"Prismatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ever occur to you how many subjects for the highest order of poetry lie unnoticed all about us? Take that chandelier, for example, the prismatic drops of which are dull in the shade, but sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow in the gaslight. Might not those hidden splendors be compared to that genius whose brilliancy is alone evoked by Beauty's ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... pounder or two may be in the dish. But three to the pound is decidedly nearer the average, at least in April. The flies commonly used are larger than what are employed in Loch Leven. A teal wing and red body, a grouse hackle, and the prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites; but it is said that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally successful. In my own brief experience I have found the trout "dour," occasionally they would rise freely for ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... consequently the light should be intercepted by the smallest quantity of glass. Dollond's achromatics contain, however, six lenses, and possess no recommendation but their enlarged field, and their freedom from prismatic colours in that field; points of no consequence in looking through a fixed glass at a fixed and circumscribed object. The field of the Galilean telescope is quite large enough, and, having but two lenses, one of which ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... room itself was deliciously familiar to him; crimson-curtained, green carpeted, shining with heavy gilt picture frames and prismatic chandeliers. Often with posies and candies and theater-tickets he had strutted across that erstwhile magic threshold and fairly lolled in the big deep-upholstered chairs while waiting for the silk-rustling ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a trifle up and now perceived that through the vapors a dim yet steady glow was beginning to shine, and on each side of it there stretched a line of other, smaller, blue-green lights. These, haloed by the vapor with the most beautiful prismatic rings, extended in an irregular row ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... cavaliers, (there was war at that time between the glorious empire of Fairydom and the weak and infatuated republic of Elfland on its southern borders, and the epaulette and spurs were the only pass to the hearts of the fair,) imbuing them with an infinitude of prismatic hues, all softened into a kind of timed starlight, exquisite as the dying voice of music. In this gorgeous saloon, at the head of which sat, well pleased, the benevolent old King Paterflor and his modest and still lovely queen Sweetbine, all were noble and accomplished and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... unreality. It was as though a sheet of glass were between him and the life of the rest of the world. He could see through it clearly, but the barrier was there, and must always be there. Upon the edge of this glass, the light of life should break and resolve itself into prismatic colours, of which he should see one at a time, now and then more, and often a clear, pitiless view of the world should give ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... is so dense that the objects are seen, like Captain Scoresby's ship, snatched up into the regions of the air, thirty or forty feet above the level of the sea; and in cloudy weather, nearer to the surface, bordered with vivid prismatic colours. Sometimes colonades of temples and churches, with cross-crowned spires, are all represented as floating on the sea, and by a sudden change of representation, the pillars are curved into arcades, and the crosses are bent into crescents, and all the edifices ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... an intruder; the smile in his eyes would have been a sneer, and he would have turned away from it in disgust. The mind of the strong man is the medium through which the eyes see, and from which life takes all its color. The heart is the prismatic conductor, through which the affections show; and that which is seared, or steeled, or ossified—perverted utterly from its original make—can exhibit no rainbows—no arches of a sweet promise, linking the gloomy earth with the bright and the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... walls of the sharp, irregular declivity reflected many cold, prismatic lights, and down, far down where the eye could no longer distinguish shapes and outlines, there lay a shadow like steam from some vast, subterranean cauldron, blue, dense, impenetrable. It fascinated Pearl and she stood there trying to pierce the depths with her eye, until at ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,—with its enchanted islands, its jewelled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivity and singing,—when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the mountain, and, seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Lifting up his ruddy face, a ray of sunshine, filtering through the tremulous leaves of the cottonwoods, fell full upon his chestnut curls, and each drop of water on his hair became of a sudden a gem of prismatic colour ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... tint, tinct[obs3], paint, wash, ingrain, grain, illuminate, emblazon, bedizen, imbue; paint &c. (fine art) 556. Adj. colored &c. v.; colorific[obs3], tingent[obs3], tinctorial[obs3]; chromatic, prismatic; full-colored, high-colored, deep-colored; doubly- dyed; polychromatic; chromatogenous[obs3]; tingible[obs3]. bright, vivid, intense, deep; fresh, unfaded[obs3]; rich, gorgeous; gay. gaudy, florid; gay, garish; rainbow-colored, multihued; showy, flaunting, flashy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... express, And value books, as women men, for dress. Their praise is still—"the style is excellent," The sense they humbly take upon content [308] Words are like leaves, and where they most abound Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass. [311] Its gaudy colors spreads on every place, The face of nature we no more survey. All glares alike without distinction gay: But true expression, like the unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon; It gilds all objects, ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... do come over the Village like the waves of the sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a phase touches it but leaves it ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... alternations of beauteous scenes above; surely there will be developments and variety in light, colour, music, harmony, and the rest of those "pleasures for evermore," which are everywhere emanations from the direct love of "Him who first loved us,"—His gifts, who even here bestows prismatic hues upon icebergs in the arctic circle, and a rosy flush to the peaks of Jebel Sanneen in ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... their thought. There are books which are luxuries, livres de luxe, whose pages seem builded of more potent words than those of common life. Keats, for example, in poetry, and Landor in prose, are illustrations of this; and perhaps the representative instance, in all English literature, of the prismatic resources of mere words is the poem of "The Eve of St. Agnes." But thus to be crowned monarch of the sunset, to trust one's self with full daring in these realms of glory, demands such a balance of endowments as no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... God's agency is declared and His ownership asserted. 'I do set My bow.' Neither Noah nor the writer knew anything about refraction or the prismatic spectrum. But perhaps they knew more about the rainbow than people do who know all about how it comes, except that God sets it in the cloud, and that it is His. Let us have the facts which science labels as such, by all means, and the more the better; but do ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... in the afternoon sunlight, shimmering in its glory of prismatic colours, on one side reflecting the rocks and the pines that lined the shore and the great peaks that stood further back, and the other lapping the grasses and reeds that edged its waters and joined it to the prairie. A gentle breeze ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... survey of this first island was all he could afford time for; and after the first exquisite impression of the white beach, and the blue curve of the bay sparkling in the sunshine, and the soft prismatic colours of the acanthus beneath the green wall of the woods had been savoured and enjoyed, he was anxious to push on to the rich lands of the Orient of which he believed this island to be only ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Delirium was in his brain, and wild fancies chased each other; he heard the crowing of cocks and saw his sister; his father would come to him, and he would stretch out his hand and grasp the shadowy nothing. There was a halo of beauty all about him; prismatic hues trembled in the light, and the tones of sweet music floated upon the breeze. He saw angels swimming in the golden light; the blue ether opened, and they came through to greet him and to welcome him to heaven. Then all was darkness, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... to beat in a sort of fond tumult, as the time of her husband's return drew near. The fire was darting in a thousand bright flashes, through the black mass that had just been cast upon it, shooting out here and there a gleam of gold on the polished blackness of the stove, and curling up in little prismatic eddies around the tea-kettle as she placed it on the grate. The lamp, clean and bright as crystal could be made, was urged to a more brilliant flame by the point of her scissors, and then with another glance at the clock, the pretty housekeeper sat down in her chair again, and with one ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... prismatic tints, flush after flush suffusing our horizon, does the Era of Hope dawn on towards fulfilment. Questionable! As indeed, with an Era of Hope that rests on mere universal Benevolence, victorious Analysis, Vice cured of its deformity; and, in the long run, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... by the rattling of the two bills in her mother's hands as she glanced from one to the other through her glasses, seemed suddenly impenetrable, and the prismatic world of the girl's rapture burst like a bubble against it. There is no explanation of the effect outside of temperament and overwrought sensibilities. She stared across the room at her mother, who had not heard her, and then she broke ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... consisting of a basic copper sulphate Cu4(OH)6SO4, crystallizing in the orthorhombic system. The crystals are usually small and are prismatic or acicular in habit; they have a perfect cleavage parallel to the face lettered a in the adjoining figure. They are transparent to translucent, with a vitreous lustre, and are of an emerald-green to blackish-green colour. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... aside the curtain and looked forth into the night, a magic night, soft and wonderful, infinitely peaceful. A full moon shone high in the sky with an immense arc of light around it, many-rayed, faintly prismatic. There was the scent of coming rain in the air, but no clouds were visible. The stars were dim and remote, almost quenched in that ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... PRISMATIC COLOURS, the seven colours a ray of pure white light is resolved into when refracted through a prism, applied figuratively by Carlyle to the pure light refracted through the soul of a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Ruhmkorff's coil, increased tenfold by the myriad of prismatic masses of rock, sent its jets of fire in every direction, and I could fancy myself traveling through a huge hollow diamond, the rays of which produced myriads ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement. He was dressed in a slashed doublet of spun gold, so fine in its texture that the prismatic colors gleamed over it, as if on a surface of mother of pearl; and over this brilliant doublet his hair and beard fell full halfway to the ground in waving curls, so exquisitely delicate, that Gluck could hardly tell ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... connection, which, but for Mr. Sheridan's coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them, might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or may not mean, I went to Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase, which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the revolutionary ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... Cyclona's skirts, stockings, shirt waists, night dresses and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed napkins varied ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... else; and "La Dame Blanche," a triptych of rhythmical flow, spreads a dainty, silky, sheen of white, whispering, glistening, softly falling water over a slightly shelving width of rock, touched here and there with prismatic color and strong light. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... swing half across the sky. He had watched with delirious amusement the dead men rise to bury each other. And he had spent hours in wondering what would happen to the last of them. His head felt oddly light, as if it were full of air, a bubble of prismatic colours that might burst into nothingness at any moment. But his body felt as if it were fettered with a thousand chains. He could hear them ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... most magnificent phenomenon I ever beheld. We were standing on the side of the geyser exposed to the sun, whose sparkling rays filled the ponderous column with what appeared to be the clippings of a thousand rainbows. These prismatic illusions disappeared, only to be succeeded by myriads of others which continually fluttered and sparkled through the spray during the twenty minutes the eruption lasted. These lesser jets, thrown so much higher than the main column and shooting through it, doubtless ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... another, like tiles on a roof. In the country adjacent to Lima, and also on other parts of the coast, three favorite species are cultivated. The Platano de la Isla, or of Otaheite, was introduced from that archipelago in 1769. The fruits are from three to four inches long, generally prismatic, as they grow thickly on the stem, and lie one over another. The skin is yellow, the fruit of a palish red, and rather mealy. The Limenos prefer this to any other species of the platano, and they consider it the most wholesome. The fruits of the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... new bar fixtures, which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought down by dog team from "Up River," was established at the rear extremity of the long building, just inside ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... divided into several compartments, presenting numerous fantastic forms. In some the glittering icicles hung like curtains from the roof, in others the whole compartment was as smooth as glass. The prismatic colours which presented themselves as the torches flashed on the surface of the ice ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... with a new method of Sawing the Twist Part of any Hand-Rail square from the face of the plank, and to a parallel width. Also, a new method of forming the Easings of the Rail by a gauge; preceded by some necessary Problems in Practical Geometry, with the Sections of Prismatic Solids. Illustrated by 29 plates. By R.A. CUPPER, Architect, author of "The Practical Stair-Builder's ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... distance, where an intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain). Very quiet ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of earth—all ready. So, while the angular clergyman ruffled into the front of the pew, with Irons on one side, a little in the rear, both books open; the plump little undertaker, diffusing a steam from his moist garments, making a prismatic halo round the candles and lanterns, as he moved successively by them, whispered a word or two to the young gentleman [Mr. Mervyn, the doctor called him], and Mr. Mervyn disappeared. Dr. Walsingham and John Tracy got into contiguous ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... place must be set apart, and used for no other purpose. The five "sacred colors" are the prismatic hues arranged in a certain way, as these colors are very magnetic. By "malignant influences" are meant any disturbances through strifes, quarrels, bad feelings, etc., as these are said to impress themselves immediately on the astral light, i.e., in the atmosphere of ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... For the choicest piece in urban gardens, where Catharine-wheels on festival nights spurt sidereal spray, and rockets shot into gold-riddled skies fall back in prismatic showers, is ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... Berlin that I know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin of Americans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, the Berlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliers and offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree is amethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow in the linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peace of the little by-streets, the Berlin that laughs in the Tiergarten ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... out their theories has been proved false. They can not believe that "fire control" of infantry, as taught in the school of fire, has no place in modern trench warfare. It will break the hearts of some of them to learn that the ability to read a map and use a prismatic compass is of far more value than knowledge of the "mil-scale" or "fire-control rule." They will probably be scandalized by the statement, which I make seriously and with full knowledge whereof I speak, that one common shovel and an armful of sand-bags are worth ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... it to be a jelly-like globe, clearer than the crystal of Merlin. Dropped softly into a vessel of water, at first it lies quiescent and almost invisible upon the bottom. A moment after, it rises in quick undulations, flashing prismatic tints with every motion. Again it rests, and we see that it is banded by eight meridians, composed of square, overlapping plates. It swims, and the plates become paddles, propelling the frail craft,— prisms, dividing the sunbeams ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... bearing a blanket, waterproof sheet, three days' rations of biscuits and preserved meat, together with an emergency ration in a sealed tin, and (for those with rifles) 200 rounds of ammunition. Officers carried revolvers, field glasses, prismatic compass, and various other extras. They were also allowed to place their valises on the train but, according to rumour, it was doubtful if they would ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... both vertically and longitudinally, and the charge so fixed in its containing case that the centre of gravity cannot shift. The difficulty of ensuring this with a large torpedo charge built up from a number of discs and segments is well known. Even with plain cylindrical or prismatic charges a marked saving in the process of production is effected by this new system. The charges being in one block they are more easily handled for the usual periodical examination, and they do not break or chafe at the edges, as in the case of discs and cubes in built-up charges. A general ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... brilliant colour, the stars were distinctly perceptible through them. This magnificent spectacle continued for a full hour with ever-increasing brilliancy, suffusing sea and land with a quivering glow of prismatic light, and imparting an aspect of magic, unearthly, indescribable beauty to the scene. Then the colours gradually faded, the flashes became more feeble, and the darting rays ever shorter and shorter, until they finally faded completely away, to be succeeded ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... glassy and had a look of greater transparency, as if it had been fused at an exceptionally high temperature; and the crystals of alum, sulphur, and other minerals with which it abounded, reflected the light in bright prismatic colours. In some places the transparency was complete, and beneath it might easily be seen the long streaks of that fibrous kind of lava, connected with a superstition of the natives, which ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... them in front of a romantic waterfall. The cousins drew rein, watching the fall of the water in silence, for the sound of the cascade precluded them from conversation. The sun shone through the tree tops giving a varied hue to the rich greenness of the foliage, and tinging with prismatic hues the sparkling water. So intent were they upon the downpour of the waterfall that they did not notice the dark forms which stole out from the underbrush, and stealthily formed a cordon about them. By the heads of the ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... the other influences of his life combined. From the inexhaustible well of those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early experience—the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic variations of colour. The civilization of the East, its culture and refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the indispensable criteria of classic art. Under the broadening influence of its persistent nationalism, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was a long time coming to them. Precisely when it did, no man knoweth. They ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... had dulled. Little lumpy clouds showed near the horizon line, and, sailing above these, hung a dirt spot of vapor, while aloft glowed some prismatic sundogs, shimmering like opals. Etched against the distance, with a tether line fastened to the spar buoy, lay the Susie Ann. She had that moment arrived and had made fast. Her sails were furled, her boom swinging loose and ready, ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Silurian group, from the Aymestry limestone to near the bottom of the Llandeilo rocks. Another coral, the Favosites Gothlandica (Figure 537), is also met with in profusion in large hemispherical masses, which break up into columnar and prismatic fragments, like that here figured (Figure 537, b). Another common form in the Wenlock limestone is the Omphyma turbinatum (Figure 538), which, like many of its modern companions, reminds us of some cup-corals; but ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... breath of the furnace, page 420. e. Bright tongues of fiery cloud burning and quivering about them, page 420. f. A clear metallic voice, page 420. g. Like that of a kettle on the boil, page 421. h. As smooth and polished as a river, page 421. i. The prismatic colors gleamed over it, as if on a surface of mother-of-pearl, page 422. j. In order to allow time for the consternation ... to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... ordinary speed of a locomotive. So rapid is its descent that it leaves a trail of smoke behind it, and sometimes kindles a fire among the slivers along its way. Ah! it strikes the water! In an instant there is an inverted Niagara in the air, resplendent with prismatic and transparent veils ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... and he had a passion for being equipped so that he could cope with any observation which might turn up. Thus Old Griff on a sledge journey might have notebooks protruding from every pocket, and hung about his person, a sundial, a prismatic compass, a sheath knife, a pair of binoculars, a geological hammer, chronometer, pedometer, camera, aneroid and other items of surveying gear, as well as his goggles and mitts. And in his hand might be an ice-axe which he used as he went along ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colours. In the gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they'd been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn husband and his cloud of cousins. ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... in sparkling points! White luminous fogs, like curtains of gauze, too thin to dim the general brightness, yet dense enough to invest the whole scene with a silver robe of mystery, and to refract the light and compel it to shine in great circles of prismatic colours! And everything—from the nature of the materials of which the gay scenery is composed—either white or blue, varying in all gradations from the fairest snow to the deepest azure, save where the rainbow's delicate hues ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... tints, and the lofty conical domes seem to be huge sparry crystalizations, hung with dropping stalactites, rather than any work of the human hand. Each of these domes is composed of five thousand separate pieces, and the pendent prismatic blocks, colored and gilded, gradually resolve themselves, as you gaze, into the most intricate and elegant designs. But you must study long ere you have won all the secret of their beauty. To comprehend them, one should spend a whole day, lying on his ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... a splendid lunar rainbow, and I suspect it forebodes a good deal more wind than we have lately had. It was perfect in shape, and the brilliant prismatic colours were most distinctly marked. I never saw such a rainbow, except as the precursor of a circular storm. I only hope that, should we encounter such a gale now, we may get into the right corner of it, and that it will be travelling in the right ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... them up according to our own private arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... off parallel widths, for making smaller scales and the like. In these cases it is substituted for the needle. In like manner for calculating cross profiles by graphical methods, for reading parallel divisions, for estimating areas, or revising maps, a finely divided prismatic ivory rule, c, can be placed under the glass, B, and will do good service. In this case the plane of the lens must be perpendicular to the axis of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... several waterfalls rush into the sea, with a roar, which quite fills the air. The singular appearance of these cataracts is greatly increased when illuminated by the rising sun, the spray, exhibiting the most beautiful prismatic colours. Below them huge masses of ice are formed, which seem to lean against the sides of the rocks, and to be continually increasing during the winter, but when melted by the power of a summer's sun, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... beryl and topaz, sapphire and almandine and amethyst, each in due order and at proper distances. The fabled dolphin in its death could not have showed a more brilliant succession of splendours waning into splendours through the whole chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic limestone to every modification of the sky's light gives a peculiar spirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in form and outline unchanged; but the beauty breathed upon them lives or dies with ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... objects around us, are not differences in substance, but differences of vibration in one substance. Take a copper wire; pass electrical currents through it, gradually increasing their intensity, and phenomena of sound, heat and light will be manifest, the prismatic colours appearing one after the other. Similarly by an increased intensity in the performance of every action, the consciousness is gradually transferred from the lower to the higher planes. In order to give a point, or to direct ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... rule, it was only right and proper that there should be prizes for the best costumes; and since the lady who shed her beneficence over this prismatic throng does nothing by halves, she had called in the assistance of two artists to adjudicate. I will not make public their names; that would be to overstep the boundaries of decorum and turn this book into sheer journalism. ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... clarified wax sparkled like stars in chandeliers of crystal. These in turn, catching the illumination, glittered in prismatic fragments with all the varied colors of the rainbow, so that a mellow yet brilliant radiance filled the entire apartment. Polished mirrors of a spotless clearness, framed in golden frames and built into the walls, reflected the waxed floors, the rich Oriental carpets, and the sumptuous paintings ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... three-cut faith of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled—shadowy Markgraves the like—church and state ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which he expected to find at a depth of two or three feet, such water to be first filtered and then boiled before use. And while the digging was proceeding, Earle and Dick took up a position on the summit of a low knoll a few yards away, and examined their surroundings through their prismatic glasses. ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... struck them, with your back toward the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving us the same prismatic effect. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... befitting impassioned thought. Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best with the greatest theme, Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz, beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there with virgin gold. The early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt line, 'weak-winged is song,' are scarcely firm and incisive. Lowell had to work up to his theme. In the third division, 'Many loved Truth, and lavished ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... had thus far been one of almost unalloyed enjoyment and profit. Attached to the staff of the commander as engineer and topographical officer, he had ridden at will on the flanks of the column, a single orderly his sole attendant, a prismatic compass his only instrument. Then with the declining hours of the day came the making up of his notes, and after supper the hours of confab with Geordie, who, whenever possible, would come over to headquarters camp-fire. There was ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... outline of the comb may be seen. In form it is still lenticular, for the little prismatic tubes of which it is composed are unequally prolonged, and they diminish as they get away from the centre towards the extremities. At this moment it might be compared, both in form and in thickness, to a human tongue hanging down from two of ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... stopped; no more South Seas in my belly. Well, Henry had cleared a great deal of our bush on a contract, and it ought to be measured. I set myself to the task with a tape-line; it seemed a dreary business; then I borrowed a prismatic compass, and tackled the task afresh. I have no books; I had not touched an instrument nor given a thought to the business since the year of grace 1871; you can imagine with what interest I sat down yesterday afternoon to reduce my observations; ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a cross. The orb bears two bands, one about its equator and the other representing the zodiac. On the column are the names of the Pinzon brothers, Martin and Vicente Yanez; and under the prows of the caravels, "Colon," with a list of the persons who accompanied him. The column rests upon a prismatic support, from which protrude four prows, and the pedestal of the whole is in the shape of a tomb, with an ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... day by day, as if it imbibed the sunlight into it. Never was there anything so bright as this. It changed its hue, too, gradually, being now a rich purple, now a crimson, now a violet, now a blue; going through all these prismatic colors without losing any of its brilliance, and never was there such a hue as the sunlight took in falling through it and resting on his floor. And strange and beautiful it was, too, to look through this medium at the outer world, and see how it was ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a short man, bald headed, with frog eyes peering at us from behind thick prismatic glasses. He was clad in baggy green overalls, and was slowly waving in our direction a glistening metal tube which he held in both hands. From the end of the tube emanated ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... Orestes's bubble swelled, and grew, and glittered every day with fresh prismatic radiance; while Hypatia sat at home, with a heavy heart, writing her ode to Venus Urania, and submitting to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this plunge and float strange beings. Are ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the vine, Lone winter holds upon the Height Her court in full renown. Obedient her courtiers go, Their gonfalons aloft and bright, And scatter pearls of snow; Her sturdy knighthood wear for crown Prismatic sheen in young delight, And wave the cedar oriflamme on high; While windward heralds cry, Across the battlements of earth To parapets along the sky, The lauds ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... colouring to the dazzling scene. Words cannot describe the intense glitter that characterized everything. Every point seemed a diamond, every edge sent forth a gleam of light, and many of the masses reflected the rich prismatic colours of the rainbow. It seemed as if the sun himself had been multiplied in order to add to the excessive brilliancy, for he was surrounded by parhelia, or sun-dogs, as the men called them. This peculiarity in the sun's appearance was very striking. The great orb of day was ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... prismatic colors like a huge curtain, gorgeously illuminated in its ample folds by the rays ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... awful humbug the Staubbach is when you go up to the top and see you can straddle across it. Well, the Staubbach is just like everything in this life. Keep your distance, and how well the creature looks!—all veiled in its spray, and all bright with its prismatic colours, so deep, and so vast, and so very impressive. But just go up to the top, scale the crags of its character, and measure the height of its aspirations, and fathom the torrent of its passions, and sift how much is the foam of speech, and how little is the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... have made her at that time clairvoyant and shown her the reality of the man whom she was seeing through the prismatic glass of her own enkindled ideality! Could she have seen the calculating quietness in which, during the intervals of a restless and sleepless ambition, he played upon her heart-strings, as one uses a musical instrument to beguile ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of illumination, W. D'A. Ryan, giving just a touch of brilliance to an Exposition otherwise clothed in soft tones. The jewels are only hard glass, fifty thousand of them cut in Austria for the purpose, prismatic in form, and each backed with a tiny mirror. Hung free to swing in the wind, they sparkle and dance as they catch ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... minute, ere, looking around him, he beheld a grotto, or natural cavern, composed of the most splendid spars and crystals, which returned in a thousand prismatic hues the light of a brilliant flame that glowed on an altar of alabaster. This altar, with its fire, formed the central point of the grotto, which was of a round form, and very high in the roof, resembling in some respects the dome of a cathedral. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... cemented by mud, led to a circular opening in the front wall of the cave. In a corner stood the frame for the grinding-slabs, or metates, and in it the three plates of lava on which the Indian crushes and pulverizes his maize were placed in the convenient slanting position. Not only the prismatic crushing-pins, but freshly ground meal also, lay in the stone casings of the primitive mill, and on these the plates themselves. Deerskins and cotton wraps were rolled in a bundle in another corner. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... moon door, which is clearly operated by the action of moon rays upon some unknown element or combination and the crystals through which the moon rays pour down upon the pool their prismatic columns, are humanly made mechanisms. So long as they are humanly made, and so long as it is this flood of moonlight from which the Dweller draws its power of materialization, the Dweller itself, if not the product ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... view of whatever it touches. It throws a single ray, separated from the rest,—red, yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade,—upon an object; never white light; that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit,—all the prismatic colors,—but never the object as it is in fair daylight. A pun, which is a kind of wit, is a different and much shallower trick in mental optics; throwing the shadows of two objects so that one overlies the other. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... through the veil sparkled a pair of eyes which were bottomless and yet held the colors of the rainbow in their depths. Above this figure, which beckoned him on, and after which the raft drifted faster and faster, was a halo of sparkling hair, which caught and broke up the light into prismatic colors. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... waves. The sun shines through it and breaks it up into a number of miniature rainbows—"sun-dogs," the sailors call them. I stood on the fo'csle-head for several hours to-day watching the effect, and surrounded by a halo of prismatic colours. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... countries; but, in such a Journalistic element as this of France, other and stranger sorts are to be anticipated. What says the English reader to a Journal-Affiche, Placard Journal; legible to him that has no halfpenny; in bright prismatic colours, calling the eye from afar? Such, in the coming months, as Patriot Associations, public and private, advance, and can subscribe funds, shall plenteously hang themselves out: leaves, limed leaves, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... more majorum, in the full Highland costume. I never saw Rob Roy on the stage look half so dignified or ferocious. He glittered from head to foot with dirk, pistol, and skean-dhu; and at least a hundredweight of cairngorms cast a prismatic glory around his person. I felt ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the raptures of bathing. You have left the world on the beach, and are caught up in the arms of experiences that you never feel on land. If you are far enough out, the breaking wave curves over you like a roof inlaid and prismatic, bending down on the other side of you in layers of chalk and drifts of snow, and the lightning flash of the foam ends in the thunder of the falling wave. You fling aside from your arms, as worthless, amethyst and emerald and chrysoprase. Your ears are filled with the halo of sporting ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... innumerable number of color elements, as shown by the phenomena of the rainbow or by experimenting with the prism. (See 7.) When a ray of sunshine passes through a glass prism it is decomposed or separated, and if the prismatic colors are received upon a white screen you will find on the spectrum among the colors generated a pure blue, a pure red and a pure yellow. These are the primary colors, and it is necessary when thinking color to bear these prismatic colors in mind ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... landmarks of his childhood came into sight, flooded with the June sunshine—the ruined mine-shafts staring up so starkly, the glory of white cattle in the golden light, the first glimpse of the pale roofs of Cloom itself, prismatic as a wood-pigeon's plumage, all these things struck at his heart with a keener shock than did anything personal, and made thought of his mother sink away from him. Behind the cluster of grey buildings he saw the parti-coloured ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the intense brilliancy of the tropical and semi- tropical sky comes as a revelation. Sometimes at noon it is painfully dazzling; but the evening is a vision of prismatic light holding carnival in the air, wherein Milton's "twilight gray" has no part. Unless the sky is held in the relentless grip of a winter storm, the Orient holds no gray in its evening tones; these ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... felt chilly amidst the trees, the sun not having attained sufficient altitude to penetrate its depths, while overhead all was warmth and light. Quivering on the tops of the timber, the horizontal sunbeams created, in their refraction, brilliant prismatic colorings, and filled the air with motes like golden dust. Our horsemen heeded not the sunshine or the shade. Occupied each with his own train of thought, they ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... covered the floor of the long, tunnel-like cabin. Down the center were ranged the tables, about which, thrice a day, the hungry passengers gathered to be fed, while from the ceiling depended chandeliers, from which hung prismatic pendants, tinkling pleasantly as the boat vibrated with the throb of her engines. At one end of the main saloon was the ladies' cabin, discreetly cut off by crimson curtains; at the other, the bar, which, in a period when copious ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... in quartz of nearly every colour and appearance, saccharoidal, crystalline, nay, even in clear glass-like six-sided prismatic crystals, and associated with silver, copper, lead, arsenic, iron as sulphide, oxide, carbonate, and tungstate, antimony, bismuth, nickel, zinc, lead, and other metals in one form or another; in slate, quartzite, mica schist, granite, diorite, porphyry, felsite, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Redmond's attention strayed to the corner where Margaret sat, the light from the painted window reached her, staining her white gown with patches of prismatic color—a bordering of crimson and blue and violet—and giving a golden tinge to her dead-brown hair; and as Hugh looks at her he tells himself again that he has never seen any one to compare with her—his pearl ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the intense blue of the ocean sky above, with a brisk breeze topping its many-furrowed waves— that are racing by and leaping over each other like a parcel of schoolboys at play—and cutting off sheets and sparkling showers of the prismatic foam that exhibits every tint of the rainbow—azure and orange, violet, light-green, and pale luminous white,—scatters it broadcast into the air around; whence it falls into yeasty hollows, a sort of feathery snow of a fairy texture, just suited for the bridal veils of ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... most extraordinary mixture of vertical strata, composed of coloured sands and ocherous earths blending into every variety of tint, and so vivid and beautiful in colour, that they have been not unfrequently compared to the prismatic hues of the rainbow. It was on this spot the Fomone, a frigate of fifty guns, returning home, after an absence of three years, with some Persian princes on board, in June, 1811, struck upon the rocks and went to pieces: the appearance of a wreck, in such an extraordinary ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... character; then, after a short interval, the search-lights were suddenly flashed on to the city of Sirapion; the beautiful buildings with their domes, towers, and minarets looking exquisitely ethereal as they were bathed in the beams of the glowing and ever-changing prismatic light. The beams were next directed downwards upon the assembly, and we gained a truer appreciation of the immense numbers that were ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... humour beyond description, abused me for putting Newton's head into my picture—"a fellow," said he, "who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle." And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was impossible to resist him, and we all drank "Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics." It was delightful to see the good-humour of Wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation, and ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... old-time planters in Virginia, have been very poor since the distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give Sally a lift over hard places. Always with instant reward, for the smallest bit of sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a magnificent rainbow of happiness. So when the idea came that they might let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl spirit in me, jumped for joy. There was no difficulty made; it was one of the rare good things too good to be true, that yet ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the scoria on the gravel being visible in several places, showing that the former is of more recent origin. On the opposite side of the crater, overlooking the Rhine, we find the cliff of Rolandsec composed of hard vesicular lava, rudely prismatic, and extending from the summit of the hill to its base, about 250 feet below. This is the most northerly of the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... yacht. Amid misty particles touched by the sun shone a tiny segment of rainbow. This Mr. Heatherbloom watched with a kind of childish interest; then stretched himself more luxuriously on the hard bunk. It was very fine having nothing more important and arduous to do than watching prismatic hues; his thoughts floated back to long forgotten wonder-days when he had possessed that master-marvel of toys, a kaleidoscope, and on occasion had importantly permitted the golden-haired child in the big house on the top of the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show, inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... very charitable in your judgments of the different types of Christian conformity to Christ our Lord. The crystals that are set round a light do not quarrel with each other as to whether green, or yellow, or blue, or red, or violet is the true colour to reflect. We need all the seven prismatic tints to make the perfect white light. The gift of Christ is many-sided; try not to be one-sided in your ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... steadily.—I was consulted about an Observatory at Oxford, where I supported the introduction of the Heliometer.—The stipend of the Bakerian Lecture was paid to me for my explanation of Brewster's new prismatic fringes.—The business of the Cape Observatory and Survey occupied much of my time.—In 1838 the Rev. H. J. Rose (Editor of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana) had proposed my writing a Paper on Tides, &c.; In Oct. 1840 I gave him notice that I must connect Tides with Waves, and in that way I will ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... if a great spool under your wheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer; details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into the purple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil on water; the bit of classic egg-and-dart border on the door-cap; the aged texture of the weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the wide woodshed entrance, on the kitchen side; the giant elm rising far above the roof. You rush on so near to the house, indeed, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... boulders, and as I lay wedged and bent on their up-bulging sides, beguiling the hard, cold time in gazing into the starry sky and across the sparkling bay, magnificent upright bars of light in bright prismatic colors suddenly appeared, marching swiftly in close succession along the northern horizon from west to east as if in diligent haste, an auroral display very different from any I had ever before beheld. Once long ago in ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic hues. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... occasionally tempt the larger cetacea into the Gulf of Manaar. In the calmer months of the year, when the sea is glassy, and for hours together undisturbed by a ripple, the minute descriptions are rendered perceptible by their beautiful prismatic tinting. So great is their transparency that they are only to be distinguished from the water by the return to the eye of the reflected light that glances from their delicate and polished surfaces. Less frequently they are traced by the faint hues ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... had fallen from Arctic skies, living, changeful, evanescent, athwart sea, plain, and mountain. Here is sore temptation for the colorist; more, perhaps, than by the wealth and combination of tints, he is affected by their celestial quality. All is prismatic, or like those hues produced by the interference of rays of light as seen in the colors of stars. Gorgeous as are these phenomena, they are also as transitory; and although the scene is repeated, it is with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... eye. He stopped now and then to take breath. He listened. The air was no longer filled with distant whistlings and the panting of engines. None of those black vapors which the manufacturer loves to see, hung in the horizon, mingling with the clouds. No tall cylindrical or prismatic chimney vomited out smoke, after being fed from the mine itself; no blast-pipe was puffing out its white vapor. The ground, formerly black with coal dust, had a bright look, to which James Starr's ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... any rate, will be proof against bad luck," she said, as she undid the case, and drew out a prismatic compass. She adjusted the eye-piece, in which was a slit and a glass prism and lifted the sight-vane, down the centre of which a horsehair stretched perpendicularly to the card of the compass. Putting the instrument to her ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... reopened my eyes, for through my eyelashes I still beheld her, all sparkling with prismatic colours, and surrounded with such a penumbra as one beholds in ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... rose to the height of twenty feet, and, returning in a shower of prismatic globules, stole away through a bed of water-lilies and other aquatic plants, losing itself in a grove of lofty plantain-trees. These, growing from the cool watery bed, flung out their broad glistening leaves to the length ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... sunlit, open court-yard; to pass beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through the jewels of fourteenth-century glass; to close the door; to sit beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried cushions, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the "strong cold," but that night there was a wind at 58 deg. below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing, this sight of three moons sailing ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... suddenly had a sensation of being lifted up or rising slowly and becoming lighter in body. A rush of power that I have no way of describing to you filled me. I seemed to be a tremendous dynamo in the air several inches above the ground and still ascending. When I noticed everything around me becoming prismatic and more or less translucent, I could have walked on water without sinking, and I had distinct understanding that matters seemed to be disintegrating and dissolving around me. I was frightened but self-conscious and quiet. I remained in this state for about three hours, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges, arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... gave them the most perfunctory of greetings, and, sitting back by himself, sullenly moped. He grumbled to himself that he had a headache; the play was a humdrum affair; Trimmer was a bore; the proposed consolidation had suddenly lost its prismatic coloring; the Traders' Club was crude; Starlett and Allstyne were utterly frivolous. All this because Agnes was out in the foyer with a very ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress; Their praise is still,—the style is excellent; The sense, they humbly take upon content. Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found: False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place; The face of nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay: But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon; It gilds all objects, but it ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... denied. In vain I drew my hands across my drooping eyelids, in vain I tried to master my knees that knocked together. The spell of the love-drink that Heru, blushing, had held to my lips was on me. Its soft, overwhelming influence rose like a prismatic fog between me and my enemy, everything again became hazy and dreamlike, and feebly calling on Heru, my chin dropped upon my chest, my limbs relaxed, and I slipped down in drowsy oblivion ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... a historical and scientific point of view, the whole country lying about the basanite roots of Snaefell is most interesting. At the feet of its southern slopes are to be seen wonderful ranges of columnar basalt, prismatic caverns, ancient craters, and specimens of almost every formation that can result from the agency of subterranean fires; while each glen, and bay, and headland, in the neighbourhood, teems with traditionary lore. On the north-western side of the mountain stretches the famous Eyrbiggja district, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the fellow's simile. When an idea gets hold of us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of nothing in the book line that equals Neely's Prismatic Library for elegance and careful selection. It sets a pace that others will not easily equal and none ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... door, it occupied a definite place among the shadows. Trennahan flung back the curtains and opened the window, closing the lower inside blinds. A cloud hurried across the face of the sun, as if light had no place in that ghastly room. About the limp body and sprawling hands clung the delicate prismatic tapestry of the spiders. It was rent in twain, and it quivered, and threatened to drop and trail upon the floor. The little weavers were racing about, full of anger and consternation, bent on repair. A number had already gathered up the broken strands and were fastening them across the body. Had ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... said, "I fear he will fritter away his powers on a hundred different petty objects, and do nothing at last worthy of his abilities. He will scatter and divide the light of his genius, and show us every change of the prismatic colours—curious and beautiful to behold, but dispersing, wasting the light he should concentrate on some one, some ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... EMERSION. The prismatic space or solid raised out on the weather side by the inclination of the ship. In astronomy it signifies the re-appearance of a celestial object after undergoing occultation ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the funnels are much larger than the centres, whereas in radium the diameter of the sphere and the length of the funnel or spike are about equal. Its heart consists of a globe containing seven atoms, which assume on the proto level the prismatic form shown in cadmium, magnesium and selenium. This globe is the centre of two crosses, the arms of which show respectively three-atomed and two-atomed groups. Round this sphere are arranged, as on radii, twenty-four segments, each containing five bodies—four quintets and ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... making sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... peroration, his visage of an urbane, successful man full of complicated satisfactions and regrets. Behind him the staircase was suddenly bathed in sunshine; all the panes of stained glass became sparkling and rich; and a sheaf of prismatic rays stretched down, through the gloom of the hall, toward ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... to a great extent in Canada. Gourlay figured it, twenty years ago, by placing the word in capitals on the arch formed by the prismatic hues of the cloud-spray of Niagara. He could get no better ground than a fog-bank to hoist his flag upon, and the vision and the visionary have alike been ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle |
