"Filmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Guildea went up to the cage. Napoleon was sitting humped up on his perch with his feathers ruffled. His long toes, which looked as if they were covered with crocodile skin, clung to the bar. His round and blinking eyes were filmy, like old eyes. Guildea stared at the bird very hard, and then clucked with his tongue against his teeth. Napoleon shook himself, lifted one foot, extended his toes, sidled along the perch to the bars nearest to the Professor ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Her costumes were filmy creations of silk or other soft fluffy stuffs that gave forth the iridescence and sheen of a perfect opal; a coal of unquenchable, oscillating ruby fire in the heart of a milky diamond. She was a gorgeous little humming bird. So John described her to his mother and ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... across the watery floor, great shafts of light, flanked by others of varying brightness, poured down from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... owes it's sparkling birth, And with prismatic crystals gems the earth, 145 O'er tottering domes in filmy foliage crawls, Or frosts with branching plumes the mouldering walls. As woos Azotic Gas the virgin Air, And veils in crimson clouds the yielding Fair, Indignant Fire the treacherous courtship flies, 150 Waves his light wing, and mingles ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... at her feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks. Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... broke through the musical jangle of cow bells that drew nearer up the valley, and a cloud of yellow smoke curling above the dark branches spread itself across the fir tops in filmy folds. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... spinners webs twixt spray and spray, The top of euery bush make gay, By filmy coards ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... oak-trees, some hung profusely with mistletoe, and others with the long, Spanish greybeard moss, that droops from the branches in silvery lines, like water spray. Sometimes, in the moonlight, it winds about the oak like a shroud, and then again like a filmy bridal veil, or drippings of mist ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cloud gradually resolved itself into a series of parallel disks of exquisite delicacy, which rotated round an axis perpendicular to their surfaces, and finally blended to a screw surface with an inclined generatrix. This gradually changed into a filmy funnel, from the narrow end of which the 'cord' extended ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... leading a life of all work and no play for six weeks on end, for the sheer delight of being frivolous once more; of dressing oneself in one's prettiest frock, drawing on filmy silk stockings and golden shoes, clasping a pearl necklace round a white throat and cocking a feathery aigrette at just the right angle among coppery swathes of hair. No single detail was wanting to complete ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in the far Southwest and travel northeast. Why did we wait for the Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first appear from the general direction of the sunset? Who ever saw them pushing their opaque filaments over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we not have "northeasters" both ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... vallies while your peaks Are pink and purple with the rays of morn, And filmy tints that swim the depths of space, To reach, and kiss you first upon the face, Before the world awakes, and day is born, To flush with colder ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... lives' histories here, as if with one of these 'manifold writers'—a black blank page beneath the flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black page will be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the page behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on which our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneath is that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shall find waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, or with humble joy, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... with an angry sound, How soon to re-unite! And see! they meet, Each in the other lost and found: and see Placeless, as spirits, one soft water-sun Throbbing within them, heart at once and eye! With its soft neighbourhood of filmy clouds, The stains and shadings of forgotten tears, Dimness o'erswum with lustre! Such the hour Of deep enjoyment, following love's brief feuds; And hark, the noise of a near waterfall! I pass forth into light—I find myself Beneath a weeping birch (most beautiful Of forest ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... an unusual hour at which to see him in the drawing-room, and Lesley looked up in surprise. Then, half unconsciously, half timidly, she drew her filmy embroidered handkerchief over the book in her lap. She had a shy dislike to letting her father ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... came into view at that instant, and his lips were closed. The painter was laying a soft, filmy scarf over the girl's bare shoulders as he ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the lines of her voluptuous form, her head poised high, erect as an arrow. Her mass of dark red hair rolled upward in a great curling wave from her face. From its crest a bunch of orange blossoms gleamed, clasping the filmy veil which fell, a white cascade, over the wilderness of delicate lace forming her train. She had turned half around, and this great train of shimmering stuff enveloped her feet and swept out in graceful curve ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Death came, and cried, Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmur'd like a noon-tide bee Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me?—And I replied No, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... turquoise, and the other one of fine, pure white shell. They filled them, smoking in silence. From the distance the songs and laughter of the merry dancers greeted their ears, but not as joyous sounds. Each smoked with apparent resolution, blowing forth cloud after cloud of filmy whiteness, and lo! as they smoked each noticed that the other had grown youthful in appearance! Their tattered garments, too, as insensibly as the creeping shadows, changed their forms, becoming fine shirts, leggings, ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... filmy material which lent an evanescent charm to her slender figure, came down the front steps as he was about to enter the area way below. The girl looked at him and her eyes suddenly widened; she stopped. Mr. Heatherbloom, quite pale, bowed and would have gone on, when something in her look, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... curiosity, in spite of her alarm, Diana ran after it, and, on reaching the upper storey, heard it making a terrific racket in the room above the one in which she now slept. Nothing daunted, however, she boldly approached, and, flinging open the door, perceived its filmy outline standing before a shadowy and very antique eight-day clock, which apparently it was in the habit of winding. A great fear now fell on Diana. What was the thing? And supposing it should turn round and face her, what should she see? She was entirely ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... clothing. Men crawled over one another, then dropped to the first open spot, to flounder there a moment, then roar in snoring sleep. Against the wall a bearded giant half leaned, half lay, one tooth touching the ragged lips and breaking the filmy skin, while the blood dripped, slow drop after slow drop, upon his black, tousled beard. But he ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... saw standing by the table, which had a kerosene lamp on the red cloth, and, even at this time of the year, winged insects buzzing around, and sticking to its greasy bowl—a small white figure like an apparition from another world, in its wonderful draperies of lace and filmy white, the little pale face framed in a cloud of shining hair, and the strange eyes wide, scared, and with tears ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... spider, when her nets are spread, Deep ambush'd in her silent den does lie: And feels far off the trembling of her thread, Whose filmy cord should bind ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... in swoon, I swear I saw Pan lying—, his limbs in the dew And the shade, and his face in the dazzle and glare Of the glad sunshine; while everywhere, Over across, and around him blew Filmy dragon-flies hither and there, And little white butterflies, two and two, In ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... she replied, "not a fire, only a smoke tree. That is why it received its name. The branches are grayish with tiny sage-green leaves and at a distance it is often mistaken for a fire as it is all so delicate and filmy." ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb. You see no leaves—only one great filmy mist of petals. Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... certain that Mr Toots had a filmy something in his mind, which led him to conclude that if he could aspire successfully in the fulness of time, to the hand of Florence, he would be fortunate and blest. It is certain that Mr Toots, by some remote and roundabout road, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... spent in the embroidering of this apparently simple linen frock and coat; nothing had restrained the hand holding the scissors which had cut into the lace which adorned in appliques and filmy frills this exquisitely charming ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... overtaking them. He called to them unintelligibly, stumbling up the sharp hill, and pointing to the boots. Finally he sat down. They continued ascending the mountain, herding close round the man with the feathers, until the rocks and the filmy tangles screened them from sight; and like a wind that hums uncertainly in grass, their ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... distant she saw the two standing. Kerr presented his back, and with his head a little canted forward seemed to listen, absorbed in his companion. But that companion was a smaller figure than Mrs. Herrick, and her veil made an aura of filmy white around her face. The sight of her was enough to stop Flora short, and in that instant Harry, making a cut across the flower-beds, caught up with her. He stopped as abruptly as she, and gazed with a dismay that surpassed her own. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... little doubt of her having the world to back her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a young man's intricacies or cavities. Let her not forget the fact she has frequently impressed upon us, that he was 'the very wealthiest nobleman of his time,' instructive to touch inside as well as out. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... heads and looked at one another with filmy eyes. They both understood what that feeble gesture meant. It told much of the fine heart of Elizabeth—that she was able to smile at the girl and forgive her for having stolen again what ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... sown with gold, and sweet With the keen perfume of the ripening grass, Where wings of birds and filmy shadows pass, Spread thick as stars with shining marguerite; To haunt old fences overgrown with brier, Muffled in vines, and hawthorns, and wild cherries, Rank poisonous ivies, red-bunched elderberries, And pied blossoms to the heart's desire, Gray mullein towering into yellow bloom, ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... kidneys, remove the filmy skin that covers them and cut them in the middle without, however, detaching completely the two parts. Season with salt and pepper, grease with oil and put them on a strong fire on the grill. After ten or ...
— The Italian Cook Book - The Art of Eating Well • Maria Gentile
... in the sky, but the great heat had caused a haze to overlie the valley, gathering thickly along the winding course of the river, and hanging in little sprays and feathers over the woodlands which clothe its banks. Through this filmy vapour there broke from time to time fierce sparkles of brilliant light as the sun's rays fell upon breastplate or headpiece. Now and again the gentle summer breeze wafted up sudden pulses of martial music to ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a new government, a new premier!" Turcas repeated, with firm, methodical politeness. Westerling looking from one face to another with filmy eyes, lowered them before Bouchard. "There's a room ready for Your Excellency up-stairs," Turcas continued. "The orderly ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... swimming step peculiar to women who are accustomed to the eyes of critical assemblages. Her thin black dress was too elaborate for a country drive; it was a concession to the heat which yet permitted the wearing of a hat, a filmy creation supporting a pair of wings that started up from her beautiful head like white flames. But Mrs. Thorne chiefly observed the look of tense preparation in the face that met hers. She retreated a little from what she felt to be a crisis of some sort, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Helen in filmy summer dress instead of the severe uniform of a nurse, and Zaidos missed the white cap on her beautiful hair, but he decided finally that she was even prettier without it. Zaidos could not keep from watching her every move. She ordered ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... she was in her coffin. It was almost full of white blossoms—jasmine, Eucharis lilies, white roses, and in the midst of the flowers the hands lay folded, and the face was veiled with some delicate, filmy handkerchief. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... and high above their region is the pure blue, and the blessed light pours down upon the upper surface of the white mist, and thins away its opaqueness, and dries up its clinging damp, and at last parts it into filmy fragments that float out of sight, and the dwellers on the green earth see the sun, which was always there even when they could not behold it, and which, by shining on, has conquered all the obstructions that veiled its beams. Sin is mighty, but one thing sin cannot do, and that is to make Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... hills—I turned and crossed through the wood, my feet sinking into the soft carpet of its dead leaves. Soon I caught a glimpse of the chimneys of Shady Side thrust above the evergreens; a curl of smoke was floating upward, filling the air with a filmy haze. At this sign of life within, my ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the top of the great ridge, a silvery effulgence proclaimed the coming of the moon. Her brilliant light silhouetted the grim and rocky ridge in startling clearness, though it was four thousand feet above us. Through a gap rises a peak, round which a filmy cloud had lovingly wrapped itself like a lace shawl upon the snowy shoulders of a beautiful woman. We took a turn down the quay, and at the end we turned our back on this witching view. Hardly had we retraced our steps a few yards when we and all our surroundings ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... mighty scheme. Having yet to learn the lesson that his best plans might be foiled, he was furious when doubt was cast upon this pet design. Like a giant of a spider at the nucleus of his web, he watched the broad fan of radiant threads, and the hovering of filmy woof, but without the mild philosophy of that spider, who is versed in the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... determined to bring him to her side, and if possible to her feet again. Other men were abject enough; why should she be lorded over in this way? She threw herself again upon her bed and covered her eyes with her filmy handkerchief and faintly called "Percy!" As he did not hear she tried again, louder, and still he did not seem to be at her door listening for the slightest sign, and she was compelled to sit up and call loudly, not for him but ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... was bashful, in her odd American dress, but we had got seats near the tribune, rather out of sight, and there was nothing to hinder our hearing, like the frou-frou of stiff silks or starched skirts (which I am afraid we poor things in America like to make when we move) from the soft, filmy tissues that the Altrurian women wear; but I must confess that there was a good deal of whispering while the captain and the men were telling their stories. But, no one except the interpreters, who were taking their testimony down in short-hand, to be translated into ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... mother ejaculated, as we three lingered before the predella. 'Do look at the filmy ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... money. There's that girl on the Star, Jean Throssel, who makes all kinds of wealth, they say, out of her spidery, filmy girls in ringlets ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... el-Fahst, which bounds the right (southern) bank of the Wady Makn. Presently we sighted the Jebel el-Maru', the strangest spectacle. The apex of the gloomy porphyritic trap is a long spine of the tenderest azure-white, filmy as the finials of Milan Cathedral, and apparently melting into thin air. Its crest seems abnormally tall and distant; and below it a huge grey vein, horizontal and wavy, cuts and pierces the peaklet of red rock; and is cut and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... vague feeling of bewilderment, while Mrs. Spruce, trotting busily ahead, gave instructions to a fresh-faced country lass, who, breathing very hard, as though she were running, was carefully shaking out what seemed to be a fairy's robe of filmy white ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... with a simple wreath of ivy leaves, was looking more charming than ever, and although she was fain to linger a moment to take in the beautified studio, they hurried her off to Elinor's room, where Mrs. Spicer was waiting to hook the last reluctant hook in Elinor's filmy gown. ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... their moral soul he learns to trace, That stronger chain which links and leads the race; Which forms and sanctions every social tie, And blinds or clears their intellectual eye. He strips that soul from every filmy shade That schools had caught, that oracles had made, Relumes her visual nerve, develops strong The rules of right, the subtle shifts of wrong; Of civil power draws clear the sacred line, Gives to just government its right divine, Forms, varies, fashions, as his lights increase, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Leslie's furniture was ivory-white, and Julia Cloud's room was furnished in French gray enamel, with insets of fine cane-work. She stood a moment in the open doorway, and looked about the place; soft gray walls, with a trellis of roses at the top, filmy white draperies with a touch of rose, a gray couch luxuriously upholstered, with many pillows, some rose, some gray, a thick, gray rug under her feet, and her own little gray desk drawn out conveniently when she wanted to write. ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... white, filmy scarf. For the first time in her life her hair was loosely piled upon her head. Through it and over it ran a bright ribbon. The gloss of the satin ribbon was as naught beside the gloss of her shining hair. Her neck, and ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... May, the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against the filmy green of the birches. The young women got out their summer muslins, and trimmed their bonnets anew; their faces, all unknown to themselves, took on a new meaning of the spring, like new flowers, and the young men looked after them ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a filmy affair—ivory white with glints of gold. Her gauzy gold wedding-sash, swathed round her hips, fell in a fringed knot below her knee. Filmy sleeves floated from her shoulders, leaving the arms bare and unadorned, except for one gold bangle, high up—the latest note from Home. For the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... one of his nights of reminiscences of the mosaic-workers. A furious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flaky crystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he seemed to catch the inspiration of their law of structure, and drew sheet after sheet of crystalline shapes; some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jar might obliterate them; some massive and strong, like those in which the earth keeps her mineral treasures; then, at last, on a round charcoal disk, he traced out a perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, which piled up ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... coarsely serrate. Fruit not so long, and more ovate, with much larger and thinner scales, the lobes hardly spreading. A large tree, 50 to 90 ft. high, with yellowish or silvery-gray bark peeling off into very thin, filmy layers from the trunk. Wood whiter, and not so useful. Rich, moist woodlands, especially ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... until he knew that he had lost the opportunity to recall Pierre and his companion. He looked at the handkerchief more, closely. It was a dainty fabric, so soft that it gave barely the sensation of touch when he crushed it in the palm of his hand. For a few moments he was puzzled to account for the filmy strip of lace. Then the truth came to him. Jeanne had used it to bind ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... a moment, the minister, who had resumed the conversation, thinking he had not heard him, looked up. There, between the foot of the table and the sideboard, stood Gibbie as if fixed to the floor gazing out of his blue eyes at the minister—those eyes filmy with gathering tears, the smile utterly faded from his countenance.—Would the Master have drunk out of that bottle? he was thinking with himself. Imagining some chance remark had hurt the boy's pride, and not altogether sorry—it gave hope ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... brother? The wizard no sooner feels the prick than he bucks down, and flings me over his head into the mire. I get up and look about me; there stands the donkey staring at me, and there stand the whole gypsy canaille squinting at me with their filmy eyes. 'Where is the scamp who has sold me this piece of furniture?' I shout. 'He is gone to Granada, Valorous,' says one. 'He is gone to see his kindred among the Moors,' says another. 'I just saw him running over the field, in the direction of -, with the devil close behind him,' ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... abundance over their shoulders,—others had it closely braided, or coiled carelessly in a thick soft mass at the top of the head,—but all without exception wore white veils,—veils, long, transparent, and filmy as gossamer, which they flung back or draped about them at their pleasure ... and presently, after watching several of these fairy creatures pass by and listening to their low laughter and dulcet speech, a sudden memory leaped into Alwyn's ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... some filmy gowns which had arrived in the latest parcel to her chin, peering over the sheerness of the lacy cascade, into ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... o'clock and Betty had started to dress. Mechanically, with fingers that shook a little from excitement, she went through the early stages of the process, until it was time to slip into the pretty filmy lace dress she was to wear for the ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. And I feel the same ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... finding and restoring. Yes, and—though those who had never seen him do this were prone to doubt it—he was certain to lay the recovered object at the feet of whichever of the two had lost it. For instance, it never occurred to him to drop a filmy square of lace-and-cambric at the muddied feet of the Master; or a smelly old tobacco-pouch at ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... stubbled corn The blithe quail pipes at morn, The merry partridge drums in hidden places, And glittering insects gleam Above the reedy stream, Where busy spiders spin their filmy laces. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Challenge" and "The Combat;" and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise—for no man can ever tell tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water). And there is such a grave analytical profundity in the faces of "The Connoisseurs;" and such pathos in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deep she looks, where like A sea god glares the everlasting Sun O'er troops of billows marching in his beam!— From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, her eyes Are lifted, bright with wonder and with awe, Till through each vein reanimation rolls! 'Tis past; and now her filmy glance is fix'd Upon the heavens, as though her spirit gazed On that immortal world, to which 'tis bound: The sun hath sunk.—her soul hath fled without A pang, and left her lovely in her death, And beautiful as an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... Mephistopheles summons gnomes and sylphs to fill his mind with lovely fancies. They do their work so well as to entrance, not only Faust, but all who hear their strains, The instrumental ballet is a fairy waltz, a filmy musical fabric, seemingly woven of moonbeams and dewy cobwebs, over a pedal-point on the muted violoncellos, ending with drum taps and harmonics from the harp—one of the daintiest and most original orchestral effects imaginable. So dainty ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... speaking low to their ruler. Around the short stillness of the open place the trees rustled faintly, the soft laughter of girls playing with the flowers rose in clear bursts of joyous sound. At the end of upright spear-shafts the long tufts of dyed horse-hair waved crimson and filmy in the gust of wind; and beyond the blaze of hedges the brook of limpid quick water ran invisible and loud under the drooping grass of the bank, with a great murmur, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... could they dream the truth—or descry the hidden skeleton at the festival, wreathed in flowers and veiled with glittering, filmy draperies, which yet put forth its bony fingers to beckon on ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... breath Of cradled buds, among the cloven elms, and saith, 'I shall not see that place beyond the seas, Nor any more pluck red anemones In windless nooks.' So seemed the child, and frail As one that weeps above dead joys. Then pale Grew Lilith as those wasting lips she pressed And kissed the filmy eyes, and kissing, blessed The child. But Eblis touched the hand so worn, The faded, wasted face. "Happy, thou mother lorn, Unseeing her," he said. "This fragile thing To-day lies on thy breast. To-morrow's wing Hath brushed it from thy sight." Low Lilith sighed: "My Eblis, is this death?" And louder ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... sofa under the bookshelf gallery. Her hands were clasped in his. They had but little to say to each other in words. Their eyes spoke the thoughts that surged up from their reunited hearts. She had thrown aside the light, filmy wrap, and the sweet, velvety skin of her neck and shoulders gleamed in the soft light; her perfectly modeled, strong young arms were as clear and white ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... they drove through the sunshine, her filmy handkerchief to her painted eyes, seeing nothing but an ugly, honest-faced boy hard at work in a bare Presbyterian chapel. He would never know nor guess the life of shame which his mother led! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is progressive. As in the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... came with a little more force, as if they had marched further up the hill. One or two arrows fell very near me, and I reached for them to examine their construction. They were made of the hollow, filmy stock of a rather tough reed, and were pointed with a chipped stone tip, which was brittle, but ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Cornish hills: Trembling within the low moon's pallid fires, The tall corn-tassels lift their fragrant spires; From filmy spheres, a liquid starlight fills — Like dew of daffodils — The fragile dark, where multitudinous The rhythmic, intermittent silence thrills, Like song, the valleys. — "Hark!" he murmurs, "Thus May bards from ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... tore it from her grasp when she opened it, and flung it against the wall with a jarring crash, while a fine powder that stung the skin unbearably drove into her face. For a few moments she could see nothing but a filmy, whirling haze, and then, as her eyes became accustomed to the change of light, she dimly made out the blurred white figures of the horses standing still, with the load of birch logs rising a shapeless mass behind them. There ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of thought and study. They may be distinguished as physical, moral, and historical. Few of these arguments, taken separately, can be called altogether new. Their new power has been caused by the simultaneous filling up and completion of all of them; by their transmutation from filmy visions into massive and vast realities; from unauthorised misgivings into the most rigid and compelling of demonstrations: and still more, by the brilliant and sudden annihilation of the most obvious difficulties, which till very lately had ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... called, and moving nearer, I paused at the kitchen step, while she came quickly forward, with some white, filmy stuff she had just rinsed in the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... one, evidently the sole child and heir of a goodly heritage, lay panting out his feeble life on the pillow. The broken-hearted parents bent over him hand in hand. The filmy look of unshed tears in the mother's eyes was wonderfully rendered. On the threshold stood a kingly presence, in dark trailing robes of majesty and a starry crown on his head. The face, solemn and beautiful, wore an expression of infinite pity; the arms were ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... twitch to a delicate ruffle, which she had begun to arrange upon the corsage of a dress, to show Mona how she wanted it, she made a great rugged tear in the filmy fabric, thus completely ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... honeymoon a year ago. Neither would admit that there had been any drifting apart, they had never been less than lovers, yet now they experienced the delights of a reconciliation. Julia, in her delicate linens and thin embroidered pongees, with a filmy parasol shading her bright hair, seemed more wonderful than ever before, and lovely Hawaii was a setting for one ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Number 2, generally comes second. S. G. G. No. 2 stands at the same leadpencil mark on the floor, resplendent in a filmy creation ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... with one hand upon the toilet table, had an air of eagerness, of successful capture. The yellow sky in the window behind her made filmy lights round her hair and outlined her tall figure in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit. Laura Filbert thought she looked like ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... tinted little species is clearly tilmadochoid in the Friesian sense. The capillitium persists after the fall of the upper filmy peridium, adherent below to the persisting peridial base. Collected thus far twice only; by Professor Bethel and by ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows fine black pencillings among his pearly down. Still, nobody denied that she had "an uncommon ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like the penguin of America. It would eate as much fish as its whole body weighed, yet ye body ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... it was not a cloud which shimmered between his eyes and the stars. It was a woman's filmy hair. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... Tide Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands, Crowds of the olden life's memorials; And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams. Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs, Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build New dwellings sending up their household smoke From treeless places once inhabited But by the secret sylvans. On the moors The pillar-stone, reared to perpetuate ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the filmy, brief skirt of Miss Rosalie Ray as she made a complete heels-over-head turn in her wistaria-entwined swing, far out from the stage, high above the heads of the audience. You saw the camera's inadequate representation of the graceful, strong kick, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... comment. She felt that Marie was commanding her to silence. But it was true: this gleaming dress with its white and golden lights, and a filmy fichu crossed meekly over the breast, gave Marie a look of sweet and virginal innocence. Her head, on the long white throat rising out of the pointed folds, seemed delicately balanced ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... vigorous-looking men. Standing at the balcony, we missed the sight of the heroes of the day, who had gone round by other streets. We, therefore, went to the cathedral, where all the principal persons in Servia were assembled. One old man, with grey, filmy, lack-lustre eyes, pendant jaws, and white beard, was pointed out to me as a centenarian witness ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... like a cat in a rug, enjoyed the thought of the force of the creature capable of wearing it lightly for a garment. Withal the rough, soft surface of it was agreeable to the hand. Out of one of the immense pockets hung the end of a coloured silk muffler, filmy as anything ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... her eye fell at the same moment on something hidden in a far corner under a white "fascinator," one of those head-coverings of filmy wool, dotted with beads, worn by the girls of the period. She drew the glittering, unfamiliar object forward, and then lifted it wonderingly in her hand. It was a string of burnished gold beads, the avowed desire of Patty's ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... when the Hungarian band (crustacean-like in costume, and therefore well within the picture) has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by dim processes, the tea-drinkers all float out through the doors, instead of bubbling up and away through the filmy roof. In truth, some such exit as that was imagined for them by a young man who remained in the aquarium after they had all gone, late one afternoon of last winter. They had been marvelous enough, and to him could have seemed little more so had they made such ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes, even though, like a dream in the waking, its outlines waver and recede and fade, until it is lost in space. We gather, then, I fancy, from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens, a sort of curious unwillingness to let our "fixed convictions" ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of escape was strong upon him, but the touch of a timid hand showed the folly of that. Luhra was beside him, her filmy lacework shining softly in the sun, to make more lovely the delicate flush beneath. Her eyes, shielded from the sun, were upon him with a look half hopeful, half despairing. No, he must see it through—go on with his play-acting—meet magic with magic. Horab had come out ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... back now with memory, but not before I had pressed her to me and returned those kisses. She had laid aside her little saffron silk coat, and her breast and arms shone softly through a filmy muslin covering. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... filigree, An opal from some elfin treasury Burning with fire and flashing every shade; While round the dim horizon, wide displayed The clouds pile up their largess tenderly As if to clothe the beauty of the sea In filmy gossamer and ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... staggering with his knuckles in his eyes, and I heard him saying, "The letter, Bunny, the letter!" in a way that made me realise all at once that he had been saying nothing else since the moment of the foul assault. It was too late now and must have been from the first; a few filmy scraps of blackened paper, stirring on the hearth, were all that remained of the letter by which Levy had set such store, for which ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... brilliance the translucent orb where the Florentine poet saw Beatrice in the dewdrop. It seemed as though an Angel, wiping the eternal pearl to cleanse it of all stains, had set it on the Earth, so like was the wheel to the Moon, when she shines high in the heavens lightly veiled under the gauze of filmy clouds. For at these times no shadow of a man carrying sticks, no mark at all, shows on her opalescent surface. Even so never a stain was visible on the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... beautiful girls were being dressed by their maids for a ball. Some were almost ready to start. Exquisite cloaks were being folded about their shoulders by fascinating French soubrettes with little lace caps like dabs of whipped cream. Other willowy creatures were lazy enough to be still in filmy "princess" petticoats and long, weblike, silk corsets ensheathing their figures nearly to their knees. A realistic dressing-table, a lace-canopied bed, and pale-blue curtains formed their background. Instead of having to rush ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... wasn't; that's true!" She took off the flower-bedecked hat with its filmy veiling. "Would you like it? I shall find a cap in ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... landscape before her; where Nature, unrobed, seemed as in a bath; for in front, the grass, steeped in descending dews, glittered as a lake. Woods confined the view in one direction, and the gleamy wave of the Ottawa, amidst filmy obscurity, bounded it, yet further off, in another. Unseen but felt, like the unperceived Genius of the landscape, towered close behind her the sombre-sided mountain; and, touched by the solemn scene, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... her chair. The doors which during the day concealed the bed in which she slept, were open, and there lay the aged woman with her eyes closed. The room was as it had always been, only there seemed a filmy shadow in it that had ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... be a cowgirl, and ride ponies, I don't suppose I'll want this," said Alice, holding up a filmy white dress. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... forehead, of almost boyhood, frown, and his pleasant mouth droop, then inexplicably smooth and smile. It was a day which no man in the flush of youth could resist. That June day fairly rioted in through the open windows. Mrs. Black's muslin curtains danced in the June breeze like filmy-skirted nymphs. Wesley, whose imagination was active, seemed to see forced upon his eager, yet reluctant, eyes, radiant maidens, flinging their white draperies about, dancing a dance of the innocence which preludes the knowledge of love. Sweet scents came in through ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... Of filmy sun, and opal tinted skies; Of warm midsummer air that lightly lies In mystic rings, Where softly swings The music of a thousand wings That almost tones ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... more down stream we pass hundreds of charming spots, sixty miles of changeful beauty all the way to Portland; Multnomah Falls, a filmy veil of water falling 720 feet into a basin on the hillside and then 130 feet to the river; past the rocky walls of Cape Horn, towering up a thousand feet; past that curious freak of nature, Rooster Rock, and the palisades; past Fort Vancouver, where Grant and Sheridan ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... to the northward a gray shade, filmy but dense, blotting out the sky and covering the sea; it was sweeping down on them like a cloud fallen from above. He tacked for the land and made for the pier, scudding before the wind and followed by the flying fog, which gained upon them. When it reached the Pearl, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... marvels, nor any sleight of faery, however desirous we are, we do not hold it time lost to plunge into the enchanted forest and in its magic half-gloom grope for, and perchance grasp, dryad draperies, or be trapped in the filmy webs of fancy which are spun in these shadows ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... states of illusory vision. He assumes, perhaps with some truth, that the distinction between dream and reality is more faintly marked in the less developed mind; in the child than in the adult, in the savage than in the civilized man. Hence a belief arises in a filmy phantasmal self that wanders abroad in sleep and leaves the body untenanted, and meets and converses with other phantasmal selves. Nor is it hard to see how death, being viewed as a permanent sleep, should be ascribed to the final abandonment of the body by its "dream-stuff" occupant. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... a stormy sky, drifted low black vapours, in stretching bars, in shapeless patches, in sinuous wisps and tormented spirals. Over the courtyard and the house floated a round, sombre, and lingering cloud, dragging behind a tail of tangled and filmy streamers—like the dishevelled hair ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... in that locality before you see them again closed together, and hanging down before him.[118] Other critics say that his air and voice are too abstract, and 'you catch the sound as though he were communing with himself. It is as though you saw a bright picture through a filmy veil. His countenance, without being strictly handsome, is highly intellectual. His pale complexion, slightly tinged with olive, and dark hair, cut rather close to his head, with an eye of remarkable depth, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... now. I have often known men ascend mountains on what seemed to be glorious days, and there was only a fine filmy veil to be seen floating round the higher parts—just enough to hide them perhaps for an hour together; but when they came down to the little hotel in the valley, they had a long tale to tell us ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... premature presumption of snowy regal camellias, audaciously advancing to crown the icy brows of Winter. All latitudes, all seasons have become bound vassals to the great God Gold; and his necromancy furnishes with equal facility the dewy wreaths of orange flowers that perfume the filmy veils of December brides—and the blue bells of spicy hyacinths which ring "Rest" over the lily pillows, set as tribute on the graves of babies, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... came out from behind filmy shadow. The world was intensely light, and I saw that the ice of the canal had never been broken, and that no pool of black water caught ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... foreground,) the granite ranges rising gradually and grim as we rode; but, further still, behind those gray and ghastly barriers, all bathed and blazing in the sun's fresh splendors, undimmed by a cloud, unveiled even by a filmy fleece of vapor, and oh, so white—so intensely, blindingly white! against the dark-blue sky, the needles, the spires, the solemn pyramid, the transfiguration cone of Mont Blanc. Higher, and still higher, those apocalyptic splendors seemed lifting their spectral, spiritual forms, seeming to rise ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... came drifting past within a score of yards of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long cobwebby threads and streamers ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the goblin pirate crew, With not a soul to deplore him, He steers for the open verge of blue With the filmy world before him. ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... suit at dinner. A lady wears a handsome gown, "dinner dress" being "full dress;" differing, however, from the evening party or reception gown in the kind of fabrics used. The most filmy gauzes are suitable for a ball costume; while dinner dress—for any but very young ladies—is usually of more substantial materials—rich silk or velvet softened in effect with choice lace, or made brilliant ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... pavilion, suspended in mid-air, I saw that it was a woman in filmy red veils. Poised on tip-toe in the air. Arms outstretched, with the red veils hanging from them like wings. A woman fully matured. White hair piled in coils on her head, with a huge, scarlet blossom in it. A face, somewhat heavy of feature, powdered white; with glowing eyes, dark lidded; ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... cheer to the world cut short, simply that they might be used for hat trimming. Of the remaining ones some were as yet unknown to me, but my mother, who had an extensive acquaintance with foreign birds, said that in that strange murderous mixture of millinery, far-away Australia had furnished the filmy feathers of the lyre bird which swept upward from a knot of ribbons, and that the forests of Germany had contributed the pretty green linnet. Dove's wings and the rosy breast of the grosbeak ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... sort of mist, which seemed to hang before him like a filmy curtain, separating him from the rest of the world. And through this film, strange to say, he perceived only three faces—women's faces—and all three were gazing at him intently. They were Madame Sipiagina, Mashurina, and Mariana. What did it mean? Why ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sides more than your heavy curtains (silk or cretonne) contribute when drawn back; in such a case decorators use coloured gauze for sash curtains in one, two or three shades and layers, which are so filmy and delicate both in texture and colouring that they allow air and light to pass through ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... their brief hours together, a filmy curtain appeared to ascend before her eyes; and that relationship, which because of her profound, psychic agitation had been almost dreamlike while in progress, assumed a perfect clarity, a new value. And now, with the dissipation of that haze cast over all her senses by his nearness, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... take the child, but he lay so still, so motionless, that the awe of death came over the father, and he stooped down to gaze more closely. At that moment, the upturned, filmy eyes rolled convulsively—a spasm passed along the body—and the lips, yet warm with kissing, quivered into ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... as he dropped behind, and Allonby who failed to catch what he said was alone, blinking at the filmy whiteness, through which he had blurred glimpses of the object ahead, now growing more distinct. He could also, when the wind allowed it, hear the dull beat of hoofs. How long it took him to overtake it he could never ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... few act, were brought into play. Hell, Judgment and Death in turn began to work upon the lad's soul—these monstrous elemental Truths that underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free wills ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the actual garments worn at the period, and after crossing the stage they took their seats in tiers, a lovely spectacle. At the last came the Red Cross workers, the nurses, the motor corps and others in war service. The picture ended with a gay group of debutantes in filmy chiffon gowns to symbolize the present day of rejoicing. The triumphs of women in the intellectual field were told in the program that followed: Education—Professor Maria L. Sanford; Medicine—Dr. Julia Holmes Smith; Law—Miss Florence Allen; Theology—the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... clerk?... Well, that's a pretty dull-looking seventh page. Why not lift this text of the new Suburban Railways Bill and spread the shooting across three columns? Get Sanderson to work out a diagram and do one of his filmy line drawings of the girl lying on the couch. And let's be sure to get the word 'Banker' into ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... red of her lips, nor the changing lights in her face, but it shows the high forehead, the dark soft hair, the fine eyes, and the tempting mouth which was smiling, yet serene. A lace head-dress is worn over the waving hair, and the filmy folds fall softly over ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... came, growing rapidly larger and larger, until it had swept over the further edge of the ruins and into view of the dense multitudes below. It drooped across the space and rose and passed overhead, rising to clear the mass of the Council House, a filmy translucent shape with the solitary aeronaut peering down through its ribs. It vanished beyond the skyline of ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Compadre under her own roof from Saturday to Monday would be too delightful. Brimful of her pleasurable anticipations, and more like the natural, joyous girl of former days than she had been since leaving Mrs. Harold and Polly, she flew to the piazza where her aunt, arrayed in a filmy lingerie gown, reclined in one of the big East India chairs. For a moment she forgot that she did not hold her aunt's sympathies as she held Mrs. ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... quill, since, having examin'd it with the greatest diligence I was able, I could not find the least appearance of pores; but he that shall well examine an unripe or pinn'd Feather, will plainly enough perceive the Vessel for the conveyance of it to be the thin filmy pith (as 'tis call'd) which passes through ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... side; it was supplied by the city aqueducts, and was constructed of five marble monsters, bearing up on twisted fishtails a huge shell, in which sat a bearded river-god. Their horse-shaped heads poured water into a vast basin, which, in the lapse of centuries, had grown full of a green and filmy vegetation. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sunset. A filmy atmosphere, with shreds of tender colour; underneath, the blue cold of ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the tendency of Greek philosophy to shape itself into systems of cosmogony, founded upon the disturbance of the chaotic matter by heat and cold. Nay, more, Anaximander explained the origin of living creatures on like principles, for the sun's heat, acting upon the primal miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and, as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently elaborated ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... landscape, but in the wild tumult of her heart she no longer distinguished the details upon which her eyes rested. Doubtless she saw the light mists hovering like ghosts, or the restless shades of the unburied dead, over the shining expanse before her, and the filmy vapours that veiled the brightness of the stars, but she had ceased to question the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seeking always, restless and wild with spring And no less in the winter, seeking still? How shall I tell you? Can you think of fields Greater than Gods could till, more blue than night Sown over with the stars; and delicate With filmy nets of foam that come and go? It is more cruel and more compassionate Than harried earth. It takes with unconcern And quick forgetting, rapture of the rain And agony of thunder, the moon's white Soft-garmented virginity, and then The insatiable ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... flesh and blood. For the eye took her in as a whole, and at first noticed neither her face nor her dress in particular. Her dress was only of white tarlatan, a thin, gauze-like material long out of fashion. It is doubtful if any woman yet remembers its airy, fairy sway, and graceful folds. The filmy robe, however, was plentifully trimmed with white satin ribbon, and the waist was entirely of satin trimmed with tarlatan. The whole effect was girlish and simple, and Thora needed no other ornament but the pink and white daisies ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... "strange," perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of Shelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmy white light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed how all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, as mists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilection for white things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of the Fourth dawned bright and clear. Quite early, while the earth was still enveloped in a silvery mist, and on the lattice work of filmy cobwebs, spun over weeds and grass, dewdrops, like tiny diamonds, sparkled and glistened, until dissolved by the sun's warm rays, the gay party left home, for the "Palisades" were quite a distance from the farm, to drive being the ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... regions into which the line and its constructors plunged. A smooth ocean of bright-coloured sand spread far and wide to distant horizons. The tropical sun beat with senseless perseverance upon the level surface until it could scarcely be touched with a naked hand, and the filmy air glittered and shimmered as over a furnace. Here and there huge masses of crumbling rock rose from the plain, like islands of cinders in a sea of fire. Alone in this vast expanse stood Railhead—a canvas town of 2,500 inhabitants, complete with station, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill |
