"Diaphanous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to take the Colonel's orders I climbed up on the parapet. Night had now fallen completely, but the moon was rising. Indeed, it would have been almost as light as day but for a slight mist which was spreading a diaphanous veil before our eyes. In the foreground to the right I could barely guess the dim outline of the battered mill and the burnt farm flanking the trench occupied by the foot Chasseurs. Further off, however, I could vaguely distinguish the row of trees that marked the first line of ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... sixth is that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have in itself, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... picture. The dress is the picture—this common white dress, with black spots, une robe a poix, une petite confection de soixante cinq francs, as the French would say; and very far it is from all remembrance of the diaphanous, fairy-like skirts of our eighteenth century English school, but I swear to you no less charming. It is a very simple and yet a very beautiful reality. A lady, in white dress with black spots, sitting on a red ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... springing upward of her robust faith, by the purity of her soul, which is lighter than the most luminous ether. Truly there is in this figure an unheard-of force of ascension, and in order to obtain this effect Titian has not had recourse to slender forms, diaphanous draperies, and transparent colours. His Madonna is a very true, very living, and very real woman, with a beauty as solid as that of the Venus de Milo, or the sleeping woman in the Tribune of Florence. Large, full drapery flows about her in numerous ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... monumental statue situated within a few feet of him was shattered to pieces. In the sunny afternoons the pretty senoritas come to the plaza with their heads and necks lightly shrouded in Spanish veils, and otherwise clothed in diaphanous garments, short enough to show their shapely ankles in white hose, and their small feet in high-heeled, pointed slippers. He must be indeed calloused who can withstand, unmoved, the battery of their ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... throng increases; still unfold With broader span and more elusive sweep The radiant vistas of a world divine. But O my soul! what vision rises now! Far, far away, white blazing like the sun, In deepest distance and on highest height, Through walls diaphanous, and atmosphere Flecked with unnumbered forms of missive power, Out-going fleetly and returning slow, A Presence shines I may not penetrate; But on a throne, with smile ineffable, I see a form my conscious spirit knows. Jesus, my Saviour! ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... alternating with the stripes of the red background; (2) a closely woven but thin cloth of abak having sometimes, as in the case of men's jackets, straight weft stripes of imported blue cotton; (3) a cloth of the same material, but so thin as to be diaphanous, and not adorned with any stripes; (4) a cloth for trousers made out of an abak warp and a ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris—who stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged—that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece of bread-and-butter on a tray, cheerfully insisting ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... got everything," he said, standing in diaphanous contemplation. The one thing that worried him a little was the studs. They had looked over twenty different varieties, flat ones and solid gold ones, spirals, encrusted studs, and studs that anchored with a queer twist. Finally they had allowed themselves to be persuaded by a flashy clerk ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... make me regret that I haven't a talent for word-painting. It's the form of a woman, a young woman, tall, slender, in some pale diaphanous garment, that appears here, appears there, remaining distinctly visible for some minutes, and then disappears. No, it isn't a subjective illusion. And it isn't, either," the unscrupulous creature added, after a pause, raising his voice, and speaking with emphasis, ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... working no one used better, or with more ingenuity and art, than Prior Guglielmo; and it is in these things that the difficulty consists, for painting the glass with oil-colours or in any other manner is little or nothing, and that it should be diaphanous or transparent is not a matter of much importance, whereas firing it in the furnace and making it such that it will withstand the action of water and remain fresh for ever, is a difficult work and well worthy of praise. Wherefore this excellent master deserves the highest praise, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the last to deny when he heard them. Many persons, not being able to take into the mind and analyze a character like Courtlandt's, sought the line of least resistance for their understanding, and built some precious exploits which included dusky island-princesses, diaphanous ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... this misty curtain of the morn, for it appeared to me symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed. At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun's disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... and the archbishops in their rich raiment of velvet and cloth of silver, carried in their hands tapers of perfumed wax; Oriental myrrh and aloes burned in golden censers, and veiled the lofty dome with a light and diaphanous vapour which gave an unearthly aspect to the building; the organ pealed forth its deep and thrilling tones; and amid this scene of excitement, splendour, and suffering, the Cardinal de Gondy celebrated the mass, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... groups range themselves to right and left like officiating priestesses. The veiled figure stands with her back against the curtain, the others being in profile. Her head is swathed in folds of diaphanous white, through which the features are visible, like the ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... not sleep. From the walls of a great palace whose entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, wearily languorous, expressing bodily fatigue and the discouragement of passion. It was full of the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... closing up the rank of Janenne's youth and rustic beauty came half a dozen chosen damsels, big limbed and strong, bearing on their shoulders a huge waxen statue of Our Lady of Lorette, and in her arms a crowned child, she herself being crowned with glittering tinsel, and robed in a glowing and diaphanous stuff, which only half revealed the white satin and spangles of the dress below it. Then a number of chubby-cheeked little boys in semi-ecclesiastical costume, improvised—no doubt under clerical supervision—by careful hands at home. Each little boy carried a fuming censer, and it was ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the world like a mere schoolgirl in her over-long, kimono-shaped, diaphanous night garment, with her hair hanging in two great plaits, and her eyes and mouth lit by the suspicion of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... first it is not without some Reason, that I ascribe Colour (in the sense formerly explan'd) chiefly to the Superficial parts of Bodies, for not to question how much Opacous Corpuscles may abound even in those Bodies we call Diaphanous, it seems plain that of Opacous bodies we do indeed see little else than the Superficies, for if we found the beams of Light that rebound from the Object to the Eye, to peirce deep into the Colour'd body, we should not ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... the grass; but the pears were now in bridal white, and a warmer glory of apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or the sunlit spaces ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all the forms in which those spirits lay Were to her sight like the diaphanous Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us Only their scorn of all concealment: they 565 Move in the light of their own beauty thus. But these and all now lay with sleep upon them, And little ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of the foam itself, a living fragment of green and white spray. She caught her arms full of the sea-colored gauze, like a great billow above her head, and then with a swirl she bent her body and drew the diaphanous film out sideways, like a wave that had run up on the sands. Drawing it together again, she seemed to produce ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... had now come; and Penn, who went out to take an observation, could discover no trace of the vanished rebels. The eastern sky was like a sheet of diaphanous silver, faintly crimsoned above the edges of the hills with streaks of the brightening dawn. All the valley below was inundated by a lake of level mist, whose subtle wave made islands of the hills, and shining inlets of the intervales. Above this sea of white silence rose the mountain ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... very beautiful," she went on. "Much more beautiful than before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and, kept in the background with her husband, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... morning her star is surely in the ascendant. Cecil sleeps late. Floyd is down on the porch, reading and smoking, when the flutter of a diaphanous robe, with billowy laces, attracts his eyes ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... flooding down, turning the dancing guests into pirouetting ghosts in diaphanous blue and green, scarlet ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down, down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a faint silver gossamer at your feet, is to feel that you are living in one of the old woodcuts which illustrate ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from Opaque, or refracted in the passage through Diaphanous Bodies, produceth in living Creatures, in whom God hath placed such Organs, an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, but the Body it selfe without us; in the ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... across the wide emptiness of it. Here among the startled jackdaws I lounged smoking and ruminating upon the bells, oily Cerberus, and his lonely task, and inhaling the misty air from the winding canals in the fertile green fields below—appraising the values of the pale diaphanous sky of misty blue, harmonizing so exquisitely with the tender greens of the landscape which had charmed Cuyp and Memling, until the blue was suffused with molten gold, and over all the landscape spread a tender and lovely radiance, which in turn became changed to ruddy flames ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... opacity, and close compactedness of its material parts hindering the penetration of the visual rays and the reception of the specieses of such things as are visible. The other is of horn, at which an entry is made to sure and certain dreams, even as through horn, by reason of the diaphanous splendour and bright transparency thereof, the species of all objects of the sight distinctly pass, and so without confusion appear, that they are clearly seen. Your meaning is, and you would thereby infer, quoth Friar John, that the dreams of all horned ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to form the hinges for these. In twenty seconds I counted seventy expansions and dilatations of this apparatus. The chaplet and the bag that holds it are flesh-coloured; the rest of the body is gelatinous and diaphanous. They live in families, and swim with great rapidity in the same ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... big simbahan, where the doleful music of the band suggested lost souls wailing on the borders of Cocytus or the Stygian creek. Young caballeros dressed in white, the concijales with their silver-headed canes and baggy trousers, and the "taos" in diaphanous and flimsy shirts that they had not yet learned to tuck inside, stood by to watch the senoritas on their way to church. The girls walked rather stiffly in their tight shoes; but as soon as mass was over, shoes and stockings came off, and the ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... looked for it as I would look for a perfect man to save a failing cause. At last I found a sapling growing in one of the sheltered angles of my rail fence. It was set about by dry grass, overhung by a much larger cherry tree, and bearing still its withered last year's leaves, worn diaphanous but curled delicately, and of a most beautiful ash gray colour, something like the fabric of a wasp's nest, only yellower. I gave it a shake and it sprung quickly under my hand like the muscle of a good horse. Its bark was smooth and trim, its bole ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... indelicate and unpleasant thought, too, for an "honest" woman to advertise so brazenly. The tight skirts and diaphanous garments were plainly a return to "sex." The ultra feminine felt they were going to lose something in this agitation for equality. They do not want rights—they want privileges—like the servants who prefer tips to wages. This is not surprising. ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... appear? In forest and field, on hill-land and lea, As crystallized harmony, Materialized melody, An uttered essence peopling far and near The hyaline atmosphere?... Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blooms from flower and tree! In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist, In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst, Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster, Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.— —O music of Earth! O God who the music inspired! Let me breathe of the life of thy breath! And so be fulfilled and ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... in all that toggery!" said Patty, bluntly, and Mona sighed as she saw Patty's diaphanous frock. Then, led by Mrs. Hastings, they went down to the drawing-room. They put Susan through a few lessons in introductions, practised calling her "Aunt Rachel," and bolstered up her failing courage by telling ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... debutante wears her very prettiest ball dress. Old-fashioned sentiment prefers that it be white, and of some diaphanous material, such as net or gauze or lace. It ought not to look overelaborate, even though it is spangled with silver or crystal or is made of sheer lace. It should suggest something light and airy and gay and, above all, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of rest between two ordeals, a smile between two sobs, and—the right to love each other. To love each other until that fatal separation which she felt was coming, until that end which was fast advancing; her poor, frail body being now only the diaphanous prison of her soul. She did not complain, as she felt the hour gently approach when, with a last kiss, a last sigh, she must say ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... don't know anything; I can only presume that he doesn't intend to open a department store in the Everglades. And if any lady is to wear garments in his vicinity, I assume that those garments are to be anything except diaphanous!... Please take your seat in the boat, Miss Barrison. I want to row ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... brightest. The little tables were surrounded by travelers of all nations, some in tourist tweeds and hats with the inevitable green veils; others, those of more leisurely sojourns, in white serges and diaphanous frocks and flighty hats fresh from the Rue de ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... temperature was not insupportable. And so, in chatting and thinking and waiting for the engineer, Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans walked about beneath the forest of screws, whose gyratory movement gave their arms the appearance of semi-diaphanous disks. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of varnish ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... met her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in their cars—and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... running about the stage in diaphanous costumes, with conventional mimicry and arm action, is classic or beautiful is a mistake; the term aesthetic may cover, but not redeem it. There is not even the art of the ordinary ballet-dancer discernible ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... and gay clothing and smiling faces. It was the express wish of Sophia that none of the company should wear white. "That distinction," she said, "ought to be reserved for the bride;" and among the maids in pink and blue and primrose, she stood a very lily of womanhood. Her diaphanous, floating robe of Dacca muslin; her Indian veil of silver tissue, filmy as light; her gleaming pearls ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Rhinoceros, in token of their grateful adherence, they had him killed and stuffed directly, and then set him up outside the door of their father's house as a diaphanous doorscraper. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... February 17th, 19—, was one of calm and mist. It was not the typical London fog so dreaded by the foreigner, but one of those little patchy mists which smoke through the streets, now enshrouding and making the nearest object invisible, now clearing away to the finest diaphanous filament of pale grey. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the front porch and gazed skyward. The wind—as the saying is—had "catched in," and was blowing briskly from the north-west, chasing diaphanous clouds across the blue zenith. The roofs still shone wet and dazzling, and there were puddles in the street. But he knew the afternoon was going to be a fine one. He took pleasure in this when, a few moments later, his ear caught the thudding of a distant drum. . . . Yes, yes—it was Bank Holiday, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... at Miela's suggestion, a number of shields for our girls to carry while in flight. These consisted of the fabric in very light, almost diaphanous, form, hung upon a flexible frame of very thin strips of bamboo. It was some twelve feet broad across the top, narrowing rapidly into a long fluttering tail ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... with her the key which should give access to the beach. It was all very foolish and romantic, no doubt, for they might have met just as conveniently in the conservatory of Clyffe House, where their privacy would have been equally respected, and where Miss Alix's satin shoes and diaphanous draperies would have exposed her to no risk of a chill. Lovers are like that, however, and had they not been so on this occasion, I should have had no story ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the springs of happiness. It was a wonderful world, a radiant world, a world of dream and delights. It was a world more real than the fantasy of moonlight. She felt more real. She was herself, too, not some strange, diaphanous image conjured out of tulle and gauze, she was her own true flesh-and-blood self, living in a dream that ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... were wild, not civilized,—the scent of cultivation was added to the scents of the woods. Just then the Angelus was ringing at Blangy, and the sounds of the bell, mingling with the wild concert of the forest, gave harmony to the silence. Here and there were rising vapors, white, diaphanous. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "^e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "e" it drapes lamentation ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... school of critics which rather finds the difficulty in picturing a life which has keen perceptions, robust emotions, and a solid surrounding all constructed in so diaphanous a material. Let us remember that everything depends upon its comparison with the things ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be so enchanting in a poet who should not confine us in the Tower of Hunger and compel us to share Ugolino's revolting repast? Dante would have less charm, if he had less power. Have the fleshly naiads, the muscular Tritons, the wanton Zephyrs, the diaphanous transparency of our water-sprites and sylphs? Is it not because the modern imagination does not fear to picture the ghastly forms of vampires, ogres, ghouls, snake-charmers and jinns prowling about ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... all finished and decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... common sense, of which she had an ample fund, came to her help and told her that whatever I had done was for her own good. So the rare smile, which was one of her greatest charms, came to her face, like the diaphanous glow of a good spirit, rested for a moment on her lips, mounted to her eyes and faded slowly away, as though it would linger a moment to ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... twine, similar to the gold cord of our officers' sword-knots. Moreover, they are hollow. The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full of a viscous moisture resembling a strong solution of gum arabic. I can see a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling through the broken ends. Under the pressure of the thin glass slide that covers them on the stage of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled ribbons, traversed from end to end, through the middle, by a dark streak, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... overcast the minds of men with its dull grey pall of realistic superstition. They combined to form a marvellous picture—those contrasts of splendour and squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure as aether, golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into a diaphanous green which suggested a resection of Kaf, that unseen mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert, changed face twice a year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as Hope, beautified with infinite verdure and broad sheetings of rain-water. The vernal and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... made a little chaplet of the fragrant leaves and flowers to adorn her smooth dark hair, and also a pretty knot for her breast. Her skirt was ruffled to her slender waist with tiniest frills of the diaphanous muslin. Elmira in her party gown looked like a double white ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... gloomy air out of Stygian deeps, as are the thoughts of spirits like Randal Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your own ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instinctive repulsion, while unwillingly acknowledging that he exercised a permanent and intimate fascination over her imagination. She dwelt, in quick pity, too, upon the frightened, wide-eyed, childish face recently seen rising from out its diaphanous cloud of tulle, the prettiness of it heightened by fair wealth of summer roses and flash of costly diamonds, and upon Mr. Decies, the whole-hearted, young soldier lover, whose existence threatened such dangerous complications in respect of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wall with a cheval de frise of bristling thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery palm swam in a drowsy upper radiance. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... swept across the river, caught her filmy skirts, and blew them about her ankles. She frowned, brushing down the wind-swept draperies with that instinct for modesty all women share. Shy and supple, elastic-heeled, in that diaphanous half light her slim long body might have been taken for that of a wood nymph had there been eyes to follow her through ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... which float above the meadows of a September morning. As the soldiers turned to look back, an invisible hand seemed to lift from the landscape the last of these veils—a delicate vapor, like a diaphanous gauze through which the glow of precious jewels excites our curiosity. Not a cloud could be seen on the wide horizon to mark by its silvery whiteness that the vast blue arch was the firmament; it seemed, on the contrary, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... daylight (in which, from that spot, they always looked exactly as though cut out of cardboard); why Providence had not arranged for perpetual full-moon; why the world looked such a place of peaceful, glorious beauty by moonlight, the bare cruel mountains like diaphanous clouds of tenderest soothing mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a fairy palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when all was so abominable by day; and, as ever—why his darling, Lenore Stukeley, had ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light vapor—a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a cloud—had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would have said: "Look quickly! in a moment it will ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... a little effort of the imagination we can picture a prismatic color sphere, using only the colors of light. In a cylindrical chamber is hung a diaphanous ball similar to a huge soap bubble, which can display color on its surface without obscuring its interior. Then, at the proper points of the surrounding wall, three pure beams of colored light are admitted,—one red, another green, and the ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... beast. Then all was hushed; the sun had burst forth, the waves were smoothed, you now see only a laughing expanse; spun out over this polished back a thousand greenish tresses sported wantonly; the light rested on it, like a diaphanous mantle; it followed the supple movements and the twisting of those liquid arms; it folded around them, behind them, its radiant, azure robe; it took their caprices and their mobile colors; the river meanwhile, slumbrous in its great, peaceful bed, was stretched out at the feet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... obtained from Selukine, massed against walls draped with green, made an exquisite setting for her entertainment and her own beauty. She glided here and there among the amber lights, welcoming her guests and setting them at the little green-clad card tables, a diaphanous vision of gold-and-orange chiffons, her perfect neck and shoulders ablaze with diamonds, and her little flat-coiffed black head, rather snakelike on its long throat, banded by a ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of one who was worn out with utter lassitude. We meet people like this from time to time who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. This young girl was very pretty, with the diaphanous beauty of a phantom; and she ate with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... fancy an expanse of dusty land lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden; but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods of clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubs stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnished leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their way down through ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... heavy ones render it more dry, by beating down the vapours. He is also of opinion that the dingy, smoky appearance in the sky, in very dry seasons, arises from the want of moisture sufficient to let the light through, and render the atmosphere transparent; because he had observed several bodies more diaphanous when wet than dry; and did never recollect that the air had that ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... of mocking satisfaction seemed to flicker through the wrinkled face; and the general aspect of the man was still formidable indeed. And yet it was the phantom of a man that she beheld. He had paled to the diaphanous whiteness of the Catholic ascetic; his hand shook upon his stick; the folds of the cloak barely concealed the emaciation of his body. Victoria, gazing at him, seemed to perceive strange intimations and presages, and, in the deep harsh eyes, ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... His clear diaphanous transparency of colouring is not used from lack of technical ability, but to approach more nearly to his ideal of celestial and divine visions, and succeed in a species of ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... is opacous, not transparent or diaphanous like Chrystall or glasse,[1] as Empedocles thought, who held the Moone to bee a globe of pure congealed aire, like haile inclosed in a ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... of her save as his more or less useful secretary, but after all, she could not be expected to reason out this thing too closely. Its very vagueness, indeed, lent it charm. Her love was veiled, as it were, in a most delicate, most diaphanous mist, which took from it all earthliness, and left it intangible, magical as some gift from fairyland. So far, no hint of desire had entered into it. It was all unselfish, girlish adoration, an almost childish reverence for one immeasurably her ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified. A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces, grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had snatched up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... after sunset. The hills, becoming uniform masses, assert their movement, strike deep into the valley, draw themselves strongly up towards the sky. The valleys also, with their purple darkness, rising like smoke out of them, assert themselves in their turn. And the sky, the more diaphanous for all this dark solidity against it, becomes sky more decisively; takes, moreover, colour which only fluid things can have; turns into washes of pale gold, of palest tea-rose pink and beryl green. Against this sky the cypresses are delicately finished ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the Moors, then," she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... vast amount of latent force and energy here, but it takes a cannon to put it in action. Of course there are exceptions enough. Our friend Henry Bright is a slender, diaphanous young gentleman, of a nervous temperament, with no beer or roast beef apparent in his mind or person; and there are doubtless many like him. The English are unfortunate in noses. Their noses are unspiritual, thick at the end; and there is an expression about ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... most suggestive use of clothing is the use of just a sufficient amount to call attention to the person, without completely concealing it. I need not refer to the fact that in modern society this is accomplished by, or perhaps we should better say transpires in connection with, diaphanous fabrics and decollete dresses; and the same effect was doubtless accomplished by a typical early form of female dress, of which I will give one instance in Australia ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... road a weather-beaten hut struck an isolated note of life, and across the valley Matterhorn towered,—solitary, superb,—his rugged head and shoulders thrust heavenward through a diaphanous scarf of cloud. Suddenly Quita Lenox fronted her husband, and his face softened to a smile that hovered in the eyes an appreciable time ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the palace of the young man's father, five miles along the blue Bosphorus as the bird flies, and the second in the little boat-house in the small indent of a cove under the garden holding the beloved arbor, the little white house, and My Lady of the diaphanous veil and the ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... plants, flowers and fruit which they are cultivating or plucking are of the same supernatural and luminous blue as the general atmosphere of the Palace. Figures of a taller stature, clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure, figures of a sovereign and silent beauty move among the CHILDREN and would seem to ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... man of war was keeping as close to us as he could, go flat onto his venerable face, and reflected that he must have got a thrown spear through him. Casting a hurried glance at him to see if he were done for or only wounded, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something diaphanous which gleamed in the moonlight and reminded me of I knew not what at ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... desires, he proceeds himself to give it the finishing touches, improving the details of form and expression, managing the different effects produced by two different materials—one, the plastic model, being opaque; the other, the marble, being considerably diaphanous; giving the proper varieties of texture in the flesh, hair, and drapery, and, more ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... translucency; diaphaneity[obs3]; lucidity, pellucidity[obs3], limpidity; fluorescence; transillumination, translumination[obs3]. transparent medium, glass, crystal, lymph, vitrite[obs3], water. V. be transparent &c. adj.; transmit light. Adj. transparent, pellucid, lucid, diaphanous, translucent, tralucent|, relucent[obs3]; limpid, clear, serene, crystalline, clear as crystal, vitreous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... passage from the comment of Benjamin Keach, which gives both the conceit of the ancients and the endorsement of it at a comparatively recent era. "Pearls," naturalists tell us, "have a strange birth and original. Pliny saith, Shell fish is the wonderful geniture of a pearl congealed into a diaphanous stone, and the shell is called the mother of pearl. Now at a certain time of the year this shell fish opens itself, and takes in a certain moist dew, after which they grow big until they bring forth the pearl. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... glorified. The afternoon autumn sun shone full through the great window and lighted her up till she looked like a spirit. Lighted her white diaphanous dress till it seemed to take shape as an ethereal robe; lighted her red hair till it looked like a celestial crown; lighted her great dark eyes till their black beauty became swept ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... man, who had treasured up so long some mystery, probably a very diaphanous one, for Emily's own dear sake in the world's esteem, and from the long bad habit of reserve, fell back into his chair as if he had been shot; but he did not faint, nor gasp, nor utter a sound; he only looked at her so long and sorrowfully, that she ran to him, and covered his pale ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... their attendance, he was both incensed and grimly amused by their various idiosyncrasies. He soon became accustomed to their vanity boxes and their public application of powder and lip stick, the frank crossing of their knees that exhibited more diaphanous silk than he had ever seen in his life before, the polite excitement that any new article of attire worn by one seemed to induce in all, the wicked but on the whole good-natured baiting of Aileen Lawton and Polly Roberts, the alternate insolence and Circean glances of Mrs. Bascom, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... not glide like us, But walk in eerie paces; They're solid, not diaphanous, With arms! ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... morning of any of the clothes. Heavy things, such as sheets or table cloths, might be safely looked for under lee of the nearest gorse hedge, but it would be impossible even to guess where the lighter and more diaphanous articles had been whisked to. A week afterwards the shepherds used to bring in stray cuffs and collars, and upon one occasion "Judy," the calf, was discovered in a paddock hard by, breakfasting off my best pocket handkerchiefs with an excellent appetite. Of course everything ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... obscurity those matters in which they are interposed. Whatever may be the question agitated, it becomes complicated: as soon as these theories are introduced, they envelope the most demonstrable sciences with a thick, impenetrable mist; render the most simple notions complex; give opacity to the most diaphanous ideas; turn the most evident opinions into insolvable enigmas. What exposition of morality does the theories, upon which ye found all the virtue, present to man? Do not all your oracles breathe inconsistency? Does not your doctrines embrace every gradation of character, however ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... corn. It lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We traveled on, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... on account of this diaphanous, indescribable, exquisite something, I am to be calmly thrown over; calmly told to go about my business!" He began to walk up and down the pathway, with feverish steps, talking rapidly, and representing Hadria's conduct in different lights, each one making it appear more absurd ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... very ethereal, as she came slowly across the grass in her diaphanous gown of rich white, covered with a flowing veil of thinnest transparent black. Her blue eyes looked restlessly bright; her lips wore a mechanical smile. Rachel, watching her, experienced a sudden pang at her undeniable loveliness. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... girl is extended upon a straight-backed settle in somewhat of a Recamier pose. She is intently occupied in the perusal of a book. The turn of the head, the careless attitude, and the flesh tints of throat and face are all admirably rendered. The diaphanous quality of the girlish costume is skilfully worked out, as are also the accessories of the room. Miss Greene's work must commend itself to those who recognize the true in art. Technical dexterity and a fine discrimination of color are attributes of this conscientious artist's work. ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... window or door or other opening. The third is Reflected light; and there is a 4th which is that which passes through [semi] transparent bodies, as linen or paper or the like, but not transparent like glass, or crystal, or other diaphanous bodies, which produce the same effect as though nothing intervened between the shaded object and the light that falls upon it; and this we will discuss fully in ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... be used as an accompaniment to music, it must be given an opportunity to supply "atmosphere." This it cannot do if confined to an insignificant spot; it must be given extensity. Furthermore, by the use of diaphanous hangings, form will be minimized and the evanescent effects surely can be charming. But finally the lighting effects must fill the field of vision just as the music "fills the field of audition" in order to be effective. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... cleared; the breeze swept off the mists, and the blue of the sky appeared in spots; so that when the coucou trundled along the narrow strip of road from Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte, the sun had fairly drunk up the last floating vapors of the diaphanous veil which swathed the scenery of that ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... have on reliable feminine authority, was one of the very few blondes whose complexions can carry off reds and yellows. This particular gown—I remember it perfectly—was of a dim, dull yellow—flounciful (if I may coin a word), diaphanous, expansive. I have not the least notion what fabric composed it; but scattered about it, in unexpected places, were diamond-shaped red things that I am credibly informed are called medallions. The general effect of it may be briefly characterised as grateful to the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... he smiled bitterly. Mere tricks of his desire! Illusions! . . . Upon turning his head he recognized the falsity of his hope. Nobody was following his footsteps; he was the only being going down the center of the avenue. Near him, in the diaphanous white of a guardian angel, was a nurse. Poor blind man! . . . Desnoyers was passing on when a quick movement on the part of the white-clad woman, an evident desire to escape notice, to hide her face by looking at the plants, attracted ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... diaphanous milord want with us?" exclaimed the Colonel, turning to assure himself that the horseman who had followed them from the bridge was ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from their places and stream ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... there are often several words to express the same or nearly the same meaning. Want of space prevents these being all included; the most important or most commonly used word has therefore been chosen; for instance, "mercury", "tranquil", "diaphanous", "suffocate", "salve", "renown", "fiddle", are not to be found, but "quicksilver", "calm", "translucent", "smother", "ointment", "fame", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... Tutts's diaphanous "tea-gown" laid out on the breeze, thereby revealing the fact that she was wearing Congress ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... sporangia crowded, ovoid or cylindric, stipitate or sessile, blue-gray, often capped with white; stipe variable in length and structure, where well developed pure white, often flattened, expanded and diaphanous, connate with others through the irregular reticulate or sheet-like hypothallus; columella none; capillitium ample, the lime knots angular or rounded, white connected by hyaline threads; spores in mass black, by transmitted light dark violet, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated by refraction. A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but it is not necessary. The thing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... expect people who were nourished on a literature which is at all events hearty even when it chances to be stupid—on what grounds can the organisers of improvement expect an English man or woman to take a sudden fancy to the diaphanous ghosts of the new American fiction? I dislike out-of-the-way words, and so perhaps, instead of "diaphanous ghosts," I had better say "transparent wraiths," or "marionettes of superfine manufacture," or anything the reader likes that implies frailty and want of human resemblance. It all comes ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... less elongated relatively to its breadth; in two specimens, with scuta of equal width, one was longer than the other by the whole of the occludent margin of the terga. Valves white, thick, (in young specimens sometimes diaphanous and thin,) closely approximate to each other; surfaces furrowed to a very variable amount. Terga generally more plainly furrowed than the scuta, of which the basal portion is generally less furrowed than the ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... would have been hard to find a happier or more expressive combination. And when Rousseau and republicanism had won the race, we find the ladies of the Directoire illustrating the national illusions with clinging and diaphanous draperies; and asserting their affinity with the high ideals of ancient Greece by wearing sandals instead of shoes, and rings on their bare white toes. The reaction from the magnificent formalism of court dress to this abrupt nudity ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... reside in the slow condensation of a radiating mass of gas under the action of gravity, is wholly inadequate to explain the observed phenomena. If the old view were correct, the earlier history of a star, from the giant stage of a cool and diaphanous gas to the period of highest temperature, would be run through within eighty thousand years, whereas we have the best of evidence that many thousands of centuries would not suffice. Some other source of energy is imperatively needed. If 5 per cent of a star's mass consists originally of hydrogen ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... diaphanous and snowy mass, I well remember feeling myself to be a mere shadowy spot on a field of light; the courage was not in me to put on a transparent white dress: something thin I must wear—the weather and rooms being too hot to give substantial ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... white things, delicate and diaphanous and fit to be worn by angels. Then the dresses arrived, and were laid out on the bed and inspected. There was a black gown and a grey gown and a confection in pale blue. If Jones had been asked to price them he would have said a hundred dollars. Like most men he was absolutely unconscious of ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... "Diana and Endymion" was painted three times—"good, better, best." A shepherd loved the Moon, who in his sleep descends from heaven to embrace him. The canvas of 1903 must be regarded as the final success—the sleeping figure is more asleep, his vision more dreamlike and diaphanous. "Orpheus and Eurydice" (painted three times) is perhaps the greatest of his classical pictures. It is one of the few compositions that were considered by its author as "finished." Here again the lover through disobedience loses ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... Indian stand motionless before these silent walls? The cool atmosphere woos him with its transparency and its perfumes; the radiant stars send down upon the sleeping earth rays of diaphanous mildness; the white constellations illumine the darkness with their enchanting light; his heart believes in those sympathetic communications which brave time ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... could have been attempting a swift, secret and, so far, unchallenged escape. The shores unfolded in a panorama without form. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights following us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn we overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made a course east by north to where ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... of blue canton flannel were bordered with trailing convolvulus in pink cretonne, and the diaphanous folds of white muslin curtains held in the centre an embroidered anchor which dragged inward, as the breeze rushed in through open windows. An arched recess in the wall, whence a door communicated with the adjoining chamber, was concealed by a portiere of blue that matched the lambrequins, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that I felt a moisture gather in my eyes just because of the beauty of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the women about me seemed suddenly coarse and insincere. Some wonderful red stones, brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the diaphanous black driftings of her dress. She asked me if the stones were not very pretty, and said she gathered them in one of ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... he told her he hoped never to see her ugly old face again. And that delicate little creature in the box next to her—that pale diaphanous face?' ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... tea-cups of turquoise china, adorned by medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping of the ivy leaves against the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... sudden fall of temperature. The village smoke then hangs a few feet above the earth like a blue-grey diaphanous cloud. ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... countenance was not the beauty of the Saxons. It was a radiant face, one of those that seem to have been touched in their cradle by a sunbeam, and to have retained all their brilliancy and suffused and mantling lustre. One marks sometimes such faces, diaphanous with delicate splendour, in the southern regions of France. Her eye, too, was the rare eye of Aquitaine; soft and long, with lashes drooping over the cheek, dark as ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... demand as its right all the happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of seraphic calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused beneath that diaphanous complexion,—due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her head, fell thence with black reflections round the delicate transparent ears and defined the outlines ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... shoulder marble-sweet The veil diaphanous fell, the folds whereof Came fluttering downward like a snowy dove, To nestle in the wonder ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... She used to say, wistfully, that she always got a hand on her entrance in that dress. It was due to the sheer shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it beheld her loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud. There it hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet as fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead white rose pressed within the leaves of a book ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... danger—the danger of an explosion which would sweep away everything, Vatican and St. Peter's also, if one day the books in their turn were to awake and speak aloud as speak the beauty of Venus and the manliness of Apollo. But the white, diaphanous old man seems neither to see nor to hear, and the huge heads of Jupiter, the trunks of Hercules, the equivocal statues of Antinous continue to watch him as he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... after all the proper frame for the picture of his golden sweetheart. Lance-straight and slender, his wood nymph waded knee deep through the ferns. Straight toward him she came, and his temples began to throb. A sylph of the woods should be diaphanous. The one he saw was a creature of color and warmth and definiteness. Life, sweet and mocking, flowed through her radiantly. His heart sang within him, for the woman he loved out of a world of beautiful women was coming to him, light-footed ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... story. This is somewhat romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of Fouque. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... dispelling the diaphanous mists of early morning, making them hang luminous a moment and then disperse, like tinted gauze that flutters slowly upward in a breeze and vanishes. Great white clouds, foam-like and crisp, piled themselves up fantastically and floated off also, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... surcharged that it had almost the singing quality of a current through it entered Miss Bleema Pelz, on slim silver heels that twinkled, the same diaphanous tulle of the photograph enveloping her like summer, her hair richer, but blending with the peach-bloom of her frock, the odor of youth ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is "not prismatic but diaphanous." Those who could understand anything could understand it, and the chansons de geste easily found currency in the market-place, when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... saw her. A huge four-posted bed with silken hangings occupied a recess in the room. Across its foot a low couch was drawn. She had thrown herself there. Her head was pillowed on crimson gold-embroidered cushions; her diaphanous draperies, billowing foamlike over her, half concealed, half revealed her lovely form; her hair waved away from her brows, and spread like a shower of gold over the cushions. One bare arm hung to the floor; something jewel-like ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... and raced us, as if, even to them, their native element had become hateful, or as if they sensed something ominous and fearsome abroad from which they sought shelter in our company. One slender little opal-hued diaphanous-winged bird-fish came aboard, and before he was picked up had the happy life grilled out of him on our scorching iron deck, hot almost as boiler plates. Poor little chap! he found with us anything but sanctuary; but perhaps he lived long enough to signal the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palais de Justice ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Street, I please myself with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance—that I am carried soft through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous, opal-tinted Dream. ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... only to hear a silvery voice calling for aid. Bursting through the thicket, he discovers Sir Guyon, lying on the ground, watched over by a spirit of such transcendent beauty that the palmer realizes it must be an angel even before he notes its diaphanous wings. This ministering spirit assures the palmer that Sir Guyon will soon recover, adding that although unseen he will continue to watch over him, and will help him to escape from all the dangers along his path. Then the heavenly spirit vanishes, and, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... dawn there was plenty to see. Even though you did not watch the citron-coloured sky overhead as it slowly changed its diaphanous draperies for others that were rose, then crimson, and then gold, finally casting off these two, and showing its blue magnificence unadorned. There were the soldiers on guard at the doors, their yellow ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... readiness and directness in his replies; of an indescribable sweetening of the address, that had been sweet, with a rose-shadow of gentle apology cast over every approach; of a deepening of the atmosphere of his reverence, which yet as it deepened grew more diaphanous. And when now the episode of angelic visitation was over, with his usual wisdom he understood the wrench her abrupt departure must have given his whole being, and allowed him plenty of time to recover himself from it. Once he came upon him weeping: not with faintest overshadowing did he rebuke ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald |
