Gossamer

It was a simple gown, caught lightly at the waist by a gossamer thread.

A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and Sónya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one uplifted hand.

A morning mist hung over the water, as thin as gossamer and the wisps of memory.

The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands–boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

When he withdrew it, some silvery substance came away, stretching from temple to wand like a thick gossamer strand, which broke as he pulled the wand away from it and fell gracefully into the Pensieve, where it swirled silvery white, neither gas nor liquid.

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shoreline indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, “the glassy surface of a lake.” When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.

Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire.

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Rue, who is dressed in a gossamer gown complete with wings, flutters her way to Caesar.

the slight stem which bears the burden of its suns Is hardly thicker than the gossamer, Or poor Arachne’s silver tapestry— Men say it bloomed upon the sepulchre Of One I sometime worshipped, but to me It seems to bring diviner memories Of faun-loved Heliconian glades and blue nymph-haunted seas, Of an untrodden vale at Tempe where On the clear river’s marge Narcissus lies, The tangle of the forest in his hair, The silence of the woodland in his eyes, Wooing that drifting imagery which is No sooner kissed than broken; memories of Salmacis Who is not boy nor girl and yet is both, Fed by two fires and unsatisfied Through their excess, each passion being loth For love’s own sake to leave the other’s side Yet killing love by staying; memories Of Oreads peeping through the leaves of silent moonlit trees, Of lonely Ariadne on the wharf At Naxos, when she saw the treacherous crew Far out at sea, and waved her crimson scarf And called false Theseus back again nor knew That Dionysos on an amber pard Was close behind her; memories of what Maeonia’s bard With sightless eyes beheld, the wall of Troy, Queen Helen lying in the ivory room, And at her side an amorous red-lipped boy Trimming with dainty hand his helmet’s plume, And far away the moil, the shout, the groan, As Hector shielded off the spear and Ajax hurled the stone; Of wingèd Perseus with his flawless sword Cleaving the snaky tresses of the witch, And all those tales imperishably stored In little Grecian urns, freightage more rich Than any gaudy galleon of Spain Bare from the Indies ever!

A few bogies shoot past Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.

How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer!

“You complain then that you do not sense the gossamer waves of Time.

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.