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Shadowy   Listen
adjective
Shadowy  adj.  
1.
Full of shade or shadows; causing shade or shadow. "Shadowy verdure." "This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods."
2.
Hence, dark; obscure; gloomy; dim. "The shadowy past."
3.
Not brightly luminous; faintly light. "The moon... with more pleasing light, Shadowy sets off the face things."
4.
Faintly representative; hence, typical. "From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit."
5.
Unsubstantial; unreal; as, shadowy honor. "Milton has brought into his poems two actors of a shadowy and fictitious nature, in the persons of Sin and Death."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shadowy" Quotes from Famous Books



... by a constant soft frou-frou of silk and satin, as persons from an inner room moved in and out, or some lady silently gave up her seat to a new-comer, or one of those in front bent over to whisper to a friend behind. The background of all seemed filled with a shadowy medley of plumed hats, from which sometimes a face emerged as a shaft of faint light from the illumined ceiling of the House ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sun shone slanting half-way down the hollow cone as the whirlpool of air caught the Flying Horse, and drew him swiftly down and down to the shadowy halls. There knelt and wept the nurses of the Earthquaker on the marble floor; but Jaqueline stood a little apart, very pale, but ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang

... looks directed, but to this venerable old gentleman with his powdered peruke, his satin coat, silk stockings, breeches, shoe-buckles, gold embroidered waistcoat and lace ruffles. This costume reminded him of the past; the halls of Versailles came back to him, and he saw before him the shadowy figures of the cavaliers of that time, all clothed like the dear old gentleman who was sitting before the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... was not a very brilliant solicitor, and his views on the trial were somewhat cloudy. When he was urging his client to leave the Fleet he threw out some equally shadowy and ill-informed notions as to what might be done in the way of punishing the nefarious solicitors, Dodson and Fogg, "those Freeman's ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... The shadowy head disappeared abruptly. The bush, released from the grasp of the bowman, sprung back with a swish, scattering a shower of muddy water over Almayer, as he bent forward, ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... welcomely, and saddled up the Squadron waits for the advance to begin and to drop into its place in the line of march as the Brigade moves past. Voices in the darkness, then shadowy forms, and, their horses' hoofs muffled by the dust, Brigade Headquarters passes by. Then the three regiments, one British and two Indian, each of the latter followed by crowds of donkeys looking ghostly white in the gloom. At length it is our turn, ...
— Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron • Unknown

... ever Miss Bibby's phrase—ever her gentle optimism. If you lost your temper, your manners, your courage, any of your higher qualities, you had "forgotten yourself," forgotten the fine, upright man you were by nature and become for a moment the shadowy ghost of that black unknown self that ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner

... therein do I claim honor and distinction. The intangible, the invisible, the vague, the shadowy, I leave to women and priests—concerning myself only with the substantial realities of life. Great Jupiter! what would become of mankind were we all women, and priests? How could the courts go on—senates sit, and deliberate—armies conquer? I think the world would stand still. However, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... prow In murmurs parted:—varying as we go, Lo! the woods open, and the rocks retire, As some gray convent-wall or glistening spire 'Mid the bright landscape's track unfolding slow! Here dark, with furrowed aspect, like Despair, Frowns the bleak cliff! There on the woodland's side The shadowy sunshine pours its streaming tide; Whilst Hope, enchanted with the scene so fair, Counts not the hours of a long summer's day, Nor heeds how fast the prospect ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... into Jealousy. The following stanzas, in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grisly house of Plutus, are unrivalled for the portentous massiness of the forms, the splendid chiaro-scuro, and shadowy horror. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... better than he, that at the end of a series of cannons she suggested that they might sit out the dance. She guided him into the garden, and they took possession of a rustic seat. In the ballroom she had seemed timid, and had spoken in undertones only; but in this shadowy tete-a-tete beneath the stars, she began to talk frankly ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... city among books of the past; but in the evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to the floor of the valley—with this difference, that it was not to a place of torment but to the halls of the swarth gods of creation, those great, dim, shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge. Into these, men of France, has your Fort Duquesne grown—mile on mile of flame-belching buildings, with a garrison as great as the population of all New France ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... Manhattan to the Mohawk, as he looked up from the chubby bow of his "Half Moon" at the massive columnar formation of the Palisades or at the great mountains of the Highlands; what dreams of success, apparently within reach, were his, when night came down in those deep forest solitudes under the shadowy base of Old Cro' Nest and Klinkerberg Mountain, where his little craft seemed a lone cradle of civilization; and then, when at last, with immediate purpose foiled, he turned his boat southward, having discovered, but ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... names and dates so many centuries old, and surveying the gray and weather-worn exterior of the church, the slow tolling of the bell announced a funeral. Upon such a stage, and amid such surroundings, with all this past for a background, the shadowy figure of the peerless bard towering over all, the incident of the moment had a strange interest to me, and I looked about for the funeral cortege. Presently a group of three or four figures appeared at the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... sadly to the little babe whom he had sent away, many years ago, to die alone on wooded Ida. And he said to himself, 'The child has been long dead, and yet no feast has been given to the gods that they may make his little spirit glad in the shadowy land of Hades. This must not be neglected longer. Within three days a feast must be made, and we will hold ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin

... in conjunction with the Venetians, carried all before them. But the triumphs of the sword were speedily wrested from him by the adroitness of the politician; in an interview with Leo X. at Bologna, Francois bartered the liberties of the Gallican Church for shadowy advantages in Italy. The 'Pragmatic Sanction of Bourgea', which now for nearly a century had secured to the Church of France independence in the choice of her chief officers, was replaced by a concordat, whereby the King allowed the papacy once more to drain the wealth of the Church of France, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression Rue du Temps Perdu—the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... bucket bumping against the walled circle as it descended, and the splash as it struck the water, were uncanny sounds to the boy's ears. The desire to look down, down into the old well's hidden secrets became to him almost a frenzy. The echoes coming up from its shadowy depths were as those ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... fact. When we count by hundreds of thousands the books that are in the Paris Library, and not to be had for the British Museum, we know the number of books which a chance refuge has protected from the general destruction, and can readily see, in shadowy bulk, though we cannot estimate in numbers, the great mass which, having found no refuge, have disappeared out of separate existence, and been mingled up with the other elements of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... their animals be devoured. Valiantly, they had rushed forth to meet the most formidable wolf pack that had ever come out of the north, and by the light of the torches Will presently saw the great, gaunt, shadowy forms and the fiery eyes of the huge wolves which, driven by hunger, had boldly ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... which drew my eyes. Far away on the other side, concealed from the house by a grove of trees, a shadowy line of tiny figures was emerging from the forest. Even as I looked, they vanished, and I rubbed my eyes in bewilderment. Yet I knew they had not deceived me. It was the war party preparing for ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... be one day fulfilled; and the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches that it is already fulfilled in Christ, who will raise His brethren, for whom He tasted death, to partake in His dominion. The present order of things is transient; and if earth is to be, as some shadowy hints seem to suggest, the scene of the future glories of redeemed humanity, it may be the theatre of a fulfilment of such visions as this. But we cannot dogmatise on a subject of which we know so little, nor be sure of the extent to which symbolism enters into this sweet picture. Enough that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... there. Then, bringing forth a crystalline violet become scented sugar, or a bit of fruit translucent in hardened sirup, she would delicately set it on the way to that attractive dissolution hoped for it by the wistful donor—and all without removing her shadowy eyes from the little volume and its patient struggle for dignified rhymes with "Julia." Florence was no longer in her beautiful ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... open doors. In a confused way she noticed mirrors and statuary and portraits, handsome old furniture and rare pieces of bric-a-brac; but one thing caught her attention so that she stood a moment in round-eyed admiration. It was a large harp, whose gracefully curving frame gleamed through the shadowy room like burnished gold. Fair and tall it stood, as if its strings had just been swept by some of the Shining Ones beyond, who were a ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston

... if disinterested, makes about as good a witness as anybody. There is really no such thing as "the lust of lying:" falsehoods are told for advantage—commonly a shadowy and illusory advantage, but one distinctly enough had in mind. Discerning no opportunity to promote his interest, tickle his vanity or feed a grudge, the habitual liar will tell the truth. If lawyers would study human nature with half the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... finger in order to see them more clearly and more sharply defined. She turned the plate slowly in her hands, this way and that, questioned its mystery on all sides, and hunted down, within its circular rim, apparitions, images, rudiments of names, shadowy initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects, omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be victorious. She wanted to see these things and she compelled herself to discover them. Under her tense gaze the porcelain became alive ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... turned upon the bench—he had been staring straight before him. He bent close, looked into her shadowy face for a moment, then found her hand, where it lay in her lap, lifted it in both his own, and pressed it, for a long, tense moment, against his lips. She felt the contact burn against the cool flesh, and it made intelligible all that ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond

... lay, he felt cold, ghostly hands on his shoulder, on his head, wherever the cold breath of the waning night could fan him through the open window; and with a loud cry he sprang out of bed as he fancied he felt a touch of the shadowy hand of Vindex. On hearing his voice, Adventus and the Indian hurried in, with Epagathos, who had even heard his shriek in the farther room. They found him bathed in a sweat of horror, and struggling for breath, his eyes fixed on vacancy; and the freedman ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the way to his quarters," said one of the officers, as he followed his chief with his eyes toward the shadowy building in which a faint light or two could ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn

... aware of a huge shadowy something directly opposite, looming out at her unexpectedly. With a cry of delight she recognized it as a water-tank; she could make out the spout overhanging the track, a stick of pallor in ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... surviving Folk practice, I would submit that there is no longer any shadow of a doubt that in the Grail King we have a romantic literary version of that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan race; the figure of a divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... path by which we strive to soar; Yet, truer still, or ere the prize be won, A common ruin hurls us to our doom. 'Twere best we parted, you and I; so, Fate, Baulked of her double prey, may seek in vain, And miss us both upon the shadowy plain. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... life, Asher Aydelot never forgot his mother's face, nor the sound of her low prophetic words on that moonlit night on the shadowy ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... I remember her; a willowy, shadowy creature, with a sort of ethereal loveliness which appealed very strongly to my imagination when ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... knowledge is made through the cit being manifested through the mental mould or states. Without the v@rtti there is no illuminating knowledge. Phenomenal creations are there in the world moving about as shadowy forms on the unchangeable basis of one cit or reality, but this basis, this light of reality, can only manifest these forms when the veil of nescience covering them is temporarily removed by their coming in touch with a mental mould or mind-modification (v@rtti). It ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears,—all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards;—like one in dread ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... slowly made his way into the park. The shadows were so dense here that the statues looked ghostly in the dim light. Now and then he could hear a low laugh and catch the flutter of a silken gown along the shadowy walks, or the glint of a stray moonbeam on a silver sword. He strolled about, scarcely knowing whither, guided by the sound of splashing water, and coming upon many a beautiful spot in his solitary ramble, ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... silver beard flowing, and tongue clothed in wisdom the choicest, Sitting 'neath shadowy birches, telling a story by Mimer's Unceasingly murmuring fountain, he too a saga unending. Covered with straw was the floor, and upon a walled hearth in the center, Constantly burned, warm and cheerful, a fire, while down the wide chimney Twinkling ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner

... every excellent man aims at; but while he pursues that only true honor which nature has in view above all other objects, he finds himself busied in arrant trifles, and in pursuit of no conspicuous form of virtue, but only some shadowy representation of glory. For glory is a real and express substance, not a mere shadow. It consists in the united praise of good men, the free voice of those who form a true judgment of pre-eminent virtue; it is, as it were, the ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... grey-white stuff. Something supernatural about her terrifies the beholders, who throw themselves on their faces. Her outline flows and waves: she is almost distinct at moments, and again vague and shadowy: above all, she is larger than life-size, not enough to be measured by the flustered congregation, but enough to affect them with a dreadful sense ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... clapped my hand to it by moving my arm towards my head, and the colossal figure did the same. The pleasure which I felt on this discovery can hardly be described; for I had already walked many a weary step in the hope of seeing this shadowy image, without being able to satisfy my curiosity. I immediately made another movement by bending my body, and the colossal figure before me repeated it. I was desirous of doing the same thing once more; but my colossus had vanished. I remained in the same position, waiting ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor

... derived is cumulative—each acquisition of knowledge adding to the satisfaction of that which comes after—it is of a sort, however, to be experienced in the presence of the thing itself; any description at a distance must necessarily be shadowy and unreal, only the dry bones of something which one sees there, a thing of beauty ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... evaporated, the air grew stagnant, and the disillusioned steppe began to wear its jaded July aspect. The grass drooped, everything living was hushed. The sun-baked hills, brownish-green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance and, arched above them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness. ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... the bed, a long, formless shape in the shadowy corner. She lay there without speaking as Lorry took her letter to the window and read it. It was from Mrs. Kirkham; a friend had sent her a box for the opera on Tuesday night and she invited both girls. It would be a great occasion, everybody was going, Caruso was to sing. Lorry looked ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... thrill with the "honk, honk" of the Canada goose and think the A-shaped band of migrants is surely this year's messenger, crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the goddess and make her paths straight; but a little later we pass through a shadowy ravine where the white oaks have held their leaves all winter, and find that the great horned owl has already appropriated a last year's hawk's nest and deposited therein her two white eggs. At the foot of the sunny hill where the spring has freely flowed all winter long, we tramp around ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... Beck, "Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens", see page 498, note 1.), his Goodness, Truth, Beauty, his class-names, horse, table, are it is true dematerialised as far as possible, but they have outside existence, apart from the mind of the thinker, they have in some shadowy way spatial extension. Yet ancient philosophies and primitive man alike needed and possessed for practical purposes a distinction which served as well as our subjective and objective. To the primitive savage all his thoughts, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... jelly-like substance, it was none the less of much more definite outline and solid consistence than anything which I had seen before. There were more traces, too, of a physical organization, especially two vast shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the wind full in her sail, seemed bearing off into sunlit distance, where sky and sea met. There was a faint, shadowy line to the left; and just beyond, a dim pencil point ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman

... twenty miles apart; but the brothers never met after their quarrel, and my grandfather's sons and daughters never saw their uncle's house. One result of the estrangement was that we hardly seemed to belong to our own family; and I remember a lady, who had some very vague and shadowy claims to a distant connection with the family at Hellifield, asking one of my aunts in a rather patronizing manner if she also did not "claim to be connected" with the Hamertons of Hellifield Peel. Even to this day it is difficult for me to realize the simple fact that she was niece to an ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... King shook hands with Archie, Teddy, Gratton, and the rest, made his formal bows to Gloria's girl friends, and felt relief when the inept banalities languished and he was free to draw apart. Gratton, with slender finger to his shadowy moustache, bore down upon him. King did not like this suave individual; he had the habit of judging a man by first impressions and sticking stubbornly to his snap judgment until circumstance showed him to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... thirteenth century; and remember also, when you go to Florence and see that mighty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio (noble still, in spite of the calamitous and accursed restorations which have smoothed its rugged outline, and effaced with modern vulgarisms its lovely sculpture)— terminating the shadowy perspectives of the Uffizii, or dominant over the city seen from Fesole or Bellosguardo,—that, as the tower of Giotto is the notablest monument in the world of the Religion of Europe, so, on this tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... colony of Brazil and the great Spanish territory of Peru. Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, and the sharply defined limits these names represent, are, of course, modern creations, comparatively speaking. For centuries the landward boundaries of Spanish New Granada remained shadowy, indefinite limits. There was a Viceroyalty of New Granada, so named from the resemblance between the plains around Bogota and the Vega of the Moorish capital, and there was a Captain-Generalship of Venezuela. New Granada was estimated as comprising ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... suddenly from behind the trees to bar his way, so quickly that he had not time to fire the rifle before one of them grappled with him. The rifle fell from his hand, and for a moment they struggled, then whilst the second man was still running, a shadowy figure slipped from behind a broad trunk close to where the two men were locked together, and Stane caught the sudden gleam of a knife as the light from the fire glinted upon it. He was unable to help himself, and, held in his antagonist's arms, he waited for the impending stroke. ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... even the poorest classes at the present day have had a profound influence upon my views of economic subjects. The conception which the masses of the present time have of how their ancestors lived in the early years of the century are so vague and shadowy as not to influence their ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... the bough of a tree and alighted before us. We split the air with a simultaneous shriek. We would have run, one and all, if there had been anywhere to run to. But there wasn't—all around us were only those shadowy arcades. Then we saw with shame that it ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... dark blue eyes had come a vague and brooding beauty which he had never before seen. In it was tenderness, and a new wisdom, alas! and a faint and shadowy something, ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... very reflectively began to rub its still shadowy nose with a shadowy paw. I think that it remembered the sting of the salt water in the cut made by the glass of the window through ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard

... and saw the shadow of a man on the sloping rock at the left hand. Her first impulse was to cry out, but the fear of alarming Annie, and her own natural courage, prevented her; and she soon thought she could detect in the shadowy outline a resemblance to Father M'Clane. "Och, then, the murder's out," she thought; "the mane creature has been listening, and faith now he shall have a pill that will settle his stomach intirely.—What were you saying, Miss Annie?" she asked ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous

... word that is more loosely used or which carries a greater variety of meanings. Its connotations are endless, and range from the aggressively man-like deity of the primitive savage up—or down—to the abstract force of the mathematical physicist and the shadowy "Absolute" of the theologising metaphysician. The consequence of this is to find commonly that while it is one kind of a god that is being set up in argument, it is really another god that is being defended and ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... evening, when the hunter's moon hung like a big golden shield above the river, glorifying the dipping willows, the narrow eyots, haunts of swan and cygnet, and the distant woodlands of Surrey. It was a night which tempted the free to wander in the cool shadowy river-side paths, rather than to worship in the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... thousand vows of reformation—all since broken, I fear me, again and again. To- morrow, says I to myself, I will live cleanly for ever. And I smiled dizzily (the liquor being still strong in me) to think of the dangers I had escaped; and built all manner of fine Castles in Spain, whereof a shadowy Kitty Somerset that had the violet eyes and the sweet slow speech of Mrs. ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... and still tread, He scans the tented line; And he counts the battery guns By the gaunt and shadowy pine; And his slow tread and still tread Gives ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... choice of windows, and as to a space broken through the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so well satisfied with his window as to shrink involuntarily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal substance showed through the shadowy illusion of passing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the street, the king's voice rising above the noises in tender caution to a heedless witness, "Have a care of the axe; have a care," and then gravely to the headsman: "When I stretch ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... speak, dated back. He drove the powerful modern car with ease and skill, but somehow she imagined him wearing steel cap and leather jack and guiding a shaggy pony. Perhaps it was the picture in a hall she knew that haunted her. One saw the shadowy horsemen and glitter of ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... was born to the minister, but so feeble that there were grave doubts if the young Rachel could survive. The report was well founded; and after three or four days of desperate struggle with life, the poor child dropped away. Thus death came into the parsonage with so faint and shadowy a tread, it hardly startled one. The babe had been christened in the midst of its short struggle, and in this the father found such comfort as he could; yet reckoning the poor, fluttering little soul as a sinner in Adam, through whom all men fell, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... recollection was, as conjured up by the metal box, in other respects the old life seemed far away as a dream; misty, shadowy, vanishing. All its old conventionalities, its abstract notions of right and wrong, what were they? Dust. Even now, whither was he wending? Would he ever again behold a white face? ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... an allegory go on all fours," it must to a certain degree be obscure and shadowy, like the images which the traveller in the desert sees mirrored on the heavens, wherein he can trace but a dreamy resemblance to the reality beneath. It therefore seems to me advisable to give a solution of the "Eidolon," the symbol, which ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... in a faint twilight, while the clipped shrubs of the Tuileries Gardens assumed brighter colours as the sky grew dark around them. It was the mystic hour so precious to people pursuing dreams or making plans. The carriages grow fewer, the shadowy figures hurry by and touch the stroller lightly. There is no interruption to the flow of a man's thoughts. So the ambitious young fellow, who had quite recovered his presence of mind, carried on his reflections clearly. His thoughts were like those of ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... better not come," she repeated, and in her speech there was a shadowy return of the old baffling reserve that had so greatly disturbed Marjorie in the early ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... going on at Les Chouettes, when Angelot came down from the moors that morning. He was not surprised, after old Joubard's report, to see his uncle's outdoor factotum, a bullet-headed creature with scarcely anything on but his shirt, leading the last of several horses into the shadowy depths of the stable. Opposite, the cook looked out smiling from the kitchen, where she lived with her solemn husband, the valet-de-chambre. He, in apron and sabots, was now in the act of carrying the first dishes ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... room. He seemed to be an honest, intelligent, pleasant young man, and his wife a pleasant woman; and I had J——-'s daguerreotype taken for three shillings, in a little gilded frame. In the description of the garden, the velvet turf, of a charming verdure, and the shrubbery and shadowy walks and large trees, and the slopes and inequalities of ground, must not he forgotten. In one place there was a maze and labyrinth, where a person might wander a long while in the vain endeavor to get out, although all the time ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... vehicle, swaying noiselessly on its straps, glided onward and upward as if obeying some mysterious impulse from behind, so faint and indefinite appeared its relation to the viewless and silent horses ahead. The shadowy trunks of tall trees that seemed to approach the coach windows, look in, and then move hurriedly away, were the only distinguishable objects. Yet even these were so vague and unreal that they might have been the mere phantoms of some dream of the half-sleeping ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte

... started, he remembered, with the discovery of missile-bearing Enemy submarines in the Gulf. Even as he watched the whole area—as though perched on a satellite—he could see, underwater and close-up, the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine gliding ...
— The Next Logical Step • Benjamin William Bova

... men with them, and Madeleine d'Ambre, and others who would gather round the beautiful and lucky player, were figures being woven into a web of tapestry together; that they were forced to group themselves as the weaver of the web decreed. He saw his own figure woven into an obscure and shadowy corner far from that of Mary, and, rebelling against the choice of the weaver, wished to tear the tapestry in pieces. But the next moment he was ready to smile at himself with the quiet, cynical smile which had become familiar to all those who knew him. "Nothing is tragic unless you ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... father of sir Launcelot, and brother of Bors king of Gaul. This "shadowy king of a still more shadowy kingdom" came over with his royal brother to the aid of Arthur, when, at the beginning of his reign, the eleven kings leagued against ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... under a patent from the viceroy of Ireland under Charles I., June, 1634. The history of his shadowy principality of New Albion is best accounted by Professor Gregory B. Keen in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, III. 457-468. The best account of the Swedish colony in the South River is by the ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor

... occasionally—maybe only once in a lifetime!—do we ever really feel that our own "soul" and the "soul" of another has met for an all-too-brief moment, shared for a flash its "secret," mutually sympathised and understood. For the rest—well, we live for the most part holding out, as it were, shadowy arms towards shadows which only seem to be substance. The road to Calvary is a lonely road, and each man and woman is forced to follow it. There remains then only God—God who knows us for what we are; God—and the faith that in a life beyond we shall by our loved ones be also ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... toward the creation of a national domain, laid the corner-stone of our Federal Union. Equal credit must be given to Virginia for her magnanimity in making the desired surrender. It was New York, indeed, that set the praiseworthy example; but New York, after all, surrendered only a shadowy claim, whereas Virginia gave up a magnificent and princely territory of which she was actually in possession. She might have held back and made endless trouble, just as, at the beginning of the Revolution, she might have refused to make common cause with Massachusetts; ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in Euphues: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, which ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... make good use of time! Eternity sublime Is cradled in its use, And Time allows no truce. The past, with shadowy pall, Is gone beyond recall; To-morrow is not thine; 'To-day is all thou hast, Which will not always last: ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... many a feat, How fairy MAB the junkets eat. She was pinched, and pulled, she said: And he, by friar's lanthern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set; When, in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy Flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-labourers could not end. Then lies him down the lubbar Fiend; And, stretched out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength: And, crop-full, out of door he flings Ere the first ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... purple and blue on the pale grounding of its chalk soil, could be seen—east, west, and north. Serried ranks, line above line, of purplish cloud girded the horizon, each circle of the great amphitheater rising from its shadowy foundations into pearly white and shining gray, while the topmost series of all soared in snowy majesty upon a sea of blue, above the far-spread woods and fields. From these hills, the Dane in his high clearings had looked out upon the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... charming study, unfinished, of course, that came the next afternoon: a boat, rolling heavily in gray water; and seen through mist, the great brown sail, looming, shadowy; one sailor, in a red jersey, at the tiller. In the corner Robert had scrawled his careless signature and the words,—"Valfjeldet, Norway, 1897." Sir Peter gently laid the picture upon the glowing coals ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens

... Swift whirling round with inconceivable speed A host of Northern Lights sprang into air, And, battling round their Queen, confused and wild, Blent with each other in the fierce affray. The frightened stars paled in the distant sky; And spectres rushed on shadowy steeds of grey Down the flushed firmament; and shining spears, Held by invisible hands, whirled high o'erhead. Pale mortals in the far off Torrid Zone Saw wonders in the Northern air with fear; And when an inward trembling shook the Pole Central through all the earth, ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown

... lighting the faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man, docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible, dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has controlled it. Touch ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... discriminating. Dreamers and visionaries had but a bad time of it with her; for without saying very much—she was not by nature of a talkative disposition—she plainly asked, by her calm steady look, and rare ironical smile, "How can you imagine, my dear friends, that I can take these fleeting shadowy images for true living and breathing forms?" For this reason many found fault with her as being cold, prosaic, and devoid of feeling; others, however, who had reached a clearer and deeper conception of life, were extremely fond of the intelligent, childlike, large-hearted girl But none had ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... Night her shadowy veil has spread, See want and infamy as forth they come, Lead their wan daughter from her branded home, To woo the stranger for unhallow'd bread. Poor outcast! o'er thy sickly-tinted cheek And half-clad form, what havock want hath made; And the sweet lustre of thine eye doth fade, And all thy ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... utmost tension. He realized that any moment he might hear a yell or see some shadowy form glide alongside. The instant an Indian awoke and discovered his ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... was low, its time-stained woods were dark, and the chairman wandered in its shadowy recesses like an ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... Through other gaps appeared the mountain of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde with its sharp pointed Basilica topped by its gleaming statue, like an immovable, twisted tongue of flame. Sometimes a torpedo destroyer entering the old harbor could be seen slipping by the mouth of one of these passageways as shadowy as though passing before the glass ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... new frolicsome, all but joyous, tune: a shadowy counterfeit of gladness, where the sob hangs on the edge of the smile. As if it could no longer be contained, now pours the full passionate grief of the broad descending strain. Death fiddles his mournful chant to echoing, expressive wind. On the abandon ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... almost hear the merry children's shout, Could breathe the scent of violet and rose, Walked down the dells where the pale primrose grows. Ah, tell the truth, felt once again the bliss Of Victor's loving clasp and burning kiss, Felt his fond arms enfold me to his breast, And I a bird safe in its shadowy nest, And then the vision vanished; I was there, A prey to sorrow, loneliness and care, Like one who spends in a dark mine his life, My baby dead, and I a drunkard's wife. Then came a thought on Him of Mary ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins

... breeze like hetairae of the forest. Below me ran the silver Thames, and above a few silver clouds—the belles of the air—were following its course, as if to watch themselves in the watery winding mirror. And near the reedy island, at the shadowy point always haunted by three swans, whom I suspect of having been there ever since the days of Odin-faith, was the usual punt, with its elderly gentlemanly gudgeon-fishers. But far below me, along the dark line of the hedge, was a sight which completed ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... pause to comment on this repulsive dogma of a party which asserts the right of property in free-born white men, in order to reach its cherished object of destroying the right of property in slave-born black men—still less shall I detain the Senate in pointing out how shadowy the distinction between the condition of the servile African and that to which the white freeman of my State would be reduced, if it, indeed, be true that they are bound to this government by ties that cannot ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... stand looking so quietly at me and Mellish, and then go back out of sight without a word, I'm blessed if I didn't think you were the angel come at last. Then I met you at the railway station and walked with you. You put the angel out of my head quick enough; for an angel, after all, is only a shadowy, childish notion—I believe it's all gammon about there being any in heaven—but you gave me a better idea than mamma of what a woman should be, and you came up to that idea and went beyond it. I have been in love with you ever since; and if I can't have ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... which opened into the great street, or looked down the canals, whose polished surface gleamed with a sort of ebon lustre through the obscurity of the night, they easily fancied they discerned the shadowy forms of their foe lurking in ambush, and ready to spring on them. But it was only fancy; and the city slept undisturbed even by the prolonged echoes of the tramp of horses, and the hoarse rumbling of the artillery and baggage trains. At length, a lighter space beyond ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... the rising of the deep purple veil that overhung the horizon by night mountains farther off! mountains far away! and yet again in the blue distance—mountains still, blending with the grey mists of the morning in the shadowy horizon!—motionless billows that sink into peace and stillness in the blue distance of the plains of Lorraine. Such is a faint idea of the mighty scenery of the Vosges, boundless forests, silver lakes, dazzling crests, ridges, and peaks projecting their ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... place in one soul could take place in the soul of the mass ... he had not changed his standards so much as he had proved them. The shape and color and perfume of love and loyalty and faith had not been altered for him, but he could discover their blossoming among the shadowy places. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... long. He was out and striding along the shadowy road when Miss Calista left the store and drove smartly after him. It never took Miss Calista long to make up her mind about anything, and she had weighed and passed judgement on Ches Maybin's case while Mr. Fell was doing up ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the other. This child ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the women who had worked with her, as if in a final roll-call. Many of them had preceded her into the next world; others were still splendidly active in the work she was laying down. But young or old, living or dead, they all seemed to file past her dying eyes that day in an endless, shadowy review, and as they went by she spoke to each ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... was time to look about me. Where was I? It was not the Broadway; it was not Staten Island on a Saturday afternoon. The night was just over, and the sun on the point of rising. Yet it was still shadowy all about, the air being marvellously tepid and pleasant to the senses. Quaint, soft aromas like the breath of a new world—the fragrance of unknown flowers, and the dewy scent of never-trodden fields drifted to my nostrils; and to ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... rooms, and the inland-blowing wind brings to them the salt spray and yellow sand swept at low tide from the desolate floors of the sea, and the white-winged bird flying from the black tempest screams aloud in their shadowy halls. There, from the high terraces, when the moon is at its full, we see the children of Coradine gathered together, arrayed like no others, in shining garments of gossamer threads, when, like thistle-down chased by eddying winds, now whirling in a cloud, now scattering far apart, they ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... the real faery tales told in shadowy nurseries whose windows in summer open upon shimmering gardens and on whose walls in winter the fire-goblins dance. Weir is one of these towns—a sweet, hushed place, lying where the hills spread broadly to the south sun, and the trees are ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl

... flames and bursting, though the reports could not be heard because of the tumult in the streets below. For the firemen and spectators had seen the sudden dying down of the fire, they had caught sight of a shadowy shape in the night, hovering over the blazing building, and they ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton

... though the sudden presence of Captain Boyson under the same roof had raised up a shadowy adversary and accuser, with whom she must go on thus arguing, and hotly defending herself, in a growing excitement. Not that she would ever stoop to argue with Alfred Boyson face to face. How could he ever understand the ideals to which she had devoted ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... wood below the eminence appears a shadowy amorphous thing in motion, the central or Imperial column of NAPOLEON'S Grand Army for the invasion of Russia, comprising the corps of OUDINOT, NEY, and DAVOUT, with the Imperial Guard. This, with the right and left columns, makes up the host of nearly ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the top of the hill, a human figure materialized in the trail before her. She was too much startled to scream. She stopped, petrified with terror, struggling to draw her breath. Its shadowy face was turned toward her. It was a very creature of night, still and voiceless. It blocked the way she had to pass. Her limbs shook under her, and a low moan of terror escaped ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... of Bagdad undisputed chief of all Moslems; and, from that time, the Abassides, though sunk in effeminacy, and much given to sensual indulgences, continued to exercise their vague privileges and their shadowy authority. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar

... to whom the world unknown, With all its shadowy shapes is shown, Who see'st appalled, th' unreal scene, While Fancy lifts the veil between, Ah, Fear! ah, frantic Fear! I see, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms, The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels, The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:— These epic, ancient gestures of the race Have still the greatness of those great who wrought In other days than ours, who keep their place Along our shadowy ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton

... the invisible things of darkness universally bound up with our feeble and fallen nature. Since the day of his first estrangement, man never, even in imagination or apprehension, approaches the dark and shadowy threshold of a world unseen without terror, lest some supernatural communication should break forth; it seems a feeling coeval with the curse on our first parents, when they heard "the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden, and were afraid." This apprehension still clings ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... the Virgin and Christ, flying through the air in a sort of cloud of shadowy cherubic faces; underneath was a landscape, forty or fifty miles in extent, and a purple ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... hoped that he too would be a girl. In the first place he became the greatest swordsman of his age and I was thus able to add him to my fine collection of Elizabethan heroes who have achieved this honour. What happens when two of these champions meet in those shadowy regions of romance where all costume novels are merged I do not know. It must be rather like the irresistible force and the immovable object. In the second place H.E. (no one could better deserve these formidable initials) was given the job of clearing Lundy Island of its piratical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various

... Mrs. Murray involuntarily laid her hand on her son's knee, and watched his face with an expression of breathless anxiety; and Edna saw that, though his lips blanched, not a muscle moved, not a nerve twitched; and only the deadly hate, that appeared to leap into his large shadowy eyes, told that the name ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... Drew Lennox that he was staring helplessly at the dark shadowy shape for quite a minute—but it was only a matter of a few seconds—before, snatching his left hand from his companion's grasp, he let his revolver drop to the full extent of its lanyard, and ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... Fairly to him was that there was no one complaining. No one looked reproach at him. If a lady was pale and reserved, she did not seem to accuse him, and to require coaxing. All faces here were as light as the flying moment, and did not carry the shadowy weariness of years, like that burdensome fair face in the London lodging-house, to which the Fates had terribly attached themselves. So, he was gay. He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and a bright one. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... reverential abstinence; and Paradise and the Fall of Man are perhaps sufficiently mythic to permit poets to take certain liberties with them. But even so far Milton has not entirely succeeded. His wars of the angels are shadowy. They have no substance like the battles of Greeks and Trojans, or Centaurs and Lapithae; and Satan could not be made interesting without touches of a nobler nature, that is, without ceasing to be the Satan ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude

... wait. In less than half an hour three shadowy figures slipped round the edge of the corral and up the lane. Each of them carried a rifle in addition to ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine

... deadly hatred of religion and of race—in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit; but the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act, called William Ratcliffe, in which there is rather a feeble use of the Scotch ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... interlacing boughs of grand old chestnuts; now barriered on the edge of a ravine with broken fragments and boulders of granite, garlanded by heavy vines; now skirting orchards full of promise; and all the way companied by a tiny brook, veiled deeply in alder and hazel thickets, and making in its shadowy channel perpetual muffled music, like a child singing in the twilight to reassure its half-fearful heart. Kate's face was softened and full of rich expression; her pink ribbons threw a delicate tinge of bloom upon the rounded cheek and pensive eyelid; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... And he saw in his dream a mighty host Of the writers gone before, And the shadowy form of many a ghost Glided in ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... in. I did so, and in the dim light saw at the end of the hall a white figure which was barely distinguishable and which I took to be the individual who had spoken to me. Consequently I addressed my conversation to it. The shadowy form asked me what I wanted and I explained that I had lost my way and asked where the headquarters of my battalion were. The being replied that it did not know but invited me to come in and spend the night. At that moment somebody from the upstairs region came with an electric ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott



Words linked to "Shadowy" :   shadow, indistinct, insubstantial, unsubstantial, dim, shaded, umbrageous



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