There was a coarse, dingy man, of whose face Tom had some vague recollection, sitting in his father's chair, smoking, with a jug and glass beside him. — from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
shadowy vault ribbed strongly
All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people's supernatural passage—all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way. — from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
still vaster reservoirs supposed
An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb. — from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Her voice, strong and clear in tone, attacked with great spirit the runs which embellish the air and though she sang very rapidly she did not miss even the smallest of the grace notes. — from Dubliners by James Joyce
snowy vapor rose slowly
* It was a lovely morning early in May; the air was vocal with the songs of birds and redolent with the breath of flowers all bathed in dew; delicate wreaths of snowy vapor rose slowly from the rippling surface of the river that threaded its way through the valley, and folded themselves about the richly-wooded hill-sides, behind which bright streaks of golden light were shooting upward, fair heralds of the coming of the king of day. — from Elsie's Girlhood
A Sequel to "Elsie Dinsmore" and "Elsie's Holidays at Roselands" by Martha Finley
So very reluctantly she got into a market-cart with her son, who sat like a lifeless thing beside her, and was driven off, while Colonel Fitzdenys cantered on before them. — from The Drummer's Coat by Fortescue, J. W. (John William), Sir
This tab, called Hiding in Plain Sight,
shows you passages from notable books where your word is accidentally (or perhaps deliberately?)
spelled out by the first letters of consecutive words.
Why would you care to know such a thing? It's not entirely clear to us, either, but
it's fun to explore! What's the longest hidden word you can find? Where is your name hiding?