splash of oars, or the warning cry of boatmen were the few ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... that remained in my life went out in that sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here—I cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to bring relief, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... animated concert through the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance; and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a music at ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... An aching, voiceless void, Hushed in the heart whereunto none reply, And in the cringing crowd Companionless! Bird, bear me ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... their mortal dwelling house; they shook their pinions and began a flight, sailing on the placid current of thought, filling the creation with new glory, and rousing sublime imagery that else had slept voiceless. Then I would hasten to my desk, weave the new-found web of mind in firm texture and brilliant colours, leaving the fashioning of the material to ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... restricted to statues and pictures and insincere essays in dry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate the whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of a younger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again make their dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and the Formless will spin rhythmic patterns on the loom of space. We shall seek and find a new language of symbols to express the joy of the soul, freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism, and fronting the unimaginable ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... little stream, Where the wild-rose blooms so fair; Oh, who would mar that happy dream I see enacted there? Beauteous orioles are they— Little timid, tongueless birds— Each listening to the voiceless lay, Love strives to put in words. Roses drop their petals round; In the air a sweet perfume; Till time no longer baffles sound— Eternal ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... moderating our passions with its calm aspect. We come back from our travels, and the sight of such a well-known mountain is like meeting an old friend unchanged. But it is a one-sided affection. The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak, Till a deaf world's ear Shall be made to hear The wrongs ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... was apparently roofed in by a lofty glass dome, decorated with hangings of watery-green silk, but the grotesque trees and plants grew to so enormous a height that it was impossible to tell which were the falling draperies and which the straggling leaves. Curious birds flew hither and thither, voiceless creatures, scarlet and amber winged; a huge gilded brazier stood in one corner from whence ascended the constant smoke of burning incense, and there were rose-shaded lamps all about, that shed a subdued mysterious lustre on the scene, and bestowed a pale glitter ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... seems to have a sense Of quiet gladness in her noiseless play. She hath a pleasant smile, a gentle way, Whose voiceless eloquence Touches all hearts, though I had once the fear That even her father would not ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... have been shown over the civilized East have often succeeded in holding intercourse, by means of their invention and application of principles in what may be called the voiceless mother utterance, with white deaf-mutes, who surely have no semiotic code more nearly connected with that attributed to the plain-roamers than is derived from their common humanity. They showed the greatest pleasure in meeting deaf-mutes, precisely as travelers in a foreign ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... character. His interest was that of the naturalist who stands by eager and curious to see a rustic entrap some rara avis that he desires to study, to use for his experiment. Better for the bird: it can suffer and die. Afterward what matter whether it stand neatly stuffed and mounted, a voiceless worshiper, in some glass mausoleum, or slowly moulder in a fence corner until its feathers are wafted far and wide, and only a little tuft of greener grass remains to its memory? As our naturalist's game was nobler and destined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... their doorways half awake, and only just recovering from their overnight orgy. They stood for some moments voiceless and thoughtful. Then the concentration upon the store began. It was strange to look upon. It was an almost simultaneous movement. These half-dazed, wholly sick creatures moved with the precision of a universally impelling force. The store might have been one huge ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... upon his staff, With all the sorrows of his fifteen years Gazing out of his eyes into the fall, A memory ineffable and sweet Half tinged with voiceless passion, half Plaintive with sad imaginings that drift Like echoes of far-off autumnal bells. He starts up with a laugh, Binds up the last gaunt sheaf and turns away; Out of the dusk an inarticulate call ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... of his darkening consciousness, Coquenil called up his mother's face and, looking at it through the eyes of his soul, he spoke to her across the miles, in a wild, voiceless cry: "I did the best I could, little mother, the—the ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fulness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marvelled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which succeeded the Armistice an occasional visit to London was a strange experience. England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh and body. But Europe is solid with herself. France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland, throb together, and their structure ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... bivouac by the gentle stir of a warm, sweet breath over his sleeping face, and looks up into the eyes of his faithful fellow-traveller, ready and waiting for the toil of the day. Surely, unless he is a pagan and an unbeliever, by whatever name he calls upon his God, he will thank Him for this voiceless sympathy, this dumb affection, and his morning prayer will embrace a double blessing—God bless us both, the horse and the rider, and keep our feet from falling and our souls ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... are confident we will yet sing them when the bodily impediments are swept away, and, as the earthly shadows lengthen, as the chill winds of old age strengthen, we more and more appreciate the wonderful expression of this thought, in that sweetest of all poems of the minor key, called "The voiceless." ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Orphans, and the calm Deaf mutes and the impassive Chinese held tight to what they had. So gathered the storm, till all the town, like the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver, was filled with a silent "call for Mr. Tomlinson," voiceless ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... an hour still and voiceless in Northern climes, but not so in the Southern. Far from it in the State of Mississippi. There the sun's excessive heat keeps Nature alert and alive, even at night, and in ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... monument shaped by men. Mukee had told Jan its story. In the first autumn of the woman's life at Lac Bain, he and Per-ee had climbed the old spruce, lopping off its branches until only the black cap remained; and after that it was known far and wide as the "lobstick" of Cummins' wife. It was a voiceless cenotaph which signified that all the honor and love known to the wilderness people had ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... P.S.—Were all your privateers voiceless in the war of 1812? Did no one of them write memoirs? I shall have to do my privateer from chic, if you can't help me.[74] My application to Scribner has been quite in vain. See if you can get hold of some historic sharp in the club, and tap him; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proud arches, now shattered and trodden under foot. Its majesty is that of a sleeping goddess, so still, so tranquil, proud even, in its ruins; yet in such utter silence it lies. In the cracks of the marble floors, in the crannies of the walls, springing from beneath the broken statue, voiceless yet persistent, grow scarlet poppies—the sleep flowers of the world, yielding to this yellowing Temple of Mysteries the quieting influence ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... comfort to the awkward and the shy that Washington could not make an after-dinner speech; and the well-known anecdote—"Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty is even greater than your valor "—must have consoled many a voiceless hero. Washington Irving tried to welcome Dickens, but failed in the attempt, while Dickens was as voluble as he was gifted. Probably the very surroundings of sympathetic admirers unnerved both Washington and Irving, although there are some men who can never "speak on their ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... I cried, and could say no more, for the agitations of five solitary, despairing years were choking me; but he was entirely voiceless, stricken, I have no doubt, beyond any power of mine to realize. How could I dream that in consideration, power, and prestige he had advanced even more rapidly than myself, and that at this very moment he was not only the idol of society, but on the verge of uniting himself ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... to listen, humbled and subdued As when the Saviour uttered 'Peace, be still.' The tardy laborer, walled within the town, Brought the uplifted hammer noiseless down, And stood in meek confession, tool in hand. The mother hushed the baby lullaby, And o'er her sleeping innocence exhaled Voiceless thanksgiving. Children ceased to play, Feeling an awe they comprehended not, And stood, unconscious of their beauty's pose, As those Murillo's pencil glorifies. Upon the airy esplanade the steed No longer pawed ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... instant the black-bearded man leaped across the fallen table like a tiger, at Rosenblatt's throat, and bore him down to the earthen floor in the dark corner. Sitting astride his chest, his knees on Rosenblatt's arms, and gripping him by the throat, he held him voiceless and helpless. Soon his victim lay still, looking up into his assailant's face in surprise, fear and ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... master, must learn music; the number of teachers and pupils are multiplied without end; and out of either class how many are there qualified by nature as singers? Not two in fifty. What follows? By labour and attention science may be acquired, although voice cannot. The voiceless teacher may instruct his voiceless pupil in the foppery of an art, the spirit of which is unattainable by either; pieces merely scientific are placed by him on her piano—are performed to the credit of both, with vast execution, as far as respects the science and the harmony—-but as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... sand under the Blue Star had to be crossed at night—a feat which even the Navajos did not have to their credit. Yet Hare had no shrinking; he had no doubt; he must go on. As he had been drawn to the Painted Desert by a voiceless call, so now he was ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... have been as much frightened as any of the four; and fear had produced upon him an effect exactly similar to that it had produced upon Ossaroo. It kept him silent. Cowering in a corner, Fritz was now as quiet as if he had been born a voiceless dingo. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... also wrote Elsie Venner (1861), which has been called "the snake story of literature," and The Guardian Angel. By many readers he is valued most for the poems which lie imbedded in his books, such as "The Chambered Nautilus," "The Last Leaf," "Homesick in Heaven," "The Voiceless," and "The Boys." ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... trees in its embrace. On every side was the never-ceasing battle for light and the struggle of the weak against the strong. The air was heavy with the breath of triumphant blooms and the odor of defeated, decaying life. A thousand voiceless tragedies were being enacted; the wood was peopled by distorted shapes that spoke of forgotten encounters; rich, riotous, parasitic growths flourished upon starved limbs or rotting trunks. It was weird and beautiful and pitiless. Unlike the peaceful order of our Northern ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... intensify, by contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless, pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer sympathizes with his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... rose from the hall. Millie Stope cowered in a voiceless accession of terror; but John Woolfolk, lamp in hand, moved to the door. He was curious to see exactly what was happening. The bulk had risen; a broad back swayed like a pendulum, and a swollen hand gripped the stair rail. The form heaved itself up a step, paused, tottering, and then mounted ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Voiceless little bird, Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... public. It was of course hotly resented by that small group of women of privilege, who think they know better than working-women what are the needs of working-women. Its deep significance lay in that it was a voice from the voiceless millions. It gave many pause to think and catch, as they had never caught before, the vital meaning underlying ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... stir The stagnate night:—till the minutest ray Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. It paused—it fluttered. But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved 660 An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a vapour fed with golden beams That ministered on sunlight, ere the west Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame— 665 No sense, no motion, no divinity— A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander—a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... voiceless, neither having breath for useless speech, and each realizing that the end would probably mean death either to the one or the other. Only our heavy breathing, the quick shuffling of feet on the stony road, and an occasional rending of cloth, evinced the desperation ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... stretched across the table, his face downwards upon his arm, whilst those tearless, voiceless sobs, which are so terrible to witness in a man, sobs which are the gasps of a despairing heart, shook the strong broad shoulders and the down-bent head that was hidden from ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... look up. She could, only cling to him in voiceless abasement. There was a brief silence, and then she felt his hand upon her head. He spoke again, the sneering note gone from his voice though it still held a faint inflection of ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... been my own first love, I knew all that he suffered in voiceless longing for his fair one, throned afar in his languishing gaze. I knew that he plucked flowers meant to be given to her, only to lay them carelessly on the floor beside his seat when school "took in," lacking the courage to bestow them brazenly ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... door, which Fanny had fastened behind her in her mad flight. Mrs. Thornton herself went. And the sound of his well-known and commanding voice, seemed to have been like the taste of blood to the infuriated multitude outside. Hitherto they had been voiceless, wordless, needing all their breath for their hard-labouring efforts to break down the gates. But now, hearing him speak inside, they set up such a fierce unearthly groan, that even Mrs. Thornton was white with fear as she preceded him into the room. He came in a little ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... days and the evil instincts of human nature: all this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had really forever disappeared, were forever useless and voiceless, forever without influence in a world to which they have ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... and voiceless, councillors of mighty fame? Vacant eye and palsied right arm watch this ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous |
