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More "Soundless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crew, That passed in battle and wreck,— Ah, so faithful and true! They died on the bloody deck, They sank in the soundless blue. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... theme. In both were the same musical instruments—pipes, cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale, as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundless now, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate bewilderments of the whole series—[54] ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... hush of peace—a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till Earth was lost ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... closer, smashing the remains of the night with an iron crutch. The half-extinguished Cafe Kloesschen, a gleaming fragment, lay still in the soundless morning. In the background sat the last customer. Kuno Kohn had let his head sink back on his trembling hump. The scrawny fingers of his hand covered his forehead and face. His whole body cried ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... the very fountain-head of fortitude and endurance, we fared on silent for the better part; and in a little time the hush of the solitudes laid fast hold of us, scanting us of speech and bidding us go softly. And after this the march became a soundless shadow-flitting, and we a straggling file of voiceless mechanisms wound up and set to measure off the miles till famine or exhaustion should thrust a finger in among the wheels and bid ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... within his outworks. Once more he roused himself, heard the storm raving on—over buried graves and curtained beds, heedless of human heeding—fell a-listening to its shriek-broken roar, and so into a soundless and ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... popularity. His very defects, and the shallowness of his philosophy, promoted his popularity; and by comparison with the French critics on the dramatic or scenical proprieties he is ever profound. His plummet, if not suited to the soundless depths of Shakspeare, was able ten times over to fathom the little rivulets of Parisian philosophy. This he did effectually, and thus unconsciously levelled the paths for Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion which he has since held over the German stage, by crushing with ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... bonny dell, whaur the mune luiks doon, As gin she war hearin' a soundless tune, Whan the flowers an' the birds are a' asleep, And the verra burnie gangs creepy-creep; Whaur the corn-craik craiks in the lang lang rye, And the nicht is the safter for his rouch cry; Whaur the wind wad fain lie doon on the slope, And the verra darkness owerflows ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... of white poppies were long shadows blue as the blue lagoons of the sky among drifting snow-white moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the pastures were in a still sleep: their tremulous leaves made no rustle, though there was a soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows, as in the dark water of a pool where birches lean in the yellow hour of the frostfire. Upon the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping, and yearling kids opened and closed their onyx eyes among ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: "To him this must have ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... something ominous and gravely impressive in this interminable line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely still; a close-packed, silent file, waiting, waiting in the vast deserted night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a movement, there under the night and under the slow-moving mists ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... of soundless music Through the vision of the seer, More of feeling than of hearing, Of the heart than of the ear, She knew the droning pibroch, She knew the Campbell's call "Hark! hear ye no' MacGregor's, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... authors as struggling with poverty, and continued to cite eighteenth-century examples by way of encouraging Goldthorpe and animating his zeal. Whilst the young man was at work Mr. Spicer moved about the house with soundless footsteps. When invited into his tenant's room he had a reverential demeanour, and the sight of manuscript on the bare deal table caused ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... need not dread This gathering of the brave; Without sword or flag, and with soundless tread, We muster once more our deathless dead, Out ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... thinking furiously on every possibility of self-salvation, there came to his sensitive nostrils a faint and a familiar scent. Instantly every faculty of his mind was upon the alert. Presently his trained ears caught the sound of the soundless presence without—behind the hut wherein he lay. His lips moved, and though no sound came forth that might have been appreciable to a human ear beyond the walls of his prison, yet he realized that the one beyond would hear. Already ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand. Our way was across—the woods we threaded did but cling upon—the vast declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle, delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew's cross against the sea and sky, certainly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heavy that at first five horses were used, but we left one with his postillion at the top of the hill and swung down at a canter into the level country. The snow lay fairly deep, and the horses' hoofs were soundless as we plunged through the crisp and tingling air. The wind raced past me as I sat perched on my rickety seat, swaying wildly with every lurch of the coach. With every gust I seemed to drink in fresh strength and felt the very motion and swiftness ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she glided away from him with soundless footsteps. Close, close behind her he followed till they reached the threshold of the Cave Hall. There he tarried out of sight, yet where his eyes could ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... her hands. He pressed them closely between his own, that were strangely cold, and lifted them to his lips. Then she swayed forward unsteadily; and in an instant her face was hidden against his shoulder, her whole frame shaken with soundless sobs. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... depths; I could hear it in a dense wood at my right, the murmur of it rising and falling in ceaseless volumes of sound, riven at intervals by a horrid scream or a thunderous roar which shook the earth; and always I was haunted by that inexplicable sensation that unseen eyes were watching me, that soundless feet dogged my trail. I am neither nervous nor highstrung; but the burden of responsibility upon me weighed heavily, so that I was more cautious than is my wont. I turned often to right and left and rear lest I be surprised, and I carried ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... words, Rameses raised himself from his attitude of languor into an upright and intensely alert position. The company ceased to breathe, but Kenkenes heaved a soundless sigh of relief. Masanath had ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... open noiselessly. Some twenty men appeared, all clothed in black and masked in velvet. Their approach over the thickly carpeted floor was soundless. ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... divided into two parties, and keeping within the deepest patches of shadow, bore down upon the nearest pickets with a fierce, soundless rush,—the most disconcerting form of attack to sleepy sentries in the small hours, when life and courage are at their lowest ebb. But the picket sentries happened to be Sikhs; and they are ill men to tackle at close quarters or to spring ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... O, yes, and soundless too; For you have stol'n their buzzing, Antony, And very wisely ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... down the soundless valley Thunders, and dark is here; And the wind blows, and the light goes, And the night ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... was a very quiet one. But every incident of life was quiet in the Vicarage. Only low sounds were ever heard, only almost soundless movements made. The two men seated themselves and talked calmly while the rain pattered on the window panes and streaming down them seemed ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger's pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little hollow among the sycamores, where the children were disposed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... struck by a violent adverse wind. Her main topsail blew out suddenly and went streaming forth in the gale, a jib split to ribbons before their eyes, and spar after spar was carried away. She careened, as though before a hurricane, her foremast came down with a soundless smother of sail and wreckage. Further and further she tilted, and then suddenly she had vanished and there was nothing left but the March sunshine ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... particles or dust, through which run immense waves, condensation and rarefaction succeeding one another as in the undulations of sound. Yet, with all their inferential tumult, they may actually be as soundless as the depths of interstellar space, for Struve has shown that those spectacular rings possess no appreciable mass, and, viewed from Saturn itself, their (to us) gorgeous seeming bow may appear only as a wreath of shimmering vapor spanning ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... elephants, swaying noisily to their moving bulk. At length we emerge in a little clearing; and even as we glance around, the stalks part harshly, and the tiger leaps forth at an unarmed beater, burying fangs in a soundless ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... of the change. Beneath him, in a space between the quays bridged by the gangway, a number of rowboats, a putative score, lay moored for the night and gently rubbing against each other with the soundless lift and fall of the river. For all that Kirkwood could determine to the contrary, the lot lay at the mercy of the public; nowhere about was he able to discern a figure in ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... spectator of the delusive character of all that splendor of color. He lifts a box from the ooze: he appears to have uncorked the world. The hold is a bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless depth. The bottom of the sea seems loopholed with cavities that pierce the solid globe and the dark abysses of space beyond. The diver is surrounded by pitfalls, real and imaginary. There is no graduation. The shallow concave ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... void and soundless river On the outer edge of space, Where the body comes not ever, But the absent dream hath place, Stands a city, tall and quiet, And its air is sweet and dim; Never sound of grief or riot Makes it mad, or ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften), and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Summer's joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming: Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too Blushing through the mist and dew Cloys with tasting: What do then? Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Spirit of a winter's night; When the soundless earth is muffled, And the caked snow is shuffled From the ploughboy's heavy shoon; When the Night doth meet the Noon In dark conspiracy To banish Even from her sky. —Sit thee there, and send abroad With a mind self-overawed Fancy, high-commission'd:—send her! She has vassals to ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and thoughtful. "Devin—give me a half-dollar." Blankly, Devin reached in his pocket, and handed over the metal disc. Cautiously Buck Kendall tossed it toward the sphere of force. Instantly there was a flash of flame, soundless and soft-colored. Then the silver disc was outlined in light, and swiftly, inevitably crumbling into dust so fine only a blue haze appeared. In less than two seconds, the metal was gone. Only the dense blue fog remained. Then ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... was made safely in the circle of Air Guardsmen. There was a small hospital plane standing beside it in a moment, and as Arcot's ship released it, and then hung motionless, soundless above it, the people watched it in wonder and excitement. They wanted to see Arcot perform; they clamored to see the wonderful powers of this ship in operation. Air Guardsmen who had witnessed the flying game of tag between these two super-air machines had told ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... single star-beam pierced the roof of branches overhead; and, as we moved forward side by side, the trees shifted silently past us in long lines, row upon row, squadron upon squadron, like the units of a vast, soundless army. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... although we know no such heaven as hers, a new temper is imparted to us, a new spirit breathed into us; I was about to say a new hope bestowed upon us, when we consider that we live surrounded by the soundless depths in which the stars repose. Such a consideration has a direct practical effect upon us, and so had the future upon the mind of Mrs. Butts. "Why dost thou judge thy brother," says Paul, "for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of God." Paul does not mean that God will punish him and ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... Earth less Paradise; its frame is full Of perfect blessedness, which to the pure Were Heaven in all its fulness; but mankind Are crimsoned o'er with sin, which like blood-stains A soundless ocean could not cleanse away. And thus all flesh must thaw back to the dust From which it sprang, as ice doth unto water, Before the soul is purified for heaven. Men little dream how near heaven is to them In possibility, how far in deed. As little as they dream amid their ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... the black and silent river, Cold, cold and soundless ever; But there our feet were stayed—unloosed our clasping fond, And he ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... to assume the peculiar mathematical relation to each other which they held, as far as distance and arrangement were concerned, and whether that could possibly have any intellectual significance. The nebulous conglomeration of the suns in Pleiades suggested a soundless depth of space, and he thought of the earth floating like a little ball in immeasurable reaches of ether. His own life appeared very trivial in view of these things, and he found himself asking whether it was all really of any significance or importance. He shook these ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... blue, appeared the ice-plumes of the cirro-stratus clouds, the true mares'-tails, flung out across the vault, their ends stretching to the centre of the storm. At the horizon, a wicked, dull glare gave threat of the typhoon's approach. All as yet was soundless, only the far-flung clouds told of the fury which was hurling them ahead ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... the verdant velvet of an English lawn shaded at the lower end by a clump of exotic trees, in the midst of which stood a Chinese pagoda with soundless belfries and motionless golden eggs. The greenhouse concealed the garden wall on the northern side, the opposite wall was covered with climbing plants trained upon poles painted green and connected with crossway trellises. This lawn, this world of flowers, the gravelled paths, the ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... glance, to give each meaning, Express as clothed in language, be term'd speech, She hath that wondrous faculty; for her eyes, Like the bright stars of heaven, can hold discourse, Though it be mute and soundless. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... last movements of his soundless lips, while his blood seemed freezing to insensibility. His eyelids were closed, and pale, and without sign of animation, he lay at the foot of a tree nigh ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... forbear laughing now as she remembered that first day she had seen Orvay Lafarge, and she said to Bissonnette: "Loce, do you mind the keg in the water-pail?" Bissonnette paused on an out-pull, and threw back his head with a soundless laugh, then played the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... line, soundless but for the hurried tramp of their heavy boots, dim figures emerged from the bush, lifted something from a speeder, and disappeared the way they had come. The first speeder, already unloaded, stood awaiting its companion. Blue Pete saw at first without ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... personage and is much too tall in proportion to the spry little dandy Lieutenant at his side. Invested with some strange attribute by the genius of the painter, this Dutchman becomes the protagonist in a soundless symphony of light and shadow. The waves that emanate from the canvas suffuse your senses but do not soothe or satisfy. The modern nervous intensity, missing absolutely in Hals and his substantial humans, is present in Rembrandt. We say "modern" as a sop to our vanity, but we are the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... well inland and mounting a perceptible grade toward the foothills: the sluggish stream they had paralleled all day ran swift here. Once, where the trail twisted near the bank, they heard the rush of rapids, and a mile farther on they came in sight of a curiously soundless waterfull. They had reached the Bogobo country but the afternoon quiet was unbroken by the sound of agongs. Fear had reached ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... banishing the oppression of despair, that had seemed to stifle me. Wherever the earth was traveling, it was, at least, going once more toward the realms of light. Light! One must spend an eternity wrapped in soundless night, to understand the full horror of being ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... vision and she was looking into great caverns of space, bursting with blackness. Some horror of emptiness was reaching to roll her in pits of murk, where her screams would be battered back on her tongue soundless. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... towards the artificial water. The sky was melancholy and grey, and the park lay before her, hushed and soundless. Through the shadows of the darkening island two swans floated softly, leaving behind slight silver lines; above, the swallows flew high in the evening. There was sensation of death, too, in this cold, mournful water, and in the silence ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... have made the moon's landscape familiar to all. Very similar was the scene Darl scanned, save that the barren expanse, pitted and scarred like Luna's, glowed almost liquid under the beating flame of a giant sun that flared in a black sky. Soundless, airless, lifeless, the tumbled plain ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... the main hall, where people might speak to her, she took the short cut through the sun-pavilion, which would bring her nearer to the stairs. But on throwing open the door she stood still on the threshold with a little soundless gasp. "Oh!" ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... slim, young top riders of the ranch force, chaparajos and sombreros being much in evidence. They gave the usual stunts in the typical Western way on a track tramped as hard as asphalt, the tattoo of hoofs making the hard earth ring in the soundless atmosphere. Their feats, singly and together, were marvelous, but there was lacking to the onlookers the charm of novelty, as they had long been accustomed to these and similar exhibitions ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their large and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was in the air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While they remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and abode with her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the thousands of other words she counted, she transmitted, in all ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... floods of day Sunn'd his clear soul with heaven's internal ray, The expanding spark divine; that round him springs, And leads and lights him thro the immense of things, Probes the dense earth, explores the soundless main, Remoulds their mass thro all its threefold reign, O'er great, o'er small extends his physic laws, Empalms the empyrean or dissects a gaz, Weighs the vast orbs of heaven, bestrides the sky, Walks on the windows of an insect's eye; Turns then to self, more curious still to trace The whirls ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... it. She glanced at him without replying, looked away, back again. Her bosom rose and fell with a slow and tremulous movement, as though stirring with deep, soundless sighs. A little smile hovered on ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... over the soft and soundless moss, which covers practically the entire surface of Mars with the exception of the frozen areas at the poles and the scattered cultivated districts, they might have captured me easily, but their intentions were far more sinister. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... racy odor, pungent-sweet, The living soul of Spring. Death's chamber seemed As though clear sunshine and a singing bird Therein had entered. From the precious herb She poured into a golden bowl the sap, Sparkling like wine; then with a soundless prayer, White as the dead herself, she held the cup To Raschi's mouth. A quick, small flame sprang up From the enchanted balsam, died away, And lo! the color dawned in cheek and lips, The life returned, the sealed, blind lids were raised, And in the glorious ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... grew. All was still and vague and dusky as in pillared aisles. There were no birds, no animals, nothing living except the giant columns which bore a woven canopy of leaves so dense that no glimmer of blue shone through. Centuries had spread the soundless carpet that we trod; eons had laid up the high-sprung arches which vanished far above us where vault and column were dimly merged, losing ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... set them up again without noise and dust, and the sound of thrust-in bolts, and the tap of the hammer that drives in the nails. It is difficult, but not impossible. Barricades can be raised noiselessly, soundless bolts—that keep out the soul—be pushed home. The black gauze veil that blots out the scene drops, and when it is raised—if ever—the ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... that thing that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will was its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of its existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this feeling into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique and dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen tons ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... to herself for a while, until Lark really slept, then she buried her head in the pillow and her throat swelled with sobs that were heavy but soundless. ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... place where Lewti lies, 65 When silent night has closed her eyes: It is a breezy jasmine-bower, The nightingale sings o'er her head: Voice of the Night! had I the power That leafy labyrinth to thread, 70 And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, I then might view her bosom white Heaving lovely to my sight, As these two swans together heave On the gently-swelling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and he caught the pallor of her hands, searching swiftly, and then a muffled clink.... Next moment, a wraith with soundless steps, she was back at his side again, urging him on with her. They passed the stairs; he felt the soft yield of carpet beneath his feet; they passed that recumbent figure and now he heard the rhythm of a sleeper's heavy breath, escaping muffledly from the folds of a thick mantle ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... I half turned. There was a soundless flash beside me, a tiny level beam leaped down the corridor—that horribly intense actinic white beam. It struck the guard, and his figure fell forward in the grille doorway. When we reached him, there was but a crumpled heap of black ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... When she went down they were seated as she had left them the evening before, grandmother, aunt, cousin; and they looked up with the same pride and fondness. But affection has so different a quality in the morning. Then the full soundless rides which come in at nightfall have receded; and in their stead is the glittering beach with thin waves that give no rest to the ear or to the shore—thin noisy edge of the deeps ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... she saw her glide soundless in across the silent dusk of the morning, that filtered through the heavy drapery of the windows, but she recovered herself at once when she saw the bundle about her neck, for it both assured her of Curdie's safety, and gave her hope of her father's. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... with that quietness he were doing something to offset the fatal blatancy with which it had just spoken. He looked down at the lifeless figure with burning eyes entirely devoid of pity, then went with a soundless tread, in spite of his heavy-soled boots, to the bed and spoke softly to the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... calm clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall have perished these still will reign on:—the slow, sure, soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... centre. For, in that Silence, all vastitude and height and depth and time and direction are swallowed up: relation therein could have no meaning but for the speck of my fleeting consciousness,—atom of terror pulsating alone through atomless, soundless, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... stopped to rest a moment and to listen for the stroke of pick or shovel from the opposite side of his living grave. But no sound came to him. He seemed to be in a soundless universe except for the rasp of ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... Ken on the lower step. The step was half sunk into the earth and mint grew thickly about and over its edge. Often crushed by so many passing feet it gave out its essence freely, and the spicy odour hung round them like a soundless, invisible benediction. Ken looked up at Rilla, whose hair was shining in the moonlight and whose eyes were pools of allurement. All at once he felt sure there was nothing in ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above the range of hearing; but he felt his body quivering in response to the unheard note. Then even these vague fragments of understanding left him. The towering, soundless thing was indistinct ... it vanished in ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... breath of awe as he turned and looked about him. Overhead the sky was sparkling with innumerable stars, and the crescent moon was shining like burnished silver, while level with his breast rolled a limitless, silent, and mystical ocean of cloud which broke against the dark peaks in soundless surf, and spread away to the east in ever-widening shimmer. All the lesser hills were covered; only the lords of the range towered above the flood in sullen ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... the mocking lilac mountains hung in the air and then paled in the intense light. The day was soundless and windless, and the heat-waves rose from the desert like smoke. For Hare the realities were the baked clay flats, where Silvermane broke through at every step; the beds of alkali, which sent aloft clouds of powdered dust; the deep ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... face of the scout brightened. Here was the most promising pupil who had ever sat at his feet for instruction; and now they redoubled their caution, as their soundless bodies slipped through the undergrowth. Everywhere they looked for the trail of that wild turkey. It may be said that a turkey can and does fly in the air and leaves no trail, but Henry knew that the one for which they looked might leave ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is paltry past all phrase * * * the uncouth semi-soaped shanks of Nerius, the slender soundless fizzlings of Libo * * * if not all things I wish would displease thee and Fuficius, the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... churning at her stern was the only sound in the world. The shore lay plunged in the silence of the deeper slumber. I watched the town recede still and soundless in the hot night, till the abrupt hail, "Steam-launch, ahoy!" made me spin round face forward. We were close to a white ghostly steamer. Lights shone on her decks, in her portholes. And the same voice shouted ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... death, if death Be visited by stealthy dreams; A vagrant note from soundless themes That ring the comet-paths of space, Seemed vibrant in the windless air That trembled with its presence there. Out beyond the nameless place Where neither fields nor clouds exist, Grey from the background of the mist, I saw three vague forms ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... hurtful to the credit of many of the best houses. In a crisis like that of Black Friday the sluice-gates of passion open. Cloaked in the masquerade of genuine distrust, came forth whispers whose only origin was in ancient enmities, long-treasured spites, the soundless depths of unquenchable malignities. Firms of staunchest reputation felt the rapier-stroke of old angers. The knowledge that certain houses were large holders of particular stocks was the signal of attacks ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... great muffling garment flung over his head and drawn tightly about his neck. He was in a fair way to strangle, and his vigorous efforts at escape were useless in the hands of so many. He might have been plunged at once into a great abyss of limitless, soundless depths, so futile did any resistance seem. And so, as it was useless to struggle, he lay like one dead and put all his powers into listening. But neither could he hear much, muffled as he was, and bound hand and foot now, with a gag in his mouth and little care taken ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... sea breezes blow alternately at stated hours. The nights are very still. The days are a tepid dream. Since I arrived not a leaf has stirred, not a bird has sung, the tides ebb and flow in listless and soundless ripples. Far off, on the shallow sea, phantom ships hover and are gone, and on an indefinite horizon a blurred ocean blends with a blurred sky. On Mount Ophir heavy cloud-masses lie always motionless. The still, heavy, fragrant nights pass with no ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... inarticulate expression of surprise and pleasure made both men follow her example. It was only a coasting vessel, which had come rather close to the shore, and was sailing swiftly by, before the freshening breeze; but Its broad, white sails, with the moonlight upon them, and its gliding, soundless motion, gave it an unearthly effect, as of a phantom of light floating between the dark sea and sky, or a great white-winged spirit sweeping past. When it had vanished into the distance and darkness, Rose turned, and looked up at Harvey with mute but half-parted ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... medley the sweetest notes of all the rest. Of a sudden, as I listened, there was a soft rustle in the undergrowth, and out from a clump of myrtles bounced a little brown rabbit, who cocked an astonished eye at me and disappeared again with a series of soundless leaps and a terrified whisk of his little white tail. Upon that the laugh in my throat bubbled over; I dropped my hands and turned ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... was considerably above the medium height, and added to the sense of grandeur conveyed by her presence. Her carriage was erect to the verge of stiffness, and her step too firm to be quite soundless. Advancing years had not produced any unseemly embonpoint, nor had her figure fallen into the opposite extreme, and sharpened into meagre angularity; its outline retained sufficient roundness not to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... upon the holly-bright table and an enormous turkey by the Doctor's plate, only a frosty menace in Mike's eye, it seemed, restrained another blood-curdling shriek of delight. There was paralyzing apology in his eyes as Mike's lips formed the soundless threat—"Mom Murphy!" ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... to wander in the dark over the ground where vanished armies fought and bled so long. He sees and hears too much. He knows that his time—the present—has passed with the day, and that when the night comes it belongs again to the armies; then they fight once more, though the battle is soundless now, amid the shades and over ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sealing my door and turned away; started forward along the deck. I followed. My steps were soundless in my elastic-bottomed shoes. Anita swaggered with a noisy tread. Near the door of the smoking room a small incline passage led downward. We ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of the wood to my left, issued something, running fast, but with soundless feet, over the snow. I doubted in my dream whether the object were a live thing or only a shadow. It came nearer, and I saw it was a child, a little girl, running as if for her life. She came straight to the tree I sat in, and when close to ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... for the great mastiff Hero, since Hugo Jocelyn's death, had taken to such dismal howling that it had been found necessary to keep him away from the house in, a far-off shed where his melancholy plaints could not be heard. Treading with light, soundless footsteps down the stairs, she reached the front-door,— unbarred and unlocked it without any noise, and as softly closed it behind her,—then she stood in the open, shivering slightly in the sweet coldness of the coming dawn, and inhaling the fragrance ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... silence spread itself through the sleeping house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river broke the stillness under the stars. But all through this silence and this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my dressing gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all the frightened ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... this, my sixth year, there happened a series of minute and soundless incidents which, elementary as they may seem when told, were second in real importance to none in my mental history. The recollection of them confirms me in the opinion that certain leading features in each human soul are inherent to it, and cannot be accounted for by suggestion or training. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... silence! Dead, vast, sepulchre-like, dreaming, waiting, a silence of ages, burdened with the history of the past, awful! I strained my ears for sound of insect or rustle of sage or drop of weathered rock. The soft cool desert wind was soundless. This silence had something terrifying in it, making me a man alone on the earth. The great spaces, the wild places as they had been millions of years before! I seemed to divine how through them man might develop from savage to a god, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... cloud-shadows and the soft, sultry music of humming-bees and singing-birds, with clear skies bending over; a deep sea the other, whereon sail stately ships, wafted by health-bearing breezes, in whose waters the sick gain strength, in whose soundless depths the coral and the precious stones repose forever, which supplies the clouds whose ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... involuted continents of white cloud. The dunes tremble in the broad flood of wind, light, and sea, diaphanous and fading, always on the limit of vision, the point of disappearing, but are established. They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personal illusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but an unapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them never suggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... laugh, that soundless laugh of hers which gave the feeling of a joke only half shared. "For a consideration, of ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... the Martian Princess and the searchers on the hull. He cried out in the soundless dark. The searchers had left the hull and were pursuing him through open space. Their speed far exceeded his. It was futile to run before them—and futile to leave the haven of the Martian Princess. ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... soft sandy-soil received and deadened the impact of her hoofs. Off she flew through the grey of the morning, soundless as ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... we were wont to stray, 'Guiling with springtime hopes the winter hours, The Spring has smiled; yon slope that late gloomed gray And sternly sad, 'neath April's tender showers Grows green and glad again. The rippled grass, A soundless sea o'er which white cloud-sails pass, Breaks at my feet in billows foamed with flowers; And blue-eyed myrtle blooms with lashes wet Smile to me thro' their tears. The skies are blue, And life ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... Death, with hollow tone, And soundless step, and clammy hand— Lo, I am now no less alone Than in thy desolate, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Olivia's lips trembling, her hand fast in Georgiana's. Young Chester Crofton gave a subdued whoop of joy, and pretty Rosalie, scarcely out of emotional girlhood, burst into hysterical crying which she struggled vainly to keep soundless. ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... though delicate, was free And firm as ever grappled with the sea, And yielded scarce to Torquil's manlier strength. The prow now almost lay within its length Of the crag's steep inexorable face, With nought but soundless waters for its base; 50 Within a hundred boats' length was the foe, And now what refuge but their frail canoe? This Torquil asked with half upbraiding eye, Which said—"Has Neuha brought me here to die? Is this a place of safety, or a grave, And yon ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and added desolation to the plain. No solitary watercourse with margin of cottonwoods or willow thickets flowed here to stripe the dingy, yellow world with interrupting green, nor were cattle to be seen dotting the distance, nor moving objects at all, nor any bird in the soundless air. The last gate was shut by the Virginian, who looked back at the pleasant trees of the ranch, and then followed on in single file across the alkali ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... to face with a man, he never seemed to be giving more than half his attention, for might not some one else approach if he lost himself in order to listen to any one voice? He had covered half the length of the room with that soundless step before she heard, and rose with a glad ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... come to. But presently the sweet enemy was again within his outworks. Once more he roused himself, heard the storm raving on—over buried graves and curtained beds, heedless of human heeding—fell a-listening to its shriek-broken roar, and so into a soundless and dreamless sleep. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the King became intensified. Quietly folding his arms, he took his stand by the coffin of the dead in silence. The dashing spray that leaped at the masts of the vessel,— the wind that scooped up the billows into higher and higher pinnacles of emerald green, might have been soundless and powerless, for all he seemed ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... light, in the otherwise pitlike darkness. Hope grew up within me, banishing the oppression of despair, that had seemed to stifle me. Wherever the earth was traveling, it was, at least, going once more toward the realms of light. Light! One must spend an eternity wrapped in soundless night, to understand the full ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... bonny, bonny dell, whaur the mune luiks doon, As gin she war hearin' a soundless tune, Whan the flowers an' the birds are a' asleep, And the verra burnie gangs creepy-creep; Whaur the corn-craik craiks in the lang lang rye, And the nicht is the safter for his rouch cry; Whaur the wind wad fain lie doon on the slope, And the verra darkness owerflows wi' hope! Oh! the bonny, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger's pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... loomed upward into the mystic haze, with purple bases melting into the horizon; southward were other mountains, equally distant and mysterious; northward—so far away that they blurred in the vision—were still other mountains. Intervening on all sides was the stretching, soundless, aching void of desolation, carrying to the rider its lurking threat of death, the promise of evil ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... green, shining on the bosom of the night. To either side, the long, dark lines of thrice-historic palaces; scarcely a poor light here and there at their water-gates; and now and then the lamps of the Traghetti.... Otherwise, darkness, soundless ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 'Silence—silence!' now is aye your soundless voice, Lifted in an awful patience o'er the world's uproarious noise; O'er its jarrings and its greetings—o'er its loving and its hate— Silence! Bare thy brows all dumbly to ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... imagination. You feel that Captain Cocq is a prosaic personage and is much too tall in proportion to the spry little dandy Lieutenant at his side. Invested with some strange attribute by the genius of the painter, this Dutchman becomes the protagonist in a soundless symphony of light and shadow. The waves that emanate from the canvas suffuse your senses but do not soothe or satisfy. The modern nervous intensity, missing absolutely in Hals and his substantial humans, is present in Rembrandt. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... shallow reach he waded, forgetful of his clothes. He caught another trout, another and another, stringing them on a green withe. He cast indefatigably, but with the greatest possible economy of effort; his progress was all but soundless; he slipped down stream like a thing of the woods, fishing with delicate art, with ardor, with ingenuity, and with ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the rough table where he laid it down noiselessly, as though with that quietness he were doing something to offset the fatal blatancy with which it had just spoken. He looked down at the lifeless figure with burning eyes entirely devoid of pity, then went with a soundless tread, in spite of his heavy-soled boots, to the bed and spoke softly to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the truth that consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now playing with the thought that Eugenio might inclusively assist her: he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she should just stupidly and awkwardly ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... why should they, her botch-work, turn about And stare disdain at me, her finished job? Why was the place one vast suspended shout Of laughter? Why did all the daylight throb With soundless guffaw and dumb-stricken sob? ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... temperaments there is an undeniable exhilaration in conflict. Corrie puckered his lips to a soundless whistle, settled back in his seat, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... for each, (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—0 heaven! The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!) This glaze of God's serenest purest sky, This film of Satan's seething pit, This heart's geography's map, this limitless small continent, this soundless sea; Out from the convolutions of this globe, This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus, Mars, This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe, Here the idea, all ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Ishmael went over the moor to the sea. Everything was very still, even his footsteps were soundless on the thick turf. It was one of those days filled with a warm mist, so fine it cannot be observed near at hand, but always seeming to encircle the walker, as though he carried some charm to make a hollow space around him where the breath of the mist may not live. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... charm. In their sultry calm, their love of heat, I read once more the burning page Of nature under cloudless skies. O pitiless and splendid land! Mine eyelids close, my lips are dry By force of thy hot floods of light. Soundless as oil the wind flows by, Mine aching brain ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... beds. Day after day and year after year they climbed these steeps seeking peace and help, pinning their hopes to burning joss stick and tinkling bell and mystic words, and in Western lands were other pilgrims entangled likewise in the mazes of dogma and form. But here among the stars, in the empty, soundless space of the white night, the gods that man has created seemed to vanish, and there stood out clear the hope that when time ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... pursuit was a thing to tap the very fountain-head of fortitude and endurance, we fared on silent for the better part; and in a little time the hush of the solitudes laid fast hold of us, scanting us of speech and bidding us go softly. And after this the march became a soundless shadow-flitting, and we a straggling file of voiceless mechanisms wound up and set to measure off the miles till famine or exhaustion should thrust a finger in among the wheels and bid them ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... waned; For groups of guests were sauntering toward their homes Across the fields, and far, on hillside paths, Gleamed the white robes of maidens. Sella grew Weary of the long merriment; she thought Of her still haunts beneath the soundless sea, And all unseen withdrew and sought the cleft Where she had laid the slippers. They were gone! She searched the brookside near, yet found them not. Then her heart sank within her, and she ran Wildly from place to place, and once again She searched the secret cleft, and next she stooped And with ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... to endanger, perhaps to sacrifice, a human soul! A million dollars, a human soul! These two ideas possessed him. A million dollars, a human soul! the two thoughts rang alternately through his brain until it seemed as if voices were crying them out upon the soundless air. According to his religion, spirits combated for the soul of man, and it seemed to Stephen that night as he mounted the solitary path under the far-seeing eyes of the frosty stars above him, that spirits really fought around him, good and evil, for the ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... dim light struggled through the casement of a window in a tower room. Save for the melancholy cry of a row of owls sitting on the roof, and croaking of the frogs in the moat which ran around the grounds, the place was soundless. My driver halted his horse at the hither side of the moat. I tried in vain to urge him, by signs, to go further. I could see by the fellow's face that he was in a paroxysm of fear, and indeed nothing but the extra sixpence ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... West Indian Island which for me is the best in the seas, because the memory of it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main was as soundless as a dream. It was but an apparition of land. It might have been no more than an unusually vivid recollection of a desire which had once stirred the imagination of a boy. Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared to believe that what once was a dream could ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... about her. Henry now lay entirely flat, and his motions were genuinely those of a serpent. It was by a sort of contraction and relaxation of the body that he moved himself, and his progress was absolutely soundless. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... went, he was soon vividly conscious that the wolves—not the Gray Master alone, but the whole pack also—were keeping pace with him through the soundless dark beyond the rim of the spruces. But not a hint of their grim companioning could he see or hear. He felt it merely in the creeping of his skin, the elemental stirring of the hair at the back of his neck. From moment to moment he expected the swift attack, the battle for his life. But ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... obscured perception a little black personage trotted into the salon on soundless paws. Quite possibly, in his then overwrought condition, had Monsieur Peloux seen this personage enter he would have shrieked—in the confident belief that before him was a cat ghost! Pointedly, it was not a ghost. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... of the permission. Whatever the madness of Mad Maitland, he was concerned only to profit by it. Never before had the long arm of the law stretched hungry fingers so near his collar. He went, springing down the hall in long, soundless strides, vanishing ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... As a soundless shell, as a songless nest, Seems now the room that was radiant then And fragrant with his happier rest Than that ...
— A Dark Month - From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... said to himself in the soundless words of thought. "What an ass never to have suspected it when it is all ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... but he got no further, for with the extraordinary aptness of conjunction which we are wont to call coincidence, though another word might more fitly be employed, the door opened almost noiselessly and a hooded figure crept on soundless feet ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... time of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit, where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale and indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below, and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room, of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend. But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness. To ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... portaged o'er hill and plain; We burnt our boat to save the nails, and built our boat again; We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn; We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn. O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly; By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky; By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge content; By rocky lairs where the pig-eyed bears peered at our ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... but squeezed his companion's hand for silence. He almost held his own breath for the moment, as they moved back from the pool with the soundless step ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... cannon's sight—split in half as the turret opened and the coiled nose of the cannon protruded. There was a soundless flash. ...
— Acid Bath • Vaseleos Garson
... eastward, and rode, Malachi and he, over the soundless turf and through the fog, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... know the place where Lewti lies, 65 When silent night has closed her eyes: It is a breezy jasmine-bower, The nightingale sings o'er her head: Voice of the Night! had I the power That leafy labyrinth to thread, 70 And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, I then might view her bosom white Heaving lovely to my sight, As these two swans together heave On the gently-swelling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the first servant hands the meat course, they consider that they should not be expected to wait a moment for a second servant to hand the gravy or jelly or whatever goes with the meat. No service is good in this day unless swift—and, of course, soundless. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... were sitting on the Casino veranda overlooking the wonderful Harbor of Port Arthur. It was one of those quiet, balmy, semi-tropical nights for which this part of the world is famous, one of those crystal, clear, soundless nights, and the silhouettes of Russia's grim silent battle monsters riding at anchor were sharply outlined on the moonlit waters of the bay. We were smoking our pipes, having just finished a long chat about the history of these regions—the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... the soft sandy-soil received and deadened the impact of her hoofs. Off she flew through the grey of the morning, soundless as ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... for him a living fact. He thought of all authors as struggling with poverty, and continued to cite eighteenth-century examples by way of encouraging Goldthorpe and animating his zeal. Whilst the young man was at work Mr. Spicer moved about the house with soundless footsteps. When invited into his tenant's room he had a reverential demeanour, and the sight of manuscript on the bare deal table caused him to ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... with trays of iced drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the passengers. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... tightly about his neck. He was in a fair way to strangle, and his vigorous efforts at escape were useless in the hands of so many. He might have been plunged at once into a great abyss of limitless, soundless depths, so futile did any resistance seem. And so, as it was useless to struggle, he lay like one dead and put all his powers into listening. But neither could he hear much, muffled as he was, and bound hand and foot now, with a gag ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... two men sat in silence. Kano leaned forward from time to time, filling the small cup which Tatsu—half in revery it seemed—had once more drained. The old servant now and again crept in on soundless feet to replace with a freshly heated bottle of sake the one grown cold. So still was the place that the caged cricket hanging from the eaves of Ume's distant room beat time like ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... back among the pillows, breathing heavily, the perfect picture of exhaustion. Jarvis came near on soundless feet and applied a wet ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... very far away, across the whiteness floating about her, a faint sound which at first only fell upon the stillness without meaning. Everything but the silence had been left behind aeons ago. Nothing remained but the soundless white sea and the slow drifting and sinking as one swayed. It was more than sleep, this still peace, because there was no thought of ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... closed his eyes. He did not sleep, for he arose in a few moments, took off his coat, and lighted a cigarette in the flame of the candle. Minkiewicz again placed himself before the instrument and played, but with silent fingers. He executed the most intricate passages, yet the wind in the room was soundless. He sat in his shirt-sleeves, his hat on his head, playing a Chopin concerto in dumb profile, and the night ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will was its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of its existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this feeling into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique and dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... day they came to the foot of the Great Falls of the Missouri, alone, majestic here in the wilderness, soundless save for their own dashing—those wonderful cascades, now so well known in industry, ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... suddenly very quiet,—quite soundless save for the beating of our hearts. On every side opened red and yellow ways, sunny glades, labyrinthine paths, long aisles, all dim with the blue haze like the cloudy incense in stone cathedrals, but nothing moved in them save the creatures of the ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... stands a-sudden at the door, And no one hears his soundless tread, And no one sees his veiled head, Or silent ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to her. A lull had descended on the house—a new order developed out of the morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving, for the hundredth time, her ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... was a time when I conceived, commenced, and half finished the work without the expectation of its being performed during my lifetime. Even last winter your confident tone, as you took leave of me, and your hope of releasing me soon from my mute and soundless exile, gave me the courage (which by that time had become a difficult matter) to continue. Such encouragement was indeed required, for, after having been without any stimulus, such as a good performance of one of my works might have given me, my position was, at last, becoming ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... cessation about eleven o'clock increased her uneasiness. He had been so afraid! Suppose already the thing he had feared had overtaken him? She listened intently. Even then she seemed to sense the soundless footsteps of disaster straying in the decayed house, and ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... formed, when in some dreamy twilight he met, through his own tears, the fixed eyes of those shadows of the great dead, unescapable and calm, piercing to his soul; or fancied that their lips moved in dread reproof or soundless exhortation? And if but for one out of many this were true—if yet, in a few, you could be sure that such influence had indeed changed their thoughts and destinies, and turned the eager and reckless youth, who would have cast ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Nigel, venturing on a pleasantry, whereat Moses opened his mouth in a soundless laugh, but, observing the professor's goggles levelled at him, he transformed the laugh into an astounding sneeze, and immediately gazed with pouting innocence and ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... A soundless gasp, a flash of dismay rocked him, but neither was his gasp nor his dismay. That pressure snapped off; he was free. But the other wasn't! Knife still in fist, Shann turned and ran upslope, his torch in his other hand. He could see a ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... most desolate shore of Italy, where the vast monotony of the Emilian plain fades away at last, almost imperceptibly, into the Adrian Sea, there stands, half abandoned in that soundless place, and often wrapt in a white shroud of mist, a city like a marvellous reliquary, richly wrought, as is meet, beautiful with many fading colours, and encrusted with precious stones: ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... For over all whom time hath overpast The shadow of sleep inexorable is cast, The implacable sweet shadow of perfect sleep That gives not back what life gives death to keep; Yea, all that lived and loved and sang and sinned Are all borne down death's cold sweet soundless wind That blows all night and knows not whom its breath, Darkling, may touch to death: But one that wind hath touched and changed not,—one Whose body and soul are parcel of the sun; One that earth's fire could ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... seized her; the curious soundless crash of her own senses followed—as though all ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... ceaseless volumes of sound, riven at intervals by a horrid scream or a thunderous roar which shook the earth; and always I was haunted by that inexplicable sensation that unseen eyes were watching me, that soundless feet dogged my trail. I am neither nervous nor highstrung; but the burden of responsibility upon me weighed heavily, so that I was more cautious than is my wont. I turned often to right and left and rear lest I be surprised, and I ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the water's edge, De Vac was walking with his right shoulder behind his companion's left, in his hand was gripped the keen blade and, as the woman halted on the dock, the point that hovered just below her left shoulder-blade plunged, soundless, into her heart at the same instant that De Vac's left hand swung up and grasped her throat in a ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. 45 The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping, Or dead, or fled ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... from him and lifted his big hands. Drennen was standing waiting for him, his own hands at his sides, his steely eyes filled with an evil light. He made no answer beyond the silent one of a slight lifting of his lip, like a soundless wolfish snarl. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... converse in the wastes, for there is something about the silence of the wilderness which discourages speech. And no land is so grimly silent, so hushed and soundless, as the frozen North. For days they marched through desolation, without glimpse of human habitation, without sight of track or trail, without sound of a human voice to break the monotony. There was no game ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... That passed in battle and wreck,— Ah, so faithful and true! They died on the bloody deck, They sank in the soundless blue. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... a moment before for the grave, he was careful in stepping into the unknown dark. Feeling with foot and hand, he went in. He trod upon an earthen floor, and the place had a musty smell: it might be a church vault, he thought. In and in he went, with sliding foot on the soundless floor, and sliding hand along the cold wall—on and on, round two corners, past a closed door, and back to that by which he had entered, where, as at the grave's mouth, sat his family in sad ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... whether, supposing the subjects rightly chosen, they ought on the canvas to look like real angels with real violins, and substantial cats looking at veritable kings; or only like imaginary angels with soundless violins, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... blink of his queer green eye over his shoulder he sauntered by a devious path out of the dell. Forgetful of thorn and brier, trickery and wantonness, we clambered down after him, out of the moonlight, into a dark, clear alley, soundless and solitary amid ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... stairs after him wearily. The door of the drawing-room was ajar, and the chatter of thin feminine voices could be heard within. George Cannon gave a soundless warning whisper: "The Watchetts." And Sarah Gailey frowned back the information that she did not wish to meet the Watchetts just then. With every precaution against noise, George Cannon opened two other ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... from her presence in the patio—that night when the posse had entered Showdown. He had thought of her while riding to the Ortez rancho—and now he was thinking of her again . . . He raised his head and glanced around. The starlit desert was as soundless as the very sky itself. The soft creak of the saddles, the breathing of the horses, the sand-muffled sound of their feet . . . Directly ahead loomed a wall of darkness. Pete touched Brevoort's arm and gestured ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... back into her own bed with a soundless sigh of exhaustion. She did not blow out the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... soundless upland trail that meandered among the spruce and pine, skirting the edges of the mountain meadows and keeping within the timber, Cheyenne finally reached the main ridge of the range. Occasionally he dismounted and examined ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... mine. To this, the all of love the stars allow me, I dedicate and vow me. I reach back through the days A trothed hand to the dead the last trump shall not raise. The water-wraith that cries From those eternal sorrows of thy pictured eyes Entwines and draws me down their soundless intricacies! ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... repetition of the command, the Dead Man hurled his arms aloft and brought down his clenched fist with all his power upon the desk in mighty blows of utterly soundless violence. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above the range of hearing; but he felt his body quivering in response to the unheard note. Then even these vague fragments of understanding left him. The towering, soundless thing was indistinct ... it vanished in ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing, thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could afford;—bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... was smooth as glass. Not a ripple was heard against the prow. Even the white sea-birds that roost among the caves of Capri pursued their prey with soundless flight. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... house lay the verdant velvet of an English lawn shaded at the lower end by a clump of exotic trees, in the midst of which stood a Chinese pagoda with soundless belfries and motionless golden eggs. The greenhouse concealed the garden wall on the northern side, the opposite wall was covered with climbing plants trained upon poles painted green and connected with crossway trellises. This lawn, this world of flowers, the ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... Obed led. Just behind them came Ned and Will. They went very slowly in order to keep the horses' feet from making any sound that listening Mexican sentinels might hear. They were fortunate in the sand, which was fine and soundless like a carpet. Ned thought that the Mexicans would not make any attempt upon the grove until late at night, and then only with skirmishers and snipers. Or they might not make any attempt at ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... mountain-basin, where he hunted most these days, he expected the fog to lift. But it did not. The trail under the hoofs of the horse was scarcely perceptible to him, and he seemed lost in a dense, gray, soundless obscurity. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... Ban rode noiselessly up the broad avenue which leads from the quays of Aaanthor to the great central plaza, he and his mount might have been mistaken for spectres from a world of dreams, so grotesque the man and beast, so soundless the great thoat's padded, nailless feet upon the moss-grown ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest "Never!" I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... executive had predetermined to act, not the perfection of clockwork, not the very masterpieces of scenical art, can ever have exhibited a combined movement upon one central point—so swift, punctual, beautiful, harmonious, more soundless than an exhalation, more overwhelming than a deluge—as the display of military force in Dublin on Sunday the 8th of October. Without alarm, without warning—as if at the throwing up of a rocket in the dead of night, or at the summons of a signal gun—the great capital, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... my breast With formless lips, Like a heavy baby, Attenuates me, Draws me through myself into it. I sit in the womb of an idiot, Helpless before its mouthing tenderness. The huge flap ears are attentive, And the soundless face bends ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... for years; so old can sorrow grow during a little sleep. When she went down they were seated as she had left them the evening before, grandmother, aunt, cousin; and they looked up with the same pride and fondness. But affection has so different a quality in the morning. Then the full soundless rides which come in at nightfall have receded; and in their stead is the glittering beach with thin waves that give no rest to the ear or to the shore—thin noisy edge of ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... perceptible grade toward the foothills: the sluggish stream they had paralleled all day ran swift here. Once, where the trail twisted near the bank, they heard the rush of rapids, and a mile farther on they came in sight of a curiously soundless waterfull. They had reached the Bogobo country but the afternoon quiet was unbroken by the sound of agongs. Fear ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... horse or two there was to fret The soundless sand; but work and debt, Fair flowers and falling leaves between, While clocks are chiming clear and keen, A man may very ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... only animals in all their peculiar fearfulness and peculiar savagery that possessed a charm. The soundless, stealthy tread in the total darkness of night; the hidden monsters of the woods; the shrieks of a bird flying past; the wind, the smell of blood, the rumbling in space; in short, the reigning spirit of the kingdom of ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... wasn't making much headway. He was Italian to the core, for all that he aped the English style and manner. He could speak the tongue with fluency, but he stumbled and faltered miserably over the soundless type. His clothes had the Piccadilly cut, and his mustache, erstwhile waxed and militant, was cropped at the corners, thoroughly insular. He ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... this trout, to its stringed accompaniment, ever whistled and sang one song with a desperate intentness. That song was "The Rosary." The fish had presumed too far. "This," I shrewdly told myself, "is almost certainly a dream." The soundless words were magic. Gorge and stream vanished, the versatile fish faded to blue sky showing through the green needles of a jack pine. It was a sane world again and still, I thought, with the shadows of ranch house, stable, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... musical efforts,—he who could not turn a tune,—he knew that Jones had himself well in hand. In his left hand the Secretary held a formal-looking paper with which he was quietly tapping the table in front of him as though keeping time to his soundless and imaginary ditty. With his chin well down, he was looking from under his heavy eyebrows with eyes that ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... they are in reality vast circling currents of meteoritic particles or dust, through which run immense waves, condensation and rarefaction succeeding one another as in the undulations of sound. Yet, with all their inferential tumult, they may actually be as soundless as the depths of interstellar space, for Struve has shown that those spectacular rings possess no appreciable mass, and, viewed from Saturn itself, their (to us) gorgeous seeming bow may appear only as a wreath of shimmering ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... softly up from the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. "Come," it seemed to say, "come with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and come!" Only too well he understood the creature's soundless call. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... neck shifted from side to side. Verily it was a moment to make a sportsman's blood leap—to make him forget; but not even then did the Indian show a sign of excitement, not for a minute did the lithe body cease in its soundless serpentine motion. It was splendid, that patient, stealthy approach, splendid in its mastery of the still hunt; but beyond this it was more, it was fearful. Had an observer been where no observer was, it would inevitably have carried with it another suggestion—the possibilities ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... the face of the scout brightened. Here was the most promising pupil who had ever sat at his feet for instruction; and now they redoubled their caution, as their soundless bodies slipped through the undergrowth. Everywhere they looked for the trail of that wild turkey. It may be said that a turkey can and does fly in the air and leaves no trail, but Henry knew that the one for which they looked might leave no trail, but it ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. If the book was a poem, the words disappeared, or took the subordinate position of an accompaniment to the succession of forms and images that rose and vanished with a soundless rhythm, and ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... snow-soft water, more dark than the roof of the pines above, Strikes forth, and is glad as a bird whose flight is impelled and sustained of love. As a sea-mew's love of the sea-wind breasted and ridden for rapture's sake Is the love of his body and soul for the darkling delight of the soundless lake: As the silent speed of a dream too living to live for a thought's space more Is the flight of his limbs through the still strong chill of the darkness from shore to shore. Might life be as this is and death be as life that casts off ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to answer, but her lips were soundless. She closed her eyes, and Murray saw that she was whiter than the foam far beneath. He stared into the colorless face upturned to his until her eyelids fluttered open and she managed to voice the words that ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... on the slender lines, And the news of the world runs under their feet,— How value rises, and how declines, How kings with their armies in battle meet,— And, all the while, 'mid the soundless signs, They chirp ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... drawing a long breath, "it is not this fire that concerns us—" The voice died in his throat. Astonishment still dominated; he stared and stared. Then a ghastly laugh stretched his features—a soundless, terrible laugh. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... talent, but of talent in the highest degree adapted to popularity. His very defects, and the shallowness of his philosophy, promoted his popularity; and by comparison with the French critics on the dramatic or scenical proprieties he is ever profound. His plummet, if not suited to the soundless depths of Shakspeare, was able ten times over to fathom the little rivulets of Parisian philosophy. This he did effectually, and thus unconsciously levelled the paths for Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... noiselessly, as though with that quietness he were doing something to offset the fatal blatancy with which it had just spoken. He looked down at the lifeless figure with burning eyes entirely devoid of pity, then went with a soundless tread, in spite of his heavy-soled boots, to the bed and spoke softly to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... mount, Lo! sleeping myriads in the dewy hush Of night repose; around in squared array, The camps are set; and in the midst, apart, The curtain'd shrine, where mystically dwells Jehovah's presence!—through the soundless air A cloudy pillar, robed in burning light, Appears:—concenter'd as one mighty heart, A million lie, in mutest slumber bound. Or, panting like the ocean, when a dream Of storm awakes her:—Heaven and Earth are still; In radiant loveliness the stars pursue Their pilgrimage, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... adult intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger's pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little hollow among the sycamores, where the children ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... but at last he choked out: "My mother taught me." Here Paddy retired from the room, doubled in a strong but soundless convulsion. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." {15} I may say of the wound in my breast, newly dealt to me by the hands of my friends, that it is deeper than the soundless sea, and wider than the whole Catholic Church. I may safely add that it has for the moment almost stricken me dumb. I should be more than human, and I assure you I am very human indeed, if I could look ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the meat course, they consider that they should not be expected to wait a moment for a second servant to hand the gravy or jelly or whatever goes with the meat. No service is good in this day unless swift—and, of course, soundless. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Viewless—soundless—stalks the spectre Thro' the city chill and pale, Which like bride, this morn, had decked her For the advent of that sail. Oft by Bergen women, mourning, Shall the dismal tale be told, Of that lost ship home returning, With "THE BLACK ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the trail. They were now well inland and mounting a perceptible grade toward the foothills: the sluggish stream they had paralleled all day ran swift here. Once, where the trail twisted near the bank, they heard the rush of rapids, and a mile farther on they came in sight of a curiously soundless waterfull. They had reached the Bogobo country but the afternoon quiet was unbroken by the sound of agongs. Fear ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... they?—those experiments tried with the truth that consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now playing with the thought that Eugenio might inclusively assist her: he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she should just stupidly and ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... knowing the look, the age, the religion or even the color of the other. But I know, from the only person fitted to judge, that they loved each other tremendously and spotlessly—these two poor souls alone in that continuous, soundless, sightless, expressionless night. I know because their baby, when he grew up, and got away from that place, and learned ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... without bringing himself in—get out of himself and see what he ought to do? The thought hurt him, then lost edge, as if it had come in contact with a breastplate. Out of oneself! Impossible! Out into soundless, scentless, touchless, sightless space! The very idea was ghastly, futile! And touching there the bedrock of reality, the bottom of his Forsyte spirit, Soames rested for a moment. When one ceased, all ceased; it might go on, but there'd be nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... between the jungle creatures were common sights for the boys during their march. They saw a weird soundless fight between a forty-foot snake and a giant vulture with talons nearly two feet across and a beak resembling a mammoth nutcracker. The vulture won, methodically cutting the reptile's body into sections, its beak slicing ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... they divided into two parties, and keeping within the deepest patches of shadow, bore down upon the nearest pickets with a fierce, soundless rush,—the most disconcerting form of attack to sleepy sentries in the small hours, when life and courage are at their lowest ebb. But the picket sentries happened to be Sikhs; and they are ill men to tackle at close quarters ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... earth Most fair, and fair the shining tracts of sea; Green solitudes, and broad low-lying plains Made brown with frequent labors of men's hands, And salt, blue, fruitless waters. But this mount, Cithaeron, bosomed deep in soundless hills, Its fountained vales, its nights of starry calm, Its high chill dawns, its long-drawn golden days,— Was dearest to him. Here he dreamed high dreams, And felt within his sinews strength to strive Where ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... patience, which teaches us that we should take our education as we would take a walk in the country, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of every sort. Such knowledge floods the soul unseen with a soundless tidal wave of deepening thought. "Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge—is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing, thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could afford;—bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... violently, looking with flaming eyes of rage into his, and added something, but not audibly. Only her lips moved, her teeth chattered, and her eyes rolled—they were soundless words. What could she have said? Timar stared in a dazed way like a sleep-walker, then suddenly raised his head to ask Athalie something. He was alone—only the key grasped in his hand showed ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... for a time, until at last the soundless night became too oppressive, and Holden was forced ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... it burst, and from it, with a scramble and a bound, issued an animal like a tiger. About his mouth and ears hung clots of mould, and his eyes winked and flamed as he rushed at me, showing his white teeth in a soundless snarl. I stood fascinated, unconscious of either courage or fear. He turned his head to the ground, and plunged ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... by the sick one's pillow; There was the soft tone and the soundless tread, Where smitten hearts were drooping like the willow, They stood "between the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... passed. The hands kept steadily at their work. Nothing more occurred to disturb the monotony of the scorching days and soundless nights; the schooner sat as easily on the unbroken water as though built to the bottom. Soon the night watch was discontinued. During these days the three officers lived high. Turtle were plentiful, and what with their steaks and soups, the fried ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... and she was dancing. There in the starlight, white-robed and wonderful, she danced as, it seemed to the man's fascinated senses, no human had ever danced before. She was like a white flame—a darting, fiery essence, soundless, all-absorbing, all-entrancing. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... opened, Lincoln's voice was swept away and drowned, and a rush of people followed on the heels of the tumult. These intruders came towards him and Lincoln gesticulating. The voices without explained their soundless lips. "Show us the Sleeper, show us the Sleeper!" was the burden of the uproar Men were bawling ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... her into her arms. Mrs. Penniman drew her into Catherine's own room, and the two women sat there together, far into the small hours; the younger one with her head on the other's lap, sobbing and sobbing at first in a soundless, stifled manner, and then at last perfectly still. It gratified Mrs. Penniman to be able to feel conscientiously that this scene virtually removed the interdict which Catherine had placed upon her further communion with Morris Townsend. She was not gratified, however, when, in coming ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... the deep, soft moss bearing them up with a tough elasticity, the sun hot and lusty on their heads, the sweet, strong summer wind swift and loud in their ears, the only sound in all that enchanted upland spot. Often Sylvia lifted her face to the sky, so close above her, to the clouds moving with a soundless rhythm across the sky; once or twice she turned her head suddenly from one side to the other, to take in all the beauty at one glance, and smiled on it all, a vague, sunny, tender smile. But she did ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... with him. They stood there for a moment, Ken on the lower step. The step was half sunk into the earth and mint grew thickly about and over its edge. Often crushed by so many passing feet it gave out its essence freely, and the spicy odour hung round them like a soundless, invisible benediction. Ken looked up at Rilla, whose hair was shining in the moonlight and whose eyes were pools of allurement. All at once he felt sure there was nothing in that gossip about ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... weary doom of baffled quest, Thou sad sea-ghost, is thine? What makes thee in the haunts of home A wonder and a sign? No foot is on thy silent deck, Upon thy helm no hand; No ripple hath the soundless wind That smites thee from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... below 79 degrees or rises above 84 degrees. The softest and least perceptible of land and sea breezes blow alternately at stated hours. The nights are very still. The days are a tepid dream. Since I arrived not a leaf has stirred, not a bird has sung, the tides ebb and flow in listless and soundless ripples. Far off, on the shallow sea, phantom ships hover and are gone, and on an indefinite horizon a blurred ocean blends with a blurred sky. On Mount Ophir heavy cloud-masses lie always motionless. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... trays of iced drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... any centre. For, in that Silence, all vastitude and height and depth and time and direction are swallowed up: relation therein could have no meaning but for the speck of my fleeting consciousness,—atom of terror pulsating alone through atomless, soundless, nameless, illimitable potentiality. ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... neatly bound with tape or faded ribbon and clearly docketed. It held nothing else whatever. But his eye was caught by a great name endorsed on the face of one of the packages; and reading what else was written there his brows rose high while his lips shaped a soundless whistle. If an inference were fair, Liane had kept not only such documents as gave her power over others. Lanyard wondered if it were possible he held in his hand an instrument to bend the woman ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... nothing will——" began Major Carstairs, but he got no further, for with the extraordinary aptness of conjunction which we are wont to call coincidence, though another word might more fitly be employed, the door opened almost noiselessly and a hooded figure crept on soundless feet into ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... said. "You saw that I was going to be a bore and you pretended to be a ghost, trusting to your noiseless and mysterious manner of appearing and disappearing to work on my fears and frighten me off. And, truth to tell, there is something uncanny about your peculiarly soundless and rustleless movements." ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... size of our own, fell into the ocean; and Gerald could have sworn that he felt a wave of heated air as if from a furnace; that he heard a seething sound, as if white-hot metal had come in contact with icy water. Consumed by anxiety for Mila's safety, he wished that these soundless girandoles, this apocalypse of architectural fire and weaving flame, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... apparently natural to him, as was also a certain languid grace of movement. He possessed an irritating mannerism of continually elevating his chin and dilating his curved nostrils disdainfully in a sort of soundless sniff. Beyond a slight flush he showed little trace of his previous ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... sour smell of magic, and saw soundless words moving Richard's little khaki moustache. Then she found ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Henry and Henry looked at Sol. A ray of moonlight fell upon their tanned and stern faces. Then as they looked a twinkle appeared in the eye of each. The twinkle deepened and the two broke simultaneously into a soundless laugh. ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a moon, Staining all the cloudy white; Sinking with a soundless tune Deep into the spirit's night. Then a morning clear and soft, Amber on the purple hills; Warm high day of summer, oft Cooled by ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Prometheus came, and from the floods of day Sunn'd his clear soul with heaven's internal ray, The expanding spark divine; that round him springs, And leads and lights him thro the immense of things, Probes the dense earth, explores the soundless main, Remoulds their mass thro all its threefold reign, O'er great, o'er small extends his physic laws, Empalms the empyrean or dissects a gaz, Weighs the vast orbs of heaven, bestrides the sky, Walks on the windows ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... inward fright seized her; the curious soundless crash of her own senses followed—as though all within had ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... which Billy did not understand. It was hard, under such disquieting circumstances, to hold a thought, and Billy found himself struggling in mind for equilibrium while he stood forward to the attack. He aimed a wild blow at his capering opponent, and drove into soundless air only, and before he could recover himself the capering opponent had "landed" on Billy's cheek in a most ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... through the sitting-room into the chapel where each had made a First Confession the night before, and had together been received into the Catholic Church. Now it was all fragrant with flowers and herbs; a pair of tall lilies leaned their delicate heads towards the altar, as if to listen for the soundless Coming in the Name of the Lord; underfoot all about the altar lay sprigs of sweet herbs, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay-leaves; with white blossoms scattered over them—a soft carpet for the Pierced Feet; not like ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... he said to himself in the soundless words of thought. "What an ass never to have suspected it when ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... however, a sudden dry, shooting attack disturbed the heart of the mother. It was an uneasy suspicion of something hostile to her, which did not threaten, did not shout, but unfolded itself unseen, soundless, intangible. It swung lazily and dully about the judges, as if enveloping them with an impervious cloud, through which nothing from the outside could reach them. She looked at them. They were incomprehensible ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... was still and fair, What sound moved up the aisles? The dead priests come with soundless prayer, Their faces wearing smiles. And this was the soundless hymn they sung: "We watch o'er you to-night; Your life was beautiful, fair and young, Not a cloud upon its light. To-morrow—to-morrow you will rest With the virgin priests ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... to Magda as though the whole world stood still—gripped in a strange, soundless stillness like the catastrophic pause which for an infinitesimal space of time succeeds a bad accident. Then ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... the cirro-stratus clouds, the true mares'-tails, flung out across the vault, their ends stretching to the centre of the storm. At the horizon, a wicked, dull glare gave threat of the typhoon's approach. All as yet was soundless, only the far-flung clouds told of the fury which was hurling them ahead ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... was—the eloquent stillness of terrible cold! The town was soundless. Chickens humped in their feathers were freezing on their roosts, horses and cows tied in their stalls were suffering, and, as always, she visualized the desolate white stretches where hungry coyotes, gaunt and vigilant, padded ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... We lie face down, we dream, We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem To stare at the ceiling or walls . . . Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls. A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers, A vortex of soundless hours. ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... Prince consented, and she glided away from him with soundless footsteps. Close, close behind her he followed till they reached the threshold of the Cave Hall. There he tarried out of sight, yet where his eyes could ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... some friend whom I had basely injured. Was the great treasure-ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain and treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the seaweed, her cabin a breeding-place for fish, soundless but for the dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle upon her battlements—that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag Bay? Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of the foreign brig—was this shoe-buckle bought but the other day ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon the body of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This last is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... left them alone and dared not wind about their calm clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall have perished these still will reign on:—the slow, sure, soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... squeezed his companion's hand for silence. He almost held his own breath for the moment, as they moved back from the pool with the soundless step of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... the four slim, young top riders of the ranch force, chaparajos and sombreros being much in evidence. They gave the usual stunts in the typical Western way on a track tramped as hard as asphalt, the tattoo of hoofs making the hard earth ring in the soundless atmosphere. Their feats, singly and together, were marvelous, but there was lacking to the onlookers the charm of novelty, as they had long been accustomed to these ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... that the moon had slid beyond her vision and she was looking into great caverns of space, bursting with blackness. Some horror of emptiness was reaching to roll her in pits of murk, where her screams would be battered back on her tongue soundless. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... Imagine the vast space to be void of ether and the subtle seeds of creation. Perfect stillness reigns supreme over the ocean of universal space, beginningless and endless. What supports it? It is supportless, soundless, cloudless. He does not see. Yet he is not blind, does not hear, yet he is not deaf. He goes beyond the feeling of time and space. Every time the true seer enters a state of dreamless sleep he enjoys the span of Ethereal ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... summoned to dress Madame. (It appeared my place was to be a hybrid between gouvernante and lady's-maid.) Till noon, she haunted the house in her wrapping-gown, shawl, and soundless slippers. How would the lady-chief of an English school approve ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... eyes rested for a moment upon the two women. A wonderfully tender, misty light shone in their keen depths. No word of his could help them now, he knew. So with soundless movement he resumed his furs and overshoes, and, in silence, passed out ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... realized that Julie Lannes had become so much to him he felt a sudden shyness, and he let the gigantic Picard lead the way. They had made no noise in opening and closing the door, and their boots had been soundless on the stone floor. ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... no underbrush grew. All was still and vague and dusky as in pillared aisles. There were no birds, no animals, nothing living except the giant columns which bore a woven canopy of leaves so dense that no glimmer of blue shone through. Centuries had spread the soundless carpet that we trod; eons had laid up the high-sprung arches which vanished far above us where vault and column were dimly merged, losing ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... ago not a doubt would have crossed his mind. That a member of Mr. Bradshaw's church could receive such people as Caillaud and Pauline would have seemed impossible. Nevertheless, neither Caillaud nor Pauline were now repugnant to him; nor did he feel that any soundless gulf separated them from him, although, so far as he knew his ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... day and year after year they climbed these steeps seeking peace and help, pinning their hopes to burning joss stick and tinkling bell and mystic words, and in Western lands were other pilgrims entangled likewise in the mazes of dogma and form. But here among the stars, in the empty, soundless space of the white night, the gods that man has created seemed to vanish, and there stood out clear the hope ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold. Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So the moment had come. His arm was round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved with him. It was a peripatetic embracement. "Do you agree with him?" ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... made safely in the circle of Air Guardsmen. There was a small hospital plane standing beside it in a moment, and as Arcot's ship released it, and then hung motionless, soundless above it, the people watched it in wonder and excitement. They wanted to see Arcot perform; they clamored to see the wonderful powers of this ship in operation. Air Guardsmen who had witnessed the flying game of tag between these two super-air machines had told ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... to my left, issued something, running fast, but with soundless feet, over the snow. I doubted in my dream whether the object were a live thing or only a shadow. It came nearer, and I saw it was a child, a little girl, running as if for her life. She came straight to the tree I ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... oblivion claims into its own soundless peace the outstretched forms of rough warriors and removes them from grim reality into the passing realms of ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Novalis. The one a June meadow, with flower-scents and cloud-shadows and the soft, sultry music of humming-bees and singing-birds, with clear skies bending over; a deep sea the other, whereon sail stately ships, wafted by health-bearing breezes, in whose waters the sick gain strength, in whose soundless depths the coral and the precious stones repose forever, which supplies the clouds whose ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... there had been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleeping house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river broke the stillness under the stars. But all through the silence and this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my dressing-gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all the frightening ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... window across the crowded street into the shattered window whence issued the Voiceless Speech. In that jagged frame in the raw November air still stood Mrs. Harvey Herrington, turning the giant leaves of her soundless oratory. The heckling request which then struck George's eyes began: ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... with the children about her. Henry now lay entirely flat, and his motions were genuinely those of a serpent. It was by a sort of contraction and relaxation of the body that he moved himself, and his progress was absolutely soundless. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rest a moment and to listen for the stroke of pick or shovel from the opposite side of his living grave. But no sound came to him. He seemed to be in a soundless universe except for the rasp of ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... a rambling, dilapidated building. A dim light struggled through the casement of a window in a tower room. Save for the melancholy cry of a row of owls sitting on the roof, and croaking of the frogs in the moat which ran around the grounds, the place was soundless. My driver halted his horse at the hither side of the moat. I tried in vain to urge him, by signs, to go further. I could see by the fellow's face that he was in a paroxysm of fear, and indeed nothing but the extra sixpence which I had added to ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... idle warm lagoon. Hasten, hand in human hand, Down the dark, the flowered way, Along the whiteness of the sand, And in the water's soft caress Wash the mind of foolishness, Mamua, until the day. Spend the glittering moonlight there, Pursuing down the soundless deep Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair; Or floating lazy, half-asleep. Dive and double and follow after, Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call, With lips that fade, and human laughter And faces individual! Well this side of Paradise! ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... main hall, where people might speak to her, she took the short cut through the sun-pavilion, which would bring her nearer to the stairs. But on throwing open the door she stood still on the threshold with a little soundless gasp. "Oh!" ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... sitting with his grey head in his hands, motionless and soundless; Chris was standing upright and rigid, staring steadily out through ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... to sink into a deeper stillness than before, and the dreamy surge of sound broke softer and softer upon the shores of evening, as daylight sobered down. High above the green valley, on both sides, the moorlands stretched away in billowy wildernesses—dark, bleak, and almost soundless, save where the wind harped his wild anthem upon the heathery waste, and where roaring streams filled the lonely cloughs with drowsy uproar. It was a striking scene, and it was an impressive hour. ...
— Th' Barrel Organ • Edwin Waugh
... the last few miles of their journey, casting a strange amber radiance around them, flinging mysterious shadows about the kopjes, shedding an unearthly splendour upon the endless veldt. It spread like an illimitable ocean in soundless billows out of which weird rocks stood up—a dream-world of fantastic possibilities, but petrified into stillness by the spell of its solitudes—a world that once surely had thrilled with ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... always a thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... of a woman after the surgeon's knife And almost a year to creep back into strength, Till the dawn of our wedding decennial Found me my seeming self again. We walked the forest together, By a path of soundless moss and turf. But I could not look in your eyes, And you could not look in my eyes, For such sorrow was ours—the beginning of gray in your hair. And I but a shell of myself. And what did we talk of?—sky and water, Anything, 'most, to hide our thoughts. And then your gift ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... he subdued his voice when conversing here. A few flowers such as can be bought in the street generally diffused a slight scent through the air, making another peculiarity which had its effect on Sidney's imagination. When Jane moved about, it was with a soundless step; if she placed a chair or arranged things on the table, it was as if with careful avoidance of the least noise. When his thoughts turned hitherwards, Sidney always pictured the old man sitting in his familiar mood of reverie, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... that, at first, not a single star-beam pierced the roof of branches overhead; and, as we moved forward side by side, the trees shifted silently past us in long lines, row upon row, squadron upon squadron, like the units of a vast, soundless army. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... spleen. Beyond the drapery Ludowika's face was dim and white. It was like an ineffable May moon. Ludowika ... Penny. For the first time Howat thought of her endowed with his name, and it gave him a deep thrill of delight. He repeated it with moving but soundless lips—Ludowika Penny. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... offers hospitality to the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept), is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated; but it nestles with a kind of wasted ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... love shall climb to thee, Like incense curling some cathedral dome From many distant vales. Yet thou shalt be, O grand, sweet singer, to the end alone. But murmur not. The moon, the mighty spheres, Spin on alone through all the soundless years; Alone man comes on earth; he lives alone; Alone he turns to front the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... There was a soundless flash beside me, a tiny level beam leaped down the corridor—that horribly intense actinic white beam. It struck the guard, and his figure fell forward in the grille doorway. When we reached him, there was but a crumpled heap of ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Bagot's Italian Lakes, and he wasn't making much headway. He was Italian to the core, for all that he aped the English style and manner. He could speak the tongue with fluency, but he stumbled and faltered miserably over the soundless type. His clothes had the Piccadilly cut, and his mustache, erstwhile waxed and militant, was cropped at the corners, thoroughly insular. He was ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... presence of mind left to send her for the bottle of blood-restorer pills, and just enough strength left to swallow several of them when she brought it. Then he boarded the phantom ship that had mysteriously appeared beside him and set sail upon the soundless sea of night. ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... they loved, the crude off-scourings of a dozen nations had retired to their bunks and were sleeping as peacefully as if their consciences were clean. Here and there a light twinkled, but as the three in the doorway looked, they blanked out one by one. The soundless night had ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... brilliant eyes behind the mask, his delicate, thin lips grew tense in what seemed to be a smile—or a soundless ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... among the pillows, breathing heavily, the perfect picture of exhaustion. Jarvis came near on soundless feet and applied a wet cloth ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... following its green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Muehlen. The stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... they came to the foot of the Great Falls of the Missouri, alone, majestic here in the wilderness, soundless save for their own dashing—those wonderful cascades, now so well known in industry, so nearly forgotten ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit, where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale and indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily up through the eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. 'Spare my beloved,' it may implore. 'Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of Heaven—bend—hear—be clement!' ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... spurred his pony, making him rear. The sheep plunged ahead, those in front swerving as they came to the canon's brink. The crowding mass behind forced them on. Fadeaway reined up. A great gray wave rolled over the cliff and disappeared into the soundless chasm. A thousand feet below lay the mangled carcasses of some five hundred sheep and lambs. A scattered few of the band had turned and were trotting aimlessly along the edge of the mesa. They separated ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... peace, O God Deep as the soundless sea, Which falls like sunshine on the road Of those who ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... He is gone, inscrutable at heart, and the poor girl is leading a sort of soundless, inert life in Stein's house. Stein has aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he is "preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave . . ." while he waves his hand sadly ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... upon that one spot of light, in the otherwise pitlike darkness. Hope grew up within me, banishing the oppression of despair, that had seemed to stifle me. Wherever the earth was traveling, it was, at least, going once more toward the realms of light. Light! One must spend an eternity wrapped in soundless night, to understand the full horror of being ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... golden-brown, adobe-walled quadrangle, sleeping like some monstrous ruminant in a hollow of the Contra Costa Range. I recalled, in the midst of this noisy picnic, the slumberous coolness of its long corridors and soundless courtyard, and hailed it as a relief. The telegram was a sufficient excuse for my abrupt departure. In the morning I left, but without again seeing either Mrs. ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... the belt of Orion came to assume the peculiar mathematical relation to each other which they held, as far as distance and arrangement were concerned, and whether that could possibly have any intellectual significance. The nebulous conglomeration of the suns in Pleiades suggested a soundless depth of space, and he thought of the earth floating like a little ball in immeasurable reaches of ether. His own life appeared very trivial in view of these things, and he found himself asking whether it was all really of any significance or importance. He shook these moods off with ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... the Mall, together with—flung against the sky—the multitudinous lighted windows of Central Park West, the high rippling shimmer of the monumental lifted electric signs on Broadway. Other cars passed, swift and soundless, he saw their occupants and then they were gone: an aged man whose grey countenance might have been moulded in sand with a frigid trained nurse; a couple desperately embracing in a taxi-cab; a knot of chattering ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of peace—a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till Earth was lost ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... silence. Now and then I glanced sidewise at my companion as we made our soundless way over the thick moss. He looked so strong and beautiful. His tall body was so fine, his shoulders so broad and splendid! How could it be! How could it be! As he tramped beside me he was thinking deeply, and he knew ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... into the mystic haze, with purple bases melting into the horizon; southward were other mountains, equally distant and mysterious; northward—so far away that they blurred in the vision—were still other mountains. Intervening on all sides was the stretching, soundless, aching void of desolation, carrying to the rider its lurking threat of death, the promise of evil ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... asleep. There would be the plop of turtles falling into the creek and the slither of alligators in the mud, and all of a sudden not a ripple would start, and between the clacking of one reed and another would come the soundless lift and stir of the Swamp snoring. Then the hair on your neck would rise, and some man caught walking alone in it would go screaming mad ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... interesting passages he had yet come to. But presently the sweet enemy was again within his outworks. Once more he roused himself, heard the storm raving on—over buried graves and curtained beds, heedless of human heeding—fell a-listening to its shriek-broken roar, and so into a soundless and dreamless sleep. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... glistening eye fell upon the holly-bright table and an enormous turkey by the Doctor's plate, only a frosty menace in Mike's eye, it seemed, restrained another blood-curdling shriek of delight. There was paralyzing apology in his eyes as Mike's lips formed the soundless threat—"Mom Murphy!" ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... instrument, may suggest, but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... from his chair, and, walking down the length of the richly furnished room, his tread soundless on the thick, heavy rug, drew the portieres aside, and stood looking out of the rear window; It was dark outside, but presently the shadows formed into concrete shapes, and, across the black space of driveway and yard, the wall ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... fear just now was not imaginative or spiritual, and she heeded these impressions but little. She went on as silently as she could, avoiding the hollows wherein leaves had accumulated, and stepping upon soundless moss and grass-tufts. She paused breathlessly once or twice, and fancied that she could hear, above the beat of her strumming pulse, the vehicle containing Fitzpiers turning in at the gate of her father's premises. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... been borne irresistibly upward on the human tide, there was one overpowering moment of fear and clamor, in which the cry of "The Prophet! The Prophet!" dominated her consciousness; then, to her, the world became suddenly and mercifully sightless, soundless, and void. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... it all—about the bluish silvery half-light, the spotless floors and walls, the abnormally noiseless maid in her flamboyant cap and apron—that arrested attention and fixed it. The soundless brightness of the house was as conspicuous as the contrast between the maid's black gown and her snow-white cuffs. There was nothing subdued about anything, although the long, silvery blue curtains were drawn over the lace ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... its soundless affray, Heaven its vaulting of dark-blue is framing, Where from infinity deep stars are flaming, Earth's masses sink into vapor away. Fleeing the darkness, the eyes seek the city, Meet with its torches a corpse borne in pity; These seek the night, but a flag is each light, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... when he heard the story, with artistic touches from the cook, slapped his thigh and laughed one of his soundless chuckles. "The son-of-a-gun! He's the right stuff. Never whined, eh? I knew it. He's his dad over again, from the ground up." And ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... room gave out on the street of the Consuls which as usual was silent. And the house itself below me and above me was soundless, perfectly still. In general the house was quiet, dumbly quiet, without resonances of any sort, something like what one would imagine the interior of a convent would be. I suppose it was very solidly built. Yet that morning I missed in the stillness that feeling ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... part of the reader of the narrative itself. Friends crowded around a loss—the centre of the gathering that which was not—the sole presence the hopeless sign of a vanished treasure—an open gulf, as it were, down which love and tears and sad memories went plunging in a soundless cataract: the weeping mother—the dead man borne in the midst. They were going to the house of death, but Life was between them and it—was walking to meet them, although they knew it not. A face of tender pity looks down on the mother. She heeds him not. He goes up to the bier, ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... years in the crescent above them; Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row, Diadems drop and Doges surrender, Soundless as dots ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... herself for a while, until Lark really slept, then she buried her head in the pillow and her throat swelled with sobs that were heavy but soundless. ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... with a few gliding steps, soundless, except for the light rattle of claws on the floor, but he stopped well out of reach of the bed and when Vic held his left hand as far as he could across his chest, Bart winced and gave harsh warning. Vic had seen vicious dogs in his day, seen ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... The night swooped down, swift and soundless, and in the verandah of the bungalow known as The Nest a red lamp glowed with a ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... character of all that splendor of color. He lifts a box from the ooze: he appears to have uncorked the world. The hold is a bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless depth. The bottom of the sea seems loopholed with cavities that pierce the solid globe and the dark abysses of space beyond. The diver is surrounded by pitfalls, real and imaginary. There is no graduation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... surface of the river, as it swept down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of the purpling distance, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... illuminated, the man who kept that watch was suddenly met by a person wearing a masque, and armed at all points. His surprise and consternation were great, and the more so as the steps of The Masque were soundless, though the floor was a stone one. The guard, but slightly prepared to meet an attack, would, however, have resisted or raised an alarm; but The Masque, instantly levelling a pistol at his head with one hand, with the other had thrown open the door of an empty cell, indicating ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the means of communicating thought, and consequently of maintaining social intercourse. If the Earth were deprived of an atmosphere, as we suppose our moon to be, it would present itself to our imagination as a soundless desert. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... closed over his leg, tentatively, experimentally, as though to ascertain of what substance he was made. He cried aloud as the rock vise, like a gigantic lobster claw, squeezed tight. The thing drew back abruptly. Then the chasm of its mouth opened a little, for all the world as though giving vent to soundless, demoniac laughter. All three of the vise-like hands clamped over him—lightly enough, considering their vast size, and intimating that the colossus did not mean to kill him for a moment or two—but so cruelly that his senses swam ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... rattlesnake asleep beneath the sage, Have now a subtle fatal charm. In their sultry calm, their love of heat, I read once more the burning page Of nature under cloudless skies. O pitiless and splendid land! Mine eyelids close, my lips are dry By force of thy hot floods of light. Soundless as oil the wind flows by, Mine aching brain cries ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... lost to all presences save the Identical and Shagpat. So they edged away from Bootlbac in awe, saying, 'He's inspired, Bootlbac! 'tis the triumph of Shagpat he drummeth.' They feigned to listen to him till their ears deceived them, and they rejoiced in the velocity of the soundless tune of Bootlbac the drum-beater, and were stirred by it, excited to a forgetfulness of their fasting. Such was the force of the inspiration of Bootlbac the drum-beater, caused by the burning of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "It was my hand." He sees that the nurse is signalling with headshakes and soundless lip-words, but has not presence of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... moments later Ste. Marie gave a sudden low exclamation, and then a soundless laugh, for he caught sight of a very familiar figure seated in apparent dejection upon a fallen tree-trunk and staring across the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Veronese does right in allowing cats and monkeys to join the company of kings: but whether, supposing the subjects rightly chosen, they ought on the canvas to look like real angels with real violins, and substantial cats looking at veritable kings; or only like imaginary angels with soundless violins, ideal ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... was the most silent woman I ever met. She could pass a whole day without uttering a word, and did not seem to suffer any ennui from her silence. In the house she wore always, like the other inhabitants of the village, men and women, soundless felt socks, which slipped readily into the wooden sabots used for walking out-of-doors. I was beginning to learn to walk in sabots myself, for the time was drawing rapidly near when otherwise I ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... reasons of personal dignity or expediency, preferred the other method. They chanted their psalms and litanies through handkerchiefs, knowing full well that their music would be none the less pleasing to the Saint for being more than usually nasal in tone. Thus, with soundless footfalls, they perambulated the streets and outskirts of the town, gathering ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... visitors, caused no talk, rose late, went out together upon the lake, knew, in short, the happiness of which we all of us dream. It was a simple little house, with green shutters, and broad balconies shaded with awnings, a house contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white couches, soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new view of the lake; in the far distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of changing color and evanescent cloud; above them spread the sunny sky, before them stretched the broad sheet ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... carried his hand tucked into the half-open front of his shirt. Drew walked toward him slowly, feeling oddly detached. He noted that the trooper's weathered face had a greenish shade, that his mouth was working as if he were trying to shape soundless words. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... sweet blooms of May and on your wings Bear me away with drowsy winnowings To some far twilight land where steals a stream From out the cool and soundless ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... She nodded her head sharply, as though in imperative self-command, and running back, her footfalls soundless on the rich, heavy rug, she picked up the plush-lined necklace case. She dropped this again, open, on the floor, halfway between the safe and the window. With the case apparently burst open as it fell, and the necklace also on the floor, the stage would be set! ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wood at my right, the murmur of it rising and falling in ceaseless volumes of sound, riven at intervals by a horrid scream or a thunderous roar which shook the earth; and always I was haunted by that inexplicable sensation that unseen eyes were watching me, that soundless feet dogged my trail. I am neither nervous nor highstrung; but the burden of responsibility upon me weighed heavily, so that I was more cautious than is my wont. I turned often to right and left and rear lest I be surprised, and I carried my rifle at the ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said, and his wife did not trouble herself to protest; Reverdy opened his mouth in a soundless laugh at the Squire's humor, and then filled it with bacon and corn-pone, and ducked his head in silence over his ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... and the last of the cattle had ceased to splash in the water-hole and had gone out on one or another of the long cattle-pads which stretched away into the silent desert, when the half-moon looked down on the motionless and soundless world, a dark face peeped over the top of the sandhill above the sleeping stockmen. The man's naked body lay flat as a snake on the sand and wriggled forward with movements like the waving of a shadow on a wall, ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... is aye your soundless voice, Lifted in an awful patience o'er the world's uproarious noise; O'er its jarrings and its greetings—o'er its loving and its hate— Silence! Bare thy brows all dumbly to the snows ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... shape and speech. Is the sun yet cast out of heaven? Is the song yet cast out of man? Life that had song for its leaven To quicken the blood that ran Through the veins of the songless years More bitter and cold than tears, Heaven that had thee for its one Light, life, word, witness, O sun, Are they soundless and sightless and hollow, Without eye, without speech, without ear? O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo, Destroyer and ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... face to face with a man, he never seemed to be giving more than half his attention, for might not someone else approach if he lost himself in order to listen to any one voice? He had covered half the length of the room with that soundless step before she heard, and rose with a ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... futility of explaining a thing he had many times explained, Mostyn rose. Before him the open doorway framed an oblong patch of calm gray sky, and toward it he moved, his mental hands impotently outstretched, a soundless cry welling up from the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
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