"Diaphanous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dry, by beating down the vapours. He is also of opinion that the dingy, smoky appearance of the sky, in very dry seasons, arises from the want of moisture sufficient to let the light through, and render the atmosphere transparent; because he had observed several bodies more diaphanous when wet than dry; and did never recollect that the air had that look ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... penetration of the visual rays and the reception of the specieses of such things as are visible. The other is of horn, at which an entry is made to sure and certain dreams, even as through horn, by reason of the diaphanous splendour and bright transparency thereof, the species of all objects of the sight distinctly pass, and so without confusion appear, that they are clearly seen. Your meaning is, and you would thereby infer, quoth Friar John, that the dreams of all horned ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... south window all winter. This spring it was full of pale pink bloom. She had made a little chaplet of the fragrant leaves and flowers to adorn her smooth dark hair, and also a pretty knot for her breast. Her skirt was ruffled to her slender waist with tiniest frills of the diaphanous muslin. Elmira in her party gown looked like ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sweeping under the sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation of a section of the picture: the highest light being some infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark being found somewhere in the foreground or ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Judge were married at the Embassy, and afterwards at an English church, the bride looking her most charming self in a costume of diaphanous chiffon and lace and the most fascinating of French hats, and the bridegroom his worst in his stiff conventional garments. They were a very radiant couple, however, and the dejeuner held after the ceremony at the "Hotel Britannique" was a cheerful occasion, ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... anything great about it, except its vanity. There Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the gilded cupola ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... instruments, the apparatus which they are constructing, the plants, flowers and fruit which they are cultivating or plucking are of the same supernatural and luminous blue as the general atmosphere of the Palace. Figures of a taller stature, clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure, figures of a sovereign and silent beauty move among the CHILDREN and would seem to ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light! In due course of ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will ourselves—at least, I will—bend unseen over the future poet, and lend him inspiration while he ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... preserved an ice-cold stream in a Northern forest. For years the choicest fruits of all the earth had been served daily upon his table. Yet as he looked back to-day no shining trout that had ever risen to his fly had stirred his emotions like the diaphanous minnows, caught, with a crooked pin, in the crooked creek; no luscious fruit had ever matched in sweetness the sour grapes and bitter nuts gathered from the native woods—by him and ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... humour, to engage your fancy, to divert it awhile from Switzerland, by which you appear and partly on my account to be offended, I began with reflections upon England: I raised up another cloud in the region of them, light enough to be fantastic and diaphanous, and to catch some little irradiation from its western sun. Do not run after it farther; it has vanished already. Consider: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Sun is; the fifth is that where Mars is; the sixth is that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... emptiness of it. Here among the startled jackdaws I lounged smoking and ruminating upon the bells, oily Cerberus, and his lonely task, and inhaling the misty air from the winding canals in the fertile green fields below—appraising the values of the pale diaphanous sky of misty blue, harmonizing so exquisitely with the tender greens of the landscape which had charmed Cuyp and Memling, until the blue was suffused with molten gold, and over all the landscape spread a tender and lovely radiance, which in ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... the springs of happiness. It was a wonderful world, a radiant world, a world of dream and delights. It was a world more real than the fantasy of moonlight. She felt more real. She was herself, too, not some strange, diaphanous image conjured out of tulle and gauze, she was her own true flesh-and-blood self, living in a ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... pasha who's taking toll of the officers inside there —Achmet Pasha. They call him the Ropemaker, because so many pass through his hands to the Nile. The Old Muslin I call him, because he's so diaphanous. Thinks nobody can see through him, and there's nobody that can't. If you stay long in Egypt, you'll find that Achmet is the worst, and Nahoum the Armenian the deepest, pasha in all this sickening land. Achmet is cruel as a tiger to any one that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the noon sun warmly. Under its light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,—circular, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint, diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of the life of ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... shone down hot and brazen, from the lurid heavens, covered with filmy clouds, so equally overspreading it that a thin, gray veil seemed to interpose between us and its scorching rays, scarcely tempering them by its diaphanous medium. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... poured a rich and colorful light over the sea—it was a light without warmth. In the turquoise sky overhead, the moving clouds changed in hue from crimson to silver, and straggling flecks, like diaphanous ribbons, became stained with mottled dyes. Against the horizon, the arctic armada of eternally moving icebergs drifted slowly southward and, like the spectral ships of the long dead Norsemen who had braved these regions, flaunted the semblance of silver-gleaming sails. The sea rose in great ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... on account of this diaphanous, indescribable, exquisite something, I am to be calmly thrown over; calmly told to go about my business!" He began to walk up and down the pathway, with feverish steps, talking rapidly, and representing Hadria's conduct in different ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... passage from the comment of Benjamin Keach, which gives both the conceit of the ancients and the endorsement of it at a comparatively recent era. "Pearls," naturalists tell us, "have a strange birth and original. Pliny saith, Shell fish is the wonderful geniture of a pearl congealed into a diaphanous stone, and the shell is called the mother of pearl. Now at a certain time of the year this shell fish opens itself, and takes in a certain moist dew, after which they grow big until they bring forth the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... kingdoms of the mermen, has never so come to one's consciousness before. And again, what an artist is Nature, with these faint washes and tenderest varied hues—varied and tender as the flames from burning gases—while her highest lights (a painter will understand the difficulty of that) are still diaphanous and profound! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Rudd lived just behind the diaphanous curtain of the pipe smoke, or in the nooks of the twilight shadow, or in the ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... to glass, but can be done on silk, parchment, paper, linen, &c., after they have been made transparent, which may be accomplished in the following manner:— stretch your paper, or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each,) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of varnish and the designs. Silk, linen, or other stuffs, should be more carefully stretched, and receive a thicker coat ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... last to deny when he heard them. Many persons, not being able to take into the mind and analyze a character like Courtlandt's, sought the line of least resistance for their understanding, and built some precious exploits which included dusky island-princesses, diaphanous dancers, and comic-opera stars. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... deeps, as are the thoughts of spirits like Randal Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In beholding this diaphanous and snowy mass, I well remember feeling myself to be a mere shadowy spot on a field of light; the courage was not in me to put on a transparent white dress: something thin I must wear—the weather and rooms being ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... him since the invention of wireless telegraphy? True it is only one among the multitude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being dissembles himself. But is it not a phenomenon of a new and perhaps an epoch-marking order? It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but it somehow suggests an alteration—perhaps a ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... road a weather-beaten hut struck an isolated note of life, and across the valley Matterhorn towered,—solitary, superb,—his rugged head and shoulders thrust heavenward through a diaphanous scarf of cloud. Suddenly Quita Lenox fronted her husband, and his face softened to a smile that hovered in the eyes an appreciable time ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... pure and diaphanous, augmented the sensation of withdrawal and quietude; not a cloud on the horizon, not a spot of smoke in the air; silence and repose everywhere. The dome of St. Peter's had the colour of a cloud, the shrubberies on the Pincio were reddened by the sun, and the ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... matchless bag-o'-tricks among which her art may be said to lurk. Suzanne gave her the finest acting part that she has ever had. It was an intellectual treat to sit and watch the really exquisite, delicate work that she embroidered upon the diaphanous theme ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... weather, which had been cloudy, cleared; the breeze swept off the mists, and the blue of the sky appeared in spots; so that when the coucou trundled along the narrow strip of road from Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte, the sun had fairly drunk up the last floating vapors of the diaphanous veil which swathed the scenery ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... 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, but the Body it selfe without us; in ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... in this new sense of illusion in familiar and trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood there, young, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... delicate arabesques were made in Vienna, and seemed to have been fashioned by the fairies who, the stories tell us, are condemned by a jealous Carabosse to collect the eyes of ants, or weave a fabric so diaphanous that a nutshell can contain it. Madame Rabourdin's graceful figure, made more slender still by the black draperies, was shown to advantage by a carefully cut dress, the two sides of which met at the shoulders in a single strap without sleeves. At every motion ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... diaphanous, limpid, perspicuous, unadorned, distinct, lucid, plain, unambiguous, evident, manifest, straightforward, unequivocal, explicit, obvious, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... sound should be made! Oh, what if a bound should be laid To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring,— To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'erblown in a dream,— Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, Overweighted with stars, overfreighted with light, Oversated with beauty and silence, will seem But a bubble that broke in a dream, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; never in his life ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissecting knife produced signs of pain, Dr. Dowler[7] laid bare the lungs and the heart. Then a hole was cut in the trachea, below the ligature, and a blow-pipe was introduced, which Professor Forshey[7] worked with violence. At length, a faint quivering of moving blood was seen in the diaphanous veins of the lungs. The inflating process being continued, the blood next began to run in streams from the lungs into the quiescent heart. The heart began first to quiver, then to pulsate; and signs of life elsewhere appearing, the animal began to move; and soon, strong men could not hold ...
— Theory of Circulation by Respiration - Synopsis of its Principles and History • Emma Willard
... about her diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing floating, no mist. She was an apparition; rose-coloured and fresh, and full of health. Yet, under the optical condition in which Ursus and Gwynplaine were placed, she looked like a vision. There are fleshy phantoms, called vampires. Such a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Nika, standing like a beautiful dream. She was draped in white silk from the Isle of Cos, and through this diaphanous dress the outlines of her lovely form were seen. Around her waist circled a zone of gems—ruby, sapphire, emerald, hyacinth, garnet, topaz, aqua marine—blended together in magnificent confusion. A splendid opal glinted above ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... of Miss Sallianna—Miss Sallianna arrayed in all her beauties and attractions, including a huge breastpin, a dress of enormous pattern, and a scarf around her delicate waist, azure-hued and diaphanous like the sky, veiled with ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... hope I've got everything," he said, standing in diaphanous contemplation. The one thing that worried him a little was the studs. They had looked over twenty different varieties, flat ones and solid gold ones, spirals, encrusted studs, and studs that anchored with a queer twist. Finally they had allowed themselves to be persuaded ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... comparison nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year of grace,—humming ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... head were looped and fastened with a ribbon of the same color. Her sleeves were gathered up to keep them clear of the paint on the palette, and the dimples were no longer visible in her arms. The ivory flesh was shrinking closer to the small bones, and the diaphanous hands were so thin that the sapphire asp glided almost off the slender finger around which ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... lower elevation of only 8000 feet, instead of 14,000 feet, the Coronal streamers were seen by Professor Newcomb's party, far less extended than Langley saw them. Perhaps the best proof of the importance of a diaphanous sky is to be found in the fact that on the summit of Pike's Peak, the Corona remained visible for fully 4 minutes after the total phase had come to an end. A comparison of the descriptions shows that even at the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... its seaward hollows. How I girded at the vapor that almost continually shrouded it. But I am now inclined to believe that the glamour which made the prospect seen from the cliff-edge so rich, was largely due to the diaphanous impediment to complete vision. This, by hiding or allowing only a bare hint of the details, gave ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... men looked at each other. Mr. Van Ostend stepped quickly to the door and, opening it, stood on the threshold. Something very like a diaphanous white cloud enwrapped him; two thin arms, visible through it, went suddenly round his neck; then his arms ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... cheval de frise of bristling thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery palm ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... I forgot completely the child and the peril of the waters, I began to be conscious of the presence of a new world. All around me currents were flowing, in whose waves dance innumerable lives; diaphanous forms glided about, a nebulous sparkle was everywhere apparent; faces as of men in dreams glimmered on me, or unconsciously their forms drifted past, and now and then a face looked sternly upon me with a questioning glance. I was not to remain long in this misty region, again I felt the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... home in their cars—and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing neither ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up through the stable-yard into the front court. There the great iron gates rose before him, diaphanous-looking and flimsy in the starlight. He went up to them and shook them; and a loose shield jangled fiercely overhead. Then he peered through, holding the bars, and saw the familiar patch of grass beyond the gravel sweep, and the dark cottages over the way. Then he ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... blue canton flannel were bordered with trailing convolvulus in pink cretonne, and the diaphanous folds of white muslin curtains held in the centre an embroidered anchor which dragged inward, as the breeze rushed in through open windows. An arched recess in the wall, whence a door communicated with the adjoining chamber, was concealed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to wish her mother good-night, she did indeed look like a fairy being. Her frock was some soft, diaphanous stuff over a pale green slip, some of her curls were tied up high on her head and the ribbon and that of her sash matched. Three strings of pearl beads were about her white throat. Marguerite smiled to herself—Miss Nevins would call ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the echo of his wife's voice. He would raise his head and strain his ears to catch the sound. But only the rustling of the leaves stirred by the breeze and the chirping of the insects in the sun came to him. All earth seemed to perspire. A diaphanous vapor rose tremblingly from the hot soil; the leaves hung languidly, and through the intense blueness of the sky passed some urubus[7] in search ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... the first tight locked and guarded in the palace of the young man's father, five miles along the blue Bosphorus as the bird flies, and the second in the little boat-house in the small indent of a cove under the garden holding the beloved arbor, the little white house, and My Lady of the diaphanous ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... are numerous varieties, from pure diaphanous white to the deepest black, were favourite decorative materials with the ancient Romans. The different kinds were used for the walls of baths, vases, busts, pillars, and sepulchral lamps, in which the light ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... early dawn there was plenty to see. Even though you did not watch the citron-coloured sky overhead as it slowly changed its diaphanous draperies for others that were rose, then crimson, and then gold, finally casting off these two, and showing its blue magnificence unadorned. There were the soldiers on guard at the doors, their yellow helmets shining in the sun, their naked ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ethereal, as she came slowly across the grass in her diaphanous gown of rich white, covered with a flowing veil of thinnest transparent black. Her blue eyes looked restlessly bright; her lips wore a mechanical smile. Rachel, watching her, experienced a sudden pang at her undeniable loveliness. It wounded her suddenly, as ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... and though the emperor was unharmed by the missiles, a monumental statue situated within a few feet of him was shattered to pieces. In the sunny afternoons the pretty senoritas come to the plaza with their heads and necks lightly shrouded in Spanish veils, and otherwise clothed in diaphanous garments, short enough to show their shapely ankles in white hose, and their small feet in high-heeled, pointed slippers. He must be indeed calloused who can withstand, unmoved, the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We traveled on, therefore, by the quickest and easiest route, and alighting from the express-train ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... could almost bathe one's fingers in its lukewarm liquid blue by reaching upward from any dwelling-roof. But this sky, softer, fainter, arches so vastly as to suggest the heaven of a larger planet. And the very clouds are not clouds, but only dreams of clouds, so filmy they are; ghosts of clouds, diaphanous spectres, illusions! ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... ruddy as iron in the furnace, some diaphanous and ruby-red, some granulated and yellow as the rind of an orange, some softly flushed as ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... glory of apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or the sunlit ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and drooped her eyes down to her little bare foot peeping out below the lines of the rosy cloak. The cloak's warmth shone on her smooth skin and rayed over her cheeks. In her flowery loveliness she looked diaphanous, ethereal; and yet you could see what a child she was, with her bright audacity, her ardour and her wilfulness flushing and paling about her like the dawn. There she ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... the red sunset light, which rose slowly from the hulls and lower spars of the shipping, and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset, portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth between either shore, made a refreshing sound as they crushed a broad course to foam ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... sleep. From the walls of a great palace whose entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... spring is seen in all the half-floating, half-dancing, gliding, diaphanous figures of the forest. The flowers of "La Primavera's" crown are blue and white cornflowers and primroses. She scatters over the earth tulips, anemones, and narcissus. The painting is allegorical and unique. Never were such fluttering odds and ends of draperies painted before, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... confection in which the beautiful Elsa Marriott swam into our ken in "Mississipp'"? She used to say, wistfully, that she always got a hand on her entrance in that dress. It was due to the sheer shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it beheld her loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud. There it hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet as fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead white rose pressed within the leaves of a book of love poems. Just next it, incongruously enough, flaunt the wicked froufrou ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... turning over the leaves of the book. [440] What a rare tale is that of the Ensorcelled Prince, alias The Young King of the Black Isles, who though he sat in a palace where fountains limbecked water "clear as pearls and diaphanous gems," and wore "silken stuff purfled with Egyptian gold," was from his midriff downwards not man but marble! Who is not shocked at the behaviour of the Three Ladies of Baghdad! In what fearful peril the caliph and the Kalendars placed ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group—here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... more ingenuity and art, than Prior Guglielmo; and it is in these things that the difficulty consists, for painting the glass with oil-colours or in any other manner is little or nothing, and that it should be diaphanous or transparent is not a matter of much importance, whereas firing it in the furnace and making it such that it will withstand the action of water and remain fresh for ever, is a difficult work and well worthy of praise. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed. At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun's disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, in dark blue silhouettes, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... passing in the shadow of a great tree—stealing over the dark, unruffled depth. A girl dressed in white, with a large diaphanous white hat and a general air of brisk English daintiness, was paddling slowly and ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh red ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the gold cord of our officers' sword-knots. Moreover, they are hollow. The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full of a viscous moisture resembling a strong solution of gum arabic. I can see a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling through the broken ends. Under the pressure of the thin glass slide that covers them on the stage of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled ribbons, traversed from end to end, through the middle, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... grave and important a matter. What is undeniable is, that if in the present day any lady were to present herself in the garb of the lady of the portrait, there would be a scandal; for from her waist (which began at her armpits) upwards, she was only veiled by light folds of diaphanous gauze, which marked out, rather than covered, two mountains of snow, between which meandered a thread of pearls. With further lack of modesty she stretched out two rounded arms worthy of Juno, ending ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... our neighbour, deprecatingly, and sitting down he began to cut up some tobacco. I looked across at New York, still surrounded in diaphanous mist, and endeavoured to adjust my mind to the immediate business. Since dinner the night before I had been indulging in somewhat frothy speculation. It was only fair that Mr. Carville should have the floor and speak for himself. Bill came out and nodded brightly. None of us suggested ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... taken from what happens in the Hatching of {194} an Egge; out of the White whereof, which is a substance Similar, insipid, soft, diaphanous, colourless, and readily dissoluble in cold water, there is by the New and Various contrivement of its small parts, caused by the Incubation of the Hen, an Animal produced, some of whose parts are opacous, some red, some yellow, some white, some fluid, some consistent, some ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... nothingness as an embodied entity can achieve had Nature seemingly created her at the outset. So light and airy was the fair, slim, physical presentation of her being to the earthly vision, and so almost impalpably diaphanous the texture and form of mind and character to be observed by human perception, that among such friends—and enemies—as so slight a thing could claim she was prettily known as "Feather". Her real name, "Amabel", was not ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... closing up the rank of Janenne's youth and rustic beauty came half a dozen chosen damsels, big limbed and strong, bearing on their shoulders a huge waxen statue of Our Lady of Lorette, and in her arms a crowned child, she herself being crowned with glittering tinsel, and robed in a glowing and diaphanous stuff, which only half revealed the white satin and spangles of the dress below it. Then a number of chubby-cheeked little boys in semi-ecclesiastical costume, improvised—no doubt under clerical supervision—by careful hands ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... thought him cold, but these words belied that. She had wrapped him in that diaphanous substance with which young ladies (and sometimes older ones) are wont to deck their heroes. She had approached a mystery—to find it human, as are many mysteries. But thank heaven that she found a dignity, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a vast amount of latent force and energy here, but it takes a cannon to put it in action. Of course there are exceptions enough. Our friend Henry Bright is a slender, diaphanous young gentleman, of a nervous temperament, with no beer or roast beef apparent in his mind or person; and there are doubtless many like him. The English are unfortunate in noses. Their noses are unspiritual, thick ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... play is flawless, of diaphanous simplicity, the dialog is pure and brief, the characters are delicately outlined in a few sure touches. "A mournful, somber triptych," says Luis Brun of its three acts, "the central panel of which is lit by a ray of light." An atmosphere of serene melancholy broods ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Mrs. Burton Jones' garden party, the Bainbridge event for which Miss Davis was, presumably, staying over. Mary, in a new frock of sheerest grey and most diaphanous white, and a hat which lay like a breath of mist against the gold of her hair, had come down early. In the course of an observant career, she had learned that, in one respect at least, men are like worms. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... unwillingly acknowledging that he exercised a permanent and intimate fascination over her imagination. She dwelt, in quick pity, too, upon the frightened, wide-eyed, childish face recently seen rising from out its diaphanous cloud of tulle, the prettiness of it heightened by fair wealth of summer roses and flash of costly diamonds, and upon Mr. Decies, the whole-hearted, young soldier lover, whose existence threatened such dangerous complications ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it becomes denser though still translucent, as it seemingly absorbs some of the fluid by which it is surrounded. The model of the future animal, exact even to the dainty contours ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... His clear diaphanous transparency of colouring is not used from lack of technical ability, but to approach more nearly to his ideal of celestial and divine visions, and succeed in a species ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... from Omphale's distaff; and the shoulders whereon had rested the pillars of the heavens, from which he had for a time freed Atlas, were now clasped in Omphale's arms, and afterward, to do her pleasure, covered with a diaphanous raiment of purple. Need I relate what Paris did in obedience to the great deity? or Helen? or Clytemnestra? or AEgisthus? These are things that are well known to all the world. Nor do I care to speak of Achilles, or of Scylla, of Ariadne ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... resistance. The perfect insect will only have to heave with its shoulder and strike a few blows with its head in order to raise the circular door and knock it off like the lid of a box. The passage of exit shows through the diaphanous skin of the pea as a large circular spot, which is darkened by the obscurity of the interior. What passes behind it is invisible, hidden as, it is behind ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... with an invidious ceremony called picking up. This was heralded by Mr. Britling, clad in the diaphanous flannels and bearing a hockey stick, advancing with loud shouts to the centre of the hockey field. "Pick up! Pick up!" ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... d'estime. Her style was, like her temperament, delicately constructed and of extreme refinement, not the style to appeal to the masses. It was "searched," a little precieuse, and the tales themselves were diaphanous enough, polished little contes, the points subtle, the action turning ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the night of February 17th, 19—, was one of calm and mist. It was not the typical London fog so dreaded by the foreigner, but one of those little patchy mists which smoke through the streets, now enshrouding and making the nearest object invisible, now clearing away to the finest diaphanous ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... instead of the thrones and diadems of the elect, was an immutable realm in which there was neither death nor life, clear ether merely, charged with beatitudes. And so, when the disciples disputed among themselves, Mary dreamed of diaphanous hours and immaculate days that knew no night, and in this wise lived until from the terrace of Jerusalem's Temple the Master bade her return to Bethany and ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... times—"good, better, best." A shepherd loved the Moon, who in his sleep descends from heaven to embrace him. The canvas of 1903 must be regarded as the final success—the sleeping figure is more asleep, his vision more dreamlike and diaphanous. "Orpheus and Eurydice" (painted three times) is perhaps the greatest of his classical pictures. It is one of the few compositions that were considered by its author as "finished." Here again the lover through disobedience loses his love; the falling figure of ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... have been hard to find a happier or more expressive combination. And when Rousseau and republicanism had won the race, we find the ladies of the Directoire illustrating the national illusions with clinging and diaphanous draperies; and asserting their affinity with the high ideals of ancient Greece by wearing sandals instead of shoes, and rings on their bare white toes. The reaction from the magnificent formalism of court dress to ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... that diaphanous milord want with us?" exclaimed the Colonel, turning to assure himself that the horseman who had followed them from the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... is not without some Reason, that I ascribe Colour (in the sense formerly explan'd) chiefly to the Superficial parts of Bodies, for not to question how much Opacous Corpuscles may abound even in those Bodies we call Diaphanous, it seems plain that of Opacous bodies we do indeed see little else than the Superficies, for if we found the beams of Light that rebound from the Object to the Eye, to peirce deep into the Colour'd body, we should not judge it Opacous, but either ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... star is surely in the ascendant. Cecil sleeps late. Floyd is down on the porch, reading and smoking, when the flutter of a diaphanous robe, with billowy laces, attracts his eyes ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... I tell?" replied Monsieur d'Albon. "A strange woman rose up there, just before me," he said in a low voice; "she seemed to come from the world of shades rather than from the land of the living. She is so slender, so light, so filmy, she must be diaphanous. Her face was as white as milk; her eyes, her clothes, her hair jet black. She looked at me as she flitted by, and though I may say I'm no coward, that cold immovable look froze the blood in ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... too, all her peculiar tastes in dress and ornament came out in a more striking way than at other times. She was never so superb as then, and never so threatening in her scowling beauty. The barred skirts she always fancied showed sharply beneath her diaphanous muslins; the diamonds often glittered on her breast as if for her own pleasure rather than to dazzle others; the asp-like bracelet hardly left her arm. Without some necklace she was never seen,—either the golden cord she wore at the great party, or a chain of mosaics, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... exquisite love music, every step, every motion perfectly attuned. It seemed as though no guiding were necessary. Slowly gliding, turning, reversing, he in his faultless uniform, she in her sweeping, diaphanous sable, seemed, without effort or the faintest exertion, fairly floating upon air. No wonder they sat or stood and gazed—these elders along the bordering benches—these others among the dancers—these few, wordless, at the windows. Then, with the Lorelei melody lingering ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the firmament reflected ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... were they in one another that they did not notice how near they stood to the window, or that the curtain was too diaphanous quite to conceal them from view. Suddenly into their world of ecstatic oblivion came a crash, a sound of falling glass, a dull thud against the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark against them. With both Falls the colour of the water is the ever- altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... arose, towards the region away from the Sun, two long luminous streaks which limited the tail. Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance appeared to be dark, of great rarity, and very diaphanous. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... a breath. His frail, weak body was visibly unfitted for the strength and force of his genius. It was a wonder how in such a weak state, he could live at all, and occasionally act with the greatest energy. His body was almost diaphanous; his eyes were almost shadowed by a cloud from which, from time to time, the lightnings of his glance flashed. Gentle, kind, bubbling with humor, and every way charming, he seemed no longer to belong to earth, while, unfortunately, he had not yet thought of heaven. He had good friends, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... was as dazzling as the eyes, and beneath its whiteness, delicate as the satiny lining of an egg, life abounded in the beautiful blue veins. The delicacy of the features was extreme; the forehead seemed diaphanous. The head, so sweet and fragrant, admirably joined to a long neck of exquisite moulding, lent itself to many and most diverse expressions. The waist, which could be spanned by the hands, had a charming willowy ease; the bare shoulders sparkled in the twilight like a white camellia. The ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac |
