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More "Sombre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had left it. Who he might ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... never sombre. She always seemed to remember, even in her bright ribbons and silks, the days of her girlhood, when half the young men in the county were wild about her. When she moved she wafted towards you a perfume of ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... spade, he took her from the wall, and looked from his door into the wood, pondering where her grave should be. A whitebeam at a little distance made a vivid conflagration of green amid the sombre boles of the pines. Pinewoods rely on their undergrowth—bracken and whortleberry and occasional bushes—for their spring illuminations, and the whitebeam shone as bright in that wood as ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... evening sun as though weary of the quiet scene, gathered all his truant rays out of the tree tops and from the purple mountain summit, and sunk to rest behind the sombre clouds that twilight spread across the sky. Then Fifine who longed to be alone, kissed her father good-night and retired to her own little room, after telling the servant to light a lamp and take her father ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... the western boundary of Waveland, was a lovely inland lake, by the margin of which Clemence had been accustomed to spend many sad hours, since she had become a resident of the little village. A narrow foot-path, that led through the sombre woods, brought her to a sheltered spot upon the sloping shore, where she often came alone to pass an idle hour. She had come to regard this place as her own peculiar property, for no one had ever come here to interrupt her, or claim any portion ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... shadows crept up the mountain peaks that stand up like grim giants away off in the East, and twilight began to throw its grey mantle over the lake; still he was alone. The darkness began to gather around him; the forests along the shore to lose their distinctness and to stand in sombre and shadowy outline above the water; still no prospect of relief presented itself. The twilight faded from the West, the stars stole out in the heavens, the milky way stretched its belt of light across ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... deserts. When the swallows fly homeward, he will come again, not without the third and fourth volume, which he here promises to the Pantagruelists, merry knaves, and honest wags of all degrees, who have a wholesome horror of the sadness, sombre meditation and melancholy of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... first glimpse of Lake Ida. In the cleft of a huge, gaunt, bare hill, divided as if by a giant hand, lay a large black sheet of ice. No ray of sunshine ever struck it from autumn until spring, and it seemed impossible to imagine our venturing to skate merrily in such a sombre looking spot. But New-Zealand sheep farmers are not sentimental I am afraid. Beyond a rapid thought of self-congratulation that such "cold country" was not on their run, they did not feel affected by its eternal silence and gloom. The ice would bear, and what more could skater's heart ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... tould me I must shpake a pace, I tried to kape a cheerful face, Though obvious lack of matther I was mournin'! But, oh sombre-faced JOHN MORLEY! Ye desired to help me surely, When ye went for Tipperary widout warnin'! Though your tale could scarce be boulder, Yet my hits straight from the shoulder Will make ye mourn the hour that ye were born in. And I think ye'll have a notion Ye were wrong to cross ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... for me at least, the face of more than one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening, through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of any country town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scattered high walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest the infinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the crowd. In the distance were Talana Hill, where the first battle of the campaign was fought; the lofty Drakensberg where more than fifty years before the early Boer Voortrekkers had their first glimpses of fair Natal, while to the south were the hills of Ladysmith of sombre history. There in the midst of bloody battlefields, and among several thousand men who sought the blood of the enemy, Kruger, the man of peace, implored Almighty God to give strength to his burghers. It was a ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... each other in Western Asia annihilated all the hopes of the Jewish race for a terrestial kingdom, and cast it back on religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion. The establishment of the Roman empire exalted men's imaginations, and the great era of peace on which the world was entering gave birth to illimitable hopes. This confused medley of dreams found ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if he boxed as he preached,—what "The Fancy" would call an "ugly customer."] The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same deep inevitable eye, the same look,—as of thunder asleep, but ready,— neither a dog nor a man to be ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... the storm from Tintagel to Clovelly? Soon this also bade fair to be a storm, for the rain began to tumble out of the sky, rather than fall, as if an army of people stood throwing down water by the bucketful. I revelled in it, and in the sombre scenery, where sharp rocks stood out like bones through the tattered green coats of soldier-mountains. All the world was gray or gray-green, save for a patch of purple heather here and there, like the stain ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... mark upon his genius—upon his most beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he was not the man of a sombre parti-pris whom M. Montegut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but little direct ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... voices of the stars and to love and understand the lowliest things that God has made, bore him straight to the heart of England as surely as it swept his name into the holy of holies of artistic France, spoke to Russia's sombre soul and temporarily revolutionised the literature of the United States. His work belonged to no "school," and its charm was not due to "style"; therefore his books lost little in translation, for true genius speaks to every man in ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Ballads Satirical, Polemical, and Political, and even Devotional and Doctrinal, of as early date as many of the songs inspired by the spirit of Love, War, and Romance. Among them they represent the diverse strands that are blended in the Scottish character—the sombre and the bright; the prose and the poetry. The one or the other has predominated in the expression of the genius of the nation in verse, according to the circumstances and mood of the time. But neither has ever been really absent; they are the opposite sides ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... was already fading into the sombre shadows of night, when two travellers might have been observed swiftly—at a pace of six miles in the hour—descending the rugged side of a mountain; the younger bounding from crag to crag with the agility of a ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... applied a match to the sombre pile. A fiery tongue thrust itself out here and there, then suddenly the whole fabric burst into flames, blazing and crackling beautifully. This was a signal for the boys to join hands and dance around the burning barrels, which they did shouting like mad creatures. When the ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a folding stool and a deal table, which latter serves me alternately for a toilette, to write upon, or to hold the Queen's dessert—there being no receptacle in the kitchen or elsewhere wherein to put it. I laugh at all this ... and amidst all the sombre occurrences which have befallen us, I console myself with my own reflections. I imagine that fortune may take a good turn, and I calmly and trustfully wait for those consolations which are powerful to assuage all my trouble."[38] "Action ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... this time that he, in accord with the chrysalid tendency manifested by most other millionaires, discarded his long-followed sombre method of life, and invested himself with a gaudy magnificence. On Fifth avenue, at Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets, he built a spacious brown-stone mansion. In reality it was a union of two mansions; ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... managing very nicely," Isabelle said, contentedly, as Tony, with a sombre face and averted eyes, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were gray—a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow in the padded chair. His right hand—the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar—rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of this engagement was sombre, magnificent, and unique. The day was perfectly clear, and you could see right down the coast as far as Sedd-ul-Bahr. There the warships of the first division were blazing away at Aki Baba and the hills around it, covering their summits with a great white cloud of bursting ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tell, that he was seeking Katherine as eagerly as he had sought herself; but with what a different object! The sight of De Burgh was as the thrust of a poisoned dagger through the delicate veins and articulations of her moral system. To see the dark face and sombre eyes she had loved so passionately—had!—still loved!—was almost physical agony. It was as if some beloved form had been brought back from another world, but animated by a spirit that knew her not, regarded her not at all. Oh, the bitterness of such an estrangement, of ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... of one husband and the wedding of another, and even that was so short as to be barely decent. Six months—yet in that space of time much might happen—things undreamed of and undesired—slow tortures carefully measured out, punishment sudden and heavy! Wrapped in these sombre musings I walked beside him in profound silence. The moon shone brilliantly; groups of girls danced on the shore with their lovers, to the sound of a flute and mandoline—far off across the bay the sound of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... know his fate before he reached Viola's home. When midway the bridge he pulled his reins and the horse stood still. The dark waters of the small river swept on beneath them. Night had just begun to spread out her sombre wings, bedecked with silent stars. Just in front of them, as they looked out upon the center of the river, the river took a bend which brought a shore directly facing them. A green lawn began from the shore and ran back to be lost in the ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was I—the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals," all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... tone at first, before she was more than chilled by his sombre and imperious gravity, before her mother supported him unrelentingly and galled and exasperated her by persecution, he might have attracted, fascinated, conquered. As it was, she jeered ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... had noiselessly followed his father, lifted his sombre, serious looks to Harold as he thus spoke; and when Harold turned away, he said to Sweyn, timidly, "He, at least, is ever good ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our hero, as he sprang away from the gasping beast. The next moment he had disappeared in the dense, dark wood. Ah! how sheltering, how kindly, seemed that sombre sanctuary, with its dark grey tufts beneath his feet, and the thick, dusk-green branches of the fir and pine! The gloomy background seemed to invite him further into the heart of its shade and silence. No bird whistled through ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... herself, whilst aloud she murmured: "I thought that you would like them. Your room has such a gloomy, sombre air, and a few roses seem to diffuse some of the sunshine on ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... O sombre heart of earth and swoln with grief, That in thy time wast as a bird for mirth, Dim womb of life and many a seed and sheaf, And full of changes, ancient heart of earth, From grain and flower, from grass and every leaf, Thy mysteries and thy multitudes ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... glittering rays of the sun, and the other side harmonising with the more louring portion of the heavens. Below us, and to the left, showed the still blue of a pond where it lay surrounded with pale-green laburnums—its dull, concave-looking depths repeating the trees in more sombre shades of colour over the surface of a hillock. Beyond the water spread the black expanse of a ploughed field, with the straight line of a dark-green ridge by which it was bisected running far into the distance, and there joining ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... sit down with you, Ursula; for, after all, reading godly books in dingles at eve is rather sombre work. Yes, I think I will sit down with you;" and I sat ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... reaches my years the fear of criticism might prevent him from indulging his fancy. I am not afraid of that. I am decidedly for pleasing color combinations in dress. I like to see the women's clothes, say, at the opera. What can be more depressing than the sombre black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions? A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... all things with its yellow haze, and is burning to brightest gold the reddish tinge in the girl's hair as she moves with dallying steps through the green fields. She is dressed in a white gown, decked with ribbons of sombre tint, and wears upon her head a huge poky bonnet, from which her face peeps out, half ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... colors seem rather out of place in the family which contains also our sombre Blackbirds, but before the leaves have fallen both kinds of Orioles and their families start for Mexico and Central America, where such tropical hues seem more in keeping, and where many members of the family are quite as brilliant as those we see ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... stricken down by a long and painful illness. When he rose from it and, as a convalescent, took his first walk into the country, he was astonished to find that the beautiful Umbrian landscape which he had always so enjoyed, seemed to him cold, discolored, and sombre. A natural effect of illness, one may say. Yet it more often happens that when a convalescent returns to fresh air and the beauty of the earth, his pleasure in them is heightened. At all events Francis was vividly impressed with the nothingness of nature, as compared ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... this the scene was most deceptive. Neither peace nor loneliness lurked amid those sombre rock shadows; over all was the dominance of men—primitive, fighting men, rendered almost wholly animal by the continued hardships of existence, the ceaseless struggle after gold. The vagrant trail, worn deep between ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... his glass and turned it toward the island. The sombre shades of twilight had already gathered over the scene; but he saw through them quite distinctly a boat pulled by four men, while a fifth sat in the stern holding the tiller. The steersman kept the small island between them and the vessel ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... gentleman's residence, built of variegated uneven stones, black and grey and white, which seemed to be chiefly flint; but the corners and settings of the windows and of the door-ways, and the chimneys, were of brick. There was something sombre about it, and many perhaps might call it dull of aspect; but it was substantial, comfortable, and unassuming. It was entered by broad stone steps, with iron balustrades curving outwards as they descended, and there was an open area round the house, showing that the offices were ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... spot where we now sit The grandest tomb a woman ever had; All sombre tints I deem would be unfit; For never have ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... might have known, or should have known the antecedents of my personages. I must let them understand how it came to pass that so pretty, so pert, so gay, so good a girl as Mary Lovelace, without any great fault on her part, married a man so grim, so gaunt, so sombre, and so old as Lord George Germain. It will not suffice to say that she had done so. A hundred and twenty little incidents must be dribbled into the reader's intelligence, many of them, let me hope, in such ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut from a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the basin, and a few stone lanterns—so called from their form, and not their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for wicks—are the sole occupants of the place. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to the king, which is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of English history is in the seventh century—a late dawn, dark and sombre, without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous with that light which never was on sea or land—thronged with heroic ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... into a stately room packed with masterpieces of art; gleaming marbles and sombre bronze in groups of bewildering beauty, with every inch of wall-space crowded with canvases in massive gold frames glowing with the soft ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... strongly built man, with thick hair crowned by a little jockey cap, and was enveloped in a kind of overcoat which might have been black once but which was now of a greenish hue, the result of the inclemency of the weather; he gnawed his heavy moustache in silence and turned sombre, uneasy looks on all, including his companion in misfortune. He wore hobnailed shoes and carried a stout cudgel. He was more like a piece of the human wreckage one sees in the street corners of great cities than ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... and moving, as that experienced by those who love and follow Art. She, Archaeology, is, for those who know her, full of such emotion; garbed in an imperishable glamour, she is raised far above the turmoil of the present on the wings of Imagination. Her eyes are sombre with the memory of the wisdom driven from her scattered sanctuaries; and at her lips wonderful things strive for utterance. In her are gathered together the longings and the laughter, the fears and ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... aboriginal Indian. This child of nature appears to materialize with remarkable facility, and, having apparently doffed his characteristic phlegm in the happy hunting grounds, enters with extreme zest on the lighter gambols which sometimes enliven the sombre monotony of a seance. Almost every Medium keeps an Indian 'brave' in her cohort of Spirits; in fact, there is no Cabinet, howe'er so ill attended, but has some Indian there. It is strange, too, that, as far as I know, departed black men, who might be supposed to be ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... habitations, and implements, so picturesque and unique, as well as the gallant gentlemen in the costume of that picturesque age, it seems almost to border on romance. But there is a dark side to the picture. The sombre veil of uncertainty hangs over the fate of two entire colonies, which, if lifted, would consecrate this spot to the extremes of suffering and bloodshed. It was, no doubt, better to have these scenes buried in oblivion, and for ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... taking advantage of the effects to be derived from impure hues, as Poussin did in his "Deluge." In this work, neither black nor white, blue, red, nor yellow appears; the whole mass being, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This absence of colour, however, is a merit, and not a fault. Vandyke employed such means with admirable effect ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... is, whether he has succeeded in writing a book which will be readable by the class for whom he intends it. To make a lively and entertaining narrative for children, with such unmalleable material as is presented by the sombre, stern, and rigid characteristics of the Puritans and their descendants, is quite as difficult an attempt as to manufacture delicate playthings out of the granite, rocks on which New ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noon! and not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the vaporous day, Dull on the windless waters falls the pallid ray. So slumb'ringly the glassy ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... severely plain in its simplicity: the snow-white kerchief, crossed in front and made fast behind; the under-petticoat of gray homespun, just showing the black hose and buckled shoes beneath; and the over-dress of sombre black or dark brown, puffed out a little over the hips in the pannier fashion, but without any pretence at following the extravagances of the day. The sleeves buttoned tightly to the lower arm, though wider at the cuff, and rose high upon the shoulder with something of a puff. It was ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of the year clothes itself in gay colors, it is deemed an evidence of immaturity for women in the fall time of life to sport crimson and scarlet and orange. Sober grays (which mean old, mature), quiet brown, and even sombre blacks, are rather what are looked for. To dress young when people are old, deceives no one. There is a beauty of age as well as a beauty of youth. Those who live to be old have had their share of the former: why should they seek to deprive ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bank, very far off, a cock crew. Swaying lightly under their feet, the raft floated on toward a point where the darkness dissolved into lighter tones, and the clouds took on themselves clearer shapes and less sombre hues. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... upon the horizon when the girl reached the ford. The rift in the woods, which formed a wagon trail, was very narrow, and even though the sun had not yet set, the spot was dark and sombre by reason of the wall of pine trees which lined it ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... was very narrow—the houses so close together that a donkey loaded with brush-wood could hardly scrape through—and so steep that he had hard work to get a foot-hold on the smooth, worn stones serving to pave it. The buildings were all of that sombre gray stone so picturesque in paintings, and so pleasant for the eye to rest on, yet withal suggesting no brilliant ideas of cleanliness or even neatness. The houses were rarely over two stories in hight, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... blessed Sabbath, was to become his wife. The sight of her perfect loveliness, arrayed in a white dress, emblem of purity and innocence, filled his heart with rapture; and as he clasped her in his arms, every sombre feeling vanished away. It is not our intention to describe the simplicity of the marriage ceremony, or the happiness which filled Philips Grey's heart during that Sabbath morning, while sitting in the church by the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... air, and began to examine into farming matters from sheer necessity, though she never rode out or personally superintended as at former times. One Friday evening in August she walked a little way along the road and entered the village for the first time since the sombre event of the preceding Christmas. None of the old colour had as yet come to her cheek, and its absolute paleness was heightened by the jet black of her gown, till it appeared preternatural. When she reached a little shop at the other end of the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... was too bright to last. The sun sank swiftly, the celestial fires paled, the purples grew faint and died, and, where they had been, night trailed her sombre plumes ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... shone forth brightly on the little settlement: the woods were alive with song-birds, numbers of which came fearlessly flying up as if to ascertain what the strangers had been about. Their notes were very sweet, though their plumage was somewhat sombre. They seemed especially anxious to make the acquaintance of Fanny and Emma Morley, who were standing at the porch of their cottage watching them, and surprised at the bold way in which they approached. First one came hopping up, and then another, and when the young ladies ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting, jostling pebbles. And, moreover—? There was no breeze. That was it! What a vast, still place it was, a monotonous afternoon slumber. And the sky open and blank, except for a sombre veil of haze that had gathered ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... other stories in this book. There is that screaming farce called "The Suicides in the Rue Sombre." Now, then, you Magazine zealots, speak up and tell me truly: is there anything too difficult for you in this? If so, the psychology of what is called "public taste" becomes a subject not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... seem to favour that gaudy implement. And it must be owned that even before the "twopence-coloured" gentry came among us from distant parts, we, the natives, had been side-tracking from the exclusive use of the old-fashioned sombre flies into the occasional use of gayer yet still modest "fancies." Of specific Spey hooks in favour at the present time the following is, perhaps, a fairly correct and comprehensive list: purple king, green king, black king, silver heron, gold heron, black dog, silver riach, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... of truth, its personages are so human, that I could delightfully persuade myself that it was all true, and that I had really shared, with a sometimes quickened pulse, the strange fortunes of the sombre young hero. But—fantasy! That is to show the strings and give away the whole game. However, if you can forget that, the coils of an admirably woven intrigue will grip your attention and sympathy throughout. The central figure is one Jaques, who comes to town ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and stained, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... feminine curiosity, but the furniture itself was so unique that the most prosaic articles assumed a surprising interest. There were no modern designs to be seen here, no cream enamelled bedroom suites, no green wood chairs, nor cosy corners. Everything belonging to the house was of a sombre grandeur which belonged to another country than our own. Sideboards and cabinets of carved Indian wood blocked up the roadway, and made black patches against the oak-panelled walls; overmantels of the same ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ripe dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight would give him the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... managed. But there is a want of individuality among the connoisseurs clustered round Phidias, and the frieze itself is very inaccurately coloured. The Greek boys who are riding and leading the horses are painted Egyptian red, and the whole design is done in this red, dark blue, and black. This sombre colouring is un-Greek; the figures of these boys were undoubtedly tinted with flesh colour, like the ordinary Greek statues, and the whole tone of the colouring of the original frieze was brilliant and light; ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... lines of that eager face; The collarless neck and the coal-black paws And the bit grasp'd tight in the massive jaws; The delicate curve of the legs, that seem Too slight for their burden—and, O, the gleam Of that eye, so sombre and yet so gay! Still away, my lithe ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... then received, and, considered from this point of view, the careless attitude of the American people toward General Grant's administration, when in 1871 it obtained the reversal of Hepburn v. Griswold by appointments to the bench, assumes a sombre aspect. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... in those early days found it difficult to live up to Miss Joe Hill's transcendental code she gave no sign of it. She laid aside her mildly adorned garments and enveloped her small angular person in a garb of sombre severity. Even the modest bird that adorned her hat was replaced by an uncompromising band. She foreswore meat and became a vegetarian. She stopped reading novels and devoted her spare time to essays and biography. In fact she and Miss Joe Hill became one and that one ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... and their insulation from the world, through the crystal medium of this stranger's character. In remembering him in connection with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outreness, of the rest of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things returned pretty much to their old fashion; ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he suggested, after watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch of dazzling white skin and soft shadow above the sombre line of her shoulders. Her wrap had slipped down to her elbows. "You'll have all the town coming out presently. I'll wait ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... his lips and drank before replying, and as he did so his customary grave composure became apparent, making Tommy wonder if his senses had tricked him. He looked at the lad with sombre eyes as he set down the glass. His brother's letter was still ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... had everything I needed. The room was a huge four windowed affair, furnished with a canopied bed and a mahogany wardrobe as big as a small house. The nights still being chilly, a roaring wood fire had been built, adding a note of cheerfulness to an otherwise sombre apartment. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... Cuthbert had to witness while still endeavouring to retain the possession of his faculties sufficiently to enable him to duck and back away if somebody suddenly asked him what he thought of the sombre realism of Vladimir Brusiloff. It is little wonder that he tossed in bed, picking at the coverlet, through sleepless nights, and had to have all his waistcoats taken in three inches ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... my landing the charge was made over to me; and on the following day my predecessor, Mr. Macdonald, took his departure, leaving me to the fellowship of my own musings, which for a time assumed but sombre hues; but I was then young, and the hopes and aspirations of an ardent mind threw a halo around the gloomy path that lay before me, and resting upon the bright spots that glimmered in the distant background, concealed from my view the toils and miseries I had to experience ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... chasm in the early morning. The sky was overcast and threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than this ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... through which we passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Roseate or sombre your humour as you patrol the reefs, it is liable to be changed in a flash into clashing tints by inadvertent contact with a warty ghoul of a sea-urchin, a single one of whose agonising spines never fails to bring you face to face with one of the vividest realities of life. A slim but ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy. Purely and delightfully humorous ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... resembling the ruddy, soft, and melancholy hues of autumnal foliage; while these hues were further deepened by a richly carved ceiling of ebony, which, not reflecting but absorbing light, allayed the sunny radiance beneath, and imparted a sombre yet brilliant effect to the pictured walls, and glossy draperies, of the spacious apartment. Above the rich and lofty mantelpiece hung one of the last portraits of himself painted by the venerable Titian, and on the dark pannels ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... absorption of all things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre character ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... scrap of black ribbon here and there. Their silent sympathy, expressed with girlish shyness, was evident, though their snow-white dresses were in striking contrast to the colour of their carriage and of the horses, and the sombre black of the rest of the funeral party. As we saw the solemn procession and heard the clank of the horses' hoofs, we were suddenly reminded of that journey in July, 1913, when we met that poor wandering young family ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... dangerous to show oneself or to call the deity's attention to one's existence. Despite the attempts made to change this day to one of 'joy,' as Isaiah would have it,[617] the Hebrew Sabbath continued to retain for a long time as a trace of its origin, a rather severe and sombre aspect. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... sister, come instead, And drape the world in mourning; let the owl, Who is thy minister, scream from his tower And wake the toad with hooting, and the bat, That is the slave of dim Persephone, Wheel through the sombre air on wandering wing! Tear up the shrieking mandrakes from the earth And bid them make us music, and tell the mole To dig deep down thy cold and narrow bed, For I shall lie within thine ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... hidden lakes has its own character and therefore its own charm. One is bright and friendly, with wooded hills around it, and silver beaches, and red berries of the rowan-tree fringing the shores. Another is sombre and lonely, set in a circle of dark firs and larches, with sighing, trembling reeds along the bank. Another is only a round bowl of crystal water, the colour of an aquamarine, transparent and joyful as the sudden smile on the face of a child. Another is surrounded by fire-scarred ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... voix qui vibraient sous le ciel Se tait: les rossignols ailes pleurent le frere Qui s'envole au-dessus de l'apre et sombre terre, Ne lui laissant plus voir que ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in November—and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys—a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Black wainscoting glimmered up to the ceiling, in small ebony panels; a cheerful clump of wax candles on the tea-table; many old portraits, some grim and pale, others pretty, and some very graceful and charming, hanging ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... is generally harsh, elaborate and abrupt; often strained into unnatural energy or condensed into factitious conciseness. The chief excellence of Alfieri consists in powerful delineation of dramatic character. In his Filippo he has represented, almost with the masterly touches of Tacitus, the sombre character, the dark mysterious counsels, the suspensa semper et obscura verba, of the modern Tiberius. In Polinice, the characters of the rival brothers are beautifully contrasted; in Maria Stuarda, that unfortunate queen is represented unsuspicious, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... careless glance conveyed just such a tinge of critical surprise as the occasion called for: he toyed with a slender tortoise-shell paper-cutter. The pendulum of the sombre, costly grandfather clock behind him swung tolerantly, silently; the murmur of the bank beyond them was utterly lost behind the heavy double doors and forgotten behind the bronze velvet curtains. The president's voice sounded on—he seemed to ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Mr. Spedding's, that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE), after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its tragedies ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... November—and the Glen is all grey and brown, except where the Lombardy poplars stand up here and there like great golden torches in the sombre landscape, although every other tree has shed its leaves. It has been very hard to keep our courage alight of late. The Caporetto disaster is a dreadful thing and not even Susan can extract much ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... divan, her knees clasped around with her arms. And again was Platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably contracted downward, toward the bridge of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... but little sun, and we know ourselves, in its absence, how sombre existence becomes. Their complexions too, were very sallow, and their deportment struck us as sadly sober. A few of the women might possibly have been called pretty, notably two of their number, who possessed clear pale skins, good features, blue eyes, and lovely fair hair, which they ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... is a distinct word etymologically, but the phrase "from side to side," as used by Comus, might well imply that the valley as well as the stream is here referred to. 'Bosky,' bushy. The noun 'boscage' jungle or bush (M.E. busch, bush, bush). 'See Tennyson's Dream of F. W. 243, "the sombre ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... aftermath of her madness, for into the minds of the mad creep strange sights and sounds, and this place, and the people amongst whom she sojourned, the Ghost-people, the grey Dwarf-people, the Dealers in dreams, the Dwellers in the sombre forest, might well open new doors in such a soul as hers. Or perhaps she was still mad. She did not know, she did not greatly care. All she knew was that her poor heart ached with love for a man who was dead, and yet whom she could not find even among the dead. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—here and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... sombre, cloudy day, and some rain fell while we were driving about the extensive grounds of the English cantonment. The influence of the sad story which these monuments commemorate, the funereal aspect of the spot, the gloomy, leaden, weeping sky ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... 1,000, romantically situated. Taking our departure from the town on the following morning, we observed that the fog, covering the surrounding landscape with a thick, impenetrable veil, increased in density until it seemed as if from moment to moment additional tints of sombre gray were united to the haze. In fact, after a while we were unable to discern the outline of the coast, having to pursue our way ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... gaunt the oak Reddens and the sombre cedar Darkens, like a sachem leader, I have lain and watched the smoke Of the steamboat, far away, Trailed athwart ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... displayed that partiality for his own country and contempt for France, which formed a strong trait in his character. He neither forgot nor forgave the insults he suffered at Calais, though he did not recollect that this treatment originated in his own ill humour, which threw a sombre shade over every object that presented itself. Having early imbibed the vulgar prejudice that one Englishman was a match for four Frenchmen, he thought it would be doing his country a service to prove the position. How far it is either useful or ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... this new and glorious horizon was soon overhung by a sombre cloud. The execution of the Duke d'Enghien threw its dark shadows from the last days of the consulate upon the truly royalist heart of Josephine; and now that heart was to receive fresh wounds through the royalists, to whom she ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... moment with drooping head, amid the sombre shadows, then, slowly, she drew the emblazoned morocco ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... sumptuous apartment than her room at home, and looked comfortable enough in the glow of the great fire of logs. The hangings of the bed were dark and heavy, and the carved oak furniture was also sombre in its polished blackness; but there was a thick square carpet on the floor, which was a luxury Kate had never possessed in her bed chamber before, and the mirrors and silver sconces for the candles all bespoke an ease and luxury that reminded Kate of what ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the sombre depths of a bottomless sea of Florida statistics in which I am at this present floundering, pray accept, my liege Queen, in art as in friendliness, all such loyal messages and fair reports compacted of love, as may come from so dull a waste of waters; ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... jours d'Ergaste. Aussi l'est-il[26] repondoit-on; je l'ai repondu moi-meme. Sa physionomie ne vous ment pas d'un mot.[27] Oui, fiez-vous y a cette physionomie si douce, si prevenante, qui disparoit un quart d'heure apres, pour faire place a un visage sombre, brutal, farouche, qui devient l'effroi de toute une maison. Ergaste s'est marie; sa femme, ses enfants, son domestique, ne lui connoissent encore que ce visage-la, pendant qu'il promene partout ailleurs cette physionomie si aimable que nous lui ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... they tried to sink into the ground, and hide their fallen state among the friendly weeds. The fantastic monsters on the walls, green with age and damp, and covered here and there with moss, looked grim and desolate. There was a sombre aspect even on that part of the mansion which was inhabited and kept in good repair, that struck the beholder with a sense of sadness; of something forlorn and failing, whence cheerfulness was banished. It would have been difficult to imagine a bright ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... amateur magazines, and when only sixteen he wrote a pamphlet on the Pentland Rising of 1666,[4] which is still in existence but a great rarity; the same subject inspired a romance, and another romance was composed about Hackston of Rathillet, that sombre and impressive witness of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, whose conscientious refusal either to take part for or against the victim had from childhood appealed to Mr Stevenson as pathetic and picturesque. He also wrote in those days a poetical play, some dramatic dialogues, and a pamphlet ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... and reflected them so clearly that they might have fancied that there was a heaven beneath as well as above them. The land presented a dark opaque mass, the mountains in the distance appearing as if they were close to them, and rising precipitately from the shore. All was of one sombre hue, except where the lights in the houses in the town twinkled here and there, announcing that some had not yet dismissed their worldly cares, and sought repose from the labours of the day. Yet all was silent, except occasionally the barking of a dog, or the ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... light plays on the varying surface of the tree-tops, one sombre and little-varied hue colors the earth. Dead and moss-covered logs; mounds covered with decomposed vegetable substances, the graves of long-past generations of trees; cavities left by the fall of some uprooted trunk; dark fungi, that flourish ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... the liturgy and discipline of the Church of England; whilst his attainments had kept pace with the qualities of his heart, and the graces of his deportment. He was, in truth, a young man of fair promise, and one whose fate excited great interest, when a sombre tranquillity had succeeded to the turbulence of rebellion. Gentle in his address, affable, kind-hearted, Lord Carnwath had a natural and ready wit, and a great command of language, to which his English education had doubtless ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... the value of these sensuous and formal elements must be added the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things, which no tragedy is sombre enough to exclude. Even if we do not go so far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into a pathetic subject, — a rude device, since the comic passages themselves need that purifying which they are meant to effect, — we must ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... pathetic or sentimental as he likes on the page beyond. One has had to reject, for instance, humour that is too boisterous or noisy, wit that is too stinging and acrimonious, anecdotes that are touched with cruelty, essays that, otherwise cheerful, deviate into the shadows of a too sombre reflection. One has sought to compile a book of cheerfulness that is kind and of happiness that is quiet and composed. One has had always in mind the invalid just able to bear the effort of listening to a melodious voice. To amuse, to distract, to divert, and above all to charm—to ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... would understand any of this if she heard it. She has a robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale, delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening, after peering absently through the window of a candy-store down near ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... down now; the last rays of the setting sun glimmered upwards, and still shone upon the tree-tops. The darkness of night was still fast closing around them. The mob stood a motley mass of human beings, wedged together, dark and sombre, gazing upon the mischief that had been done—the work of their hands. The military stood at ease before the burning pile, and by their order and regularity, presented a contrast to the mob, as strongly by their bright gleaming arms, as ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... seen pictures of him in the newspapers, and had studied them with some care, trying to imagine what sort of personage he might be. I knew that he was twenty-four, but the man who came towards us I would have taken to be forty. His face was sombre, with large features and strongly marked lines about the mouth; he was tall and thin, and moved with decision, betraying no emotion even in this moment of surprise. "What are you doing here?" were his first ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... did not even take the precaution of smoking up the chimney. I boldly lighted my cheroot. I peeped through the dense window curtain there were no shutters. A cold, bright moon was shining with clear sharp lights and shadows. Everything looked strangely cold and motionless outside. The sombre old trees, like gigantic hearse plumes, black and awful. The chapel lay full in view, where so many of the, strange and equivocal race, under whose ancient roof-tree I then stood, were lying under ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... caught and bowled the fresh man who came in, before he scored at all—four wickets for a hundred and fifty runs, not one of which had been put on since he came on to bowl. Things began to look up, or, at all events, did not appear in so sombre a light ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... ravaged for centuries across this bleak territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary. Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Phidias, and the frieze itself is very inaccurately coloured. The Greek boys who are riding and leading the horses are painted Egyptian red, and the whole design is done in this red, dark blue, and black. This sombre colouring is un-Greek; the figures of these boys were undoubtedly tinted with flesh colour, like the ordinary Greek statues, and the whole tone of the colouring of the original frieze was brilliant and light; while one of its chief beauties, the reins and accoutrements ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent—are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... time we meet. For I hope," said Mrs. Krill, smoothing her face to a smile—it had grown rather sombre—"that we shall often meet again. You must come and see us. We have taken a house ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... was one of blazing sunshine. "One of your days," Gilbert would have said to Frances. Grey days were his, when nature's colours he said were brightest against her more sombre background, sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky. The little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his friends from London, from all over England, from France even and from America. All Beaconsfield ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... comrades' praise— All that romance that seemed so fair Grows dim, and you are left to bear The prose of duty's sombre ways And labour of the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again—in my nursery—by myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me . . . . Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above a hall—though my playmates ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... dined quietly with Brinsley FitzGerald at the Ritz, and here it was curious to observe how Paris, like Dover, had put on a sombre garb of war. The buoyant, optimistic nature of the French people was apparent in the few we met; but there was no bombastic, over-confident tone in the conversation around us; only a quiet, but grim, determination which fully appreciated the tremendous difficulties and gigantic ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... looked sombre—she might have been saying to herself: "Heaven help us, what chance has a girl of mine with a man who's so agog about actresses?" She was disconcerted and distressed; a multitude of incongruous things, all the morning, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... frequent Saturday evening parties, when they were "at home" to a large number of guests. Lesley was just about to go downstairs. Her dress was black, for she was in mourning for her grandfather; and it must be confessed that the sombre hue made her look very pale indeed. The wish for a flower was gratified, however, almost as soon as formed. Kingston entered her room at that moment carrying a bouquet of flowers, chiefly white, but with a scarlet blossom ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him; but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off sunrise. Poetry, art, religion—they meant a thousandfold ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had a strange and magical effect. As the horses were being put to, I stepped across the road to examine the interior of a small church—where I observed, in the side aisle, a group of figures of the size of life—which, at that sombre hour, had a very extraordinary effect. I approached nearer, and quickly perceived that this group was intended to represent the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Our Saviour, at a little distance, was upon his knees, praying; and the piety of some ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... held them tightly, but he answered only in a whisper. He wore a sombre black cloak and a broad-brimmed black hat. A muffler concealed the lower part of his face. She put her finger upon the electric light, but he ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Sombre become the skies, the winds of fall Sing dangerously through the hissing grass; Sunlight and clouds in slow procession pass Over the tress, then comes an interval Of utter calm, the air is a morass ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... at that view," said Saxe, pointing downward at the hind quarters of the mule, which was the only part visible, the descent was so steep, to where they came upon a sheltered grove of pines, whose sombre green stood out in bright contrast to the ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... by the comic manner of the king that the sombre suit hid a secret, and he thought it wise to allow the king to take his own time ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... and sombre, Sobbed through all its robes of darkness, Rattled like a shore with pebbles, Answered wailing, answered weeping, "Take my balm, ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... Some sombre evening, when I sit And feed in solitude at home, Perchance an ultra-bilious fit Paints all the world ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... reached the entrance of the tower, an archway of solid masonry, over which the ivy hung like a sombre curtain. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... were formerly theirs not more than half a dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of fierce mystics ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... early Greece, through the mists of which the forms of men assume proportions as gigantic as indistinct. The enchanting Herodotus abandons us, and we do not yet permanently acquire, in the stead of his romantic and wild fidelity, the elaborate and sombre statesmanship of the calm Thucydides. Henceforth we see more of the beautiful and the wise, less of the wonderful and vast. What the heroic age is to tradition, the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... remain, and we are unable to espy the new social institutions beyond them. Bjoernson is a conciliatory spirit who wages war without bitterness. April sunshine glints and gleams through all his works, while those of Ibsen, with their sombre seriousness, lie in deep shadow. Ibsen loves the idea—the logical and psychological consistency which drives Brand out of the church and Nora out of the marital relation. To Ibsen's love of the idea ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... flows without effort,—which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,—a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,—can come only with a physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,—from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens, as he does her golden grapes, filling it with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... this point appeared a man who in an age "so uncivilized and sombre," says Pierre Robiquet, "by wonderful instinct laid down and nearly succeeded in obtaining the adoption of the essential principles on which modern society is founded—the government of the country by elected representatives, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... courtyard and occupied herself with the future, Abel explored the mysteries of the ancient building and found all manner of strange nooks and mysterious passages. He wove dreams and magnified the least incident into an adventure. He inhabited the dark corners and sombre, subterranean places with enemies that wanted to catch him; he most potently believed that hidden treasures awaited him under the hollow-echoing floors. Once he had a rare fright, for a bat hanging asleep in its folded wings, was wakened by him and suddenly flew into his face. He climbed ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... her mother's side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage, by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... church there is a little stone sort of shed with two arched openings, and from it you look into the tiny church with its crucifixes and relics, or out to great, bold, sombre Martinswand, as you like best; and in this spot Findelkind would sit hour after hour while his brothers and sisters were playing, and look up at the mountains or on to the altar, and wish and pray and vex his little soul ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... of bread and cakes. Hutton, which is somewhat of a model village for the retainers attached to Hutton Hall, stands in a lovely hollow at the edge of the moors. The steep hills are richly clothed with sombre woods, and the peace and seclusion reigning there is in marked contrast to the bleak wastes above. When I climbed the steep road on that autumn afternoon, and, passing the zone of tall, withered bracken, reached ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... the woodland scenery around me! The sombre green of pines, and the equally dark though glossy foliage of oaks, were beautifully enlivened by lighter greens, and by the brilliant hues of the sassafras-tree. Here climbed in tantalizing beauty—tempting as insidious vice, which attracts but to destroy—the poison-oak ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... where I had some relatives of the middle class, I felt very ill at ease, and the only pleasant companion I had there was an aged servant to whom I used to read fairy tales. I longed to be back in the sombre old place, overshadowed by its cathedral, but a living protest, so to speak, against all that is mean and commonplace. I felt myself again when I got back to the lofty steeple, the pointed nave, and the cloisters with their fifteenth century tombs, being always ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... depressing, but it is very beautiful; at least if your taste includes an appreciation of what is wild, magnificent, and sombre. Oppressed you must be, even if you are an artist, by its bleakness and its dreariness, its lonely lakes reflecting a dull, grey sky, its desolate boglands, its solitary chapels, its wretched cabins perched on hillsides that are very wildernesses ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doleful fate, but the more youthful and active slaves were spared awhile, not out of pity, but because of their utility; and Hubert's fine constitution enabled him still to live. But he could not have lived on had he not still hoped. The tremendous inscription seen by the poet over the sombre gate of hell was not yet burnt into his young heart: All ye that enter ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... an aspect of the most profound gravity— the reflection, as it were, of the sombre countenance of the austere and relentless Grand Master. The lower part of the hall was filled with guards and others whom curiosity had drawn together to witness ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... for several reasons, some belonging to the head, and others the offspring of the heart, give me a great deal of pleasure. I have little pretensions to critic lore; there are, I think, two characteristic features in her poetry—the unfettered wild flight of native genius, and the querulous sombre tenderness ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... thou lingerer, Light! Eve saddens into Night. Mother of wildly-working dreams! we view 75 The sombre hours, that round thee stand With down-cast eyes (a duteous band!) Their dark robes dripping with the heavy dew. Sorceress of the ebon throne! Thy power the Pixies own, 80 When round thy raven brow Heaven's lucent roses glow, And clouds in watery colours drest Float in light drapery o'er thy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... morally, and socially. It is the community in which the average of well-being is higher than in any State we know in history. Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large community in the world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore, the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the angry intolerance of contradiction—they all made a narrow strip of sad civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The moral and physical tenacity ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Nature wore a hardy countenance, as wild and as untamed as the savage landholders. Manhattan's twenty-two thousand acres of rock, lake and rolling table land, rising at places to a height of one hundred and thirty-eight feet, were covered with sombre forests, grassy knolls and dismal swamps. The trees were lofty; and old, decayed and withered limbs contrasted with the younger growth of branches; and wild flowers wasted their sweetness among the dead leaves and uncut herbage ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... two, became the loveliness of summer skies at morning; the Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a thousand exquisite flowers and fancies; the Chromes and Ochres (mere dull earths) were allowed to spread themselves in sheets of gold that took the shine of the sun into the darkest places; Umber, a sombre and gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a child's curls and laugh in a child's smiles; whilst all the families of the Vermilions, the Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual glory of sunset or sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn woods, of ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... through the night the dull throbbing of a horse's feet, and the man who sat waiting raised his head. A gleam of expectancy shone in his sombre eyes. Some of the rigidity ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... of these sombre and terrible Eastern autocrats—the strange sentimental chinks in their armour—are seen in the very characteristic story which follows. "Secret information having been given to Al-Mutawakkil that the imam, Abu 'l-Hasan Al-Askari, had a quantity ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... time, I described the method of work, and while talking, holding him by the arm, drew him over toward the schoolhouse. Almost before he realized it, we were ready for the task. As he removed his shirt and prepared for the operation of oiling and the application of the plaster, he looked somewhat sombre. After seeing the work well begun, I stepped outside and sat in the portico until it should be done. The first piece of plaster had been applied, the subject had been turned, and was lying ready for the second application. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... "soft" pedal, which is intended not solely to reduce the intensity of tone in the pianoforte—that may be accomplished by a modification of force in striking the note—but to give the tones a darker, more sombre quality, or colour. To vary the tone-colour, a violinist or 'cellist draws the bow across the strings close to, or distant from, the bridge, in accordance with his desire for a reed-like or flute-like quality ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... Eyre, be it remembered, was struggling on for his life, Forrest travelled in comparative ease, being able to supply himself three times from the schooner during the journey; it is but natural that Eyre's report should bear a very sombre tinge. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... flood of sunlight poured in and turned Barbara's fair hair to gold. Far off, above and beyond the sombre masses of the evergreen pine forests, a jagged range of mountain peaks, like tossing billows frozen at their height, shone in snowy silhouette against a sky of deep and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... touch my axe. Yours was the executioner's axe, mine is God's; yours kills, mine saves. Your love was but mortal, it could not endure disdain or ridicule; mine can endure all things without growing weaker, it will last eternally. Ah! I feel a sombre joy in crushing you that believe yourself so great; in humbling you with the calm, indulgent smile of one of the least among the angels that lie at the feet of God, for to them is given the right and the power to protect and watch over men in His name. You have but felt fleeting desires, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Johnson remained indifferent. He knew everybody's poetry, and was always ready to write anybody's Life. If he knew the facts of a poet's life—and his knowledge was enormous on such subjects—he found room for them; if he did not, he supplied their place with his own shrewd reflections and sombre philosophy of life. It thus comes about that Johnson is every bit as interesting when he is writing about Sprat, or Smith, or Fenton, as he is when he has got Milton or Gray in hand. He is also much less provoking. My own favourite Life is that ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... sleeping in endless serenity; the deep abyss of Kegon, into which the waters of Chiuzenjii plunge from a height of 250 feet; the bright beauty of the falls of Kiri Furi, the loveliness of the gardens of Dainichido; the sombre grandeur of the passes through which the Daiyagawa forces its way from the upper regions; a gorgeousness of azaleas and magnolias; and a luxuriousness of vegetation perhaps unequalled in Japan, are only a few of the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... the young girl stood out in beautiful distinctness in the pale light; behind her the soft evening swept the sea, effacing with azure the brown sails of the fishing-boats; in front of her the dresses of the girls flitted white through the sombre green of ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Nina could not but bethink herself that she was poor—so poor that everything around her, on her, and about her, told of poverty; while Rebecca was very rich, and showed her wealth even in the sombre garments which she had chosen for her morning visit. No idea of Nina's poverty had crossed Rebecca's mind, but Nina herself could not but remember it when she felt the sarcasm implied in ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... himself standing apart with Gwen's particular protegee, and he realised at once that he could expect no help from Charlie in this quarter. For, though slim and graceful, Mademoiselle Treves's general appearance was undeniably sombre and elderly. The hair that she wore coiled regally upon her head was silver-grey, and there was a certain weariness about the mouth that, though it did not rob it of its sweetness, deprived it of ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... froth and suds from an eddy or foam and bubbles from a rapid, the surface ruffled by a fresh breeze, and shadowed by drifting clouds. I have frequently seen bass dart like an arrow and seize the bait from a distance of thirty feet. A sombre suit of clothes, the hue of which mingles with the foliage or verdure, is a wise precaution, for fish undoubtedly ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... i.e., the seventieth." The reason for thus numbering these Sundays has been beautifully set forth in "Thoughts on the Services" as follows: "The Church now (Septuagesima Sunday) enters the penumbra of her Lenten Eclipse, and all her services are shadowed with the sombre hue of her approaching Season of humiliation. . . .We have turned our back upon dear old Christmas and the group of holy days that hand in hand seemed fairly to dance around it; and setting our faces towards the more sober, but still more glorious, light of ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... we two stepped forward, Mr. Whitmore had instantly shot out his right hand to the door—against which Mr. Rogers, however, had planted his foot—with a gesture as if to slam it in our faces. But the sombre apparition of the Rector seemed to freeze him where he stood—or all of him but his left hand which, grasping the candlestick, slowly and as if involuntarily lifted it above the level of his eyes. Then, before the Rector had concluded, he lowered it, turned, and walked hastily ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... It was a dark, sombre day, with a steady downpour of rain. Only a dim light pervaded the courtroom, and the spectators caught a very indistinct view of the prisoner when the guards brought him in. But his heavy, shambling walk, the manner in which he ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... food and warmth and every comfort of life for months on end. In his eyes glowed the fire of an intense and honest, but fierce and narrow piety, and with that expression was mingled another, not of anger nor of sorrow, but of reproach, of judgment and of sombre triumph. His hands were strapped in front of him with a stirrup leather, and his head was bare. As the moon shone more clearly, Claverhouse saw other stains than those of peat upon his chest, and while he looked the red blood seemed to rise from wounds ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... to look, and the sight is certainly striking. Beyond a doubt Fuenterrabia is old. It has a true Spanish tint, and one dyed in the wool; one might probably travel far in Spain before meeting a truer. This street seems utterly unmodified by modern formulae. Wavering and narrow and sombre, it stretches upward on a gradual incline until it meets the cathedral stepping out from the line of the old houses and closing the vista. Even in the short perspective, the huge, blackened eaves of the opposite roofs ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... into the chasm in the early morning. The sky was overcast and threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than this ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... theme in a manner that was worthy of its greatness. The work was one of the novelist's later writings—it was published in 1859—and is in many respects distinct from all his others. It stands by itself among Dickens's masterpieces, in sombre and splendid loneliness—a detached glory to its author, and to his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Dunstan's story, the serenity of the legend of St. Brandan, are examples rarely met with in this literature. Under the light ornamentation copied from the Celts and Normans, is usually seen at that date the sombre and dreamy background of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Hell and its torments, remorse for irreparable crimes, dread of the hereafter, terror of the judgments of God and the brevity of life, are, as they were before the Conquest, favourite ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... with the twenty cents for Miss Lowery. We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch imaginable. And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of life. ...
— Options • O. Henry
... tower, amid the shadows looming, Stands grim and sombre in the dying light; The trees with leafless branches shiver, moaning, As the sad winds sigh softly through ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... has he of your army and name? You have brought him here,' he continued, 'with your money and arms. Well, leave him now with us Afghans, and let him rule us if he can.' When Jubbar Khan returned to Cabul with his sombre message, the Dost, having been joined by Akbar Khan, concentrated his army, and found himself at the head of 13,000 men, with thirty guns; but he mournfully realised that he could lean no reliance on the constancy and courage of his adherents. Nevertheless, he marched ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... that is why many men pay so much for clever deceivers. The Rabouilleuse did not appear till the next morning, when she came down to breakfast with Rouget on her arm. Tears filled her eyes as she beheld, sitting in Max's place, the terrible adversary, with his sombre blue eyes, and the cold, sinister expression on ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... felt his heart sink. Where our new house had made such a brave show a year before on the surface of the Barrier, there was now no house at all to be seen. All that met the eyes of the visitor was a sombre pile of ruins. But his anxiety quickly vanished when a man emerged from the confusion. The man was Lindstrom, and the supposed ruin was the most ingenious of all winter-quarters. Lindstrom was ignorant of the Fram's arrival, and ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... season came in, the market assumed an aspect of half-subdued brilliancy with the many sombre and high-colored varieties of that fungus. The poorer people indulge in numerous kinds which the rich do not eat, and they furnish precious sustenance during fasts, when so many viands are forbidden by the Russian Church and by poverty. One ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Robert Ashe's sombre eyes smiled a kindly welcome as he looked into the radiant young faces of his daughter's guests. As each girl was presented to him he shook hands with her in a hearty, whole-souled way that completely dispelled any feeling ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... upon Jerrie, for she could see so plainly on the sombre wall the picture of the sweet-faced girl, with the long stocking in her lap—a very long stocking she felt sure it was, but dared not ask, lest they should think her question a strange one. Of the stranger in the back yard watching the young girl she had no recollection, but her ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Steinlin died at a place called Altheim, in the diocese of Constance. Steinlin was a man in easy circumstances, and a common-councilman of his town. Some days after his death he appeared during the night to a tailor, named Simon Bauh, in the form of a man surrounded by a sombre flame, like that of lighted sulphur, going and coming in his own house, but without speaking. Bauh, who was disquieted by this sight, resolved to ask him what he could do to serve him. He found an opportunity to do so, the 17th of November in the same year, 1625; for, as he was reposing ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... it, then?—Can you not get used to the life one leads here? Is it too gloomy here?—It is true the castle is very old and very sombre.... It is very cold, and very deep. And all those who dwell in it, are already old. And the country may seem gloomy too, with all its forests, all its old forests without light. But that may all be enlivened if we will. ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... mount his horse, and immediately on re-entering the breakfast-room, Catherine walked to a window in the hope of catching another glimpse of his figure. "This is a somewhat heavy call upon your brother's fortitude," observed the general to Eleanor. "Woodston will make but a sombre appearance today." ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Alcidiane, was a scarcely concealed utilising of the famous scandal about Tancrede de Rohan (Mlle. des Jardins' mother had been a dependant on the Rohan family, and she herself was much befriended by that formidable and sombre-fated enchantress, Mme. de Montbazon). In fact, common as is the real or imputed "key"-interest in these romances from the Astree onwards, none seems to have borrowed more from at least gossip than this. Her later performances, Les Annales Galantes de la Grece (said to be very rare), Carmente, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The father of this sombre creed was a wealthy Russian landlord named Bakunin; or rather, he shares this doubtful honour with the Frenchman Prudhon. Bakunin, who was born in 1814, entered on active life in the time of soulless ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... occasion (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning.—Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I, vauntingly—for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... hour. Now she was going; to receive the reward of her prudent patience, and she said to herself, "How good it is to be discreet!" With an intense desire and interest she looked at the beautiful beads, but madame's face was troubled and sombre, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... famous duel; this, and the sorry dignity of the Soho houses, was enough to stir her imagination. Night after night, she would elude the men who mostly followed her and walk along the less frequented of the sombre streets. These she would people with the reckless beaux, the headstrong ladies of that bygone time; she would imagine the fierce loves, the daring play, the burning jealousies of which the dark old rooms, of which she sometimes caught a glimpse, could tell ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... synonym for being "cut." There are, however, other interpretations of the saying, and, though this sounds plausible, it may be incorrect. The heart of the town, once the strong-hold of the "Red Rose," is still very ancient, picturesque and sombre-looking, though the suburbs have been widened, "improved" and modernized to suit present requirements. The Coventry of our day depends for its prosperity on its silk and ribbon trade, necessitating all the appliances of looms, furnaces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... calculated to deepen that impress on one of her nature. In the first place, he had fronted squarely the shock of her defection—patently on account of Roy. She could see him now—standing near her mantelpiece, his eyes sombre with passion and pain; no word of reproach or pleading, though there smouldered beneath his silence the fire of his formidable temper. And just because he had neither pleaded nor stormed, she had come ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... of Belgium and France contributes, indeed, some of the blackest pages to its sombre annals. Rarely has a non-combatant population suffered more severely, and rarely, if ever, have the monuments of piety and of learning and those sentiments of religion and national association, of which they are the permanent embodiment, even in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... beheld a bier of sombre hue Adorned with broken lilies; crosses, tears; And on their beds ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... some little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... silence, and they pulled up before a handsome, though somewhat sombre-looking house ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... continued the taste of the Germans turned to sombre, tragical and almost sinister plays. Only a death on the stage seemed to bring a ray of animation to the stolid bovine faces of the audience. In my last winter in Berlin the hit of the season was "Erdgeist," a play by Wedekind, whose "Spring's Awakening," given in New York in the spring of 1917, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... were not tremendous to any of the other passengers) emerged slowly from the mist and cleft the sombre low-hanging clouds, from which a few flakes of snow fell, her terror vanished suddenly before the excitement which ran through her body. She forgot her hunger, her loneliness, her shivering flesh, her benumbed and aching feet. A sensation not unlike the one with which the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... their commander. There, too, was Bradley, the boyish, red-cheeked chief of the artillery; and Stilton, the rough, old, bearded regular, who headed the cavalry. The staff was at hand, also, including Fitz Hugh, who sat his horse a little apart, downcast and sombre and silent, but nevertheless keenly interested. It is worthy of remark, by the way, that Waldron took no special note of him, and did not seem conscious of any disturbing presence. Evil as the man may have been, he was a thoroughly good soldier, and just now ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... tone. But Israel Kafka's eyes grew dark and the sombre fire beamed in them as he spoke again. The weary, tortured smile left his wan lips, and his ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... which Wingate presented himself punctually at eight o'clock that evening, had a sombre, almost a deserted appearance. The great bell which he pealed seemed to ring through empty spaces. His footsteps echoed strangely in the lofty white stone hall as he followed the butler into a small anteroom, from which, however, he was rescued a few minutes ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiegne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls—I hadn't expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... land which had suddenly appeared after three thousand miles of water. All houses in Bermuda are whitewashed, and their owners are obliged by law to whitewash their coral roofs as well. Bermuda, too, is covered with low cedar-scrub of very sombre hue, and there are no tall trees. The boy, a very sharp little fellow, was astonished at the red-brick of the houses on the Isle of Wight, and at their red-tile or dark slate roofs, and was also much impressed by the big oaks and lofty elms. Finally he ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... task, methinks; for I see that instead of being polished and bright, as were ours at Dunbar, the others keep their steel caps and back pieces painted a sombre colour." ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... the film. The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is a perfect blood- sucker. Vast territories ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... lighted the immense building, because the strong shadows of the columns, projected among the galleries, produced fantastic forms which increased the darkness that already wrapped in gloom the arches, the vaulted ceilings, and the lateral chapels, always sombre, even at mid-day. ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... 1870, several vessels of the British fleet were cruising together off the coast of Spain, the "Captain" being amongst the number. Although the clouds to the west looked sombre and heavy, there was no apparent signs of a storm; but during the night the barometer fell and the winds arose. The "Captain" was observed by the crew of the "Lord Warden," following a north-west passage. A white squall battled for a couple of hours with ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... the poet, that he must perforce leave the golden atmosphere of loftiest aspirations—step from the magic circle, where all is pure and etherial—and find himself the impotent denizen, of a sombre and an earthly world, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... is he who prays that God will send All pain from earth. Pain has its use and place; Its ministry of holiness and grace. The darker tones upon the canvas blend With light and colour; and their shadows lend The painting half its dignity. Efface The sombre background, and you lose all trace Of that perfection which ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as well,' muttered our hero, as he sprang away from the gasping beast. The next moment he had disappeared in the dense, dark wood. Ah! how sheltering, how kindly, seemed that sombre sanctuary, with its dark grey tufts beneath his feet, and the thick, dusk-green branches of the fir and pine! The gloomy background seemed to invite him further into the heart of its shade and silence. No bird whistled through the glaucous green of this silent, majestic wood; nor ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... whole of this department under the care of any Brahmin caste; the subject is one which every common man and woman can understand. It is one which comes home to every human being, for it adds a new interest to life, and vivifies the sombre ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... an idea that he did not enjoy his rides. He used to return from them with a resentful, sombre look, as if his reflections had not been pleasant company for him. In truth they were not pleasant company. He was beset by thoughts he did not exactly care to be beset by—thoughts which led him farther than he really cared to go, which did not incline him to the close companionship ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... days of summer pass by, a city takes on that sombre garb of grey, wrapt in which it goes about its labours during the long winter. Its endless buildings look grey, its sky and its streets assume a sombre hue; the scattered, leafless trees and wind-blown dust and paper but add to the general solemnity of colour. There ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Boston carried a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped, and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at the loss of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... sanctuary be mine! Though the deep will of Zeus be hard to track, Yet doth it flame and glance, A beacon in the dark, 'mid clouds of chance That wrap mankind Yea, though the counsel fall, undone it shall not be, Whate'er be shaped and fixed within Zeus' ruling mind— Dark as a solemn grove, with sombre leafage shaded, His paths of purpose wind, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... the world so damnable a place of torment as a bed? To lie awake through the slow, dragging hours, surrounded by a sombre quietude from whose stifling blackness thoughts, like demons, leap to catch us by the throat; or, like waves, come rolling in upon us, ceaselessly, remorselessly—burying us beneath their resistless flow, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... as the night was clear though cold, he threw His chamber door wide open[779]—and went forth Into a gallery of a sombre hue, Long, furnished with old pictures of great worth, Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too, As doubtless should be people of high birth; But by dim lights the portraits of the dead Have ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... had no idea how true a prophet he was. Almost at the very moment when he was capitulating, Duke Charles, throwing off his sombre apathy, was once more entering Lorraine with all the troops he could collect, and on the 22d of October he in his turn went and laid siege to Nancy. Duke Rend, not considering himself in a position to maintain the contest with only such forces as he had with him, determined to quit Nancy in person ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... enhanced in importance for many reasons; the very sight of rushing, foaming water has a cooling and refreshing effect when the thermometer is at 90 deg. Fahr. The rank, tropical verdure, the depth of the sombre gorge, the tumultuous, sparkling waters, the cool, welcome shade, and the ceaseless anthem of the falls make the charming spot a scene long to be remembered. One would have liked to linger there for hours. Finally, after having passed over a distance of nearly twenty miles, we cross ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... house was of the type which, having from the first been massive and richly sombre, had mellowed into a darker sombreness and richness as it had stood unmoved amid London years and fogs. The grandeur of decoration and furnishing had been too solid to depreciate through decay, and its owner had been of no fickle mind led to waver in taste by whims of fashion. The rooms were ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... or not she should take another nap, ere she bedecked herself in the garments of spring. My Indians paddled slowly against the stream, and I lay back, with a leg cocked over each gunwale, watching the sombre pines as they dropped slowly astern. On our way we passed two landslips which encroached a good deal on the river, each forming a small rapid round its base. The trees with which they had formerly been clothed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... be always seated there, like the tomb of his manhood and his fatherhood. Poor Winifred: she was still young, still strong and ruddy and beautiful like a ruddy hard flower of the field. Strange—her ruddy, healthy face, so sombre, and her strong, heavy, full-blooded body, so still. She, a nun! Never. And yet the gates of her heart and soul had shut in his face with a slow, resonant clang, shutting him out for ever. There was no need for her to go into a convent. Her will had ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... garden in a semicircle, its flat pilasters and mouldings of yellow stone taking under the moonlight the color and the delicacy of ivory. Beyond the terrace which bordered the garden, the ground fell to a river, of which the reaches, now dazzling, now sombre, now slipping secret under woods, and now silverly open to the gentle slopes of the park, brought wildness and romance into a scene that had else been tame. Beyond the river on a rising ground was a village church with a spire. The formal garden, the Georgian conservatory, the park, the river, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... me—"I am sent by my honored father, the colonel, to break up this charmed circle; and he humbly requests to be put under the spell himself, through the enchanting voice of Miss McIvor—one little Highland air, my dear Flora, is all he asks—but see, with sombre Melancholy leaning on his arm, he comes to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... hunger and exhaustion. They had not the strength to resist the wind, and at times its buffets hurled them off their feet. On several occasions the sled was overturned, and they were compelled to reload it with its sombre freight. The last hundred feet to the graves was up a steep slope, and this they took on all fours, like sled-dogs, making legs of their arms and thrusting their hands into the snow. Even so, they were twice dragged backward by the weight of the sled, and slid and fell down the hill, ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... on infertile stretches of marshland intersected by moss-covered gravel shoots, looking as though they had been pushed into the plains in front of extinct glaciers coming down from the region behind us. On the low hills away from the sea those sombre evergreen forests with an undergrowth of moss and red lichens were more variegated with light foliage, and indeed the pines proved to be but a fringe to the Arctic ice, giving way rapidly to more typical Martian vegetation each mile ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... better or the ladies fairer in his day, but the renaissance of carelessness and good-living had set in. True Roundheads again sought quiet abodes in which to worship in their gray and sombre way. Cromwell, their uncrowned king, was dead; and there was no place for his followers at court or in tavern. Even the austere and Catholic smile of brother James of York, one day to be the ruler of the land, could not cast a gloom over the assemblies at Whitehall. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... Ellen Terry? The question answers itself as soon as asked, for a gliding, graceful feminine presence appears on the stage. Miss Ellen Terry is attired in black, with a white fichu at her breast to relieve the monotony of this sombre garb. In her hand she carries a little black basket, and there is a glimmer of steel at her side as if she wore a reticule containing the hundred-and-one trifles which ladies like to carry about ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... into sombre silence, out of which David could hardly rouse him. Except that he said once, 'And we that had kep' it so long. I'd better never ha gien it tha.' And clearly that was the bitter thought in his mind. The sacrifice that had taxed all his moral power, and, as he believed, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... departed from his eyes. An elegant gentleman was Mr. Wilding, tall, and seeming even taller by virtue of his exceeding slenderness. He had the courage to wear his own hair, which was of a dark brown and very luxuriant; dark brown too were his sombre eyes, low-lidded and set at a downward slant. From those odd eyes of his, his countenance gathered an air of superciliousness tempered by a gentle melancholy. For the rest, it was scored by lines that stamped it with the appearance of an age in ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... materials of the primitive world-history are suffused in the Jehovist with a peculiar sombre earnestness, a kind of antique philosophy of history, almost bordering on pessimism: as if mankind were groaning under some dreadful weight, the pressure not so much of sin as of creaturehood (vi. 1-4). We notice a shy, timid spirit, which belongs ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... heart and abundant playful humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he sympathises keenly and cordially with the joys and sorrows of others; and yet that he seems saturated with sadness, isolated from companionship, lonely and alone. It is this temperament, combined with a sombre and melancholy aspect of countenance, that has helped to make him so admirable in the character of Hamlet. Of his fitness for that part his father was the first to speak, when on a night many years ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the blaze of it was mounting high into the murky gloom. A right merry and social gathering it was round the bright glow of this Yule log in a far-off land. The flames danced on the wide circle of bearded faces, on the tangled fleeces of the postheens, on the gold braid of the forage caps, on the sombre hoods of beshliks.... The songs ranged from gay to grave; the former mood in the ascendency. But occasionally there was sung a ditty, the associations with which brought it about that there came something strangely like a tear into the voice of the singer, and that a yearning wistfulness ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... an excellent and cooling drink. In parts all was covered with beautiful pendant air-flowers, gorgeous with all the colors of the rainbow. Monkeys chattered and parrots screamed, but otherwise there was a sombre stillness. The exhalations from the depth of rotting leaves and the decaying fallen wood rendered the steamy atmosphere most poisonous. Truly, the flora was magnificent, and the fauna, represented by the spotted jaguar, whose roar at times broke the awful ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a thousand ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period, to fragments of mediaeval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... on the meaning of happiness,' he said, extending his hand to Malkin; and, in spite of the smile, his face had a sombre cast. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... on his flat rock; San Pietro lay down for a brief, ascetic slumber. The lovers sat side by side, with the mystery of beauty about them: the purple and gold of nearness and distance; bright color of green grass near, sombre tint of cypress and stone ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... the female may be seen perching — a posture one rarely catches her gay lover in — preening her dainty but sombre feathers with ladylike nicety. The young birds do a great deal of perching before they gain the marvellously rapid wing-motions of maturity, but they are ready to fly within three weeks after they are hatched. By the time the trumpet-vine ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... balm; and responsive love, the most potent of remedies, was renewing her life. She found herself counting the days and then the hours that must intervene before the 25th. On Christmas eve her woman's nature triumphed, and she instinctively added such little graces to her toilet as her sombre costume permitted. She also arranged her beautiful hair in the style which she knew he admired. He might come; and she determined that his first glance should reveal that he was not serving one who was coldly apathetic to ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Looking about him from the hilltop he could see nothing but open sea around the island with an expanse of desolation beyond—snow, snow everywhere, from the water's edge to where the rugged mountains to the south and east held their cold heads into the gray clouds that hid the sky and sun. The sea was sombre and black. Not a breath of air stirred, not a sound broke the silence, and it seemed almost as though Nature in anxious suspense watched the outcome of it all. But Bob's faith was renewed—the simple, childlike faith of ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... "You may receive, my dear, whom you like"—that was what Aunt Maud, who in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were many explanations, and they were all amusing—amusing, that is, in the line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs. Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her niece to see him alone. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... speechless. The brilliant sunshine seemed to be turning into sombre night before my eyes; ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... oh why Is truth so darkened to the human eye? As if a sombre cloud all heaven made black, And the sun shone but through a chink or crack, Within a wall, where light is but the accident of things, And not the purport. Truth may be then as the white men write, And all our tribes in a ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... interests him. In the dense tropical woods near Rio Janeiro I heard in late October—springtime, near the southern tropic—the songs of many birds that I could not identify. But the most beautiful music was from a shy woodland thrush, sombre-colored, which lived near the ground in the thick timber, but sang high among the branches. At a great distance we could hear the ringing, musical, bell-like note, long-drawn and of piercing sweetness, which ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... at each other. Hilda's face flushed to a sombre red. Mrs. Lessways brusquely left the room. Then Hilda could hear her rattling fussily at the kitchen range. After a few minutes Hilda followed her to the kitchen, which was now nearly in darkness. The ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... a broad oaken staircase to the first floor of the left wing, the very one which had struck me as the least habitable. I was shown into a large room that had once been well furnished, but which now appeared rather sombre, as all the shutters were closed except one, and this was only left ajar. I asked Fritz to open them, telling him I was ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... direction, however, was not cheering. Mountain succeeded mountain in irregular succession, rugged and bleak—the dark precipices and sombre pine-woods looking blacker by contrast with the newly-fallen snow. Some of the hills were wooded to their summits; others, bristling and castellated in outline, afforded no hold to the roots of trees, ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... the north, sinking closer to the horizon. The heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody. The shadows lengthened, the light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the forest life slowly died away. Even the wild fowl in the river softened their raucous chatter and feigned the nightly farce of going to bed. Only the tribesmen increased their clamor, war-drums booming ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... drearily, the sombre eve comes down! And wearily, how wearily, the seaboard breezes blow! But place your little hand in mine—so dainty, yet so brown! For household toil hath worn away its rosy-tinted snow; But I fold it, wife, the nearer, And I feel, my love, 'tis dearer Than all dear things ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... goat-skin cloak that hung loosely upon their shoulders, displaying their magnificent proportions somewhat freely. They were much handsomer than the men, having splendid solemn eyes, very white teeth, and a remarkable dignity of gait. Their faces, however, wore the same sombre look as those of their husbands and brothers, and they did not chatter after the manner of their sex, but contented themselves with pointing out the peculiarities of the strangers in a few brief words to their children ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... and lovely Pityeia. Next after them they came to Corcyra, where Poseidon settled the daughter of Asopus, fair-haired Corcyra, far from the land of Phlius, whence he had carried her off through love; and sailors beholding it from the sea, all black with its sombre woods, call it Corcyra the Black. And next they passed Melite, rejoicing in the soft-blowing breeze, and steep Cerossus, and Nymphaea at a distance, where lady Calypso, daughter of Atlas, dwelt; and they deemed they saw the misty mountains ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... double gloom in their caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... days, in an agonised memory of the past. But as they crossed the bridge she recognised all round her the massive towers of the great city: Notre Dame, the grateful spire of La Sainte Chapelle, the sombre outline of St. Gervais, and behind her the Louvre with its great history and irreclaimable grandeur. How small her own tragedy seemed in the midst of this great sanguinary drama, the last act of which had not yet even begun. Her own revenge, her oath, her tribulations, what were they in comparison ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... starry shadows over the quiet sea, which with subdued murmur lulled in their sleep the great summer homes along the shore. The ship departed, carrying toward her sombre destiny Agrippina, absorbed in her smiling dreams. When the moment came and the wrecking machine was set to work, the vessel did not sink as fast as they had hoped: it listed, overturning people and things. Agrippina had time to understand the danger; with admirable ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... and I loved her, and told her of it. The sun was waning—going down to rest, and, like a mighty monarch, was folding himself away to sleep in gorgeous robes of crimson and gold. In his shaded light, outstretching for fifty miles beyond the river, lay, in sombre silence, the mighty swamp, with its wonderful trees of cypress, clothed in moss of gray, long, and festooning from their summits to the earth below, and waving, like banners, in the passing wind. The towering magnolia, in all ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... out of his inflamed eyes at the five women who all wore the garbs of the Sisters of Mercy, their white coiffes and tabliers contrasting sharply with the sombre habits of the Russian nuns who had gathered in the candle-lit dusk ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the code of indifference proper on the plains; but he presently remarked, "I'm right glad to see somebody," which was a good deal to say. "Them that comes hyeh," he observed next, "don't eat. They feed." And he considered the guests with a sombre attention. "D' yu' reckon they find joyful digestion in this ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... Jennie followed them, and they talked about the many events that had transpired during Dexie's absence. The room was almost dark. It seemed pleasanter to talk in the twilight, but a bar of light shone from the sitting-room door, and relieved it from any sombre appearance. Dexie kept wondering why the expressman did not appear; she was anxious to see if the little treasures she had collected for distribution had borne the journey safely. She rose at last and went ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... The eyes whose sombre blackness had been like a veil now flamed with the anger she had long repressed. "How little you understand me," she said passionately, "when you think I can argue questions like these. You are virtually asking what to me ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... divided, and from the house of Paris came forth Helen herself, in a robe woven with all the wonders of war, and broidered with the pageant of battle. With her were her two handmaidens—one in white and yellow and one in green; Hecuba followed in sombre grey of mourning, and Priam in kingly garb of gold and purple, and Paris in Phrygian cap and light archer's dress; and when at sunset the lover of Helen was borne back wounded from the field, down from the oaks of Ida stole OEnone in the flowing drapery of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... she hesitated timidly in the sombre frame of the doorway, looking far over our heads. Then old Leggett came in front of her. There was a word of presentation to Miss Berham, our teacher, the vision was escorted to a seat at my left front, and I was bade to continue the reading lesson if I ever expected to learn anything. As ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... coat of mail, with cuishes and brassarts, he wore an ample pair of red trousers, fastened round his ankles by broad rings of gilt brass. His long caftan of black cloth, embroidered with scarlet and gold, was bound round his waist and wrist by other large rings of gilt metal. This sombre costume imparted to him an aspect still more ferocious. His thick and red-haired beard fell in large quantities down to his chest, and a long piece of white muslin was folded round his red head. A devout missionary in Germany ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... least doubt in my mind that the only thing he could do was to descend once more from the throne. I communicated to him all the particulars I had just received, and I did not hesitate to advise him to follow the only course worthy of him. He listened to me with a sombre air, and though he was in some measure master of himself, the agitation of his mind and the sense of his position betrayed themselves in his face and in all his motions. 'I know,' said I, 'that your Majesty may still keep the sword drawn, but ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... in the morning Julie sat up, sombre and moody, beside her sleeping husband, in the room dimly lighted by the flickering lamp. Deep silence prevailed. Her agony of remorse had lasted near an hour; how bitter her tears had been none perhaps can realize ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the place was so suggestive of murder that my soul sickened within me; and so much so, in fact, that when I saw several grisly forms gliding down the gloomy staircases and along the sombre, narrow passages, where X——'s immaterial personality was halting, apparently to greet it, I could look no longer, but shut my eyes. For some seconds I kept them closed, and, on re-opening them, found the tableau had changed—the material body ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... opened his enormous umbrella, which he held up over the heads of the ladies, while Ammiani led the way. All was quiet near the citadel. A fog of plashing rain hung in red gloom about the many watchfires of the insurgents, but the Austrian head-quarters lay sombre and still. Close at the gates, Ammiani saluted the ladies. Wilfrid did the same, and heard Lena's call ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the surface being covered with froth and suds from an eddy or foam and bubbles from a rapid, the surface ruffled by a fresh breeze, and shadowed by drifting clouds. I have frequently seen bass dart like an arrow and seize the bait from a distance of thirty feet. A sombre suit of clothes, the hue of which mingles with the foliage or verdure, is a wise precaution, for fish undoubtedly ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... seemed to fall with the deepening shadows was only broken by the ringing strokes of the axe and the crack of the splitting wood. When he ceased the valley had faded into darkness, and the range with its sharp outlines was only faintly discernible against the sombre gray pall ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... It was a gloomy winter's night. Many torches illumined the path of the procession, exhibiting to the thousands of spectators the solemn pageant of the burial. The ecclesiastics and the monks, in their gorgeous or picturesque robes, the royal sarcophagus, the sombre light of the torches, the royal coaches in funereal drapery, and the wailing requiems, now swelling upon the breeze, and now dying away, blending with the voices of tolling bells, presented one of the most mournful and ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... of the evening gather slowly around, The twilight it thickens and darkens the ground, Night's sombre mantle is spreading the plain. And as I turn round to look on thee again, To take one fond look, one last fond adieu, By night's envious hand thou art snatched from my view; But Oh! there's no darkness—to me—no decay, Home of my ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... The plant has not been called circe without a reason. Under the beeches there were raspberry canes with some fruit still left upon them. After leaving the wood, the scene became more wild and craggy. The basalt, bare and sombre, or sparsely flecked with sedums, their stalks and fleshy leaves now very red, rose sheer from the middle of the narrow valley, down which the stream sped like fleeing Arethusa, now turning to the right, now to the left, foaming over rocks or sparkling like ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... like the tomb of his manhood and his fatherhood. Poor Winifred: she was still young, still strong and ruddy and beautiful like a ruddy hard flower of the field. Strange—her ruddy, healthy face, so sombre, and her strong, heavy, full-blooded body, so still. She, a nun! Never. And yet the gates of her heart and soul had shut in his face with a slow, resonant clang, shutting him out for ever. There was no need for her to go into a convent. Her ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... Lord Henry, dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... Astraea, still buoyant and energetic, and strong in her resolves, relinquished slowly the charming pictures she had drawn in her imagination, and came down to the most prosaic views of our position, tinged from day to day with tints that grew more and more sombre. The bright colors of the poetry ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... a gallery with jewels for pictures. Out of the sombre depths the aged webs of magic glowed with the matchless flush of precious stones. From every side colours we had not dreamed of enriched our eyes. To make the great west rose, the world herself might have been ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... and have the gig hauled up into shelter; for will you not want it when the gale abates, and the seas are smooth, and you have to go away, to Dare, you and your comrades, with silent tongues and sombre eyes? Why this wild lamentation in the darkness of the night? The stricken heart that you loved so well has found peace at last; the coal-black wine has been drunk: there is an end! And you, you poor, cowering fugitives, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the fixed, sombre light in the eyes, and the pallor of death stealing over the face of the chief. He turned his eyes away from the sad spectacle, and when he looked again ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... was very new then, and all the gay, flourishing towns and villages, which are now scattered in every direction, scarcely existed even in the minds of the first sanguine settlers. Dark woods and sombre swamps covered the surface; and what do you think we had instead of roads, when we wanted to go from one town to another? The first one who found his way along cut pieces of bark out of the trees, and others followed these marks, until after ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... specimens of ecclesiastical architecture, we may read the world's later history, and to-day they breathe the sombre reverential influence of a faith which sought to satisfy itself with the visible symbolizing of those half-poetical, half-superstitious conceptions with which the religion of the Middle Ages was ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... of voices of men, of women, of girls, of little children, without my inmost heart being stirred, and tears coming into my eyes. There is in it something, I know not what, that is grand, solemn, sombre, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... assuroit qu'il faisoit beau au-dessous de ce sommet; nous fumes visiter le revers meridional de la montagne qui conduit au val d'Aost; apres une demie heure de marche, nous fumes hors de cet atmosphere sombre et humide, le soleil etoit chaud, le ciel pur et serein: on voyoit dans le lointain les sommets des plus hautes montagnes enveloppes dans les nuages comme le Saint-Bernard: les sommets les plus a portee etoient decouverts et eclaires par le soleil; ces rochers ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... rather out of place in the family which contains also our sombre Blackbirds, but before the leaves have fallen both kinds of Orioles and their families start for Mexico and Central America, where such tropical hues seem more in keeping, and where many members of the family are quite as brilliant as those we see here." "There goes ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... supposed to be. Clearly the elm belonged by bird custom to the orioles, for their pretty swinging hammock could be seen partly hidden by leaves, about halfway up the tree, and what business other than that of marauder had the sombre-hued ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... not met you," Margaret was saying confidingly when Eleanor came out of the sombre mood into which she had suddenly fallen, "I should never have had the courage even to open my lunch, at least I could not have eaten it in a railway carriage with every one staring at me. Could you have eaten your lunch ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... been diverted again, after her greeting with Doctor and Mrs. Tarrant, by stopping to introduce the tall, dark young man whom Miss Chancellor had brought with her to Doctor Prance. She had become conscious of his somewhat sombre figure, uplifted against the wall, near the door; he was leaning there in solitude, unacquainted with opportunities which Miss Birdseye felt to be, collectively, of value, and which were really, of course, what strangers came to Boston for. It did not occur to ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Cliff guards the remote little village of Tyneham from the sea; certain portions of this precipice seem in imminent danger of falling into the water, so much do they overhang the beach. At Kimmeridge Bay the cliff takes the sombre hue seen near Chapman's Pool and the beach and water are discoloured by the broken shale that has fallen from the low cliff. It is thought that a sort of jet jewellery was made here in Roman times; quantities of perforated ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... shields of clouds, and kisses the brown earth with a quivering spot of light. Across the sloping, unkept lawn, about midway between the house and the whitewashed gate leading from the yard, a rabbit hops, aimlessly, his back humped up, and his white tail showing plainly amid his sombre surroundings. I can see the muscles about his nostrils twitching, as he stops now and again to nibble at a withered tuft of grass. A lonely jay flits from one tree to another; a cardinal speeds by my window, a line of color across a dark background; ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... scenery somewhat resembles that of the Blue Mountains, and is even more beautiful. The exquisite effects produced by the waning daylight lent a peculiar charm to this landscape. The forest close to us looked dark and sombre, whilst the valley further off was bathed in sunlight, and in the dim distance the mountains over which we had passed early in the day faded into a delicious pale blue chiaroscuro. The banks beneath or above us were cleft by little gullies, with struggling ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... bien raisonnable, disoit-on tous les jours d'Ergaste. Aussi l'est-il[26] repondoit-on; je l'ai repondu moi-meme. Sa physionomie ne vous ment pas d'un mot.[27] Oui, fiez-vous y a cette physionomie si douce, si prevenante, qui disparoit un quart d'heure apres, pour faire place a un visage sombre, brutal, farouche, qui devient l'effroi de toute une maison. Ergaste s'est marie; sa femme, ses enfants, son domestique, ne lui connoissent encore que ce visage-la, pendant qu'il promene partout ailleurs cette physionomie si aimable que nous lui voyons, et qui n'est qu'un ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... looking at that view," said Saxe, pointing downward at the hind quarters of the mule, which was the only part visible, the descent was so steep, to where they came upon a sheltered grove of pines, whose sombre green stood out in bright contrast ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things. The gorse and the broom were a fine accent in the landscape. Here and there they burst out in sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a body catch his breath with the happy surprise of it. And then there was the wattle, a native bush or tree, an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom. It is a favorite with the Australians, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... quietly done. The key fitted the lock smoothly and his fingers turned it without hesitation, though his heart, usually extremely steady, beat sharply for a second. The hall loomed massive and sombre despite the modernity of electric lights. It was darkly and expensively decorated in black and brown; a frieze of wrought bronze, representing peacocks with outspread tails, ornamented the walls; the banisters were ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... calling the guard. The electric bell's broken, and your father wanted a drink. That's a good sign, isn't it? Shows he's friendly, What kind did you say you wanted, Mr. Cahill—Scotch was it, or rye?" Ranson glanced back at the sombre, silent figure of Cahill, and then again opened the door sufficiently for him to stick out his head. "Sergeant," he called, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... which led from his quarters to the oak hall, whistling sotto voce a bar or two of the Schumann as he went; then his manner became sombre as he crossed the polished boards and entered the passage beyond which led to his ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... way to the Strand I met an old friend, one of my links with whom is his love of the Adams' work. He had not read the news, and I am sorry to say that I, in my selfish agitation, did not break it to him gently. Rallying, he accompanied me on my sombre quest. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... curved Anna's lips. She glanced towards her sister, and curiously enough found in her face some faint reflection of her own rather sombre mirth. She leaned back in her chair. It was no use. The smile had become a laugh. She laughed till the tears stood in ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... consequence of his early attendance upon M'Clutchy, had been obliged to leave home that morning without his breakfast, it must be admitted that he was not just then in the best possible disposition to draw much edification from it. After poring over it with a very sombre face for some time, he at length looked shrewdly at M'Slime closing one eye a little, as was his custom; "I beg pardon, sir," said he, "but if I'm not mistaken this book I believe is intended more for the sowl than ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... we passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... "Will's not good at surprises. No, I won't stay. I'll get right back, after I've done some business in the village." He stood, glancing thoughtfully down at the village for some moments. Then he turned again, and a shadowy smile lit his sombre eyes. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... wall that barred her dungeon, and the Wizard struck upon it as he had the other. It yawned apart in its turn, and with such impetuous zeal did Prince Ember hasten toward the opening that he entered before the rest the sombre prison ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one of the huge boulders. As he was conveying the lighted sulphur match,—with which Dowd's Tavern abounded,—to the cigarette that hung limply from his lips, he was startled by a sharp, almost agonized ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... was long and sad among the sombre trees that overshadowed the churchyard. He left the archdeacon's grounds that he might escape attention, and sauntered among the green hillocks under which lay at rest so many of the once loving swains and forgotten beauties of Plumstead. To his ears Eleanor's last words sounded ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... near the fire talking, or rather listening, to a bird-like little woman in a short white frock and blue ribbons. A sombre lady just behind her, whom Joan from the distance took to be her nurse, turned out to be her secretary, whose duty it was to be always at hand, prepared to take down any happy idea that might occur to the bird-like little woman in ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... faint light that barely showed up the slimy banks, covered by a network of snake-like roots. The little waves churned up by the screw splashed softly upon the roots, making the only sound that disturbed the sombre silence of the place. So low was the leafy roof at places that ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... into my lap as I sit over the brook, on a log—a single leaf, gilded about its border, in the centre a crimson flush, fast swallowing up the original greenness; the whole will presently be bronzed and sombre. O, Leaf! how art thou mummified! We do not think of these little things of Nature. Look at this leaf. What is its record? How many generations, think you, are numbered in its ancestry? A perpetual intermarriage has not weakened its fibres. The anatomy of this leaf is perfect, ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... name of "Egdon Heath," which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of Shakespeare's comedies would be easily remarked in his commentary—and even, possibly, that they would be singled out for more annotation and comment than the tragedies or the histories. The most heavily annotated plays are, however, the tragedies, and it is curious to observe that the sombre "problem comedy," Measure for Measure, commands more notes than any other comedy. Further, Johnson's moral and religious sensibilities were offended by profanity and obscenity in the drama, and Shakespeare's comedies, far more than his tragedies and histories, transgress in ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... are struck by the grand movements of light and shade, which seem to flood the canvas as if with waves of coloured harmonies. Then, suddenly, two men seem to step out from the group. The one is dressed in sombre-coloured clothes, whilst the other is resplendent in white. That is Rembrandt all over, not afraid of putting the light in bold contrast against the dark. So as to maintain the harmony between the two he makes the dark man lift his hand as if he were pointing at something, and in doing ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... Presently the mist seemed to blow thinner, and through a gap he saw a land spread out below him; and soon he came out of the cloud, and saw a lonely forest country, all unlike his own, for the trees seemed a sort of pine, with red stems, very tall and sombre. He looked round, and presently he saw that a little track below him seemed to lead downward into the pines, so he gained the track; and soon he came down to ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... on the whole, conclude the people to have been a somewhat attractive race, frankly enjoying the more pleasant aspects of life, and capable of a keen delight in all the beauties of Nature. Minoan art has little that is sombre about it; it is redolent of the open air and the free ocean, and a people who so rejoiced in natural beauty and delighted to surround themselves with their own reproductions and interpretations of it can scarcely have been bowed beneath a heavy yoke of servitude, or have lived other ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... hear traces of the griefs which in the rough furrows of daily life the Russian woman finds it prudent to conceal. "Ages have rolled away," says the poet Nekrasof; "the whole face of the earth has brightened; only the sombre lot of mowjik's wife God forgets to change." And the same poet makes one of his village heroines say, apropos of the enfranchisement of the serfs, "God has forgotten the nook where He hid the keys of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... your solicitude," I said, "but I must have my walk. Play to your sombre friend, Schaaf, and see if you can soften ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... rolling hills, and were overwhelmed with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could remember it exactly. One figure I can still see—there is an open space, green grass, and Corot like trees on either side reflected in water, and a girl carrying a black water-pot on her head, crosses the grass in the rays of the setting sun—a splash of transparent rosy ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Dr. Renton was in a bad humor. The very library caught contagion from him, and became grouty and sombre. The furniture was grim and sullen and sulky; it made ugly shadows on the carpet and on the wall, in allopathic quantity; it took the red gleams from the fire on its polished surfaces in homoeopathic globules, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... smoke into the still warm air. At frequent intervals the steely blue of some lovely lake, where thousands of water-fowl disport themselves, reflects from its polished surface the sheen of the noonday sun. Great masses of mango wood shew a sombre outline at intervals, and here and there the towering chimney of an indigo factory pierces the sky. Government roads and embankments intersect the face of the country in all directions, and vast sheets of the indigo ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the clouds seemed to shadow the good-looking, tanned face of the youth, producing a troubled, sombre expression. The truth is that Master Clinton Boyd Thayer was lonesome and, although he would have denied it vigorously, a little bit homesick. (At sixteen one may be homesick even though one scoffs at the notion.) Clinton had left his home at Cedar Run, Virginia, ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... The sombre reds and grays of the room troubled me; even with its seven candles the place was merely dim. The light in the alcove flaring in a draft, and the fire flickering, kept the shadows and penumbra perpetually ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells
... "Small chance for me with that swarm outside. Well, what must come, will come." He was white, and his eyes grew even more sombre; but, though his blood might play him traitor, his will was unshaken. I saw that. I saw, too, that his manner had lost all bravado. He suddenly came to me, and laid his hand on my arm. "I am glad, monsieur, that it was ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Emily think and feel in this sombre season, the passionate force of her imagination making itself the law of life and the arbiter of her destiny. She could not take counsel with time; her temperament knew nothing of that compromise with ardours and impulses ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... Twala's sombre eye ran up and down our ranks, and I felt, as for a moment it rested on myself, that the position had developed a new horror. What if he chose to begin by fighting me? What chance should I have against a desperate savage six feet five high, and broad in proportion? I might as well commit suicide ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... then, of these earlier years, while we have the memoirs with us. We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs might be taken from Macbeth: "The near in blood, the nearer bloody."[44] But in that sombre history there is no darker page ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... look, and never for one moment did he relax his gaze. He seemed absolutely absorbed by his music, and as the queer old figure—a sort of Moses with his long beard—played his native instrument, amid the quaint trappings of the museum for background, we felt enthralled by the sombre surroundings and curious apparition, who might have been Winminen himself, the mythological god ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... and looked where she pointed. A dull, grey light topped the waters, and the sky above held a faint tinge of crimson. The wan glow accented the loneliness, and for the moment left him depressed. Was there ever a more sombre scene than was presented by that waste of tumbling waves, stretching to the horizon, arched over by a clouded sky? It grew clearer, more distinct, yet remained the same dead expanse of restless water, on which they tossed helplessly and alone. Nothing broke the grimness of ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... be alluringly gracious, but he could feel that she was more nervous than she had ever shown herself before—the strain was telling on her. Her beautiful eyes were not so slumbrous as usual; they were brilliant as from some inward fever, and, though she smiled and met his sombre gaze with a challenge, she smothered a sigh ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... been fought in the North Sea! Ten British battleships had been sunk, but the whole German fleet had been destroyed! For the first time war took on some colour. Crimson and purple and gold began to shoot through the sombre black and grey. A completely new set of emotions filled their hearts, a new sense of exultation, a new pride in that great British Navy which hitherto had been a mere word in a history book, or in a song. The children who, after their manner, were quickest to ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... as new!" cried Araminta, gleefully. She was clad in a sombre calico Mother Hubbard, of Miss Mehitable's painstaking manufacture, and hopping back and forth on the bare floor of her room at ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary. Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did the fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged opposition. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... same title seems to indicate that this kind of composition awakened no great interest in him; but in El Medico de sa honra and El Mayor monstruo los celos the theme of jealousy is handled with sombre power, while El Alcalde de Zalamea is one of the greatest tragedies in Spanish literature. Calderon is seen to much less advantage in the spectacular plays—dramas de tramoya—which he wrote at the command of Philip IV.; the dramatist is subordinated to the stage-carpenter, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... grown sombre, and to Jimmie, gazing at him, it seemed that all the sorrows of the world were in his tired grey eyes. "Perhaps I'd better go," ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... mouth is wide, but well shaped. This head is carved in hard limestone of a creamy tint which seems to soften the somewhat satirical expression of her eyes and smile. The king (fig. 200) is in black granite; and the sombre hue of the stone at once produces a mournful impression upon the spectator. His youthful face is pervaded by an air of melancholy, such as we rarely see depicted in portraits of Pharaohs of the great period. The nose is straight and delicate, the eyes are long, the ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... kindling in the light, and that luxuriant influence passing on like a celestial presence, brightening everything! The wood, a sombre mass before, revealed its varied tints of yellow, green, brown, red: its different forms of trees, with raindrops glittering on their leaves and twinkling as they fell. The verdant meadow-land, bright and glowing, seemed ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... Then the sombre village crier, Ringing loud his brazen bell, Wandered down the street proclaiming: There was an estray ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... line of Martians moving along the road, away from the City. Behind them the City was losing itself in the sombre tones of night, its black spires disappearing ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... Outside, sombre masses of lead-coloured clouds gathered ominously in the tempestuous sky. The gale roared loudly round the old-fashioned house and the windows rattled ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... despair, vainly questioned that sombre cavity, now so full of lamentable sounds, where, on other days, such a bright vision usually awaited him amid the silence of the stagnant water. He had to go away without seeing Miette. On the morrow, arriving before the time, he gazed ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... experience, and with the memory of home and work room, manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair exterior whatever may be ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... a handsome, sombre room in oak and dark red, with sinister easy chairs and couches, great curtains discreetly drawn, a door to enter by, a door to hide by, a carelessly strewn table on which to write a letter reluctantly to dictation, another table exquisitely decorated ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... here referred to was the locality of what has been called "that sombre, fatal, terrible stone wall," just under Marye's Hill, where the most fearful slaughter of the Federal forces took place. Marye's Hill is a strong position, and its importance was well understood by Lee. Longstreet's infantry was in heavy line ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the gloomy lake of Avernus, a black pool of unknown depth, hedged in by precipitous cliffs, and emitting gases so poisonous that no bird was able to fly over it in safety. In the rocks at one side of the lake there yawned a sombre cavern, which was believed in those days to be the entrance to the kingdom of Pluto—the abode of ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... That oft smacked of "Killaloe," The contagious wrath of Buskin and of Sock Hath abated for awhile, And no more the Emerald Isle On the stage and in the green-room seems to shock. The curtain is rung down, The comedian and the clown, With the sombre putter-on of tragic airs, Are gone, with all the cast, And the Theatre, at last, Is "Closed for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... flushing faintly. "Each individuality gives out a spiritual vapour, like a cloud, which surrounds one. These are all in different colours, and the colours change with the thoughts we think. Black and purple are the gloomy, morose colours; deep blue and the paler shades show a sombre outlook on life; green is more cheerful, though still serious; yellow and orange show ambition and envy, and red and white are emblematic of all the virtues—red of the noble, martial qualities of man and white of the angelic disposition of woman," he concluded, with a meaning glance ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... his confidant, gazed out at the dancers with an expression in which there was both sternness and a contempt for the squalid lives of the unyachted Midlanders before him. However, among them, he marked his mother; and his sombre grandeur relaxed momentarily; a more genial light came into ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea water like the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... more restless for want of some excitement. A mad gallop, a visit to Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had taken such a fancy to him, or a chat with the Widow Rowens, who was very lively in her talk, for all her sombre colors, and reminded him a good deal of same of his earlier friends, the senoritas,—all these were distractions, to be sure, but not enough to keep his fiery spirit from fretting itself in longings for more dangerous excitements. The thought of getting a knowledge of all Mr. Bernard's ways, so ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... wavings like the smoke of the snow blown over the steppes. In the hurrying clouds a great space clears, and along the south-west runs a great rosy fleece of sunset. It is rapidly darkening. The sea in the western corner is crimson, but all the vast south is silver and sombre. The horizon is like that seen from a balloon—pushed out to its furthermost, and there, where clouds and sky mingle, one sees fantastically as it were the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... mortgaged, was about to pass from her forever. Much that was humbling had fallen to her in life, but nothing as sore as this final disaster. At length she rose, took a lighted candle from the table, and walked slowly around the great library room. The sombre bindings of the books her childhood knew called back dim recollections. The great china bowls, the tall silver tankards, the shining sconces, and above, all the Stuart portraits or the Copleys of the men who shone in Colonial days ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... any of this if she heard it. She has a robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale, delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening, after peering absently through the window of a candy-store ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... carefully consumed in a large fire every particle of the tattered garments that Tantaine had been in the habit of wearing, and laughed merrily as he watched the columns of sombre ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... amid laughter and shouts of approval. Suddenly all the noise dies down and a sombre silence reigns—a woman's strange voice drowns the noise—so strange and unfamiliar, as if it were not Mariet's voice at all, but another voice speaking ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... time they were clear of the sombre wood, and had to commence another fight in the hollow of the slope they had to climb, for here the brambles and furze grew in their greatest luxuriance, and had woven so sturdy a hedge that it was next to impossible ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... her hands and held them tightly, but he answered only in a whisper. He wore a sombre black cloak and a broad-brimmed black hat. A muffler concealed the lower part of his face. She put her finger upon the electric light, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the breakers and the groaning of the cordage all blended together and filled the air with a prolonged minor note, lamentable beyond words. The atmosphere was cold and damp, the spray flying like icy bullets. The sombre light that hung over the sea reflected itself in long blurred streaks upon the wet decks and slippery iron rods. Here and there about the rigging a tremulous ball of orange haze showed where the ship's lanterns were swung. Directly under him in the stern ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... of cutting away the branches alarmed my sombre little friend (I knew that the nest was tenanted, as the bill and head were distinctly visible through the lateral entrance), and out she darted with such a 'whir' that anything like satisfactory identification ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... their whole stock in trade of sweetmeats, syrups, toys or singing grasshoppers. They are the dolls of our own childhood, endowed with disconcerting life. Around their little bodies flames the love of colour of an oriental people, whose adult taste has been disciplined to sombre browns and greys. Wonderful motley kimonos they make for their children with flower patterns, butterfly patterns, toy and fairy-story patterns, printed on flannelette—or on silk for the little plutocrats—in ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... alla Napolitana, Cinghale all'Agra Dolce and wine of Orvieto. The Falcone was another accident of our tramps, though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished of itself as a haunt of the Caesars, and was prepared to believe the waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... breathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed by imagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductile substance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent still hung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre and forbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascination that drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressing awe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in his grandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course of action ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... bloated, pimpled women at the doors, with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there? It left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his life, he entered a church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's. Yet it touched, moved him uncontrollably. The distances, the shadows, the still, marble figures, the mass of silent kneeling ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... hazy day after a dozen bright ones. The northerly breeze seemed falling. The water spread out a sombre lead colour. The heights of Naxos were in sight to starboard, but none too clearly. Much more interesting to Hasdrubal was the line of dots spreading on the horizon to northwest. Despite the distance his keen eyes could catch the rise and fall of the oar banks—war-ships, not ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... him, the beautiful, the worldly, the joyous. As he rose slowly to his feet, he looked half despairingly around. It was a stern religion which they loved, this handful of weatherbeaten farmers and their underlings. Their womenkind were made as unlovely as possible, with flat hair, sombre and ill-made clothes. Their surroundings were whitewashed and text-hung walls, and in their hearts was the love for narrow ways. He gave out his text slowly and with heavy heart. Then he paused, and, glancing once more round the little building, met again the ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... the older building that the Vicomte made the following remarks:—"The church of the Holy Sepulchre, composed of several churches erected upon an unequal surface, illumined by a multitude of lamps, is singularly mysterious; a sombre light pervades it, favourable to piety and profound devotion. Christian priests of various sects inhabit different parts of the edifice. From the arches above, where they nestle like pigeons, from the chapels below and subterraneous vaults, their songs are heard at all hours both of the day and ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... welcome. He returned her greeting eagerly, and all his constraint was loosed away, and he felt at ease, and happy. Her face was very pale indeed against the glittering blackness of her eyes, and her sombre disordered hair and untidy dress; but it did not show fatigue nor extreme anxiety; it was a face of calm meekness. The sleeves of her dress were reversed, showing the forearms, which gave her an appearance of deshabille, homely, intimate, confiding. "So it was common ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... sheeny gray sea, with gleams of steel running across; trailing skirts of mist shutting off the mainland, leaving Light Island alone with the ocean; the white tower gleaming spectral among the folding mists; the dark pine-tree pointing a sombre finger to heaven; the wet, black rocks, from which the tide had gone down, huddling together in fantastic groups as if to hide ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... built of variegated uneven stones, black and grey and white, which seemed to be chiefly flint; but the corners and settings of the windows and of the door-ways, and the chimneys, were of brick. There was something sombre about it, and many perhaps might call it dull of aspect; but it was substantial, comfortable, and unassuming. It was entered by broad stone steps, with iron balustrades curving outwards as they descended, and there was an ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... immobile yet—a little darker night in that much deeper. When I turned, Jane was gone from the room. I sat down, my face towards the still candles, as one who is awake, yet dreams on. The faint scent of the earth through the open window; the heavy, sombre furniture; the daintiness and the alertness in the many flowers and few womanly gew-gaws: these too I shall remember in a tranquillity ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... of the house was of the type which, having from the first been massive and richly sombre, had mellowed into a darker sombreness and richness as it had stood unmoved amid London years and fogs. The grandeur of decoration and furnishing had been too solid to depreciate through decay, and its owner had been of no fickle mind led to waver in ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... uncle's apartment. "You're at home, now, you know," he said, in a kindly way, and took her hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber, with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was a bed curtained with mosquito-netting. Carved chairs were pushed here and there against ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... across the satin-white, gold-fringed pall, where on rich crimson cushions rested the Three Emblems of Sovereignty. The dignified, kingly figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow under the Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of crowned heads; the blaze of uniforms and orders, the clank of sword and bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the sumptuously-trapped, shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the mourning-carriages ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... shades, was then, and is now, a mystery profound. But in my desire to see, to be just like other children, I resolved to learn all I could about color, and so I memorized the list of colors, which ones harmonized, which were most pleasing to the eye, which were bright, which produced a sombre impression. Thus I soon learned to speak of color with a degree of intelligence, and to select my gowns with a view to pleasing the eyes of my friends. I soon learned to associate certain phrases with certain colors—for instance, blue as the sky, green ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... his spirit is serene; For here no stranger can intrude To view this last, pathetic scene, Or mar its sombre solitude; Prone on the lonely mountain crest, Confronting the resplendent west, The dying lion sinks ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... agony of his later years, what mark has this left on his work, how far is it responsible for a modification of his attitude,—for the change from the careless gaiety of "Tartarin of Tarascon" to the sombre satire of "Port-Tarascon"? What caused the joyous story-teller of the "Letters from my Mill" to develop into the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... to the popular taste," added Andrew in his most sombre tones, and with a curl of his thin, delicately-moulded lips. "I ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... the manner in which he wrote The Raven is incredible, being probably one of his solemn and sombre jokes; equally incredible is Trollope's confession of his humdrum, mechanical methods of work. Doubtless he believed he was telling the whole truth, but only here and there in his Autobiography does ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... further enhanced by poverty and squalor. The mass of this fierce cavalry was wretchedly clothed and disgustingly dirty. Even the showy Mexican costume of Manga Colorada was ripped, frayed, stained with grease and perspiration, and not free from sombre spots which looked like blood. Every one wore the breech-cloth, in some cases nicely fitted and sewed, in others nothing but a shapeless piece of deerskin tied on anyhow. There were a few, either ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... magnified image of their passions, reflected upon the curtain which hides futurity from their gaze, and have turned away shuddering from their own shadows. Poets, philosophers, and statesmen have painted their fancies on the curtain in brighter or more sombre colors, according as their own prospects were bright or gloomy. Many a juggler has also taken advantage of the universal curiosity, and by well-managed deceptions led astray the excited imagination. A deep silence reigns behind this curtain; no one who passes beyond it answers any questions; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... thickened into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside the corpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither, he had acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well as he could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease. It was doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so. Of Avice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and the other had emigrated, while her only child besides the present Avice ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... in the habit of talking to Jerrold in a gloomy depressing manner, presenting to him only the sad side of life. "Hang it!" said Jerrold, one day, after a long and sombre interview, "she wouldn't allow there was a bright ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... in these modern days to realize how young were some amongst those who took part in the great battles of the past. The Black Prince, as he was afterwards called from the sombre hue of the armour he wore, was not yet fifteen when the Battle of Crecy was fought; and when the King had summoned his bold subjects to follow him to the war, he had called upon all knights and ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... with the doctor to the chamber of death, while I remained in the study, turning the whole matter over and over in my head, and feeling as sombre as ever I had done in my life. What was the past of this Trevor, pugilist, traveler, and gold-digger, and how had he placed himself in the power of this acid-faced seaman? Why, too, should he faint at ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... for comfort, and it struck Wilton that he could be a great deal more comfortable nursing his wounded heart with his back against one of the rocks than tramping any farther over the sand. Most of the Marois Bay scenery is simply made as a setting for the nursing of a wounded heart. The cliffs are a sombre indigo, sinister and forbidding; and even on the finest days the sea has a curious sullen look. You have only to get away from the crowd near the bathing-machines and reach one of these small coves and get your book against a rock and your pipe well alight, and you can simply ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... these hidden lakes has its own character and therefore its own charm. One is bright and friendly, with wooded hills around it, and silver beaches, and red berries of the rowan-tree fringing the shores. Another is sombre and lonely, set in a circle of dark firs and larches, with sighing, trembling reeds along the bank. Another is only a round bowl of crystal water, the colour of an aquamarine, transparent and joyful as the sudden smile on the face of a child. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Attila. And this had to be done without a moment of wavering, and I the cold and gentle Celt, whom you know, remained there, under the scorching African sun. Then what repose of soul, what strange meditations were mine, when free at last, at night, in my sombre tent, around which death might be prowling, I could watch the little Touareg, saved by me, sleeping in her cradle by the side of her chameleon lizard. Ridiculous, is it not? But, go there and lead the life of a brute, of a plunderer and ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... ardent, enthusiastic, young in heart and mind, a thoroughly open nature. Her husband, on the other hand, was of a morose, sombre, melancholy, reserved nature. In spite of her superior intelligence Hortense had a sort of childlike air; but Louis, though young in years, had the character and appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... they were enduring: no flowery phrases; no attempt at effect; but merely a statement of bald fact. These communications were to be put into the orthodox bottle and dropped into the sea in the hope that the sombre tidings would be picked up and read at home. The stage of openly cursing the owner had long since passed. Now and again they wondered if their spirits would haunt him in the event of their having to succumb, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... I fancied myself in the times of the martyrs, and gladly would I have chosen this sombre abode for my dwelling if there had been any question of confessing my faith. Presently the guide's voice roused me from my reverie, and I crossed the "Bridge of Sighs," so called because of the sighs uttered by ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... valleys, John flamed above his generation all aglow with the light, as the witness that in another moment it would spring above the eastern horizon. But he sees that this is no joyful message to them. Nothing is more remarkable in his preaching than the sombre hues with which his expectation of the day of the Lord is coloured. 'To what purpose is the day of the Lord to you? It is darkness and not light'; it is to be judgment, therefore repentance ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... all George Eliot's works. It is not a long story, but it is a most carefully finished novel—"a perfect gem, a pure work of art," Mr. Oscar Browning describes it. Mr. Blackwood, the publisher, found it rather sombre, and George Eliot replied to him, "I hope you will not find it at all a sad story as a whole, since it sets—or is intended to set—in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations. I have felt all through ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... silent and slow, he was not imperial of aspect on canvas or coin, even when his brows were decorated with the conventional laurel wreath. He had been stripped of his authority and all but discrowned by his more bustling brothers Matthias and Max, while the sombre figure of Styrian Ferdinand, pupil of the Jesuits, and passionate admirer of Philip II., stood ever in the background, casting a prophetic shadow over the throne ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... section of a tragedy we find humorous or semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch of comedy in the conversation of Lady ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the threshold and gazed in surprise at its plain, gloomy vault, the walls of which were not adorned with trophies, nor with any decorations whatever, and at that humble wooden coffin, which stood so bare and solitary in the middle of the sombre room. Behind him were his marshals, who looked at the strange scene with an air ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... carried low, almost to the level of his knees, on a neck of colossal strength, which was draped, together with the forelegs down to the knees, in a flowing brown mane tipped with black. His head, too, to the very muzzle, wore the same luxuriant and sombre drapery, out of which curved viciously the keen-tipped crescent of his horns. Dark, huge, and ominous, he looked curiously out of place in the secure and familiar tranquillity of ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... own. He is happiest in his descriptions of the artistic side of the people, with which he is in fullest sympathy. So he took us to see the flower pageants. The joyful festivals of the cherry blossom, the wistaria, the iris and chrysanthemum, the sombre colours of the beech blossom and the paths about the lotus gardens, where mankind meditated in solemn mood. We had pictures, too, of Nikko and its beauties, of Temples and great Buddhas. Then in more touristy strain ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... their trembling mouths, letting fresh tears well from their tear-reddened eyes. Chris was standing a few feet away from the white-clad, flower-circled, radiant sleeper who had been Alice; his arms were folded, his splendid dark gaze fell upon her with a sort of sombre calm; he seemed entirely unconscious of the pitying and sorrowful friends who were moving ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... I can't help it. It is depressing to be the only prisoners in a black van; I should have said "passengers," but the sombre character of the omnibus suggests "Black Maria;" it is depressing (I repeat to myself), to be the only two passengers driving through a dead town at night-time, as if we were the very personification ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... edition lied or blundered after the manner of his contemporary kind in attributing on the title-page—as apparently he meant to attribute—any share in the additional scenes or speeches to the original author of the play. In any case, the passages thus added to that grimmest and most sombre of tragicomedies are in such exact keeping with the previous text that the keenest scent of the veriest blood-hound among critics could not detect a shade of difference in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Street, which was destined to be the scene, nearly a century afterward, of another encounter between the troops of Britain, and a people struggling against her tyranny. Though more than sixty years had elapsed since the pilgrims came, this crowd of their descendants still showed the strong and sombre features of their character perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency than on happier occasions. There were the sober garb, the general severity of mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the scriptural forms of speech, and the confidence in Heaven's ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... manner in which he wrote The Raven is incredible, being probably one of his solemn and sombre jokes; equally incredible is Trollope's confession of his humdrum, mechanical methods of work. Doubtless he believed he was telling the whole truth, but only here and there in his Autobiography does he permit to peep out touches of light, which ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... white laborers, the master and his family often being the only whites present the year around. Fanny Kemble's "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation," 1838-39, gives an interesting though somewhat sombre picture of the conditions prevailing on the rice plantations ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... regrets, felt his eyes fill with tears. At the very same place which Franklin and his companions passed full of energy and hope, there only remained a block of marble in remembrance! And notwithstanding this sombre warning of destiny, the Forward was going to follow in the track of the Erebus and the Terror. Hatteras was the first to rouse himself from the perilous contemplation, and quickly climbed a rather steep hill, almost ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... light of evening flickered through a window painted in sombre colours commemorating the achievements of Satan upon Earth. High up in the wall the window stood, and the streaming lights of candles ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... complaint. Resignation took the form of stoicism. A sort of dogged taciturnity was measurably relieved by the never-failing spirit of camaraderie. There was even a touch of bravado in the attitude of these people toward each other,—as of courage kept up by scoffing. Even Death, on his sombre visits, was regarded with a strange derision by those who continued to spin. They had cheated him not once but many times, and they mocked ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... have Hoeflinger, who did not seem to be in a hurry, catch up with him. Whenever he saw people on the road he tooted violently, while Hoeflinger tinkled his little bell. When workingmen greeted Hoeflinger, Pratteler responded with sombre mien, as if he were going to a battle. When they made a joke, his brow contracted in a frown. What was there to jest and laugh at, where they should rise in revolt against reaction? Everywhere he saw too much peaceful comfort. He was determined ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the sombre depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her into a stately room packed with masterpieces of art; gleaming marbles and sombre bronze in groups of bewildering beauty, with every inch of wall-space crowded with canvases in massive gold frames glowing with the soft radiance ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... and with the memory of home and work room, manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... throughout the country. We are, however, in a position to state that there has been trouble between Hilda Smith and the Newcastle Directors for some time past. It appears that Newcastle's brilliant full-back objected to wearing the Newcastle jersey, on the plea that its sombre colour-scheme did not suit her complexion. She pointed out that Fanny Robinson, the Newcastle goal-keeper, wore an all-red jersey and that, as the shade chosen was most becoming to anyone with dark hair, she (Hilda ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... stood on the grass outside the window. The lamplight from within shone on her upturned face with its saucy, confiding smile. Her head was uncovered and gleamed golden in the radiance. She was wearing a very ancient fur cloak belonging to her mother, and she glowed like a rose in the sombre drapery. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... chair by the hearth, watched them curiously. At first it was merely the exuberant spirits of their release and the unaccustomed altitude that inspired them, but their countenances grew more and more sombre, their eyes wilder, their voices more war-like. They were no longer doing a stunt, they were atavistic. Their voices ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a Watteau's brush—the sun just sinking behind the orchard trees gilding the edge of each leaf, shone on the dark red of John Johnstone's dress, warmed the sombre hue of fair Betty's lincoln green, and played on the blue and primrose of Mistress Mary's flower-like costume. It was a fair picture, and no eye could rest on a goodlier couple than the tall lithe young man, ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... arrived; might have noted the cheerful flow of talk which enlivened the board, in distinction from the stiff silence or bitter repartee which once chilled her. As she responded to the smiles hovering now about Eloise's lovely lips, she might have remembered the once sombre sadness of those eyes. Even Mrs. Evringham had buried the Macbethian dagger, and wore the meek and patient air of one misunderstood; but nothing would have amazed the child so much as to be told that she had had anything to do with ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... done, and the rooks in their sombre cloaks and hoods, and the magpies in their courtly black satin and white velvet, pounced on the morsels, and retired with them to the branches ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... hours of suspense, full of sombre thoughts and the most melancholy ideas, I could not help fancying that I was going to be plunged in one of these horrible dens, where the wretched inhabitants feed on idle hopes or become the prey of panic fears. The Tribunal might well ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Breslau was of secluded, silent, sombre character, this time; nothing of stir in it but from work only: in marked contrast with the last, and its kindly visitors and gayeties. A Friedrich given up to his manifold businesses, to his silent sorrows. "I have ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... International Relish, I know of none that he declined, but it was evident to me that he moved but half-heartedly in this higher circle. On one occasion, too, he appeared in the trousers of a lounge-suit of tweeds instead of his dress trousers, and with tan boots. The trousers, to be sure, were of a sombre hue, but the brown boots were quite too dreadfully unmistakable. After this I may say that I looked for anything, and my worst ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... forest which lay before them was in its gayest autumn dress, but in the sombre light of the approaching storm, its brilliant leaves looked faded and faint. The deep reds and many tinted yellows of the foliage formed a beautiful picture, but these were the colors of decay and death, and told that the end of their life and ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... for Braddyll's allusion conjured up a sombre train of thought within his breast, awakening apprehensions which he could neither account for, nor shake off. Meanwhile, the cavalcade slowly approached the north-east gateway of the abbey—passing through crowds of kneeling and sorrowing ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... altitude, with a fair number of minor undulations on the way to diversify it. I will not describe the route, though it is one of the most beautiful I have ever travelled—rocky hills, ruined castles, huge, straight-stemmed pines that clamber up green slopes, or halt in sombre line against steeps of broken crag; the reality surpasses my poor powers of description. And the people I passed on the road were almost as quaint and picturesque in their way as the hills and the villages—the men in red-lined jackets; the women in black petticoats, short-waisted ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... as I was entering the old gateway, I saw a beautiful young girl sitting in its shadow selling oranges. She was my Agnes. Walking that same evening through the sombre depths of the gorge, I met "Old Elsie," walking erect and tall, with her piercing black eyes, Roman nose, and silver hair,—walking with determination in every step, and spinning like one of the Fates glittering silver flax from a distaff ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks, are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and invited every body she saw. The great apartment is first; painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room sombre. The tapestries are fine, but, not fine enough, and there are few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great jet d'eau I like, nor would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it was done, I would retain, else ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... from their sight. The meagre pleasures which we allowed ourselves—sympathizing looks, words spoken in whispers not to wake the count, hopes and fears repeated and again repeated, in short, the thousand incidents of the fusion of two hearts long separated—stand out in bright array upon the sombre background of the actual scene. Our souls knew each other to their depths under this test, which many a warm affection is unable to bear, finding life too heavy or too flimsy in the close ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent—are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of Mankind; ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... in France, in the department of the Sombre and Meuse, where the Austrians and the French fought a battle in the year 1794, in which the former were defeated. This victory is ascribed to the information obtained in consequence of reconnoitering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... brother-in-law. "I've lost my coin and that's the end of it. I don't intend to have the evening spoiled for a thing like that. Music! ladies, music and a jolly air! No more dumps." And with as hearty a laugh as he could command in face of the sombre looks he encountered on every side, he led the way back ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... building on which they had expended much of their ammunition for the purpose of destroying their officers. The rest of the panorama was made up of an immense view of forest below them, and upright masses of mountains above them. Over these, heavy bodies of mist were slowly sailing, giving a sombre appearance to the primeval woods which, in general, covered both mountains and plains. The atmosphere indicated an inter-tropical morning during the rainy season, and the sun shone resplendently ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... foam and bubbles from a rapid, the surface ruffled by a fresh breeze, and shadowed by drifting clouds. I have frequently seen bass dart like an arrow and seize the bait from a distance of thirty feet. A sombre suit of clothes, the hue of which mingles with the foliage or verdure, is a wise precaution, for fish undoubtedly see, ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... casting him down an oubliettes, ever haunted the fatal tower, first as a sleep-walker, then as a restless ghost—moaning and gibbering to himself, and tearing at a walled-up door with bleeding hands. The train of thought thereby suggested was so very sombre, that I preferred returning to my cabin, and climbing into an unfurnished berth, to spending more minutes in that weird company. I never made the man out satisfactorily afterwards. It is possible that he was one of the few who scarcely showed on deck, till we were in sight of land; but rather, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... and hot, and breathless, when the dance came to an end. The sun had been gone a long time, and all the pink shades had slowly turned to grey; the creek had lost its radiant colour, and looked like a silver mirror, and so desolate and sombre, that no one could have imagined it to have been the scene of ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... forsakes each dale: 'Mis Cyclopean pulse of hell Giant cauldrons vomit vapours green And skirr thro' bristling lanes and halls: Whilst beacons die and shrood each soul, Dank tears drop on a fatal bell, Wrought by a Titan's sombre queen, Where graven vypers soop the walls With blood from maidens scourged as toll. Sentinel silence then holds gloom! Vile squats curse roaring pools inflame, A swarthy gump leers at the damn'd, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... but the music saddened his heart yet more, for there was no inward response of gratitude and joy. The bright green of the Spring foliage and of the waving grass seemed dark and gloomy, as he gazed upon it through tearful eyes. His mourning spirit gave its own sombre interpretation to all the lovely scenes of nature. He deeply felt that he was a wretched sinner against God, and he could not see how God could be merciful to one who had so grievously transgressed. He scarcely dared to hope for the pardon of his iniquities, and was in almost utter despair ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... less dirty than the portion of the vessel in which I was destined to live. The bulwarks, companion-hatch, and other parts had, to be sure, once upon a time been painted green, but the dust from the coal, which formed her usual cargo, had reduced every portion to one sombre hue, which even the salt seas not unfrequently breaking over her deck had failed to ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... at her and then at me. His face was hard and sombre; there was no relenting there. 'Perhaps it will be better,' he returned slowly. 'Yes, you may go, but do not stay long with her. I may want to speak to ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... His disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... have the gas lighted in the parlor, and even Uncle Leonard came in there sometimes and sat after dinner, before he went up into that dreary library above. I think he rather enjoyed hearing us talk gayly across his sombre board; he certainly became softer and more human toward me after Richard came to be so constantly a guest. He gave me more money to spend, (that was always the expression of his feelings, his language, so to speak;) ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... bald and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant effort? ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... at an angle which gave Mr. Grimston a view of the tips of shaggy eyebrows, a broad nose, and that peculiar kind of protruding lower lip before which timid people quail. As there was no response, Mr. Grimston looked round vaguely on the sombre, handsome furnishings, fixing his gaze at last on the lithographed portrait of Mr. van Tromp senior, the founder of the house, hanging above ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... deception's art, Hope to conceal and jealousy, False confidence or doubt to impart, Sombre or glad in turn to be, Haughty appear, subservient, Obsequious or indifferent! What languor would his silence show, How full of fire his speech would glow! How artless was the note which spoke Of love again, and yet again; How deftly ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Hawkins and "Young Mars" Clay, the new member of the family, ranged themselves on a log, after supper, and contemplated the marvelous river and discussed it. The moon rose and sailed aloft through a maze of shredded cloud-wreaths; the sombre river just perceptibly brightened under the veiled light; a deep silence pervaded the air and was emphasized, at intervals, rather than broken, by the hooting of an owl, the baying of a dog, or the muffled crash of a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Towsley's reflections became so sombre that some very unusual tears crept into his eyes. This fact restored him to a sense of his ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber, with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... this darkness. There are only exhaled slightly sulphurous white vapours, chiefly steam. The dismal aspect of this black and silent gulf, in which our view was lost—its dark moist sides, along which crept, in a languid and monotonous manner, long flakes of vapour of a sombre gray—the great crater to which this narrow gulf is attached, with its confused heap of diverse substances, coloured yellow, gray, red, like the image of chaos—all presented around us an aspect ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... see it, one unheralded high-noon, as if it were just ready to burst beautifully upon its world. So it is, still much depends on how the world is going to treat it. The flower blows, if sunshine greets and warms it. But let the sky be grey, sombre, leaden, and that flower cometh not to its full kingdom—cometh not, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... made its way. Snow rested on the surrounding heights, and the ground was crisp with frost. The foliage which still clung to the deciduous trees exhibited the most gorgeous colours, the brightest red, pink, yellow, and purple tints contrasting with the sombre hues of the pines covering the lower slopes ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... driver who had promptly fallen asleep again. On we went as in borne on air, so soft was my bed, now beneath the far-flung branches of trees, sometimes so low that I could have touched them with my hand, now, beneath a sky heavy with sombre masses of flying cloud or bright with the soft radience of the moon. On I went, careless alike of destination, of time, and of future, content to lie there upon the hay, and rest. And so, lulled ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... In a morning, I'm always sullen, and to-day is as sombre as myself. Rain and mist are worse than a sirocco, particularly in a beef-eating and beer-drinking country. My bookseller, Cawthorne, has just left me, and tells me, with a most important face, that he is in treaty for a novel of Madame D'Arblay's, for which 1000 guineas are asked! He ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... after a darkness thick and heavy brooded over the settlement. The sombre pines encompassing the village seemed to close threateningly about it as if to reclaim the wilderness that had been wrested from them. A low rustling as of dead leaves, and the damp breath of forest odors filled the lonely street. Emboldened by the darkness other ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... day dawned bleakly, literally blown piecemeal from out darkness as bleak, the Happy Family rose shiveringly and with sombre disapproval of whatever met their blood-shot eyes; dressed hurriedly in the chill of flapping tent and went out to stagger drunkenly over to where Patsy, in the mess-tent, was trying vainly to keep the biscuits from becoming dust-sprinkled, and sundry ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... solitary, silent, River of Death, who shall live in sight of your blackness? Who may sing aloud at his toil, whether he dig, or plant, or plough, or trap, or fish? Beautiful though the grand sweep and headlong rush of the fall, the people of the settlement avoid its sombre majesty and farms were none and smaller clearings few along the upper St. Ignace. A quarter of a mile back from the fall lay the village, holding a cluster of poor houses, a shop or two, a blacksmith's forge, a ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... in that direction, however, was not cheering. Mountain succeeded mountain in irregular succession, rugged and bleak—the dark precipices and sombre pine-woods looking blacker by contrast with the newly-fallen snow. Some of the hills were wooded to their summits; others, bristling and castellated in outline, afforded no hold to the roots of trees, and stood out in naked sterility. Everywhere the land seemed to have put on its ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... Once again through the sombre inert wainscoting, exactly as if a soul had creaked, the Senior Surgeon sensed the threatening, intrusive presence of an unseen personality. Once again he strode across the room and jerked the door open ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... attention than before to agriculture proper and the raising of crops which would directly support the family. There was nothing dispiriting in the view of the country on this first day's ride, and though a winter landscape can hardly be exhilarating when it is leafless and bare, gray, and a little sombre in color, we found ourselves under no stress of sympathy with misfortune or want, as is so often the case with ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... back involuntarily over their shoulders into the dense blackness of the forest. At one point a single broad shaft of light slid down between two pines and cast a golden blotch upon their track. Save for this one vivid spot all was sombre ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... speak. She clung to her father, looking at him with anxious, sombre eyes; but he laughed and ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... property. The younger woman, whose chin-cloth is dropped in the painting though worn like the others in the drawing for her portrait, is Meyer's second wife, Dorothea Kannegiesser, whom he married about 1512, and with whom he was painted by Holbein in 1516. The sombre garments of both women are echoed by the black of Meyer's hair and coat, the latter lined with light-brown fur. Meyer's face, in its manly intensity of devotional feeling, is a wonderful piece of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... up stream a silvery stone bridge, just mellowed by time, spanned the river with many fair arches. Through these the coming river peeped sparkling a long way above, then came meandering and shining down; loitered cool and sombre under the dark vaults, then glistened on again crookedly to the spot where sat its two fairest visitors that day; but at that very point flung off its serpentine habits, and shot straight away in a broad stream ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... plumes wave from the heads of the horses, and flowing black drapery covers their bodies and legs. Even their heads are draped in black, nothing being perceptible but their eyes. The coffin lies exposed on the top of the hearse, and is also similarly draped. This combination of sombre plumage and drapery has a singularly mournful appearance. Priests stand on steps attached to the hearse holding images of the Savior over the coffin; others follow in the rear, comforting the friends and relatives of the deceased. A wild, monotonous chant is sung from time to time ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... quiver. Then she looked at herself in a mirror with serious attention. She held herself sidewise, her neck turned over her shoulder, to follow with her eyes the spring of her fine form in its sheath-like black satin gown, around which floated a light tunic studded with pearls wherein sombre lights scintillated. She went nearer, curious to know her face of that day. The mirror returned her look with tranquillity, as if this amiable woman whom she examined, and who was not unpleasing to her, lived without either acute joy or ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... confess it!" cried Ferrier, as he carried off his papers. But his gayety soon departed. He stood awhile at the window in his room, looking out upon the sodden park—a rather gray and sombre figure. Over his ugly impressiveness a veil of weariness had dropped. Politics and the strife of parties, the devices of enemies and the dissatisfaction of friends—his soul was tired of them. And the emergence of this possible love-affair—for the moment, ardent and deep as were the man's affections ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Uffizi is a most life-like portrait of sombre colouring, but not highly finished. Here we have the same black cap and long hair; the dress is a painter's blouse of a blue-grey, which well brings out the flesh tints. The face is intelligent, but not refined; the clear dark eyes bespeak the artist spirit, but the full ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... and dinner that day had Amaryllis wondered why Dick Bellamy was so taciturn—silent and sombre almost to moroseness. But Randal had no ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... is pitched back in the throat is dark, sombre, and unattractive. The tone must be pitched forward, but do not force it forward. You will recall that our first principle was ease. Think the tone forward and out. Believe it is going forward, and allow it to flow easily. You can tell whether you are placing your tone forward ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of Amelia, there is no harm in saying, at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was a dear little creature; and a great mercy it is, both in life and in novels, which (and the latter especially) abound in villains of the most sombre sort, that we are to have for a constant companion so guileless and good-natured a person. As she is not a heroine, there is no need to describe her person; indeed I am afraid that her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a heroine; ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sweet, mine ears are clogged to all sweet sounds save thine own voice, and mine eyes blinded to all sights but thee, else had I heard that nightingale, and seen the golden-vestured morning sun itself steal from its sombre east before its time for jealousy that thou art twice ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... seemed to say 'twas minded him to greet. He took it up, unknowing what it meant; And soon his thoughts pursued their former bent. Of far-off, sombre German woods he dreamed; He saw the waving tree-tops of the north, He saw the comrades to their tryst go forth. Each word true as their own sharp weapons seemed, As much for friendship as for war their worth. Then ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... grandeur. Beginning in the splendid glitter of Solomon's reign, the monarchy passed with unsteady gait across the centuries, menaced by foes without and within, and ended at last in the irretrievable disaster of exile. But through the sombre march of history, a divine purpose was being accomplished. The disaster which swallowed up the nation renewed and spiritualized the religion, and thus the seeming ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... the meal, there was an evident desire on his part to appear cheerful and unconcerned; he talked more freely than usual, and even made many light and jesting remarks. But the veil assumed was too thin. Harriet's eyes saw through it, and rested only upon the sombre reality beneath. As they were rising from ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... night, except when the full moon shone, was sombre, with nothing doing. The street lamps burnt but indifferent gas; people stayed indoors, and read the piquant paragraphs of The Pioneer Bushman, Timber Town's evening journal, or fashioned those gay dresses which by day helped to make the town so bright, and went to bed early and slept ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... street. A continuous flower-bed ran all round the house close to its walls, planted full of geraniums, heliotrope, nasturtiums, mignonette, and pansies. Every window and balcony boasted its box of ferns or flowers; and in spite of the squareness of the building, and the sombre green-gray with which it was painted, the general effect was of cheerfulness, and shade broken by color,—an effect which is ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... increasing her speed. I was eagerly looking out for the coast; at length it came in sight—its distant outline rendered indistinct by the misty pall which hung over it. As we drew nearer, its forest covered heights had a particularly gloomy and sombre appearance, which made me think of the cruelties I had heard were practised on those shores, of the barbarous slave trade, of the fearful idolatries of its dark-skinned children, of its wild beasts, and of its deadly fevers. There ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... Jerrie, for she could see so plainly on the sombre wall the picture of the sweet-faced girl, with the long stocking in her lap—a very long stocking she felt sure it was, but dared not ask, lest they should think her question a strange one. Of the stranger in the back yard watching the young girl she had no recollection, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... aroused from his sombre reflections by his host, who rushed into the apartment crying out, "The Spaniards! ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... considered too long already. It only remains for me now to get all my people happy as soon as possible. Zany and Chunk 'make up,' and a good deal of their characteristic love-making will be worked in to relieve the rather sombre state of things at this stage. Whately returns with his empty sleeve, more of a hero than ever in his own eyes and his mother's. Miss Lou thinks him strangely thoughtful and considerate in keeping away, as he does, after a few short visits at The Oaks. The truth is, he is wofully ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... the trees grew thinner, and I emerged upon a bare, low headland running out into the sombre water. The night was calm and clear, and the reflection of the growing multitude of the stars shivered in the tranquil heaving of the sea. Some way out, the wash upon an irregular band of reef shone with ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... of the snow-capped sierras on their right, the ruddy blush of the peaks on their left—upon the summits of which the last rays of the vanished sun still lingered, to change to purest white even as they gazed—and every clump of sombre olive vegetation between. To the right and left of them, a few miles apart, two streams, having their sources in the neighbouring mountains, discharged into the lake; and so perfectly still was the air that the murmur of their waters came faint but ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... to Fifty-ninth streets, the avenue presents a continuous line of magnificent mansions. There are a few marble, yellow stone, and brick buildings, but the prevailing material is brown stone. The general appearance of the street is magnificent, but sombre, owing to the dark color of the stone. Nearly all the houses are built on the same design, which gives to it an air of sameness and tameness that is not pleasing. But it is a magnificent street, nevertheless, and has not its ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Jeff nodded, with sombre meaning. He was always a pessimistically inclined man; and, in his rough way, he had conceived a good deal of affection and respect for ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the middle of the ballad, he perceived, close to the door, immovable and pale, the beautiful face of Lelia. [FOOTNOTE: This name of the heroine of one of her romances is often given to George Sand. See Vol. I., p. 338.] She fixed her passionate and sombre eyes upon him; the impressionable artist felt at the same time pain and pleasure... others might listen to him: he played ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the hut the figure came to a halt. Thus it stood, immovable, a grey sombre shadow in the darkness of night. Then, after a long pause, high above the voice of the rising wind the howl of the wolf rang out. It came like a cry of woe from a lost soul; deep-toned, it lifted upon the air, only to fall and die ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... orange in complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like an undertaker ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... will say we have found it. [Looks down into the gorge.] How uncanny it looks down there! It is as if the fog were shunning the gully, so inky black!... See how sombre the ravine looks! ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... till the land, whither it was bound, should rise like a soft shadow over the horizon; till the shadow became a shape, and at last the tall cliffs, with the green downs above, the glittering plain, the sombre forest, loomed out above one, just beyond where the waves whitened on the loud sea-beaches, and the sound of the breakers came harmoniously over the waste of waters, like the soft tolling of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lost, therefore, in repairing to the sombre and substantial mansion already described. It was during the latter days of the venerable "Poppy Lownds," as the worthy old jailer was called, who for so long a succession of years had presided over the internal police of the prison. He was a kind-hearted old gentleman; and ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... forming the western boundary of Waveland, was a lovely inland lake, by the margin of which Clemence had been accustomed to spend many sad hours, since she had become a resident of the little village. A narrow foot-path, that led through the sombre woods, brought her to a sheltered spot upon the sloping shore, where she often came alone to pass an idle hour. She had come to regard this place as her own peculiar property, for no one had ever come here to interrupt her, or claim ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... why they did not care to speak. And even the girls, discreet in ribbons and shining boots, thought less of kisses than they generally did on Sunday. The older people, sober by temperament, became sombre under the influence of sad, breathless sky, and breathless waters. The coldness that lay in the bosom of nature soon found its way to the responsive bosom of humanity. It chilled Uniacke in the pulpit, Sir Graham in the pew below. The ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and body. Her face had not a line in it of strain or sorrow. Faint pink tinted her cheeks. Her pink-linen gown, open in a low V, showed the perfect contour and creaminess of her breast. The restless, adoring eyes of her husband came back to her always with that glance, vigilant and sombre, that was ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... owes its origin to the endless suggestions of the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise prosaic, coarse, and sometimes ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... aspirings. In later life, a new spirit, partaking of that which was our earliest, returns to us. The solitude which delighted us in youth, but which, when the thoughts that make solitude a fairy land are darkened by affliction, becomes a fearful and sombre void, resumes its old spell, as the more morbid and urgent memory of that affliction crumbles away by time. Content is a hermit; but so also is Apathy. Youth loves the solitary couch, which it surrounds with dreams. Age, or Experience (which is the mind's age), loves the same ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... altered. She spoke particularly of Walter Butler, whose moodiness had now been inflamed, by dissipation and by the evil spell which seemed to hang over everything in the Valley, into a sinister and sombre rage at the Whigs, difficult to ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... she played on the harp for Le Gardeur the airs which she knew he liked best. His sombre mood yielded to her fond exertions, and she had the reward of drawing at last a smile from his eyes as well as from his lips. The last she knew might be simulated, the former she felt was real, for the smile of the eye is the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Answer, sombre beast and dreary, Where is Brown, the young, the cheery, Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force? You were at that last dread dak We must cover at a walk, Bring them back to me, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... up with a start, and the sky had darkened almost to blackness, and was thick with a gathering multitude of coldly watchful stars. I looked eastward, and the light of that shrivelled world was touched with sombre bronze; westward, and the sun robbed now by a thickening white mist of half its heat and splendour, was touching the crater rim, was sinking out of sight, and all the shrubs and jagged and tumbled rocks stood out against ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... this must be the abode of the Oracle, and just as the sun was setting he reached its outermost gates. The whole castle was surrounded by a deep moat, and the drawbridge and the gates, and even the water in the moat, were all of the same sombre hue as the walls and towers. Upon the gate hung a huge bell, upon which was ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... Everard's listless hand, and, with his head bowed upon his bosom, he suffered his horse to move at a foot's pace up the sombre avenue. Deep in thought, he heeded not the movement of the steed ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... dark on Burnt Ridge. Seen from below, the whole serrated crest that had glittered in the sunset as if its interstices were eaten by consuming fires, now, closed up its ranks of blackened shafts and became again harsh and sombre chevaux de frise against the sky. A faint glow still lingered over the red valley road, as if it were its own reflection, rather than any light from beyond the darkened ridge. Night was already creeping up out of remote canyons and along the furrowed flanks of the mountain, or settling ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... Thoas," those rapidly changing expressions of the features, those statuesque attitudes melting into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indicated a common origin. It needed not the added eloquence of words and the sombre music of the voice to tell the tragic story of the victim of the Eumenides. After listening to the recitation, I was not surprised to learn that the young student was to appear, under the auspices of his teacher, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... his arm with a more vehement will; he struck, and at the same instant every horror disappeared. The sky was cloudless; the forest was neither terrible nor beautiful, but heavy and sombre as of old—a natural gloomy wood, but ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... The sky was overcast and threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than this ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... general name of "Egdon Heath," which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under the plough with ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... overwhelmed with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could remember it exactly. One figure I can still see—there is an open space, green grass, and Corot like trees on either side reflected in water, and a girl carrying a black water-pot on her ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... falls into my lap as I sit over the brook, on a log—a single leaf, gilded about its border, in the centre a crimson flush, fast swallowing up the original greenness; the whole will presently be bronzed and sombre. O, Leaf! how art thou mummified! We do not think of these little things of Nature. Look at this leaf. What is its record? How many generations, think you, are numbered in its ancestry? A perpetual intermarriage has not weakened its fibres. The anatomy of this leaf is perfect, and ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... mask of the mummy, in fact, gives a fair idea of that of the living king; the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath the sombre materials used by the embalmer. The disappearance of the old hero did not produce many changes in the position of affairs in Egypt: Minephtah from this time forth possessed as Pharaoh the power which he had previously wielded as regent. He was now no longer young. Born somewhere about the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... men presented a singular contrast. One, with his black hair, swarthy skin, slender limbs and sombre eyes, was the type of the Southern race which counts among its ancestors Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Spaniards. The other, with his rosy skin, large blue eyes, and hands dimpled like a woman's, was the type of that race of temperate ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... up now, but we cannot see it for the hills and buildings. My goodness, see that!" and the Englishman pointed to the east. A flood of delicate pink light was now pouring into the vast body of gray and was slowly driving the more sombre color toward the west. The line of separation was marked—so marked, indeed, that it seemed a vast, rose-colored billow rolling, widening and sweeping onward like a swell of the ocean shoreward. On it came rapidly, till the whole landscape was magically ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... cold, fine, chilling rain. Through it the wagon trains crossed, the artillery with a sombre noise, the wounded who must be carried, the long column of infantry, the advance, the main, the rear. The corps of Stonewall Jackson was the last to ford the river. He sat on Little Sorrel, midway of the stream, and watched his troops go onward in the steady, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... coals of the campfire, which cast a red reflection on the tall, sombre pines in back of them, they voted Dick a capital cook, and the supper one of the best they had eaten since they left the station where they had done fire ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... compensation the forest itself is remarkably beautiful. Its undergrowth, though dense, is very low and even, not more than a foot or so off the ground; and in the Hunting Moon the leaves of this undergrowth have turned to purest yellow, without touch or trace of red, so that the sombre forest is carpeted with gold. Here and there shows a birch or aspen, also bright, pure light yellow, as though a brilliant sun were striking down through painted windows. Groups of yellow-leafed larches add to the splendour. And close to the ground ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... there to meet him, nerved and calm as a spirit of the past, in that great quiet sarcophagus of books—at least, I so deceived myself to believe. I had made up my mind, during the time I had been sitting alone in that sombre room, as to what I would say to him, and how clearly and concisely I would array my wrongs in words, and pronounce his sentence. But, when he came, all this was forgotten. A tumult of wild feeling surged through my brain. My very tongue grew icy, and trembled in my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... small, white-painted sloop. Nothing romantic about it. No hint of adventure. A splendid pictorial argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that is what Cloudesley and I thought, that sombre, leaden morning as we turned out to cook breakfast and wash decks. The latter was my stunt, but one look at the dirty water overside and another at my fresh-painted deck, deterred me. After breakfast, we started a game of chess. The tide ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... stars. The ancient forest stretched around us on every side, and a foreboding sadness sunk upon my heart. Memory was busy with the events of many years. I retraced step by step the pilgrimage of my past life, until arriving at that passage in its sombre history, I gazed through tears upon the singularly savage scene around me, and secretly marvelled, "What ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the young girl was necessarily of the most limited and uncostly character; and, though she was dressed for a ceremonious dinner, her attire consisted merely of a sombre-hued barege, made with the severest simplicity, and gaining its only pretension to full dress by disclosing her white, finely-moulded neck and arms. Her sole ornament was the bracelet which ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Had her words touched him, had she said what was best for the welfare of the girl who was so dear to her, and whose departure she felt so keenly? How would she fare at this man's hands? What lay behind his stern face and sombre tragic eyes? Her lips moved in silent prayer, but when she spoke her voice was ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... only the flesh that he had put on, but also the clothes, that made him hard to recognise. In the old days, an imitation fur coat had seemed to be as integral a part of him as were his ill-shorn lantern jaws. But now his costume was a model of rich and sombre moderation, drawing, not calling, attention to itself. He looked like a banker. Any one would have been proud to ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... two before had been heard the muffled click of a hammer. Feet scuffled down the stairs, outside the dining-room door, and along the passage. And then the door was opened, and in low, decent undertaker's voice, red-nosed, sombre, well-fed Mr. Mortmain told them that ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... he said. "The proof is a terrible one, but I require this proof. I must descend into the tomb to obtain it: well, then, I will descend into the tomb. I must consult the sombre oracle of death concerning the mysteries of life: well, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... there sounded through the night the dull throbbing of a horse's feet, and the man who sat waiting raised his head. A gleam of expectancy shone in his sombre eyes. Some of the rigidity went out of ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... interspersed in the most picturesque fashion, with knolls richly clad with larch, oak, or hazel; while here and there the gleam of the River Earn betrays her course, where she has emerged from sombre wood, or deep and rocky gorge. In spring-time the eye is delighted and refreshed with the varieties of green—from the deep and sombre shade of the Scotch pine and the almost yellow and brown of the young oak to the exquisite freshness ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... meet for him who rules to drive away his stress— He, being god, should lightnings hurl and make a wilderness— But, haste! for night is darkling—soon, the festival it brings; Already see the hydra show its tongues and sombre wings, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... papers Blow along the side-walks, Contorted, horrible, Without curves. A horse steps in a puddle, And white, glaring water spurts up In stiff, outflaring lines, Like the rattling stems of reeds. The city is heraldic with angles, A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable And countercoloured bends of rain Hung over a four-square civilization. When a street lamp comes out, I gaze at it for fully thirty seconds To rest my brain with the suffusing, round brilliance of ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Pichincha. So encircled is this sequestered spot, the traveler, approaching by the Guayaquil road, sees only a part of it, and is disappointed; and even when standing on Panecillo, with the entire city spread out before him, he is not wholly satisfied. Buried between treeless, sombre sierras, and isolated from the rest of the world by impassable roads and gigantic Cordilleras, Quito appears to us of the commercial nineteenth century as useless as the old feudal towns perched on the mountains of Middle Europe. Not a chimney rises above the red-tiled roofs, telling of homely ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... occasional outbursts of merriment from De Croix and his equally reckless companion grew gradually less frequent, and appeared more forced. The constant and never-ending toil of our progress, the depressing gloom of the sombre primeval forest on every side of us, the knowledge of possible peril lurking in each league of this haunted silence, weighed upon us all, and at last closed the lips of even the ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... from her death-sleep: some forward sun-rays broke through the clouds of this sombre sky of Scotland; the snow melted, the lake broke its ice-crust, the first buds opened, the green turf reappeared; everything came out of its prison at the joyous approach of spring, and it was a great grief to Mary to see that ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the cargo was to be made. There was no moon. The sun set red and lowering over Durlstone Point, and dark clouds were seen chasing each other rapidly across the sky, rising from a dark bank which rested on the western horizon, while white-crested seas began to rise up out of the sombre green ocean, every instant increasing in number. The wind whistled mournfully among the bushes and the few stunted trees, with tops bending inland, which fringed the cliffs, and the murmur of the waves on the beach below changed ere long into ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... cloth; lips, fingers and ears, the tongue in her open mouth—all creeks for the blood were ebbed dry. Her awful eyes, fixed and sombre stars, threatened to gulf her in their dark. Love was drowned in ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... deepened, in the gathering shade Beneath that old titanic cypress row, Whose sombre vault and towering colonnade Dwarfed the enfolded forms that moved below, Oft with close steps these happy lovers strayed, Till down its darkening aisle the sunset glow Grew less and patterning ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure of ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... bazaars clustered about its holiest sanctuaries form its most sombre quarter. Dusk falls there early, and oil-lanterns twinkle in the merchants' niches while the clear African daylight still lies on the gardens of upper Fez. This twilight adds to the mystery of the souks, making them, in spite of profane noise ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... desirable as an associate with luminous colors. Black does not associate as well with two colors, one of which is luminous and the other sombre, as when associated with ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... countenance of the sick woman stood out like a figure of Christ imperfectly gilded and fixed upon a cross of tarnished silver. The flickering rays shed by the blue flames of a crackling fire were therefore the sole light of this sombre chamber, where the denouement of a drama was just ending. A log suddenly rolled from the fire onto the floor, as if presaging some catastrophe. At the sound of it the sick woman quickly rose to a sitting posture. She opened two eyes, clear as those of a cat, and ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... laboured and painful, her gaze more concentrated and searching, and when her cousin exclaimed: "Oh, mother! she is an angel! I have always known it. She is unlike everybody else!" Electra's heart seemed to stand still; and from that moment a sombre curtain fell between the girl's eyes and God's sunshine. She rose, and a silent yet terrible struggle took place in her passionate soul. Justice and jealousy wrestled briefly; she would be just though every star fell from her sky, and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to be seen, their ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... satisfying than that of the dour and dark rocks of Tintagel and the Land's End. And if Wessex cannot boast the sustained grandeur of the stern face that England turns to the Atlantic waves, the romantic arch of Durdle Door, the majestic hill-cliff that rises above the green cleft of Arish Mel, and the sombre precipices of St. Aldhelm's, with the smiling loveliness of the Wessex lanes and hamlets behind them, will be ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... little else; and, before proceeding to examine the residuum of truth that probably exists in connection with this subject, it will be well for us briefly to examine the other and darker side of this curious relic of mediaeval superstition, and to see it in its most sombre hues. A belief for which more than nine million persons were either burned or hanged since it sprang into being; in whose cause five hundred persons were executed in three months in 1515 in Geneva alone, is not to be put aside as unworthy of a moment's ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... trail, he scanned the ground very carefully. It was still flat, notwithstanding some rocky patches. The shade was deep, and as far as the eye reached, nothing moved; nothing suspicious was seen, nay, nothing that bore life, except the sombre vegetation. The wind increased in force; the pines faintly murmured from time to time; a blast penetrated beneath them to the surface of the soil, chasing the dry needles in fitful whirls or playing with the tall bunch-grasses that ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... proceed to Siligoree, where I arrived at 6 a.m. on the 13th. Hitherto I bad not seen the mountains, so uniformly had they been shrouded by dense wreaths of vapour: here, however, when within eight miles of their base, I caught a first glimpse of the outer range—sombre masses, of far from picturesque outline, clothed everywhere ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... quietly, and moved in silence towards the bed. She nodded an affectionate welcome. He returned her greeting eagerly, and all his constraint was loosed away, and he felt at ease, and happy. Her face was very pale indeed against the glittering blackness of her eyes, and her sombre disordered hair and untidy dress; but it did not show fatigue nor extreme anxiety; it was a face of calm meekness. The sleeves of her dress were reversed, showing the forearms, which gave her an appearance of deshabille, homely, intimate, confiding. "So it was common property ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... amid life's roses Will the sombre cypress be twined, And wherever a joy reposes, A dream of sorrow ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... Gervase as he surveyed the outside of the particular dwelling Fulkeward pointed out to him—a square, palatial building, which had no doubt once been magnificent in its exterior adornment, but which now, owing to long neglect, had fallen into somewhat melancholy decay. The sombre portal, fantastically ornamented with designs copied from some of the Egyptian monuments, rather resembled the gateway of a tomb than an entrance to the private residence of a beautiful living woman, and Fulkeward, noting his ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... was always ready to write anybody's Life. If he knew the facts of a poet's life—and his knowledge was enormous on such subjects—he found room for them; if he did not, he supplied their place with his own shrewd reflections and sombre philosophy of life. It thus comes about that Johnson is every bit as interesting when he is writing about Sprat, or Smith, or Fenton, as he is when he has got Milton or Gray in hand. He is also much ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... this desponding reflection, he moves off from the scaffold; and, making his way among the mausoleums, once more approaches the spot where the South American banyan casts its sombre ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... shoulder, till the road curled up into the depths of a broad pine-wood, through which it cut, thin, and dead straight, and cool, and strangely solemn. In a flash it had become the nave of a cathedral, immense, solitary. Sombre and straight and tall, the walls rose up to where the swaying roof sobered the mellow sunshine and only let it pass dim and so, sacred. The wanton breeze, caught in the maze of tufted pinnacles, filtered its chastened way, a pensive organist, learned to draw ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... There was a sombre silence. Faversham broke it. "I must see the nurses," he said to Lydia; "but again, I beg of you to go! ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... candour—of her saying what other writers cannot help thinking, though they may not like to express the thought. Readers of Persuasion are well aware that the author made room for cases (at all events, in the lives of women) where such disappointments, though they may not kill, yet give a sombre tone to the life and spirits of the sufferer through a long ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... The porcelain of tea paraphernalia caught the glow of the fire; a reading lamp burned on a centre table, shedding subdued lustre over ceiling, walls, books, and over the floor where lay a few ancient rugs of Beloochistan, themselves full of mysterious, sombre fire. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... was blotted out from Spain,—and Spain was blotted out from the ranks of enlightened nations. Freedom of thought was at an end. The mind of the Spaniard was put in fetters. Spain, under the sombre shadow of this barbarity, was shut out from the light which was breaking over the remainder of Europe. Literature moved in narrow channels, philosophy was checked, the domain of science was closed, progress was at an end. Spain stood still while the rest of the world was ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... the divan, her knees clasped around with her arms. And again was Platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably contracted downward, toward ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... likely that the sombre satire of the pure and beautiful Jeanne-Marie Philipon touched the heart of Paris more than the shedding of tears and shrieking lamentations. The wife of Roland, led to the scaffold, faced with the stern certainty of death, asks with calm dignity for pen, ink, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... fired the passion of Asad-Reis—as he then was, one of the captains of the famous Ali-Basha. There were streaks of red in her heavy black tresses, her skin was of a soft pearliness that seemed translucent, her eyes were large, of a golden-brown, agleam with sombre fires, her lips were full and sensuous. She was tall and of a shape that in Europe would have been accounted perfect, which is to say that she was a thought too slender for Oriental taste; she moved along beside her lord with a sinuous, languorous grace, gently stirring ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
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