"Opaque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this and, turning away, continued his tasks. Joan had a close look at his eyes and again she was startled. They were not like eyes, but just gray spaces, opaque openings, with nothing visible behind, ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... and a clatter the plane was off. Guns had commenced to bark and red splashes of fire to stab the opaque mist that had now fallen on the lower ground with the deepening night. Jack felt like laughing at all these vain efforts ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... close-reefed and all other canvas to be furled with the utmost expedition possible, and the men, with much grumbling, crept out from their secluded corners and slowly proceeded to drag their relaxed and sweating bodies up the rigging. To shorten sail in such opaque darkness as then enveloped the ship was a lengthy task, and it was nearly one o'clock in the morning before that task was completed and the exhausted men were ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... appeared a total stagnation in the elements. The men in the boats pulled off their jackets, for, after a few moments' pulling, they could bear them no longer. As we pulled in, the atmosphere became more opaque, and the darkness more intense. We supposed ourselves to be at the mouth of the harbour, but could see nothing—not three yards ahead of the boat. Swinburne, who always went with me, was steering the boat, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... through the gloom Of Market-street's opaque simoom, A queue of people, parti-sexed, Awaiting the command of "Next!" A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign: "Teeth dusted ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the calmer face that belongs to a scholar, though in some respects I thought it a stronger one than his brother Joseph's. In the marble bath lay Bonaparte, only his head and a little of his shoulders visible, for the water was frothy and opaque from quantities of cologne, whose sweet, pungent odor rose to my nostrils refreshingly. Bonaparte was in the act of speaking ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... while to learn that the dirty-white walls of this tunnel which were almost entirely opaque, with dark objects showing dimly through them here and there, were of solid ice. A black wire was hooked overhead and at regular intervals hung with lights which did nothing to break the sensation of ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... when a small issue is required on each successive year. For the reproduction of manuscript by the blue process, the best plan that I have found has been to write the manuscript upon the thinnest blue tinted French note-paper, with black opaque ink—the stylographic ink is very good—and, afterward, to dip the paper into melted paraffine, and to dry the paper at the melting temperature. This operation, if cheaply done, requires special apparatus. For positive printing from the glass negative, I use a multiple ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Telbin, who was a stranger to me, sat with her back towards a large opaque screen. In front of her stood a small table upon which rested a crystal ball. She was asked to gaze at the crystal and to describe any vision that might appear to form itself therein. I may parenthetically remark that the object of crystal-gazing is to concentrate the mind ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... one isn't), or unless one listened to what he said, he did not at first appear too alarmingly clever. He had one or two characteristics which must have at times led to misunderstandings. One was that whatever or whoever he looked at, his dark opaque eyes were so full of vivid expression that women often mistook for admiration what was often merely observation. For instance, when he glanced at Lady Walmer she at once became quite confused, and intensely flattered, nearly blushed and asked him to dinner. While, if she had but known, ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... morning a certain monotonous grating on the sand, that had for many minutes alternately cheated and piqued the ear, asserted itself more strongly, and a moving, vacillating shadow in the gloom became an opaque object on the shore. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... a flower stuck in the button-hole of the school-master's coat, a pale tea-rose. If Dr. Knowles had been a man of fine instincts, (which his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed coat. A scholar, a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a world too short. Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... in water and then pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different degrees of fineness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining the views obtained in these various methods, each of the rounded bodies may be proved to be a beautifully-constructed calcareous fabric, made up of a number of chambers, communicating freely with one another. The ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... within six months, into such a morass — or should have let Boutwell drop him into it — rendered the outlook for the next four years — probably eight — possibly twelve — mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... men to rescue children from the influences of a bad home. And, even then, with what obstacles do they have to contend! How radical are the prejudices already formed in that young mind! How obstinate the customs, how opaque the ignorance, how rank the growth of error! Nay, into what complete fruition have all these grown, simply in the neglect of home-culture, to say nothing of influences positively evil! Really, the color and current of a man's destiny are indicated here, unless a shock ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... a night made opaque by approaching showers, a man stands under the low-drooping branches of the edge of a wood skirting the cross-road leading ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... hear the door in the opaque glass partition that walled his desk off from the outer editorial offices open and close, for all that it was very quiet. Ever since the hour which followed the going to press of the afternoon edition of the paper the huge room, with its ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... permanent yoke of prosperity. It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking up and down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... of perjury depicted in capital letters on his forehead, and indelibly engraven in the recesses of his heart, considering that every tongueless object was eloquent of his woe, and at periods laboring under a semi-perspicuous, semi-opaque, gutta-serena, attended with an acute palpitation of his pericranium, and a most tormenting delirium of intellects from which he finds not the least mitigation until he consopiates his optics under the influence of Morpheus. There ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... each other followed, as well as their transformation into a granular mass, which gradually decreased in size in consequence of the dropping of a train of granules in it wake as it moved across the field. The development of these granules was traced from their minute semi-opaque and spherical form to that of the perfect flagellate organism first shown, the entire process being completed in about an hour. Experiments as to their thermal death-point showed that, while the adults could not be killed by a temperature less than 146 deg. F., ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... again, and the signature too, if he wanted to; for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to those round spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not unbecoming blush, opened the fold of the letter before ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the fact that the bag, which is of some opaque material, and is nine inches deep and six inches broad, has one of its sides double. The easiest way to make such a bag is to take a piece of cloth six inches broad and 24 inches long. Fold six inches ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... and the doctor was half suspected by the latter, quite clear to himself, and only unperceived by his opaque stepdaughter. As he idled down towards the old fisher-dwellings and the net-huts, he tried to picture the form the declaration would take, and the way it would be received. That this would be favourable he never doubted for a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the gypsum in which it is concreted; but that in having the humidity evaporated, by being taken out of the mine and exposed to the dry air, those portions of calcedony, which did not before appear, may be perceived by becoming more opaque[41]. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... in pulling up to it. No one this night felt inclined to go to sleep. We were all too anxious about our companions. I saw Mr Merton turning his eyes with a steady gaze away to the south-east. I looked in the same direction. Gradually I saw emerging out of the darkness an opaque, towering mass. At first I thought it was a mere mark in the clouds, and then it resolved itself into the form of a tall ship close-hauled under all canvas. A shout from the boats showed that they had discovered the stranger. Again we shouted, and a cheer ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... over the edge of the raised platform. Seeing all this at one glance my anxious eyes sought the deeper gloom shrouding the tunnel leading toward the entrance. As I stared that way a sudden flash of fierce lightning illumined it. So brilliant it burst forth from the opaque night, I hid my blinded eyes, every ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... unlike the earth, being at a temperature so high that, like our sun, they shine by their own light. In such worlds we may regard it as quite certain that no organized life could exist. But evidence is continually increasing that dark and opaque worlds like ours exist and revolve around their suns, as the earth on which we dwell revolves around its central luminary. Although the number of such globes yet discovered is not great, the circumstances under which they are found lead us to believe that the actual ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... revolving the cylinder on an axis parallel to the circular faces, we find that it incloses a solid, opaque sphere; teaching us the lesson, not only that each member of the second gift contains each and all of the others, but that whatever is in the universe is in every individual part of it; that even the meanest ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... brown, water-soluble [Greek: a]-naphtholsulphonic acid. A dilute solution of the latter, when treated with formaldehyde in the cold, undergoes no change; on heating the mixture on the water bath a brown precipitate is thrown down. If gelatine solution is added to the opaque liquid, a yellow flocculent precipitate separates. If caustic soda is added to the opaque liquid containing the condensation product described above, a clear solution results from which no deposit separates on the addition of acetic acid. Gelatine ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... The opaque white mist was dense about him, and he could see nothing. As he stood still, he heard a muttered oath, and after a time the man cleared his throat in a rasping fashion, as if the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... fluorescently—an apparent anomaly that was due to the fact that the problems of shielding marine life from direct sunlight in such a shallow medium had not yet been worked out; while the opaque plastic that walled the laboratories within the rivers was a concession to their strength, since the clear plastic that would have provided aquarium walls for the lab and complete inspection for a constant and overall check of the ecological experiments had been overruled ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... many times seen wilder schemes succeed. Spanish grants have been shifted leagues to suit the occasion. Boundaries are removed bodily. Witnesses are manufactured under golden pressure. The eyes of Justice are blinded with opaque weights of the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... infant mind is transparent to resemblance, but opaque to difference."—Susan E. Blow, Symbolic Education, ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... God knows that God is with him, not for his personal glorification, but for the welfare of God's people, and cares little for the estimation in which men hold him, if they will only believe that the conquering God is with them. We too often make great leaders and teachers in the church opaque barriers to hide God from us, instead of transparent windows through which He shines upon His people. We are a great deal more ready to say, 'God is with him,' than to add, 'and therefore God is with us, in our Joshuas, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... remarkable variation in this star's brilliancy has been assigned by some astronomers to the presence of an opaque secondary, which transits Algol at regular intervals; others have adopted the view that Algol is a luminous secondary, revolving around an opaque primary. Of these views the former seems the most natural ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... coming that morning you swam for life in West-Indian waters, with your knife in your teeth, while the balls of the Cuban coast-guard were purring all around you. That day the swarming sea was warm,—warm like soup—and clear, with an emerald flash in every ripple,—not opaque and clamorous like the Gulf today ... Miguel and his comrade are anxious. Ropes are unrolled and inter-knotted into a line. Miguel remains on the beach; but Mateo, bearing the end of the line, fights his way out,—swimming and wading by turns, to the further sandbar, where the water is shallow ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... darting a look of wrath at her companion, " I want to prevent that marriage." She had been betrayed into this avowal by the singularly opaque mind of the old lady. The latter at once sat erect. - " Oh, ho," she said, as if a ray of light had been let into her head. " Oh, ho. So that's it, ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... persistently over a certain bedstead standing against the wall, the said halo absolutely refusing to remove itself when attacked with a feather- duster. The housemaid thought at first that it was simply an effect of the sunlight, but observed subsequently that the halo was just as large, fine yellow, opaque, and circular on dark days as on bright ones; consequently, on a certain morning when it was so huge and glaring as to be positively offensive to the eye, inasmuch as it did not hang over a Holy Family, but over an ordinary and somewhat uncomfortable article of furniture, ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to the sea-shore or among the mountains and sleep a month. If the world abuses us at any time, we go and take an extra sleep; and when we wake up, all the world is smiling on us. If we come to a knotty point in our discourse, we take a sleep; and when we open our eyes, the opaque has become transparent. We split every day in two by a nap in the afternoon. Going to take that somniferous interstice, we say to the servants, "Do not call me for anything. If the house takes fire, first get the children out and my private papers; ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... restaurant. The window was lighted up brilliantly. No blind was drawn over it. There was opaque glass at the bottom, but not at the top. She was tall and could look through the glass at the top. She did so, and at once saw ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... these vases is tender, easily scratched or cut with a knife, remarkably fine and homogeneous, but of loose texture. When broken, it exhibits a dull opaque color, more or less yellow, red or grey. It is composed of silica, alumina, carbonate of lime, magnesia and oxide of iron. The color depends on the proportions in which these elements are mixed; the paler parts containing more lime, the red more iron. The exterior coating ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... surface of the water; at first it was a deep black line on the horizon, but as it approached the vessel, it changed to white; the surface of the water was still smooth. The clouds were not more than ten degrees above the horizon, although they were thick and opaque—but at this season of the year, these tornadoes, as I may call them, visited us; sometimes we had one, sometimes more, and it was only when these gusts came on that we had any rain below. On board of the vessel—I speak now from my after knowledge—they did not appear to be aware of the ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... composition itself, I may say that it is full of life, indeed, spirited in every respect, in movement and in boldness of harmonic and melodic conception. The Tarantelle is a translation from Italian into Polish, a transmutation of Rossini into Chopin, a Neapolitan scene painted with opaque colours, the south without its transparent sky, balmy air, and general brightness. That this composition was inspired by impressions received from Rossini's Tarantella, and not from impressions received in Italy (of which, as has already been related, he had ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... pellucid water, and in the centre of it a spherical mass of denser and darker water. The outer surface of this sphere, or its limits every way, is the vessel containing it. The Kabalah regards the vessels "as by their nature somewhat opaque, and not so splendid as the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that led to Colonel Mannheim's suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they were long, glass-enclosed ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... forward, now breathing more freely in open places where there was a good slice of sky overhead, now feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window-bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad; the inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shapely, you are adorned, But opaque and dull in the flesh, Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast In a ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... scores of times in that abominable low-lying part of the town, and I knew the symptoms. There was a faint smell in the air, an odour that bit the nostrils, carrying the reek of that changeless wilderness of factories and houses. The opaque grey sky lost its greyness and was struck to a lurid yellow. Banks of high fog rolled up the east and moved menacingly, almost imperceptibly, upon the town. For a moment there were dim shadows of the wharves and the ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... define every step in the sequence. Since Newton's time it has been proved that only three of the spectral hues are primary; viz., a red, a green, and a violet-blue, while their mixture produces all other gradations. By receiving the spectrum on an opaque screen with fine slits that fit the red and green waves, so that they alone pass through, these two primary hues can be received on mirrors inclined at such an angle as to unite on another screen, where, instead of red or green, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... ocean. The fresh trade wind was welcome after sweltering for weeks in the sultry and unwholesome atmosphere of Demarara; and the clear and pellucid waters of the ocean bore a cheerful aspect, contrasted with the thick and opaque waters of the river in which we had remained ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... faintly black, which filled the corridors. As Betty Young drew closer to the door of the paleontological laboratories, the mist grew more opaque. It was as though a sooty fog permeated the air, and the girl could see it was pouring from the door of the laboratory in heavy coils. And her nostrils caught the strange odor ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... like another at waking time. My mental vision, never pellucid, is in its most opaque condition in the early grey of the morning; and at Oxford, I remember, I found it necessary to instruct my scout to rouse me from slumber in some such fashion as this: "Eight o'clock on Thursday mornin', sir!" (as if I had slept since Monday at ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... Thou! whose word from solid darkness struck That spark, the sun, strike wisdom from my soul; My soul which flies to thee, her trust her treasure, As misers to their gold, while others rest: Through this opaque of nature and of soul, This double night, transmit one pitying ray, To lighten and to cheer. Oh, lead my mind, (A mind that fain would wander from its woe,) Lead it through various scenes of life and death, And from each scene the noblest truths inspire. Nor less inspire my conduct, than my song; ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... contested with the stronger types of ruffianism for a place, loaded the air with their blasphemies and imprecations. The day broke slowly and doubtfully upon the scene; a dense yellow, murky fog floated round the spot, wrapping in its opaque folds the hideous gallows and the frowning mass of masonry behind. An hour passed, and then a hoarse murmur swelled upwards from the glistening rows of upturned faces. The platform was no longer empty; three pinioned men, with white caps drawn closely over their faces, were standing ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... side of the pool, no sign of life was visible. Far up through the green foliage of the jungle I could see a solid ceiling of cloud, while beneath me the liquid clay of the pool was equally opaque and lifeless. As a seer watches the surface of his crystal ball, so I gazed at my six-foot circle of milky water. My shift forward was like the fall of a tree: it brought into existence about it a temporary circle of silence and fear—a circle whose periphery ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... mental vision, but fair as these visions were, another far brighter rose before which all others paled or faded by comparison. Edith, in all her glorious beauty, now riveted his every thought, engrossed the whole stretch of his imagination, and for the time rendered all else opaque and obscure; for had she not promised to become his wife, to share with him the varied fortunes of a soldiers' life, to be the joy and solace of his riper years, and heart in heart and hand in hand, to glide together, as it were, almost imperceptibly into the yellow leaf of ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... great cities will often note what happens when some ancient building has been demolished by the house-breaker. The site is concealed by an opaque hoarding. For months, even sometimes for years, nothing seems to follow. The passer-by who happens to get an opportunity of peeping in when some gate is opened to let out a cart full of debris, only sees a vast crater at the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... lower part of the web, starting from the centre, a wide opaque ribbon descends zigzag-wise across the radii. This is the Epeira's trade- mark, the flourish of an artist initialling his creation. 'Fecit So- and-so,' she seems to say, when giving the last throw of the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... enjoys worldly objects can never be emancipated. That man, on the other hand, who casts off such objects (in this world), succeeds in enjoying great happiness hereafter. Like one afflicted with congenital blindness and, therefore, incapable of seeing his way, the sensualist, with soul confined in an opaque case, seems to be surrounded by a mist and fails to see (the true object for which he should strive). As merchants, going across the sea, make profits proportioned to their capital, even so creatures, in this world of mortals, attain to ends according to their respective acts. Like a ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... tripped out of the kitchen, and in an instant returned with the desiderated commodity—a dumpy, bluff, opaque bottle, of about a gallon contents—which she placed on the table. Adair seized it by its long neck, and, filling up a brimming bumper, tossed it off to the health of his guest. This done, he filled up another topping glass, and presented it to the stranger, with a strong recommendation ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... to detach the ice it is customary to cut off the supply of cold brine and circulate brine at a higher temperature through the cells. Ice frozen by either of the above described methods from ordinary water is more or less opaque, owing to the air liberated during the freezing process, little bubbles of which are caught in the ice as it forms, and in order to produce transparent ice it is necessary that the water should be agitated during the freezing process in such a way as to permit the air bubbles to escape. With ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... the scuttles, the professor looked out through the thick disc of plate-glass, and beheld a sight of beauty that is given only to the adventurous few to look upon—a sea of dense, opaque, fleecy cloud, white as the driven snow in the high lights, with its irregular surface, some sixteen hundred feet below, broken up into a thousand tender, delicate, pearly shadows that came and went, and momentarily changed ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... necessary for this game. The ground should be divided into two approximately equal parts by an opaque curtain eight feet in height, strung on a rope or wire carried across from side supports. This should touch the ground, so that there is no means of seeing the position of the opposing players on the other side. As stated above, the game may ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... secluded chamber, the centre of which was occupied by a richly decked table. Many people were seated around it; they were carousing and having a merry time. Suddenly all eyes were turned to the middle of the table, where a vessel of opaque blue glass, which had not been there before, now stood. What was in the glass receptacle? what could it signify? who brought it? was asked in muffled tones. Thereupon an uncanny silence ensued; all gazed now at the blue vessel, now, with ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... brain was of that peculiar caliber which does not originate an idea, but which inserts a solid bone construction as well as keen little sparklets into the fabric of another's labor, and makes the whole translucent where before it may have been opaque. On Broadway he was called a play doctor, and Mr. Vandeford was not the first manager who had shut him up with quarts of refreshment to tinker on the play of many a ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... old platitude or axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth. It would not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass decorated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare bedroom. But like the psalmist's enemies, platitudes live and are mighty. They remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... passages; a poem must have transitions. It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing, than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a succession of day and night. Milton, when he has expatiated in the sky, may be allowed, sometimes, to revisit earth; for what other author ever soared so high, or sustained ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... little gate in the garden railings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king paused under the shadow of an flex and looked back at the place. It was very high and narrow, a twentieth-century rendering of mediaevalism, mediaevalism in steel and bronze and sham stone and opaque glass. Against the sky it splashed a confusion of pinnacles. High up in the eastward wing were the windows of the apartments of the ex-king Egbert. One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a little black figure stood very still and ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... when the state of the eye is restored, that shade appears as light? Does not an owl see the darkness of night as the light of day, and the light of day as the darkness of night, and also the sun itself as an opaque and dusky globe? If any man had the eyes of an owl, which would he call light and which darkness? What then is light but the state of the eye? and if it be a state of the eye, is not light darkness, and darkness light? therefore each of the propositions ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... his personal appearance.—A fine head and clever face, the nose astute, slightly Jewish in type, so she thought. His eyes were disappointing, too thickly brown in colour, too opaque. They told you nothing, were indeed curiously meaningless; and, though well set under an ample brow, were wanting in depth and softness owing to scantiness of eyelash. But his chin satisfied her demands. It was square, forcible, slightly cleft; and his mouth, below the fly-away reddish moustache, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... on the other two sitting squat in the middle of the trail; and if the windfall had been opaque, one of the two wore an expression on his face as if he had guessed. He was tossing a handful of little pebbles up from his palm and catching them on ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... reaches the person to whom it is addressed, and if each one of them has to stop to play with it awhile an appreciable amount of time is lost, not to mention the strain it puts on their respective tempers. The paper of which an envelope is made should always be opaque enough to conceal the contents ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... birch copse through which flowed the same little stream that lower down encircled our village. The moon stood, a pale blur in the sky—but its light was not, as on the evening before, strong enough to penetrate the smoky density of the fog and hung, a broad opaque canopy, overhead. I made my way out on to the open ground and listened.... Not a sound from any direction, except the calling of ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... sitting once again in Lady Laura's drawing-room soon after lunch. Mr. Vincent had just looked in with Laurie's note to give the news. It was a heavy fog outside, woolly in texture and orange in color, and the tall windows seemed opaque in the lamplight; the room, by contrast, appeared a safe and pleasant refuge from the reek and ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... perfectly proportioned. She was young, hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she divined that in some way his ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... London days, had been attracted by him as a curiosity—"a balloon man who had twice fallen from the skies and yet was still alive"—had divined the mental power veiled habitually by his blank, opaque, wooden looks, had listened to his ambitious talk and gathered up the utterances of his thoughtful, long-pondering mind, had quarrelled with him finally and lastingly over rivalry in the good graces ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... who survived had fled to the hills, leaving nothing for the larger wave to do but complete the work of devastation on inanimate objects. Ere the situation had been well realised the volcanic fires went down again, and left the world, for over a hundred surrounding miles, in opaque darkness. Only the humble flicker of the binnacle-light, like a trusty sentinel on duty, continued to shed its feeble rays on a few feet of the deck, and showed that the compass at least was ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... sun threw no reflected lights on the boy's skin, the texture of which was darker than that of a mulatto, and had a dead, opaque look, lacking the golden glow of mulatto skin. The lad's hair showed little hint of Bantu ancestry and his feet were small. True, all this might betoken any of the Creole combinations common in Haiti, but the Cuban was not satisfied. If the ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... torrent of matter, in a state of fusion, has broken into several parts, which have been arrested at different distances from the sun, according to their density, or the impetus they received. They then united in spheres, by the effect of the motion of rotation, and condensing by cold, have become opaque and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... impossible within the space at my command to give anything like a complete account of the matter, and I must necessarily omit all mention of much interesting work. One well-known experiment consisted in putting opaque caps on the tips of seedling grasses (e.g. oat and canary-grass) and then exposing them to light from one side. The difference, in the amount of curvature towards the light, between the blinded and unblinded specimens, was so great that it was concluded that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... one rises to heights of ecstasy, to the very Mount of Transfiguration itself, and thus transcends all former limits and creates his new environment, whose walls are transparent to the sunrise flame and through which the glory enters in. What has he to do with that far-away, opaque, limited environment into which he was born? No more than has the giant oak, tossing its branches under the stars, to do with the acorn cup out of which it sprang. Let one realize, ever so faintly, even, the miracle of possibilities that may unfold, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... asked Jussuf, after he had opened it, and saw in it a rather opaque milk-white stone, at the bottom of which a red spark seemed to shine. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... Stephen had seen vivid skies on the Riviera, but there the blue was more opaque, like the blue of the turquoise. Here it was ethereal and quivering, like the violet fire that hovers over burning ship-logs. He was glad the sky of Africa was unlike any other sky he had known. It intensified the thrill of enchantment he had begun to feel. It seemed to him that ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and ascertained that kisteine, as this particular substance has been called, is constantly formed on the surface of the urine of women in a state of pregnancy. The urine must be allowed to stand for from two to six days, when minute opaque bodies are observed to rise from the bottom to the surface of the fluid, where they gradually unite and form a continuous layer over the surface. This layer is so consistent that it may be almost lifted off by raising it by one of its edges. This is the kisteine. ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... companion and blushed again as she fled with her bag to the ladies' dressing-room. As for the man, Lindsay presently came on him in the smoking-room where he sat with an unlit cigar between his teeth and his feet on a chair. Behind half-shuttered lids his opaque eyes glittered with excitement. Clearly he was reviewing in his mind the progression of his triumph. Clay restrained a good, healthy impulse to pick a row with him and go to the mat with the ex-prize-fighter. But after all it was none of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... adds invalidates entirely the first portion of his assumption: "If an observer were placed on the moon, he would see the solid body of our earth only in those places where the transparent fluids of the atmosphere would permit him. In others, the opaque vapours would reflect the light of the sun without permitting his view to penetrate to the surface of our globe." Thus, if the atmosphere of our earth, which in its relation to the "atmosphere" (?) of the sun is like the tenderest skin of a fruit compared with the thickest ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... low meanness. It was with a despairing heart and the certitude of final disaster that Amedee, needing a little sleep after the fatigue, wandered through Paris's obscure streets, barely lighted here and there by petroleum lamps, under the dark, opaque winter sky, where the echoes of the distant cannonading unceasingly growled like ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... and the upper Missouri on their right. The country was a rolling prairie, well covered for the most part with grass, and watered by small alkaline streams creeping towards the Missouri with an opaque, whitish current. Except along the watercourses, there was little or no wood. "I noticed," says the Chevalier de la Verendrye, "earths of different colors, blue, green, red, or black, white as chalk, or yellowish like ochre." This was probably in the "bad lands" of the Little Missouri, where these ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... and forcing me to bend till his mouth and my ear were exactly on a line—'What is really remarkable about it is, that the angel who painted that Virgin, so completely adopted the style of that epoch! Same angular, incorrect outline! Same opaque shadows! eh? eh?' He took a pinch, and wishing me a good appetite, turned up the Via ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... much finer. When viewed under a microscope the samples of crystals given to me did not appear to have any definite form, but rather resembled pieces of broken up egg coal of fine quality. The majority were opaque, but there were some which were transparent and colored. The crystals are a kind of carbon containing some impurities; they are extremely hard, and withstand for a long time even an oxygen blast. When the blast is directed against them ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... obtaining radiation of the requisite intensity for the repetition of his experiments. The following notes on the production of vacuum tubes of the required quality may therefore be of use to those who desire to prepare their own apparatus. It appears that flint glass is much more opaque to Roentgen's radiation than soda glass, and consequently the vacuum tubes require to be ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... the building, but this is undoubtedly in the main due to the fact that the blue stone of which it is chiefly composed responds immediately to the purple and violet lights that fall from the great East window. On a summer day the blue of the tomb seems almost opaque as though it were made of blue glass, and the gilt on the background of the screen and the brasses of the groins glitter and ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... air of wishing above all things to understand our point of view. Over and over again I have noticed that trait, although he always tried to cover it under an air of polite indifference and easy tolerance that was as opaque to a careful observer as Fred's ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... its charm from sorrow; Sorrow feverish with the color of joy; An opaque crystal, a stone on life's string Made of music that doth ring As the stars ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... of the abdomen being opened, no water was discovered in it, nor any other uncommon appearance, except about the liver, the coat of which had been rendered opaque by coagulated lymph, and was studded over with soft, dark coloured tubercles. The substance of the liver was tender, and full of bile and ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... was appalling; and, adding to its awful impression, black clouds were at the moment rolling over the valley, and swathing the mountains in their opaque masses. The lightning jetted from peak to peak, followed by short claps of close ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... was nothing definably abnormal about him. His tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark beard was not really long or wild—, but he looked rather hairy, because the beard began very high ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... seedlings the part which bends NEAR, but ABOVE the ground is heliotropic, and I believe so from this part bending only moderately when the light is oblique, and bending rectangularly when the light is horizontal. Nevertheless the bending of this lower part, as I conclude from my experiments with opaque caps, is influenced by the action of light on the upper part. My opinion, however, on the above and many other points, signifies very little, for I have no doubt that your book will convince most botanists that I am wrong in all the points ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... commands, For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade, But all Sun-shine, as when his Beams at Noon Culminate from th' Aequator, as they now Shot upward still direct, whence no way round Shadow from body opaque can fall, and the Aire, No where so cleer, sharp'nd his visual ray 620 To objects distant farr, whereby he soon Saw within kenn a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the Sun: His back was turnd, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunnie Raies, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the stomach ordinarily produces no symptoms. The roentgenogram and the fluoroscopic study with an opaque mixture are the chief ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Their rude hands in numberless instances have skinned the pictures, obliterating those peerless tints, lights, and shadows, and those delicate but emphatic touches that bespeak the master-stroke, leaving instead cold, blank, hard surfaces and outlines, opaque shadows and crude coloring, out of tone, and in consequence with deteriorated sentiment as well as execution. The profound knowledge and vigorous or fairy-like handling which made their primary reputation ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... done is imposed the task of making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Now this, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful I mean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there must be a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... it were, in a pretty verse, and because I must needs liken Montmorenci to something that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting of the water in its downward swoop; it is like some broad slope of sun- smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs the cataract unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be so large that one glance fails to comprehend it all. The rugged ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the convenient buttress of the teapot and substituted "Punch" when he became aware that day had turned to night. Looking up he perceived that his open window, which was rather small and of the casement variety, was completely blocked by a huge, shapeless, and opaque mass. Next moment the mass resolved itself into an animal of enormous size and surprising appearance, which fell heavily into ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... arrived, the navigation was once more free, and they resumed their course. Towards evening, they saw on their right the mouth of a great river; and the clear current was invaded by the headlong torrent of the Missouri, opaque with mud. They built their camp fires in the neighboring forest; and, at daylight, embarking anew on the dark and mighty stream, drifted swiftly down towards unknown destinies. They passed a deserted town of the Tamaroas; saw, three days after, the mouth of the Ohio; [Footnote: Called by Membre ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche of snow While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some broken gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to his feet ankle deep in slush thanking heaven for an opaque footing again. His guide was already clambering up a metal ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... in diameter, while a pointed nose stretched five feet farther at each end. Fixed in each point was a telescopic lens, while there were windows along the sides and at the top—all made, Garth informed us, of another form of the alloy almost as strong as the opaque variety. Running half-way out each end were four "fins" which served to apply the power driving the craft. A light inside showed the interior to be a single room, ten feet high at the center of its cylindrical ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... he observed a peculiar air of weariness and dulness in their faces. He was answered that the girdles were very tight and heavy, and being bound over the regions of the heart, were supposed to impede its action, and prevent it from beating high, and also to chill the wearer, as, being of opaque material, the warm sunshine of the earth could not get through to ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... crystalline Drops straightway down, refusing to partake In gross admixture with the baser brine, But shrinks and hardens into pearls opaque, Hereafter to be worn on arms and ears; So one ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... removed at once, and the hatching trays should be gone over carefully once or twice a day to see if any are present in them. Dead ova are easily recognized from the fact that they become opaque and white. They are best removed with a glass tube. The thumb is placed over one end of the tube, and the other end brought directly over the dead ovum. When the thumb is removed from the end of the tube held in the hand the water will rush up into the tube, ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... the villa was furnished in European fashion with plenty of comfortable arm-chairs and sofas made of bamboo. The floors were covered with thick soft mats and the front walls facing the piazza were really sliding panels covered with opaque paper through which the light cast a soft mellow luster. As a matter of fact, Dr. and Mrs. Spears, the owners of the villa, had kept it as Japanese as possible without interfering with their foreign ideas of comfort. The only ornaments were several beautiful ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes |
