"Translucent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin. Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... it for ever!" Ellen, a younger and more enthusiastic sister remarked, with fervent admiration. "Look, Ma! was ever anything more gorgeous than that pure white cloud, fringed with brilliant gold, and relieved by the translucent and sparkling ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... been night in the palace of darkened windows but in the garden it was yet day, although the rose and gold of sunset had faded to paling pinks and translucent ambers and in the east the stars were shining in the deepening blue. It was the same garden on which her windows opened; Arlee recognized the huge lebbek tree in the center, the row of acacias, and the palms against the farthest wall. It was a very ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... is slightly acid and edible. The trunk exudes an abundant gum, of the odor of turpentine, translucent, greenish-yellow, forming small masses slightly soluble in alcohol, soluble in water, with which a mucilage is formed. The juice of the leaves is used for asthma. The sap is used in Bombay to remove opacities of the cornea. There is another ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... substance bears a close resemblance to carnauba wax. It is lighter than water, has a waxy lustre, is somewhat translucent, is easily powdered, and melts below the boiling point of water. It is insoluble in water, but dissolves in alcohol and in ether. When boiled with weak caustic soda it melts but is not dissolved by the alkali; it can, however, be dissolved by boiling with alcoholic ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... and the land was taking on those translucent opal tints which make of New Mexico a land of enchantment. The far hills enveloped themselves in a faint, purplish haze through which they seemed to blush unwittingly. The mesa, no longer showing itself an and waste of heat and untracked wilderness, lay soft under a thin veil of many ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... lie under the awning by the engine-room door, lazily reading "Faust." There is a speck on the sky-line—the mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant "ah-ha-a-a" of some argumentative penguin. Even the drab-coloured African ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water. The waters then changed their character—from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... occurs:—"To a spectator on the surface of the sun, the splendour which appears to us would be invisible, since it contains, as it were, an earth for its central mass, with a circumferential envelope of light and heat, and between the two an atmosphere of water and clouds and translucent air." The luminary of Herschel's fancy could scarcely be more clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of the Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a shining star to any one outside the fiery element." It was, in fact, an extension to the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... her head, without the least disorder, but with a wilfulness of elegant play most harmonious with all the rest of her appearance. To characterise the two in a word, Christina was a beautiful pearl, and Dolly was a translucent opal. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... of the cabin were discs of scarlet, that pure translucent colour which comes from the reflection of sunset in leagues of still water. The ship lay at anchor under the high green scarp of an island, but on the side of the ports no land was visible—only a circle in which sea and sky melted into the quintessence of light. The ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... to hear it," said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy that was somewhat exultant. "I thought you'd come round to my view, but I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man is a translucent liar ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... temporal becomes eternal. They are therefore in heaven after death and in palaces there, the useful designs of which are resplendent with gold and precious stones. They look on these things, however, as the shining and translucent external of inward things, namely, of uses, in which they take a pleasure and enjoyment which are the happiness and joy of heaven. The opposite is the lot of those who have looked on riches and wealth just for the sake of riches and wealth and for their own sake, thus on the externalities ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair, Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... yellow silk. The panels of the litter itself were ablaze with the loves of all the gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon—lacquer on cedar. The cedar sliding doors were fitted with hasps of translucent Jaipur enamel and ran in grooves shod with silver. The cushions were of brocaded Delhi silk, and the curtains which once hid any glimpse of the beauty of the king's palace were stiff with gold. Closer investigation showed that the entire ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... POPPED CORN.—The small, translucent varieties of maize known as "pop corn," possessed the property, when gently roasted, of bursting open, or turning inside out, a process which is owing to the following facts: Corn contains an excess of fatty matter. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... on that firm, round throat I shall find it cold as marble. No, no, my friend, blood does not run beneath that ivory skin; the purple tide of life does not swell those veins, nor stir those fibres which interlace like net-work below the translucent amber of the brow and breast. This part palpitates with life, but that other part is not living; life and death jostle each other in every detail. Here, you have a woman; there, a statue; here again, a dead body. Your creation is incomplete. You have breathed ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... Red Chicken, he had prepared a decoction from the hollow joints of the bamboo, which he administered in frequent doses from a cocoanut-shell. It was milk-white, and became translucent in water, like that beautiful variety of opal, the hydrophane. There was a legend, said the tatihi, that the knowledge of this medicine had been gleaned from a dark man who had come on a ship many years before, and with ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... was back as if his throat were open to the stroke of her words, but there was that growing in his face which was enormous, translucent, even apogean. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... this stone as being brought from Cappadocia, and says that it was as hard as marble, white and translucent, cxxiv. c. 22.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... granting of course the sensitiveness to light of some forms of nervous tissue. For he shows that there are, in several of the lower animals, rudiments of eyes, consisting merely of pigment cells covered with a translucent skin, which may possibly serve to distinguish light from darkness, but nothing more. Then we have an optic nerve and pigment cells; then we find a hollow filled with gelatinous substance of a convex form—the first rudiment ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Adriatic? It pleases me to begin a love story over its translucent sapphire and under its heavenly skies. I shall rejoice again in its splendours as I hover in fancy over these two impressionable young hearts, to whom a new ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... struck me were, first, the colossal width of the river. As we gazed across the translucent surface, reflecting as in a looking-glass the fringe of trees along the edge, the first impression was that your eyes actually perceived the opposite bank; but we were undeceived by one of the residents, who observed that was ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... hour, over against the harvest moon, see them rise congruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominous gloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafage which do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structure sunders them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some are tall and straight, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... winter day, when a big side-wheel steamer bound for way ports down the Sound lay at the wharf at Vancouver waiting for the mail. Towering white in the sunshine high above the translucent brine, she looked with her huge wheel-casings, lines of winking windows, and triple tier of decks more like a hotel set afloat than a steamer, and the resemblance was completed by the long tables set out for breakfast in the white and gold saloon. No swarm of voracious passengers had, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the color into her face; the delicate rose shifted under her translucent skin almost with the effect of light, until that lustrous midnight beauty of hers was as richly glowing as one of those marvellous dark opals of ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... foggy autumn that we met again, winter in the air, all London desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told me the truth at once. Only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. There glowed within a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... mainly composed, of certain elements which, in organisms somewhat higher in the scale, become aggregated and developed into nerves specially endowed with the same sensibility. An optic nerve thus formed, surrounded by pigment cells, and covered by translucent skin, is the simplest organ that can be called an eye, but it is an eye incapable of distinct vision, and serving only to distinguish light from darkness. In certain star-fishes, small depressions in the layer of pigment-cells are filled with transparent ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... able to follow its descent through the waves. The powerful light it gave forth lighted up the translucent water, while the cavern became gradually obscure. At length this vast effusion of electric light faded away, and soon after the Nautilus, now the tomb of Captain Nemo, reposed in its ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... to secure one tiny specimen, about two inches long, which was shaped like other minnows, but had no eyes, and was perfectly white, there being not the slightest shade of coloring on the back. The upper part of its head was as translucent as agate, through which could be seen opaque spots imbedded in the head where the base of the eye-sockets should have been. The specimen I obtained was one of the smallest, as the guide told me these fishes frequently attained the length of six ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... from his dwelling and Greenstream village. The mature spring day had almost the appearance of summer; the valley was flooded with sparkling sunlight; but the young leaves were still red, the greenery still translucent, the trees black with risen sap. The buggy rolled through the shallow, rocky fords, the horse's hoofs flinging up the water in shining drops. The road rose slightly, turning to the right, where an intermediate valley lay diagonally through ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with tangling creepers, bright with perennial bloom, and curtained with sweet-scented groves, where the orange and the pomegranate hung like golden globes and ruddy moons. I think its air was softened with the dreamy haze of perpetual summer; and through its midst there flowed a translucent river, alternately gleaming in its sunshine and darkening in its shadows. And there, in some sweet, dusky bower, fresh from the hand of his Creator, slept Adam, the first of the human race; God-like in form and feature; God-like in all the attributes of mind and soul. No monarch ever ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... motor-cars, in which it was irreverent to charge up to the Great Pyramid as if to the door of a cafe. We walked, and Monny still lent herself to me; but she no longer bubbled over with delight at everything. A subdued mood was upon her, and her eyes looked sad, even anxious, in the translucent light which was not so much like earthly moonlight as the beginning of sunrise in some far, magic dreamland. She had the pathetic air of a spoiled child who begins suddenly, if only vaguely, to realize that it cannot have everything it wants in the world. And she merely ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... its white ridges; at fall of day, the summit hidden by heavy clouds, and western beams darting from behind the mountain, those far, cold heights glimmered with a hue of palest emerald, seeming but a vision of the sunset heaven, translucent, ever about to vanish. Night transformed but did not all conceal. Yonder, a few miles away, shone the harbour and the streets of Messina, and many a gleaming point along the island coast, strand-touching or high above, signalled ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... name of Stuckey has discovered a new filtering process, by which "a stream from a most impure source may be rendered perfectly translucent and fit for all purposes." In the name of our rights and liberties! in the name of Judy and our country! we call upon the proper authorities to have this invaluable apparatus erected in the lobby of the House of Commons, and so, by compelling every member to submit to the operation of filtration, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... feather edge of dull red. But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself, which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color—a fine translucent purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... less observant eyes; not forgetting, as they thus reclined, their hands clasped together, to couple each remark with some allusion to his love or some deduction which heightened compliment into poetry. He bade her mark the light gossamer as it floated on the air; now soaring high—high into the translucent atmosphere; now suddenly stooping, and sailing away beneath the boughs, which ever and anon it hung with a silken web, that by the next morn, would glitter with a thousand dew drops. "And, so," said he fancifully, "does ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for they were friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class, undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid bourgeoisie that is ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... present faculties have among them a rudimentary one, like the germs of wings in the chrysalis, by which the spiritual world becomes sometimes an object of perception; there may be natures in which the walls of the material are so fine and translucent that the spiritual is seen through them as through a glass darkly. It may be, too, that the love which is stronger than death has a power sometimes to make itself heard and felt through the walls of our mortality, when it would plead for the defenseless ones it ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then there came a lull, and a wave of moonlight swept the Lake. In a flash it revealed hundreds of boats, steel-dark against lustrous ripples; then it withdrew as if with a furling of vast translucent wings. Charity's heart throbbed with delight. It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful; but near her she heard someone say, "You wait till ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or such arcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir F. Bramwell's upper footpaths on the model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no reason but the existing filth why the roadways should not have translucent velaria to pull over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably need less labour to manipulate such contrivances than is required at present for the constant conflict with slush and dust. Now, of course, we tolerate ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... such masterly delicacy alluding, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the things without. It is a pity that some human beings are not more transparent. If Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent or even passably translucent, then perhaps he might have realised from the Laocoon struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so much a human being as ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... in large amount in the province of Santander in Spain, in Missouri, and at several other places where zinc ores are mined. The best crystals of the mineral were found many years ago at Chessy near Lyons; these are rhombohedra of a fine apple-green colour. A translucent botryoidal calamine banded with blue and green is found at Laurion in Greece, and has sometimes been cut and polished for small ornaments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines against the translucent sky—with this exception it is the same—the same clear sky dropping into the depths of the forest, the same outlines, the same forest, the same horizon, day after day, week after week; we hurry to the summit of a ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... open country the light was translucent and cold as the waters of a spring, and when the trees waved in the wind their undulation seemed to communicate itself to all the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... cut off by the Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders, slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, we spent ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... is carefully poured in the negative in a porcelain dish, it will frequently remove a great deal of colouring matter, thereby rendering the negative still more translucent. It is astonishing how much colouring matter a negative so treated will give out, even when to the eye it appears so clean as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... as mysterious as before. Of course they did not touch it with bare hands—all wore insulated mittens—but the dazzling stuff was certainly as hard as steel and as highly polished. It was neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent, "like ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... the stuffs and gems shown her by nude maidens, who scattered around the wealth contained in the coffers. Tahoser had just emerged from the bath, and the aromatic oils with which she had been rubbed, still further softened her delicate, satin-like skin; her flesh was almost translucent. She was of superhuman beauty, and when she gazed upon the burnished metal mirror, with her eyes brightened with antimony, she could not help smiling upon her reflection. A full gauze robe enveloped her fair form without veiling it. For sole ornament she wore a necklace composed of lapis-lazuli ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... a boy you are! Had I been any other woman—but let it go. You are as translucent as a woodland brook, and—at times you babble like one, confident that your music pleases everyone who hears it.... I pray you let me judge whether the errant lady be what a poet's soul would have her.... I am not speaking with any unkind thought or doubt.... But woman must judge woman. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... lodges Berries we have dried and meat; Come again! e'er comes the winter, Let us hear your horses' feet." And they sprang into their saddles, Swept, white-splashing, through a stream Red and saffron hued, the pageant Crossed the blue translucent gleam. Then unwilling, as they vanished, "Star-Child" slow to camp returned; Told the council of the Blackfeet All the marvels he had learned; Dressed him in his chief's apparel, Rode to where, within the glen, Lay the trail that led ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the crepuscular dimness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do and mean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent presentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of their value. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of The Vikings at Helgeland, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in our criticism of the author's choice of a subject. It is valuable to compare ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... combined in new proportions, so as that 'the veil, that is to say, His flesh,' is thinned to transparency and all aglow with the indwelling lustre of manifest Deity. So a light, set in some fair alabaster vase, shines through its translucent walls, bringing out every delicate tint and meandering vein of colour, while itself diffused and softened by the enwrapping medium which it beautifies by passing through its purity. Both are made visible and attractive to dull eyes by the conjunction. 'He that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... slightly—and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... hollowed-out yuke bone. Her face was dark, too, dark and lined with colored ceremonial pigment, green and orange stripes across her cheeks. Earrings were strung through her ears. On her feet were tiny slippers of perruh hide, laced around her ankles, and she wore long translucent Martian trousers with a bright sash tied around her waist. Between her small breasts a chain of stone beads rested, good-luck ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... his bewilderment, Beatrice reassures him in a motherly strain, and, gazing around him, Dante realizes they have entered the translucent circle of the moon (revolved by angels). After warning his fellow-men "the way I pass ne'er yet was run," Dante goes on to relate what Beatrice teaches him in regard to the heavenly spheres and spiritual evolution, and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... waves of gas became more greenish in color as fresh volumes poured out continually from the squat iron cylinders which had now been raised and placed outside the trenches by the Germans. The translucent flood flowed over the parapet, linking at once on the inner side and forming vague, gauzy pools and backwaters, in which men stood knee deep while the lighter gas was blown in their faces over ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull; "strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great, strong, with a prevailing mild seriousness all along its ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Christine's hand. He declined with thanks to join the captain's excursion party, and early next day rode south into the upper basin of the Park, which contains over 400 springs and geysers; many of the springs in their peculiar shapes, translucent waters, and variety and richness of color, are of exquisite beauty. Alfonso visited emerald and sapphire springs, where it is said nymphs, elfs, and fairies came to bathe, and don their dainty dress of ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... rose, but set with sharpest spine; You are a pretty bird that pecks at me; You are a little squirrel on a tree, Pelting me with the prickly fruit of the pine; A diamond, torn from a crystal mine, Not like that milky treasure of the sea A smooth, translucent pearl, but skilfully Carven to cut, and faceted ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... the reddish cast of cedar, are due to pigments, while the deeper shade of the summer-wood bands in pine, cedar, oak, or walnut is due to the fact that the wood being denser, more of the colored wood substance occurs on a given space, i.e., there is more colored matter per square inch. Wood is translucent, a thin disk of pine permitting light to pass through quite freely. This translucency affects the luster and brightness ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more translucent in the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... camera—the first the islanders had ever seen.) Besides the Cathedral of San Marco, with its splendid doors, its exquisitely carved choir-stalls black with age and use, its choir balustrade and pulpit of translucent alabaster, and its dim old altar-piece by Tintoretto, the town boasts the Loggia or council chambers, the palace of the Venetian governors, the noble mansion of the Arnieri, and, brooding over all, a towering campanile, five centuries old. The Lion of St. Mark, which appears ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again into its sinuous bed. This water was as fickle and wanton and many-mooded as a coquettish girl. Now its translucent glassy surface is unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored. I look out again, and the face of the water ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... molten gold with the barges and the wherries plying upon it, and the great houses on the banks and their gardens coming down to the water-gates, and the forest of chimneys and roofs and steeples behind, and all of a translucent blue colour. The sounds of the City, too, came to us plainly across the water—the chiming of bells and the firing of some sunset gun, and even the noise of wheels and the barking of dogs and the crowing of cocks—all in a soft medley of human music ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... within half a mile of its inner end, where the water shoaled to four and a quarter fathoms. The scenery was very striking and beautiful—a sheer precipitous cliff, varying from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in height, towering out of the clear translucent water on their larboard hand as they passed in, whilst on their starboard hand the ground sloped gently upward from the water's-edge for a distance of about a mile and a half inland, where it cut the sky-line as an undulating ridge some four hundred feet in height. The ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... bright squadrons watch with chemic eyes The cold-elastic vapours, as they rise; With playful force arrest them as they pass, And to pure AIR betroth the flaming GAS. 205 Round their translucent forms at once they fling Their rapturous arms, with silver bosoms cling; In fleecy clouds their fluttering wings extend, Or from the skies in lucid showers descend; Whence rills and rivers owe their secret birth, 210 And Ocean's hundred ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... brandy-cherries in a very elegant way. Then the waiter served two dantzigs in little glass cups. Jean admired the translucent liquor dotted with golden sparkles, and Monsieur Tudesco demanded two more. Then, raising his cup ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... glowed dully through a thin mist when, on the following morning, Robin Greve emerged from the side door into the gardens of Harkings. It was a still, mild day. Moisture from the night's rain yet hung translucent on the black limbs of the bare trees and glistened like diamonds on the closely cropped turf of the lawn. In the air was a pleasant smell of ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... royal Fay, intent To do all honor to King Arthur's knight, Smote with his rod the bank on which they leant, And Fairy land flash'd glorious on the sight; Flash'd, through a silvery, soft, translucent mist, The opal shafts and domes of amethyst; Flash'd founts in shells of pearl, which crystal walls And phosphor lights of myriad hues redouble. There, in the blissful subterranean halls, When morning wakes the world of human trouble Glide the gay race; each sound our discord knows, Faint ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... insolation, the leaf is picked off. Then the gum which holds the papers together is dissolved by immersion in warm water. The decolorizing is easily effected through boiling alcohol, which dissolves the chlorophyl and leaves the leaf slightly yellowish and perfectly translucent. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... with joy at sight of the translucent potent stuff—the very stuff of life, its essence and prime principle, without which neither plant nor animal nor man can live—oxygen, mother of all life, sustainer ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Another stood without, beneath the shadow of a high hedge, and gazed upon the unconscious musician with even deeper admiration; and his dark, expressive features lighted up with an emotion almost of reverence. The stars came forth in the translucent depths of ether; the young moon cast her tremulous light over the garden, yet still the intruder lingered in his place of concealment. Twice he put the boughs aside, as if to approach the room and announce his presence, but again receded, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... rayless ball halved by the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by a glow that was without. ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the Shore Drive at about five o'clock. At this time of year the days are still comparatively short, and the shadows of the evening were beginning to settle down upon the great city. Lamps were beginning to burn with that mellow radiance which seems almost watery and translucent to the eye. There was a softness in the air which speaks with an infinite delicacy of feeling to the flesh as well as to the soul. Carrie felt that it was a lovely day. She was ripened by it in spirit for many suggestions. As they ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... closely resembles that of his insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... sparkles of silver upon the ocean. The Evening Star declines slowly in its turn toward the western horizon. Our gaze is held by a shining world that dominates the whole of the occidental heavens. This is the "Shepherd's Star," Venus of rays translucent. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honor's sake, Goddess of the silver lake! ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... pearl and common brown. The former occurs in small hard grains, not exceeding in size that of a pin's head, inodorous, and having little taste. They have a brownish or pinkish yellow tint, and are somewhat translucent. By the aid of a solution of chloride of lime they can be bleached, and rendered perfectly white. The dealers, it is said, pay L7 per ton for bleaching it. Common sago occurs in larger grains, about the size of pearl ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... exposures and this demand could not be realized as long as the pictures were taken on glass plates. But in that period experiments were undertaken on many sides to substitute a more flexible transparent material for the glass. Translucent papers, gelatine, celluloid, and other substances were tried. It is well known that the invention which was decisive was the film which Eastman in Rochester produced. With it came the great mechanical improvement, the use of the two rollers. One roller holds the long strip of film ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... with ornamental shrubs and flowers, led to the center pavilion which was roofed by a huge crystal dome. This translucent cover transmitted the light and sunshine necessary for the floricultural display beneath. Stately palms, tall tree ferns in great variety, and gorgeous specimens from the flora of almost every section, formed an immense pyramid of ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... It was a stone half the size of his hand; darkly translucent and glowing in the light of the setting ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... a broad, dry space with a lofty, salt-icicled roof. The green, translucent sea, as it rolled back and forth at their feet, gave to their brown faces a ghastly white glare. The scavenger crabs scrambled away over the dank and dripping stones, and the loathsome biting eel, slowly reached out its well-toothed, wide-gaping jaw to tear the tender ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... two, Katy and Ned departing in the boat at four. It was a simple but abundant repast, with plenty of delicious home-cooked food,—oysters and salads and cold chicken; fresh salmon from Lake Superior; a big Virginia ham baked to perfection, red and translucent to its savory centre; hot coffee, and quantities of Debby's perfect rolls. There were strawberries, also, and ice-cream, and the best of home-made cake and jellies, and everywhere vases of fresh roses to perfume the feast. When all was arranged, there was still time for Katy to make Cousin ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... and faint, as light is sometimes seen through a translucent substance, but he saw it so plainly that there could be no error. When he looked aloft at the impenetrable gloom, he was sensible of the same dim light upon the water. He tested his accuracy of vision by looking in different directions, ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... fair Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of Lillies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair, Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver lake, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual saw, saw—that was—to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... right, whom he had brought in, was a leading actress of the town—indeed, of the United Kingdom and America, for that matter—a creature in airy clothing, translucent, like a balsam or sea-anemone, without shadows, and in movement as responsive as some highly lubricated, many-wired machine, which, if one presses a particular spring, flies open and reveals its works. The spring in the present case was the artistic commendation she deserved and craved. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... for fear of crushing something beautiful. We look down upon a bank of green moss, and find snowy, shell-like fungi, so delicate that we hold our breath lest they should float away. Farther on are orange-colored ones, and some shaped like callas, translucent, and in color a pale pink carnelian. Wandering on, we enter a grove of pine-trees, in the midst of which a spring is bubbling up, and the ground is covered with a carpet of ferns, mosses, and wild flowers. By the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... across it—skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes again—in long spaces resting on the sea—the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange massing and curving of the clouds. Between their blackness and the deep purple of the Campagna rose the city—pale phantom—upholding one great dome, and one only, to view of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Pichincha, Atacatzo, and Guamani are irregular. The Ecuadorian volcanoes have rarely ejected liquid lava, but chiefly water, mud, ashes, and fragments of trachyte and porphyry. Cotopaxi alone produces pure, foam-like pumice, and glossy, translucent obsidian.[62] The paucity of quartz, and the absence of basalt, are remarkable. Some of the porphyroids are conglomerate, but the majority are true porphyries, having a homogeneous base. Dr. T. Sterry Hunt ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... looked away to the west where the deep flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east dusk walked silently down ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gray waste. A wild and rocky coast in a terrific storm, yes—but not that moving gray plain that comes in and falls down, comes in and falls down. It is the mountains I turn to when I can. I often long for the Austrian Alps. The Dolomites! The translucent green lakes like enormous emeralds, sparkling in the sun and set in straight white walls. A glimpse of pine forest beyond. The roar of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... square piece of muslin was hammered on top until the ramrod almost bounded from the gun; then the bullet which the youthful hunter had molded himself, was shoved gently but firmly downward, backed by another bit of muslin. The ramrod was pushed into its place, and the hammer, clasping the yellow, translucent flint, was drawn far back, like the jaw of a wild cat, and the black grains sprinkled into the pan. The jaw was slowly let back so as to hold the priming fast, and the old fashioned rifle, such as our grandfathers were accustomed to use, ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... not talking lovers' nonsense," he hastened to add. "I mean that there is something about human beings—not just the everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittently—as though a light shone through something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it is a divinity revealed to me by other people—And even by myself ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... touch of sadness on her lips, and a faint shadow of thought on the clear fine brows, the face of Lettice was noticeable for its tranquillity. No storm of passion had ever troubled those translucent eyes: patience sat there, patience and reflection; emotion waited its turn. One could not doubt her capabilities of feeling; but, in spite of her four-and-twenty years, the depths of her heart had never yet been stirred. She had lived a somewhat restricted life, and ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... simplest, prettiest thing a man could have seen. Her life had left her nature as pure and translucent as the clearest brook. She had had no one to compare herself with or to be made ashamed or timid by. She knew only her own heart and Tom's love, and she smiled as radiantly into the lighting face ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shores of lochs Na Keal, and Iua, and Scridain to this world of sunlit foliage—the golden yellow of the laburnum, the cream-white of the chestnuts, the rose-pink of the red hawthorn, and everywhere the keen, translucent green of the young lime-trees—was enough to fill the heart with joy and gladness, though he had been no diligent student of landscape and color. The few days he had to spend by himself—while getting ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... appeal.—There was a rustle of silk behind him, an incoming of perfumes, a light footstep. He started, as did Alice, and beheld—Miss Marcia Sandford! She was tastefully dressed, as usual, and she bore herself with superb composure. In coming from the sunlight into the semi-translucent gloom which pervades modern drawing-rooms, people are not easily recognized, and the lady swept majestically across the floor, and took a seat, without a sign of consciousness, near the couple whose conversation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... astonished eyes he saw sun-scorched mountain-top, sun-scorched granite, sun-scorched field stubble turned suddenly to shade—no cool, translucent miracle of fluctuant greens, but a horrid, plushy, purple dusk under a horrid, plushy, purple sky, with a rip of lightning along the horizon, a galloping gasp of furiously oncoming wind, an almost strangling ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Of these two bags without outlet, one of which is enclosed within the other, the outer is transparent, flexible, colourless and extremely delicate; the second is brittle, almost as delicate as the first, but much less translucent because of its yellow colouring, which makes it resemble a thin flake of amber. On this second sac are found the stigmatic warts, the thoracic studs and so forth, which we noted on the pseudochrysalis. Lastly, within its cavity we catch a glimpse of ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... inferred from the fact that the anxious morning before the wedding, he stopped at Novelli's for a last look, a ceremony strangely parodying the bachelor supper of more ordinary bridegrooms. After a lingering survey of its deep translucent enamels penned within crisply chiselled silver, like tiny lakes rimmed by ledges, he handed the cross back to the reverent Novelli. It had never looked more desirable, he barely heard Novelli's genial congratulation on the coming of the great day, as he wondered how so splendid ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... in the covers of lard tins, fourteen inches across and five layers high! There was a layer of cake, thickly spread with rich chocolate frosting, another layer of cake, overlaid with the translucent Bar-le-Duc jam, a third layer of cake with chocolate, another layer spread with Bar-le-Duc jam, then cake again, the whole covered smoothly over with thick dark chocolate, top and sides, down to the very base, without a ripple in it. It was ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses his personal bias, and approximates the objective view that a scientist gives. We cannot ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... away from the doorway of the silk loom to observe. Pole coolies came joggling along with bobbing blocks of jade—white jade, splashed and veined with translucent emerald green. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... of the sea. And what sort of obscurity is that? Not that which comes from mud, or anything added, but that which comes from depth. As far as a man can see down into its blue-green depths they are clear and translucent; but where the light fails and the eye fails, there comes what we call obscurity. The sea is clear, but our sight ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... use a little colouring in the arrangement of her face, and now, in honour of her sickness, she was very pale indeed. But still, through the paleness, there was the faintest possible tinge of pink colour shining through the translucent pearl powder. Any one who knew Lizzie would be sure that, when she did ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... pounding it out on the pianoforte. Voice quality has nothing in common with pianoforte quality of tone, yet constant thumping of the pianoforte by a singing-teacher in order to give the pupil the pitch, is apt to mix pianoforte color into a pupil's voice and mar its translucent vocal quality. A teacher need not be a fine singer—few vocal teachers are—but, at least, he should be able to give pitch vocally and to suggest with sufficient definition the quality of tone the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... a vision wrapped, with his staff he silently pointed To the golden legend written in glittering star-points under, Shining in crystal ferns, and translucent berries of holly. Yet as I pondered the words of ineffable awe and wonder, A mist of rainbow brightness obscured them, and hid them wholly, While wrapt in his vision he stood, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... of health had left her cheek. Its complexion was akin to that of translucent alabaster. The features wore a more fixed and regular aspect, and their play was less buoyant and quick ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... earth gives forth her increase; the deep bowels of the rocks render up their tribute. Forms which were dull and hideous become endowed with grace and beauty, and vegetable existence rises to the scale of celestial life. Then, too, Genius appears clad in a panoply of translucent armour, grasping in his hand the whole terrestrial surface, and making every rood of earth subservient to his purposes;—Genius, the child of Civilization, the mother of the Arts!" The last little bit, taken from ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... were several buildings: a few small stone houses suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke funnels which seemed perhaps a smelter; a huge, dome-like spread of translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mine-shaft. It looked more like the dome of an observatory—an inverted bowl fully a hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ground. What ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... long time they earnestly communed, Seeking to aid each other in the search For higher life and for a clearer light. And here, under a sacred peepul's shade, Two Brahmans, famed for sanctity, had dwelt For many years, all cares of life cast off, Who by long fastings sought to make the veil Of flesh translucent to the inner eye; Eyes fixed intently on the nose's tip, To lose all consciousness of outward things; By breath suppressed to still the outer pulse, So that the soul might wake to conscious life, And on unfolded wings unchecked might rise. And ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity, perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Change and intertwine! Glories over glories streaming All translucent shine! Blessings, praises, adorations Greet Thee from the trembling nations Majesty ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... translucent air, but withal so temperate that its winters are sunny, and its summers cool; and life passes there without sorrow, since hostile seasons are feared by none. Hence, too, man himself is here freer of soul than elsewhere, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... thinner and thinner, but still visible to a great height. Far as the eye could reach, in the circle in the centre of which we floated, there was the same shining, unbroken surface; except when here and there some flying-fish leaped out of the translucent sea, or the fin of some monster of the deep appeared as he swam ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to laughing and play, and required a strong hand to manage them;—then young growing misses of every shade of Saxon complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes, some of them so translucent-looking, that it seemed as if you could see the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls were objects of sight; brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip, and which with pure outlines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... of beauty—the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plain of Daemons spreads. Stands to each human soul its own, For watch and ward and furtherance, In the snares of Nature's dance; And the lustre and the grace To fascinate each youthful heart, Beaming from its counterpart, Translucent through the mortal covers, Is the Daemon's form and face. To and fro the Genius hies,— A gleam which plays and hovers Over the maiden's head, And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes. Unknown, albeit lying near, To men, the path to the ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tea-time, slanted from over the roof of the red house, and painted up that small procession—the deep blue frock of little Gyp, the glint of gold in the chestnut of her hair; the daisy-starred grass; the dark birds with translucent red dewlaps, and checkered tails and the tulip background, puce and red and yellow. When she had lured them to the open gate, little Gyp raised herself, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the young fish have a large translucent protuberance on the under-surface. This is the umbilical or yolk-sac, and contains the nourishment upon which the little fish lives during the first stage of its life after it is hatched. This sac is gradually absorbed but until it ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... nights?' 'If the constituents of London mud can be resolved, if the sand can be transformed into an opal,' to use the noble simile of a great living writer, 'and the water into a drop of dew or a star of snow, or a translucent crystal, and the soot into ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... head to be quite comfortable. From under this hood the dark lamps of her eyes shone forth, gazing steadily into the dim world—into the bit of future that she thought she saw unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the open spaces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green sky, the rising moon—these things made the picture, but were to all intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a hedge of laurels, and fixed itself ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... not understand his metaphor, for the deglet nour is the finest of all dates, translucent as amber, sweet as honey, and so dear that only rich men or great marabouts ever taste it. "The ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... aside for her while she dined. Now she claimed it again, and having no fear of the "night air," walked out into the azure flood which had overflowed the fantastic fairyland like deep, blue water. The gardens lay drowned in this translucent, magic sea, and the coolness of the sunset hour had been mysteriously followed by a balmy warmth, like the temperature of a summer night ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... truer theme to sing at night and of a Sunday. Or we might say that what substance there is, is "too coherent"—it is too clearly expressed in the first thirty seconds. There you have the "whole fragment," a translucent syllogism, but then the reality, the spirit, the substance stops and the "form," the "perfume," the "manner," shimmer right along, as the soapsuds glisten after one has finished washing. Or we might say that his substance would have ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... came. Surely it will be possible to judge at the instant of his withdrawing whether he knows. It may well be that his fixity of attention—Druse turned his head and looked through the deeps of air downward, as from the surface to the bottom of a translucent sea. He saw creeping across the green meadow a sinuous line of figures of men and horses—some foolish commander was permitting the soldiers of his escort to water their beasts in the open, in plain view from ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... ambulance,—with some others, two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and sands below and murmuring pines above,—vast colonnades of towering, branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... in straight-forwardness, it is time to question sincerity. This is true in all human affairs involving motive and conduct. Especially is it true in friendship. Sincerity knows its own. By a glance it penetrates the very heart of its true friend, and leaves translucent and transparent its own. Sincerity gives steadfastness and constancy to friendship. Insincerity mars and breaks friendship. Who has not seen a soul spring into life through the love of a radiant friendship; and then following a series of hollow pretenses, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... thought of the tulips I had put in in November, and that I had never seen since. The whole of the rest of the garden was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other side of the wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of translucent loveliness, a jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what was there not on the other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and flowered exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me, in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... fortune—it simply discloses character; also, in situations like those so vividly depicted in "Keepers of a Charge" and "A Yearly Tribute," the tense strain of modern circumstance. In all these real instances there are luminous points of idealism—of an idealism implicit but translucent. ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... red blaze. It was the busiest time of the year. The villagers all swarmed in the melon-fields and the vineyards. The vineyards thickly overgrown with twining verdure lay in cool, deep shade. Everywhere between the broad translucent leaves, ripe, heavy, black clusters peeped out. Along the dusty road from the vineyards the creaking carts moved slowly, heaped up with black grapes. Clusters of them, crushed by the wheels, lay in the dirt. Boys and girls in smocks stained with grape-juice, with ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and behave like ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... party stood directly in front of what was evidently the main entrance to the temple. It was formed of twenty slender shafts of white stone which in the moonlight looked translucent, and each column upheld a grotesque figure composed of what ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near the end of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... calmly transferred the marvellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imaginary toad-stone. The only stone in the above list which has a real existence is that in the fish's head. Fish have a pair of beautiful translucent stones in their heads—the ear-stones or otoliths—by the laminated structure of which we can now determine the age of a fish just as a tree's age is told by the annual rings of growth in the wood ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the room. Dan was about to turn back into the house, when again Monsieur de Boisdhyver came to the window. He did not raise the shade, but inserted between the windowpane and the candle a strip of dark green paper. It was translucent and had the effect of sending a beam of green light southward, across the meadows and the dunes, to meet—Tom suddenly realized—the rays of the green light from ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... chamber silently Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb, Or mark her delicate cheek 35 With interchange of hues mock the broad moon, Outwatching weary night, Without assured reward. Her dewy eyes are closed; On their translucent lids, whose texture fine 40 Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below With unapparent fire, The baby Sleep is pillowed: Her golden tresses shade The bosom's stainless pride, 45 Twining like tendrils of the parasite Around a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the things in the world—this side of the world—worth having, nothing else seemed comparable to jade—a jade necklace. Not the stone that looked like dull marble with a greenish pallor—no. She wanted the deep apple-green jade, the royal, translucent stone. And she knew that she had as much chance of possessing the real article as she had of taking her pick ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... utterly desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the Penelope off Shingle Point, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... certainly more delicately formed. Perhaps it would be better to say they resembled the Zenians, save for this marked difference: the Strobians were exceedingly light in color, their skins being nearly translucent, and their hair a light straw color. The darkest hair I saw at any time was a pale gold, and many had hair as colorless as silver—which I should explain is a metal of Earth somewhat resembling ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Lilamani moved back to the window with her innate, deliberate grace. There she sat down again, very still, resting her cheek on her hand; drinking in the serenity, the translucent stillness of clear green spaces robed in early evening light, like a bride arrayed for the coming of her lord. The higher tree-tops were haloed with glory. Young leaves of beeches and poplars gleamed like minted gold; and on the lawn, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the sun beam'd—an indescribable utterance of color and light, so gorgeous yet so soft, such as I had never witness'd before. Then its continuance: a full hour pass'd before the last of those earth-ends disappear'd. The sky behind was all spread in translucent blue, with many little white clouds and edges. To these a sunset, filling, dominating the esthetic and soul senses, sumptuously, tenderly, full. I end this note by the pond, just light enough to see, through the evening ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Sporangium ellipsoidal or pyriform, stipitate; the wall a thin pellucid membrane, covered with small scales of lime, yellow-gray to greenish-yellow, rupturing at maturity into two to four segments. Stipe long, slender, translucent, pale red to dark red in color, tapering upward, entering the sporangium and prolonged nearly to the apex as a slender columella. Capillitium of very slender tubules, radiating from numerous points of the columella, forming a delicate net-work of very small meshes, scarcely expanded at the angles; ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... the wilderness, and Willet sat silent a long time. Dawn came, intense and brilliant. He had hoped the day would be cloudy, and he would have welcomed rain, despite its discomfort, but the sun was in its greatest splendor, and the air was absolutely translucent. The lake and the mountains sprang out, sharp and clear. Far to the south the hunter saw a smudge upon the water which he knew to be Indian canoes. They were miles away, but it was evident that the French and Indians still held ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The rich red of our Triassic sandstones is due to a pellicle of peroxide of iron coating each of the grains. That this is merely surface coloring is shown by the fact that hydro-chloric acid will discharge the color and leave the grains translucent. Unfortunately the most brilliantly colored stone is not the most durable, and it so happens that these brilliant red sandstones are often composed of exceedingly rounded grains. Also some of the very red ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... was an opal sea I looked on of mist, shot along its upper surface with the rosy gold and pinks of dawn. Then, as that soft, translucent lake ebbed, jutting hills came through it, black and crimson, and as they seemed to mount into the air other lower hills showed through the veil with rounded forest knobs till at last the brightening day dispelled the mist, and as ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... five feet above the water, and peered into the indeterminable depths below. The pool had been stirred, partly by the inexpert pokings of the fishermen and partly by small clods and bits of dirt dislodged from above by the feet of the audience. The water, consequently, was but brownly translucent and revealed its secrets reluctantly; nevertheless certain dim little shapes had been observed to move within it, and were still there. Ramsey failed to ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... their tails and snuffing at the stream. The birds were silent now in the glowing noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed. There, beside a lock with its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent through a half-shut sluice. Now and then the springs of thought brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and passed like a breaking bubble—but for the most part we were silent, content to converse with nod or smile. And so we came ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... tanka-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,—that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races. Don't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... posturers, wear a costume which suggests nature more effectively than does nature itself, so did Grace's conventionality suggest to Freeman the essential absence of conventionality more forcibly than if he had seen her clad in a turban and translucent caftan, dancing off John the Baptist's head, or driving a nail into that of Sisera. Grace certainly owed much of her importance to her situation, which rendered her foreign and piquante. But, then, everything, ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... glorious a prospect as could greet the eye. A magnificent sheet of water lay before us in one unbroken expanse, resembling a smooth translucent lake. Its gentle repose harmonized exquisitely with the slender motionless boughs of the drooping gums, palms, and acacias, that clustered on the banks, and dipped their feathery foliage in the limpid stream, that like a polished mirror bore, within ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... louder members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip of that which they do not immediately comprehend. But to me, plunged chokingly in translucent profundities of aquamarine splendour, not of a truth that in the heights above splendour resides not, chidingly offering a fat whiskerless cheek to the blows of circumstance, this was ever the problem of problems. How to write. How not to write. This way and that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... representing the Tree of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... window down, for the current of air had become too strong and cool to be pleasant. The color of the sunlight changed to green, and then at noon, from the zenith, a glorious red light shimmered down and veiled the earth with such a beautiful translucent haze that the poor American for a ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... would make a very pretty couple, very suitable. Your two heads are forever among the stars. I wonder there is a book of poetry left in the house. It is a marvel you both did not sail away in some carved shell of hollow pearl, almost translucent with the light divine des tous deux within. For ottomans you could have piles of Scott, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and for food and drink, you could have stringed instruments, and easel, palette, ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... face—it takes an artist to describe the various faces with their beauty of modelling, their infinite variety of type, their subtlety of expression. You can almost see the flushing of the capillaries under the translucent skin, so fine are the mediums of silk and wool under the magic handling of the talented weavers in brilliant epochs. Not a detail in one of these older canvases of the highest Gothic development ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... girded his loins and packed his jackass. After incredible scramblings the two succeeded in surmounting the ranges and in dropping sheer to the mile-wide round valley through which flowed the river—the broad, swift mountain river, with the snow-white rapids and the swirling translucent green of very thick grass. They were very glad to reach the grass at the bottom, but a little doubtful on how to get out. The big mountains took root at the very edge of the tiny round valley; the river flowed out of a gorge at one end and into ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... upstairs was one long room with only sides and a front, but it was immediately divided into four by drawing sliding screens or panels, covered with opaque wall papers, into their proper grooves. A back was also improvised, but this was formed of frames with panes of translucent paper, like our tissue paper, with sundry holes and rents. This being done, I found myself the possessor of a room about sixteen feet square, without hook, shelf, rail, or anything on which to put anything—nothing, in short, but a matted floor. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... and "screwed pack" by David and "Scholleneis" by German writers. In contrast to young ice, the structure is no longer fibrous, but becomes spotted or bubbly, a certain percentage of salt drains away, and the ice becomes almost translucent. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton |
