"Cloudland" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Odenwald near which he was stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim the road taken by the Nibelungs from Santen to Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to Hungary. But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world of anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance become mere cloudland to the Thuringian knight. And similarly have the heroes of other nations, the Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, become mere vague names; they have become liquified, lost all shape and local habitation. They ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... a very cloudland of foliage. The easternmost horizon of this lake is a chain of rugged mountains, one glance at which would tell you the season was autumn, for they are crimsoned over with blooming heather. The season is autumn, and the time is sunset; the shadow of the great ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... rain-clouds heaped one on top of the other, as the rocks the Titans piled to reach Olympus. Then a break in the woof, and a bit of dark blue sky could be seen glittering with stars, in the midst of which sailed the serene moon, shedding down her light on the cloudland beneath, giving to it all, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... of a God Were first high heaven and cloudland, and beneath Lay earth and sea: the winds, the clouds were there, The moon and sun, each in its several place; There too were all the stars that, fixed in heaven, Are borne in its eternal circlings round. Above and through ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... that had troubled them both slowly metamorphosed itself into a tender, dreamy content. Why ask anything of fate? Why crystallize with a word the cloudland perfection of the mirage in which they walked? They were content, happy with the vernal joy of young things in harmony with all the world of spring. They were silent now—unconscious, and one with the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Neither wast thou great nor little, Neither noted for thy beauty, Nor remarkable for evil, 280 When as milk thou wast created, When the sweet milk trickled over From the breasts of youthful maidens, From the maidens' swelling bosoms, On the borders of the cloudland, 'Neath ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... as dreams are made of [Tempest]. ideality, idealism; romanticism, utopianism, castle-building. dreaming; phrensy^, frenzy; ecstasy, extasy^; calenture &c (delirium) 503 [Obs.]; reverie, trance; day dream, golden dream; somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung [G.], excogitation^, a fine frenzy; cloudland^, dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; thick coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rose and sank on a scarce perceptible ocean-swell in the centre of a great circular field of liquid glass, on whose undulations the sun gleamed in dazzling flashes, and in whose depths were reflected the fantastic forms, snowy lights, and pearly shadows of cloudland. In ordinary circumstances such an evening might have raised the thoughts of ordinary men to their Creator, but the circumstances of the men on board of that vessel were not ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... her world with the keener vision of one who, blind from very seeing, closes the eyes a space and looks again with wider clearer vision. Out of a nebulous cloudland she seemed to step; a land where all things floated in strange confusion, but where one thing stood steadfast, and that was love. When love was shaken all things moved, but now, at last, for the first time ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Lollipop has certainly proved a source of disappointment to her lady friends. They have watched her for three seasons going lightly and merrily through all the gaieties of Cloudland; they have listened to the scandal of the cuckoos among the pine-trees and rhododendrons, but they have not caught her tripping. Oh, no, they will never catch her tripping. She does not trip for their amusement: perhaps she trips it when they go on the light ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... down from her cloudland home, saw Halcyone kneeling on the waves beside the dead king. She leaned down from her place in the heavens and ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... lips to breathe some wondrous story. Hush, not a whisper! Let your heart alone go dreaming. Dream unto dream may pass: deep in the heart alone Murmurs the Mighty One his solemn undertone. Canst thou not see adown the silver cloudland streaming Rivers of faery light, dewdrop on dewdrop falling, Starfire of silver flames, lighting the dark beneath? And what enraptured hosts burn on the dusky heath! Come thou away with them, for Heaven to Earth is calling. These are ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... advance, the sea begins to widen, the mountainous outline of the Spanish coast trends boldly to the northward; whilst the African shore grows indistinct and flatter, save where here and there some mighty peak rears its head from out of cloudland. Since leaving "Gib." we have been under the escort of shoals of porpoises, who ever and anon shoot ahead to compare rate of speed; or, by way of change in the programme, to exhibit their fishy feats under the ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... bright certainty of their mutual love, and entranced by the absorbing contemplation of their new-found happiness, forgot in the sunshine of each other's presence the flight of moments, whilst I, involuntarily contrasting the fair prospect that lay open before them with the dark cloudland of my own gloomy fortunes, had soon traversed in thought the distance to Barstone Priory, and become immersed in fruitless speculations as to what might eventually be the result of Mr. Vernor's sordid and cruel policy. It was now longer than usual since I had heard from Clara; suspense and impatience ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they figure so prettily—pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let them doze ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unwearied interest to the oft-told tales, for the stories of the world's childhood, like the fairy lore of our own early days, deepen their significance to the untaught mind by perpetual repetition. The Hindu cloudland which veils the Javanese past "was reached by a ladder of realities," for the exploits of gods and mythical heroes were afterwards attributed to native Rulers, until the medley of truth and fiction, history and mythology, became ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... set wings, sweeping in wide circles, balancing, soaring, mounting on the winds. But we must note this difference: that the eagle keeps his keen eye on the distant earth, and always knows just where he is; while Coleridge sees only the wonders of Cloudland, and appears to ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... be a vast and shining plain, streaked with purple and gold. In the spaces between the streaks of gold and purple they saw soft, milk-white stars. And the children thought that the great plain, so far below them, also belonged to cloudland. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... across the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... anguish, he knows not where or under what name, Marie has deposited her own golden hoard. The "Hotel Tessier" has gone to Cloudland with the other "chateaux en Espagne"—the two payments are lost! Jules rages at knowing that even the savings of murdered Marie are lost to him. Even if found, they cannot be his by law. The ruffians who robbed him of everything, have left ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sphere of poetry. Poetical truth means, not that certain events actually happened, or that the poetical "machinery" is to be taken as an existing fact; but that the poem is, so to speak, the projection of truths upon the cloudland of imagination. It reflects and gives sensuous images of truth; but it is only the Philistine or the blockhead who can seriously ask, is it true? Some such position seems to be really conceivable as an ultimate compromise. Put aside the prosaic insistence upon ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker. In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... shun, but our little chalet, hardly accessible save on foot, is just tucked down on the side of the gentle slope leading up the mountain. It is remote from all sights but those magnificent ones afforded by the range of mountains, the green rich valley, and the ever-varying sky and cloudland, and all sounds save that of a brook which runs hurrying down its rocky little channel and keeps us company when we want it. I ought, however, to add that my view of this particular valley is that of a novice. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional reference to ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... bird, until Walter and his friends rescued it with difficulty. But on a windy day when his father took him into the open fields, away the kite would sail, until Walter grew anxious lest it should disappear altogether in cloudland. ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... remember, he was driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now preoccupies and excites a poet, is best given by a positive example. If, besides the coming of spring, any one external ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woven their many colored web of events, since Mrs. Montgomery had dropped down suddenly among us like a being from cloudland. The friendly relation established between us in the beginning, had continued, growing more and more intimate. My good Constance found in her a woman after ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... imparting an azure hue to the mirror of the rosewood wardrobe placed between the two windows. The quiet simplicity of the room, the blue tints on the hangings, furniture, and carpet, served at this hour of night to invest everything with the delightful vagueness of cloudland. Facing the windows, and within sweep of the shadow, loomed the velvet-curtained bed, a black mass, relieved only by the white of the sheets. With hands crossed on her bosom, and breathing lightly, lay Helene, asleep—mother and ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... woman gazed at him with thoughtful affection, and returned his smile. He went on playing, and the long hours of the autumn night went by like birds into the cloudland of ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... Metaphysician, Cloudland.—Your article on the "Psychical Basis of Objective Existence" is excellent. Look out for it in the "Juvenile Department" ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... we begin by saying that the theme proposed is a perfectly legitimate one for science. It is entirely pertinent to science to undertake to search for the hidden traces of man's former history, if there be any. It is no dreamland or cloudland which it proposes to explore. It is no Quixotic adventure which it has gotten up to astonish and alarm the vulgar. If our human ancestors have lived fifty or one hundred thousand years longer on this planet than was generally supposed, it is quite likely they have left some traces behind them. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... from a gorgeous description of "Cloudland" by Wordsworth, which occurs near the end of the second book of the Excursion. The opium-eater gives a long extract, as ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... angels in all; the lowest, upon whose head the Virgin rests her foot, is half Blake and half Michael Angelo. But there are many other busy little cherubs swimming, climbing, and flying amidst the interstices of cloudland. The Virgin herself, draped in easy-flowing material, has folded her hands, and awaits her entry to Paradise. Her face is the picture of anxiety and apprehension. The Assumption is carved in the lowest possible relief, called stiacciato. The word means depressed or flattened. It is the word ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm ground on which to plant our footsteps, if ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... songsters that inhabit only the green hedges and woods of "Merrie England" are carolling their morning vespers in all directions; skylarks are soaring, soaring skyward, warbling their unceasing paeans of praise as they gradually ascend into cloudland's shadowy realms; and occasionally I bowl along beneath an archway of spreading beeches that are colonized by crowds of noisy rooks incessantly "cawing" their approval or disapproval of things in general. Surely ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... something very much resembling a period. In the first place, I offer on the "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," the eulogium that the work has, in a great degree, naturalized the Corsican as he was never naturalized before—thus bringing him out of cloudland and mere impossible fog to the plain level of human action ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... funeral." I have often contrasted the habitual qualities of that gloomy friend of theirs with the astounding spirits of both Thackeray and Dickens. They always seemed to me to be standing in the sunshine, and to be constantly warning other people out of cloudland. During Thackeray's first visit to America his jollity knew no bounds, and it became necessary often to repress him when he was walking in the street. I well remember his uproarious shouting and dancing when he was told that the tickets to his first course of readings were all sold, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... heart a dream-blossom, Memory haunting. But dark is the forest Where now is my dwelling, Never the light of day Reaches its shadow. Thither a perilous Pathway meanders. Lonely I stand On the lonelier hill-top, Cloudland beneath me And cloudland around me. Softly the wind bloweth, Softly the rain falls, Joy like a mist blots The thoughts of my home out; There none would honour me, Fallen from honours. I gather the larkspur Over the hillside, Blown mid the chaos Of boulder and bellbine; Hating the tyrant Who ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... dodim, "love"; and, on the strength of this derivation, he soars into a lofty flight of philological conjecture to transmute dodim, into Aphrodite, "love" into the "goddess of love". It would be an impertinence on my part to attempt to follow these excursions into unknown heights of cloudland. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... intense joy which the springtime and this new life gave him . . . 'No, my life cannot end at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me, others must know it too! Pierre and that "slip" of a girl, who would have fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour theirs, and their ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... distinction that he was equally master of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens at least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part, to material which could hardly be called romantic. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the end, O wife? what remains at the last? Heaven claims Aeneas as his country's god, thou thyself knowest and avowest to know, and fate lifts him to the stars. With what device or in what hope hangest thou chill in cloudland? Was it well that a deity should be sullied by a mortal's wound? or that the lost sword—for what without thee could Juturna avail?—should be restored to Turnus and swell the force of the vanquished? Forbear ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... fir and cedar and maple and cherry and sycamore and spruce and tamarack, and all these that grow in common confusion here and shut out the sun from the earth as perfectly as if all things dwelt forever in cloudland. ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... himself was not, more or less, a nebulous kind of element; prescribed not by Nature and her verities, but by the Century expecting every man to do his duty? Whether not perhaps, in good part, temporary dilettante cloudland of our poor Century;—or can it be the real diviner Pisgah height, and everlasting mount of vision, for man's soul in any Century? And I think Sterling himself bent towards a negative conclusion, in the course of years. Certainly, of all subjects this ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... glorious if only it could be made as he dreamed it. This fair earth need be no vale of tears. There were the blue skies, the white tapestry of cloudland ever varying; there was the wind upon his face and the sweet rain; there was the purl of mountain brook, the graceful sweep of the river, the smile of the flowers, the songs of the birds; the golden splendor of the day and the silver radiance ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... idea and captivated by a phrase. To rest therewith content and to neglect the carrying of the idea into practice is a weakness still more common. It is this frequent failure of reformers to reduce their theories to practice, their tendency to dwell in the cloudland of the ideal rather than to test it in action, that has often made ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... seemingly bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes mad—but with a ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... this morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde, and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love and Life than heretofore. I know that with the dawn came a sense of infinite power and vision, as though the cool wind were the rushing music of the spheres, and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... swim in a crimson sea, Out of whose bright depths rising silently, Great golden spires shoot into the skies, Among the isles of cloudland high, that rise, Float, scatter, burst, drift off, and slowly fade, Deep in the twilight, shade ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... appearance there. They take no interest in the beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable of more than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man listening ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... snow! the snow! 'tis a pleasant thing To watch it falling, falling Down upon earth with noiseless wing, As at some spirit's calling: Each flake seems a fairy parachute, From mystic cloudland blown, And earth is still, and air is mute, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... possessed a larger fund of such thrilling incident or greater enthusiasm for his calling than he who recently paid that last penalty which ever hovers over its followers—the venerable John Wise. His autobiography, Through the Air, is a prose poem on the glories of Cloudland. The following extract from a private letter written by him in 1876, after an aeronautical career of forty years, comprising nearly five hundred ascensions, illustrates this enthusiasm and his views on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... these last months, and ousting the old one; and which now, terribly emphasised by Campion's arguments and illuminated by the fire of his personality, towered up imperious, consistent, dominating—and across her brow her title, The Catholic Church. Far above all the melting cloudland of theory she moved, a stupendous fact; living, in contrast with the dead past to which her enemies cried in vain; eloquent when other systems were dumb; authoritative when they hesitated; steady when they reeled and fell. About her throne dwelt her children, from every race and age, secure ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Sky Country, in a place called Cloudland, live a great many little people, called raindrops. They are very helpful, and always try to do their best, because they know the great King of Cloudland has work for them all. One morning two tiny ...
— Buttercup Gold and Other Stories • Ellen Robena Field
... had been heard by all the world, he rose on the wings of the winds and went far into cloudland to his golden palace in the sky. There he still sings his wonderful songs for those ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... man to journey on, Urged by a longing blind but dominant! Nothing he sees can hold him, nothing daunt His never failing eagerness. The sun Setting in splendour every night has won His vassalage; those towers flamboyant Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt His daylight wanderings. Forever done With simple joys and quiet happiness He guards the vision of the sunset sky; Though faint with weariness he must possess Some fragment of the sunset's majesty; He ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... monarch supreme in my cloudland. I was master of fate in that proud land; I would not endure That a grief without cure, A love that could end, Or a false hearted friend, Should dwell for an instant in ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... they knew His inspiring, guiding presence; they knew the forgiveness of sins; they knew, though they very dimly understood, the promise, 'In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.' How far they looked across the gulf of death and beheld anything—even cloudland—on the other side, is a question very hard to answer, and about which confident dogmatism, either affirmative or negative, is unwarranted. But it is to be remembered that, whether they had any notion of a future state or no, they had a promise which fulfilled ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... intrudes, is sometimes Don Juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together, and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain. And after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is settled in the end. I do not say that the leaving of the questions unsettled is not like life. It is very like life, but not like the work of poetry, whose high office ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of tare and tret and the price of butter; but "sich is life"—prose and poetry intertangled. The cloud may have a silver lining, but clouds are not all silver. Wherefore Nordau's glorification of the love-match is curiously unscientific; it belongs to silver-cloudland; it might work among the birds of [Greek: Nephelo-kokkugia]. Loveless marriages may beget happiness, if not ecstacy; and love-matches may be neither for the interest of the individuals nor of the race. They serve, however, to feed Art, and one real love-match ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... forests filling the valley of the Sacramento, all in turn were obscured or buried, leaving the lofty cone on which we stood solitary in the sunshine between two skies—a sky of spotless blue above, a sky of glittering cloud beneath. The creative sun shone glorious on the vast expanse of cloudland; hill and dale, mountain and valley springing into existence responsive to his rays and steadily developing in beauty and individuality. One huge mountain-cone of cloud, corresponding to Mount Shasta in these newborn cloud ranges, rose close alongside with a visible ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... azure sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far off their pearl-white ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... live the Pope-King!" Whilst ascending those endless staircases a moment previously it had seemed to him as if the colossus of stone were quivering with the frantic shout raised beneath its ceilings. And now that he had climbed even into cloudland that shout apparently was traversing space. If the colossal pile beneath him still vibrated with it, was it not as with a last rise of sap within its ancient walls, a reinvigoration of that Catholic blood which formerly had demanded that the pile should be a stupendous ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... top of his world. His great blue misty hills washed their turbulent waves to the yellow shore of the dropping sun. Those waves of forests primeval were his, and the green spray of them was tossed into cloudland to catch the blessed rain. In every little fold of them drops were trickling down now to water the earth and give back the sea its own. The dreamy-eyed man of science had told him that. And it was unchanged, all unchanged since wild beasts were the only tenants, since wild Indians ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... when in company with the former; nor has it been, for not a few who were once on the anti-popular side have entered public life, and even secured the highest prizes. This necessitated a descent from cloudland to the solid ground of colonial society. The alternative was extinction, and wisely, in most cases, the latter was ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... complacent idiocy of my condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to lull my thoughts asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the object of pleased consideration;—and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to us from that which we can see and touch and handle, and the inferences that we may draw from these; and to many all that world of thought and beauty, all those divine manifestations of tenderness and grace, are but mist and cloudland. Intellectually, though in a somewhat modified sense, this generation has to take the rebuke: 'Except ye see, ye will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... on all these topics as much as that of any man of his acquaintance. But, with the visionary Mrs. John Seymour aforesaid, he never seemed to himself to be either reading history or settling accounts, or talking politics; he was off with her in some sort of enchanted cloudland of happiness, where she was all to him, and he to her,—a sort of rapture of protective love on one side, and of confiding devotion on the other, quite inexpressible, and that John would not have talked of for ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the summer sky, after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand; the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory. The beings of Greek, mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls which he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. In reading this, as in reading most of his poetry, we feel that, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... science arrive at the solution of problems which the Newtonian law of gravitation does not suffice to solve; and—But here I halt. At the date which my story has reached, my mind never lost itself long in the Cloudland of Guess. ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life. Two events when directly compared apparently may differ enormously in their ability to arouse emotions, but the human organism is so adaptive that each in its proper environment may powerfully affect the emotions. For example, those who have sported in aerial antics in the heights of cloudland or have stormed the enemy's trench are still capable of enjoying a sunset or the call of a bird to its mate at dusk. The wonderful adaptability of the inner being is the salvation of art as ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... "Uncle Tom's Cabin," perhaps the book which has the truest stamp of the genius of Mrs. Stowe is her "Old Town Folks." In her incomparable description of "School Days in Cloudland," in which she shows how her sympathies went out to the people of every nation and tongue who are oppressed, she compares the influences of education in New England with a country without schoolhouses, saying: "Look at Spain at this hour and look back at New England at the time of ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various
... of the cloudland in the skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colours of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all meditative minds, even upon those that could not distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... them as they walk yonder in the gray limbo of romance, shining faintly in their coats of steel, wandering by the side of long-haired ladies, with long-tailed gowns that little pages carry? Yes! one sees them: the poet sees them still in the far-off Cloudland, and hears the ring of their clarions as they hasten to battle or tourney—and the dim echoes of their lutes chanting of love and fair ladies! Gracious privilege of poesy! It is as the Dervish's collyrium ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lightly flecked with clouds, the turf fragrant with wild thyme, and before our eyes we had a panorama every moment gaining in extent and grandeur. As yet indeed the scene, the features of which we tried to make out, looked more like cloudland than solid reality. On clear days are discerned here, far beyond the rounded summits of the Vosges chain, the Rhine Valley, the Black Forest, the Jura range, and the snow-capped Alps. To-day we saw grand masses of mountains piled one above the other, and higher still a pageantry of azure ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines of recorded history. The Normans, offspring of an ancestry of conquerors,—the Bretons, that stubborn, hardy, unchanging race, who, among Druid monuments changeless as themselves, still cling with Celtic obstinacy to the thoughts and habits of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... gave her much help in restoring her mind to quietness. Their perfect beauty entranced her, and the rapturous purity of ideal passion, the mystic delicacies of emotion, which made every verse gleam like a star, held her for the time high above that gloomy cloudland of her being, rife with weird shapes and muffled voices. That Beauty is solace of life, and Love the end of being,—this faith she would cling to in spite of all; she grasped it with the desperate force of one who dreaded lest it should fade and fail from her. Beauty ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... souls! You seem so near, so far away, Yet while the cloudland round us rolls, We love you better ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the next question, pointed at the poor little girl who had just dropped out of cloudland. "I thought it explained itself," was the plaintive reply. With a slight air of depreciation, in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull clouds of routine shut down over the sudden glory. "Shades of the prison-house" ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... there is a marked absence of downright wholesome common-sense? Of course the effect is partly due to the region in which the old dramatists generally sought for their tragic situations. We are never quite at home in this fictitious cloudland, where the springs of action are strange, unaccountable, and altogether different from those with which we have to do in the workaday world. A great poet, indeed, weaves a magic mirror out of these dream-like materials, in which ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... cry that they continue far into the night; and owls revel in moonlight and rich hunting. At dawn, robins wake the echoes of each new day with the admonition, "Cheer up! Cheer up!" and a little later big black vultures go wheeling through cloudland or hang there, like frozen splashes, searching the Limberlost and the surrounding country for food. The boom of the bittern resounds all day, and above it the rasping scream of the blue heron, as he strikes terror to the hearts of frogdom; while the ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and she was wholly occupied with them when she could watch them without rudeness to those about her; and even when she was obliged to look away, I could see that she was still thinking of the sky. "Do you live much in cloudland?" I asked, and felt for a moment I had said a silly thing; but she turned to me quickly, and looked at me for the first time as if she saw me—and when I say she looked at me, I mean something more than an ordinary look, for ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... than the last, and re-establishing the truth of some historical narrative in which we had been called upon to disbelieve. Dr. Schliemann and the excavators who have come after him have revealed to an incredulous world that Troy of Priam which had been relegated to cloudland, and have proved that the traditions of Mykenaean glory, of Agamemnon and Menelaos, and even of voyages to the coast of Egypt, were not fables but veritable facts. Even more striking have been the discoveries which have restored credit to the narratives of the Old Testament, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... melancholy broodings had haunted him at college, and how a woman's face shone brightly in the cloudland of his imagination, so that, when he first laid eyes upon her, he felt that her features were quite ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Sigurd rideth the waste, when, lo, on a morning of day, From out of the tangled crag-walls, amidst the cloudland grey, Comes up a mighty mountain, and it is as though there burns A torch amidst of its cloud-wreath; so thither Sigurd turns, For he deems indeed from its topmost to look on the best of the earth; And Greyfell neigheth beneath him, and his heart ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... still solitude, only matched in the skies; Perilous in steep places, Soft in the level races, Where sweeping in phantom silence the cloudland flies." —R. BRIDGES. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... waiting-room, and then took our places in the funniest little toy train. This is the Darjeeling-Himalaya Railway. It was all very primitive. A man banged with a stick on a piece of metal by way of a starting-bell, and we set off on our journey to cloudland. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... overpowering joy means. Yet the severe and strait-laced censors are not perhaps so much of a nuisance as the sternly-cultured and emotional persons who "yearn" a great deal. The "yearnest" man or woman always has an ideal which is usually the vaguest thing in the cloudland of metaphysics. I fancy it means that one must always be hankering after something which one has not and keeping a look of sorrow when one's hankering is fruitless. The feeling of pity with which a "yearnest" one regards somebody who cares ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil; But inspiration cometh from above, And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence She fell; nor human soul, by native worth, Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance, Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth; Until God maketh earth and soul anew; The one like heaven, the other like himself. So shall the new creation come at once; Sin, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various |
