"Iridescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... AND HALL), is an admirable example of this. Certainly no one else could have created this exotic city with its painted palaces and copper-encrusted towers, a vision of sea-mists and rainbows; or peopled it with so iridescent a company—the strange princess; the queen, her mother; the senile king who should have been (but wasn't) her father; Theophilus, the Greek artist; the philosophic old Druidess, and the dwarfs who "chanted squeaky hymns amid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... more golden, of a stiller warmth than any yet, dawned, and she knew it would bring Ishmael over early with some plan for a picnic. The little garden lay steeped in sunshine that turned the stonecrop on the roof to fire and made the slates iridescent as a pigeon's breast. The rambler that half-hid the whitewashed lintel threw over it a delicate tracery of shadow which quivered slightly as though it breathed in a charmed sleep. Fuchsias drooped ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... The tint of the clear iris suggested sea shallows on a day of light cloud—more green than blue; yet with just enough of the sky's own colour to lend the charm of a constant variability, that harmonised admirably with her iridescent changes of mood. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi, indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an iridescent sunset. His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful after death, and he says that these pleasures are "part of the delights of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us, namely delights a thousand times superior, and above which only the sight of the Benevolent ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo, now the man's philosophy has perished like a bubble, his influence has utterly disappeared, for his books are unread, while only ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Whether the glittering iridescent tints and singular ornaments for which this family is famous result from the cumulative process of conscious or voluntary sexual selection, as Darwin thought, or are merely the outcome of a superabundant vitality, as Dr. A. R.. Wallace so strongly maintains, is a question ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... spirals of thought, those grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind shimmering like a poplar tree in sun and wind—jetting and spouting like plumbing after a freeze-up—'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else to do it for him. Think, then, what ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famous as the laureate of the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is forever suggesting water—fountains and pools, the glistening spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... are singing again," said to one another the gods. And looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger than a star shine beautifully but faintly, and up and up from it looking larger and larger came a flock of white, innumerable swans, singing and singing and singing, till it seemed as though even the gods were ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... lowest level of the crater, pretty nearly a mile across, presenting from above the appearance of a sea at rest, but on crossing it we found it to be an expanse of waves and convolutions of ashy-coloured lava, with huge cracks filled up with black iridescent rolls of lava, only a few weeks old. Parts of it are very rough and ridgy, jammed together like field ice, or compacted by rolls of lava which may have swelled up from beneath, but the largest part of the area presents ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... one corner is a cannon made in 1710, and brought by Junipero Serra. Ranged on shelves is a collection such as can be found nowhere else, of great value: strange stone idols, a few specimens of the famous iridescent pottery, queer ornaments, toys, and relics. In another corner see the firearms and weapons of long ago: old flintlocks, muskets, Spanish bayonets, crossbows, and spears. There are coins, laces, baskets, toys, skulls, scalps, and a sombrero ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... good luck in Florence. "Too bad you're not getting out here!" she said, as they shook hands. And then Mary forgot her in gazing at the Rock of Hercules, the red rock crowned with walls as old as history, and jewelled with flowers. Close to shore the water was green and clear as beryl, and iridescent blue as a peacock's breast where the sea flowed past the breakwater. In the harbour were yachts large and small, a trading ship or two, and fishing boats drawn up on a narrow strip of beach. Across from the Rock, and joined to it by the low-lying Condamine, was Monte Carlo, with the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... my half-open eyes; the vault of heaven and the iridescent snow made magical visions about me; the slight roaring in my ears lulled me like a confused melody; the wind, as it blew over the deserted plain, brought ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood, where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than in "Ole Lukoeie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ideal woman. I don't know why I should say was, by the way, because she's still living. But there's something—I don't know; it's rather difficult to explain—But you know how pouring champagne into a glass makes it froth up into a million iridescent little bubbles? Well, there was none of that in our married life. There was no fizz in it, no sparkle, no taste, phew! The days were all one color—flat and stale and gray as the devil. And that's why I wanted to get away and forget. You can't forget ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... life going about ignoble ends under the walls of the great Venetian fortress and the still more magnificent cathedral of Zara; he had visited Spalato, clustered in sweltering grime within the ample compass of the walls of Diocletian's villa, and a few troublesome sellers of coins and iridescent glass and fragments of tessellated pavement and such-like loot was all the population he had found amidst the fallen walls and broken friezes and columns of Salona. Down this coast there ebbed and flowed a mean residual ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down Fifth ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of loggias and by every window of the palace facade which was the crowning glory of the villa. The amethystine Sabine Hills and the immense Campagna encircle the Eternal City, from whose mists the dome of Saint Peter's seems to rise a buoyant, iridescent bubble. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... Giusippe found sightseeing dull. And the next day Uncle Bob was as good as his word, and took the young people to the British Museum, where he showed them some of the old Egyptian and Graeco-Syrian glass. There were little vases, cups, and flasks of wonderful iridescent color, as well as many glass beads that had been found upon ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... porpoises turned out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... bent of Arthur for the mystic, the supernatural, was understood by his wife. Here was frosty music, dazzling music, in which the spangled North, with its iridescent auroras, its snow-driven soundless seas and its arctic cold, were imagined by this woman. She quickly discerned the Sun theme and the theme of the Shadow, and alternately blushed and wept at the wonderfully ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the sky-line of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... now, leaving behind them in shimmering dewdrops an iridescent veil on mead and copse and garden; the river gleamed in diamond curves and loops, while in the covert near me the birds were singing as if from hearts that ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... plodding way to call even his youngest and rashest brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his journey,—for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is cherished, all the rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey grows dull and leaden unless companioned by youth's iridescent dreams. Not only that, but the mature of each generation run a grave risk of putting their efforts in a futile direction, in a blind alley as it were, unless they can keep in touch with the youth of their own day and know at least the trend ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... or as our merry ancestors would have called it, a flam, is usually the most ephemeral and evanescent of human devices. Like a boy's soap bubble, it glitters for a brief moment in iridescent rotundity, then ceases to be even a film of air. It is unsubstantial as the tail of Halley's comet. On rare occasions, it is true, its existence is prolonged; many worthy people are beguiled; and some enthusiasts are so effectually hoodwinked as to persist in ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... my wish, Sir," she answered, and suddenly a rising wind blew all the strands of her hair into a cloud of gold, so that her coarse wool dress appeared brocaded; and while she was thus sumptuously clothed a great peacock in iridescent array strutted by her, and she placed her gloved hand for a moment on his shining feathers, looking, indeed, a princess. Back of her the courtiers stared and rubbed their eyes. The three slim boys on the lawn ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... impression that their tails were superfluous appendages, but no doubt they serve the birds a useful purpose as rudders and balancing-poles. The magpie presents a handsome picture as he swings through the air, the iridescent black gleaming in the sun, beautifully set off with snowy-white trimmings on both the upper and lower surfaces of the wings. On the perch or on the wing he is an ornament to any landscape. As to his voice—well, he is a genuine squawker. There is not, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... the shell-scattered house and flesh of Nalasu. These dream episodes constituted for him another land of Otherwhere, mysterious, unreal, and evanescent as clouds drifting across the sky or bubbles taking iridescent form and bursting on the surface of the sea. Froth and foam it was, quick-vanishing as he awoke, non-existent as Skipper, Skipper's head on the withered knees of Bashti in the lofty grass house. Malaita the real, Malaita the concrete and ponderable, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... following him again! He looked around wildly as the sidewalk moved swiftly through the cool evening air. Far above, he could see the shimmering, iridescent screen that still stood to protect the New City from the devastating virus attacks which might again strike down from the skies without warning. Far ahead he could see the magnificent "bridge" formed by the sidewalk crossing over to the apartment area, where the thousands who worked in the ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... of grapes, and where it thinned away to a point the bees dropped off by their own weight into the grass below, then rose again and either flew aloft in wide and circling flight or rushed headlong upon the swarm once more. Across the iridescent cluster passed a gleam and glow of peacock and iris, opal and mother-of-pearl; while from its heart ascended a deep murmur, telling of tremendous and accumulated energy suddenly launched into this peaceful glade of apple-blossom and ambient green. The frenzy of the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... he says a thing like that," she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies there. ... I don't want you right on the table"; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... opalescent sea, Flung like a ribbon limp athwart the sky, A rose lay blooming on the restless lea, While sundry birds came chattering sweetly by. 'Twas then my soul that all too long had slept, Awoke from out its iridescent nap, ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... experiment was as much above the melting-point of gold as this is above that of the silver-gold alloy. The finish of the cupellation of gold or gold-silver alloys is practically the same as with pure silver; there is the same thinning out of the litharge into a luminous film which becomes iridescent before the brightening. But the danger of spirting decreases as the proportion of gold becomes greater, and disappears when the gold is much over 30 per cent. Nevertheless it is well to let such buttons become ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... is always hard to realise. The past and the distant are easily perceived. Like a far-off mountain, their glory is conspicuous, and the iridescent vapours of romance quickly gather round it. The main outline of a distant peak is clear, for rival heights are plainly surpassed, and sordid details, being invisible, cannot detract from it or confuse. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... and the only retreat was through the chamber of the skulls, where perhaps the savage beings of the underground vault were already collected. Looking over and down, he could see the jets of water shooting out to fall in a mantle of spray, on which the arrow-like shafts of sunlight sparkled in iridescent hues, and through the spray he could see the white waters of the cataract. Above his head there was a jutting rock, which shut out the wall immediately above, but outside the rock he saw the roof of the vault, gaunt ribs of rock pierced at intervals by fissures, through ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his thought was ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... made of red rock like brilliantly polished marble, hollowed to hold tobacco. A stick two feet long, as thick as a cane, formed the stem. For the dance these pipes were often decked with gorgeous scarlet, green, and iridescent feathers, though white plumes alone made them the symbol of peace, and red quills bristled ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... eyes saw it all. The black shadows had fallen from him; he had left them with Flint; and a bright day had dawned within him and without him. Everything was tinged with iridescent light, for he looked at the world, as it were, through dew-drops. Happy morning—happy life! when one can put aside the trailing vines of painful memory, and let the warm sunshine of Heaven find its way into ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive, imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex, innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent unmistakably grave and sincere; yet it spoke without emphasis: ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... to await her at Genoa; and, closing her eyes in the cab, she saw in anticipation the white stones of an Italian harbor enclosing an iridescent sea, where the sunlight had a gleam of the Orient, where everything sang joyously, even to the swelling sails upon the deep. It so happened that on that day Paris was muddy and murky, drowned by one of those continuous downpours ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... results there have probably been several causes at work. There seems to be a constant tendency in the male of most animals—but especially of birds and insects—to develop more and more intensity of colour, often culminating in brilliant metallic blues or greens or the most splendid iridescent hues; while, at the same time, natural selection is constantly at work, preventing the female from acquiring these same tints, or modifying her colours in various directions to secure protection by assimilating her to her surroundings, or by producing mimicry of some protected ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... insects. Held up by the excitement—for by this time other birds have darted to the feast—the starlings alight among the plumes of the laburnum, interrogating in acidulous tones, their black, burnished, iridescent feathers and flame-hued eyes making a picture of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... existed in an iridescent dream of happiness, without sense of relation to a material world, forgetful of the flight of time, lost to everything but her lover's arms and voice ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Buddha was very much excited, he ordered a basin of water brought and set before the altar. He called the Lamas and began to pray. Suddenly the altar candles and lamps lighted themselves and the water in the basin became iridescent." ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... "Yes, see the iridescent wings of this chap," and Uncle Jeff pointed to a fine specimen. "I don't wonder the old Egyptians loved this creature and carved their scarabs in ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... bromide from which it is made. The image of the latter is susceptible to practically only one agent likely to come in contact with it, namely, sulphur fumes from burning gas, which partially sulphurize it and give rise to iridescent markings resembling those due to stale paper. Now, as the sulphide-toned print is the result of this sulphurizing process carried out with intention to a state of completeness, the result should be—and proves to be in practice—immune to this ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
... forgotten his quest. But once I saw him for a moment as he stood alone at sunrise, waiting at the gate of a Roman prison. He had taken from a secret resting-place in his bosom the pearl, the last of his jewels. As he looked at it, a mellower lustre, a soft and iridescent light, full of shifting gleams of azure and rose, trembled upon its surface. It seemed to have absorbed some reflection of the lost sapphire and ruby. So the secret purpose of a noble life draws into itself the memories of past joy and past sorrow. All that has helped it, all that has ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... homage that extraordinary beauty can elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it (I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often fulfill themselves, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... no lethargic Eastern, unpractical, though deviously subtle, taking no thought for the morrow, uselessly imaginative, submissive, ready to cringe genuinely to authority, then turn and kick the man below him. He was no stagnant pool with only the iridescent lights of corruption upon it. Almost in the English sense he was thoroughly manly. He had the true instinct for sport, the true ability of the thorough sportsman. He was active. He had within him the faculty to command, to administrate, to organize. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... busy life the denizens of the water, already quickened by the mysterious electric influences of the last night's thunder-shower. The long-winged cinnamon-flies spun and fluttered over the pools; the sand-bees hummed merrily round their burrows in the marly bank; and delicate iridescent ephemerae rose by hundreds from the depths, and, dropping their shells, floated away, each a tiny Venus Anadyomene, down the glassy ripples of the reaches. Every moment a heavy splash beneath some ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... their mute intervals fell upon them. Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... conceive something in thought before it actually exists. He must have seen all the glories of the material universe, worlds upon worlds circling through space, moon and stars, the beauty of forest and stream, of tinted flower and iridescent insect wing before they were brought into being, and He had the power to create them. Man has this wonderful gift of imagination. The inventor sees the machine in his thought before he attempts to build it. The poet has ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... sky grew thick and heavy with clouds. The water of the lake was like molten jewels, ruby and amethyst. The boat seemed floating in some strange, ethereal substance hitherto unknown to man—translucent and iridescent. The mountains loomed like dim purple pillars at the western gate of the world, and the rays of the half-hidden sun plunging athwart these sentinels sank deep into the shining flood. Later the sky cleared, and the inverted mountains in the lake were scarcely ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... fresh. They never should be bought if either out of condition or season. If fresh they are peculiarly beautiful fish, their backs of an iridescent blue green barred with black, and their bellies of a ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... 40 deg. or 50 deg. C. A gentle heat is quite sufficient to dry the albumen quickly; a greater heat would spoil it, as it would produce coagulation. So soon as the film is dry, which will be seen by the iridescent aspect it assumes, the plate is allowed to cool to the ordinary temperature, and is then at once exposed either beneath a positive, or beneath an original drawing the lines of which have been drawn ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... tender, Flushed with an opaline gleam, And passionate sunset-splendor— Ye both but embody a dream. Visions of cloud-hidden glory Breaking from sources of light Mimic the mist of life's story. Mingled of scarlet and white. Sunset-clouds iridescent, Opals, and mists of the day, Are thrilled alike with the crescent Delight of a deathless ray Shot through the hesitant trouble Of particles floating in space, And touching each wandering bubble With tints of a ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... grotesque adumbrations of man's modern concepts of art and god. From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mighty red-iridescent sphere. ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... one the palaces of light in the Exposition grounds below us burst into radiance. The Horticultural dome turned to a wonderful iridescent bubble and the Tower of Jewels caught and reflected the light that played upon it. Wide bands of color streaked the sombre sky, transforming the clouds to shades of violet, yellow and rose. "The rainbow colors of promise," he said gently as he drew closer. "I shall take them as a message ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... he was very dark green. At least, that is what Peter thought at first glance. Then, as the stranger moved, he seemed to be a rich purple in places. In short he changed color as he turned. His feathers were like those of Creaker the Grackle—iridescent. All over he was speckled with tiny light spots. Underneath he was dark brownish-gray. His wings and tail were of the same color, with little touches of buff. His ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... be no doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page after page—full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound epigram—fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... simplicity of it, the few tints used, the modesty of the tints, and therewithal the clearness and precision of all boundary lines. In all fine flat colouring there are regular systems of dividing colour from colour. Above all, don't attempt iridescent blendings of colour, which look like decomposition. They are about as much as possible the reverse ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... Its decorative spire-like finials resemble the cypress and poplar. The clusters of floral ornaments and festoons reflect one of the fundamental purposes of decorative glory to which all plant life has been decreed. The bulblike glass dome is like an enormous dewdrop of beautiful proportions and iridescent color. All this beauty was conceived by Architects Bakewell and Brown, who have given full evidence of their appreciation of the purposes to ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known three centuries and more, had ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... 1910, a series of plays in which he let the creative imagination range over time and space. In Elga he tells the story of an old sorrow by means of the dream-technique of Hannele; in And Pippa Dances, he lets the flame of life and love flicker its iridescent glory before man and super-man, savage and artist; in The Maidens of the Mount he celebrates the dream of life which is life's dearest part; in Charlemagne's Hostage and in Griselda he returns to the interpretation and ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... equal to her malice. An occasional deed of alms, done not for charity's sake, but for ostentation; an adroit deal of cards, or a horoscope cast to flatter a foolish girl; a word of sympathy, hollow as a water bubble, but colored with iridescent prettiness, averted suspicion from the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... colouring of this wonderful creature! The semi-transparent dorsal fin, which extends without a break from the back of the head to the tail, is broad and slightly scalloped. It displays an upper edging of radiant blue, a broad band of iridescent pink with greenish opal-like lights, and a narrow streak of the richest emerald green, close along the back. The body is covered with large scales, the colouring of which conveys a general appearance of an elaborate system of slightly ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a song—his eyes not leaving the narrow veiled head before him. It was like a brown sealed lily-bud of hardened enamel, brown yet iridescent—set off by two jewels of flaming rose. There was no haste. The king's mouth was not tight with strain. It was the look of one certain of victory, certain from a life that knew no failures—the look of one that had learned the hunt ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... its industry from the beauty of the fall. The cascade, with two or three successive leaps above the road, plunges headlong down a steep crescent-shaped slope, and hides its foamy whiteness in the dark-foliaged ravine below. It is a wonder of graceful motion, of iridescent lights and delicious shadows; a shape of loveliness that seems instinct with a conscious life. Its beauty, like that of all natural marvels on our continent, is on a generous scale; and now the spectators, after viewing it ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... other parts of the islet is a medley of comminuted shells. We collected cowries of four kinds, large and small, crabs and balani, lobsters and sea-urchins (erinacei) with short spines; diminutive rock-oysters and a large variety with iridescent mother-o'-pearl, pink, red and yellow. The latter yields a white seed-pearl, and here, perhaps, we might attempt ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... it,' commented Henry, looking at a few iridescent bubbles at the bottom of the glass. 'I made ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy balloon—red, yellow, blue, green or purple, as the case might be. Over the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away, at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but full-pocketed, marvelling at the stroke of luck that enabled him to take ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... dug up by Layard in his researches,— things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the world,—indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets, and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little fragment ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cannot relate, one with the other, nor can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters, and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent, splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes—one a gigantic cat with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... is a prose poem, a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy—the white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism of his mind into the colored glories of the spectrum; truth dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less but all the more true. His other papers in the British Quarterly, the North British Review, and his last gem on "Paper, Pens, and Ink," in his valued and generous friend Macmillan's first number of his Magazine, are all astonishing ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... scarce know where else to look for so complete and convincing an account of such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course infinitely more copious, but his autobiography is cheap loose journalism compared with the directed, finely-condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea." ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... over all, hills and valley and canyon and mountain, was a bright opalescent mist. Green, pink, and other pale colors gleamed as behind a thin layer of crystal. Where the sun shone through a low white cloud upon a distant slope there might have been a great globe of iridescent glass illuminated within. The water was a light, soft, filmy yet translucent blue. Concha gazed with ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... develop from speculative matter of opinion to definite intentions, as contrasts and affinities grow sharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modifications in the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour must needs have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the forces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of society make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, the forces that bring together the really ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... where the home examination shows the greatly augmented purity of the water. A second specimen of water, taken from the Bay of Biscay, held in suspension fine particles of a peculiar kind; the size of them was such as to render the water richly iridescent. It showed itself green, blue, or salmon-coloured, according to the direction of the line of vision. Finally, we come to our last two bottles, the one taken opposite St. Catherine's lighthouse, in the Isle of Wight, the other at Spithead. The sea at both these ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... after this that Mrs. Caldwell went to visit her relations in England, accompanied by two of the children. It was in the summer, and Jane took Beth to the Castle Hill that morning to see the steamer, with her mother on board, go by. The sea was iridescent, like molten silver, the sky was high and cloudless, and where sea and sky met and mingled on the horizon it was impossible to determine. Numbers of steamers passed far out. They looked quite small, and Beth ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... ice-cold brook an hour before, accompanied by a dish of tender cucumbers fresh from the garden and smothered in crushed ice; so was the dry champagne—a rare vintage of hissing gold poured generously into Venetian glasses frail as a bubble, iridescent and fashioned like an open flower; so was the saddle of mutton that followed—and so, too, were the salad and cheese—and the minor drinkables and eatables to ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... them. She felt the wings of all the world upraised against the morning in a flashing, multitudinous flight. The world itself was flying. Sunlight poured on the large round world till she fancied it a heavy bee humming on its iridescent atmosphere across ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... it. About it were four tall vases of cut roses, two of white, two of red. Button-holes in white and red lay at three covers, gigantic American Beauties, red, with flowing white ribbons, at two. And napery, silver, iridescent glass, all the materialities, were well worthy of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... at ease in such surroundings as these in which he now found himself as a trout in a sandpile. The great room, with its costly furnishings, the tea-table crowded with silver and fragile porcelain, the kettle purring contentedly above the iridescent flame of the alcohol lamp,—above all, the subtle, indefinable suggestion of femininity which unknowably pervaded his surroundings,—all these enthralled young Nisbet beyond expression, and awed him immeasurably, into the bargain. He was, as usual, very clear in his own mind as to what he wanted, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... a dark color will predominate; when they are contracted, the skin becomes lighter in color. Besides the pigment-cells just described, Heincke discovered another kind of chromatophore, which was filled with iridescent crystals. They were only visible, as spots of metallic lustre, when the cells were in a state of contraction. He observed these latter chromatophores in a fish belonging to Gobius, the classical name of which is ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... filled with his own and Ruth's iridescent hopes,—a bubble which had floated before him as he tramped through the cool woods, and out upon the hillside, vanished ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... polished narra table, sipping a sweet, false Spanish wine from which we drew, not a convivial spirit, but rather a quiet, reflective gloom. All the shell shutters were drawn back; we could see the tin-roofed city gleam and crackle with the heat, and beyond the lithe line of cocoanuts, the iridescent sea, tugging the heart with offer of coolness. But, all of us, we knew the promise to be Fake, monumental Fake, knew the alluring depths to be hot as ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the fancy. Not a beauty like his Europa of the pasture (who was, when it came to that?)—but a fascinating little beggar, with a quality of sudden surprises that he could describe by no word except "iridescent." He liked the high arch of her brows; but her nose wasn't good and her lips were too thin except when she smiled. When she smiled! It was her smile, after all, that made her seem a thing of softness and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... narrow gauge, can go but slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an iridescent bubble suspended in the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... good business doing. The new bar fixtures, which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought down by dog ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... hardest of all. Think! Imagine one of those serene, iridescent rings of land, moored close beside the cliff, at which the waves never rest from beating. Could the one forever at peace, with leave from wind and wave to grow its verdure and twine its tendrils just where it would,—could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... stood an exquisitely carved statue of the patron St. Anne, holding by the hand her little daughter, the Blessed Virgin. And beyond the church and the mass of sorrowing, suffering human life at its doors was the great River St. Lawrence, a molten silver stream glimmering with a million iridescent ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... the dog, who turned protestingly from her-who-dispensed-savory-pieces-of-meat, he found that he had suffered the fate of all who hesitate, for a glance through the window showed him that, although the glowing, iridescent reflection from the western sky still lingered in the mountain top, embroidering its edge with gold, it was fast fading, and already Night had spread her dusky mantle over the eastern slope. Already darkness had blotted out ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... stanchions inside the window-panes were eaten away to the size of wires at the bottom where they entered the stone, the condensed breathings of generations having settled there in pools and rusted them. The panes themselves had either lost their shine altogether or become iridescent as a peacock's tail. In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an old dial; and shiftiness ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... womanhood which goes by the name of 'Dignity of Women'. Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry,—the chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity. Man is depicted as a wild creature, ever tossing on the sea of passion, or chasing phantoms in the empyrean. Reckless and vehement, he lives by the law of force, or, at the best, by the law ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... royal palace, so there he went to change his shaggy suit of clothes for another just as shaggy but not so dusty from travel. He selected a costume of pea-green and pink satin and velvet, with embroidered shags on all the edges and iridescent pearls for ornaments. Then he bathed in an alabaster pool and brushed his shaggy hair and whiskers the wrong way to make them still more shaggy. This accomplished, and arrayed in his splendid shaggy garments, he went to Ozma's banquet hall and found ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors, of wonderful gleams,—so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and stimulated thought, and communicated mental activity to all who approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her fancy, and she made numerous mistakes. Her integrity was perfect, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of pink and ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... by Blunse who named it samaderin; it is a white, crystalline, foliaceous substance, more soluble in water than in alcohol, fusible. Nitric and hydrochloric acids color it yellow. Sulphuric acid immediately forms a violet red color which disappears as iridescent, feathery crystals are precipitated. ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... the cloak beside her. The distance was now steel gray against the sky; then came a stripe of violet, and then a broad sheet of the vivid iridescent blue which one sees on the necks of peacocks, which again melted into the long line ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... which has preserved traces of ancient peoples we find local artistic types of work, of furniture, of poetic songs and popular music. This multiform creation of the inner man, then, enfolds him and protects his spirit in its intellectual needs, just as the iridescent shell ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... in his voice, but if Eve could have seen his eyes in the firelight, she might have noticed that they were very bright, and their pupils were contracted to hard, iridescent points. ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... a little clearing where the moss is thick at all seasons and starred in August with wild pinks. The water, though deep, is deliciously clear. At a depth of more than six feet you can distinguish the dead leaves at the bottom, the grass, the twigs, and here and there a stone's iridescent outline. They all lie asleep there, the waste of seasons gone by, soon to be covered by others in their turn. From time to time out of the depths of these submerged thickets an eft darts up. He comes circling up, quivering his yellowbanded tail, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... himself up to that spectral contagion. He saw the fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong, gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship. He saw himself taken in, soul and body, by a thin-plated fraud, a cheap trick of mother's ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Indeed, when the iridescent bubble of reputation floated out from her modest dressmaking rooms in East Twenty-third Street, Millie Moores, whom youth had rushed past, because she had no leisure for it, felt her heart open like a grateful flower when life brought her more chores to do. And when one ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... before,—as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with preternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the Northern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In the leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly iridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward became almost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was as interesting as it was grotesque. This, as well as I can describe it, is what the bird was doing. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... falsehood. They can only see the mouldy cheese, they cannot see the sunrise glory. All that is heroic, all that is sublime, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a dreary creed. It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass with its iridescent hues of opal as real every whit as your pot of pewter? Yet the time is coming when every one, morally and mentally at least, will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain of being 'writ down an ass'—or worse. It ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... when Anson, stiff with cold and haggard with a night of sleepless riding, sprang off the train and looked about him. The beauty of the morning made itself felt even through his care. These rows of resplendent maples, heavy with iridescent frost, were like fairy-land to him, fresh from the treeless prairie. As he walked on under them, showers of powdered rubies and diamonds fell down upon him; the colonnades seemed like those leading to some enchanted ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... she broke the awful news to Elizabeth's uncle. It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson—who had not time to read his Bible for pressure of business—had gone out into the grape-arbor in his narrow garden to feed the pigeons. There was a crowd of them about his feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray bosoms pushing and jostling against one another, and their pink feet actually touching his boots. When Miss White burst out at him, the pigeons rose in startled ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... drowned? Not a bit of it; this was simply in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp, he might catch sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure and crystal "as a frozen tear," and in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately the sky of Germany, and its iridescent sparkle recalled to his mind the very tear which "dost thou remember, fell from thine eyes when we were sitting under that emerald tree, and thou didst cry out joyfully: 'There is no crime!' 'No,' I said through my tears, 'but if that is so, there are no righteous ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the sweet-smelling twilight, or rather the glow that comes before it, and as we idly sipped the coffee, lo and behold, the old farm lay before us—a dream picture painted by the twilight! The little window-panes, iridescent with age and bulged into odd shapes by yielding sashes, caught the sunset hues and turned to fire opals; the light mist rising over the green meadows where the flowers now slept with heads bent and eyes closed lent ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Breathe through my soul tonight, You in your gown, impossibly white— I marvel greatly that it fail To glow and pale With iridescent light— How can it hang in silent nun-like folds? Think of the flaming mystery it holds, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... discount the remaining meals of the day. But the amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem not obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to be burdened by it—at any rate, he ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... down to Cornwall I realise the curious contradiction which lies in this region as at once a Land of Granite and a Land of Mist. On the one hand archaic rocks, primitive, mighty, unchanging, deep-rooted in the bases of the world. On the other hand, iridescent vapour, for ever changing, one moment covering the land with radiant colour, another enveloping it in a ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... very good, but does not provide fat, and as yet, meat. But the starving out business I have always said was an "iridescent" dream. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... opened, almost full, and Harry took admiringly into his hand the great piece of rock representing the half of a mass of stone that had been accidentally broken in two, and found to contain a considerable quantity of iridescent, many-hued crystal. The next chest contained some very fine specimens of sapphire; but it was little more than half-full, the mine having only been discovered within the last decade, and even then ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... and looked out to where the fountain was flinging its iridescent drapery to the wind. She gazed at his strong, ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... round the north and east of the White Mountain, we fell into the Wady Simkh (of "Wild Sumach"), that drains the great gap between the Pinnacles and the Buttresses of the 'Urnub-Tihmah section. After riding some two miles, we found to the south-east fragments of dark, iridescent, and metallic quartz: they emerge from the plain like walls, bearing north-south, with 36 degrees of westing and a westward dip of 15 degrees to 20 degrees—exactly the conditions which Australia seeks, and which produced the huge "Welcome Nugget" of Ballarat. They crop out of the normal ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... upon them as they went, but lifted never a wing to follow them. Ten minutes later the sun came out again. Then the monsters all sprang hurtling into the air, and darted hither and thither above the glade in shoals of iridescent radiance, seeking their prey. But Grom and A-ya, Mo and Loob triumphant in spite of their wounds, were by this time far away among the inland thickets, where those intolerable eyes could not search them out, nor the ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... mellower gold to the rippling ears of wheat. When all the slag has been drawn off, there is a moment's pause, and then a new cascade begins. The steel is beginning to flow, not in a daffodil stream like the slag, but in a cascade of exquisite turquoise blue, melting away at the sides into iridescent opal. Sometimes a great cloud of steam from the pit below passes across the mouth of the crucible, and then the torrent of molten steel takes on all the colours of the rainbow, and the great shed, with its alert, swiftly moving ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... now defining itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... window opposite made her face of all colours, like Joseph's coat. Not knowing how it looked from outside, she pictured to herself a sort of celestial radiance coming from within, though Diva, sitting opposite, was reminded of the iridescent hues observable on cold boiled beef. But then, Miss Mapp had registered the fact that Diva's notion of singing alto was to follow the trebles at the uniform distance of a minor third below, so that matters were about square between them. She wondered between ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... passed again, driving in the direction of the Applegate road. The day was breaking clear and still, and over the autumnal pageantry in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter of sassafras. Overhead the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... till the very jackals yapped in sympathy outside. And when he had told a score of wonderful wood stories as pungent of the life of these fairy forests as the aromatic scent of his bark-heaps outside, as iridescent with the colours of another world as the rainbow bubbles riding down his starlit rill, I took a turn, and told him of the commonplaces of my world so far away, whereat he laughed gloriously again. The greater the commonplace the larger his joy. The humblest story, hardly ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... airs, perfumed with birch and balsam and warm scents of the sun-steeped sward, drew over the pool from time to time, wrinkling and clouding its glassy surface. Birds flew over it, catching the small flies to whom its sheen was a ceaseless lure. And huge dragon-flies, with long, iridescent bodies and great jewelled, sinister eyes, ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... avalanche had powdered with fresh snow, and through which little spaces of a glaucous green showed themselves here and there, slippery and treacherous. Very calm, confident through experience that there was not the slightest danger, Tartarin walked along the verge of the crevasses with their smooth, iridescent sides stretching downward indefinitely, and made his way among the seracs, solely intent on keeping up with the Swedish student, an intrepid walker, whose long gaiters with their silver buckles marched, thin and lank, beside his alpenstock, which ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... sun was attended by four extraordinary sun-dogs. A large bright halo encompassed him, on the top of which the segment of a larger circle rested, forming a sort of heavy brilliant crown. At the bottom of the circle, and depending from it, was a mass of soft, glowing, iridescent vapor. On either side, like fragments of the larger circle, were two brilliant arcs. Altogether, it was the most portentous storm-breeding sun I ever beheld. In a dark hemlock wood in a valley, the owls were hooting ominously, and the crows ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Major Powell walked for more than a mile on a marble pavement fretted with strange devices and embossed with a thousand different patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shone on this floor, which gleamed with iridescent beauty. Exploring the cleft, Major Powell found a succession of pools one above another, and each cold and clear, though the water of the river was a dull red. Then a bend in the canon disclosed a massive abutment that seemed to be set ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... on a golden box, Whose rare enamel piqued her with its hue, Changeable, iridescent, shuttlecocks Of shades and lustres always darting through Its level, superimposing sheet of blue, Charlotta did not hear footsteps approaching. She started at the words: "Am ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... release it. Then in its frantic struggles the dolphin threatened to spring back to its native element, and Loring had to head him off and thrust him to the middle of the deck again, close to the skylight of the "saloon," and there he bade her come and watch the vivid, swiftly changing, iridescent hues of the beautiful creature, and she obediently drew near and stood bending over in mingled triumph and compassion. "Ah, que es bonito!" she sighed, as the frantic leapings seemed to cease and the prize lay gasping at full length, exhausted ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... an iridescent personality, made up of sudden shynesses, of bright flashes of bravado, of tenderness and hauteur, and she contrived to be fascinating in all of them. She held Kate as the Ancient Mariner held ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... were gorgeous with the October coloring. The oak in regal purple stood outlined against the beech in cloth-of-gold, while green-flecked hickory and elm, and iridescent silver and scarlet ash, and flaming maple added to the kaleidoscope ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... flushing, marking strange hours in the tall mahogany clocks that were never wound up and that yet audibly ticked on. All the elements, he was sure he should see, would hang together with a charm, presenting his hostess—a strange iridescent fish for the glazed exposure of an aquarium—as afloat in her native medium. He left his letter open on the table, but, looking it over next morning, felt of a sudden indisposed to send it. He would keep it to add more, for there would be more to know; yet when three days had elapsed he still had ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... the butcher's boy, and romance enough in the story of the miller's daughter, to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment; iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood—the wildest, deepest infinity of marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable, infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]—they are gone their way, and ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... mourn over the smallness of the piece, and its isolation. For the face of St. Francis himself is repainted, and all the blue sky; but the clouds and four sustaining angels are hardly retouched at all, and their iridescent and exquisitely graceful wings are left with really very tender and delicate care by the restorer of the sky. And no one but Giotto or Turner could ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... He thinned away and thinned away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he kept his shape. You could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see things through a soap-bubble, and all over him played and flashed the delicate iridescent colors of the bubble, and along with them was that thing shaped like a window-sash which you always see on the globe of the bubble. You have seen a bubble strike the carpet and lightly bound along two or three times before it bursts. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... when in season, which is the spring and summer: in the winter it spawns, and is not so good. When above ten or twelve pounds in weight it is of a brilliant copper-red on back and sides: the smaller ones are of a steel-blue on the back, and iridescent when first caught. It grows to the weight of fifty or sixty pounds, runs in great schools, and in habits and play when hooked resembles the allied species Labrax lineatus, the striped bass. Cuvier named the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... rich, varied, and luxuriant. As a rule, the foliage is thick and glossy; but while it is green to blackness in some of the trees, it is parti-coloured or iridescent in others. Many of the flowers, too, are iridescent, or change their hues from hour to hour. The beauty and profusion of the flowers is beyond conception, and some of the loveliest grow on what I should take for palms, ferns, canes, and grasses. A distant forest or woodland ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... realistic, pictures of slimy city streets with slimy creatures crawling on the pavements. It is an interesting fact that they appeared the same year of Synge's Poems with Synge's famous Preface counselling brutality, counselling anything to bring poetry away from the iridescent dreams of W. B. Yeats down to the stark realities of life and nature. They bear testimony to the catholic breadth of A. E.'s sympathetic appreciation, for they are as different as may be imagined from the spirit ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... other works. They are fresh and untrammeled in their development, and as full of sunlight as the nocturnes are of darkness. The one in A flat major was dedicated to the Countess de Loban as a wedding present, and was a farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby" impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the hypnotic ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... of stains, Is fashioned this last entry and design, By one aware of cold, approaching rains,— Who senses, through each iridescent line, A presence at the shoulder—chills and blights, Winds that will snuff his ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... she was going to eat, provided she got them and they were good. Besides, it would be like finding an old lost friend to look into her mirror (it was cracked and turned one's complexion pale green, with iridescent spots; but that was a detail) and see a bare-necked, white-armed ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... the franc and the brooch on the bottle, filled with hot water, and placed them for warmth in the fold of a blanket. After dejeuner, we inspected them. As I anticipated, the brooch had grown black on the surface with a thin iridescent layer of silver sulphide, while the franc had hardly suffered at all from ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the whole to be much less dense than those to which we were accustomed at home. They had, too, a peculiar iridescent beauty as if there was something in their composition or their texture which split up the chromatic elements of the sunlight and thus produced internal rainbow effects that caused some of the heavier cloud masses ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... the River of Souls.... But pictured terrors were offset by pictured consolations,—by the beautiful figure of Kwannon, white Goddess of Mercy,—by the compassionate smile of Jizo, the playmate of infant-ghosts,—by the charm also of celestial nymphs, floating on iridescent wings in light of azure. The Buddhist painter opened to simple fancy the palaces of heaven, and guided hope, through gardens of jewel-trees, even to the shores of that lake where the souls of the blessed are reborn in ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... in vogue among Fuegian belles for neck adornment is a pearl oyster (Margarita violacea) of an iridescent purplish colour, and about half an inch in diameter. It is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... All-coloured velvets, pearl-iridescent colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary![2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... with feathers, for he saw no wings,—with a helmet-like protuberance at the top of its head resembling mother-of-pearl darkened with black-lead. It had enormous feet and legs of a pale ash colour; the loose skin of its neck was coloured with an iridescent hue of bluish-purple, pink, and green; the body being of a rufous tinge, but of a purple-black about the neck and breast. The bird stood its ground boldly, not in the slightest degree alarmed at the appearance of the strangers, as it eyed them with a look ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... playing! The unison passages that mount and recede were iridescent columns of mist painted by the moonlight and swaying rhythmically in the breeze. Here was something rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker |
