"Transparency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... layer by layer, the colors of Titian, king of light. Like him, great sovereign of art, I have sketched my figure in light clear tones of supple yet solid color; for shadow is but an accident,—remember that, young man. Then I worked backward, as it were; and by means of half-tints, and glazings whose transparency I kept diminishing little by little, I was able to cast strong shadows deepening almost to blackness. The shadows of ordinary painters are not of the same texture as their tones of light. They are wood, brass, iron, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... stooping swiftly, picked out of a mass of ornaments a magnificent diadem of some strange milk-coloured, opaque crystals of a character entirely strange to me. The stones were beautifully cut and polished, and although they glittered, even in the sickly rays of our lamp, they had no transparency. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... ugly of face as a gargoyle—ugly as his goddess was beautiful. Not merely negroidal, in lips, nose, ears, and tight black wool divided on the absolute equator; not racially but uniquely ugly—till he smiled—and spoke. He smiled and spoke with a joy of soul, a transparency of innocence, a rapture of love, that made his ugliness positively endearing even apart from the ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... been my good fortune to meet these noble friends occasionally in the course of our busy lives, sometimes under their roof, sometimes under mine, and as, day by day, the nobility, the transparency, the unselfishness of their characters have grown upon me, the memories of the old stone house and its care-worn inmates, have stood transfigured before me, with almost a celestial radiance. In grouping the main facts of this eventful life, and analyzing the impelling motives ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... along a narrow, tortuous vicoletto, lighted only by a single lamp burning in the niche of a Madonna. The purity and transparency of the air gave a celestial softness and clearness to the very darkness itself; and one could find one's way without difficulty under such a limpid night. But in a little while we began to pass through a "venella," or, in Neopolitan parlance, a sottoportico, which led under so many archways and ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of Babylon. For a week before Miss Granger's coming there had been heard the splashing of innumerable pails of water, and the scrubbing of perpetual scrubbing-brushes; windows had been polished to the highest degree of transparency; tin tea-kettles had been sandpapered until they became as silver; there had been quite a run upon the village chandler for mottled ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... began to descend upon the warm, still brightness of the lamps. The shadows changed, the colours grew more cold, the dark nooks among the heavy foliage less black. Israel Kafka's face was ghostly and livid—the Wanderer's had the alabaster transparency that comes upon some strong men in sleep. Still, neither stirred. Unorna turned from the one and looked upon the other. For the first time she saw how he had ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... blemishes of his nature gave security for its honesty. "The cleanness and purity of one's mind," says Pope, "is never better proved than in discovering its own faults, at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... worthy of being loved. She had "almond-shaped eyes, like the autumn waves, which, sparkling and dancing in the sun, seem to leap up in very joy and wantonness to kiss the fragrant reeds that grow upon the rivers' banks, yet of such limpid transparency that one's form could be seen in their liquid depths as if reflected in a mirror. These were surrounded by long silken lashes—now drooping in coy modesty, anon rising in youthful gaiety and disclosing the laughing eyes ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... suddenly yielded to full transparency, spreading from the fanfare of the rising sun come bolt above the range, and the mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... her amazed. Her transparency transfixed him. What is superficial is also often deep in clear natures such as Magdalen's, like a water lily whose stem goes down a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... considerable distance. On the banks of these rapids there was a constant overflowing of the water, but in such small quantities as to freeze before it had reached the surface of the central ice, so that we passed between two ridges of icicles, the transparency of which was beautifully contrasted by the flakes of snow and the dark green branches of the ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... the mountain region scarcely retains one characteristic of the stream far below. Here, it is confined to a bed of rock and sand, not more than two hundred yards wide, and its water is of unwonted clearness and transparency. Its banks are steep and the attrition caused at the time of spring freshets shows a deep vegetable mould reaching far back, making the soil highly fertile. Here, too, the river forces its way through a barrier of tablelands, forming one of those striking peculiarities incident to ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... one happy heave Of golden green the hillside curves, Where slowly, smoothly, rounding swerves The shadow of each perfect tree, By slanting shafts of eve Flame-fringed and bathed in pale transparency. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... see us," thought Chris again, for as the low-down sun struck nearly horizontally it lit up the enemies' eyes in a peculiar way, showing their transparency, and at the same time it seemed to the boy that as they came on in line at a walk they were looking in advance of where his party ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... regularly formed; otherwise, when windy, I have seen them like a shell within a shell, very thin, of a pearly whiteness. Professor Tyndall has shown in a very beautiful manner that ice is but an agglomeration of snow crystals: the transparency of the former being due to the expulsion of the air, entrapped in and causing the whiteness and opacity of the latter. There is a formation called the snow plant of California, which arises to some height, and has been compared to various things, a fountain convoluted ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... regarding nature as relatively dead and merely subservient to things spiritual, and have confirmed themselves in this view, are in heavenly light; and all things that appear before their eyes are made by that light transparent, and in their transparency exhibit innumerable variegations of light, which their internal sight takes in as it were directly, and from this they perceive interior delights. The things seen within their houses are as if made of diamonds, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio; back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner at old Hermes Pessoa's preposterous house, that was built like—so far as it was like anything else on earth—the Villa d'Este ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... been closed, came open with a snap, as if an electric shock had passed through her, and the eyes, wild in their brightness, stared directly at me. And what eyes they were! The membrane grew red and redder until it was of the color of blood, standing out in frightful contrast with the transparency of the cornea. The pupil gradually dilated until it seemed about to burst out of the socket. The nostrils, which had been sunken and motionless, quivered, swelled, and glowed. The respiration became short, quick and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... eyne" ("Venus and Adonis", l. 633), or "crystal eyes" (Sonnet xlvi, l. 6). There are also "crystal favours",[5] a "crystal gate",[6] and "crystal walls",[7] the two characteristics of brilliancy and transparency suggesting these ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... known as the transfer process. In this process a reversed photographic negative is made from the copy, from which a positive or "transparency" is made, either by contact or in the camera. A piece of carbon paper is then coated lightly with gelatine, sensitized with bichromate of potassium and allowed to dry. The paper is then placed in contact with the positive and printed in daylight until the image is imprinted on the gelatine ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... composition is "Haydnish" is to express in one word what is well understood by all intelligent amateurs. Haydn's music is like his character—clear, straightforward, fresh and winning, without the slightest trace of affectation or morbidity. Its perfect transparency, its firmness of design, its fluency of instrumental language, the beauty and inexhaustible invention of its melody, its studied moderation, its child-like cheerfulness—these are some of the qualities which mark the style of this most genial of all ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... from Jonesborough, on Red River, in the first and only expedition across the immense prairies. They were some six or eight months on the road, and suffered incredible hardships for want of water and provisions. Our Yankee was a stout man when we saw him, but he told us that he was a perfect transparency when he first arrived at the Mexican settlements—so poor, in fact, that according to his own account, 'a person might have read the New-England Primer ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... head, to let him see How boundless might his soul's horizons be, How vast, yet of what clear transparency! How it were good to live there, and breathe free; How fair a lot to fill Is left ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... necessary, for Satan was neither blown nor leg-weary. He stood dripping with sweat, indeed, but poised lightly, his head high, his ears pricked, his nostrils distended to transparency as he drew in great breaths. Even that interval Barry used, for he set to work vigorously massaging the muscles of shoulders and hips and whipping off the sweat from neck and flank. It was several moments, ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... The transparency of the atmosphere upon the Plains is such that objects can be seen at great distances; a mountain, for example, presents a distinct and bold outline at fifty or sixty miles, and may occasionally be seen as far as a ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... size and force of this prodigious river. It is mentioned by Major Rennell in his very interesting account of the Ganges, that the sea in the bay of Bengal ceases to be affected by the waters of that river, and recovers its transparency, only at the distance of about twenty leagues from the coast. (Phil. Transactions, vol. lxxi.) But the Ganges being obstructed by its Delta, and passing through eight channels into the sea, is probably much less rapid ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... given to devouring himself." It was already late when Lavretzky set out on the return journey. The sounds of the preceding day took possession of him, the image of Liza arose in his soul in all its gentle transparency; he melted at the thought that she loved him,—and drove up to his little town-house in a composed and ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... of non-transparent bodies. But as the thin slices, made in this way, are very apt to crack and break into fragments, it is better to employ marine glue as the cementing material. By the use of this substance, slices of considerable size and of extreme thinness and transparency may ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... get almost all we know of the examinations of accused parties in the witchcraft proceedings, and of his long contentions with his parish, from him, there is hardly any ground to regret that the parties on the other side had no friends to tell their story. A transparency of character, a sort of instinctive incontinency of mind, which made him let out every thing, or a sort of blindness which prevented his seeing the bearings of what was said and done, make his reports the vehicles of the materials for the defence of the very persons he was prosecuting. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... saw the radiance of Greek colouring. He had not realised that the physical aspect of mountains and sky would be so different from the landscape about Rome, and he had never lost his delight in the fresh transparency of the Athenian air. One of his earliest experiments in translation had been with Euripides's choral description of the "blest children of Erechtheus going on their way, daintily enfolded in ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Upper Egypt for destroying vermin in clothes' presses, and store-rooms; and ostrich feathers sent to Lower Egypt are sprinkled with it. A recent traveller found in the head of a mummy, of a superior kind, a balsam, in colour and transparency like a pink topaz. It burned with a beautiful clear flame, and emitted a very fragrant odour, in which cinnamon predominated. In the heart of one of the mummies he found about three drams of pure nitre; the heart being entire, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... hatched. After raising a tremendous tumult in this numerous colony, and sustaining continued combat, we came off victorious, making capture of about a thousand eggs, resembling in size, colour, and transparency of shell, those of a duck; and the taking possession of this immense quantity did not occupy more than one hour, which may serve to prove the incalculable number of birds collected together. We did not allow them sufficient time, after ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the glowing transparency of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of our own horses,— which, running on a sandy margin of the road, made but little disturbance,—there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the earth prevailed the same majestic peace; and, in spite ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... this last stage of their eventful journey, they were all in the highest spirits. On to Rome! was the watchword. It was a glorious day; the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky; the air was pure, and brilliant, and genial, and it also had such a wonderful transparency that distant objects seemed much nearer from the distinctness with which their outlines were revealed. The road was a magnificent one,—broad, well paved, well graded,—and though for some miles it was ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... I'll sit me down upon yon broken rock, To muse upon the strange and solemn things Of this mysterious realm. All day my steps Have been amid the beautiful, the wild, The gloomy, the terrific; crystal founts Almost invisible in their serene And pure transparency, high pillared domes With stars and flowers, all fretted like the halls Of Oriental monarchs—rivers dark, And drear, and voiceless, as Oblivion's stream, That flows through Death's dim vale of silence,—gulfs All fathomless, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... been when Willie saw her last, she might have been called fat compared with the condition in which they now found her. She appeared like a mere shadow, with a delicate skin thrown over it. A bad transparency would have been more substantial in appearance. She lay alone on her lonely pallet with a farthing candle beside her, which cast a light sufficient only to make darkness visible. Being near ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... Forester. "There is a kind of fine dust, or something like that, which dims the bark; but, when you put on oil or varnish, there is a sort of transparency given to the outside coating, which brings the natural color of the bark fully ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... and her golden hair under her head-dress of gold brocade, with her fingers held up, and showing in the blood, as it flowed downwards in the veins that pale pink hue which shines before the light owing to the living transparency ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... its depths a milky cloud took shape, swirling and pulsating like a living thing. Then it flashed into dazzling brilliance and the globe cleared to startling transparency. It was as if it did not exist. Rather they looked through an opening in the cosmos that carried their gaze to another and distant point. It was a large open space that was revealed to their eyes; a sort ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... of spectators only feebly responding to this enthusiasm, as is our national custom. At the end of it all marched a plentiful crew of tatterdemalions, a few bleared white men, and the rest negroes. They bore aloft a crazy transparency, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... east, over a vast basin of tumbled, lesser hills, dim black forests, and steel-blue loops of a far-winding water. Here and there long, level strata of pallid mist seemed to support themselves on the tree-tops, their edges fading off into the startling transparency that comes upon the air with the first of dawn. But that was in the lower world. Up on the solitary summit of White Face the daybreak had arrived. The jagged crest of the peak shot sudden radiances of flame-crimson, then bathed itself in a flow of rose-pinks and thin, indescribable reds and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... instance, the gelatine film which is squeegeed against the glass necessarily takes its dimensions from the paper to which it is attached, and if that be expanded more in the one direction than another, the transparency is similarly deformed; and so, of course, is any negative, enlarged or otherwise, produced in the camera therefrom. A reproduced negative by contact printing may either have the distortion due to expansion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... The apparition this time was much more distinct, and it lifted the paper weight, as Henry had three weeks before. Charley was so sure that it was Henry Vail himself that he began to get up to shake hands with his friend, but the perfect transparency of the apparition checked him, and he hid his face in his hands a moment, in a terror that he could ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... exclamation sadly puzzled Jeff, whose claim to consideration at the hands of many friends was a guileless transparency of purpose, a candour and simplicity unhappily too rare. Now, his climax, so artfully introduced, provoked nothing more satisfactory than ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a strange vision, out from the undulating ripples rose slowly a creature more fantastic than the boy's wildest dreams. The head was green, with large unwinking, glittering eyes. In slow contortions, the body, of a transparency that showed the light through, writhed like a tremendous ribbon-snake, and a sharp row of serrated fins surmounted all its length, from which, near the head, scarlet streamers floated like a mane. A moment thus ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the churches and the palaces, Corinne conducted Oswald to the villa Mellini, a solitary garden, without any other ornament than its magnificent trees. From here is seen, at a distance, the chain of the Appenines; the transparency of the air colours these mountains and throws them forward in the perspective, giving them a most picturesque appearance. Oswald and Corinne remained in this spot to enjoy the charms of the sky and the tranquillity of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... The rich and elegant black velvet robes worn by her ladyship displayed the beautiful transparency and form of her snowy arms and shoulders. Flashing jewels lent a glow to the lovely face, reflecting their ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... child of a large family, and brought up without a mother's care, since Mrs. Parsons had died in her infancy, there was a delicacy and fragility, a slenderness of form and transparency of complexion, which, added to her gentleness and modesty, gave an unexpected elegance to the tinman's daughter. A soft appealing voice, dove-like eyes, a smile rather sweet than gay, a constant desire to please, and a total unconsciousness of her own attractions, were amongst ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... touch of opposition or distrust. He distrusted himself enough. It was as though he carried about with him wounds that only Eleanor's soft touch could be allowed to approach. And from the first evening he had very naturally divined in this Yankee girl, with her mingled reserve and transparency, her sturdy Protestantisms of all ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and present an astonishing variety. As an example of the beauty which they sometimes display, we may refer to a species which resembles an exquisitely formed glass-shade, ornamented with a waved and tinted fringe. The most perfect grace of form, the transparency of the crystal, and colour as delicate as that of the flower, combine to render this frail being one of ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... differing essentially from the air of the atmosphere, but agreeing with it in the properties of weight, elasticity, and transparency, might be generated from solid substances, was discovered by Mr. Boyle, though two remarkable kinds of factitious air, at least the effects of them, had been known long before to all miners. One of these is heavier than common air. It lies at the bottom of pits, extinguishes ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... were drifting about, and, together with a very active, silvery-blue Idotea, half an inch long, prayed upon the Velellae. At another time, among many other pelagic crustacea, we obtained three kinds of Erichthus, a genus remarkable for the glassy transparency of its species, also Hyalaea inflexa and H. tridentata, curious pteropodous molluscs which swim near ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... walls and the dim dome overhead. Having reached the certainty that everything was in its former state, he waved his hand, and with one long look backward at the model, ghostly beautiful in its shining white transparency, he led the way to the passage of entrance, leaving the king to his solitude and stately sleep, unmindful of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in color at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of the visual rays and the reception of the specieses of such things as are visible. The other is of horn, at which an entry is made to sure and certain dreams, even as through horn, by reason of the diaphanous splendour and bright transparency thereof, the species of all objects of the sight distinctly pass, and so without confusion appear, that they are clearly seen. Your meaning is, and you would thereby infer, quoth Friar John, that the dreams of all horned cuckolds, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... transparency of the whole of the productive and business relations afforded to the tax assessed in Freeland a perfectly reliable basis. The principle was that the public expenditure of the community should be covered by a contribution from each individual exactly in proportion to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... picked it up. A beautiful stone, like a sapphire; blue but uncut and of a strange pellucid transparency—a jewel undoubtedly; but of a kind we have never seen. We all of us examined it, and were all, I am afraid, a bit disappointed. It was ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... spoken by the property of transparency which is so predominant among crystals. One of the fundamental characteristics of heavy solid matter is to resist light - in other words, to be opaque. Exposed to heat, however, physical substance loses this feature to the extent that at the border of its ponderability all matter becomes pervious ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... deepening through violet to a narrow streak of copper on the horizon. By this time the shadows, especially on the eastern slope, were very sharp and black, and the open spaces very white and radiant, with a strange transparency borrowed from ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... spacious appearance within, and has none of that depressing dulness which makes some people very sad long before they have been ministerially operated upon. From side windows there comes a good light; and from the roof, which has a central transparency, additional clearness is obtained. The light from the ceiling would be improved if the glass it ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Geysirs, in openings separated by a barrier of rock—which, however, rise nowhere above the level of the ground. Their waters boil very gently, with an equable and almost rhythmic flow. The charm of these springs lies in their wonderful transparency and clearness. All the prominent points and corners, the varied outlines of the cavities, and the different recesses, can be distinguished far within the depths, until the eye is lost in the darkness of the abyss; ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... wine you have poured for me? You have offered up Your face in its pure transparency Like a crystal cup Which trembling fingers slowly lift— It is faintly masked With a tremulous smile. You have brought me a gift, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... disclosed in words my love to Blanche. Through the lucid transparency of Presence, I believed that she knew all and comprehended all, without the aid of those blundering symbols. We never even spoke of the future; for all time, past and to come, seemed to converge and centre and repose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was discovered by Father Jacques, who passed through it in 1646, on his way to the Iroquois, by whom he was afterward tortured and burned. It is thirty-six miles long by three miles broad. Its elevation is two hundred and forty-three feet above the sea. The waters are of remarkable transparency; romantic islands dot its surface, and elegant villas line its shores. Fort William Henry and Ticonderoga, situated at either end of the lake, were the salients respectively of the two most powerful nations upon the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... more interesting than the seal to take their attention, for all at once there was a faint greeny transparency right before them. Then it darkened, lightened again, darkened and lightened more or less till, all at once, there was a flash, so short, quick, and brilliant that it dazzled ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... by his friends; his features resembling a transparency disfigured by the smoke of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... textiles, Sir G. Birdwood says: "All violent contrasts are avoided. The richest colours are used, but are so arranged as to produce the effect of a neutral bloom, which tones down every detail almost to the softness and transparency of the atmosphere." He says that in their apparel both the colouring and the ornaments are adapted to the effect which the fabrics will produce when worn and in motion. "It is only through generations of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... is neighbored by several paintings, if the kind called Grecian for a reason never revealed by the inventor of an art as old as potichomanie itself. It was an art by which ordinary lithographs were given a ghastly transparency, and a tone as disagreeable as chromos; and I doubt if it could have been known to the Greeks in their best age. But I remember very well when it passed over whole neighborhoods in some parts of this country, wasting the time of many young ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... freckles, of this otherwise stolid child. When she had spoken, she would at once take her own words in the sense in which her audience must have heard them, she would be alarmed at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the 'good sort' that she was, the finer features of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw, wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... well as he nears his far home. His serenity is vast and enviable. But I cannot shake from my eyes that vision of him when life forsook his veins, and his mouth slacked, and his eyelids closed, while his face took on the white transparency of death. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the haste of the journey, from her bedchamber up-stairs through the great rooms and down the marble stairs, the fronts of the sea-blue, sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus disclosing not only her delicate night-dress, but—since this last was fine to the point of transparency—all the secret loveliness of her body and her limbs. Her shining hair curled low upon her forehead, half concealed her pretty ears, and lay upon her shoulders like a little, golden cape. And, from out this ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... energy. This primary condition had dictated the red ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reaching the outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of the red, and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground of the corners is put in emerald green; but then, in the corners themselves, the blue is recalled and is given an additional solidity of value by the delicate ornamentation ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... parlour half filled with the organ which her husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the pyrus japonica that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize ox over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of feathery flowering grasses with a peacock's feather or two among them to set them off, and the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... youthful countenance, whose manly expression contrasted with his long golden hair. He hastened down-stairs, and crossed the hall into the street. The noise had ceased, and nearly all the lights had burnt out. As he turned a corner rapidly, he was attracted by a transparency. The inscription, in large letters on a crimson ground, read: "Gaeb's jetzt noch einen Goettersohn, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... intention of saluting the monarch; and Sir Roger de Launay gazed at her in mingled surprise and admiration. She was certainly wonderfully beautiful. Her complexion had the soft clear transparency of a pink sea-shell—her eyes, large and lustrous, were as densely blue as the dark azure in the depths of a wave,—and her hair, of a warm bronze chestnut, caught back with a single band of red coral, seemed to have gathered in its ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... little leisure and is too obviously anxious to make the most of what he has. He always seemed to be talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly, too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and contemplative expression which irradiates the features of the elect is again visible in our painter's figures. In the colouring of both, vivacity is combined with softness, and vigour of chiaro-scuro goes together with transparency ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... water lay. Its surface was broken here and there by tussocks of grass and reeds, and beyond it the prairie ran back unbroken, a dim gray waste, to the horizon. The sun had dipped behind the bluff, and the sky had become a vast green transparency. There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was broken only by the clamor of startled wildfowl which Agatha could see paddling in clusters ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... that cathedrals for the most part ought not to be etched. You lose too many shadows, though you gain in line; but in the etching you have to cross-hatch so heavily with ink that the result is just ink, and not shadow at all. Charcoal gives you depth and transparency. I was eager to do a series of the cathedrals, as I had done a series for the Dickens and Thackeray books, and had planned to give ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... heartless; and he had happened to marry a girl whose greatest charm to him had been her tenderness of heart, her innocent candor, and that purity of mind which comes of hatred—not ignorance—of sin. A worldlier woman would not have been so shocked; but he had never desired less crystalline transparency of mind—less exquisite whiteness of soul, for Nan. No; that was the worst of it: the very qualities that he admired and respected in her bore witness against ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... essentially similar, but the solid supporting framework of which is of a softer nature, are such as Alcyonium and Pennatula. All these belong to the "class" Actinozoa. There are other coelenterates of an active free-swimming habit, such as Beroee and Cydippe, which are balls of glassy transparency displaying iridescent hues as they move rapidly through the water by means of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the setting sun, admitted through the window of a back room, shot obliquely through the open door, and lighting on the chair, shone with a dull transparency through ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... calculating eye of a man who studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded. In the course of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes. He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and elbow. With his other hand he lifted her forearm and doubled it back. Disgust and wonder showed in his face, and he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... remarkable and interesting experiment; it has this very important limitation—that it is always epithelium with which it has to do, whereas in Wolff's experiment the regeneration takes place from mesoblastic tissue. The cause of the transparency may be a chemical reaction—it depends a good deal upon our definition of that phrase. Is protoplasm a chemical compound? Some have considered it so, and spoken of its marvellously complicated molecule. Of course it is made up of ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... her face with both hands and began to sob like a Magdalen. Her hands were, in truth, beautiful, more beautiful even than Don Luis had described them to be in his letters. Their whiteness, their pure transparency, the tapering form of the fingers, the roseate hue, the polish and the brilliancy of the pearl-like nails, all were such as might turn the head of ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... said that the law gave life to sin—as by the sun is the shadow. He saw too that in the spiritual world we need a live sun strong enough to burn up all the shadows by shining through the things that cast them, and compelling their transparency—and that sun is the God who is light, and in whom is no darkness at all—which truth is the gospel according to St. John. And where there is no longer anything covered or hid, could sin live at all? These and such like thoughts held him long—till ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... but the system was then adopted of letting for a term of three years and a higher rent was obtained. The value varies enormously according to colour, which should be a particular shade of dark green. Semi-transparency, brilliancy and hardness are, however, also essentials. The old river mines produced the best quality. The quarry mines on the top of the hill near Tawmaw produce enormous quantities, but the quality is not ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... calves, they terminated in a small foot, quite at ease, and well arched in its very small shoe of black morocco with silver buckles. She is standing before the glass on the chimney-piece. The slope of her spencer displays her elegant, graceful neck, of dazzling whiteness, but without transparency. ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... phenomenon of FROSTED TREES, the most astonishing and brilliant that I ever remember to have noticed. The previous storm and mist had thickly covered every exposed object,—the loftiest trees, the minutest blade, hill and dale, with the icy garment. This transparency was most perfect, defining every form and ramification into exact models of the entire body, branch, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... transparency, motion, both internal and progressive, and transformation. A History somewhat Analogus cited out of Piso. Several Observations about the various wayes of the generations of Insects: by what means they act so seemingly wisely and prudently. Several Quaeries propounded. Postscript, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... was in full swing. The fore-cabin was washed and cleaned up till the Ripolin paint and the brass shone with equal brilliance; Ronne decorated the workroom with signal flags, and the good old "Happy Christmas" greeted us in a transparency over the door of the saloon. Inside Nilsen was busily engaged, showing great talents as a decorator. The gramophone was rigged up in my cabin on a board hung from the ceiling. A proposed concert of piano, violin, and mandolin had to be abandoned, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... rock surfaces, acting in much the same way as does the jet of steam fed with sharp sand, which is used in the manufacture of ground glass. Indeed, in a single storm at Cape Cod a plate glass of a lighthouse was so ground by flying sand that its transparency was destroyed and ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... up by these deposits are exquisite specimens of Nature's work and are filled with water of wonderful transparency; while the variety of forms of these receptacles and their charming colors ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... exactly that. For roughened glass still retains a dull and milky brightness, a recollection, as it were, of its former transparency. But her eyes seemed rather to have been made of metal, which had turned rusty, and really if pewter could rust I should have compared them to pewter covered with rust. They had the dead color of pewter, and at the same time, they ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... bowers Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers A bunch of fragrant lilies be, Or the stars of eternity? Alike to him the better, the worse,— The glowing angel, the outcast corse. Thou metest him by centuries, And lo! he passes like the breeze; Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy, He hides in pure transparency; Thou askest in fountains and in fires, He is the essence that inquires. He is the axis of the star; He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky. Than all it holds ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... facility to investigation. If a character be free from the stain of guilt, it will not shrink from those proceedings which tend to hold it up to the light, and which of course only exhibit its perfect transparency. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great cities stud its shores; but they are powerless to dim the transparency of its waters. Steamships cover the broad bosom of its lakes and estuaries; but they change not the beauty of the water-no more than the fleets of the world mark the waves of the ocean. Any person looking at ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... a feasible plan. Cash wondered if Bud thought he was pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. Bud did not want to give up that kid, and he was tickled to death because the storm gave him an excuse for keeping it. Cash was cynically amused at Bud's transparency. But the kid was none of his business, and he did not intend to make any suggestions that probably would not be taken anyway. Let Bud pretend he was anxious to give up the baby, if that made him ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... dreamer lay, or perhaps the general's; but the noun may be used as a collective, and what is meant may be that the loaf went through the camp, overturning all the tents in its way. The interpretation needed no Daniel, but the immediate explanation given, shows not only the transparency of the symbol, but the dread in the Midianite ranks of Gideon's prowess. A nameless awe, which goes far to produce the defeat it dreads, was beginning to creep over them. It finds utterance both in the dream and in its translation. The tiny loaf worked effects disproportioned to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pupils, we find Rembrandt was aware of the great advances made in natural representations of objects by Adrian Brauwer, (several of whose works, by the catalogue given of his effects, were in his possession;) therefore, as far as transparency and richness, with a truthfulness of tint, are concerned, Brauwer had set an example. But in the works of Rembrandt we perceive a peculiarity entirely his own—that of enveloping parts in beautiful obscurity, and the light again emerging from the shadow, ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... forward, apparently weak, able hardly to stand without leaning upon the desk in front of him; his face waxen and drawn, hollowed at the cheeks and temples, his long hands thin to transparency. Life was betrayed in him only by the eyes. These burned darkly, far back under his brows, and flashed fiercely, as his glance darted ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... looking down into the clear transparency of the cool green depths, I could discern here and there a few large branches of splendid coral projecting through the sand, with multitudes of strangely-formed fishes darting round and about them; and in one spot I observed ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... clearly the features of those swarthy men, bearded and gnome-like. But the molten mass has been put into the mould; you watch it withdrawn, the bottom indented, the mouth cut and shaped. And now it is complete, but still red-hot, and glowing with an infernal transparency, gem-like and wonderful; it is a bottle fit now for the juice of satanic vineyards, and the miraculous potions of eternal youth, for which men in the old days ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... his imprisonment, as gracefully as if he entered a drawing-room, he took his stand in a firm but easy attitude. His appearance was equally removed from bravado and fear. His features, usually placid and pale, had a rigid clearness about them that day we can never forget. They seemed, from their transparency and firmness, like some wondrous imagination of the artist's chisel, in which the marble, fancying itself human, had begun to breathe. The eye was calm and bright—the mouth, the feature round which danger loves to play, though easy, motionless, and with lips apart, had about it an air of immobility ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... "I must get that transparency removed," he murmured, "and have the window filled with stained glass. The stuff is artistic, but it is so frankly what it assumes ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... crystals, called calcareous spar, or substances containing much lime, and generally colored by the impurities of the water that has dropped on them. Sometimes these crystals are of a pure white, and have, when the cave is lighted up, a richness and transparency that can scarcely be imagined. Others have the appearance of stone, moss, and shells, in every variety ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... veranda is very pretty; I will admit that it resembles the landscape of a fairytale. There are admirably wooded mountains, climbing high into the dark and gloomy sky, and hiding in it the peaks of their summits, and, perched up among the clouds, is a temple. The atmosphere has that absolute transparency, that distance and clearness which follows a great fall of rain; but a thick pall, still heavy with moisture, remains suspended over all, and on the foliage of the hanging woods still float great flakes of gray fluff, which remain there, motionless. In the foreground, in front of and below this ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... examined the old man attentively. There was no doubt about the curious pallor of his skin. It was like the pallor of extreme collapse, save for the presence of a faint colour in his cheeks which seemed to lie as a bright transparency over a dead background. My fingers again sought his pulse. It was full and steady. As I counted it my eyes rested on ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... Italy, are considered the best, on account of their transparency and exceeding strength. Most frequently each string is made up of two or three separate strands, twisted together with the utmost care. But there is another use of the greatest value, and that is as a thread for sewing up wounds in internal surgery, because, being of animal matter, the thread will, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and winning in bearing and manner, and with great claim to personal beauty. Her figure was tall, slender, and as flexible in movement as that of a Delsarte disciple; her face, framed in dark hair and lighted by luminous blue eyes, had the transparency and rose-flush of tint so often seen in New England, and she was magnetic, earnest, impassioned. No photographs can do the least justice to Mrs. Eddy, as her beautiful complexion and changeful expression cannot thus be reproduced. At once one would perceive that she ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... itself. But a moment after she rushed the position without a single casualty. "I want to know what people say, when I'm not there, about who my father was, and why he and mother parted. And I'm sure you can tell me, and will. It's no use asking Tishy Wilson any more about it." Observe the transparency of this young lady. She wasn't going to conceal that she had talked of it ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... said he, "very good! but I am afraid that this Pyrot business may lose its beautiful simplicity. It was limpid; like a rock-crystal its value lay in its transparency. You could have searched it in vain with a magnifying-glass for a straw, a bend, a blot, for the least fault. When it left my hands it was as pure as the light. Indeed it was the light. I give you a pearl and you make a mountain out of it. To tell you the truth I am ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... scrupled to get up a chorus on a motive from his symphony, 'The Influence of Blue in Art.' Monsieur Schaunard has gone farther: he has inserted in the lantern which serves the establishment for sign, a transparency ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... tower of Mauconseil must have been very difficult to express; for the water on the right is between a light coloured stone-quay and the tower itself, also very bright; yet the artist, W.B. Cooke, has contrived to give it a fine and natural transparency entirely in keeping with the scenery around. The second is a simple and lovely landscape, with a sky exquisitely managed: but Avignon is still a greater favourite with us. The rich architectural structures on one hand, the silvery river, the picturesque bridge, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the silk was imported into Greece, partly in its raw state, partly worked into dresses. Ready made dresses of this kind differed greatly from the dresses made in Greece of the imported raw silk. The Isle of Kos was the first seat of silk manufacture, where silk dresses were produced rivaling in transparency the above-mentioned. These diaphanous dresses, clinging close to the body, and allowing the color of the skin and the veins to be seen, have been frequently imitated with astonishing skill by Greek sculptors and painters. We only remind the reader of the beautifully modeled ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of the tetel is considered the most valuable for this purpose. The hide of the wild ass is the finest of all leather, and is so close in the grain that before tanning, when dry and hardened in the sun, it resembles horn in transparency. I have made excellent mocassins with this skin, which are admirable if ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker |
