"Luminosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him thickly about when he regained consciousness—a darkness saved from utter black only by a faint luminosity that seemed to penetrate and be part of the ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... his overcoat pocket, intuitively closed around his automatic revolver. A dark silhouette was outlined against the gray luminosity cast up by the lights of Broadway, half a block from the window. Through the opening another belching flame shot forth, to be answered by the criminologist's weapon, barking like a miltraileuse. They heard ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him as on a rack.... And with that his will ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... be found in Rubens, Sarto, Guido Reni, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raffael, Michelangelo, or Trajan's Column. For further information consult "The Discourses" of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., whose recipes are made palatable by a quality infrequent in his dishes, luminosity. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... occupy the mid region of the cluster—the very locality near which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun. The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did he manage to explain its failure to be rendered visible by the incalculable host of glorious suns glaring in all directions about it? No doubt what he finally maintained was merely a centre of gravity ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the images was diminished in proportion as they were nearer the eye which saw them [Footnote 22. 23: Com'e provato. See Vol. II, Nos. 874-878 and 892-901], as it has been proved in the definition of the luminosity of the moon, and of our marine horizon when the sun's rays are reflected in it and the eye which receives the reflection is remote from ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... second place, the name heaven is applied to a body that participates in any property of the heavenly body, as sublimity and luminosity, actual or potential. Thus Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii) holds as one heaven all the space between the waters and the moon's orb, calling it the aerial. According to him, then, there are three heavens, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... The cloudy luminosity of the Milky Way had been resolved into a multitude of separate stars, disclosing the immensity of the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... irregularities in each case to the attraction of an invisible companion, the period of revolution of Sirius being about half a century. Later he said: "I adhere to the conviction that Procyon and Sirius form real binary systems, consisting of a visible and an invisible star. There is no reason to suppose luminosity an essential quality of cosmical bodies. The visibility of countless stars is no argument against the invisibility of countless others." This grand conception led Peters to compute more accurately the orbit, and to assign the ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... Tests specially carried out by one of the authors to determine some of the figures required in the ensuing table show that ordinary paraffin or "wax" candles usually emit about 20 per cent. more light than that given by the standard spermaceti candle, whose luminosity is the unit by which the intensity of other lights is reckoned in Great Britain; and also that the light so emitted by domestic candles is practically unaffected by the sizes—"sixes," "eights," or "twelves"—burnt. In the sizes examined the ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... The palpable difference of luminosity between the sun and the planets, which, as they are all made of the very same materials, and by the same process, according to this theory, ought to be equally self-luminous, is in itself a self-evident refutation of the nebular hypothesis, or of any other process of creation by mere ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... This brilliant luminosity of the southern hemisphere, no one that ever gazes at the Full Moon in a cloudless sky, can help noticing. Ardan, who had always particularly admired it, now hailed it as an old friend, and almost exhausted breath, imagination and vocabulary in ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... fact that the Palace contains little American art earlier than 1905, American artists are showing marked individualities, even in their acceptance of popular precepts. The virile men of the day love luminosity; it dominates all else, and marks their canvases with light; they restrain the too bold stroke of the radical Impressionist, but outline with firmness, so that details are more easily imagined by the observer, even when an expected ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... although there is a good deal of half-shade there are scarcely any cast shadows except on the floor; but the light on the white walls in the outside gallery is so reflected into the cast shadows that they are extremely faint. The luminosity of this part of the sketch is greatly enhanced by the contrast of the dark legs of the bench and the shadows in the roof. The warm glow of all this portion is contrasted by the grey door ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... the battle in my brain? Not so; far away I could see faint corruscations of sparks; star shells; coloured fire balls from pistols; searchlights playing up and down the coast. Our fellows were being hard beset to hold on to what they had won; there, where the horizon stood out with spectral luminosity. What a contrast; the direct fear, joy, and excitement of the fighting men out there in the searchlights and the dull anguish of waiting here in the darkness; imagining horrors; praying the Almighty our men may be vouchsafed valour to stick it through the night; wondering, waiting until the wire ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... silvery light was then displayed as star-dust scattered over the black background of the sky. It was observed that though the individual stars were too small to be seen severally without optical aid, yet such was their incredible number that the celestial radiance produced that luminosity with which every ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... northern night. There was a clearness in the still frosty air which gave to the starry host a vivid luminosity, and seemed to reveal an infinite variety of deep distances instead of the usual aspect of bright spots on a black surface. Besides the light they shed, the aurora was shooting up into the zenith with a brilliancy ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... ofttimes, dwelt on the luminosity of the atmosphere in southern and south-western France. To-night not a breath was stirring, the outer radiance was the radiance of stars only, yet so limpid, so lustrous the air that cloudless moonlight could hardly have made every object seem clearer, more distinct. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... heated in a water-bath, and the vapours condensed by a Liebig's condenser. In the case of phosphorus the condenser should be of glass, and the process of distillation conducted in the dark, so that the luminosity of the ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... Coggia's comet, as seen through Newell's large refracting telescope at Ferndene, Gateshead, and which he described as having a head like "a fan-shaped projection of light, with ear-like appendages, at each side, which sympathetically complemented each other at every change either of form or luminosity." ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... darkened values, and not to hues or chromas. Yet one writer says, "This yellow shades into green," which is certainly a change of hue, and then speaks of "a brighter shade" in spite of his evident intention to suggest a stronger chroma, which is neither a shade nor brighter luminosity. ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... associated with fungi that are of greater interest than those which relate to luminosity. The fact that fungi under some conditions are luminous has long been known, since schoolboys in our juvenile days were in the habit of secreting fragments of rotten wood penetrated by mycelium, in order to exhibit their luminous properties in the dark, and thus astonish their more ignorant or ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... idea that as a person progresses on the upward path his causal body, which is the determining limit of his aura, distinctly increases in size as well as in luminosity and purity of colour. Many of us know from experience that the aura of a pupil who has already made considerable advance on the Path is very much larger than that of one who is but just setting his foot ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... visible, behind the meshes of the wire-gauze cover. The visitors, seeing plainly in the dark night, must have been able to see her by the vague luminosity of what for us is the dark. What would happen if I imprisoned her in an opaque receptacle? Would not such a receptacle arrest or set free the informing effluvia ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... hardness, flatness, and rigidity that are desirable you can get with the bristle brush. When you work too much with sables, the overworking brings a waxy and woodeny surface, which is against all the qualities of atmosphere and luminosity, and of freshness and ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy to death, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still, taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, by supplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us really to get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemn argument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such a chrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... was not all. About half-an-hour after this singular luminosity of the atmosphere first became apparent, and before the startled seamen had recovered their self-possession, in an instant, without any premonition whatever, there appeared at each mast-head and yardarm, at the jibboom-end—in ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... his research papers. The ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... nucleus they were in semi-darkness—not twilight, for any ray that succeeded in penetrating was dazzlingly brilliant, and the shadows, their own included, were inky black. As they approached the farther side and the sunlight decreased, they found that a diffused luminosity pervaded everything. It was sufficiently bright to enable them to see the dark side of the meteoric masses, and, on emerging from the nucleus in total darkness, they found the shadow stretching thousands of miles before them into space. "I now understand," said Bearwarden, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... "picture is the logical development of light." Monticelli before him had said: "In a painting one must sound the C. Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, all the great ones have sounded the C." His C, his key-note, was the magic touch of luminosity that dominated his picture. Like Berlioz, he adored colour for colour's sake. He had a touch all Venetian in his relation of tones; at times he went in search of chromatic adventures, returning with the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of our northern middle latitudes, in summer, where the Milky Way breaks up into vast sheets of nebulous luminosity, lying over and between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius, there is a remarkable assemblage of "coal-sacks,'' though none is of great size. One of them, near a conspicuous star-cluster in Scorpio, M80, is interesting for having been the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... children sat there, a pale light began to blossom forth on the sky before them among the stars and extended a flat arc through them. It had a greenish tinge which gradually worked downward. But the arc became ever brighter until the stars paled in it. It sent a luminosity also into other regions of the heavens which shed greenish beams softly and actively among the stars. Then, sheaves of vari-colored light stood in burning radiance on the height of the arc like the spikes of a crown. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Tarsis, and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her father, are typical imaginary classic compositions and variations on the artist's favourite theme—the effects of sunlight on an atmosphere of varying luminosity and on the limpid, rippling waves of the sea. We now come to the grand monarque of the arts at Paris during the century, Charles Lebrun (1619-1690), founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that finally eclipsed the old Painters' ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be where we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areas representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter than the others—they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue, Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I expected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole lot bigger than I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... some prospect of the luminosity excited in a vacuum tube by the alternating currents from a dynamo or an induction coil becoming an illuminant. Crookes has obtained exquisitely beautiful glows by the phosphorescence of gems and other minerals in a vacuum ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... extent of the nebula, as seen in a moderately good telescope. The nebula is of a faint bluish colour, impossible to represent in a drawing. Its brightness is much greater in some places than in others; the central parts are, generally speaking, the most brilliant, and the luminosity gradually fades away as the edge of the nebula is approached. In fact, we can hardly say that the nebula has any definite boundary, for with each increase of telescopic power faint new branches can be seen. There seems to be an empty space in the nebula immediately ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Mantles. For a long time, the only gas flame used was that in which the luminosity resulted in heating particles of carbon to incandescence. Recently, however, that has been widely replaced by use of a Bunsen flame upon an incandescent mantle, such as the Welsbach. The principle of the incandescent mantle is very simple. ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion[Brit], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor[obs3], fulgidity[obs3]; dazzlement[obs3], resplendence, transplendency[obs3]; luminousness &c. adj.; luminosity; lucidity; renitency|, nitency[obs3]; radiance,, radiation; irradiation, illumination. actinic rays, actinism; Roentgen-ray, Xray; photography, heliography; photometer &c. 445. [Science of light] optics; photology[obs3], photometry; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... power of clear judgment. It was just the combination calculated to lead a spirited and brave people through such a trying crisis as the American Revolution. His star was not dark and bright by turns—did not reveal itself in uncertain and fitful glimmerings—but shone with a full and steady luminosity across the troubled night of a nation's beginning. Under these broad and beneficent rays the Ship of State was guided, through a sea of chaos, to safe anchorage. The voyage across those seven eventful years was one that tried men's souls. Often, appalling ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... which we have no exact equivalent, the dominant note of the Italian sky, when the sun is well up, being its intense luminosity. ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... disagreeable. Whether to manhood hoary-headed in wisdom, or to childhood yet in soft-brained ignorance, darkness is an unpleasant fact, to be got over in the best way possible—to be got over at all events, and at any cost, and to be turned into luminosity by every expedient that can be used. Wax-tapers, to throw their soft, luxurious light on my lady's delicate face, as she lies like a beautiful piece of marble-work on her dreamy couch; shaded lamps for the grave merchant, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... quietly in a grim farm-house, dying of ennui, and here you are in an establishment that ought to be the imperial residence of an Eskimo chief. Possibly you have crude petroleum for soup and whipped salad-oil for dessert. I declare, a man living here ought to attain a high candle-power of luminosity. It’s perfectly immense.” He stared and laughed. “And hidden treasure, and night attacks, and young virgins in the middle distance,—yes, I’d really ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... associated, and a beauty devoid of coarseness. We remember well the power it possessed of attracting the eye from a distance; and how, on near approach, it threw nearly all other pigments into the shade. It has in truth a lustrous luminosity not often to be met with, added to a total absence of rankness or harshness. A simple original colour, containing no base but cadmium, it is of perfect permanence, being uninjured by exposure to light, air or damp, by sulphuretted hydrogen, or by admixture. Having in common with cadmium ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... hardness that belongs to real precious stones; for indeed she shone like a jewel, thanks to the lustre of her eyes in artificial light. Whether from humidity or some quality of their substance, I do not know, but they reflected the rays as I have rarely seen eyes do; and in their luminosity her whole face seemed to have part, so that her presence had an effect of warm brilliancy that lured and dazzled you. To see her emerge from the darkness of the Faringfield coach, or from her sedan-chair, into the bright light of open doorways and of lanterns held by servants, was to ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the day within our hut, the elements without seemed desirous of celebrating the occasion with equal emphasis and greater decorum. The eastern sky was massed with swaying auroral light, the most vivid and beautiful display that I had ever seen—fold on fold the arches and curtains of vibrating luminosity rose and spread across the sky, to slowly fade and yet again ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... roof, and she could maintain her position, although she could scarcely breathe in the keen frigidity. Snow had fallen, deeper than she had ever seen. With it had come that strange quality of visibility that seems to appertain to a sheeted world like an inherent luminosity; or was it perchance some vague diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... were due principally to the greater distance of the fainter stars, then the brightness of a star would enable us to form a more or less approximate idea of its distance. But the accumulated researches of the past seventy years show that the stars differ so enormously in their actual luminosity that the apparent brightness of a star affords us only a very imperfect indication of its distance. While, in the general average, the brighter stars must be nearer to us than the fainter ones, it by no means follows that a very bright ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... human eye there appears in space a luminous sphere that in its appointed path goes on unceasingly. The wise men are not agreed whether this apparition is merely of gaseous composition or is a solid body supplied extraneously with heat and luminosity, inexhaustibly; some argue that its existence will be limited to the period of one thousand, or five hundred thousand, or one million years; others declare that it will roll on until the end of time. Perhaps the nature of that luminous sphere will never be truly known to mankind; ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Above the plain a myriad of stars twinkled. The moon came out from under the earth and began to satiate the darkness with light, and on the west with the waning and pale twilight extended the zodiacal luminosity. The air was transformed into a great luminous gulf. The ever-increasing luster submerged the region. The palanquin, which remained forgotten on the King's back, and the tents glistened, just as whitewashed ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... told him. "That luminosity in action means something—some conversion of energy, electrical, perhaps, to carry them on lines of force of which we know nothing as yet. That's a guess—but they do it. You and I ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... close bonds to-night. After a while, as it darkened, he rose from the fallen log upon which he had been sitting, and began to follow the little stream, still wrapped in far-away thoughts. The twilight had settled into a night that was moonless, but had that luminosity often seen on clear nights in late autumn. He could see all about him, even in the wood. As he reached another somewhat open space, coming upon it silently from behind a thick growth of underbrush, with only the narrow cow-path to cut it, a sound arrested him, and, lying flat ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... courageous eyes, and her figure was slender with well-balanced fullness. The strong, fine lines of her features were accentuated by the darker more deeply colored complexion which the years had given her; the smile of her widely sweeping lips was very sweet; an almost enigmatical youth in the dewy luminosity of her brown eyes softened and mellowed everything again. And yet she also had the round fullness of cheek, the strong-willed chin of ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... zodiacal light; it can, therefore, be observed successfully in the temperate latitudes only by patient and long-continued watching. But in tropical regions, the deep azure of the sky, and the brief twilight, give it a distinctness and luminosity never witnessed elsewhere. In Egypt, we are told it is clearly 'visible every night, except when the light of the moon is too great, from January to June;' and in India its appearance is described as that of 'a pyramid of faint aurora-borealis like ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... strange cloud and singular light upon the green prairie, and a luminosity in the sky, drew Carley to the platform of her car, which was the last of the train. There she stood, gripping the iron gate, feeling the wind whip her hair and the iron-tracked ground speed from under her, spellbound and stricken at the sheer ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... commanding officer could let his thoughts get away—I won't tell you where. Somewhere where there was no choice but between truth and death. But thick weather, though it blinded one, brought no such relief. Mist is deceitful, the dead luminosity of the fog is irritating. It seems that you ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... receivers were shouting the late news; on the great power boards dials and light signals stood out in the glow of the amylite tubes. On a rotary stage a thousand feet above the ship a giant searchlight, visible for a thousand miles, moved its shaft of dazzling luminosity across ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... nocturne in the shape of a T—one pier of the bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the fleeting river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance, and all is so obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how there could have been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic significance, but of equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as "the Cremorne ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... assigned to it, the probability is that it was not a gem at all, but one of those counterfeits of glass, in producing which STRABO relates that the artists of Alexandria attained the highest possible perfection (1. xvi. c. 2. sec. 25). Its luminosity by night is of course a fiction, unless, indeed, like the emerald pillar in the temple of Hercules at Tyre, which HERODOTUS describes as "shining brightly by night," it was a hollow cylinder into which a lamp could ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... that finds occasional hysterical utterance. The Monroe Doctrine, as popularly apprehended and indorsed, is a rather nebulous generality, which has condensed about the Isthmus into a faint point of more defined luminosity. To those who will regard, it is the harbinger of the day, incompletely seen in the vision of the great discoverer, when the East and the West shall be brought into closer communion by the realization of the strait that baffled his eager search. But, with the strait, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... trail at night," replied Carpenter when I asked him about it, "but in daylight, there is nothing to see. The slight luminosity of the gasses is hidden by the sun's rays. We may be able to see it when we get out in space beyond the layer, but I don't know. We have arrived at the bottom of the layer now, I believe. At any rate, we are ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... structure and the brain with its still more complicated structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower. Properly speaking, science ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... The illuminant is most commonly an oil-lamp, or an acetylene gas jet, or a cylinder of lime heated to intense luminosity by an oxy-hydrogen flame. The natural combustion of hydrogen is attended by a great heat, and when the supply of oxygen is artificially increased the temperature of the flame rises enormously. The nozzle of an oxy-hydrogen jet has an interior pipe connected with the cylinder holding ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... supplemented its account by recording the falling, just before dawn of the 11th, of an extraordinarily brilliant meteor that flamed with a curious red and green light as it entered the earth's atmosphere. This meteor did not burn itself out, but fell, still retaining its luminosity, from a point near the zenith, ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... eyes are clear, whose eyes are kind, whose eyes are full of pity and of sweetness—O Thou Lovely One, with thy beautiful face, with thy beautiful eye—O Thou Pure One, whose luminosity is without spot, whose knowledge is without shado—O Thou forever shining like that Sun whose glory no power may repel—Thou Sun-like in the course of Thy mercy, pourest ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was the creation of a master architect who had looked out over the ranges of fated mankind and looked also into hell. Thomas ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... grayer luminosity about them than he had at first suspected?—wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of sunlight falling upon a ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they were to describe enormous geometric figures, drawn in characters of reflecting luminosity, among which was the proposition regarding the 'square of the hypothenuse,' commonly called the 'Ass's Bridge' by the French. 'Every intelligent being,' said the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, do they exist, will respond by a similar figure; ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the Earth becomes 'self-luminous', and that as a planet, besides the light which it receives from the central body, the Sun, it shows itself capable in itself of developing light. The intensity of the terrestrial light, or, rather the luminosity which is diffused, exceeds, in cases of the brightest colored radiation toward the zenith, the light of the Moon in its first quarter. Occasionally, as on the 7th of January, 1831, printed characters could be read without difficulty. This almost uninterrupted development of light p 202 in ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... that there are mighty disturbances in the sidereal heavens which entirely negative the idea of "conservation" as a geognostic law. But the phenomena of variable stars, with all their apparent irregularity of motion and fluctuations in luminosity, are now being traced to definite and well-determined laws of motion, if not of light, while the theory of extinguished and disappearing stars belongs exclusive to the age of Tycho Brahe. Where there is one self-luminious body (or sun) in the interstellary spaces, there are probably ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... is not a voluminous document: it contains only fifty-one brief articles, which the poet Basho compares to the luminosity of the full moon. It has been excellently translated and annotated by Mr. Consul-General J. C. Hall in the "Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan" (Vol. XXXIV, Part I), and Mr. J. Murdoch, in his admirable History of Japan, summarizes its provisions ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the flame something which is not part of the flame, but is ascending and drawing the flame upwards. Now, I am going to imitate the sunlight, by applying the voltaic battery to the electric lamp. You now see our sun, and its great luminosity; and by placing a candle between it and the screen, we get the shadow of ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... luminosity, resplendence, radiance, refulgence, effulgence, glow; aptness, precocity, acuteness, sharpness, discernment; vivacity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... many minor points in which there seems to be an imperfect relation between Nature's effects and those of pigments, we will briefly refer to the great discrepancy occasioned by the luminosity of light. In all the lower effects of light, in the illumination of Nature and the revelation of colored surfaces, in the exquisite play and power of reflected light and color, and in the depth and richness of these when transmitted, we find a noble and complete response on the palette. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... things rushed over the thrilled little secretary with an effect, as already described, of a certain bewilderment, that left no single, dominant impression. What remained with him, perhaps, most vividly, he says, was the quality of the big blue eyes, their luminosity, their far-seeing expression, their kindliness. They were the eyes of the true visionary, but in such a personality they proclaimed the mystic who had retained his health of soul and body. Mr. Skale ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... tints, was visibly narrowing. They all knew that presently it would become a mere gorge, a vast indentation in the mountain-side. The weird vistas across the gorge were visible how, craggy steeps, and deep woods filled with moonlight, with that peculiar untranslated intendment which differentiates its luminosity in the wilderness from the lunar glamour 'of cultivated Scenes—something weird, melancholy, eloquent of a meaning addressed to the soul, but which the senses cannot entertain or ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 2. And fans him with her moonlight wings. See Bion (p. 65), 'and another, from behind him, with his wings is fanning Adonis.' The epithet 'moonlight' may indicate either delicacy of colour, or faint luminosity—rather the latter, ...
— Adonais • Shelley |
