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Opaque   Listen
noun
Opaque  n.  That which is opaque; opacity.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Opaque" Quotes from Famous Books



... gave the best result was that of the Aristolochia Sipho. The leaf, adherent to the plant, is entirely inclosed between two pieces of perfectly opaque black paper. That which corresponds to the upper surface of the limb bears cut-out characters, which are here the initials of Mr. Deherain. The two screens are fastened to the leaf by means of a mucilage of gum arabic that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... and in the long, quiet nights. She was like a portrait by Veronese with her fair, glossy hair, which seemed to cast a radiance on her skin, a skin with the faintest tinge of pink, softened by a light velvety down which could be perceived when the sun kissed her cheek. Her eyes were an opaque blue, like those of Dutch porcelain figures. She had a tiny mole on her left nostril and another on the right of her chin. She was tall, well developed, with willowy figure. Her clear voice sounded ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... he indicated; and there, even while he was speaking, we observed the approach of a cloud, or rather I should call it a dense mist, so completely without break of any sort did it occupy the whole horizon. It looked like an opaque mass of some substance, borne onward by some invisible power towards us. Van Graoul, whose equanimity nothing extraordinary could disturb, likened it to the wall of China painted black, and taking a cruise to ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... the concert agent with connections in Paris whom Audrey had first consulted in the enterprise of launching Musa upon the French public. He was a large, dark man, black moustached and bearded, with heavy limbs and features, and an opaque, pimpled skin. In spite of these characteristics, he entered the room soft-footed as a fairy, ingratiating as a dog aware of his own iniquity, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... visit. Only the strange valise was missing. Going to the kitchen, which he opened through intermediate doors on a straight line with the front room, Average Jones inspected the window. The glass was thickly marked with faint, bluish blurs, being, indeed, almost opaque from them in the middle of the upper pane. There was nothing indicative below the window, unless it were a considerable amount of crumbled putty, which he fingered ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... was one of pathetic entreaty. I turned the handle and entered. It was a small room, dimly lighted by a dirty window, the bottom half of which was rendered opaque by tissue paper pasted to its panes. The place suggested a village shop rather than an office. Pots of jam, jars of pickles, bottles of wine, biscuit tins, parcels of drapery, boxes of candles, bars of soap, boots, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer's shop, in reality the meeting-place of the junta. By an outside stairway the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque with ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... 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 on the lyre ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji

... There was the lawyer, sharp, observant, talkative, ready for a joke or an argument. There was the solemn man of business, who ate from a sense of duty, and scowled at the lawyer's bad puns. Near him, with an absurdly youthful wig and opaque goggles, sat the Unknown; his name, occupation, resources, and tastes alike a profound mystery. Several dapper clerks, whose right ears drooped from having been used as pen-racks, wearing stunning cravats, outre brooches and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... 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, she adopted ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... 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 is ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... you that the vapor becomes visible, and chilled, as it expands. Many thanks to them; but can they show us any reason why particles of water should be more opaque when they are separated than when they are close together, or give us any idea of the difference of the state of a particle of water, which won't sink in the air, from that of one that won't rise ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a wrecking crew of curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that tossed wearily beyond the bar. By noon the flying clouds huddled together in masses, and then were suddenly exploded in one vast opaque sheet over the heavens. The sea became gray, and suddenly wrinkled and old. There was a dumb, half-articulate cry in the air,—rather a confusion of many sounds, as of the booming of distant guns, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... or perhaps a light-footed dryad—flitted past and was gone. The surface of the "lick" rippled with her footprints, and was smooth again. All the encompassing masses of trees and undergrowth about the place were densely black and opaque, giving the sense of absolute solidity and weight, except upon the verges, which were somehow shaded off into a cloudy brown against the translucent dove-tinted tissues in which the night seemed enveloped and obscured save for the white gleaming of the stars. This was the clear color that the brackish ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... stacked in the same order which they occupied in the native shaft, the oldest at the bottom of the tube and the youngest close to the orifice; they are isolated by means of partitions; they are placed vertically, head upwards; moreover, my device has the advantage of substituting for the opaque wall of the bramble a transparent wall which will enable me to follow the hatching day by day, at any ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... such a fine day that there was no saying what a pair of field-glasses might not have fetched into view. Two fishing luggers, presumably from St. Ives Bay, were now sailing in an opposite direction from the steamer, and the floor of the sea became alternately clear and opaque. As for the bee, having sucked its fill of honey, it visited the teasle and thence made a straight line to Mrs. Pascoe's patch, once more directing the tourists' gaze to the old woman's print dress and white apron, for she had come to the door of the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole France is a great magician, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... his eyebrow lines gathered into a frown, his heavy eyelids closed around his pupils to contract his huge field of vision, and he looked! What a look—as if he could magnify objects shrinking into the distance; as if he could probe your very soul; as if he could pierce those sheets of water so opaque to our eyes and scan the deepest ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... with a smile. The country life suited her, and her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have grown opaque. ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... with dirty mouldering walls, broken doors and windows, shattered floor, and crumbling ceiling. The dust and fog of long-forgotten causes lowering everywhere, making the small leaden-framed panes of glass opaque, the dark wainscot grey, coating the dark rafters with a heavy dingy fur, and lading the atmosphere with a close unwholesome smell. Time and neglect have made the once-white ceiling like a huge map, in which black and swollen rivers and tangled mountain ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... coming, was upon hunted and hunters even now. The veil of mist that had floated between him and the wolf and its victim was spreading up and down the valley, rising from the wet ground, dense and heavy, opaque like ink, despite its whiteness. Presently the great whitish cloud would enclose him and the warriors, hiding them from one another, and it would be strange if he could not escape them in the white ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... totally different conception of the element. Imagine for an instant the different feelings of an husbandman whose hut is built by the Rhine or the Po, and who sees, day by day, the same giddy succession of silent power, the same opaque, thick, whirling, irresistible labyrinth of rushing lines and twisted eddies, coiling themselves into serpentine race by the reedy banks, in omne volubilis aevum,—and the image of the sea in the mind of the fisher ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... opaque than "deep chrome" and a shade more orange, seems to have a peculiar attraction for wandering tribes. Gipsies use it, and it is a favorite color with Indian squaws. To the last dirty rag it is effective, whether it flutters near a tent on Bagshot Heath, or in some wigwam doorway makes a point of ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... it all, and was sorry when they came to the Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to land ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... their terrible projectiles. You know that these have to be manufactured by artificial light, as exposure to sunlight always results in an explosion. You have noticed that their bullets explode when they strike an object? Well, the opaque, outer coating is broken by the impact, exposing a glass cylinder, almost solid, in the forward end of which is a minute particle of radium powder. The moment the sunlight, even though diffused, strikes this powder it explodes with a violence which nothing can withstand. If you ever ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... 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

... 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 ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... pellucid, that is, not opaque, or dark—it gives admission to the light, and reflects it back again in all its beauty, brilliancy, and purity. I do not wish to see my little boy a green-house, or a glass-house merely, for then he would be brittle, and not strong—easily damaged, if ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick

... we should have no consciousness of living; but if we base our thought entirely on sense perception, taking for granted that Time and Space have reality instead of recognising that they are only modes or limits under which those senses act, the Wall will ever remain opaque to us. Let us try and make this clearer. If we analyse the impression we receive from Motion, we find it is made up of the product of our two limitations, it is the time that an object takes to go over a certain space. We must come therefore to the conclusion ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... knew just what happened, much less how it was accomplished. He knew only that a black, opaque wave ran up the long windows, shutting off the light, so that instantly the darkness of night enveloped everything, blotting out all that maze of colour; it was the blackness of the void. Then came a tiny light, a mere dot of flame, over on the opposite wall; a pin-point of light it was, ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... was made. The stucco adheres to a strong canvas, which in its turn is nailed on to a wooden panel. The background, also much injured, is decorated with mosaic and geometrical patterns of glass, now dim and opaque with age. The relief must have been of signal merit. Complete it would have rivalled the polychrome Madonna of the Louvre: as a fragment it is quite sufficient to prove that the Piot Madonna, in the same museum, is not authentic. One more trick of the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... Al(OH)3, is obtained as a gelatinous white precipitate, soluble in potassium or sodium hydrate, but insoluble in ammonium chloride, by adding ammonia to a cold solution of an aluminium salt; from boiling solutions the precipitate is opaque. By drying at ordinary temperatures, the hydrate Al(OH)3.H2O is obtained; at 300 deg. this yields AlO(OH), which on ignition gives alumina, Al2O3. Precipitated aluminium hydrate finds considerable application in dyeing. Soluble modifications ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... organ of vision. It is formed by a spherical shell which encloses fluid or semisolid parts. The shell is anteriorly made up of a transparent convex membrane, the cornea, while the remainder of its wall is formed by three opaque layers ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... advanced much in the production of window shades that will let in light and air, shut out the gaze of strangers, hold no shadows, match interior and exterior, fit properly, work with ease, cost little, and last forever. The ordinary opaque roller shade still has no serious rival, and usually the best we can do is to see to it that we get a good quality which is not always reliable, rather than a poor ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... moment under the lintel which dominated the broad entrance. His eyes had some difficulty in penetrating the density which seemed drawn across the place on his left like some ink-smeared and opaque curtain. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... sacrificed their all for a political and religious belief were bound to build of such belief foundation for a sturdy nation of the future. It is easy to look back and realize. It is hard to look forward with eyes that see; but one must be a very opaque thinker, indeed, not to wonder what this latest vast migration of Saxon blood portends for future empire. The Jutes and Angles and Saxons poured into ancient Albion for just one reason—to acquire each for his own freehold of land. Look at the ancient words! Freehold of land! For ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... slim, delicately modeled shoulders the straps of shirred and beaded chiffon which apparently performed the office of keeping her dress from sliding to the floor. In reality, under its fluid, gauzy draperies, it was constructed on a firm, well-fitting, well-fastened foundation of opaque cloth which quite adequately clothed the young body, but its appearance was of a transparent cloud, only kept from floating entirely away by those gleaming straps on the shoulders, an effect carefully calculated in ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... laughter or spoken words. But towards 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 ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... in an atmosphere opaque with smoke, he hung for ten minutes above a roulette wheel. Then downstairs he crept, and was out-sped by the important negro, jingling in his pocket the 40 cents in silver that remained to him of his five-dollar capital. At the corner ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... presented an indescribable spectacle. It is literally impossible to describe it, for every detail was obscured by the immense clouds of dust that hung over the place like a pall, clinging and opaque. The water-works and wells were fortunately intact, but until everything had been carefully tested and examined, the horses, who had drunk nothing since the previous day, ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... bed, feeling for what she needed. And in her mood this unusual proceeding was fun. When ready for bed she opened the door to take a peep out. Through the dense blackness the waterfall showed dimly opaque. Carley felt a soft mist wet her face. The low roar of the falling water seemed to envelop her. Under the cliff wall brooded impenetrable gloom. But out above the treetops shone great stars, wonderfully white and radiant and cold, with a piercing contrast to the deep clear blue ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... 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, behind ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... indescribability; and as a large splay-wheeled, tall-funneled, plowing engine rolled off the Bensley highroad and lumbered in upon the right-of-way, the powerful bouquet of hot lubricating oil nullified all other smells, and the atmosphere became opaque to the point of solidity. As the dust began to settle it was possible to observe that attached to the locomotive was a square, solid, wooden van, the movable residence of the stoker, the engineer, and an apprentice; that a Powler cultivator, a fearsome piece ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... large building of white marble. A lift carried them to the top floor, and left them facing a black door with "Felicity Berber" painted on it in vermilion letters. Opening this, they found themselves in a huge windowless room roofed with opaque glass. The floor was inlaid in a mosaic of uneven tiles which appeared to be of different shades of black. The walls, from roof to floor, were hung with shimmering green silk of the shade of a parrot's wing. There were no show-cases or other evidences of commercialism, but about the room were ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... proceeded was opposite the opening by which the count could see into the dressing-room. He fixed his eyes on that window—he distinguished a shadow in the darkness; then one of the panes became quite opaque, as if a sheet of paper were stuck on the outside, then the square cracked without falling. Through the opening an arm was passed to find the fastening, then a second; the window turned on its hinges, and a man entered. He ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... current, while the North Platte brings a considerable amount of earthy sediment from the heart of that Alpine region. After fairly entering upon the Plains, every stream begins to burrow and to wash, growing more and more turbid, until it is lost in 'Big Muddy,' the most opaque and sedimentary of all great rivers. I suspect that all the other rivers of this continent convey in the aggregate less earthy matter to the ocean than the Missouri pours into the previously transparent Mississippi, thenceforth an unfailing testimony that evil company corrupts ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... experiment Miss 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 and ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally

... directions; toward light and toward dark. Drawings in outline upon tinted paper take on a surprising finish with a few darks added for shadow and the high lights touched in with chalk or Chinese white. The method in opaque water color, employed by F. Hopkinson Smith and others, of working over a tinted paper such as the general tone of the subject suggests, has its warrant in the early art of the Venetian painters. If a blue day, a blue gray paper is used; if a mellow ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... its flat, ugly head reposing in the middle. He came a bit nearer. "Hideous!" was all he said. And then his eyes was fixed on the eyes of the animal—the lidless eyes, with their perpetual glassy stare. He had thought at first they were closed; but now he saw that that opaque yellow substance was covered by a glassy coating, while in the centre there was a small slit as if cut by a penknife. The great coils slowly expanded and fell again as the animal breathed; otherwise the fixed stare of those yellow ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... merely fog, nor smoke, nor yet a pall of suspended dust, but rather what one might expect in a blending of those three. Only a tinge of moonlight from above softened the dull hue. It was not darkness as night usually is dark. It was an impenetrable, opaque narrowing of the horizon, and closing in of the heavens above us; which, as we advanced, constantly shifted its boundary, retaining us still in the center of the great amphitheater of half-night. We could see one another, but beyond or above the encompassing ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell

... but she wrapped her face and nose in her woollen gown, and reached Tom's door. He never slept with it fastened, and the amazed youth was awakened by a voice which he knew to be that of Miss Furze. Escape by the way she had come was hopeless. The staircase was now opaque. Fortunately Tom's casement, instead of being in the side wall, was at the end, and the drop to the scullery roof was not above four feet. Catharine reached it easily, and, Tom coming after her, helped her to scramble down into the yard. The gate was unbarred, and in another minute they were ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford

... place. We saw Lord Palmerston; but at too great a distance to distinguish anything but a gray head. The House had daylight in it when we entered, and for some time afterwards; but, by and by, the roof, which I had taken to be a solid and opaque ceiling, suddenly brightened, and showed itself to be transparent; a vast expanse of tinted and figured glass, through which came down a great, mild radiance ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and meeting shapely feet. COAT—The coat is hard hair, but short and smooth, the texture is as stiff as bristles, but beautifully laid. COLOUR—Belvoir tan, which is brown and black, perfectly intermixed, with white markings of various shapes and sizes. The white should be very opaque and clear. Black and white, with tan markings on head and stifles. Badger pied—a kind of grey and white. Lemon pied, light yellow and white. Hare pied, a darker yellow and white. STERN—Long and carried gaily, but not curled; often half white. ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... formed steps under our feet became stalactites overhead. The lava, which was porous in many places, had formed a surface covered with small rounded blisters; crystals of opaque quartz, set with limpid tears of glass, and hanging like clustered chandeliers from the vaulted roof, seemed as it were to kindle and form a sudden illumination as we passed on our way. It seemed as if the genii of the ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... my lifted foot, and through the almost opaque darkness I saw far below me a vast plain. A long river skirted it in a semi-circle, turned away from me; its course was marked by the steely reflection of the water still faintly glimmering here and there. The hill on which I found myself terminated abruptly in an ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... Senator Elijah Westlake Bemis did for Barclay in the legislature the things that Barclay would have preferred not to do for himself, and the Golden Belt Elevator Company throve and waxed fat. And Lige Bemis, its attorney, put himself in the way of becoming a "general counsel," with his name on an opaque glass door. For as Barclay rose in the world, he found the need of Bemis more and more pressing every year. In politics the favours a man does for others are his capital, and Barclay's deposit grew large. He was forever helping some one. His standing with the powers in the state was ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... of a large mill; the water is delicious; the prevailing limestone does not reach this valley. In the morning before the army moved there, the little river was clear as crystal; at night it was changed into an opaque white color, a stream of soapy water; a pleasing witness to the cleanliness of our men. There were no clothes lines, however, but many of the washers were so scantily off for clothing that they put their garments on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... do the subject of evolution full justice. It is a matter of great importance to our lost and undone race. It lies near to every human heart, and exercises a wonderful influence over our impulses and our ultimate success or failure. When we pause to consider the opaque and fathomless ignorance of the great masses of our fellow men on the subject of evolution, it is not surprising that crime is rather on the increase, and that thousands of our race are annually filling drunkards' graves, with no other visible means of support, while multitudes ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... that from the hour when two mortals had shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel which would have dimmed all earthly things its splendor waned. When our pilgrims reached the cliff, they found only an opaque stone with particles of mica glittering on its surface. There is also a tradition that as the youthful pair departed the gem was loosened from the forehead of the cliff and fell into the enchanted lake, and that at noontide ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... great numbers. In consequence of these occasional collections of air-bubbles, the layers differ, not only in density and closeness, but also in color, the more compact strata being blue and transparent, while those containing a greater quantity of air-bubbles are opaque and whitish, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... to cheat that opaque pall of night of one little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light. Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes. But perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... the Egyptian priest Thoutmosis, who knows so many wondrous secrets, has given her the mysterious stone which is found in the heads of dragons, and whose property, as every one knows, renders all shadows and the most opaque bodies transparent to the eyes of those who possess it. Nyssia always carries this stone in her girdle, or else set into her bracelet, and in that may be found ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... liberty—freedom from sin, but the completing of the redemption of the spirit by the redemption of the body, the perfecting of the greater by its necessary complement of the less. Evil has been constantly at work, turning our house of the body into a prison; rendering it more opaque and heavy and insensible; casting about it bands and cerements, and filling it with aches and pains. The freest soul, the purest of lovers, the man most incapable of anything mean, would not, for all his mighty ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... descended the steps about half way, looked at the great gray pillars in ghostly rows receding off into a blackness of silence thick with damps and cellar smells, each a reminder of contagion; then at the motionless opaque water, into which the pillars sank to an unknown depth: and they shivered, and cried: "Ugh! how cold and ugly!" ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... us from on high during the night, and the country is cut into islands: the river from a rocky wriggling stream has risen into a tawny, opaque torrent that roars with a voice a mile long and is become quite unfordable. The little mill-stream just below has broken its banks and poured itself away over the lower vineyards into the river; a lot of the vines look sadly upset, generally ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous

... only one belonging to the genus. The cells are very large, regular, and uniform, resembling very closely an antique sculptured urn. Colour dark brown, and the walls so thick as to be nearly opaque. The polyzoary, which appears to attain a height of four or five inches, is bipinnate (with all the branches on one plane) the branches alternate, and given off with extreme regularity. The ultimate ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... pushed away and rowed off into the fog, waving adieus to the little group that watched them from the Maid of the North. Both kept their eyes upon the steamer until a veil of gauze, ethereal but opaque, closed in between them. The sun, still near the horizon, lit up the mist with a golden light, and Pats with the haughty lady seemed ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell

... leaning back in his chair. "Now comes the kicker. I suggest that we make the hull of foot-thick lux metal and line it on the inside with relux wherever we want it to be opaque. And we want relux shutters on the windows. Lux is too doggone transparent; if we came too close to a hot star, ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... were an opening BG, limited by opaque bodies BH, GI, the wave of light which issues from the point A will always be terminated by the straight lines AC, AE, as has just been shown; the parts of the partial waves which spread outside the space ACE being too ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens

... style was to put in the sky, water and distances with opaque paints, and the most prominent objects with transparent colors. This was probably the reason that his foregrounds seemed always to be sunk in his backgrounds. The model was scarcely considered as a guide, for he ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... distribution of heat', which depends on the relative position of the transparent and opaque masses (the fluid and solid parts of the surface of the earth), and on the hypsometrical configuration of continents; relations which determine the geographical position and curvature of the isothermal lines (or curves of equal mean annual temperature) both in a horizontal ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... leaflets. Again, a pot full of plants of Trifolium resupinatum, which had been kept in a warm room for three days, was turned out of doors (Sept. 21st) on a clear and almost frosty night. Next morning ten of the terminal leaflets were examined as opaque objects under the microscope. These leaflets, in going to sleep, either turn vertically upwards, or more commonly bend a little over the lateral leaflets, so that their lower surfaces are more exposed ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... result of an exhausted or degenerate brain, gives rise to Mysticism. Since the mystic cannot express his cloudy thoughts in ordinary language, he loves mutually exclusive expressions. Mysticism blurs outlines, and makes the transparent opaque." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... another. The stairs led up through an ordinary trap-door into what was the ground-floor of the house. This, too, was one immense room, with four latticed windows looking on to the garden, and one with opaque glass on to the lane at the back; and a great door, generally kept locked, for rather more valuable things were kept here, such as the garden-roller, flower-pots, and the targets for archery. Then a light staircase led straight ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... called (Fig. I). The two other kinds, whose functions, as we shall see, are not yet properly understood, have enormously swollen and massive heads; in one (Fig. 2), the head is highly polished; in the other (Fig. 3), it is opaque and hairy. The worker-minors vary greatly in size, some being double the bulk of others. The entire body is of very solid consistency, and of a pale reddish-brown colour. The thorax or middle segment is armed with three pairs of sharp spines; ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... Die Shall He Live Again? The Invisible Something That Survives Death. A Case That Will Bear Quoting. Seeing Through Opaque Substances. Faith Is Not Fact—Evidence Not Proof. Proof Must Rest Upon Individual Experience. The Psychic Body Basis of Organism. All Life Is Manifested in Form. Science Stands for Axioms ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... turns to dust; when the fields are like tinder; when the air is the breath of an oven; when even the merciful dews are withheld, and the morning is no fresher than the evening; when the friendly road is a desert, and the green woods like a sick-chamber; when the sky becomes tarnished and opaque with dust and smoke; when the shingles on the houses curl up, the clapboards warp, the paint blisters, the joints open; when the cattle rove disconsolate and the hive-bee comes home empty; when the earth gapes and all ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so, with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord, with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we not have them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... attack the same organ are essentially different, in different animals, in their symptoms, intensity, progress, and mode of treatment. In periodic ophthalmia—that pest of the equine race and opprobrium of the veterinary profession—the cornea becomes suddenly opaque, the iris pale, the aqueous humour turbid, the capsule of the lens cloudy, and blindness is the result. After a time, however, the cornea clears up, and becomes as bright as ever; but the lens continues impervious to light, and vision ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... of inky fluid spread over the waters and into the opaque waves the waving arms sank, dragging with them to the depths of the sea ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... substances besides glass exert a similar action on a beam of polarized light. Even opaque solids like iron possess this property. Kerr has proved that a beam of light passed through an extremely thin plate of highly magnetic iron has its plane of polarization slightly rotated. Faraday showed that the power of rotating a beam of polarized light is also ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... open forum-like squares, from which were elevated the great glass globes I have described, which hung lamp-like in the sky,—past palaces and arcades, blocks of low stores in iridescent tints, and long, straight fronts of white opaque buildings, through occasional tunnels into which we plunged as into a sea of radiance, and on, out, past a few squares of black umbrageous trees that seemed like dead coals laid on the heat quivering ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... orders, and getting the meat and extras, and the mutual crowding of the messengers, some of the dinners were not put on the fire till an hour or two after the fainting patient should have had his meal: and then, of course, he could not take it. The cold mutton-chop with its opaque fat, the beef with its caked gravy, the arrowroot stiff and glazed, all untouched, might be seen by the bedsides in the afternoons, while the patients were lying back, sinking for want of support. Probably the dinners had been brought up on a tray, cooling all the way up-stairs and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian. For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... in patches, while in others the injection was limited to the margins of the follicular and Peyerian glands, giving an appearance which is quite peculiar to cholera. In comparatively few cases were the changes so slight as to consist in a somewhat swollen and opaque condition of the superficial layers of the mucous membrane, with delicate rosy-red injection, and some prominence of the solitary follicles and Peyer's patches. In such cases the intestinal contents were colorless, but resembling meal-soup ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... advanced. I walked awhile among the rocks: the sky was perfectly clear, and the sun so hot, that I was forced to turn my face from it: when all on a sudden it became obscure, as I thought, in a manner very different from what happens by the interposition of a cloud. I turned back, and perceived a vast opaque body between me and the sun moving forwards towards the island: it seemed to be about two miles high, and hid the sun six or seven minutes; but I did not observe the air to be much colder, or the sky more darkened, than if I had stood under the shade of a mountain. As it approached nearer ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... the tan. The winds had furled their wings. White clouds rose, dazzling, opaque, up to the blue zenith. The querulous cicada complained in the laurel. Birt heard the call of a jay from the woods. And then, as he once more urged the old mule on, the busy bark-mill kept up such ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... Salle's Indians, too, had lagged behind; but, within a week, all had 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, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... Madeline saw the gray darkness grow opaque, change and lighten, lose its substance, and yield the grotesque shapes of yucca and ocotillo. Dawn was about to break. Madeline imagined she was facing east, still she saw no brightening of sky. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... George must do the same," Jack declared, from somewhere in the opaque mist. "Supposing we were separated in some way; you two fellows would be badly off with no means for locating east from west, ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel

... feel that just what she is at Home she will appear abroad. If she attempts to appear otherwise, everybody will soon see through the attempt. We can not cheat the world long about our real characters. The thickest and most opaque mask we can put on will soon become transparent. This fact we should believe without a doubt. Deception most often deceives itself. The deceiver is the most deceived. The liar is often the only one cheated. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... noticed (provided you had had the courage to look into the basin), that after a few seconds, the blood which had been taken away separated itself of its own accord into two portions; the one a yellowish transparent liquid, the other an opaque red mass floating on the top, and which is called the coagulum of the blood or clot. This coagulum owes its color to an infinity of minute red bodies of which we will speak more fully by and by, and which are retained as if in a net, in the ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace

... where the clouds have parted. The wind sings, and a schooner is working rapidly out to windward for more room. During changeable weather the sky between the clouds occasionally takes a pale yellow hue, like that of the tinted paper used for drawing. This colour is opaque, and evidently depends upon the presence of thin vapour. It is seen when the wind is in the act of changing its direction, and the clouds, arrested in their march, are thrown out of rank. That which was the side becomes the rear of the cloud, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... trains in London, however, just long enough to get in a background, as it were, for our Continental experiences. The weather was typical, and the background, from an artistic point of view, was perfect. While not precisely opaque, you couldn't see ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... to be told by our conductor that this was due to the fact that we no longer had the shadow of the earth to make night for us when the sun was behind it. The sun was now never behind the earth, or any other great opaque body, and when we wished to sleep we made an artificial night, for our special use, by closing all the shutters. And there was no atmosphere about us to diffuse the sunlight, and so to hide the stars. We kept count of the days ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... It is closed with wire-gauze, whose meshes, two millimetres wide (.078 inch.—Translator's Note.), do not permit of the Fly's passage. The Bluebottle comes to my apparatus, guided by scent rather than sight. She hastens to the test-tube, whose contents are veiled under an opaque cover, with the same alacrity as to the open tube. The invisible attracts her quite as much as ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... like paper-scroll. Iscariot Egalite was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.' This Prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... whom this summons had not come as a surprise, had resolved that he would confide none of his anxieties to his sister but, alas, as well might a pane of glass resolve to be opaque to a ray of sunlight. Within ten minutes, Nancy knew not only all that he knew, but such additional deductions as her sharper wits ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller

... upper wind, the broken clouds take endless liberties with shadow and shine. What she saw I cannot tell; I know she saw far more than a stranger would have seen, for she knew her home. His eyes would, I believe, have been drawn chiefly to those intense spots of live white, opaque yet brilliant, the heads of the cotton-grass here and there in thin patches on the dark ground. For nearly the whole of the level was a peat-moss. Miles and miles of peat, differing in quality and varying in ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... is a matter of some nicety and discrimination to pick out the very one the preferableness of which is scarcely perceptible, but decisive. The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style is that there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but 'tall, opaque words,' taken from the 'first row of the rubric'—words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English terminations. If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author's elegance by the measurement ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... portending a tempest, overspread the heavens, and shrouded every light and prospect underneath their heavy folds. The extremities of the avenues were imperceptibly detached from the copse, by a lighter shadow of opaque gray, which, upon closer examination, became visible in the midst of the obscurity. But the fragrance which ascended from the grass, fresher and more penetrating than that which exhaled from the trees around him; the warm and balmy air which enveloped him for the first time for many years past; ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... a certain degree, the surface becomes first brown, and then scorched. In consequence of these changes, the muscular fibre becomes opaque, shorter, firmer, and drier; the tendons less opaque, softer, and gluey; the fat is either melted out, or rendered semi-transparent. Animal fluids become more transparent: the albumen is coagulated and separated, and ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... material, like the skull of the Piltdown man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying. Though it deals with the conscious life of his fellow citizens, it is all too often distressingly opaque, because the man who is trying to generalize has practically no supervision of the way his data are collected. Imagine medical research conducted by students who could rarely go into a hospital, were deprived of animal experiment, and compelled ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... wine casks, first blinding his lantern. He whispered for the others to follow. In a moment they were squeezing themselves through the narrow spaces between the dark, strong-smelling casks, back into a darkness so opaque that it seemed lifeless. Selim halted them in a recess near the wall and there they huddled, breathlessly awaiting the ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... lake; and that the highest conception of the "I" known even to advanced souls, is but a faint reflection of the "I" filtering through the Spiritual Mind, although that Spiritual Mind is as clear as the clearest crystal when compared with our comparatively opaque mental states. And the highest mental state is but a tool or instrument of the "I," and is not the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... hoof which for six hundred years trod Greece into the slime. In the long bondage to the barbarian, the Hellenic spirit was weakened, but not broken. The Greek, with his fine texture, loathes the stolid, opaque temperament of the polygamistic Turk. Intermarriages between the races are very few. The Greek race is not extinct. In many rural populations in Greece the modern Hellenic blood is as pure as the ancient. Only Hellenic ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... hitch or a puff or a festoon about it. It had two skirts, I believe, but they were plain-hemmed, and fell like a mist about her figure. Underneath was no rustling silk, or shining satin; only more mist, of finest, sheerest quaker-muslin; you could not tell where the cloud met the opaque of soft, unstarched cambric below it all. And from her head to her feet floated the shimmering veil, fastened to her hair with only two or three tube-rose blooms and the green leaves and white stars of the larger myrtle. There was a cluster of them upon her bosom, and she held ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... 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 tied ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... nodded his head. The opaque rose lenses set in Mister's face seemed to open a door ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer

... on the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from Opaque, or refracted in the passage through Diaphanous Bodies, produceth in living Creatures, in whom God hath placed such Organs, an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... utterly unsuited to him. He cannot distinguish the letters of the largest print in a newspaper advertisement; he cannot see the spaces between the outstretched fingers, at arm's length, in clear water; nor at a few inches' distance in water that is somewhat opaque. I read a short paper on this subject, at the British Association in 1865, in which I showed the precise cause of this imperfection of vision and how it might be remedied. If the front of our eyeballs had been flat, we ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... his shoulders and snorted. Mrs. Dale's eyebrows had drawn so close together that they almost touched; her eyes appeared darker, smaller, more opaque. Mr. Ridgett continued talking in a tone of light facetiousness that seemed to ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... breathed her mother, unconscious of any irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith in the younger ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... readily eradicated. Mrs. Reed took her hand away, and, turning her face rather from me, she remarked that the night was warm. Again she regarded me so icily, I felt at once that her opinion of me—her feeling towards me—was unchanged and unchangeable. I knew by her stony eye—opaque to tenderness, indissoluble to tears—that she was resolved to consider me bad to the last; because to believe me good would give her no generous pleasure: only a ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... that nothing remained to be added; and yet we are still very ignorant in regard to the internal construction of the sun." "The spots have been supposed to be solid bodies, the smoke of volcanoes, the scum floating on an ocean of fluid matter, clouds, opaque masses, and to be many other things." "The sun itself has been called a globe of fire, though, perhaps, metaphorically." "It is time now to profit by the observations we are in possession of. I have availed myself of the labors ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... globe of the eye and consists of two parts—the sclerotic coat and the cornea. The sclerotic coat covers the greater portion of the larger spherical segment and is recognized in front as "the white of the eye." It is composed mainly of fibrous connective tissue and is dense, opaque, and tough. It preserves the form of the eyeball and protects the portions within. It is pierced at the back by a small opening which admits the optic nerve, and in front it becomes changed into the peculiar tissue that makes up ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... wings that are intended for employment in flight are transparent membranes, with the course of the air-tubes marked out upon them as opaque nervures. These air-tubes, it will be remembered, are lined by spires of dense cartilage; and hence it is that they become nervures so well adapted to act like tent-lines in keeping the expanded membranes stretched. In the dragon-flies, the nervures are minutely netted for the sake ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various

... the formidable forces of the world's tyrant; and, as will be seen in a future page, she came off victorious. At the very first onset, indeed, by the capitulation at Baylen, the charm of French invincibility was broken, and the star of Napoleon was covered with an opaque cloud. It was this battle, fought in July, which induced England to assist the Spaniards. Money, arms, munitions of every sort, and troops were sent to both Spain and Portugal; and, as regards the latter country, their power ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... dead ahead. Instantly every head was uncovered, and the rustle of whispered prayers fluttered over the deck, as the pilgrims bowed and crossed themselves. Nothing was to be seen; but, stroke after stroke, the hollow sounds, muffled and blurred in the opaque atmosphere, were pealed out by the guiding bell. Presently a chime of smaller bells joined in a rapid accompaniment, growing louder and clearer as we advanced. The effect was startling. After voyaging for hours over the blank ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... salt entirely disappears and leaves the water transparent, whilst the chalk changes it into an opaque liquid ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet

... small, waxy-looking cylinders, which are kept in water to prevent oxidation. It may also occur as the amorphous non-poisonous variety, a red opaque infusible substance, insoluble in carbon disulphide. Ordinary phosphorus is soluble in oil, alcohol, ether, chloroform, and carbon disulphide; insoluble in water. It is much used in rat poisons, made ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction—nothing but a silent mass of ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... habitual preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue, rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in these studies—which are more often than not full sunlight effects—blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the sun, and is profusely distributed in ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair

... no sunlight left, and they worked with torches. Ashe began his inspection of the relatively simple transfer—the two upright bars, the slab of opaque material forming a doorstep between them. This was only a skeleton of the gates Ross had used in the past. But continual experimentation had produced this more ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... midnight on midocean—the blackness of darkness above, below, around, beneath. Suddenly into this opaque darkness glows a spark of red light. It increases, spreads, and shoots upward, revealing—a ship on fire! Showing the deck crowded with dark figures! Only one fearfully distinct form—the form of Odalite. She stands on the top of the bulwarks, clothed in white ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... him, in place of a horizon, was a vast livid opacity. He looked at this attentively, and under the fixedness of his glance it became less indistinct. At the base of a distant fold of land towards the east, in the depths of that opaque lividity (a moving and wan sort of precipice, which resembled a cliff of the night), crept and floated some vague black rents, some dim shreds of vapour. The pale opacity was fog, the black shreds were smoke. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... hope to go and see him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every instant. The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches, fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body, the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits, unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... practice, the student may fuse the oxide of manganese with borax, upon a platinum wire, in the oxidation flame, when a violet-red glass will be obtained; or if too much of the oxide be used, a glass of a dark color and opaque will be obtained. By submitting this glass to the reduction flame, it will become colorless in correspondence to the perfection with which the flame is produced. Or a piece of tin may be fused upon charcoal, and kept in that state for a considerable ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous

... vivid light, hastily left the tent and was near falling over Maurice, who had raised himself on his elbow. The darkness seemed by contrast more opaque than it had been before, and the two men lay stretched on the bare ground, a few paces from each other. All that they could descry before them in the dense shadows of the night was the window of the farm-house, faintly illuminated ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... hour, when the twilight had coagulated into dark, the silent negro who was driving the buggy hailed an opaque body somewhere ahead of them in the gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon them a luminous disc which regarded them like a malignant eye out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer, John saw that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile, larger and more magnificent ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... spacious, 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, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... Grant should have fallen, 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

... "That opaque spot you see is London fog. Those twin clouds are North and South America. Jerusalem and Madagascar are ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... 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

... but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and jumbled with nature. We are blind and we fall back each to his place. When we are enveloped in the iron-hammered rumble of advance, we fix up our luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk. Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a corner of a tavern that has been caught up and swept ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... consisted of, first, boards, then straw, then sacking; and it had remained so long without being frayed out that it had become packed as hard as terra firma. His blankets had not seen the light of day, nor enjoyed the fresh cool breezes for many long years. His one window was opaque with the smoke of many years' accumulation. Although his chickens had a coop of their own where they roosted at night, they ran about the floor of his "dug-out" in the daytime looking for crumbs that fell from the poor man's table; and his cat, through years of criminal impunity, would sit on ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... marvellous realness of a boy's day-dreams, how colourful they glow, rosy and living, and how opaque the curtain closing down between the dreamer and the actual world. That curtain is almost sound-proof, too, and causes more throat-trouble among parents ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... 'Re," said Adrian. "These things want thinking out. A limited vision might be restricted in other ways than by mere stupid opaque fog, and bald, insipid position in Space. Consider how much more aggravating it would be—from the point of view of Providence—to limit the vision to the selection of peculiar objects which would give offence to the Taste or Religious Convictions of its owner! ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... outer skin of ordinary men, as through a parchment against the light, the inner writing, and spell out its meanings. How is it that they fail to see quite through one Jos. Larkin, a lawyer of Gylingden? The layover of Gylingden is somehow two opaque for them, I almost think. Is he really too deep for you? Or is it that you don't care to search him too narrowly, or have not time? or as men in money perplexities love not the scrutiny of their accounts or papers, you don't care to tire your eyes over the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... /n./ [Unix] 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of 'ftell(3)' may be a magic cookie ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... was. Every Christian, by each sin, whether it be acted or only thought, casts himself out of the light into the darkness that rings it round, and out there he is a victim to the beasts of prey that hunt in darkness. An eclipse of the sun is not caused by any change in the sun, but by an opaque body, the offspring and satellite of the earth, coming between the earth and sun. And so, when Christian men lose the light of God's face, it is not because there is any 'variableness or shadow of turning' in Him, but because between Him and them has come the blackness—their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... how often an 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 in the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... infinite nature of duty, is the central part of all within us; a ray as of eternity and immortality immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your coloured glass varies so much from century to century—and in certain money-making, game-preserving centuries, it gets terribly opaque. Not a heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant, leaden, cold hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this coloured glass; now, may it not become at once translucent and uncoloured? Painting no pictures more for us, but only the everlasting azure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... August night. A mist is rising slowly from the fields and casting an opaque veil over everything within eyesight. Lighted up by the moon, the mist gives the impression at one moment of a calm, boundless sea, at the next of an immense white wall. The air is damp and chilly. Morning is still far off. A step from the bye-road which runs along the edge of the forest a ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... clean glass vessel. Pour a little sweet oil upon the surface, and put it to stand where it can get cold, and where no one will touch it. When cold, put in a stick, and the fluid, previously clear, will at once become opaque, and begin to crystallize, until at length there is a solid ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... and absurd determination of the Governor-general. The infantine simplicity of the effort seemed incredible. The ignorance was as sublime as the tyranny. The most lucid arguments and the most earnest remonstrances were all in vain. Too opaque to be illumined by a flood of light, too hard to be melted by a nation's tears, the Viceroy held calmly to his purpose. To the keen and vivid representations of Viglius, who repeatedly exhibited all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... in the morning had smiled so brightly in undimmed sunshine, was now black with clouds. These hung so low that the house seemed the centre of a narrow and almost opaque horizon. The room soon darkened with the gloom of twilight, and the faces of the inmates faded into shadowy outlines. The mountains, half wrapped in vapor, loomed vast and indefinite in the obscurity. Every moment the storm grew nearer, and its centre was marked by ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... addition to this prime colouring matter, however, the animal also possesses a normal yellow pigment, and a bluish layer in the skin which acts like the iridium glass so largely employed by Dr. Salviati, being seen as straw-coloured with a transmitted light, but assuming a faint lilac tint against an opaque absorbent surface. While sleeping the chameleon becomes almost white in the shade, but if light falls upon him he slowly darkens by an automatic process. The movements of the corpuscles are governed by opposite nerves and muscles, which either cause them ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... the red, coarse-skinned face, the tight mouth and opaque brown eyes and the low, stupid forehead with its old-fashioned narrow fringe of dingy hair. He knew that in spite of Sir Godfrey and the family estate of which she was always talking, she was common to the heart—not a lady like Christine and his ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... be stopped at any time and the ice removed. In order 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death. I almost fancied that I could see the haggard face staring up at me through the slimy water; but no, it was as opaque as stone. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... I am David Grayson. I am real and solid and opaque; I have plenty of red blood running in my veins. I assure you that I am a ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... Cambridge Edition. From new plates, printed from clear type on opaque paper, and attractively bound. With a Portrait and engraved Title-page, and a Vignette of Lowell's Home, Elmwood. 8vo, gilt ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... thing under his arm and partly concealed by the sleeve of his gown. Watching him as he approached the master's desk and spoke with Mr. Colfe, the form-master, Dam noted that he had what appeared to be a long oblong glass box of which the side turned towards him was white and opaque. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... completely, only to about two-thirds of their height. A large space is therefore left empty; and the victualler has to judge of the moment when the surface of the mess has attained the right level. The honey being perfectly opaque, its depth is not apparent. I have to use a sounding-rod when I want to gauge the contents of the jar; and I find, on the average, that the honey reaches a depth of ten millimetres. (.39 inch.—Translator's Note.) The Bee has not this resource; she has sight, which may enable her ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... up an opaque curtain dropped as quickly. They lay together on the far side of the ridge, but the space below was empty. They saw no ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton

... rods and feathered arrows; from the top of the chapel steeple a great cross of stone, seeming to stretch out its arms; here and there the whitish zinc, cutting the dark blue of the slates; in spots an indistinct glittering and flashes of pale light enveloped in opaque shadows, and then the tops of three or four large trees which extended beyond the eaves, as if prying into the secrets of the attic. By the glittering light of the stars, the slightest peculiarity in the architecture assumed singular contours, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... rollers. There was a young girl lying at full length at the edge of the foam. She reclined parallel to the beach, not with her feet towards the sea, but so that it came to her side. She was clad in some material of a gauzy and yet opaque texture, permitting the full outline and the least movement to be seen. The colour I do not exactly know how to name; they could tell you at the Magasin du Louvre, where men understand the hues of garments ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... did not strike me as in the least odd that he should thus make friends with me by the mere exchange of half a dozen words. I looked at him as he lay resting on his elbows and smoking lazily. He had thrown his hat off, and his wavy hair, longish and of an opaque charcoal black, fell over his temples while he shook it back behind his ears. He was a little above the middle height, of dark complexion, with large and soft black eyes and arched eyebrows, a small ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... not this done?—I will tell you why. Because that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge, was still opaque even to Bull and Waterland;—because the Idea itself—that 'Idea Idearum', the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvent of all truths,—was never present to either of them in its entireness, unity, and transparency. They most ably vindicated the doctrine of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... acquainted with the person and character of the chief executioner; and, before I proceed further, I must also make him acquainted with the serdar. A man of a more sinister aspect was never seen. His eyes, which, in the common expression of his countenance, were like opaque bits of glass, glared terribly whenever he became animated, and almost started out of their old shrivelled sockets; and when this happened, it was always remarked that a corresponding smile broke out upon his mouth, which made the Shah's poet say, that Hassan Khan's face ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.



Words linked to "Opaque" :   opacity, uncomprehensible, foggy, unintelligible, unclear, milky, opaque gem, solid, milklike, fogged, light-tight, frosted, clear, turbid



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