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More "Shapeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in these last few minutes between him and Quade. The latter had already hunched himself forward, the red knife in his hand poised at his waistline. He was terrible. His huge bulk, his red face and bull neck, his eyes popping from behind their fleshy lids, and the dripping blade in the shapeless hulk of his hand gave him the appearance as he stood there of some monstrous gargoyle instead of a thing of flesh and blood. And Aldous was terrible to look at, but in a way that wrung a moaning cry from Joanne. His face was livid from the beat of the rocks; it was crusted ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... all misty in my mind; but I do recall (for when Skipper Tommy had made my mother's coffin he took me to the heads of Good Promise to see the sight) that the big seas of that day pounded the vessel to a shapeless wreck on the jagged rocks of the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils: where she lay desolate for many a day thereafter. But the sea was not quick enough to balk our folk of their salvage: all day long—even while the ship was going to pieces—they swarmed upon her; ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... dust, plowing the grass with splintered limbs, then lying very still. From glorious tree to battered log it sank. No man ever saw more instant wreck and ruin fall lightning-like on a fair thing. The mass was crushed flat and shapeless by its own vast weight, and the larger boughs, which did not touch the earth, were snapped short off by the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Isabela on the north coast, the settlers in an ever increasing stream removed to the new town which flourished as the other decayed, until after a few years Isabela was entirely abandoned. The only vestiges now remaining of it are a few ruined foundation walls and shapeless heaps of stone overgrown with rank ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... almost unanimous cry. The life of Lycidas had not been in greater peril when he had been discovered at the midnight burial, or when he had wrestled with Abishai on the edge of the cliff. In a few moments the young Greek would have lain a shapeless trampled corpse beneath his murderers' feet, when the one word "Forbear!" uttered in a loud, clear voice whose tones of command had been heard above the din of battle, stayed hands uplifted to destroy; and with the exclamation, "Maccabeus! the prince!" the throng fell back on either ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... and sunning their plumage, on ledges of riven stone below us. Every object forming the wide sweep of the view was on the vastest and most majestic scale. The wild varieties of form in the jagged line of rocks stretched away eastward and westward, as far as the eye could reach; black shapeless masses of mist scowled over the whole landward horizon; the bright blue sky at the opposite point was covered with towering white clouds which moved and changed magnificently; the tossing and raging ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... vocalist is a comic man, who emerges from behind the scenes in a grotesquely exaggerated costume—an ill-fitting, long, green calico tail-coat, with a huge yellow bandana dangling from a rear pocket; a red cotton umbrella with a brass ring on one end and a glass hook on the other; light blue shapeless trousers; a flaming orange—colored vest; a huge standing collar, and in his buttonhole a ridiculous artificial flower. This type of comic singer is unknown in American concert-halls of any grade, though he is sometimes seen at the German concerts in the Bowery of the lowest class. Here he is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... New College gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn observed, "something simply slick about all these old quatrangleses," crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always returned to his exile's room, where he now began to hear the new voice of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn't care whether he loved ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... he would, he could not expel from his mind the new and painful principle which disturbed it. And thus he went on, sometimes triumphantly defending Mary from all ungenerous suspicion, and again writhing under the vague and shapeless surmises which the singular events of the evening sent crowding to his imagination. His dreams on retiring to seek repose were frightful—several times in the night he saw graceful Phil squinting at him with a nondescript leer of vengeance and derision in his yellow goggle eyes, and ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... a very good chance of exercising his imagination in the sky chamber where he slept—a capital situation from which to observe the world. There could not have been an uglier view created—a shapeless mass of brick and stone and painted wood, a collected, towering monstrosity of rectangular and inharmonious lines, a realized dream of hideousness—but for the splendid sky, always changing and doing all that was possible in the gleams and shadows and the glowing colors of morning and evening ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... into the garden and to the strawberry patch, where she found Lucretia in her familiar, colorless, shapeless dress, picking berries in the hot sun, the mosquitoes biting her neck ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... windows in the house, but the arches for the doors were still standing, where ivy, poison oak and wild honey-suckle hung in profusion; the cellar, which was quite filled with stones, was overgrown with Solomon's seal, eschscholtzia and yerba santa, while a white rose and a shapeless clump of half wild artichokes grew where the garden had once been, also many flowers, hardly distinguishable from the weeds, having lost all they had ever gained by cultivation; a winding bed of ranunculus, or little frog, ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... by the fire, and in summer they could be preserved only by keeping them on ice; and if, during the thawing process, they were placed too near the fire, there was danger that they would melt into a shapeless and useless mass. They cost from three to five dollars per pair, which was very high for an article ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... a piece of slate between the doorstep and the wall. There she kept three stunted little wall-flowers—no room for more—which she attended to every morning after breakfast. Cats destroyed them in the end. She laughed, as it were gleefully. Her laugh is her own; derisive, open-mouthed, shapeless, hardly sane—but she has a smile—a smile at nothing in particular, at her own thoughts—which is singularly sweet and pathetic. I cannot but think that the spirit which enables her to live on without despair, to love her little garden and to smile so sweetly, is better worth than much material ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... minute more a fat old squaw rounded the spruce grove and shied off startled when she glimpsed Bud. Bud grunted and started on, and the squaw stepped clear of the faintly defined trail to let him pass. Moreover, she swung her shapeless body around so that she half faced him as he passed. Bud's lips tightened, and he gave her only a glance. He hated fat old squaws that were dirty and wore their hair straggling down over their crafty, black eyes. They burlesqued womanhood in a way that ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... entrance is to the west, between the two towers first mentioned, over a draw-bridge, whose piers still remain, and through three gateways, whose arches, though now torn and dislocated into shapeless rents, seem to have been circular, and probably of Norman erection. One of the towers of the gate-way appears formerly to have been a chapel. Hence you pass into a court, whose surface, uneven with the remains of foundations, marks it ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... long jack boots, butchers' blouses of white and shapeless form, are Russian soldiers. Soldiers, indeed! where is the smartness, the upright bearing, the stately tread and general air of cleanliness one expects in a soldier? These men look as if they had just tumbled out of their beds and were still wearing night-shirts; even ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... than the waste rubbish from brickyards, the rejected accumulations of years—not by any means the unburned, but the overburned, the hard, flinty, molten, misshapen and highly-colored masses of burned clay which indeed refused to be consumed, but have been twisted into shapeless blocks by the fervent heat. Of course, with such unconventional materials for the main walls it would be a silly affectation to embellish the exterior of the house with elaborate mouldings or ornamental wood-work, ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Simon Tappertit, the recreant 'prentice, burnt and bruised, and with a gun-shot wound in his body; and his legs—his perfect legs, the pride and glory of his life, the comfort of his existence—crushed into shapeless ugliness. Wondering no longer at the moans they had heard, Dolly kept closer to her father, and shuddered at the sight; but neither bruises, burns, nor gun-shot wound, nor all the torture of his shattered limbs, sent half so keen a pang to Simon's breast, as Dolly ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... scarcely large enough to contain the few articles of furniture absolutely required. Its walls were of unplaned plank occasionally failing to meet, and the only covering to the floor was a dingy strip of rag-carpet. The bed was a cot, shapeless, and propped up on one side by the iron leg of some veranda bench, while the open window looked out into the street. There was a bolt, not appearing particularly secure, with which Miss Donovan immediately ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... shapeless cap, made of a goat's skin, with a flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the sun from me as to shoot the rain off from running into my neck, nothing being so hurtful in these climates as the rain upon the ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... request, and Turkey told us one or two stories out of history books he had been reading, and I pulled out my story of the Robins and read to them. And so the hot sun went down the glowing west, and threw longer and longer shadows eastward. A great shapeless blot of darkness, with legs to it, accompanied every cow, and calf, and bullock wherever it went. There was a new shadow crop in the grass, and a huge patch with long tree-shapes at the end of it, stretched away from the foot of the hillock. The ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... this day. The heavens over you are the same; the same shores; morning comes, and evening, as they did. All else, how changed! What grim batteries crowd the burdened shores! What scenes have filled this air, and disturbed these waters! These shattered heaps of shapeless stone are all that is left of Fort Sumter. Desolation broods in yonder sad city—solemn retribution hath avenged our dishonored banner! You have come back with honor, who departed hence, four years ago, leaving the air sultry with fanaticism. The surging crowds that rolled up their frenzied shouts, ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... The shapeless character of my fears and suspicions did not by any means lessen their force and volume. On the contrary it caused them to loom out through the hazy atmosphere of the imagination, assuming aspects more huge and terrible, in consequence of their very ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... went up, and up the soft expression of those chiselled features, the delicate curves and outlines of the limbs and figure, became gradually fainter and fainter, and when at last it readied the place for which it was intended, it was a shapeless ball, enveloped in mist. Of course, the idol of the hour was now clamored down as rationally as it had been cried up, and its dishonored rival, with no good will and no good looks on the part of the chagrined populace, was reared in its ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... blue eyes, twinkling with delight and pride. Yes, there they are, photographed somewhere in my brain, the wrinkled, yellow, withered faces of the two old women, their watery eyes and toothless mouths, with figures as shapeless as the bowlders on the beach, watching beside the bed where lay the white but tenderly beautiful face of the young girl, with her curls of glossy hair tossed about the pillow, and her long, tremulous eyelashes making a ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the potter working at his wheel; and it is wonderful to see the beautiful effects he can produce. He can take a lump of clay, and from that shapeless mass of matter he can make vessels and ornaments of rarest beauty. He has no machinery but that simple wheel, but by that and the skillful movements of his hand, he can evolve beauty out of chaos. It made me think of the way God evolved this beautiful world out of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... error to believe that. Monnica wept real tears. In her whole-hearted prayers she bedewed the pavement of the basilica; she moistened the balustrade against which she leant her forehead. This austere woman, this widow whose face nobody saw any more, whose body was shapeless by reason of the mass of stuffs, grey and black, which wrapped her from head to foot—this rigid Christian concealed a heart full of love. Love such as this was then a ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... her guide's arm in terror; for through an open door-way of the second story, to which she was ascending with her companion, she saw in the dusk a shapeless figure, moving strangely hither and thither, up and down. Her tone was by no means confident as, pointing towards it with her finger, she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... larger vessel, continued their course; they passed along the narrow and dangerous defile of the Gewirre, and the fearful whirlpool of the "Bank;" and on the shore to the left the enormous rock of Lurlei rose, huge and shapeless, on their gaze. In this place is a singular echo, and one of the boatmen wound a horn, which produced an almost supernatural music,—so wild, loud, and oft ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and know not what we want, and cry With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by. Love's for completeness! No perfection grows 'Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose, And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied. Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape, Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape, Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed, Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost By crescive ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... pyramidal heaps here and there, at the base of which he laid mould, and planted rose-bushes, the Barbadoes flower-fence, and other shrubs which love to climb the rocks. In a short time the dark and shapeless heaps of stones he had constructed were covered with verdure, or with the glowing tints of the most beautiful flowers. Hollow recesses on the borders of the streams shaded by the overhanging boughs of aged trees, formed rural grottoes, impervious ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... fire, shapeless in his whitened coat, with his bronzed face half hidden by his big fur cap, he had nevertheless ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... appeared constantly to multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting them, there were never any more. Sometimes, in the distance, masses of foam rose up like a wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as the coming waves took form out of the unseen, it seemed as if no phantom were too vast or shapeless to come rolling in upon their ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... loss to account for. For a moment the two faces confronted each other silently, in marked national contrast—the Scotchman's, long and lean, hard and regular; the German's, plump and florid, soft and shapeless. One face looked as if it had never been young; the other, as if it would ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... idols which man sets up for adoration, have usually had their birth, either in the bosom of misfortune, when ignorance was at a loss to account for the calamities of the earth upon natural principles, or else have been the shapeless fruit of melancholy, working upon an alarmed mind, coupled with enthusiasm and an unbridled imagination. It has been pointed out how these prejudices, transmitted by tradition from father to son, grafting themselves upon infant minds, cultivated by education, nourished by fear, corroborated ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... straggly brown moustache stained with coffee, and stumpy black teeth, and gnarled hands into which the dirt and grease were ground so deeply that washing them would obviously be a waste of time. His clothes were worn and shapeless, his celluloid collar was cracked and his necktie was almost a rag. You would never have looked at such a man twice on the street—and yet the Candidate saw in him one of those obscure heroes who are making a movement which is to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... without molestation from the Gauls who inhabit those regions. Then, tho the scene had been previously anticipated from report (by which uncertainties are wont to be exaggerated), yet the height of the mountains when viewed so near, and the snows almost mingling with the sky, the shapeless huts situated on the cliffs, the cattle and beasts of burden withered by the cold, the men unshorn and wildly drest, all things, animate and inanimate, stiffened with frost, and other objects more terrible to be seen than described, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another's, but, while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine, keeps this one object carefully in view—if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary, to fashion and to polish it; if anything already reduced to shape and developed, to consolidate and strengthen it; if any already ratified and defined, to keep and guard it. Finally, what ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... founder of the library of St. Mark. The antiquary Tomasini found Petrarch's books cast aside in a dark room behind the Horses of Lysippus. Some had crumbled into powder, and others had been glued into shapeless masses by the damp. The survivors were placed in the Libraria Vecchia, and are now in the Ducal Palace; but it was long before they were permitted to enter the building that sheltered the gift ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... to all the Berceau, the news was not very terrible, because it was so vague and distant—an evil so far off and shapeless. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... rather disparagingly of 'many among us,' who 'will be found upon inquiry, to fancy God in the shape of a man sitting in heaven, and have other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.' As though it were possible to think of shapeless Being, or as though it were criminal in the superstitious to believe 'God made man after his own image.' A 'Philosophical Unbeliever,' who made minced meat of Dr. Priestley's reasonings on the existence of God, well remarked that 'Theists are always for turning their God into an overgrown ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... she sat in the dark, having turned out the light, the deep breathing of the children told her they were asleep. She rose quietly, stepped to the window, and stood looking at the three shapeless, tattered stockings. She was high up in the tenement and the moonlight came softly over the house roofs of the city into the bare, cold, cheerless room. She stared at the stockings and tears streamed down ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand, Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head; O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears? What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate! O shade so sedate and decorous ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... dire, Vague terror, shapeless dole. Forever climbing ghats of fire I struggled to a goal Where, lone upon the suttee pyre, I saw my life's long-lost desire— The widow of ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeled on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... light streamed unbrokenly through the wood. And then it could be seen that the yellow mass of undergrowth HAD moved with the passage of another figure than his own. For ever since he had entered the shade, a woman, shawled in a vague, shapeless fashion, had watched him wonderingly, eagerly, excitedly, gliding from tree to tree as he advanced, or else dropping breathlessly below the fronds of fern whence she gazed at him as between parted fingers. When he wheeled she had run openly to the west, albeit with hidden face ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the character of the scene was varied considerably for the worse. A hilly, waste, and uncultivated country approached close to the banks; the trees were few, and limited to the neighbourhood of the stream, and the rude moors swelled at a little distance into shapeless and heavy hills, which were again surmounted in their turn by a range of lofty mountains, dimly seen on the horizon. Thus the tower commanded two prospects, the one richly cultivated and highly adorned, the other exhibiting ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... rage upon his block-like legs—but he did not for one second take his full attention from the report until it had been completed. Then he seized the nearest object, which happened to be his chair, and with all his enormous strength hurled it across the floor, where it lay, a tattered, twisted, shapeless mass of metal. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... with him—the latter angry and pulling him, the former weeping and imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if he had been ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... single row of egregious dwellings, squat, uncouth, stretching away on either side of the veranda-fronted store and "gambling hell" which formed a sort of center-piece around which revolved the whole life of the village. It was a poor, mean place, shapeless, evil-smelling in that pure mountain air. It was a mere shelter, a rough perch for the human carrion lusting for the orgy of gold which the time-worn carcass of earth should yield. What had these people to do with comfort ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Henry had made upon Denis Malster had been unfavourable in the extreme. Here was a man who could not be relied upon to be the same two days running. On the occasion of his first visit to Bullion Ltd. he had looked a vagabond; his clothes had hung in shapeless folds about his body, completely concealing whatever ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... legs pitched high as he slid off the lunging steed. His other foot caught in the stirrup. This fact terribly frightened the horse. He bolted, dragging the rustler for a dozen jumps. Then Snecker's foot slipped loose. He lay limp and still and shapeless in the road. I did not need to go ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... Britannia after I stepped from her deck back to the small steamer that had taken us to her. "How little I thought" (were the last lines of his first American letter), "the first time you mounted the shapeless coat, that I should have such a sad association with its back as when I saw it by the paddle-box of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the sound of some commotion outside, the sound of hurried footsteps and agitated voices. Then a terrible little procession appeared. Something—it seemed to be a shapeless heap of clothes—was carried in and laid upon the floor, in the little space between the revolving doors and the inner entrance. Two blue-liveried attendants kept back the horrified but curious crowd. Francis, vaguely recognised as being somehow or other connected with the law, was ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there, in front of his eyes, is the figure as his fancy made it—brittle, easily broken into dust, but impossible of being moulded afresh until it shall again go back into the water of oblivion and become the shapeless mass that ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... discover a skiff moored in a little-visited creek, which the boatman got out for me. The sculls were rough and shapeless—it is a remarkable fact that sculls always are, unless you have them made and keep them for your own use. I paddled up the river; I paused by an osier-grown islet; I slipped past the barges, and avoided an unskilful party; it was the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... bed, she descried a pair of keen eyes—the face of Mrs. Harrington. The face, the eyes, the mind were alive, the body was stricken; it was almost dead already. Mrs. Harrington looked down at the shapeless limbs beneath the coverlet with something like fear in her eyes, something of the expression of a dog that has been run over. This ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... as he thrust stiff fingers deep within the shapeless coat pockets. He slowly withdrew his right hand holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He tore a three-cornered flap in the cover, looked at the brightly colored contents, replaced the flap and returned the parcel, his chin ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... lunge with his bayonet at a gaunt, yellow-faced spectre of a man who staggered on to the boat with a child in his arms wrapped in a tattered blue quilt. A gust of the chilly wind picked his shapeless, loose-fitting hat off as he leaped to avoid the bayonet-point, and his head was seen to be shaven. The crowd on the bank laughed loud at his clumsiness and at his grotesque head. Joel Rae ran to help him forward on ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... pig faces; called by the aborigines by the more elegant name of canagong. The pulp of the almost shapeless, but somewhat ob-conical, fleshy seed vessel of this plant, is sweetish and saline; it is about an inch and a half long, of a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... bounding from place to place, always gathering speed, till he lay a shapeless mass among the stones of the valley; and, in spite of himself, he turned ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... making an experiment which to many minds will seem uncalled for and ridiculous. I mean the experiment of trying to visualize, by an arbitrary exercise of fancy, the sort of form or shape which this formless and shapeless thing may ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... even the genital organs, whilst there was yet scarcely any trace of the liver. And indeed at the period when all the parts, like the heart itself in the beginning, are still white, and except in the veins there is no appearance of redness, you shall see nothing in the seat of the liver but a shapeless collection, as it were, of extravasated blood, which you might take for the effects of a ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... malice sought them in the quiet of their homes—outraged and slew them in cold blood. Thus with the past as a haunting, bitter recollection, the present filled with fear and disaster, and the future a shapeless horror, think ye life was sweet to the Negro? Bitter? Bitter as death? Ay, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... feathered race. Birds of the boldest wing and brightest hues—the denizens of the woods and the waters—of every variety of plumage, habit, song, and size—from the splendid macaw and toucan to the uncouth pelican and the shapeless puffin—from the gigantic ostrich to the beautiful but diminutive golden wren; in short, all the birds which are congregated in this spot come, literally, from every corner of our globe. The great alpine vulture may have sailed above the heights of Hohenlinden; the Egyptian vulture have roosted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs; young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step they took was going ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... and if King Robert did enter these visions, it was simply as her sovereign, as one whose patriotism would yet achieve the liberty of Scotland; but there was a dimness even o'er that dream, for the figure of her noble boy was gone, naught but a blank—dull, shapeless—occupied that spot in the vision of the future, which once his ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... soon recovered, but asked to be taken to Belgrave Square at once. Wild as I was with the desire to go in quest of Winifred; goaded as I was by a new, nameless, shapeless dread which certain words of Wilderspin's had aroused, but which (like the dread that had come to me on the night of my father's funeral) was too appalling to confront, I was obliged to leave the studio and take my mother to the house of my aunt, who was, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... when he is alone. I will venture in; perhaps I can make something of him." So he stepped slowly to the door and listened again; then taking heart, he opened it suddenly. In the dimly-lighted room sat a stooping figure in a leathern chair, a shapeless hat on its head. The figure kept constantly nodding, and muttering unintelligible words. How changed was Hirsch Ehrenthal in the course of the past year! When he last drove over the baron's estate, he was a stout, respectable-looking man, a fresh, well-preserved man, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... one of Johnny's arrows in a tuft of fern. This was conclusive evidence that we were upon the right track. A little farther on, was a piece of marshy ground, and here we made a startling discovery. In the soft soil, several foot-prints could be plainly distinguished. Some were coarse, shapeless impressions, precisely such as would be made by the rude moccasins worn by Arthur and Johnny. Others were the prints of naked feet, and some of these were of far too large a size to be made by either of the three. This discovery affected us for the moment like ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... a week to pack, and unpack, to go panting down-stairs to the corner drug-store for new tubes of tooth-paste and a presentable sponge, to remend all that was remendable, to press Father's flappy, shapeless little trousers with the family flat-iron, to worry over whether she should take the rose-pink or the daffodil-yellow wrapper—which had both faded to approximately the same shade of gray, but which were ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... idols, for such the natives would have regarded them, were lowered overboard, and went bobbing about astern of the ship, and the water soon washing off the paint, reduced them to the appearance of shapeless logs. There were still several cases of crucifixes of all sizes, having the appearance of silver but were found to be of iron, covered with the thinnest tinsel. The priests pleaded hard to have ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mussulmanic. So far as looks were concerned, he was not a flattering example of his race, whatever his race might be. The portentous size of his beak-like nose would have been, in itself, sufficient to damn him in any court of beauty. His lips were thick and shapeless,—and this, joined to another peculiarity in his appearance, seemed to suggest that, in his veins there ran more than a streak of negro blood. The peculiarity alluded to was his semblance of great age. As one eyed him one was reminded ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... who almost seem to consider it their whole life's mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground, a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is as though fire, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... artist is seen to the utmost advantage. There, dressed in the vast, shapeless coat which drapes itself about him as he gesticulates, his neck free from the cravat which puts modern Europeans in the pillory, and allowing himself greater space than at his concerts—there, and there alone, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... almost finished with the schoolroom. She was down on her hands and knees in the midst of a steaming muck of soapy water. On her feet were a pair of man's shoes fastened with buckles; a dirty cotton gown, damp with the water, clung about her shapeless, stunted figure. From time to time she sat back on her heels to ease the strain of her position, and with one smoking hand, white and parboiled with the hot water, brushed her hair, already streaked with gray, out of ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and Leadenhall Street; the eastern Billiter Street and Mark Lane; the southern Thames Street; and the western the east side of Walbrook. Of the larger Roman wall, there were within the memory of man huge, shapeless masses, with trees growing upon them, opposite what is now Finsbury Circus. In 1852 a piece of Roman wall on Tower Hill was rescued from the improvers, and built into some stables and outhouses; but not before a careful sketch had been effected by the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... entry of the outcasts into the promised land. Tired, travel-stained, and worn come the fair-haired crowd of men and women and many children, eating all manner of strange food while they rest, and speaking all manner of strange tongues, carrying the most uncouth shapeless boxes that trunk-maker of Bergen or Upsal can devise—such queer oval red-and-green painted wooden cases, more like boxes to hold musical instruments than for the Sunday kit of Hans or Christian—clothing much soiled and worn by ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... which I stand, instead of being what it has often been represented to be, is but a shapeless mass of earth 205 feet high, occupying a village square of 1310 feet. It is sufficiently wasted by time to give full scope to the imagination to fill out or restore it to almost any form. One hundred ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... old occupants of her place and her husband's; to have a vivid experience of how they looked, spoke, and lived; to see them in spirit—in their morning good wishes, their noonday cares, their evening cheer, their nightly prayers? Was their union only apparent? were they severed by a dim, shapeless, insurmountable barrier, for ever together, yet for ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... degraded and irreligious population, belongs exclusively to the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. But more ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... struck: and in this connection it may be pointed out that symbols which stand out clearly and distinctly by themselves are of more importance than those with difficulty to be discerned amid cloudlike masses of shapeless leaves. When these clouds obscure or surround a lucky sign they weaken its force, and vice versa. In tea-cup reading, however, the fortune told must be regarded chiefly as of a horary character, not, as with an astrological horoscope, that ...
— Tea-Cup Reading, and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves • 'A Highland Seer'
... resounded to the strains of music and the shouts of revelry, a few black tents of the wandering Arab and Turkoman are now scattered among the shapeless mounds of earth and rubbish,—the ruins of the city,—as if in mockery of her departed glory; while their tenants were engaged in the fitting employment of weaving 'sackcloth of hair,' as if for the mourning attire of the ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... body, a poor, shapeless, sodden thing with such a crumpled skull. My thoughts went back to the sweet-faced girl who had wept so bitterly at his going. Even then, maybe, she was thinking of him, fondly dreaming of his return, seeing the glow of triumph in his boyish ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... was Wilkins. He is the only human being I ever disliked so that it was hard to speak to him. His brother, too, the agent who had charge of all Mr. Maynard's business, was almost as disagreeable as he. They both looked like bloated frogs; their wide, shapeless mouths, flat noses, and prominent eyes, made me shudder when I ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... general. Mr Broderip describes the curious way in which he saw a toucan seize a small bird, pluck off the feathers, and having broken the bones of the wings and legs with his beak, continue working away till he had reduced it to a shapeless mass. He then hopped from perch to perch, uttering a peculiar hollow, chattering noise, and began pulling off piece after piece, till he had swallowed the whole, not even leaving the beak and logs. In a quarter of an hour he had finished, when he cleansed ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... stones but live buffalo. Big Pete had often told me that these animals lived unmolested by him in the park; but when I realized that I was looking at between three and four hundred real buffalo my heart gave a great jump of joy. I tried to view them so as to take in their details, but the apparently shapeless masses of dark reddish brown wool appeared to have none, unless indeed the comical fur trousers with frayed bottoms on their front ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... quaint village street with a row of pollarded elms on each side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched, bearing upon their summits a shapeless something which had once been the rampant lion of Capus of Birlstone. A short walk along the winding drive with such sward and oaks around it as one only sees in rural England, then a sudden turn, and the long, low Jacobean house of dingy, liver-coloured brick lay before us, with an ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... century, which soon became, and deservedly, a favourite in the Highlands, it unhappily was used as a single belting in exposed places near farm houses and steadings. The consequence, as every one who travels through the Highlands must be painfully conscious of, has been trees shapeless and crooked, giving no shelter, and unpleasing in view. A ludicrous illustration of this may be seen from the Highland Railway between Forres and Dunphail, the larches having grown up zig-zag, according as the several winds happened to prevail. It is well known that no regular plantation ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... was descending endless stairs and dark corridors, with a heavy, shapeless burden on her shoulders. A bright, constantly-changing flame flickered before her; now red, now yellow, now green, it flitted before her from side to side. She knew that if she could reach it, the burden would fall from her. But the light seemed to ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Peggy let her muscles slacken and leant back, limp and shapeless, against the cushions, while Rob, in his turn, gave ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... breathed heavily, and moved restlessly in the old four-poster. As Peter stood up he saw that the patched quilts were all askew over her shapeless bulk. Evidently, she ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... episode most unaccountable, particularly when I reflect that while no trace of my visitor was discoverable in my room the next morning, as my nurse tells me, my blue necktie was in reality found upon the floor, crushed and torn into a shapeless ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... robing-room of the kings were cellars filled with rubbish. Of them only crumbling walls remain. And on the south and west the facades of the cathedral and flying buttresses and statues of kings, angels, and saints were mangled and shapeless. ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... was ascending the steps, heavily burdened. So heavily was he burdened that for the moment ascent looked impossible. Each arm was filled with a shapeless bundle of white and yellow fur which closer inspection revealed ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. We both saw a large, pale light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attics. I followed the light, and my servant followed me. It entered, to the right of the landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open. I entered in the same ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... light the children bent lovingly over the little fluttering thing in the old man's hand; they had never before seen a young bird at such close range and they looked with wonder at the soft, shapeless body, the big eyes, the ugly bill, wide open ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets, and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful agent, that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed through all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... blotchy, oily skin, Red, Rough Hands, with chaps, painful finger ends and shapeless nails, and simple Baby Humors prevented and cured by CUTICURA SOAP. A marvelous beautifier of world-wide celebrity, it is simply incomparable as a Skin Purifying Soap, unequalled for the Toilet and without ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... red, shapeless remain of two horses, and near them a ghastly scattering of bleached bones. "A lion-lair right here on the flat. Those two horses were killed early this spring, and I see no signs of their carcasses having been covered with brush and dirt. I've got to learn lion ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless creature who had put me to bed ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... look more than five years old, if as much, but what her natural figure was like, it would have been hard to say, for she had apparently two, if not three dresses, one above the other, and over these a thick red woollen shawl wound round about her, so that the little body presented a shapeless appearance, as, with its small feet shod in thick, nailed mountain-shoes, it slowly and laboriously plodded its way up in the heat. The two must have left the valley a good hour's walk behind them, ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... levelling an obtrusive gun, once the colour of bright gold. Now the legend above the picture is faded beyond conjecture; the gun's relation to the title is a matter of faith; the menaced animal, wearied of the long aim of the hunter, has resolved itself into a shapeless blot. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... be easier than he had expected; but a looker-on would have shuddered to see the way in which the lad clung to the rough stones, where the slightest slip would have sent him down headlong for at least three hundred feet before he touched anywhere, and then bounded off again, a mere mass of shapeless flesh. ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... though as game to die? Has Science spoilt their skill, that their iron pots so fill my old Locker? How I thrill at the lumbering crash, When a-crunch upon a rock, with a thundering Titan shock, goes some shapeless metal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... crouched like a big bull in a small space, poking his close-cropped black head out like a turtle that's not sure something won't be thrown at it, and then dragging his big bulk out and standing over you. He used to be trim—Tom—and taut, but in those shapeless things, the old trousers, the dirty white shirt, and the ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... morning—it was a volume of Boileau, which the student knew by heart, and the pages whereof did not altogether absorb his attention—he passed and repassed a bench on which a lady sat, pensive and solitary, tracing shapeless figures on the ground with the point of her parasol. He glanced at her somewhat carelessly the first time of passing, more curiously on the second occasion, and the third time with considerable attention. Something in her attitude—helplessness, hopelessness, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... away at one or two exercises. As Nicholas Rubinstein once said to me, "Scales should never be dry. If you are not interested in them work with them until you become interested in them." They should be played with accents and in different rhythms. If they are given in the shapeless manner in which some teachers obliged their unfortunate pupils to practice them they are worthless. I do not believe in working out technical exercises at a table or with a dumb piano. The brain must always work with the fingers, and without the sound of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... was forty feet long, and twenty feet round at the thickest part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing, like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the blowholes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head measured about twenty-one feet round. Its ears were ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... speaking, I thought I heard a little gasp behind me. I turned. I wanted to see this woman who stirred my memory with her voice. But the rays of the lantern did not fall on her, and she was a shapeless blur in the darkness. Somehow I felt that she was looking intently ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... would be ready to go the moment when he was called on! Money to a man who has no wife, no children, no interests outside the sacred circle of the Church! Brother, do you see the dust and dirt and shapeless marble chips lying around your statue there? Cover that floor instead with gold, and, though the litter may have changed in color and form, in my eyes ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the outer Mulberry Street. Tilted back in chairs against the wall, in various attitudes of dislocation of the spine and compound fracture of the neck, are an Alderman of the ward, an Assistant-Assessor, and the lady who keeps the hotel. The first two are shapeless with a slumber defying every law of comfortable anatomy; the last is dreamily attempting to light a stumpy pipe with the wrong end of a match, and shedding tears, in the dim morning ghastliness, at her ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... it was only minutes before the blessed sound of waddling feet came to the bedroom door. Old Grandma Simons, Mrs. Napthaly's mother, came in. Martie liked and Teddy loved the shapeless, moustached old woman, who lived out obscure dim days in the flat below, washing and dressing and feeding little black-eyed grandchildren. Martie never saw her in anything but a baggy, spotted black house-dress, but there were great gatherings and feasts occasionally downstairs, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... world! Beholding with dismay That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey, A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare, The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair, Makes haste to clutch the beast. Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day, Till lies the beast, a shapeless carcass there! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... such as those which Pausanias found still devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who, coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only a shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods, which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing ever with the worshippers in whom they live and move and have their being, borrow something of the lordliness and distinction ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... great than thine, Might cause alarm; but, far as light extends, Of this great work to thee shall be the fame: When with their ships the long-hair'd Greeks shall take Their homeward voyage to their native land, This wall shall by the waves be broken through, And sink, a shapeless ruin, in the sea: O'er the wide shore again thy sands shall spread, And all the boasted work ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... morning when they stepped out of the stove-warmed car into the stinging cold of the prairie. Fur-clad figures, showing shapeless in the creeping light, clustered about them, and Winston felt himself thumped on the shoulders by mittened hands, while Alfreton's young voice broke ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... your trust Upon unstaid perverseness! now ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the untimely embryon of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by the unletter'd Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply, And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... monsters were changing color as he marched them through the door and into the open. But now they glowed with a visible red that rapidly intensified to the dazzling whiteness of intense heat. Cadorna babbled in superstitious terror. Then, in an instant, both mechanisms were reduced to shapeless blobs of molten metal. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... the battle, he had sought the Lord for a dream, and had lain down by my side in hope. The dream came, but it was a dream of the Terror, and he shrieked and turned, and clasped me in his arms; and I soothed him, and asked him what he had dreamed, but he could not tell—it was a horror, awful, shapeless, which he dared not try to utter; and he clasped me again, me wretched, clasped me for the last time. He rose and went out in the morning early; went round his army by himself. He was alone, and he knew that God ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... to be an unusual clearness in the air, for Spidertracks distinctly heard the buzz of some earnest conversation. There seemed strange shadows floating in the air—a strange sense of something moving toward him—something almost shapeless, yet tangible—something that approached him—that gave him a sense of insecurity and then of alarm. Suddenly the indefinable something uttered a yell, and resolved itself into a party of miners, led by the gallant and aggrieved major himself, ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... the Almo, two huge shapeless masses of ruins may be seen above the vineyard walls: that on the left is said to be the tomb of Geta, the son of the Emperor Severus, who was put to death in his mother's arms by order of his unnatural brother. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... deficiency Seth should have endeavored to hide. The thatch of the roof, the sod, the carpetless floor, the lack of furniture, the plain wooden bedstead in the corner with its mattress of straw, the crazy window fashioned by his own rude carpentry, the shapeless door which was like a slap in the face with its raw and ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... structure is demolished when reduced to a shapeless mass; it is razed when leveled with the ground; it is destroyed when its structural unity is gone, whether or not its component parts remain. An edifice is destroyed by fire or earthquake; it is demolished by bombardment; it is ruined when, by violence or neglect, it has become ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the dresser, where the face in the silver frame smiled up at her. She stared at the picture for one long minute fixedly, with unchanging expression, and suddenly she swept it from the dresser with a savage sweep of her hand, dashed it on the floor, and stamped it shapeless ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and witnessing tree Bent down, and in his branches registered Each dark and passionate word; And on the rocks, trenched in their shapeless sides, The terrible oath abides; And the dark waters, muttering to their waves, Bore to their secret mansions and dim caves The low of death they heard. Thus were the dead appeased—the listening dead— For, as the warrior paused, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... of the building, and yet is of a single piece and so large that it appears impossible that a stone of this description, weighing more than 200,000 pounds, could be placed so high up. But to return to our point, the masters of that day produced nothing but shapeless and clumsy things which may still be seen to-day. It was the same with architecture, for it was necessary to build, and as form and good methods were lost by the death of good artists and the destruction of good buildings, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... upon the broken deck of the great vessel added to the horror.... In a wild ungovernable mob they poured out of the saloons to witness one of the most appalling scenes possible to conceive.... For a hundred feet the bow was a shapeless mass of bent, broken and ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... "Shapeless heaps of rubbish cover for many an acre the face of the land.... On all sides, fragments of glass, marble, pottery, and inscribed brick are mingled with that peculiar nitrous and blanched soil, which, bred from the remains of ancient habitations, checks or ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... smaller central globe half filled with a colorless liquid. Beneath this, and half encircling it, was an intricate maze of bright wire; and two other wires dipped into it, touching the surface of the liquid with their platinum tips. Within the liquid pulsed a shapeless mass of almost ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... and drove towards his destination; then, dismissing the carriage, began to climb the steep rock-hewn steps leading to the place which was to be his journey's end. In those moments—with the waters of the Bay beneath him, and beyond the beautiful view of the distant islands like shapeless sea monsters guarding the approach, with the mountains capped by Vesuvius, and the towns gleaming white under the shimmer of the lazy smoke wreaths—he felt the reality of life. But it was not his own life spent in a vain chase after glory, a struggle for something ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... could have been heard some distance the WHIZZER settled to the sand. It ran along a slight distance, and then, as the bicycle wheels collapsed under the pressure, the airship seemed to go together in a shapeless mass. ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... and fresh. The land, as yet unwarmed by the slowly rising sun, was hung with a faint autumn mist. Traces of an early frost lay in the brown hedgerows inland; the sea was like a sheet of polished glass. Gone the smoke-stained rows of shapeless houses, the atmosphere polluted by a thousand chimneys belching smuts and black vapour, the clanging of electric cars, the rattle of all manner of vehicles over the cobbled streets. Gone the hoarse excitement ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the spleen by materializing spirits. Dr. Hotz for instance obtained two photographs of a materialization through the German medium, Minna-Demmler. On one a cloud of ether is seen oozing out through the left side of the medium, shapeless and without form. The second picture, taken a few moments later, shows the materialized spirit standing at the medium's side. Other photographs obtained by scientists from the Italian medium Eusapio Palladino show a luminous ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness with ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... slope. A packed snowfield was underfoot, firm enough to hold our weight, with a foot or so of loose, soft snow on its top. The falling flakes whirled around us. The darkness was solid. Our helmeted leather-furred flying suits were soon shapeless with a gathering white shroud. We carried our Essens in our gloved hands. The night was cold, around zero I imagine, though with that biting wind it ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... wondered what took so many foreigners, that is, Protestants, to Rome; it was so dreary, so melancholy a place; a number of old, crumbling, shapeless brick masses, the ground unlevelled, the straight causeways fenced by high monotonous walls, the points of attraction straggling over broad solitudes, faded palaces, trees universally pollarded, streets ankle deep ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... again over the boy as if he would trample him to a shapeless pulp. But, trembling there, he ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... the table there were indistinct glimmerings of light, and at the far end the outline of a dull glowing revolver, evidently in the detective's pocket. I remember a sort of subconscious satisfaction, as I settled the point in a queer automatic fashion. On the table, near to me, there was a little shapeless collection of the light; and this I knew, after an instant's consideration, to be the steel portions of ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... Charlie Bragg and an orderly to remove the supplies from the ambulance while the surgeon took Ruth to the hut that was to be her own. On the way they passed a crushed and shapeless mass that might once, the girl thought, have ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... Arthur returned from Paris with an order from the King for the revision of my sentence. Fresh witnesses were heard. Patience did not appear; but I received a note from him containing these words in a shapeless hand, "You are not guilty, so don't despair." The doctors declared that Mademoiselle de Mauprat might be examined without danger, but that her answers would have no meaning. She was now in better health. She had recognised her father, and at present would never leave him; ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... recognize the conventional teacher he knew in this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman who fronted him so sure of herself. She seemed to him to swim brilliantly in a tide of flushed beauty, in spite of the dust and the stains of travel. She was in a shapeless khaki riding-suit and a plain, gray, broad-brimmed Stetson. But the one could not hide the flexible curves that made so frankly for grace, nor the other the coppery tendrils that escaped in fascinating ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... mankind. He received no rewards except the approval of his conscience and the sympathy of his fellows; and he worked with an energy rarely paralleled by the most energetic public servant. His labours are described in a rather shapeless book[30] to which I may refer for full details. But I must add a few words upon his character. Venn was not an eloquent man either in the pulpit or on paper; nor can I ascribe him any power of speculative thought. He had ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... I wore on my head, was great, high, and shapeless, made of a goat's skin, with a flap of pent-house hanging down behind, not only to keep the sun from me, but to shoot the rain off from running into my neck, nothing being more pernicious than the rain falling ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... for a moment, a silent, shapeless figure in the cold air. "Pretty actions, I call it," said she then, quite loudly, and went out of the yard with a curious tilting motion on slender ankles, as of a balancing bale ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... after the fashion of her people, in the folds of a gigantic and flaming red turban constructed of an entire pocket handkerchief. Her face was pock-pitted to an incredible degree, so that what with this deformity, emphasized by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and the rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg thought that he had never beheld a figure at once so ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... present to me, two good fat hogs, though not so fat as himself, if weight of body could give weight in rank and power, he was certainly the most eminent man in that respect we had seen; for, though not very tall, he was very unwieldy, and almost shapeless with corpulence. He seemed to be about forty years of age, had straight hair, and his features differed a good deal from those of the bulk of his people. I found him to be a sedate, sensible man. He viewed the ship, and the several new objects, with uncommon attention, and asked many ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... a while Cooney slipped off to his hammock; Faed to his bunk, alongside Lashman's. The Gaffer had picked up his book again. The Snipe laid a couple of logs on the blaze, and remained beside it, cowering, with his arms stretched out as if to embrace it. His shapeless shadow wavered up and down on the bunks behind him; and, across the fire, he still stared at ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... her horse around and rode down the valley trail, pausing occasionally to watch the tall figure climbing the canon with that shapeless burden in his arms. "I wonder if any other man on the Concho would have done that?" she asked herself. And Sundown, despite his more or less terrifying appearance, won her estimation ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... extracts from letters to his wife will illustrate the nature of the work, and also give an idea of Jenkin's clear and graphic style of correspondence:—May 14.—'Syra is semi-eastern. The pavement, huge shapeless blocks sloping to a central gutter; from this base two-storeyed houses, sometimes plaster, many-coloured, sometimes rough-hewn marble, rise, dirty and ill-finished, to straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... used her parlour every day in the week. She was obliged to, in fact, for it was the only room in her house, except Mr. Thorpe's, which commanded an unobstructed view of the crossroads. A cover of brown denim protected the carpet, and the chairs were shrouded in shapeless habiliments of cambric and calico. For the rest, however, the room was mildly cheerful, and had a habitable look which was distinctly uncommon in ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... him to change his mind. One thought of a sleep-walker; uncertainty was stamped upon every gesture and movement; yet he was really drifting towards camp. After a while he struck the well-defined trail, and his gray, shapeless body slowly disappeared up the slope. In five or six minutes I overtook him shuffling along within sight of the big rock upon which rested my blanket and lunch. As I came up to him he depressed his tail, put up his shield, and slowly pushed off into the wild grass. While I was at lunch ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... whole life's mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground, a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is as though fire, water, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... ceases to resist and sometimes unexpectedly overcomes. The difference between action in accordance with abstract principles, and action as the result of original, innate tendency, is the same as that between a work of art, say a watch—where form and movement are impressed upon shapeless and inert matter—and a living organism, where form and matter are one, and each is inseparable from ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the top, the custodians of the Gate could, by simply pressing a button, send a current of electricity through the wires that form the cores of the ropes of such a strength, that the ropes and ourselves would almost instantly be fused into a shapeless mass. See! the ropes are wet, so that the full strength of the current could, if desired, be turned upon us." And he pulled forward the ladder and placed it in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Whose eyes shone erst like Titan's glorious beam: 'Daughter,' she says, 'fly, fly, behold thy dame Foreshows the treasons of thy wretched eame, Who poison gainst thy harmless life provides:' This said, to shapeless air unseen ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... he had often done before—for it was not a handsome hand. It was broad and red, and the fingers were thick and stumpy, with very coarse deep wrinkles at every joint. His nails also were flat and shapeless; and he used to be continually gnawing them till he had succeeded in getting them down to the quick—and they were a sight to set one's teeth on edge. Then he extracted from the first-mentioned trunk a white pocket handkerchief—an exemplary one, that had gone through four Sundays' ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... head; others exhibited a nearer approach to the form of a man; and some, made with considerable attention to proportion, were small models of the human figure. They were colored according to fancy; and the most shapeless had usually the most gaudy appearance, being intended to catch the eye of an infant. Sometimes a man was figured washing, or kneading dough, who was made to work by pulling a string; and a typhonian monster, or a crocodile, amused a child by its grimaces, or the motion ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... our heavenly Father gave to us after this mode, we should have only coarse, shapeless piles of provisions lying about the world, instead of all this beautiful variety of trees, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... however, observed that she held herself more stiffly than her co-mates, and shuffled less. The prison garb clothed her like a weed; she had the trick of wearing clothes so that they draped the figure, not concealed it, were as wax upon it, not a cerement. That which fell shapeless and heavily from the shoulders of the others, upon her seemed to grow rather from the waist—to creep upwards over the shoulders, as ivy steals clinging over a statue in a park. Here, said he, is a maiden that cannot be hid. Call her a murderess, she remains perfect woman; call ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... ice pierced the higher blue; carelessly, as though with studied indifference, flakes of snow fell, turning grey against the lamp-lit windows, then vanishing utterly. Maggie, going to the window, saw a dark shapeless figure beyond the glass. For an instant she was invaded by the terror of her surprised loneliness, then she remembered her father and the warm kitchen, then realised that this figure in the dark must ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety. Can wine match that for joy? She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe. Any wish to be enfolded by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her own, the familiar the stranger—an utter ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her large, black eyes, as they reflected the light of the lamps on either side, she might have been asleep, so motionless she lay; but, whenever Eugene turned a timid glance upon her rigid features, he saw that she seemed ever and ever to be looking away from him, and far out upon the black and shapeless masses of the woods through which they ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... and was neat and clean as any white maiden with a heritage of bath-tubs. Spotlessly white were her buckskin moccasins and leggings, which encased a pair of tiny feet and then wound round and round her sturdy legs until they looked as shapeless as telegraph posts. Her scant, red calico skirt met her leggings at the knee; and her red mantle, of Navajo weave, fell back from her head, but wrapped closely her waist and arms, and then dropped long ends down the front of her dress. Her coal-black ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... Metamnbogu! By my own name, I name myself. I tear away the veil. I would be served or perish. Hear me, slime of the fat swamp, blackness of the thunder, venom of the serpent's udder—hear or slay me! I would have two things, O shapeless one, O horror of emptiness—two things, or die! The blood of my white-faced husband; oh! give me that; he is the enemy of Hoodoo; give me blood! And yet another, O racer of the blind winds, O germinator ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I hadn't promised to go to a spread on the campus to-night. I wish—— What a nuisance so many reputations are!" And she crumpled the purple cow and the green dragon into a shapeless wad and threw it at Rachel, who was coming up-stairs swinging her gym ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... their home for the next three years. They spent a fairly cheerful Christmas with mince pies and "iced cherry brandy" taken from the stores of the Fury, and early in 1830 the monotony was broken by the appearance of Eskimos. These were tremendously dressed up in furs, a shapeless mass, and Ross describes one as resembling "the figure of a globe standing on two pins." They soon became friendly, taking the Englishmen to see their snow huts, drawing them charts of Boothia Gulf beyond Felix Harbour, while in exchange the explorers taught English to the little ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... a sage bush—dry, shapeless, bruised in the press, but it carried its message bravely. Holding it close to his face, drinking in the smell of it greedily, he closed his ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... peered into the shapeless features, crooning and gurgling, and emitting short, sharp whines of delight. Her beady eyes glittered wickedly, like the eyes of a snake, and the withered lips curled into a horrid grin, exposing ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... seemed as if I were standing beside by own body, looking down at it, and that on all sides of me, and apparently invisible to the rest of the company, were strange, inscrutable pale eyes, set in the midst of grey, shapeless, shadowy substances. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... proportions they exhibit, with their gigantic heads, abortive necks, and the calves of their legs protuberant around their tibias and fibulas, alike before and behind! And then they are all left-handed! Were these the gay gallants and fair dames of the golden age of chivalry? Were these shapeless things the forms and costumes of the princes and princesses of ancient France? Why, the dark-skinned old-clo' men, who hang their cast-off raiment in Brattle Street, would be mobbed, if they paraded such vestments at their doors; and Papanti ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... there to help? The American Consul was powerless for the time, if he could be found. Warren knew that the portion of the city where he had lived was a shapeless ruin. ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... to the thoughtful man, are by far the most interesting of all, appear in history as a confused and shapeless medley of political, military and forensic activity, strongly coloured by social scandals, which rested upon a foundation of truth, and darkened by accusations of worse kind, for which there is no sort of evidence, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... College gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn observed, "something simply slick about all these old quatrangleses," crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always returned to his exile's room, where he now began to hear the new voice of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn't care whether he ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her miserable existence. Yet though She no longer felt their insults, the Rioters still exercised their impotent rage upon her lifeless body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting. ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... low public outside the town—in a back room—with their arms on the table and their low foreheads nearly touching, sat whispering two men—types. One had the deep-sunk, colorless eyes, the protruding cheek-bones, the shapeless mouth, and the broad chin good in itself but bad in the above connection; the other had the vulpine chin, and the fiendish eyebrows descending on the very nose in two sharp arches. Both had the restless ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... gentleman and a young fellow of sense; then the kava came to the king; he poured one drop in libation, drank another, and flung the remainder outside the house behind him. Next came the turn of the old shapeless stone marked T. It stands for one of the king's titles, Tamasoalii; Mataafa is Tamasoalii this day, but cannot drink for it; and the stone must first be washed with water, and then have the bowl emptied ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out. And here, almost within sight of Vilna, D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly flying before an ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... could not see them, and says, "It is because a Capuchin carries everywhere the five senses of faith, while I only carry those of nature." He speaks of "the lies of Josephus," and makes merry over "the rude and shapeless block" which the guide assured him was the statue of Lot's wife, explaining the want of human form in the salt pillar by telling him that this complete metamorphosis was part of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the morning before Lettie, with Stella and her brother, reached the house, a wretched, draggled-looking, and very cross party, all without hats,—for these had been lost in the river,—and Lettie, her fine silk dress a ruin, her delicate shoes a shapeless mass from which the water ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... ledges of riven stone below us. Every object forming the wide sweep of the view was on the vastest and most majestic scale. The wild varieties of form in the jagged line of rocks stretched away eastward and westward, as far as the eye could reach; black shapeless masses of mist scowled over the whole landward horizon; the bright blue sky at the opposite point was covered with towering white clouds which moved and changed magnificently; the tossing and raging of the great bright sea was sublimely ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... humor fills about four-fifths of the eyeball and prevents it from falling into a shapeless mass. It also serves to hold the choroid and the retina in position, and to maintain the proper relations of the inner ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... crisp, iron-gray whiskers. The suggestion of a rough-haired terrier was so strong that Done expected the brute to bark at him. The small eyes in the protecting shade of tufted brows, like miniature overhanging horns, were keen and shrewd This extraordinary head was supported by a small and shapeless body, the legs of which were much too long and extremely thin, as were the arms also; but the wrists and hands, strained to hold the restive horses, were hard, corded, and hairy, suggesting a gorilla-like vitality in the curious man. Done let himself down to the roadway again. One could ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... finished the remainder of his glass of sherry in silence, and presently rose to go. Coroner Whidden and Mr. Ward had already gone. The guests in the public room were thinning out; a gloom, indefinable and shapeless like the night, seemed to have fallen upon the few that lingered. At a somewhat earlier hour tdhan usual the gas was shut ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, the shutters off their hinges, the floor-boards ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... civilised. For civilisation, you will have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no stuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-blood is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the Mollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of human society. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points and have no dimensions, that strictly neither ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... across the sullen face in which the corners of the mouth drooped morosely, her blunted expression grew animated for a moment or two. And then she prepared to trudge away, the shapeless bundle containing the child on one arm, the heavy pail ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... went peacefully to sleep, while the eldest brother kept watch. At a certain hour of the night the lake became agitated with a swaying motion which startled the watcher not a little. He soon observed a shapeless form arising out of the midst of the water and rushing straight toward him. It was a frightful monster of a Dragon, with two great flapping ears, which was rushing so fiercely upon him. The Prince bravely drew his sword, and seizing the Dragon, cut off his head. Then he ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... rained that day! The dark clouds had collapsed upon the hills in shapeless folds. The waves of the lake were beaten flat by the lashing strokes of the storm. Quivering sheets of watery gray were driven before the wind; and broad curves of silver bullets danced before them as they swept over the surface. All around the homeless shores the evergreen ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... squat old woman, with a skin tanned like leather, and kindly little blue eyes, twinkling with delight and pride. Yes, there they are, photographed somewhere in my brain, the wrinkled, yellow, withered faces of the two old women, their watery eyes and toothless mouths, with figures as shapeless as the bowlders on the beach, watching beside the bed where lay the white but tenderly beautiful face of the young girl, with her curls of glossy hair tossed about the pillow, and her long, tremulous eyelashes making a shadow on ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... of Lynton as a watering-place, and wrote a glowing description of the village and the Valley of Rocks. Of the latter he says: "A palace of the pre-Adamite kings, a city of the Anakim must have appeared so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped after the waters of the flood subsided." Great bowlders, half hidden by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read, wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... hardly furnish them with a magical early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of water ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... cottages, whose black gables, rendered more distinguishable by the contrast with the whitened surface from which they rose, were still standing; the side-walls had long since given way to time, and, piled in shapeless heaps and covered with snow, offered frequent and embarrassing obstacles to our traveller's progress. Still, however, he persevered, crossed the rivulet, not without some trouble, and at length, by exertions which became both painful and perilous, ascended its ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ruins, in the common acceptation of the term, scarcely exist—though there are no arches, no pillars, but one or two appearances of masonry even yet the whole country is covered with traces of exactly that kind which it was prophesied Babylon should leave. Vast "heaps" or mounds, shapeless and unsightly, are scattered at intervals over the entire region where it is certain that Babylon anciently stood, and between the "heaps" the soil is in many places composed of fragments of pottery and bricks, and deeply impregnated with nitre, infallible ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... and smiling a welcome to her father's guests, had gone as completely as though she lay buried beside the drowned mariners, for whom the silting sand under the waves makes a safe graveyard all along that bleak and rugged coast; but a horror—a crawling, shapeless, loathsome thing—writhed itself along the pathway from cliff to village, and sent the terror-striken peasants shrieking into their huts and battering at the castle gates for sanctuary. The old ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... wonder. Was this Lysia? He could not see her face, as she wore a thick white veil through which only the faintest sparkle of dark eyes glimmered like flickering sunbeams; nor was he able to discern the actual outline of her form, as it was completely enveloped and lost in the wide, shapeless folds of her stiff, golden gown. Yet every nerve in his body thrilled at her presence! ... every drop of blood seemed to rush from his heart to his brain in a swift, scorching torrent that for a second blinded his eyes with a red glare and made him ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was not in a mood to answer questions regarding his dignity. He looked at the queer slender figure before him, in its torn coat of embroidered silk, and its narrow, shapeless, dirty cotton trousers; and especially he looked at the boy's hair and eyes—his wavy yellow hair ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... observed by some mysterious eye. A shot was fired at me, and again it came from a French plane. That was all I could see. We were in a bank of mist at the time, and I just caught a glimpse of the plane itself. The man was a mere shapeless figure to me. I had no time to fight him, because I was due here with another message which made vengeance upon him at that time ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a river is a seemly way of disposing of a god. A man was anxious to sell us a plot of land in a certain village, but there was on it a very primitive temple, fenced in with a few sticks and stones. Within this enclosure were several shapeless stone gods, painted with vermilion. We said that if we bought the site the temple would have to be removed first. The man replied that there would be no difficulty about that, because the gods could be buried in the river. The god is then supposed to leave the stone and pass out into the sacred ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... years, and married him at last but for the cloud upon his birth. It was not this—not his own misery that crushed him, nor even her present wretchedness that prostrated him—no! but it was the awful, shapeless shadow of some infinite unutterable woe is Claudia's future, and into which she was blindly rushing, that overwhelmed him. Oh, to have saved her from this woe, he would gladly have ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticos of Nero's palace: survey the other hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens. The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the body, a poor, shapeless, sodden thing with such a crumpled skull. My thoughts went back to the sweet-faced girl who had wept so bitterly at his going. Even then, maybe, she was thinking of him, fondly dreaming of his return, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... involuntarily at the moment, for the appearance was one so shapeless, that there was no such thing as defining, from even that ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the Judge arranged the chess problem on the board above the gilt-and-red Turkish slippers on the feet of the thing's shapeless cotton-stuffed legs, and briefly described the point to be gained by the Sheik in the series of moves which he was to begin and the success of which I was to combat. The creature made its first move in its deliberate manner and ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... of individualism—one of the first fruits of Freedom in the West—gave to the life of the little village a rich flavor of comedy. The great talents of Douglas had not been developed. His character was as yet shifty and shapeless. Some of the leading citizens openly distrusted him. He sought to command respect by assaulting men of full size and was repeatedly and soundly thumped for his presumption. He had endeavored publicly to chastise the sturdy Simeon Francis and had been bent over a market cart and severely wigged ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... dark nothingness. The pathway was barely two feet across, a mere tight-rope in the wide waste, and on either side nothing stood out to give relief to the desolate scene; over us the clouds hung low, shapeless and gloomy, behind was the darkness, in front when the starlights made the darkness visible they only increased the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... fell upon the waiting room, as Ram Juna thrust the covered rose into the brazier. At last he lifted the cover and displayed a little gray shapeless heap. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... a wisdom greater than his own, beneficent, continuing, but not known to me, who was no fool; and I envied him—spite of his burden of folly—his legacy of love. 'Twas fallen into dusk: the hills were turning shapeless in the night, the glow all fled from the sky, the sea gone black. But still I waited—apart from the rock and shadows and great waters of the world God made—a child yearning for the face and hand and tender guidance ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... How utterly absurd! He had actually positively disliked this beautiful creature all the winter! He was astonished at his own bad taste. Before him stood his wife on the kitchen hearth, her figure rendered shapeless by her advanced state of pregnancy. And he had once thought her ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped. She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall.... ...
— The Very Secret Agent • Mari Wolf
... from it and came to his feet in one swift, wary motion, his eyes on it and his knife already in his hand. As he did so the water went past below them with a thunder that deafened. Logs and trees shot past, boulders crashed together, and things could be seen surging in the brown depths; shapeless things that had once been woods goats and the battered gray bulk of a unicorn. He saw it all with a sideward glance, ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... cities; mobocratic violence broke up assemblages and churches of Colored people; and malice sought them in the quiet of their homes—outraged and slew them in cold blood. Thus with the past as a haunting, bitter recollection, the present filled with fear and disaster, and the future a shapeless horror, think ye life was sweet to the Negro? Bitter? Bitter as death? ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... her; the very name of Typhoid had become a shapeless dread, a horror creeping unseen, singling out its victims, playing with them as a cat does with a mouse, letting them go, then springing... She wanted to cry out, to warn the man beside her ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... bull in a small space, poking his close-cropped black head out like a turtle that's not sure something won't be thrown at it, and then dragging his big bulk out and standing over you. He used to be trim—Tom—and taut, but in those shapeless things, the old trousers, the dirty white shirt, and the vest too ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... distance. Had he been followed, it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous, reddish mask of dust and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments clung to the impeding branches. Twice ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... backward and forward, increased and increased in stature, till it attained the height of some seven or eight feet. Van Hielen could not compare this with anything he had ever seen. It was monstrous but shapeless—a mere mass of irregular lumps, a dull leadish white, and vibrating horribly in the moonlight. He thought of the children; but where they had stood he saw only two greenish-yellow spheres that, twirling round and round, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... among them, silent, immense, clad in her dark purple silk gown spread over a great hoopskirt. A real lace collar lay softly over her enormous, billowing shoulders; real lace ruffles lay over her great, shapeless hands. Her face, the delicacy of whose features was veiled with flesh, flushed and paled. Not even flesh could subdue the sad brilliancy of her dark-blue eyes, fixed inward upon her own sad state, unregardful of the company. She made an indefinite murmur of response to the salutations given her, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and we hurried up to join the group. I found myself looking down at one of those thick-set Burmans whom I always associated with Fu-Manchu's activities. He lay quite flat, face downward; but the back of his head was a shapeless blood-dotted mass, and a heavy stock-whip, the butt end ghastly because of the blood and hair which clung to it, lay beside him. I started back appalled as ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... above their slender bases, that their summits, like the top of Babel become mystified by the clouds; and when the first storm of adversity, or the breath of insidious circumstances are blown against them, they totter, and eventually fall crashing to the earth, and lie scattered in shapeless ruins around their basis. ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me, my will came back, my body ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... the clover were not uncommon sights at every station, while the train was surrounded by motley crowds of Bedouins, Arabs and Egyptians, the women being veiled to the eyes, a fact for which we probably had reason to be devoutly grateful, if we but knew it, as there was nothing in their shapeless figures ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... tarpaulin which he had spread out to receive it, and having broken up the box with the ax, cast the boards down that they might fall to one side of the provisions. This done, he returned to the wagon, from above invisible, but which, when he stood on the plain, loomed dim and shapeless ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... water were, on the surface, even worse than the too green meadows or the gleaming brown furrows of plough land, a careful man could count upon its letting him go no further than knee deep. When he came to Whetstone, Harry's feet were brown, shapeless, weighty masses, but he had not lost either shoe, and he was still in hopes of reaching Barnet and a pint of small beer before it was time to struggle back. At the worst a dry throat and wet legs were a cheap price for escaping the voice of Lady Waverton, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... prostrate thing through and through with his mighty tusks, trumpeting and roaring in his rage, and at last, convinced that no slightest spark of life remained in the crushed and lacerated flesh, he lifted the shapeless clay that had been Sven Malbihn far aloft and hurled the bloody mass, still entangled in canopy and hammock, over the boma and out into ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... second, being internal, contains the seed of the future within itself. After the period of materialist effort, which held the soul in check until it was shaken off as evil, the soul is emerging, purged by trials and sufferings. Shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc., which belonged to this time of effort, will no longer greatly attract the artist. He will endeavour to awake subtler emotions, as yet unnamed. Living himself a complicated ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... of her vision was not due to any defect in her sight. The wet fog was rising like a shapeless evil genius out of the sluggish sea, rolling heavily across the little bay to the lovers' beach, with its swollen arms full of blight and mildew. Margaret shivered at the sight of it, and drew the lace thing she wore closer to her throat. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... images, a few of them looking somewhat idolatrous; and heaps upon heaps of nameless and shapeless odds and ends that boasted more or less bead-work in the line of ornamentation; but all chiefly noticeable for the lack of taste displayed, both in design and the combination of color. The Chilkat blanket is an exception to the Alaskan Indian rule. It ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Hawkins, a brisk, middleaged man in brown riding gaiters and yellow breeches, looking as much squire as solicitor. He and Anderson are allowed precedence as representing the learned professions. After them comes the family, headed by the senior uncle, William Dudgeon, a large, shapeless man, bottle-nosed and evidently no ascetic at table. His clothes are not the clothes, nor his anxious wife the wife, of a prosperous man. The junior uncle, Titus Dudgeon, is a wiry little terrier of a man, with an immense and visibly purse-proud wife, both free from the ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... point in single file, came a long line of some thirty canoes, uncouth, shapeless things, each hewed out of a great cypress log. In the end of each an Indian stood erect plying a long pole which sent their clumsy looking crafts forward at surprising speed. Magnificent savages they were, not one less than six ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... towers crept the shades of night, Whilst scarce distinguished in the black profound, Stairs, aqueducts, great pillars, gleamed around, And ruined capitals: then was seen a group Of granite elephants 'neath a dome to stoop, Shapeless, giant forms to view arise, Monsters around, the spawn of hideous ties! Then hanging gardens, with flowers and galleries: O'er vast fountains bending grew ebon-trees; Temples, where seated on their rich tiled thrones, Bull-headed idols shone in jasper ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... tell. A small sound of creaming waters came from it, produced by the light swell washing its shelter side. It lay all in a line of grayish darkness even when I was quite close, and I could see nothing but the shapeless body of it. Of a sudden my feet struck ground, and I waded thirty paces along a shelf that was under water till my paces lifted to the dry beach. But by this time I was fearfully exhausted; I could scarcely breathe. My legs and arms were numbed to the weight of lead. The atmosphere ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... speechless and almost terrified astonishment, while she undid the door, and stood up in the sacred desk from which his maledictions had just been thundered. She then divested herself of the cloak and hood, and appeared in a most singular array. A shapeless robe of sackcloth was girded about her waist with a knotted cord; her raven hair fell down upon her shoulders, and its blackness was defiled by pale streaks of ashes, which she had strewn upon her head. Her eyebrows, dark and strongly defined, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... trans-personal status. Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion; and if a man concentrates his view on private pleasures, these may qualify the fleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic value, but they leave the life itself shapeless and infinite, as if sparks should play over a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... their work, to teach: quite as imperatively we then want the right kind of text-books, in the pupils' hands, with which to carry forward their common work. If mind is the animating spirit, and knowledge the shapeless matter, still method—and to the pupil largely the method of the books—is the organizing force or form under which the knowledge is to be organized, made available and valuable. We shall suffer quite as much from any lack of the best form, as through lack of the best matter, or of the most ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to enter into friendly relations with them. But it seemed impossible to take any one alive. They were as untamable and as savage as bears and wolves, fighting against any odds to the last gasp. Both women and men were exceedingly ill-looking, with shapeless heads, which were said to have been deformed by the compression of bandages in infancy. The province was called Tula, and the village was situated, it is supposed, between the waters of the upper Washita ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Aldgate. The north wall followed for some part the course of Cornhill and Leadenhall Street; the eastern Billiter Street and Mark Lane; the southern Thames Street; and the western the east side of Walbrook. Of the larger Roman wall, there were within the memory of man huge, shapeless masses, with trees growing upon them, opposite what is now Finsbury Circus. In 1852 a piece of Roman wall on Tower Hill was rescued from the improvers, and built into some stables and outhouses; but not before a careful sketch had been effected ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... child. And perhaps I should say that my mind was, and has always remained, with my mother on such matters. If God gives food for the use of His creatures, it is to His honour and glory to serve it handsomely, so far as may be; and I see little religion in a slovenly piece of meat, or a shapeless hunch of butter on ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... does not seem such an inferior organ as is often inferred by writers on the subject. I would willingly match a crow against a walrus any day in a test of intelligent behavior.... A crow ... though with horny, shapeless lips, nose, and mouth, looks at us through eyes so expressive, so human, that no wonder man's love has gone out to feathered creatures throughout all his ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried to define to himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He held at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in love ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... cattle had taken was toward her house, and she hastened homeward. And not a quarter of a mile from her door she found the body of Waite beside that of his pony, crushed out of its familiar form into something unspeakably shapeless. In her excitement she half dragged, half carried that mutilated body home, and then ran up her signal of alarm on the stick that Waite himself had erected for her convenience. She thought it would be a long time before any one reached her, but she had hardly had time to ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... forms. The fortifications of Charleston and Savannah being still in the hands of the enemy, and intact, these two chief seaports of that coast were unassailable by our fleet. Even after Fort Sumter had been battered to a shapeless heap of masonry, and Fort Pulaski had surrendered, neither city fell until Sherman's march took it in the rear. But the numerous inlets were substantially undefended against naval attack; and for them the blockade, that tremendously potent instrument of the national pressure, the work of which ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... one among them—"Surely not in vain My substance of the common Earth was ta'en And to this Figure molded, to be broke, Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again." ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... old Gideon Batts, fanning himself with his white slouch hat. He was short, fat, and bald; he was bow-legged with a comical squat; his eyes stuck out like the eyes of a swamp frog; his nose was enormous, shapeless, and red. To the Major's family he traced the dimmest line of kinship. During twenty years he had operated a small plantation that belonged to the Major, and he was always at least six years behind with his rent. He had married the widow Martin, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... most of whom carried bundles wrapped up in variegated handkerchiefs, and all of whom were tremendously excited at the prospect of travel. Lean-visaged, swarthy men peered forth from the folds of shawls or from beneath shapeless caps of many colors; a pair of carabinieri idled past, a soldier in jaunty feathered hat posed before the contadini. Dogs, donkeys, fowls added their clamor to the ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... all parts of a whole, and formed of such shapeless, mixed materials, that every part and every ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,—a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to another case. As she passed the stretcher, the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... pirates—and, as a matter of fact, he had not done so when I threw the keg into the lagoon. If the commanders propose to land storming parties and the ships advance into the zone of danger there will soon be nothing left of them but bits of shapeless ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... quite probable that he would have been hurled into an unhappy state of skepticism, if the train in which he was riding had not been suddenly hurled down an embankment some twenty feet in height, where the cars were piled up in shapeless wrecks, and human beings, full of life and hope a moment before, were suddenly ushered into eternity, or maimed ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... frames short, hurried sentences such as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or with recollections of terror. The final impression that Frankenstein leaves with us is not easy to define, because the book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet when all its faults have been laid bare, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... cold, sober letters, and then intrust it to the faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative force, much too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws itself immediately on the present, on active life, and strives to transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The misfortune of his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder: enthusiasm is inflamed, and in souls ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my horrified gaze no decent trace of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the sunken, red, shapeless remain of two horses, and near them a ghastly scattering of bleached bones. "A lion-lair right here on the flat. Those two horses were killed early this spring, and I see no signs of their carcasses having been covered with brush and dirt. I've got ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... that moment she turned to the door; evidently some one inside had called her. Nekhludoff moved away from the window. The fog was so dense that five steps from the house the windows could not be seen, but the light from the lamp shone red and huge out of a shapeless black mass. And on the river the same strange sounds went on, sobbing and rustling and cracking and tinkling. Somewhere in the fog, not far off, a cock crowed; another answered, and then others, far in the village ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... plunged. The rustler fell back, and one of his legs pitched high as he slid off the lunging steed. His other foot caught in the stirrup. This fact terribly frightened the horse. He bolted, dragging the rustler for a dozen jumps. Then Snecker's foot slipped loose. He lay limp and still and shapeless in the road. I did not need to go back to ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... North-countryman whose faith in the chains locked round the wheels was not unlimited; he was driving carefully, with a wary eye for the worst patches noted on the outward run, and, beside him, equally alert, sat Yoshio muffled to the ears in an immense overcoat, a shapeless bundle. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... I cannot conceive how anything could look more beautiful than this girl did at that moment. At the same time though she appeared serious and melancholy, and, I think, a little out of humour too, while her hat, which was too large for her, had, from the wet, become quite shapeless, and appeared pressed down over her face, so that I could not forbear laughing, in spite of everything, though at the moment ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
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