"Nimbus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... times on bare toes at the top of the stairs, spinning until her silken skirts expanded in a nimbus, then danced down-stairs into Tess's arms, where she clung, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael Angelo smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he has carved the face of the very earth to his design. And though no fair youth steps forth to paint the unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his beloved madonna, I count it fair exchange that from every reef and point of this our sea-girt isle there shines a radiance none can watch without a catching of ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... yellowish brown. Sometimes, as in an egg I took at Bareilly, a few spots of this colour are mingled with the black ones. Deep reddish brown often takes the place of the typical black, and the spots are not very unfrequently surrounded by a more or less extensive brownish-pink nimbus, which in one egg I have is so extensive that the ground-colour of the whole of the large end appears to be a delicate pink. Occasionally several of the clear-cut spots appear to run together and form a coarse irregular blotch, and ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... surest guarantee of virtue and propriety. The mere fact that Fanny had gained Flora's friendship made her own domestics regard her with quite different eyes, and even Squire John himself began to understand what sort of a wife he had won; and so the nimbus of gentility began ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... outlines. How the river dances and sparkles; how the new leaves of all the trees shine under the sun; the air has a soft lustre; there is a haze, it is not blue, but a kind of shining, diffused nimbus. No clouds, the sky a bluish white, very soft and delicate. It is the nuptial day of the season; the sun fairly takes the earth to be his own, for better or for worse, on such a day, and what marriages there are going on all about us: the marriages ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... a pardon, or a fete, or a first communion, we never knew. But the town of St. Lo is ever gloriously lighted, for us, with a nimbus of young heads, such as encircled the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... health, so far as that dreadful scrofulous affection extended, except in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, where there remained, to the doctor's intense disappointment, round, angry sores, about the size of a half-crown, and each surrounded with a nimbus of raw, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... nimbus of crackling flame, his skin blackening, charred. He was dead in an instant. A second pillar of flame bloomed next to the car, and a choking scream was cut off at the moment it ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... moment practically to ourselves—I seem to see a small empty room looking on the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by Madame Fezandie, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarse voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... in silence that she seated herself, and he began to work. He felt as if some fair saint were sitting to him, and that the picture would never come out right without a nimbus round the head. As he went on with his rapid drawing in charcoal he saw a change settle heavily upon the face before him. Utter sadness seemed to come there as soon as the lines relaxed into their ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... the morning— So the mystic legend goes— With the placid face still smiling In its statuesque repose;— With a lily in his left hand, And in his right a rose, With their fragrance curling upward Through a nimbus 'round his nose. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... tranquil, and profound, like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the muse, Urania, who traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great like the universe and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... coins from the tenth century forwards. The face is oval, similar to that of a youthful matron of ancient Rome, and carrying always the expression of a calm benignity. The head is covered with a veil and surrounded by a nimbus. Next to Mary and her Son, Peter and Paul, the chief apostles of the Pagan and Judaic world, are most frequently represented. They were both objects of devotion, even to those who still lingered without the pale of Christianity. The Mosaics display them more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god had arrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, whose profile, having the breeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with a quivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew, and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was a brown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my best to get back to it; but ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... glinted on her hair, turning it into a nimbus of ruddy gold, and there was something delicately flower-like in the droop of her small bent head on its slender throat. It reminded him of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... though imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and bust which composed the "fine figure" of the period, Florrie seemed to float with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam. From the shining nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was the incarnation of girlhood—of that white and gold girlhood which has intoxicated the imagination of man. She shed the allurement of sex as unconsciously as a flower sheds its perfume. Though her eyes were ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... say what thou art? Diana's nimbus? The golden clasp of her floating robes? The blazing head of the great bolt that rivets the lunar hemispheres in union inseverable? Or cans't thou have been some errant bolide, which missing its way, butted blindly against the lunar face, and there stuck fast, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... in the hall and a face of twenty years, surrounded by a nimbus of abundant, fluffy brown hair, abruptly made its appearance. De Gery looked at M. Joyeuse with an ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... air and water.] Bubble [Cloud.] — N. bubble, foam, froth, head, spume, lather, suds, spray, surf, yeast, barm^, spindrift. cloud, vapor, fog, mist, haze, steam, geyser; scud, messenger, rack, nimbus; cumulus, woolpack^, cirrus, stratus; cirrostratus, cumulostratus; cirrocumulus; mackerel sky, mare's tale, dirty sky; curl cloud; frost smoke; thunderhead. [Science of clouds] nephelognosy^; nephograph^, nephology^. effervescence, fermentation; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... within a vesical compartment, a figure of the Blessed Virgin, seated on a carved throne, holding a fleur-de-lis in her right hand, and supporting with her left the Infant Saviour upon her knee. The Holy Child is distinguished by a cruciform nimbus, while that of the Virgin is a plain circle. The Child is raising the right hand in benediction, and holds in the left an orb. The vesica is bordered with a double dotted line, containing the salutation: "Ave: Maria: gracia: ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... the persecuting Jews and Romans, reacted on their brethren to give profounder firmness and new intensity to their faith in a glorious life beyond the grave. The Christians thrown into the amphitheatre to the lions calmly kneeled in prayer, and to the superstitious bystanders a bright nimbus seemed to play around their brows and heaven to be opened above. As they perished at the stake, amidst brutal jeers and shrivelling flames, serenely maintaining their profession, and calling on Christ, over the lurid vista of smoke and fire broke on their rapt vision the blessed splendors of Paradise; ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to the significance of this deity, he doubtless represents the personification of a heavenly body of astronomic importance, probably the polar star. In Codex Cort. 10 (bottom), his head is represented surrounded by a nimbus of rays, which can only mean a star (see Fig. 13). On the lower part of the same page, the third picture from the left, we again see the deity hanging from the sky in a kind of rope. Furthermore it appears in Codex Tro. 20, 22 and 23 (centre) Fig. 14, in the familiar ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... ornamented than the rest, in which we seem to have a second representation of the king, differing from the first only in the fact that his arrow has flown, and that he is in the act of taking another arrow from an attendant In this second representation the king's head is surrounded by a nimbus or "glory." Altogether there are in this tablet more than seventy-five human and nearly 150 animal forms. In the other, the human forms are about seventy, and the animal ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... echoed and reechoed as we passed between packed ranks of townspeople; cheers, the pealing music of the bells, the thunderous shock of the guns grew to a swimming, dreamy sound, through which the flag fluttered on high, crowned with the golden nimbus ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... any Marguerite," Le Rossignol added, and she tossed from her head the entire subject with a cap made of white gull breasts. A brush of red hair stood up in thousands of tendrils, exaggerating by its nimbus the size of her upper person. Never had dwarf a sweeter voice. If she had been compressed in order to produce melody, her tones were compensation, enough. She made lilting sounds while dangling her feet to the blaze, as if she ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... was his very limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of his sister. The second was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard. They intermingled over his ears and surrounded his head like a huge lurid nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated, the face of a scholar, a dilettante, a comparer of points and texts, a man who lives in a library bending over books and prints and medals. At a distance it might have passed for smooth ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... sound sleep under the moon, we rose at 5 A.M. and loaded the camels. It was a raw morning. A large nimbus rising from the east obscured the sun, the line of blue sea was raised like a ridge by refraction, and the hills, towards which we were journeying, now showed distinct falls and folds. Troops of Dera or gazelles, herding like goats, stood, stared at us, turned their white tails, faced away, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... sentiments; Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty" for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings. Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... mother's blue near-sighted eyes without her mother's beauty. Gertrude was unusually tall, and had a sort of lily-like grace; her light hair was very thick, and so fine in quality that it stood out like a nimbus round her pale pretty face. Little Marian, the youngest, two years Candace's junior, was not yet in society, but had been allowed to go to the picnic as a great favor. Her hair had a reddish tint in its chestnut, and was braided in one large plait down her back; she had brown eyes and ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... Zurbarans of the gallery,—also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to look darker than blackness. Before him in a luminous nimbus that burns its way through the dark, is the image of the crucified Saviour, head downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the vast indemnity asked? Each passing day demonstrates more clearly the misunderstanding of the indemnity. The non-experts have not learned financial technics, but common sense tells them that the golden nimbus which has been trailed before their eyes is only a thick cloud of smoke ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... harsh or forbidding. On the contrary, protected by this dignity, she seemed much more sweet and genial than before. It was as though she felt that she could afford to stoop now that her loftiness was realized—that her position was recognized and secure. If her inherent dignity made an impenetrable nimbus round her, this was against others; she herself was not bound by it, or to be bound. So marked was this, so entirely and sweetly womanly did she appear, that I caught myself wondering in flashes of thought, which came as sharp periods of doubting judgment between spells ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... and the force of love And thou not near, my maiden-minded dove! With all the coyness, all the beauty sheen Of thy rapt face? A fearless virgin-queen, A queen of peace art thou,—and on thy head The golden light of all thy hair is shed Most nimbus-like, and most suggestive too Of youthful saints enshrined ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... beginning on the doughnuts, when a step on the planking above him caused him to look up. A girl in a tam-o'-shanter cap was leaning over the rail. The sun was behind her, throwing her face into shadow—so blinding a light that Oliver only caught the nimbus of fluffy hair that framed the dark spot of her head. Then came a voice that sent a thrill of surprise ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... tremendously jolly dinner—a little rowdy, perhaps, but delightfully friendly. If I had entered the dining room as Old Tom Middleton's daughter, "who actually used to live over a livery stable, my dear," it was not so I left it; for the nimbus of the sacred name of Porter had already begun to shed its beautiful light on my many graces and social accomplishments. Indeed, when I retired with my hostess to the drawing room, it was to hold a sort of reception; Mrs. Tudor ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... before. The one successful experiment had, as it chanced, been conducted under Mr. Gray's personal and ardent supervision. He had overseen the flying of the kites, the impudent invasion of the upper depths when a button was touched, and then he had seen the white cumulus clouds gather and become nimbus, followed by a brief rainfall upon a hot and yellow land. He had felt as Moses may have felt when he smote the rock, as De Lesseps may have felt when he brought the seas together. He thought one of the man-helping problems ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... screen was fifteenth-century work, and it was one of the finest in the county; much of the work was Flemish. On it were images of saints, both male and female, and of some of the prophets, the saints being distinguishable by the nimbus or halo round their heads, and the prophets by caps and flowing robes after the style of the Jewish costumes in the Middle Ages. There was also a magnificent pulpit of about the same date as the screen, and so richly designed as to equal any carved pulpit in Europe. It was said to have been carved ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... faith is in working and fighting. With every inducement to offer himself for a romantic figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern romance, its shears and its labels: in fine, every one of those positive things by whose aid, and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nimbus known as a mysterious halo is produced about a gentleman's head. And a highly alluring adornment it is! We are all given to lose our solidity and fly at it; although the faithful mirror of fiction has been showing us latterly that a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... after these strange instruments in themselves; Edward, indeed, applied his to the scrubbing-out of his squirrel's cage, and for personal use, when a superior eye was grim on him, borrowed Harold's or mine, indifferently; but the nimbus of distinction that clung to them—that we coveted exceedingly. What more, indeed, was there to ascend to, before the remote, but still possible, razor ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... father could only be with her to see the ancient enemy in flight! Her cheeks were rosy with the happy thrumming of her heart; a delirious beat was in her temples. She wanted to sing and cheer and give thanks to the Almighty. The advancing bursts of billowy shrapnel down the slopes were a heavenly nimbus to her eyes. She breathed a silent blessing on a manoeuvring Brown dirigible. They were coming! The soldiers of her people were coming to take back their own from the robber hosts and restore her hearth to her. Soon she would be seated on the veranda watching the folds ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... night. Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and the depths ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... days in the pack. It was bitterly cold in the crow's-nest however much one put on then, and water skies often turned out to be nimbus clouds after we had laboured and cannoned towards them. The light, too, tired and strained one's eyes far more than ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... how her own breath drags at the tough air, and how her throat resents the sting of the large percentage of sulphur monoxide it contains. The gas-jet is on at the full—or rather the tap is, for the fish-tail burner doesn't realise its ideal. It sputters in its lurid nimbus—gets bronchitis on its own account, tries to cough its tubes clear and fails. Sally and her mother sit on in the darkness, and talk about it, shirking the coming suffocation of their old friend, and praying that his ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Ararat, a muddy pyramid dotted here and there with olive trees—curious, by the way, to find olives so high!—in the receding waters the vagrant raven cheerfully picking out the eye of a defunct pterodactyl. The heavy clouds rolling off the sodden world—they must have indeed been heavy clouds, nimbus of the first water—as they had raised the world's water-level 250 feet per day during "the flood" ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... "shall be among the first of my saints. You see her there, in an every-day dress-cap with a mortal thread-lace border, and with a very ordinary worked collar, fastened by a visible and terrestrial breastpin. There is no nimbus around her head, no sign of the cross upon her breast; her hands are clasped on no crucifix or rosary. Her clear, keen, hazel eye looks as if it could sparkle with mirthfulness, as in fact it could; there are in it both the subtile flash of wit and the subdued ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... on a figure that stood at the foot-board looking down at him with anxiety-tortured eyes; a figure whose heavy hair caught a bronze glimmering like a nimbus, and whose hands were held to her breast with a clutching little suspended ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the yearning for man's beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly, with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the prison rules of the fantastic. Winifred's entry was as that of a warder. He sprang ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... seconds Clancy is invisible, the sulphurous smoke forming a nimbus around him. When it ascends, he is seen prostrate upon the earth; the blood gushing from a wound in his breast, and spurting over ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... to-day in weather phenomena is acquainted with the terms used in cloud classification - Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. These have come so far into general use that it is not easy to realize that, until Howard's paper, On the Modification of Clouds, appeared in 1803, no names for classifying clouds were available. Superficially, it may seem that Howard had done nothing ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... he) seized the halyards, and attempted to pull down the flag, when Mrs. Day flew at him with her broom, and beat him so severely over the head that she knocked off his hat, and made the powder fly from his wig. "I saw it shine like a dim nimbus around his head in ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... apprehension. The apparition was an incandescent chariot; in it sat Karospina, and beside him—oh! the agony of her lover—Mila Georgovics. As the fiery horses swooped down, he could see her face in a radiant nimbus of meteors, which encircled the equipage. Karospina proudly directed its course over the azure route, and once he passed Gerald at a dangerously low ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... on to say that Gregory wore the penula (cloak) of chestnut colour, and over it the sacred pall, and that in his hands he carried the book of the Gospel. We learn, further, that he did not have the round nimbus, but a rectangular or square one, with which it was the custom to adorn the heads of portraits of eminent people in their life-time. John considers this a sure proof that the painting was executed during the life of the saint; ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... with special apparatus for the maintenance of its right to live. By the expansion and partial closing of the valves it swims or is propelled with a curiously energetic, fussy, mechanical action, while the ever-active pink rays—a living, nimbus—beat rhythmically, imperiously waving intruders off ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... richest Bishopric in England. And yet, with this exultation, there was a spirit of deep melancholy pervading his countenance, as well as his discourses, that seemed to imply a sense of danger. The nimbus of the saint in his eyes was associated with the crown of martyrdom. He seemed to look forward to a fatal termination of his ministry, as the most and proper conclusion ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... fragments of the cloud Join with the nucleus form, Cirrus to Nimbus quickly bowed— ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... come in, grave, yet with something blithe and unperturbed in his bearing that, as she stood waiting for what he might say to her, seemed the very nimbus of chivalry. He was splendid to look at, too, tall and strong with clear kind eyes ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... has been to the present time the Old Testament in its existing tradition. This Form will certainly decidedly alter considerably with the discovery of inscriptions and excavations; there is nothing harmful in that, it is even no harm if the nimbus of the Chosen People loses much thereby. The kernel and substance remain always the same—God, namely, and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... somebody said Guido was a dreamy name, as if it belonged to one who was full of faith. Those golden curls shaking about his head as he ran and filling the air with radiance round his brow, looked like a Nimbus or circlet of glory. So they called him St. Guido, and a very, very wild saint ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... their gospels, St. Bartholomew showing the knife with which he was flayed; and higher still the lawgiver Moses, ending in the serried ranks of angels against the azure firmament, each head circled with a golden nimbus. ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... maintain his own circle of serene air, shutting out from it the flat reverberations of common life; but if he fail to live generously toward his fellows,—if he cannot make the light of every day supply the nimbus in which he hopes to appear shining to posterity,—then he will fall into the treacherous pit of selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... coarse fare was unbearable even after the custom of fifteen years, and time had not lessened the surprise with which they watched the young man's healthful enjoyment of his food. Even Lila, whose glowing face in its nimbus of curls lent an almost festive air to her end of the white pine board, ate with a heartiness which Cynthia, with her outgrown standard for her sex, could not but find a trifle vulgar. The elder sister had been born to a different heritage —to one of restricted ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Virgin on the coins of the Greek empire. On a gold coin of Leo VI., the Philosopher, she stands veiled, and draped, with a noble head, no glory, and the arms outspread, just as she appears in the old mosaics. On a coin of Romanus the Younger, she crowns the emperor, having herself the nimbus; she is draped and veiled. On a coin of Nicephorus Phocus (who had great pretensions to piety), the Virgin stands, presenting a cross to the emperor, with the inscription, "Theotokos, be propitious." ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... show you, if I could, our pleasant evenings of lingering, after coffee, behind the tremulous screen of honeysuckle, with the night very dark and quiet beyond the warm nimbus of our candle-light, the faces of my two companions clear-obscure in a mellow shadow like the middle tones of a Rembrandt, and the professor, good man, talking wonderfully of everything under the stars and over them,—while ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... Eleanor was resting. Out on the lawn in the breezy sun and shadow under the tulip tree, Edith, fresh from a shampoo, was reading. Now and then she tossed her head like a colt, to make her fluffy hair blow about in a glittering brown nimbus. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... duster a deal table already clean enough to make Bill's face much ashamed of itself. She was a large heavy old woman, with a round colourless visage that suggested the full moon by daylight, and wispy grey locks like a nimbus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts and cities. It was, however, the passionate eloquence ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... a small, withered man with a big head, great, luminous eyes, and a bald scalp. Such hair as yet remained to him was the true Redmayne scarlet; but the nimbus that still adorned his naked skull was streaked with silver and his thin, long beard was also grizzled. He spoke in a gentle, kindly voice, with little Southern gestures. He was clad in a great Italian cloak and a big, slouchy hat, which between them, almost served to extinguish ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... discovery. There was a downy shadow upon his upper lip. What he had just found out was that this down could be seen projecting beyond the line of his lip, like a tiny nimbus. It ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... it should be an l. Write g for the first l, and we have un fait accompli. I shall be in pillory; and overhead, in a cloud, will sit Mr. James Smith on one stick laid across two others, under a nimbus of 3-1/8 diameters to {156} the circumference—in [pi]-glory. Oh for a drawing of this scene! Mr. De Morgan presents his compliments to Mr. James Smith, and requests the honor of an ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... little mirror, that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together, as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She smoked very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also, if she walked about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the thing between her first and second fingers, and found that easier than smoking. Then she went to the salon where there was ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... made beautiful and sweet By self-devotion and by self-restraint,— Whose pleasure is to run without complaint On unknown errands of the Paraclete,— Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet, Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint Around the shining forehead of the saint, And are in their completeness incomplete. In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower, The lily of Florence blossoming in stone,— A vision, a delight, and a desire,— The builder's perfect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... curtains so that they rasped on the brass rod, letting in the almost blinding glare of the full moon which drew a nimbus from the silvery head and threw shadows which danced and gibbered by the aid of the log fire over the walls and ceiling, and in and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... circumstances of his heroic death, and in the halls of Harvard a tablet has been placed in his honor. Charles Shier is a name which ought to be as proudly remembered in Michigan and in Ann Arbor as is that of Charles Lowell in Massachusetts and in Cambridge. But fate, in its irony, has decreed that the nimbus which surrounds the brow of a nation's heroes shall be reserved for the few whom she selects as types, and these more often than otherwise idealized types chosen by chance or by accident. These alone may wear the laurel that catches the eye of ideality and furnishes the theme for ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... the storied fields of trampled grain, As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul Blowing the rally against a Caesar's reign. Her soul's protesting sobs she drowned to swear Fidelity unto the sainted man, Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again The foreigner in Europe, known of none, None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun. Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe's van; The dream she nursed a snare, The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breaking the bread as on the evening of the Last Supper, in his pilgrim robe, with his blackened lips, on which the torture has left its traces, his great brown eyes soft, widely opened, and raised towards heaven, with his cold nimbus, a sort of phosphorescence around him which envelops him in an indefinable glory, and that inexplicable look of a breathing human being who certainly has ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... at this moment are to me Dearer than words on paper, shall depart, And be no more the warder of my heart, Whereof again myself shall hold the key; And be no more, what now you seem to be, The sun, from which all excellencies start In a round nimbus, nor a broken dart Of moonlight, even, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... The nimbus or nightcap again appears as in the Ridley specimen, but, whatever it be, the teeth are undoubtedly the ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... a faint scraping sound on the outside of his cabin, and a dark shadow eclipsed the faint nimbus of light which the foggy night sent through his porthole. On the deck directly over his head three dark figures sat in deck chairs, while a fourth paced the deck, his cigar glowing like the tail ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... of seven trefoil-headed niches, with a half-niche at each end. Four of these niches are pierced for windows, which have trefoils with pointed heads, though the trefoil heads of the niches themselves are round at the top. The three intervening niches contain figures. All these nine figures have a nimbus; and as these, with the three under the crosses, make up twelve, it is assumed that they represent the Apostles. The six smaller statues, just above, are said to be kings; the twelve below, benefactors. There are thus thirty statues ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... His striding pace made Celeste fairly trot along at his heels. He went through room after room. Was there no end to them? At last Nina's slight, girlish figure was seen silhouetted against a broad window at the end—the light at her back hazing the gold of her hair, like a nimbus, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... beings composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows. It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it; they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier, Cosette's innocence; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... Nickname moknomo. Nicotine nikotino. Niece nevino. Niggard avarulo. Nigh proksima. Nigh (time) baldauxa. Night nokto. Nightly nokta. Night, by nokte. Nightingale najtingalo. Night-watch nokta patrolo. Nightmare terursongxo. Nimble vigla. Nimbus glorkrono. Nine naux. Ninny simplanimulo. Nip pincxi. Nippers prenileto. Nitre salpetro. Nobility nobelaro. Noble nobla. Nobleman nobelo. Nobleness nobleco. Nobody neniu. Nocturnal nokta. Nocuous pereiga. Nod (beckon) signodoni. No ne. No one neniu. Noise bruo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... traffic, backed by the green of the gardens and the shimmering walls of glass and stone of the great hotels, their windows glowing weirdly golden in the late sunlight. A little down-stream Cleopatra's Needle rose, sadly the worse for London smoke, flanked by its couchant sphinxes, wearing a nimbus of circling, sweeping, swooping, wheeling gulls. Farther down, from the foot of that magnificent pile, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge sprang over-stream in its graceful arch.... All as of yesterday; ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... seen his master, Ursus, bow himself down in fear—that prodigious pinnacle was under his feet. He was in that place, so dark and yet so dazzling in England. Old peak of the feudal mountain, looked up to for six centuries by Europe and by history! Terrible nimbus of a world of shadow! He had entered into the brightness of its glory, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... dips at last, and vanishes up the grateful flue. At such times, when a five-year-old, what a haven every boy has found between the old grandfather's knees! Look back in fancy at the faces blending there—the old man's and the boy's—and, with the nimbus of the smoke-wreaths round the brows, the gilding of the firelight on cheek and chin, and the rapt and far-off gazings of the eyes of both, why, but for the silver tinsel of the beard of one and the dusky elf-locks of the other, ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... in others digging new trenches, in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box, the shell fire seemed different; it had a quality of action and adventure in comparison with the monotonous exhibition ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the child was as other children: about its head was neither nimbus nor material crown; its lips opened not in speech; if it heard their expressions of joy, their invocations, their prayers, it made no sign whatever, but, baby-like, looked longer at the flame in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... originally a sort of nimbus of a larger order, surrounding the entire figure, instead of merely the head. It was oval in shape, like the ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... into a marvelous womanhood, sat before him like an embodied spirit. Her beauty of soul shone out in gorgeous luxuriance, and seemed to him to envelop her in a sheen of radiance. The brilliant sunshine glanced sparkling from her glossy hair into a nimbus of light about her head. Her rich complexion was but faintly suggestive to him of a Latin origin. Her oval face and regular features might have indicated any of the ruddier branches of the so-called Aryan stock. But his thought was not dwelling on these things now. It was brooding over the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fling up his arms, as if apostrophizing Heaven, as if asking a question of the stars that twinkled in the wide-flung nimbus of the moon. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... in a corner, at the far end, at a distance exaggerated by the shadows, sat Lampron engraving, solitary, motionless, beneath the light of a lamp. His back was toward me. The lamp's rays threw a strong light on his delicate hand, on the workmanlike pose of his head, which it surrounded with a nimbus, and on a painting—a woman's head—which he was copying. He looked superb like that, and I thought how doubly tempted Rembrandt would have been by the deep significance as well as by the chiaroscuro of ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... in the earliest ages, when the Deity was painted or sculptured as a personage, the nimbus, or glory, which surrounded the head of the Father, was often made to assume a triangular form. Didron says on this subject, "A nimbus, of a triangular form, is thus seen to be the exclusive attribute of the Deity, and most frequently ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... everything that can remind us of the heathen gods is to be swept away from the hamlets and fields of the pious Mary. That is what is intended! Then they will hurry off to the Bishop with the great news and to crown one marvel with another, the reversion will be secured of a martyr's nimbus. And this is what all this zeal is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash might pass through them,—but the fire must come down from heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,—the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,—Goddess, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... martyred men, twenty-six in number, seems to move along, in all the majesty of suffering, bearing their crowns of martyrdom as offerings to the Redeemer. The Christ is here not an infant but a full-grown man, the Man of Sorrows, His head encircled with a nimbus, and two angels are standing on either side. The martyr-procession starts from a building, with pediment above and three arches resting upon pillars below. The intervals between the pillars are partly ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... extraordinary, nor did it either embarrass or stir his senses, that standing as she did before the moon and the little fires her body showed in clear silhouette through her silken robe. Apparently this was her only garment. It made a pale nimbus about her. She seemed to the vague remnant of Kingozi's thinking perceptions like a priestess—her slim, beautiful form erect, her small head bound with the golden fillet from which, he knew, hung the jewel on her ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... met in the same room, Paula appearing in a straw hat having a bent-up brim lined with plaited silk, so that it surrounded her forehead like a nimbus; and Somerset armed with sketch-book, measuring-rod, and ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... rows, narrowing to a point under a distant hazy nimbus, marked the course of the outreaching arteries of a great city. Warning bells clanged peremptorily at the lowered gates ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... of persons who are supposed to have contributed to the building of the church, which was erected in the thirteenth century. On one of the corbels (the nearest to the altar, and therefore in the most honourable place) there is a lamb bearing a flag. The lamb has a nimbus {279} round its head, and the staff of the flag terminates in a cross like the head of a processional cross. The device, I have reason to think, was the badge of the knights of the order of Saint John of Jerusalem, who had a preceptory in this neighbourhood during the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... folded hands resting on the rail of the balustrade, her head slightly drooped upon her bosom; and the beautiful face was lighted by the dying sunset splendour, that seemed to kindle a nimbus around the golden head, and rendered her in her violet drapery like some haloed Mater Dolorosa, treading alone the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... ancestors; and it is a fault that none need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still remains the example of the turnpike-loving clerk, with all its golden possibilities. Denied the great delight of driving a locomotive, or a fire-engine — whirled along in a glorious nimbus of smoke-pant, spark-shower, and hoarse warning roar — what bliss to the palefaced quilldriver to command a penny steamboat between London Bridge and Chelsea! to drive a four-horsed Jersey-car to Kew at sixpence a head! Though turnpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be taken ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... solitary link between the long lines of his noble house, before and after—to his lonely cell on San Nicolo; the retirement of the Lady Anna from the sweet motherhood of her home to reign as Lady Abbess in the convent of Sant' Elena; the nimbus of sainthood for the pair when their quiet days were closed—it was a pretty story, leading ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... 10,000 yards jarring and clattering loud overhead—then flung a red earthquake just beyond the Lancers' horses. Again and again,—it looked as if he could not miss them; but the horses only twitched their tails, as if he were a new kind of fly. The 4.7 crashed hoarsely back, and a black nimbus flung up far above the trees on the mountain. And still the steady tack and tap—from the right among the Devons and Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicesters were, from the left centre, among the 60th, and the ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... the walls which are of more than ordinary interest. There is a Temple to the Goddess of Mercy, where deep reverence is shown to the images of the Trinity of Sisters. They are seated close into the wall, the nimbus of glory which plays round their impassive features being represented by a golden aureola painted on the wall. The Goddess of Mercy is called by the Chinese "Sheng-mu," or Holy Mother, and it is this name which has been adopted by the Roman Catholic ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... personages who knew how to embody in themselves the emotions and the desires of the masses—we may think of Jeanne d'Arc, Mahomet, Peter the Great, Napoleon I—were surrounded with a nimbus by the more or less blind belief of the people in their genius; this frequently acted with suggestive power upon the surrounding company which it carried away with a magic force to its leaders, and supported and aided the mission ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... into the soul of a man who can be mistaken in his conclusions and means, but not in his motives, since these are directed to the general weal. Here, too, we find the explanation of the fact that at one time he comes before us surrounded with the blue and hazy nimbus of the romantic period, and at another as the most modern prince of our time. Out of the rise in him of the consciousness of majesty there grows a greater sense of duty, and instead of keeping watch from his turret over his people ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... sat there, the door was very gently opened, and I beheld Giuliana standing before me. She detached from the black background of the passage, and the light of my three-beaked lamp set her ruddy hair aglow so that it seemed there was a luminous nimbus all about her head. For a moment this gave colour to my fancy that I beheld a vision evoked by the too great intentness of my thoughts. The pale face seemed so transparent, the white robe was almost ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... thing now took place. He stood up on his hind legs and shot into the air, alighting on his four feet as if to pierce the earth. He whirled like a howling dervish, grunting, snorting—unseeing, and almost unseen in a nimbus of dust, strap ends, and flying pine needles. His whirling undid him. We seized the rope, and just as the pack again slid under his feet we set shoulder to the rope and threw him. He came to earth with a thud, his legs whirling ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Master of Divine Secrets. There were on his brow great spots of perspiration, and, as if from agony, tears trickled down his cheeks, but his eyes were upturned and glazed, and his face was as that of a dead man without soul, only it seemed to me that the nimbus of which men spoke was verily round his head. His form, too, which was grown rigid, appeared strangely taller. One hand grasped the corner of the dresser. I turned away my eyes quickly, fearing lest they should be smitten with blindness. I know ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... brightness on its surface made by the freer outer hairs, a fit setting and crown for a countenance of such rare changeful loveliness. In the shade, viewed closely, the general colour appeared a slate, deepening in places to purple; but even in the shade the nimbus of free flossy hairs half veiled the darker tints with a downy pallor; and at a distance of a few yards it gave the whole hair a vague, misty appearance. In the sunlight the colour varied more, looking now dark, sometimes intensely black, now of a light uncertain hue, with a play ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... His eyes were upon Jacqueline, standing at the foot of the bed. The room was in the western wing of the house, and where she stood she was bathed in the light of the sinking sun. It made her brown hair golden and like a nimbus. Rand made a straying motion with his hand. "I did not believe in heaven," he muttered. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... their heads, with their long hair stiff with pomatum, and their heads set inside a well-starched ruff a foot wide, "like St. John's head in a charger," as a splenetic contemporary observed, with a nimbus of musk and violet-powder enveloping them as they passed before vulgar mortals, these rapacious and insolent courtiers were the impersonation of extortion and oppression to the Parisian populace. They were supposed, not unjustly, to pass their lives in dancing, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from her lips as she viewed the world revealed by the telescope—the beautiful woman over yonder amid her flowers, her form encircled by the nimbus of ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... flukes for him; but, generally speaking, the greatest have been for collections formed and dispersed without any view to profit, where the state of the market has accidentally favoured the owner, or there was some nimbus round ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt |
