"Prismatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... island of prismatic light and shade, of gay and joyous life. Here Tiberius had his summer palace, and it was from these shores that he sent the historic letter which revolutionized the life of Sejanus. The letter—verbosa et grandis epistola—is still vivid in the historic associations of Rome. Capri ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... 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, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... snow everywhere were illumined with the prismatic rays in proper order. The tree branches caught them, the corners of the houses, the window hoods, the straggling bushes, the fences. Everywhere the sublime beauty was repeated until everything quivered ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... 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 ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Just as wet starch contracts on drying to prismatic forms, so lava often contracts on cooling to a mass of close-set, prismatic, and commonly six-sided columns, which stand at right angles to the cooling surface. The upper portion of a flow, on rapid cooling from the surface exposed to the air, may contract to a confused mass of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... in perfect order, of which the regular prisms give the whole mass the effect of being one gigantic crystal; and the remarkable transparency of the sea enabled us plainly to observe the curious shafts of the prismatic columns that support the ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... yet explained. The steel may be tempered by modifying the degree of heat to which it is afterwards subjected. It may thus be toughened by slightly reheating the hardened steel; the resoftening course is indicated by certain prismatic tints, which appear in a peculiar order of succession on its surface. The skilful artisan thus knows by experience the exact point at which it is necessary again to plunge it into cold water in order to secure the requisite combination ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... deposit of oxide of chromium upon the carbon—is not here avoided. It occurs quite slowly, to be sure, but it does occur, and, from this point of view, the arrangement shown in Fig. 2 is preferable. The elements here are composed of prismatic porcelain vessels containing, as before, the solution ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... around the trees flitted the shining fragments,—a diamond dust swept by the freshening breeze. The torrent rolled on toward them; along its length a vapor rose, tinted by the sun with every color of his light; the decomposing rays flashing prismatic fires along the many-tinted scarf of waters. The rugged ledge on which they stood was carpeted by several kinds of lichen, forming a noble mat variegated by moisture and lustrous like the sheen of a silken fabric. Shrubs, already in bloom, crowned the rocks with garlands. Their waving foliage, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... You may caress me as in the days of old, and I will answer with a curse. Hold me to your heart and I will wither it with my breath of flame. Praise me, and I will requite you with dishonor and crown you with the grewsome chaplets of grief. Fool! Thou hast striven for a prismatic bubble bursting on the crest of a receding wave. Why scorned you gold and lands to grasp at castles in the air? Why dreamed of the Dimiurgus when desiring harlots beckoned thee? Why dealt with open hand and unsuspecting heart when thrown 'mid a world of thieves? Hadst thou been content and not ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a chair to the sidewalk. He was coatless, and he leaned back against the wall and smoked, while he stroked his beard. Surprise came into his pale blue eyes when he caught sight of Smith in his unusual and prismatic clothes. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... its own distinctive 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
... I 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 gazing ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... halcyon days with Miss Plinlimmon because, as they were the last I spent at the Genevan Hospital, so they soften all my recollections of it with their own gentle prismatic haze. In fact, a bare fortnight had gone by since my adventure on the spire when I was summoned to Mr. Scougall's parlour and there found Miss Plinlimmon in conversation with a tall and very stout man: and ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... The answer came from the diagonal joints themselves, on discovering that the stone between them was opposite to the butt end of the portcullis of the first ascending passage, or to the hole whence the prismatic stone of concealment through 3000 years had dropped out almost before Al Mamoun's eyes. Here, therefore, was a secret sign in the pavement of the entrance-passage, appreciable only to a careful eye ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Kenworthy diamonds were taken in broad daylight, during the excitement of a charitable meeting on the ground floor, and the gifts of her belted bridegroom to Lady May Paulton while the outer air was thick with a prismatic shower of confetti. It was obvious that all this was the work of no ordinary thief, and perhaps inevitable that the name of Raffles should have been dragged from oblivion by callous disrespecters of the departed and unreasoning apologists for the police. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... Ambassador in pale mauve, the Princess Christian in turquoise blue; and the Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia wore a magnificent robe of pink satin trimmed with sable, with a tiara of diamonds and a stomacher of diamonds and emeralds. From the neck and forehead of the Queen of Roumania flashed a thousand prismatic hues; and the Green Vault of Dresden sent some of its most precious treasures to keep company with the fair Queen of Saxony in ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... landscape as the sun sank rapidly in the western sky afforded a picture the surpassing loveliness of which there are no words to describe. Unconsciously I halted that I might the better be able to watch the wonderful play of prismatic colour upon the bosom of the river, upon the gently swaying reeds along its margin, upon the broken ground ahead in its emerald mantle of lush grass, dotted here and there with broad clumps of bush, and upon the gently swelling contours of the distant hills, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... 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 laugh and ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... essentially a sodium and ferric metasilicate, NAFe(SiO3)2. In its crystallographic characters it is close to ordinary pyroxene (augite and diopside), being monoclinic and having nearly the same angle between the prismatic cleavages. There are, however, important differences in the optical characters: the birefringence of acmite is negative, the pleochroism is strong and the extinction angle on the plane of symmetry measured to the vertical axis is small (3 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... they are shown in bewildering variety. The molecules of snow arrange themselves in crystals of the hexagonal system, every angle exactly sixty degrees. The white color of the snow is caused by a combination of the prismatic colors of these snow crystals. Some of them are regular hexagons, with six straight sides; others are like a wheel with six spokes, with jewels clinging to each spoke. Many men have spent a lifetime in the study of these fairy forms. W. A. Bentley, of the United ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic; abdomen pointed, The Death's—headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and disquieting, I refuse to leave all, including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that. It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on fashioning ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the orchestra from the hamlet of Saint-Lys. The orchestra—two violins, a reed-pipe, a biniou, and a harp—were playing away with might and main. Through the bay-window she could see the crystal chandeliers glittering with prismatic light, the slender gilded chairs, the cabinets and canapes, golden, backed with tapestry; and everywhere massed banks of ferns and lilies. They were dancing in there; she saw Lady Hesketh floating in the determined grip of Cecil Page, she saw Sir Thorald proudly prancing to the air of the farandole; ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 forces which are now ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the points of the spears of grass. A thicker veil, a gauze of pearl and silver, dimmed the blue of the sea, and blurred the architecture of the cliffs. On the sea's edge lay a long grey cloud, a long, low, soft cloud, flat, like a band of soft grey velvet. The cloud was grey indeed; but (as if prismatic fires were smouldering there) its grey held in solution all the colours of the spectrum, so that you could discern elusive rose-tints, fugitive greens, translucent ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... gun weighs 1,800 lb., and is capable of penetrating 35 in. of unbacked wrought iron at a distance of 1,000 yards. The projectile fired from the 67 ton guns of the Empress of India will have much less penetrating power, being only equal to 27 in. of wrought iron with a full charge of 520 lb. of prismatic brown powder, the missile weighing 1,250 lb. or about one-half less than the weight of the shot used with the 110 ton gun. It will thus be seen that the ordnance of the Benbow can penetrate armor that would defy the attack ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... Saiksi. If you hadn't set fire to that sealer the other day, I might not have found you. It was a senseless piece of work that did you no good. Oh, you are a sweet character! How do you get your ultraviolet rays—by filtration or prismatic dispersion?" ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... milky, also 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, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... that the whole design was lit up by electricity. Electric sparkles, like drops of dew, shone on the leaves of the flowers; the gondola was lit from end to end with electric stars, which were reflected with prismatic brilliancy in the crystal below; the gondolier's long pole glittered with what appeared to be drops of water tinged by the moonlight, but which was really an electric wire, and in his cap flashed an electric diamond. The whole ornament scintillated and glowed like a marvellous piece of curiously ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Dull, prismatic fires glowed upon the distant clouds—dawn-jewels laid upon the breast of Night. Violet and blue mellowed into opal and turquoise, then, as the spectrum may merge into white light, a shaft of sunrise broke from the mysterious ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... of complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... 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 ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... twin soul among the pure-hearted, the meek, the true. Like must mate with like; the kingly eagle pairs not with the owl, nor the lion with the jackal. Neither must woman rush blindly, heedlessly, into the noose, fancying the sunny hues, the lightning glances of her first admirer, true prismatic colours. She must first chemically analyze them to be sure they are not reflected light alone, from her own imagination. That frightsome word to many, "old maid," ought not to exercise any influence ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... returning again—again to shoot away. Our meadow at the bottom of the orchard is like a small frozen sea, now; and that is the present scene of our heroic games. Sometimes, in the splendor of the dying light, we seem sporting upon transparent gold, so prismatic becomes the ice; and the snow takes opaline hues, from the gems that float above as clouds. It is eminently the hour to see objects, just after the sun has disappeared. Oh, such oxygen as we inhale! Often other skaters appear,—young men and boys,—who principally ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... on from circumstance to circumstance of the destiny Janet had marked for herself, each one rounded in my mind of a blood colour like the edge about prismatic hues. I lived through them a thousand times before they occurred, as the wretch who fears death ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wicked! and what a lovely green! I will never wear them: they are prismatic: now, if ever I am to be a Christian, I had better begin: everything has a beginning. Oh vanity of women, you stick at nothing. A thousand innocent lives stolen to make one dress!" And she put one hand before her eyes, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... river-wall to watch the blanchisseuses at work. It has a curious interest, this spectacle of primitive toil: the deep channel of the Roxelane winding under the palm-crowned heights of the Fort; the blinding whiteness of linen laid out to bleach for miles upon the huge bowlders of porphyry and prismatic basalt; and the dark bronze-limbed women, with faces hidden under immense straw hats, and knees in the rushing torrent,—all form a scene that makes one think of the earliest civilizations. Even here, in this modern colony, it is nearly ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... weighed 22 ounces. It contained a piece of gunbarrel four inches long, a mother-screw steel, a screw-driver, a saw of steel for cutting wood four inches long, another saw for cutting metal, a boring syringe, a prismatic file, a half-franc piece and four one-franc pieces tied together with thread, a piece of thread, and a piece of tallow, the latter presumably for greasing the instruments. On investigation it was found that these conic cases were of common use, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... radiant, and so novel were its shifting and wondrous tints; purple, and crimson, and gold; streaks of azure, dashes of orange and glossy black; now a single feather, whiter than light, and sparkling like the frost, stars of emerald and carbuncle, and then the prismatic blaze of an enormous brilliant! A quiver hung at the side of the beautiful youth, and he leant upon ...
— Ixion In Heaven • Benjamin Disraeli
... from the tips of my outstretched fingers were the prismatic tints with which the crystal daily registered the decline of the day; but not for all my striving and all my wit could I get within reach. They were as remote as ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... A.M., overcast generally with hazy clouds and fog of prismatic shades, chiefly greenish-yellow; 7 A.M., (S.-S.-E. freshening,) thick in W; 8 A.M., (S. fresh) much cirrus, thick and gloomy; 9 A.M., a clap of thunder, and clouds hurrying to N.; a reddish haze all around; at noon the margin of a line ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... not much of a student of nature after all, or he would not have called worms "nasty things," but have taken more notice of them as they were turned out of their damp bed, and seen that they were clothed with a skin whose surface reflected colours of prismatic hue, as bright and perfect as those seen upon some pearly shells. He would have seen how wonderfully the worms were constructed for the fulfilment of their apportioned position in the animal kingdom; ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... of Spectrum Analysis Prismatic Analysis of the Light of Incandescent Vapours Discontinuous Spectra Spectrum Bands proved by Bunsen and Kirchhoff to be characteristic of the Vapour Discovery of Rubidium, Caesium, and Thallium Relation of Emission to Absorption The Lines of Fraunhofer ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... 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 ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... happy improvement upon Rochon's prismatic or double-refraction micrometer. See M. Mathieu's note in Delambre's 'Histoire de l'Astronomie ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the morning sunlight. To the guides the boat was something astonishing; they could not refrain from laughter to find that they were really afloat in it, and pointed with surprise at the waves, which could be seen through the boat, rippling against its sides. With the aid of the boat, with prismatic compass and sextant, I was able to secure an excellent map of the lake; and we almost succeeded in catching a deer, which was driven into the lake by a strange hound. The dog lost the trail at the water, ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... beyond the last sentinel the trio paused, and stood listening and gazing as far as they could across a rock chamber whose sides glittered with double prismatic crystals. ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... two hundred feet, which is at least thirty miles wide, by ninety in length. It looks as though it had sunk down below all the country round; while standing like sentinels all around, one sees pillars of immense height, of irregular prismatic columns of masses of stone, stretching up to the height of from one to two hundred feet or more. It reminds one of the ruins of Pompeii (described by Bulwer) as the traveler wends his way through deep passages, amidst petrified ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... 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 if wit, is a different and much shallower trick in mental optics throwing the SHADOWS of two objects so that one overlies ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this world, in the other divine riches. And if gold and silver correspond to precious things of the mind, so must brilliant jewels. The diamond! How wonderful is its affection for light—taking in the rays eagerly, dissolving them, and sending them forth again to gladden the eyes in rich prismatic beauty! And to what mental quality must the diamond correspond? As it loves the sun's rays, in which are heat and light—must it not correspond to the affection of things good and true?—heat being of love, and light of truth or wisdom? The wearer of diamonds, then, should have ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... trellised window opening upon the lawn. A small table had been placed in the sun near the window, and was covered with dazzling white linen, polished silver, and cut glass, which, catching the morning beams, reflected a prismatic riot of colors. The chops, lettuce, bread and butter, and coffee were already served. As he seated her, he felt as though he were living out a dream—one of the dreams that as a very young man he had sometimes dreamed when, lying flat upon his back in the sun, he had watched the big ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... front of the heroine's eyes, but never till this moment had she experienced that remarkable sensation herself. The Savior of Guatemala did not actually swim, perhaps, but he certainly flickered. She had to blink to restore his prismatic outlines to their proper sharpness. Already the bustle and noise of New York had begun to induce in her that dizzy condition of unreality which one feels in dreams, and this extraordinary statement ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... phenomenon. Curiously, the bank of mist seemed not to dissipate in a normal fashion. Samples of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic colorings. State troopers were warning the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Switzerland, the only remarkable event of which was a singular atmospheric phenomenon we saw on the top of the Grimsel. On the clouds of vapour below us we saw our shadows projected, of giant proportions, and each person saw his own shadow surrounded by a bright circle of prismatic colours. It is not ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... 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 such subtile and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... left to itself, may function satisfactorily, or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... 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 ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the 1st September, heavy clouds were flying fastly over us, and a few drops of rain fell at intervals. About ten o'clock p.m. I observed a lunar rainbow in the northern horizon; its diameter was only about fifteen degrees. There were no prismatic colours visible about it. To-day was clear, fine, but rather windy. We travelled up the creek, skirting its banks, but cutting off the bends. We had low ridges on our right. The creek came for some distance from the south-west, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... fly up from our prow as it cuts through the 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
... resounding harpers of 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 ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... will be 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
... and the west gleamed faintly. The afterglow merged into the first night and at star-break, Venus blazed superbly on high, sending out rays mystically prismatic, as from some enchanted lamp. "Our star," Anthony Dexter had been wont to call it, as they watched for it in the scented dusk. For him, perhaps, it had been indeed the love-star, but she had followed it, with breaking ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... express them in lines and dots and breadths of pure color. He had caught the vital effect of the whole, and he meant to interpret it so that its truth should be felt by all who had received the light of the new faith in painting, who believed in the prismatic colors as in the ten commandments, and who hoped to be saved by tone-contrasts. For the others, Ludlow was at that day too fanatical an impressionist to care. He owed a duty to France no less than to America, and he wished to fulfil it in a picture which ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... finished speaking, a furtive smile played upon the canon's lips and his eyes were extraordinarily animated. Don Cayetano busied himself in giving various forms—now rhomboidal, now prismatic—to a little ball of bread. But Dona Perfecta was pale and kept her eyes fixed on the canon with observant insistence. Rosarito looked with amazement at her cousin. The latter, bending toward ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... language—altogether different from the obvious little Anglo-Saxons who had misrepresented childhood to Pemberton. Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation. To-day, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens. If it were not for a few tangible tokens—a lock of Morgan's hair cut by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were disjoined—the whole episode and the figures ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... slightest hope even to a young man thirsting for pleasure. Ignoring my tortured flesh, she shed the rays, undeviating, incorruptible, of the divine love, which satisfies the soul only. She rose to heights whither the prismatic pinions of a love like mine were powerless to bear me. To reach her a man must needs have won the white ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... stood round, now occupied by the young people who ate and drank and chattered, the majority quite unmindful of their journey's object—Old Sol, in his departing splendor, glorifying the clouds with prismatic color, ere he sank beyond ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... 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 ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... recall a more beautiful sunset than the one of current date. Merely to behold the orb of day descending beyond the western horizon in all its magnificence of prismatic colouring was sufficient to awaken within one's bosom the ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... as the chameleon, capable of giving out any variety, and yet all equally true; hence it is that the skies, for example, of Claude, Salvator Rosa, and Gaspar Poussin are universally subordinate to the general effect of the picture. These men, living in Italy, were quite aware of the various prismatic effects observable in sunset, but were also convinced of the necessity of making the sky subservient, at least conducive to, the breadth and harmony of the picture. It may be said that Titian and Tintoret embodied the ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... table standing near, called a marver, (that is, marbre,) in size and shape not unlike the largest of a nest of teapoys. Here the lump of sandiver lay, while through its mass shot rays of vivid prismatic color, glowing and dying along its surface so vivaciously that one needs must fancy the salamander no fable, and that this death of gorgeous agony was something more than the mere cooling of an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... There is the huge, high entrance to the outer caves where we are standing, with a massive lintel of rocks overhead, all black but for a few purple and gray tints scattered across the blackness. Behind us the sea is glistening, and prismatic colors play upon the cliffs. Shadows fall from rocks we cannot see. Olivia stands before me, pale and terrified, the water running from her heavy dress, which clings about her slender figure. She shrinks away from me a ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... 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 laughing as heartily as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... plates, which appear to be analogous to the plates of the batteries used in automobiles. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter, four great branches of which are as large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the prismatic columns, and finally pass into all the cells. "A complete knowledge of all the mysteries which have been gradually unfolded from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday, and of many others which are still inscrutable to ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences of all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable. To begin to tell the details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible. It is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose beauties blend into one as the prismatic tints combine to white. And then, after the first dazzle of admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges you to penetrate the centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The dupe of unexpected splendor, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... and bright, with a promise of summer in the air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily's street, mellowed the blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings of the door-step, and struck prismatic glories from the panes of her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of mercury) is in heavy colourless masses of prismatic crystals, possessing an acrid, metallic taste. It is soluble in sixteen parts of cold and two of boiling water. Soluble in alcohol and ether, the latter also separating it from its ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... 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 the tints of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... would go, for five minutes without stopping, apparently with the view 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 colours gleamed over it as if on a surface of mother of pearl; and, over this brilliant doublet, his hair and beard fell full half way to the ground in waving curls, so exquisitely delicate, that Gluck could ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... peaks, or burst forth from among clouds in his midday course, mountain and dell, glazed rock and frosted tree, glowed and sparkled with surpassing lustre. The tall pines seemed sprinkled with a silver dust, and the willows, studded with minute icicles reflecting the prismatic rays, brought to mind the fairy trees conjured up by the caliph's story-teller to adorn his ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... society and family of M. de Malesherbes, and lastly, to approach a most amiable queen and a most upright king, without believing ourselves about to enter upon a kind of golden era of which preceding centuries afforded no idea. . . . We were bewildered by the prismatic hues of fresh ideas and doctrines, radiant with hopes, ardently aglow for every sort of reputation, enthusiastic for all talents and beguiled by every seductive dream of a philosophy that was about to secure the happiness of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in Europe, ranging through all parts of the 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 all the Silurian genera belong to the palaeozoic type before mentioned ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... that they 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 of their tiny peduncles, arms, or tentaculae; and ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... series of successive plains, resembling in their gradation the order of a staircase, observes, as he descends to the inferior stratum upon which the water rests, that where rocks are disclosed the symptoms of crystallization have taken place, and then the prismatic configuration is commonly denoted basaltic. Such an appearance, therefore, in the approach to the Lake of Tiberias is only a parallel to similar phenomena exhibited by rocks near the Lakes of Locarno and Bolsenna in Italy, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... 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 ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... firm on Ararat: th' returning sun Exhaled earth's humid bubbles, and, emulous of light, Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise, Hope's harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly, Which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... my books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity, or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their making. The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my books is not paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids. All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... 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 ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... with 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
... was afterwards improved by Arnold, Earnshaw, and other English makers. Dent's prismatic balance is now considered ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... notice the decorations of the "parlour." They offered to the eye a strange mixture of the East and West—reminiscences of the old home in "Illinoy" and trophies of the new camping-out on the frontier. From the ceiling hung a heavy lamp with prismatic danglers, surrounded by a globe on which were depicted stags in the act of leaping six-barred gates. By way of complement to this gorgeous centrepiece, the paper on the walls showed, in infinitely recurring duplicate, a huntress in green habit and big hat carrying on a desperate flirtation with ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the conning-tower of the Flying Fish, looking down over sea and land through his prismatic binoculars, suddenly ground his teeth hard together, and sent a hearty Irish curse hissing between them. He had a complete plan of the operations in his possession, and knew perfectly what to ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... missed many days. He had seen the moon 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
... again to raise them, that so I might escape the distraction of outward things, for I felt the spell more and more, and I hardly knew what I did; but a minute afterwards I again looked up, for I perceived her beauty still shining across my dropped lashes as if with prismatic glory, and encircled by the crimson halo that, to the gazer, surrounds the sun. How beautiful she was! Painters, when in their chase of the ideal they have followed it to the skies and carried off therefrom the divine image of Our Lady, never drew near this fabulous reality. Nor are ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... world: and through this we discern, as in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it in the way in which our neighbours see it; sometimes through a pink veil, sometimes through a grey. Religion, indigestion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes. The prismatic colours of a fashionable school of art may stain them. Inevitably, too, we see the narrow world our windows show us, not "in itself," but in relation to our own needs, moods, and preferences; which exercise ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... moment do not suffice the eager illustrator. The passing word seizes his fancy. Herod describes the jewels which he promises to give to Salome so she relieve him of his oath, and the music of the orchestra glints and glistens with a hundred prismatic tints. Salome wheedles the young Syrian to bring forth the prophet, and her cry, "Thou wilt do this thing for me," is carried to his love-mad brain by a voluptuous glissando of the harp which is as irresistible ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... studies for a new understanding of the prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow. Intimation of new possibilities of experimental research guided by the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another, From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil, Up just ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... everything was of crystal, shining with the splendour of the sun itself. At the end of a gleaming pathway rose a castle built entirely of crystal, its innumerable domes and turrets reflecting the light in a thousand prismatic hues. ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the ruby following it, and so on. The author has seen an opal in Pesth weighing fourteen carats, for which five thousand dollars were refused. They can be purchased at Queretaro at from ten dollars to ten hundred; for the latter price a really splendid gem may be had, emitting a grand display of prismatic tints, and all aglow with fire. The natives, notwithstanding the seeming abundance of the stones, hold very tenaciously to the valuation which they first place upon them. Of course, really choice specimens are always rare, and quickly ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars. But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally long—or brief—the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... her way—almost another Brantome!—engrossed in his pessimistic 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 ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... shall become a pool.' Life without Christ is but a long illusion. 'Sin makes a mock of fools.' How seldom are hopes fulfilled, and how still less frequently are they, when fulfilled, as good as we painted them! The prismatic splendours of the rain bow, which gleam before us and which we toil to catch, are but grey rain-drops when caught. Joys attract and, attained, have incompleteness and a tang of bitterness. The fish is never so heavy when landed on the sward as it felt when struggling ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... books, as women men,{5} for dress: Their praise is still,—the style is excellent; The sense, they humbly take upon content.{6} Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found: False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, In gaudy colors 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 alters ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... situation, on a terrace between Mount Evan and Mount Ithome, overlooking both the upper and lower plains of the Pamisos—a glorious spread of landscape, green with spring, and touched by the sun with the airiest prismatic tints through breaks of heavy rain-clouds. Inside the courts is an old Byzantine chapel, with fleurs-de-lis on the decorations, showing that it dates from the time of the Latin princes. The monks received us very cordially, gave us a clean, spacious room, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... seemed all in one piece, with the central objects cast inside like a toy ship in a sealed bottle. Then a mathematically precise ring of prismatic reflections showed me that the top third of the ball was a separate piece, fitting conically down like the tapered glass stopper of a monstrous perfume bottle. The handle on the top was for the purpose of lifting this giant's teapot lid, and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... their original 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, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the storm ceased as suddenly as it began. A bright streak of clear red sky appeared above the western verge of the prairie, the horizontal rays of the sinking sun streamed through it and glittered in a thousand prismatic colors upon the dripping groves and the prostrate grass. The pools in the tent dwindled and sunk into the ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... 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 ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... becomes accustomed to it, it operates like medicine, and I on this occasion was fairly taken in. The fish we caught were not very good, but comical in appearance, and of a great variety of the most beautiful prismatic colours, changing in tint as different lights and ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... represents an arrangement with blocks. The jar V, is provided with a cover of copper, E, screwing into the glass. This cover carries two vertical plates of sheet-iron, A, A', against which are fixed the prismatic blocks, B, B, by means of India rubber bands. The terminal, C, carried by the cover constitutes the positive pole. The zinc is formed of a single pencil, D, passing into a tube fixed to the center of the cover. The India rubber, G, is folded back upon this tube ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... a state of foam and commotion, when a stern frost transformed them into a solid mass. Pillars and blocks of the shining and hardened element were seen modelled into a thousand quaint and grotesque patterns. Here a fountain, perfectly formed with Ionic and Doric columns, was reflecting a thousand prismatic hues from the diamond-like stalactites which had attached themselves to its crest. There a huge obelisk, which, if of stone, might have come from ancient Thebes, lay half buried beneath a pile of fleecy snow. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... as a young man on garrison duty, he took great delight in listening to the overtones of bugles and of the bells from a nearby convent. This chromatic style had been anticipated by Chopin whose use of the harmonic series in those prismatic, spray-like groups of superadded tones is such a striking feature in his pianoforte works. There is, therefore, nothing outre or bizarre in Debussy's idiom; it is but a logical continuation of former tendencies. His works show ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick was younger than the other men too; but his manner was, if anything, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with folds of air the lingering fires; O'er Eve's pale forms diffuse phosphoric light, And deck with lambent flames the shrine of Night. So, warm'd and kindled by meridian skies, 180 And view'd in darkness with dilated eyes, BOLOGNA'S chalks with faint ignition blaze, BECCARI'S shells emit prismatic rays. So to the sacred Sun in MEMNON's fane, Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain; 185 —Touch'd by his orient beam, responsive rings The living lyre, and vibrates all it's strings; Accordant ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Telescopes, with a comparative Determination of the Extent of that Power in Natural Vision, and in Telescopes of various Sizes and Constructions; illustrated by select Observations.—Investigation of the Powers of the Prismatic Colours to heat and illuminate Objects; with Remarks that prove the different Refrangibility of radiant Heat; to which is added an Inquiry into the Method of viewing the Sun advantageously with Telescopes of large Apertures and high magnifying Powers.—Experiments ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... a very hard pull, the Barrier surface being covered with prismatic crystals—without any glide we felt we might as well be hauling the sledges over ground glass, but diversion in the shape of Land-oh: I think I sighted Mount Hope refracted up, and pointed ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... the Teutonic School. The alliterative poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is "not prismatic but diaphanous." Those who could understand anything could understand it, and the chansons de geste easily found currency in the market-place, when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of honour in "bower and hall." The Teutonic poetry, even at its simplest, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... revenues of the King and Queen of Spain. A brief 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 ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... 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
... aqua-fortis, leaving the design in bold relief, like a rude stereotype. This was then printed off in the predominant tone— blue, brown, or yellow, as the case might be—and delicately tinted by the artist in a prismatic and ethereal fashion peculiarly his own. Stitched and bound in boards by Mrs. Blake, a certain number of these leaflets—twenty-seven in the case of the first issue—made up a tiny octavo of a wholly exceptional kind. Words indeed fail to exactly describe ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... C. Oslers, of Broad Street, have attained a very high reputation for their cut and ornamental, as well as the ordinary, articles of flint glass. The have been especially successful in producing fine effects from prismatic arrangements. Their gigantic chandeliers of great size, made for Ibrahim Pacha, and the Nepalese Prince, were the steps by which they achieved the lofty crystal fountain, of an entirely original design, which forms one of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... one condition is that you live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do. I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic life of New York. I want you to be the life and ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. "You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January 13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,—'R.B.', a poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... liquid bodies when raised to a white heat give a continuous spectrum, one like the prismatic band already described, and one not interrupted by any dark lines or bands. The rays emitted from the white-hot substance of the sun have to pass, before reaching our earth, through the sun's atmosphere, and since the light emitted from any ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... Gedge excitedly; and in spite of several risks of overturning, he steered the novel toboggan sledge down the gigantic slide, with the wild, metallic, hissing sound rising and falling on the keen wind that fanned their cheeks, and a glistening prismatic, icy dust rising behind them like a ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... blue and again a dirty gray as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud, and as a gust of wind caught the top of the combers decapitating them at one mad rush, the spray was dashed high in the air, flashing out all the prismatic colours. Here and yonder, the white caps rose, disappeared and came again, and the waves grew and then diminished in size. Then others rose, towering, became larger, majestic, terrible; the milk-like comb ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... 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 ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... see the table at the front of the shop, Roger's bulletin board under the electric light, and one or two nondescript customers gleaning along the shelves. Then something bounded violently under the third button of his shirt. There she was! In the bright, prismatic little circle of the lenses he could see Titania. Heavenly creature, in her white V-necked blouse and brown skirt, there she was looking at a book. He saw her put out one arm and caught the twinkle of her wrist-watch. In the startling familiarity ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... power of a given mass of specified material of specified shape and connections. Conductance varies in cylindrical or prismatic conductors, inversely as the length, directly as the cross-section, and with the conductivity of the material. Conductance is an attribute of any specified conductor, and refers to its shape, length and other factors. Conductivity ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... and that what we saw in the distance between these two mountains was the great plateau itself. The question, then, was to find a way up, and to conquer this last obstruction in the easiest manner. In the radiantly clear air we could see the smallest details with our excellent prismatic glasses, and make our calculations with great confidence. It would be possible to clamber up Don Pedro himself; we had done things as difficult before. But here the side of the mountain was fairly steep, and full of big crevasses and a fearful quantity of gigantic blocks ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... First a low groaning noise was heard, which waxed louder and louder until—so Beata declared—it resembled the snoring of Father Neptune. Then suddenly a shower of spray spurted from the aperture, the sunshine lighting it with all the prismatic colours of the rainbow. For a few seconds it played like a fountain, then died down as the wave receded. The girls were so interested in watching it that they quite forgot the sea behind them. While their backs were ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... emphasis with which 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... of this area was occupied by a small segment of a rainbow, the concave side of which was turned from the true sun, while on its convex edge, in contact with it at its most prominent part, was stretched a broad straight band of prismatic colours, similar to the rainbow in all but curvature. Across the space, within the circle of light, there was a broad stream of dusky cloud, formed of three distinct streaks, and reaching from one of the most distant mock suns to another opposite ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... other, but is shaded over by a multitude of dark lines, only a few of which are shown in the adjoining plate. (Plate XIII.) These lines are a permanent feature in the solar spectrum. They are as characteristic of the sunlight as the prismatic colours themselves, and are full of interest and information with regard to the sun. These lines are the characters in which the history and the nature of the sun are written. Viewed through an instrument of adequate power, dark lines are to be found crossing ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... on the 7th we had the first clear view of the sun which we had yet enjoyed since its reappearance above our horizon, and an indistinct parhelion, or mock sun, slightly prismatic, was seen on the eastern side of it, at ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of them I met in Venice—at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other form so cool and unfading ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... true concerning every form in which truth is embodied, whether it be sight or sound, geometric diagram or scientific formula. Unintelligible, it may be dismal enough, regarded from the outside; prismatic in its revelation of truth from within. Such is the world itself, as beheld by the speculative eye; a thing of disorder, obscurity, and sadness: only the child-like heart, to which the door into the divine idea is thrown open, can understand somewhat ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... round as it would go, for five minutes without stopping, apparently with the view 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 where they ended; they seemed to melt into air. The features ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... you," replied Sumichrast. "The sugar-cane, like all other vegetables, contains a certain quantity of liquid, in which the sugar is held in a state of solution; if this is removed, prismatic crystals immediately form. Look now! the contents of the copper are just beginning to boil, and are covered with a blackish scum, which is carefully skimmed off; for in three or four days, when it has fermented, it will produce, by means of distillation, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... rise to a tremendous height, particularly on the Kaumayok side, from whence 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
... 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... singular 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 ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... spiritual and moral ends. Its aim and purpose is to make reason prevail over sense and appetite; to raise man not only to a perception of the harmonies of truth, but also to the love of whatever is good and fair. Not in a darkened mind does the white ray of heavenly light break into prismatic glory; not through the mists of ignorance is the sweet countenance of the divine Saviour best discerned. If some have pursued a sublime art frivolously; have soiled a fair mind by ignoble life,—this leaves the good of the intellect untouched. Some who ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... 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 of the human mind, is at ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... a slowly moving white curtain of mist. It was flowing over the marsh, moving with apparent deliberation, but, as Tommy saw, actually very swiftly. It shimmered and quivered and moved onward steadily. Its upper surface gleamed with elusive prismatic colors. It had blotted out the horizon and the Golden ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the foot of the verandah steps in order to steady herself on her feet, the last filmy veil that hid the face of the moon glided ethereally by. The moon was on the wane, golden and mysterious, and now, as she appeared high in the heaven, surrounded by a halo of prismatic light, she threw a cold radiance on everything around, picking out every tree and cottage with unfailing sharpness and casting black, impenetrable shadows which made the light, by contrast, appear yet more vivid and ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is it arranged that no metal, either of joint or pipe, can be seen. It is "one entire and perfect chrysolite." From its lofty summit issues forth a dome of water, which separates, and falls in prismatic showers into a spacious basin beneath. There are three other fountains, but this is the monarch of all. On either side of this beautiful production of a Birmingham manufacturer are two equestrian statues of the queen and Prince Albert, about which I ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... the walls furnished the light, wavering but brilliant. There were tables and rude seats, fashioned from the same prismatic stones which covered the column in the lake, and from their surfaces a thousand points ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... and, as a commentator has already remarked, as much like a rocket as anything 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... 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, 310 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, 315 Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon, It gilds all objects, ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... THE OPAL. Thus the opal is distinguished by the prismatic colors that emerge from it owing to the effect of thin layers of material of slightly different density, and hence of different refractive index from the rest of the material. These thin films act much as do soap-bubble films, to interfere with light of ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade |
