"Diaphanous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... commenced before the vacant seats near them were occupied. Malcolm had a momentary glimpse of a tall, graceful-looking figure, in soft, diaphanous raiment, that seemed to pass them very swiftly; he even caught a strange, subtle fragrance that seemed to linger in the air; and then they all knelt down and Miss Jacobi buried her face in her hands, and her brother removed his lavender ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... pagan gods and goddesses, who disported themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... do not glide like us, But walk in eerie paces; They're solid, not diaphanous, With arms! and ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... semicircle arose, towards the region away from the Sun, two long luminous streaks which limited the tail. Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance appeared to be dark, of great rarity, and very diaphanous. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire, awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanous white over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about her neck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers were embroidered so richly that they resembled the painted porcelain of old vases. She looked like a sultan's ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... windows flooding down, turning the dancing guests into pirouetting ghosts in diaphanous blue ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... the pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... In a diaphanous atmosphere gilded with an invisible clearness as of Paradise, the winged heads and bodies of little angels are moving: the former gracefully grouped, the latter boldly and skilfully disposed. The celestial ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... just behind the diaphanous curtain of the pipe smoke, or in the nooks of the twilight shadow, or in the heart of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... often several words to express the same or nearly the same meaning. Want of space prevents these being all included; the most important or most commonly used word has therefore been chosen; for instance, "mercury", "tranquil", "diaphanous", "suffocate", "salve", "renown", "fiddle", are not to be found, but "quicksilver", "calm", "translucent", "smother", "ointment", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... in the cemeteries of Rome, and offered by him to Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards. Special mention is made in the document of the oil from the tomb of S. Cornelius; and de Rossi asserts that the fragments of a diaphanous oil-basin found in the exploration of this crypt were ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... be noted that privation is sometimes essential to the species, whereas sometimes it is not, but supervenes in a thing already possessed of its proper species: thus privation of the due equilibrium of the humors is essential to the species of sickness, while darkness is not essential to a diaphanous body, but supervenes in it. Since, therefore, when we assign the cause of a thing, we intend to assign the cause of that thing as existing in its proper species, it follows that what is not the cause of privation, cannot ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... conducted successful social campaigns, as I have said before, in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin. I did not go along, but I read about it all in the papers and received weekly from the scene of conflict a pound or so of mail matter, consisting of hundreds of diaphanous sheets of paper, each covered with my daughters' fashionable humpbacked handwriting. Hastings, my stenographer, became very expert at deciphering and transcribing it on ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... enchantment of the Straits of Messina, that Fata Morgana, when, under certain conditions of weather, phantasmagoric palaces of wondrous shape are cast upon the waters—not mirrored, but standing upright; tangible, as it were; yet diaphanous as a veil ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of Nature whose creation appears to demand as its right all the happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of seraphic calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused beneath that diaphanous complexion,—due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her head, fell thence with black reflections round the delicate transparent ears and defined the outlines ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... directs them. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles invade or transfuse them, replacing the diaphanous phosphorescent spirit fluid, and they grade into supple white and rosy ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... pretension to rank and fashion. They saw very little of each other, but were seen together on all fitting occasions. The morning service in the little church at Beechdale would not have seemed complete without those two figures. The faded beauty in trailing silken draperies and diaphanous bonnet, the slim, well-dressed Captain, with his bronzed face and black whiskers. They were in everybody's idea the happiest example of married bliss. If the lady's languid loveliness had faded more within ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... more or less elongated relatively to its breadth; in two specimens, with scuta of equal width, one was longer than the other by the whole of the occludent margin of the terga. Valves white, thick, (in young specimens sometimes diaphanous and thin,) closely approximate to each other; surfaces furrowed to a very variable amount. Terga generally more plainly furrowed than the scuta, of which the basal portion is generally less furrowed than the upper part; ridges, often rough, generally much narrower ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... northern forests was more striking, or where one more involuntarily imagines long alleys of trunks terminating in glimpses of daylight, curved branches meeting in acute angles, domes of irregular and commingling foliage, universal shade scattered with lights through colored and diaphanous leaves. Sometimes a section of yellow panes, through which the sun darts, launches into the obscurity its shower of rays and a portion of the nave glows like a luminous glade. A vast rosace behind the choir, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... It was a radiant face, one of those that seem to have been touched in their cradle by a sunbeam, and to have retained all their brilliancy and suffused and mantling lustre. One marks sometimes such faces, diaphanous with delicate splendour, in the southern regions of France. Her eye, too, was the rare eye of Aquitaine; soft and long, with lashes drooping over the cheek, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... a pause of the thin rain, I met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the church parade wore in life through those halcyon days when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but upon the whole it failed. It may have been an impulse from this ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... extended upon a straight-backed settle in somewhat of a Recamier pose. She is intently occupied in the perusal of a book. The turn of the head, the careless attitude, and the flesh tints of throat and face are all admirably rendered. The diaphanous quality of the girlish costume is skilfully worked out, as are also the accessories of the room. Miss Greene's work must commend itself to those who recognize the true in art. Technical dexterity and a fine discrimination of color are ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... which glowed amongst the brilliant green corn. It lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We traveled on, therefore, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... grass; but the pears were now in bridal white, and a warmer glory of apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or the sunlit ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... She had thought him cold, but these words belied that. She had wrapped him in that diaphanous substance with which young ladies (and sometimes older ones) are wont to deck their heroes. She had approached a mystery—to find it human, as are many mysteries. But thank heaven that she found a dignity, a seriousness,—and these ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris—who stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged—that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece of bread-and-butter on a ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... and with sure, swift hands, fitted the key in the lock. The house wore a welcoming aspect. The drawing-room was filled with blossoming plants, and the diaphanous curtains which Blue-eyed Mary had hung at the windows blew softly in the breeze. The piano, with its suggestive litter of music, stood open, and across the bench trailed one of Mary's ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a fresco of Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly—for I can't go through the catalogue—I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... our neighbour, deprecatingly, and sitting down he began to cut up some tobacco. I looked across at New York, still surrounded in diaphanous mist, and endeavoured to adjust my mind to the immediate business. Since dinner the night before I had been indulging in somewhat frothy speculation. It was only fair that Mr. Carville should have ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... accepted on the superior judgment of her European sisters. Altogether, the girl's outer and visible aspect is not unattractive to the eye of the traveler, however faulty to the eye of the traveler's wife. When about to dance, the Alme puts on a lighter and more diaphanous dress, eschews her slippers, and with a slow and measured step advances to the centre of the room—her lithe figure undulating with a grace peculiarly serpentile. The music is that of a reed pipe ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... floats a long cradle, formed by the coils of a serpent, all whose heads, bending forward at the same time, overshadow a god who lies there asleep. He is young, beardless, more beautiful than a girl, and covered with diaphanous veils. The pearls of his tiara shine softly, like moons; a chaplet of stars winds itself many times above his breast, and, with one hand under his head and the other arm extended, he reposes with a dreamy and intoxicated ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... a vast amount of latent force and energy here, but it takes a cannon to put it in action. Of course there are exceptions enough. Our friend Henry Bright is a slender, diaphanous young gentleman, of a nervous temperament, with no beer or roast beef apparent in his mind or person; and there are doubtless many like him. The English are unfortunate in noses. Their noses are unspiritual, thick at the end; and there is an expression about the mouth ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... an invidious ceremony called picking up. This was heralded by Mr. Britling, clad in the diaphanous flannels and bearing a hockey stick, advancing with loud shouts to the centre of the hockey field. "Pick up! Pick ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... you, you have become, without my knowing how, the joy of my life, the source from which I draw my sweetest and most holy pleasures. With the memory of you, I lull myself in the Infinite. I see Heaven and the angels, I dream of Seraphims who resemble you, who bear me on their diaphanous wings into the abode where all is joy and love ... heavenly love, dear Suzanne, love like that of the angels for the Virgin, the mother, eternally pure, of our sweet Saviour. You see, you have no reasons to be offended with my dreams. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... and black longitudinal warp stripes, alternating with the stripes of the red background; (2) a closely woven but thin cloth of abak having sometimes, as in the case of men's jackets, straight weft stripes of imported blue cotton; (3) a cloth of the same material, but so thin as to be diaphanous, and not adorned with any stripes; (4) a cloth for trousers made out of an abak warp and a ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... next morning her star is surely in the ascendant. Cecil sleeps late. Floyd is down on the porch, reading and smoking, when the flutter of a diaphanous robe, with billowy laces, attracts his eyes and he ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... elevation of only 8000 feet, instead of 14,000 feet, the Coronal streamers were seen by Professor Newcomb's party, far less extended than Langley saw them. Perhaps the best proof of the importance of a diaphanous sky is to be found in the fact that on the summit of Pike's Peak, the Corona remained visible for fully 4 minutes after the total phase had come to an end. A comparison of the descriptions shows that even at the elevation of 10,200 ft. ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... did feel vaguely gratified to find herself treated to-night far more as a guest of honour than she had been on the first occasion when she had come to the house. The guest herself had done honour to the feast by putting on the most becoming of her diaphanous black evening dresses, and, as she sat to the right of her host, each of her three feminine critics admitted to their secret selves that she was that rather rare thing, a genuinely pretty woman. Features, colouring, hair, were all as near perfection ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... hill-land and lea, As crystallized harmony, Materialized melody, An uttered essence peopling far and near The hyaline atmosphere?... Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blooms from flower and tree! In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist, In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst, Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster, Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.— —O music of Earth! O God who the music inspired! Let me breathe of the life of thy breath! ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... diction, the unprosaic terms and figures of 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, must have required more ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... about her flooded the springs of happiness. It was a wonderful world, a radiant world, a world of dream and delights. It was a world more real than the fantasy of moonlight. She felt more real. She was herself, too, not some strange, diaphanous image conjured out of tulle and gauze, she was her own true flesh-and-blood self, living in a ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... could see that a diaphanous gauze of dust overhung it and the air was heavy with the most volatile particles. The sandy earth had been ground and worked to the depth of over a foot. How difficult had it been for the rearmost ranks to cover ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... canton flannel were bordered with trailing convolvulus in pink cretonne, and the diaphanous folds of white muslin curtains held in the centre an embroidered anchor which dragged inward, as the breeze rushed in through open windows. An arched recess in the wall, whence a door communicated with the adjoining chamber, was ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... When first the heav'n her self was giv'n, That in my heart her beams did passe As some the sun keep in a glasse, So that her beauties thorow me Did hurt my rival-enemy. But fate, alas! decreed it so, That I was engine to my woe: For, as a corner'd christal spot, My heart diaphanous was not; But solid stuffe, where her eye flings Quick fire upon the catching strings: Yet, as at triumphs in the night, You see the Prince's Arms in light, So, when I once was set on flame, I burnt all ore the letters ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... more subtle, pure, delicate and sight-soothing than the French grey which robes the clear-cut horizon; no variety of landscape more pronounced than the alternations of glowing sunlight and snowy moonlight and twinkling starlight, all streaming through diaphanous air. No contrast more admirable than the alternation of iron upland whereupon hardly a blade of grass may grow and the Wady with its double avenue of leek-green tamarisks, hedging now a furious rain-torrent then a ribbon of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the Moors, then," she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned his ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... made an exquisite setting for her entertainment and her own beauty. She glided here and there among the amber lights, welcoming her guests and setting them at the little green-clad card tables, a diaphanous vision of gold-and-orange chiffons, her perfect neck and shoulders ablaze with diamonds, and her little flat-coiffed black head, rather snakelike on its long throat, banded by a chain of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... it is not without some Reason, that I ascribe Colour (in the sense formerly explan'd) chiefly to the Superficial parts of Bodies, for not to question how much Opacous Corpuscles may abound even in those Bodies we call Diaphanous, it seems plain that of Opacous bodies we do indeed see little else than the Superficies, for if we found the beams of Light that rebound from the Object to the Eye, to peirce deep into the Colour'd body, we should ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... Mrs. Burton Jones' garden party, the Bainbridge event for which Miss Davis was, presumably, staying over. Mary, in a new frock of sheerest grey and most diaphanous white, and a hat which lay like a breath of mist against the gold of her hair, had come down early. In the course of an observant career, she had learned that, in one respect at least, men are like worms. They are inclined to be early. Mary had often profited by this bit of wisdom, and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... only in the diaphanous robes of her calling, and she was stacked. Beside her, little Maya Wilson would have looked about eight years old. Her hair was as red as the inside of a blast furnace, and had about the same effect on Forrester's ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to the scents of the woods. Just then the Angelus was ringing at Blangy, and the sounds of the bell, mingling with the wild concert of the forest, gave harmony to the silence. Here and there were rising vapors, white, diaphanous. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... bookcases full of tall volumes in sumptuous bindings, and crowned with Etruscan vases and rare bronzes. Schulembourg, who was a man of taste, looked around him with great satisfaction. And while he was gazing on a group of diaphanous cherubim, by Murillo, an artist of whom he had heard much and knew little, his arm was gently touched, and turning round, Schulembourg beheld his patient, a man past the prime of youth, but of very distinguished appearance, and with ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... clothing and smiling faces. It was the express wish of Sophia that none of the company should wear white. "That distinction," she said, "ought to be reserved for the bride;" and among the maids in pink and blue and primrose, she stood a very lily of womanhood. Her diaphanous, floating robe of Dacca muslin; her Indian veil of silver tissue, filmy as light; her gleaming pearls and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... rooms were all finished and decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the firmament ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... a little effort of the imagination we can picture a prismatic color sphere, using only the colors of light. In a cylindrical chamber is hung a diaphanous ball similar to a huge soap bubble, which can display color on its surface without obscuring its interior. Then, at the proper points of the surrounding wall, three pure beams of colored light are admitted,—one red, another green, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... swept across the river, caught her filmy skirts, and blew them about her ankles. She frowned, brushing down the wind-swept draperies with that instinct for modesty all women share. Shy and supple, elastic-heeled, in that diaphanous half light her slim long body might have been taken for that of a wood nymph had there been eyes to follow ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... morning. In the grove near the Campo del Moro some soldiers were drilling to the sound of bugle and drums; from a stone chimney on the Ronda de Segovia puffs of dark smoke issued forth to stain the clear, diaphanous sky; in the laundries on the banks of the Manzanares the clothes hung out to dry ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... too, all her peculiar tastes in dress and ornament came out in a more striking way than at other times. She was never so superb as then, and never so threatening in her scowling beauty. The barred skirts she always fancied showed sharply beneath her diaphanous muslins; the diamonds often glittered on her breast as if for her own pleasure rather than to dazzle others; the asp-like bracelet hardly left her arm. Without some necklace she was never seen,—either the golden cord she wore at the great party, or a chain of mosaics, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... two years ago he told her he hoped never to see her ugly old face again. And that delicate little creature in the box next to her—that pale diaphanous face?' ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... this history begins, a brilliant July sun was illuminating the studio, and two rays striking athwart it lengthwise, traced diaphanous gold lines in which the dust was shimmering. A dozen easels raised their sharp points like masts in a port. Several young girls were animating the scene by the variety of their expressions, their attitudes, and the differences in their toilets. The strong shadows ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... not sleep. From the walls of a great palace whose entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, wearily languorous, expressing ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Major hurried off to take the Colonel's orders I climbed up on the parapet. Night had now fallen completely, but the moon was rising. Indeed, it would have been almost as light as day but for a slight mist which was spreading a diaphanous veil before our eyes. In the foreground to the right I could barely guess the dim outline of the battered mill and the burnt farm flanking the trench occupied by the foot Chasseurs. Further off, however, I could vaguely distinguish the row of trees that marked the ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... Mrs Judge were married at the Embassy, and afterwards at an English church, the bride looking her most charming self in a costume of diaphanous chiffon and lace and the most fascinating of French hats, and the bridegroom his worst in his stiff conventional garments. They were a very radiant couple, however, and the dejeuner held after the ceremony at the "Hotel Britannique" was a cheerful ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to wish her mother good-night, she did indeed look like a fairy being. Her frock was some soft, diaphanous stuff over a pale green slip, some of her curls were tied up high on her head and the ribbon and that of her sash matched. Three strings of pearl beads were about her white throat. Marguerite smiled to herself—Miss Nevins would call ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... yourself to Hock and Moselle, sirrah: I fear me, you have a base hankering after mutton and beef. Restrict yourself to salads, and do not sin even with an omelette more than once a week. Coridon must be visionary and diaphanous, or he is no Coridon for me. Remove my night-gloves, and assist me to rise: it is past four o'clock, and the sun must have, by this time, sufficiently ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Mrs. Abe Tutts's diaphanous "tea-gown" laid out on the breeze, thereby revealing the fact that she was wearing Congress ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... they have been made transparent, which may be accomplished in the following manner:— stretch your paper, or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each,) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of varnish and the designs. Silk, linen, or ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... the moon was rising higher and higher, pouring down a flood of silver light, which lit up the denser part with its soft diaphanous rays. ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... instead of the thrones and diadems of the elect, was an immutable realm in which there was neither death nor life, clear ether merely, charged with beatitudes. And so, when the disciples disputed among themselves, Mary dreamed of diaphanous hours and immaculate days that knew no night, and in this wise lived until from the terrace of Jerusalem's Temple the Master bade her return to Bethany ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... front porch and gazed skyward. The wind—as the saying is—had "catched in," and was blowing briskly from the north-west, chasing diaphanous clouds across the blue zenith. The roofs still shone wet and dazzling, and there were puddles in the street. But he knew the afternoon was going to be a fine one. He took pleasure in this when, a few moments ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... across the enchanted radiance of the water. Even the Child, usually as restless as the dragonflies themselves or those exponents of perpetual motion, the brown water skippers, was lying on his back, quite still, and staring up with round, contemplative blue eyes through the diaphanous green of ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "a" it drapes ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... or gray; sporangia crowded, ovoid or cylindric, stipitate or sessile, blue-gray, often capped with white; stipe variable in length and structure, where well developed pure white, often flattened, expanded and diaphanous, connate with others through the irregular reticulate or sheet-like hypothallus; columella none; capillitium ample, the lime knots angular or rounded, white connected by hyaline threads; spores in mass black, by transmitted light dark ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... drugging her spirit as with anodyne. As she had fallen at Gracedieu, so she fell now into a languid habit where tears swam in flood about the lids of her eyes, where the eyes were too heavy for clear sight and the very blood sluggish with sorrow. She grew pale again, hollow-eyed, diaphanous—a prism for an unearthly ray. Her beauty took on its elfin guise; she walked a ghost. Night and day she felt for the ring; though she knew it was not there, her hand was always in her vest, her bosom always numb and cold. Sometimes her urgent need was more than she ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... weather-beaten hut struck an isolated note of life, and across the valley Matterhorn towered,—solitary, superb,—his rugged head and shoulders thrust heavenward through a diaphanous scarf of cloud. Suddenly Quita Lenox fronted her husband, and his face softened to a smile that hovered in the eyes an appreciable time before ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fetes Galantes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... which they manage to act in concert and combine their labour, when simultaneously carving two opposite sides of a comb, and unable therefore to see each other. Take a finished comb to the light, fix your eyes on the diaphanous wax; you will see, most clearly designed, an entire network of sharply cut prisms, a whole system of concordances so infallible that one might almost believe them to be stamped ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the debutante wears her very prettiest ball dress. Old-fashioned sentiment prefers that it be white, and of some diaphanous material, such as net or gauze or lace. It ought not to look overelaborate, even though it is spangled with silver or crystal or is made of sheer lace. It should suggest something light and airy and gay and, above all, young. For a young girl to whom white is ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... pellucidity^, limpidity; fluorescence; transillumination, translumination^. transparent medium, glass, crystal, lymph, vitrite^, water. V. be transparent &c adj.; transmit light. Adj. transparent, pellucid, lucid, diaphanous, translucent, tralucent^, relucent^; limpid, clear, serene, crystalline, clear as crystal, vitreous, transpicuous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for his dirty habit of wetting his thumb when turning over the leaves of the book. [440] What a rare tale is that of the Ensorcelled Prince, alias The Young King of the Black Isles, who though he sat in a palace where fountains limbecked water "clear as pearls and diaphanous gems," and wore "silken stuff purfled with Egyptian gold," was from his midriff downwards not man but marble! Who is not shocked at the behaviour of the Three Ladies of Baghdad! In what fearful peril the caliph and the Kalendars placed themselves when, in spite of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... was the appearance of Miss Sallianna—Miss Sallianna arrayed in all her beauties and attractions, including a huge breastpin, a dress of enormous pattern, and a scarf around her delicate waist, azure-hued and diaphanous like the sky, veiled ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... were still fairly regular in their attendance, he was both incensed and grimly amused by their various idiosyncrasies. He soon became accustomed to their vanity boxes and their public application of powder and lip stick, the frank crossing of their knees that exhibited more diaphanous silk than he had ever seen in his life before, the polite excitement that any new article of attire worn by one seemed to induce in all, the wicked but on the whole good-natured baiting of Aileen Lawton and Polly Roberts, the alternate insolence and Circean glances of Mrs. Bascom, who amused ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... opinion that the dingy, smoky appearance of the sky, in very dry seasons, arises from the want of moisture sufficient to let the light through, and render the atmosphere transparent; because he had observed several bodies more diaphanous when wet than dry; and did never recollect that the air had that ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... Latrobe began to show well to the front in the run for the prize, the two sisters had gone to their room at the hotel to dress for the hop. It was their custom to disappear from public gaze about six o'clock and when they came floating down the stairs in filmy, diaphanous clouds of white, the halls were well filled with impatient cavaliers in the natty cadet uniform, and with women "waiting to see." Then the sisters would go into the dining room and have some light refreshment, with a glass of iced tea—and no matter how torrid the heat or how flushed and dragged ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... who revisit, in their wrath or their remorse, the places wherein erst they suffered or wrought evil. There is one who, every Halloween, flits into the dining-hall, and hovers before the portrait which Hans Holbein made of him, and flings his diaphanous grey form against the canvas, hoping, maybe, to catch from it the fiery flesh-tints and the solid limbs that were his, and so to be re-incarnate. He flies against the painting, only to find himself t'other side of the wall it hangs on. There are five ghosts permanently residing in the right ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... for a pasha who's taking toll of the officers inside there —Achmet Pasha. They call him the Ropemaker, because so many pass through his hands to the Nile. The Old Muslin I call him, because he's so diaphanous. Thinks nobody can see through him, and there's nobody that can't. If you stay long in Egypt, you'll find that Achmet is the worst, and Nahoum the Armenian the deepest, pasha in all this sickening land. Achmet is cruel as a tiger to any one that stands in his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... time of her apprenticeship. For the tales had enjoyed only a fleeting succes d'estime. Her style was, like her temperament, delicately constructed and of extreme refinement, not the style to appeal to the masses. It was "searched," a little precieuse, and the tales themselves were diaphanous enough, polished little contes, the points subtle, the action turning upon minute ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... all that toggery!" said Patty, bluntly, and Mona sighed as she saw Patty's diaphanous frock. Then, led by Mrs. Hastings, they went down to the drawing-room. They put Susan through a few lessons in introductions, practised calling her "Aunt Rachel," and bolstered up her failing courage by telling her how well ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... man, who had treasured up so long some mystery, probably a very diaphanous one, for Emily's own dear sake in the world's esteem, and from the long bad habit of reserve, fell back into his chair as if he had been shot; but he did not faint, nor gasp, nor utter a sound; he only looked ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the customary plain and colored glasses, bottles, labels, and mirrors. The floor was a composition of small, shaded red-and-green marbles; the ceiling a daub of pinky, fleshy nudes floating among diaphanous clouds; the walls were alternate panels of cerise and brown set in rosewood. Mr. Kerrigan, when other duties were not pressing, was usually to be found standing chatting with several friends and surveying the wonders of his bar trade, which was very large. On the day of Mr. Gilgan's ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... as dark as hers, but finer; dark eyes, not without meaning; irregular but very pleasing and delicate features; and an unusually white rather than pale complexion, with a sort of sallow glow under the diaphanous skin. There was not a little piquancy in the expression of her countenance, and ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... despairing prisoners marched a squad of tall, clean-shaven priests with great gold hoops in their ears. They blew mightily upon long, curved horns, and were followed by perhaps a dozen lithe, posturing girls, half clothed in diaphanous yellow robes. These priestesses swung golden censers which flung bluish clouds of aromatic smoke high into the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... and brazen, from the lurid heavens, covered with filmy clouds, so equally overspreading it that a thin, gray veil seemed to interpose between us and its scorching rays, scarcely tempering them by its diaphanous medium. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... morn, for it appeared to me symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed. At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun's disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, in dark blue silhouettes, the evanescent ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up through the stable-yard into the front court. There the great iron gates rose before him, diaphanous-looking and flimsy in the starlight. He went up to them and shook them; and a loose shield jangled fiercely overhead. Then he peered through, holding the bars, and saw the familiar patch of grass beyond the gravel sweep, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... runs the document] the life of Chopin was but a breath. His frail, weak body was visibly unfitted for the strength and force of his genius. It was a wonder how in such a weak state, he could live at all, and occasionally act with the greatest energy. His body was almost diaphanous; his eyes were almost shadowed by a cloud from which, from time to time, the lightnings of his glance flashed. Gentle, kind, bubbling with humor, and every way charming, he seemed no longer to belong ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping of the ivy leaves against ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... other ground, they sent from moment to moment flashes of delicate and rare light from the great multitude of their wings. I know of nothing to which one may compare these glimpses of evanescent shining but these two things—the flash of a sword edge and the rapid turning in human hands of a diaphanous veil held in the light. It shone or glinted for a moment, then they would all wheel ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... her feet and shook out the folds of her diaphanous gown, daring alike in its shapelessness and scantiness. She lit a cigarette and laid her ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... tall, graceful forms swayed in unison with the exquisite love music, every step, every motion perfectly attuned. It seemed as though no guiding were necessary. Slowly gliding, turning, reversing, he in his faultless uniform, she in her sweeping, diaphanous sable, seemed, without effort or the faintest exertion, fairly floating upon air. No wonder they sat or stood and gazed—these elders along the bordering benches—these others among the dancers—these few, wordless, at the windows. Then, with the Lorelei melody lingering to the last, the ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... calmer water heading in a more southerly direction so as to come up with the land. Fog, fine snow and an overcast sky made a gloomy combination, but during the afternoon the fog lightened sufficiently for us to perceive the mainland—a ghostly cliff shrouded in diaphanous blink. By 10 P.M. the Mertz glacier was visible on the port bow, and to starboard there was an enormous tilted berg which appeared to be magnified in ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and Chopin, also, with dark blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own words, "An angel of fair countenance, with brown eyes from which intellect beamed rather than burned; a gentle, refined smile, slightly aquiline nose; a delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all bearing witness to the harmony of a soul which required no ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... my place in the bastion. The northern lights waved overhead in a restless ocean of rose-tinted fire. Against the blue, stars were aglint with the twinkle of a million harbour lights. Below, lay the frost mist, white as foam, diaphanous as a veil, every floating icy particle aglimmer with star rays like spray in sunlight. Through the night air came the far howlings of the running wolf-pack. The little ermine, darting across the level with its black tail-tip marking ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the bell-flower; the elf seized it in his little diaphanous alabaster floral hands, waved it three times round his dazzling head, so that the little bell sent a peal round the hills, and then threw it upon the ground. It dilated immediately, took the shape of a galley with masts and yards, although ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... tenderest morning blush of virgin snow to the vinous evening flush upon the lowlands washed by the purple wave. The pure translucent vault never ceased to shift its chameleon-like hues, that ranged between the diaphanous azure of the zenith and the faintest rainbow green, a border-land where blue and yellow met and parted. The air felt soft and balmy; a holy calm was on the face of creation; all looked delicious after the rude north, and we acknowledged once ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... with a cheval de frise of bristling thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... mist wraith which on a cloudless day stretched across some mountain's breast, lies lightly upon the air, with diaphanous ends coming out of and going into nothingness; for in just such manner does the music fall across an Egyptian ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... lower spars of the shipping, and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset, portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth between either ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... the comment of Benjamin Keach, which gives both the conceit of the ancients and the endorsement of it at a comparatively recent era. "Pearls," naturalists tell us, "have a strange birth and original. Pliny saith, Shell fish is the wonderful geniture of a pearl congealed into a diaphanous stone, and the shell is called the mother of pearl. Now at a certain time of the year this shell fish opens itself, and takes in a certain moist dew, after which they grow big until they bring forth ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... reside in the slow condensation of a radiating mass of gas under the action of gravity, is wholly inadequate to explain the observed phenomena. If the old view were correct, the earlier history of a star, from the giant stage of a cool and diaphanous gas to the period of highest temperature, would be run through within eighty thousand years, whereas we have the best of evidence that many thousands of centuries would not suffice. Some other source of energy is imperatively ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... realistic superstition. They combined to form a marvellous picture—those contrasts of splendour and squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure as aether, golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into a diaphanous green which suggested a resection of Kaf, that unseen mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert, changed face twice a year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as Hope, beautified with infinite verdure and broad sheetings of rain-water. The vernal and autumnal shiftings of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... on reliable feminine authority, was one of the very few blondes whose complexions can carry off reds and yellows. This particular gown—I remember it perfectly—was of a dim, dull yellow—flounciful (if I may coin a word), diaphanous, expansive. I have not the least notion what fabric composed it; but scattered about it, in unexpected places, were diamond-shaped red things that I am credibly informed are called medallions. The general effect of it may be briefly characterised as grateful to the eye and ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... His clear diaphanous transparency of colouring is not used from lack of technical ability, but to approach more nearly to his ideal of celestial and divine visions, and succeed in a ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... semicircle there arose, towards the region away from the sun, two long luminous streaks which limited the tail. Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance seemed dark, very rare, and very diaphanous. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... fifth is that where Mars is; the sixth is that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have in itself, according ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... by the little fat director, only remarkable for a diamond flash-light in his shirt-front, and by Andrew, inordinately long and gawky, in his ill-fitting, short-sleeved evening suit, his ready made white tie already wandering in grievance towards a sympathetic ear. Women in dreams of diaphanous and exiguous raiment stared derisively at the trio as they passed their tables. Elodie stared back at them. Now, Lackaday, honest soul, had, not the remotest notion of what was wrong with her attire. In his eyes she was dressed like ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... as they could imagine the light of heaven—a pure lucent yellow as of the early primrose, but diaphanous and almost transparent, as though this, which seemed to them light, was itself in reality but an outer veil hiding the still greater glory behind. The curtain lifted but a span, and the lower rim of it curved ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... at supper time Kate's dark eyes shone with admiration and a lurking mischief. At the sight of Helen she clapped her hands delightedly. The younger girl's smart, tailored suit had made way for the daintiest of summer frocks, diaphanous, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... spray show dark against them. With both Falls the colour of the water is the ever- altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a great double rainbow, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists, gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Watteau. It would have been hard to find a happier or more expressive combination. And when Rousseau and republicanism had won the race, we find the ladies of the Directoire illustrating the national illusions with clinging and diaphanous draperies; and asserting their affinity with the high ideals of ancient Greece by wearing sandals instead of shoes, and rings on their bare white toes. The reaction from the magnificent formalism of court dress to this abrupt nudity ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... anterior with a small diaphanous spot near the base, below the median nervure; a larger one before the middle extending from the sub-costal to the radial nervure, divided by the median nervure into two unequal portions, the extremity of the cell marked by a crescent-shaped, metallic blue spot, beyond which are two diaphanous ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... of the adjacent sees, and the archbishops in their rich raiment of velvet and cloth of silver, carried in their hands tapers of perfumed wax; Oriental myrrh and aloes burned in golden censers, and veiled the lofty dome with a light and diaphanous vapour which gave an unearthly aspect to the building; the organ pealed forth its deep and thrilling tones; and amid this scene of excitement, splendour, and suffering, the Cardinal de Gondy celebrated the mass, and the Bishop of Aire delivered the funeral oration. ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... was still in mourning, a filmy and diaphanous kind of mourning, beautiful enough to placate the angel Azrael himself. A filmy and diaphanous creature was Mrs. Patton also—one could never have dreamed of so exquisite a black butterfly. She was very sweet and sympathetic, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... that diaphanous milord want with us?" exclaimed the Colonel, turning to assure himself that the horseman who had followed them from the bridge was the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... vapors, poured a rich and colorful light over the sea—it was a light without warmth. In the turquoise sky overhead, the moving clouds changed in hue from crimson to silver, and straggling flecks, like diaphanous ribbons, became stained with mottled dyes. Against the horizon, the arctic armada of eternally moving icebergs drifted slowly southward and, like the spectral ships of the long dead Norsemen who had braved these regions, ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... boyish. He was a benevolent creature. The responsive kindliness of his enquiring "How?" was beyond question genuine. Once more, in the warm and dark-glowing comfort of her home, the contrast between the masculine, thick rough overcoat and the feminine, diaphanous, useless kimono appealed to her soul. It seemed to justify, even to call for, confidence ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... a tiny little tapestried room, as neat and dainty as herself, with low walls hung with Imari plaques and with pretty little Swiss brackets bearing blue Kaga ware, or the pure white Coalport china. In a low chair beneath a red shaded standing lamp sat Ida, in a diaphanous evening dress of mousseline de soie, the ruddy light tinging her sweet childlike face, and glowing on her golden curls. She sprang up as her sister entered, and threw her ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blind man is sightless because, through so much weeping, there remains no more moisture, not even the crystalline and moisture through which, as a diaphanous medium, the visual ray was transmitted, and the external light and visible species were introduced, so that the heart became compressed because all the moist substance, whose office it is to keep united the various parts and opposites, was ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... now, those hills of my infancy (for it is they that call), with their faces upturned to the purple twilight, and the faint diaphanous figures of the fairies peering out from under the bracken to see if evening is come. I do not see upon their regal summits those desirable mansions, and highly desirable residences, which have lately been built for ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... fire to the hearts and turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in their cars—and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing neither ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to engage your fancy, to divert it awhile from Switzerland, by which you appear and partly on my account to be offended, I began with reflections upon England: I raised up another cloud in the region of them, light enough to be fantastic and diaphanous, and to catch some little irradiation from its western sun. Do not run after it farther; it has vanished already. Consider: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... compositions have a serene and limpid horizon, with the figures approaching it painted in clear, silvery hues, airy and diaphanous, while the forms below are more muscular, the flesh tints are deeper, and the whole of the foreground is often enveloped in shadow. Veronese had lit up the shadows, which, under his contemporaries, were growing gloomy. Tiepolo carries his art further ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... his work appears in even more extraordinary ways. Throughout he repeatedly offers himself as a victim to illustrate his great friend's wit, ill-humor, wisdom, affection, or goodness. He never spares himself, except now and then to assume a somewhat diaphanous anonymity. Without regard for his own dignity, he exhibits himself as humiliated, or drunken, or hypochondriac, or inquisitive, or resorting to petty subterfuge—anything for the accomplishment of his one main purpose. 'Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, 'it was not the wine that made your head ache, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... they do not glide like us, But walk in eerie paces; They're solid, not diaphanous, With arms! and legs!! ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... end of the house. Marcolina's window was still open; the pale, diaphanous gown showed up against the dark background of the room. Along the wide chestnut avenue they made their way on to the road, now completely in the shade. Leisurely, they walked up the slope skirting the garden wall. Where it ended, the vineyard began. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... that were beautiful in these sunny openings, but the ferns, mosses, orchids, and selaginellas, with the crimson-tipped dracaena, and the crimson-veined caladium, and the great red nepenthe with purple blotches on its nearly diaphanous pitchers, and another pitcher-plant of an epiphytal habit, with pea-green pitchers scrambling to a great height over the branches of the smaller trees. The beautiful tree-ferns themselves were loaded ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... that made them appear unnaturally large, and almost Dantesque in their mournful gleaming. Even the lips seemed shrunken, changed in their classic contour; and the ungloved hand that clasped the folds of lace across her bosom was wasted, wan, diaphanous. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of critics which rather finds the difficulty in picturing a life which has keen perceptions, robust emotions, and a solid surrounding all constructed in so diaphanous a material. Let us remember that everything depends upon its comparison with ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from their places and stream ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... hole rose rapidly to 42 degrees. Hence we may conclude what must be the heat in this solfatara at the depth of thirty or forty fathoms. The sulphur reduced into vapour is condensed into fine crystals, which however are not equal in size to those M. Dolomieu brought from Sicily. They are semi-diaphanous octahedrons, very brilliant on the surface, and of a conchoidal fracture. These masses, which will one day perhaps be objects of commerce, are constantly bedewed with sulphurous acid. I had the imprudence to wrap up a few, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance—that I am carried soft through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous, opal-tinted Dream. ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... striving to decipher a painted allegory of Venus and Mars, or Helen and Paris, or the countess and Francis—he could not decide precisely its purport—when she who had succeeded Chateaubriant floated into the room, dressed in some diaphanous stuff, a natural accompaniment to the other decorations; her dishabille a positive note of modesty amid the vivid colorings and graceful poses of those tributes to love with which Primaticcio and other Italian ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham |
