"Phosphorescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paces from "Titian's Mistress." Compare the two women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... Absolutely the only lights that one saw was when he leaned over the railing and saw the splash of innumerable phosphorescent organisms breaking against the boat. I have seen the like of it only once before, and this was on the Pacific down at Asilomar one evening, when the waves were running fire with phosphorescence. It was a beautiful sight there ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... out to sea and stand slowly up and down the coast. Night after night Paul and his crew watched for an opportunity to place one of their torpedoes under the dark hull of a Chilano; but the latter were on the alert for them, having been informed that Boyton had been engaged by Peru. The phosphorescence of the water at night was also against them. The least disturbance on its surface would cause a glow of silver to flash in the darkness that could be seen for quite ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... kings are dreaming! The Golden Rule dries many tears! The Golden Number rules the spheres! Gold, gold it is, that sways the nations: Gold! gold! the center of all rotations! On golden axles worlds are turning: With phosphorescence seas are burning! All fire-flies flame with golden gleamings! Gold-hunters' hearts with golden dreamings! With golden arrows kings are slain: With gold we'll buy a freeman's name! In toilsome trades, for scanty earnings, At ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... we could not be far astray if we accepted and held fast to the teachings of Sir Charles Lyell. The book of Genesis, he said was not to be taken as meaning a day when it said a day, but rather something other than a mere day; and the word "light" meant not exactly light but possibly some sort of phosphorescence, and that the use of the word "darkness" was to be understood not as meaning darkness, but to be taken as simply indicating obscurity. And when he had quite finished, the congregation declared the whole sermon to ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... They staggered unsteadily to the rail and emptied the pail into the darkness. The splash was lost in the sound of the waves and of churned water fleeing along the sides. Fuselli leaned over the rail and looked down at the faint phosphorescence that was the only light in the whole black gulf. He had never seen such darkness before. He clutched hold of the rail with both hands, feeling lost and terrified in the blackness, in the roaring of the wind in his ears and the sound of churned water ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... navy once encountered near the Canary Isles a complete specimen of one of these monsters floating upon the sea, sick or wounded. The officials sketched its form and noted its phosphorescence and changes of color, but after a two-hour struggle with its indomitable force and its slippery mucosity constantly escaping the pressure of blows and harpoons, they had to let it slip back into ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway, and indeed he thought he could make out another thread of light, as fine as a needle and as faint as phosphorescence, which might very well be reflected along the polished wood of a handrail. Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... and the legs of his oilskins rasping noisily as they rubbed together. The shore was quite dark. Here and there a stove could be seen glowing on the deck of some boat, blinking as the figure of a sailor passed in front of it. The sea was shrouded in deep gloom, marked by an occasional flash of phosphorescence. The surf was trickling in with a barely audible moan. Softened by the distance came the voices of some "cats" singing as they made their way toward the Cabanal and stirred some dog to bark along the road. A faint band ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... through the mazes of her city until we came out into the great square fronting on the palace, which rose beyond it like a white chalk cliff in the dull light. Not a taper showed anywhere round its circumference, but a mysterious kind of radiance like sea phosphorescence beamed from the palace porch. All was in such deathlike silence that the nails in my "ammunition" boots made an unpleasant clanking as they struck on the marble pavement; yet, by the uncertain starlight, I saw, to my surprise, the whole square was thronged with Martians, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... inclined to think nature study a new idea in the world forgets, or has never known, his Dante. The birds and the bees, the flowers, the leaves, the varied aspects of clouds and sea, the phenomena of phosphorescence, the intimate habits of bird and beast and the ways of the plants, as well as all the appearances of the heavens, Dante knew very well and in a detail that is quite surprising when we recall how little nature study is supposed to have attracted the men of his time. Only ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... positive pole of the battery—certain bands of light, varying in colour with the colour of the glass. But these are insignificant in comparison with the brilliant glow which shoots from the cathode, or negative wire. This glow excites brilliant phosphorescence in glass and many substances, and these "cathode rays," as they are called, were observed and studied by Hertz; and more deeply by his assistant, Professor Lenard, Lenard having, in 1894, reported that the cathode rays would penetrate ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... left quite empty. After that last great stroke Death seemed to be resting on his laurels. When thus unpeopled it looked a very vast place like to a huge arched causeway, bordered on either side by blackness, but itself gleaming with a curious phosphorescence such as once or twice I have seen in the waters of ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... Aqueous potash does not form potassium hypofluorite when fluorine is bubbled into it, but only potassium fluoride. Lime becomes most brilliantly incandescent, owing partly to the excess being raised to a very high temperature by the heat developed during the decomposition, and partly to the phosphorescence of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... sceau de ses petites solitudes, as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories with a glowworm phosphorescence. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... tall and white, and her eyes were like two blue flowers which brushed my soul when she looked at me; and when she spoke to me she entreated me and urged me toward her, and her voice was like a sweet phosphorescence with a taste of ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of the electrodes, "of different sizes, often large lumps,"[5] Puluj attributes all the phenomena of heat, force and phosphorescence that I from time to time have described ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... lightning, the lake at the foot of the rock, ordinarily so still and so dark, lighted up, not on the surface only, but down to half its depth; so that, as it tossed in the wind, like a tortured sea of writhing flames, or incandescent half-molten serpents of brass, they could not tell whether a strong phosphorescence did not issue from the transparent body of the waters, as if earth and sky lightened together, one ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... that light only the fugitive phosphorescence of putrefaction; wherefore as one contemplates him one soon begins to realise with bitterness and vexation and disappointment that he is but a sluggard, but a braggart, but one who is petty and weak ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... rocky, volcanic seafloor, there bloomed quite a collection of moving flora: sponges, sea cucumbers, jellyfish called sea gooseberries that were adorned with reddish tendrils and gave off a subtle phosphorescence, members of the genus Beroe that are commonly known by the name melon jellyfish and are bathed in the shimmer of the whole solar spectrum, free-swimming crinoids one meter wide that reddened the waters with their crimson ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... of this light must have been electricity; it could not be attributed to a bank of fish spawn, nor to a crowd of those animalculae that give phosphorescence to the sea, and this showed that the electrical tension ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... Summer developed in their multi-coloured glory: they burned with fiery splendour; the pine-trees glowed with a resinous phosphorescence. There was the fragrance of wormwood. Chicory, blue- bells, buttercups, milfoil, and cowslip blossomed and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... professional standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which it will cease to ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... at twilight, and sported round the vessel. I saw some sea-birds that seemed to be playing,—running and sliding on the green, glassy waves. In the wake of the vessel were most beautiful changing colors. Little Nelly S. sat with us to watch the phosphorescence. She said, "The stars in the sea call to me, with little fine voices, 'Nelly, Nelly, ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... there, tight against the rail, as though she had brought up abruptly against it, making impetuously for the void. He could see her slight pliant form, silhouetted against the jeweled horizon; upon her shoulders, her scarf floated like a vague phosphorescence, and her face was whitely turned toward the stars. He heard her take a long deep breath of the night, and then her arms went up and out ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... was some light—dim phosphorescence from the Martian night-rock lining the walls and tiling the floor. He walked swiftly, cursing the clack-clack his heels made on the ringing stone. When he reached the end of the corridor he tried the ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... the line of sight which he had indicated, perceived, at a distance of about two hundred yards a faint glow, so faint indeed that I think only Hans would have noticed it. Really it might have been nothing more than the phosphorescence rising from a heap of fungus, or even ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... eye of Pele, He onohi no Pele (verse 11), is the phosphorescence which Pele's footfall stirs to activity ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... threw a sheltering shadow; the moon was low in the west. In the blackness a phosphorescence was apparent. It rippled and rose in the dark with the pulsing beat of the jellylike mass. And through it were showing two discs. Gray at first, they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... darkness, there was something—some such effort, perhaps, as one seeking to penetrate the darkness of life must needs show. And as she looked, the white, living breakers gradually resolved them-selves out of the dark, thin filmy phosphorescence, and the roar of the lashed sea broke like thunder upon the pebbled beach. She leaned a little more forward, carried away with her fancy—that the shrill grinding of the pebbles was indeed the scream of human ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... laid on the ship; when his mene, mene, Tekel Upharsin has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the condition of the party was, the appearances in the forest soon changed the professor's woe into eager delight, for the phosphorescence became more and more pronounced, until every tree-stem blinked with a palish green light, and it trickled like moonlight over the ground, bringing out thick dumpy mushrooms like domes of light. Glowing caterpillars and centipedes crawled about, leaving a trail of ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... I saw Morris step suddenly back from a corner, which he was examining. We all followed his movements with our eyes, for undoubtedly some nervousness was growing on us, and we saw a whole mass of phosphorescence, which twinkled like stars. We all instinctively drew back. The whole place was becoming alive ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the result of chemical action, such as the lime, magnesium, and electric light. A third source of light is phosphorescence, as we see it in the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... in naturally luminous stones, a belief partly due to a superstitious explanation of the ruddy brilliancy of rubies and garnets as resulting from a hidden fire in the stone, and partly, perhaps, to the occasional observation of the phenomena of phosphorescence or fluorescence in ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... like lava, to a lifeless limb, They think the phosphorescence of the bark Is morning, which the long-belated lark Is hastening to welcome with his hymn; Else, they form poisons and breathe from the dark, Miasma mist to make ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Plucker (1801-1868) noticed that when there was an electrical discharge through an exhausted tube at a low pressure, on the surrounding walls of the tube near the negative pole, or cathode, appeared a greenish phosphorescence. This discovery was soon being investigated by a number of other scientists, among others Hittorf, Goldstein, and Professor (now Sir William) Crookes. The explanations given of this phenomenon by Professor Crookes concern us here more particularly, inasmuch as his views did not ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... me on the deck. The "All's well" of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the swish of water against the dividing hull of the 'Fulvia' sounded like a call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams. These dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had dropped out from the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... organization, which, although curiously and wonderfully adapted to live in a compressed liquid, collapsed when lifted into a lighter medium, and which, despite the assumed perpetual darkness of their profound abode, were adorned with variegated colors and furnished with organs of phosphorescence whereby they could create for themselves ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... and only left her the poor amusement of looking over the side for the phosphorescence of the water, and watching the smoke of the funnel lose itself overhead. The silent stars and sparkling waves would have set Phoebe's dutiful science on the alert, or transported Honor's inward ear by the chant of creation, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... because all motion would be impossible there, and so on. Some inquisitive person sends down a dredge, and brings up lovely creatures, so delicate in structure that the daintiest touch must proceed with circumspection. There is no light in these depths: they make it with their own phosphorescence. Other inquirers visit subterranean caverns, and discover animals and plants whose organs have been transformed by adaptation to their ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... begun to break. But as the cupped hand of night, closing over the earth, had also shut away the wind, the air-liner was now resting more easily. Surf still foamed about her floats and lower gallery—surf all spangled with the phosphorescence that the Arabs call "jewels of the deep"—but unless some sudden squall should fling itself against the coast, every probability favored the liner taking ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... untransferable to words, and therefore not transmittable to others or to the reason. This way causes the creature a great amazement, and is like a flooding or moving of whiteness, or an inwardly-felt phosphorescence; it is a vitalising ministration greatly enjoyed by the soul. This is not any ecstasy, and is exceedingly swift; the soul must be at high attention to receive this, yet neither anticipates nor asks for it, but is in the act of giving great ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... dim, not misty, but darkened with that shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy; the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of which the Church has appropriated for its services; Marius Victorius, whose gloomy treatise on the Pervesity of the Times is illumed, here and there, with verses that gleam with phosphorescence; Paulinus of Pella, poet of the shivering Eucharisticon; and Orientius, bishop of Auch, who, in the distichs of his Monitories, inveighs against the licentiousness of women whose faces, he ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... upon the captain's gestures. Finally I went on deck to cool. The sky was overcast I discovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at the faint quivering luminosity that had spread over the heaps of quap, a phosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And about the beach east and west there were patches and streaks of something like ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... ocean breast. You felt you were in a tropical clime, for, though no breath fanned your cheek, your senses easily detected the delicious odor of a distant garden of sweet roses. The sea sparkled with phosphorescence. Not a sound was heard except the panting of the hard-worked little donkey-engine and the whirr of the line as it came up taut and dripping from the ocean depths. The lamp, hanging from the mast, threw a bright glare on deck, presenting the strongest contrast with the black shadows, firm and motionless ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... really be we could not tell, because it was unlit. Our little stream of light ran in a dwindling thread and vanished far ahead. Presently the rocky walls had vanished altogether on either hand. There was nothing to be seen but the path in front of us and the trickling hurrying rivulet of blue phosphorescence. The figures of Cavor and the guiding Selenite marched before me, the sides of their legs and heads that were towards the rivulet were clear and bright blue, their darkened sides, now that the reflection of the tunnel wall no ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... hard and resplendent like fire. The rays which beamed from the stone sufficed to light up that terrible place, where the sun's rays never penetrated; but I know not whether that light was the effect of a certain phosphorescence of the stone itself, or of the many talismans and charms with which it was ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange phosphorescence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands; chant ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... think this mysterious man behind the operations of the liquor runners can be?" Frank asked, as they leaned in a group apart on the rail, watching the phosphorescence in the water alongside. ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... we place a very irritable medusa on a pewter plate, and strike against the plate with any sort of metal, the slight vibrations of the plate are sufficient to make this animal emit light. Sometimes, in galvanising the medusa, the phosphorescence appears at the moment that the chain closes, though the exciters are not in immediate contact with the organs of the animal. The fingers with which we touch it remain luminous for two or three minutes, as is observed in breaking the shell of the pholades. If we rub wood with ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... the one whom Tom had named Sambo glared around him. His eyes gleamed with a phosphorescence like that which one sees on the water on a lowering night. What Reade did not know was that this black man possessed eyes that were a little keener in ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... colony of real artists, but the big fish left and the minnows swim slimily about, giving off nothing but their own sickly phosphorescence." ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway; and indeed he thought he could make out another thread of light, as fine as a needle, and as faint as phosphorescence, which might very well be reflected along the polished wood of a handrail. Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire for action of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fire. The more we examine her, the less we can grasp the subtle lineaments that serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence. We end by seeing in her nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities of her countenance. Notice that in the place she ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton |
