grimness

The beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself together in a stony, inaccessible grimness. It would not surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in the reef, it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.

"Ay," said Hoseason, with a sudden grimness, "that's the point."

van der Luyden; but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said "No" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked.

"And I have seen it," the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her tone, "when it was a great deal more like the other place--stillness that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and blot out everything; nothing but the gurgling of a little water, and the sighing--the most melancholy sighing you ever heard--of the wind in our ragged elms.

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.

"Yes, sir, I do!" Gerald replied, with unexpected grimness. "I feel my responsibility deeply."

Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder--for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure.

"Whom should I be afraid of if I am not afraid of you?" she asked with her shrunken grimness.

Even Nellie, child that she was, understood the grimness of the battle before them.

"You seem able to make yourself pretty comfortable," said Doctor South, with a grimness which would have disturbed Philip if he had not been in such high spirits.

"Then," said Peter, not without grimness, "step in, if you feel so sure of her," and he helped Maimie into the Thrush's Nest.