"Transparency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' did not excite him very much. There had been so many grave ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of our own horses,— which, running on a sandy margin of the road, made but little disturbance,—there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the earth prevailed the same majestic peace; and, in spite of all that the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... approached the shores they were delighted by the beauty and grandeur of the forests; the variety of unknown fruits on the trees which overhung the shores; the purity and suavity of the atmosphere, and the crystal transparency of the seas which bathe these islands. On landing, Columbus threw himself upon his knees, kissed the earth, and returned thanks to God with tears of joy. His example was followed by his companions, whose breasts, indeed, were full to overflowing. Columbus, then ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... light of that terrible eye came gleaming through it, as if it had been of the clearest crystal. He ran to another, then to a third, fourth, fifth—tenth. In vain! Interpose what he might, still was it all as airy transparency between himself and that piercing glance. There are X-rays for the soul, as well as for the body. He turned his back upon it; there it was still! Look where he would—in the depths above—and the eye was ever before him, its calm and terrible look unchanged. Yet it did not ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... but a sketch of fancy. The investigations of modern writers have entirely thrown down the scaffolding on which the airy fabric, so delightful to poets and moralists, reposed. The departing Emperor stands no longer in a transparency robed in shining garments. His transfiguration is at an end. Every action, almost every moment of his retirement, accurately chronicled by those who shared his solitude, have been placed before our eyes, in the most felicitous ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... relations, the man who has an inconsistent wife, or the husband who is minotaurized are simply husbands as they appear in Moliere. Well, then, O goddess of modern taste, do not these expressions seem to you characterized by a transparency chaste enough for anybody?" ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... in love with the verses of the new poets. She found such enchantments and such disillusions in the fragile music of new poetry, written so happily and so elusively, with a lightness and transparency like those of the dresses that ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... disclosed in words my love to Blanche. Through the lucid transparency of Presence, I believed that she knew all and comprehended all, without the aid of those blundering symbols. We never even spoke of the future; for all time, past and to come, seemed to converge and centre and repose in that radiant present. In the enchantment of my new life, I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cases the exudate within the cornea begins to disappear within a week or 10 days, the eye becomes clearer and regains its transparency, until it eventually is fully restored. In unfavorable cases blood vessels form and are seen to traverse the affected part from periphery to center, vision becomes entirely lost, and permanent opacity (albugo or leucoma) remains. When it arises ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to a wild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony, which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria was still a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. In the absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, an infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparkling clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... fine flour, and is something between hail and snow. This never falls during summer in southerly countries. In the Andes hailstones from five to seven lines in diameter are sometimes formed of layers of different degrees of transparency, so as to permit rings of ice to be separated from them with a very slight blow. In Orkney, hailstones have fallen as finely polished as marbles, of a greyish white colour, not unlike fragments of light-coloured marble. Hailstones are often so hard and elastic, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... probably the first substance ever noticed as occurring in a regular form, and the ancients believing it to be water permanently congealed by extreme cold, from its transparency, called it Krustallos, signifying ice; but in time the word became used without attention being paid to its original meaning, and was applied to all the regular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... from the excessive cold of the night, the fishermen build small houses of ice on the river, which are arranged in a semicircular form, and extend near a quarter of a mile, and which, from the blazing fires within, have a brilliant transparency and vivid lustre, not easy either to imagine or to describe: the starry semicircle looks like an immense crescent of diamonds, on which the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... on Red River, in the first and only expedition across the immense prairies. They were some six or eight months on the road, and suffered incredible hardships for want of water and provisions. Our Yankee was a stout man when we saw him, but he told us that he was a perfect transparency when he first arrived at the Mexican settlements—so poor, in fact, that according to his own account, 'a person might have read the New-England Primer through ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... feet in circumference. On looking at this column from the side opposite the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light pouring down in a long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice made the whole appear as if it were set in a frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of the light penetrating through the mass at its ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Lenox answered, smiling at the characteristic suggestion. Yet his eyes, half-blinded with snow-glare, peered anxiously southward, and detected a change; a faint hint of transparency, as though light ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... repose of a winter landscape, enjoyable in pictures, or on skates, otherwise nipping. . . . Mental directness, of no greater breadth than her principal feature, was the character it expressed; and candour of spirit shone through the transparency she was, if that mild taper could be said to shine in proof of a vitality rarely notified to the outer world by the opening of her mouth; chiefly then, though not malevolently to command: as the portal of some ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a system are not, properly speaking, works in color at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... personages carried in his right hand a sword; the second, two golden keys; the third, a pair of scales; the fourth, a spade: and, in order to aid sluggish minds which would not have seen clearly through the transparency of these attributes, there was to be read, in large, black letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade, MY NAME IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS CLERGY; on the hem of the woolen ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... negatives which may be passed over in an album without provoking a remark will, if printed as transparencies and thrown on the screen, call forth expressions of the warmest admiration; and justly so, for no paper print can do that full justice to a really good negative which a transparency does. This difference is more conspicuous in these days of dry gelatine plates and handy photographic apparatus, when many of our most interesting negatives are taken on quarter or 5 x 4 plates the small size of which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... stumped a chunky woman, crowding fifty. She was in a worse state of dishabille. She hadn't quite made it to bed and was still in her slip. Her stockings had been unhitched from her garters and hung in slack transparency around her fat calves, like the sloughed-off skin of ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... of his heart that others were as gullible as himself, the fugitive sailor sought habitually to hide his identity beneath some temporary disguise of greater or less transparency. That of farm labourer was perhaps his favourite choice. The number of seamen so disguised, and employed on farms within ten miles of the coast between Hull and Whitby prior to the sailing of the Greenland ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... "There is a kind of fine dust, or something like that, which dims the bark; but, when you put on oil or varnish, there is a sort of transparency given to the outside coating, which brings the natural color of the ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... to leave, at last, this extraordinary stream on which we had sojourned so long, enjoying abundance of excellent water in the heart of a desert country. From the sparkling transparency of this water, its undiminished current, sustained without receiving any tributary throughout a course of 660 miles, and especially from its being salt in some places and fresh at others, it seems probable that the river, when in that reduced state, is chiefly supported by springs. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... also be shown that the said document was a forgery, the result of a prearranged plan, devised by those who had been lifelong enemies of Hugh Mainwaring and the contestant, to defraud the latter of his rights, and to obtain possession of the Mainwaring estate; and that the transparency of the device in bringing the so-called will to light at that particular time and under those particular circumstances was only ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... lesser hills, dim black forests, and steel-blue loops of a far-winding water. Here and there long, level strata of pallid mist seemed to support themselves on the tree-tops, their edges fading off into the startling transparency that comes upon the air with the first of dawn. But that was in the lower world. Up on the solitary summit of White Face the daybreak had arrived. The jagged crest of the peak shot sudden radiances of flame-crimson, then bathed itself ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... skill in writing, he would have been as successful in the one art as in the other. From early life it was his great ambition to be not merely a fine but a forcible writer. He did not seek splendor of diction, but that perspicuity, that transparency of expression which would convey the thought most directly ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... which can only be insured by careful gauging. In selecting the E string, choose those that are most transparent; the seconds and thirds, as they are made with several threads, are seldom very clear. The firsts never have more than a few threads in them, and hence, absence of transparency in their case denotes inferior material. Before putting on the first string, in particular, in order to test its purity it will be well to follow Le Roy's advice, which is to hold between the fingers of each hand a ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... that poured downwards from the roof. The gilded rafters, the smooth inlaid marble pillars, the rich hangings of the windows, the jewelled candlesticks on the altars, the pictures, the statues, the bronzes, the mosaics, each and all glowed with a steady and luxurious transparency absolutely intoxicating to the eye. Not a trace of wear, not a vestige of tarnish now appeared on any object. Each portion of the nave to which the attention was directed appeared too finely, spotlessly radiant, ever to have been touched by mortal hands. Entranced ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... of character is held by many thoughtful men for what Coleridge asserted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of glass. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that the perfection of fine and noble manners the peculiar province of feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste and lustrous exuberance ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of Glass: every one is familiar with most of the properties of this curious substance; its transparency, hardness, destitution of colour, and stability under ordinary circumstances: to these obvious qualities we may add those which especially adapt it to the use of the chemist, namely, that it is unaffected by most acids or other fluids contained within it. At certain temperatures it becomes more ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... in a photographic camera is perfect lenses. They should be achromatic, and the utmost transparency should be obtained; and under the closest inspection of the glass not the slightest wavy appearance, or dark spot should be detected; and a curvature which as much as possible prevents spherical aberration should be secured. The effect produced by this ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... internal surface between which there is a space, the body cavity; daphneae are transparent and can be studied under the microscope while living. Metschnikoff observed that certain of them in the aquarium gradually lost their transparency and died, and examining these he found they were attacked by a species of fungus having long, thin spores. These spores were taken into the intestine with other food; they penetrated the thin wall of the intestine, passed ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... head and his arms and his legs almost as clearly as though he had been made of glass. This was so surprising in itself that when Davy presently discovered that he was made of beautiful, clear lemon candy, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, as explaining his transparency. He was neatly dressed in a sort of tunic of writing-paper, with a cocked hat of the same material, and he had under his arm a large book, with the words "HOLE-KEEPER'S VACUUM" printed on the cover. This curious-looking creature was ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... it consisted of fibres. This fibrous construction became still more distinct to the light by adding some caustic alcali to the water; as the adhering mucus was first eroded, and the hair-like fibres remained floating in the vessel. Nor does the degree of transparency of the retina invalidate this evidence of its fibrous structure, since Leeuwenhoek has shewn, that the crystalline humour itself consists of fibres. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... turn and face the wave and wait for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw, wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and gold ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Author, as the muddy water of a torrent which has ravaged the plains, coming to rest, and diffusing itself over some low grounds out of its course, deposits there the slime it has taken up, and, resuming its wonted transparency, reflects, with its own shores, the verdure of the earth and the light of heaven. Thus does solitude recruit the powers of the body as well as those of the mind. It is among hermits that are found the men who carry ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... in the medical section. I shall be able satisfactorily to verify the statement that science and art have reached exactly the same result. First however I will present the examples from the poets according to their comprehensibility and their transparency. I begin with ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... laid open the blemishes of his nature gave security for its honesty. "The cleanness and purity of one's mind," says Pope, "is never better proved than in discovering its own faults, at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... artists. A Van der Heyden (an old New York name, by the way), surpassed anything I know, in its atmosphere. Poussin, and our own artist Cole, excel in this high merit, but this picture of Van der Heyden has a cold, gray transparency that seems actually to have transferred a Dutch atmosphere to ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... As a transparency on some night of public rejoicing, seen by common day, with the lamps from within removed—even such would the Psalms be to me uninterpreted by the Gospel. O honoured Mr. Hurwitz! Could I but make you feel what grandeur, what magnificence, what an everlasting ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Love? Ought she not to hold it apart, and to shield it with her hand to deaden its brightness? Moreover, that would have lighted the picture in a striking way. These good people do not know that the eyelids have a kind of transparency; they have never seen a mother coming in the night to look at her child in the cradle, with a lamp in her hand, and fearful of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... an old baronial castle; and the occupant of the room was in keeping with his surroundings. He lay on his couch, staring at her with sunken eyes, a picturesque-looking old man, with a complexion of bleached transparency; a white head, covered by a velvet skull-cap, and a wasted form, wrapped in a dressing—gown of embroidered Oriental silk. He looked both sad and suffering, and Nan recognised as much with a pang of regret for all the hard terms she had lavished upon his want of hospitality. Yes, indeed! he looked ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hung low in the sky, a sulky blue cloud. Beneath it, the sea, still unruffled, was of a dense blue that, so it seemed, would have been black altogether but for its transparency and the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... and that which you seek: they obtrude themselves; they monopolize your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half- revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion a dog or a boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys,— transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless quality that is akin to trees and growths and the inarticulate forces of nature. With him you are alone, and yet have company; you are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature stream through him and around him; he is ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... of the applications and uses of water, the variety of its forms—its frozen state in that of ice, its fluid state in that of a liquid, its aeriform state in that of clouds and other modes of atmospheric suspension—all these, together with its transparency and cleansing power make it a most appropriate emblem of DIVINE TRUTH. As such, water is much spoken of by the prophets in the Old Testament, and by our Lord in the New. I will here quote some ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... occur abundantly in our present seas; and their shells are present in some numbers in the ooze which is found at great depths in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, being easily recognised by their exquisite shape, their glassy transparency, the general presence of longer or shorter spines, and the sieve-like perforations in the walls. Both in Barbadoes and in the Nicobar islands occur geological formations which are composed of the flinty skeletons ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... know what a nice place it is," he added, with a transparency which did no harm. "Yes, you're right. The devil had something to do with my coming here. Match-making old women are ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20] there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... present pontificate these have been generally held in the Hall of Beatifications, a magnificent room with a tribune, above the portico of Saint Peter's, turned into a chapel for the occasion, with innumerable candles and lamps, the transparency of the beatified person, called the Gloria, and standards on which are painted representations of miracles. The last of these ceremonies was held in Saint Peter's, with closed doors, but in the presence of an enormous concourse, with the greatest pomp, the whole of the Noble Guard ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... never mingle, but as matter, the glass is less opaque than the walls. The mortal mind through which Truth appears most vividly is that 295:21 one which has lost much materiality - much error - in order to become a better transparency for Truth. Then, like a cloud melting into thin vapor, it no longer ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... thing in nature or art to news, and commonly imparts to it so much of his own peculiar character, that it loses all identity with the subjects to which it originally belonged. One scarcely knows which to admire most about this man, the atmospheric transparency of his motives, for he is so disinterested as seldom even to think of paying for a dinner when travelling, and yet so conscientious as always to say something obliging of the tavern as soon as he gets home—his rigid regard to facts; or the exquisite ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the consoling beauty which the earth offers to a lonely heart. That serene content which she had learned to call happiness had filled her being until the dark canopy was lifted and the waters took back their transparency under a cloudless sky. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... where the Channel of St. Mary enters this lake to the furthest extremity is 240 miles, the greatest breadth is 220, the circumference about 1000; the surface is only 32 feet lower than that of Superior; in depth and in pure transparency the waters of this lake are not surpassed by its great neighbor. Parallel to the north shore runs a long, narrow peninsula called Cabot Head, which, together with a chain of islands, shuts in the upper waters so as almost to form a separate and distinct lake. The Great Manitoulin Island, the largest ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... as his heels were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier. He had thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he could see Bulmer's body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid halo over the woods and the wall. He was haunted also with the hint, which somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all had ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... Terror flashed, but with it flashed also wonder and delight—the audacity of unreflecting courage—and more—even a breathless worship of the powers, knowledge and forces that lifted for him in that little bedroom the vast Transparency that hides from ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... "the transparent man," an exhibitionist, showing curious deformity of the long bones and atrophy of the extremities. He derived his name from the remarkable transparency of his deformed members to electric light, due to porosity of the bones and deficiency of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... fore-cabin was washed and cleaned up till the Ripolin paint and the brass shone with equal brilliance; Ronne decorated the workroom with signal flags, and the good old "Happy Christmas" greeted us in a transparency over the door of the saloon. Inside Nilsen was busily engaged, showing great talents as a decorator. The gramophone was rigged up in my cabin on a board hung from the ceiling. A proposed concert of piano, violin, and mandolin had to be abandoned, as the piano was altogether ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... as long as that of the short- styled; the stigma of the former is globular and closely beset with papillae, whilst that of the short-styled is smooth and depressed on the apex. The pollen- grains of the two forms differ in size and transparency as before, but not in shape. The fertility of the two legitimate to that of the two illegitimate unions is by the first standard as 100 to 72; and by the second standard as ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the mountains. they are the same of those found in the upper part of the Missouri, but are not so abundant in the Columbia as on that river. we never saw this fish below the mountains but from the transparency and coldness of the Kooskooske I should not doubt it's existing in that stream as low as it's junction with the S E. branch of the Columbia.- The bottle nose is the same with that before mentioned on the Missouri and is found exclusively within ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... In swollen legs and thighs, where the resistance to pressure is considerable, the tendency to transparency in the skin not obvious, and where the alteration of posture occasions but little alteration in the state of distension, the cure cannot be ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... Burton had for some months shown signs of bodily decay; and he now daily grew weaker. His eyes, though still fierce and penetrating, were sunk into hollow cavities. His body was emaciated, his hands were thin to transparency, his voice was sometimes inarticulate, and he could hardly walk without support. Still, there seemed no immediate cause for anxiety, and, as will be seen from the following letter [628] (15th October ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... exploit the undertaking for the benefit of some private interest; here it is natural that the whole body of members, who are interested in the successful conduct of the business, should incessantly and attentively watch the behaviour of the officials they have elected; and in view of the perfect transparency of all the business transactions in the free community, secret practices and crooked ways—those inevitable expedients of dishonour—are not to be thought of. In a word, the form of labour organisation corresponding to the higher stage of civilisation proves itself to be infinitely superior ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Eden as Eden was before the devil got in. Without a note of courtship or coquetry love ran ever more and more smoothly, growing hourly and receiving each accession as we have seen the Mississippi receive Red River—merely by deepening its own flow—but, unlike the Mississippi, gaining in transparency as it gained in ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... came from springs in the immediate vicinity, and the rest from a very pure lake half a mile distant. The water derived from the lake was thoroughly aerated by its passage over a steep rocky bed. The transparency of the water in the pond was so great that a pin could be seen at the depth ...
— New England Salmon Hatcheries and Salmon Fisheries in the Late 19th Century • Various
... away, the woods hung like bluish lace over a field of pure snow. It was a brilliant day. A hundred tints glistened on the white ground and the iron bars of the garden railing. There was a lightness and transparency in the air that only the days of early spring possess. Gabriel Andersen turned his steps toward the fringe of blue lace for ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Death-Wake would perhaps have expected the leprosies and lunacies to drop off, and the genius, purged of its accidents, to move into a pure transparency. The abnormal, the monstrous, the boyish elements should have been burned away in the fire of the genius of poetry. But the Muses did not so will it, and the mystic wind of the spirit of song became of less moment to Mr. Stoddart than the breeze on the loch that stirs the ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... expressiveness. Style may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind; and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the transparency and directness of its ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of the horn, after being flattened by heat, and having its transparency improved by oil, is split into thin layers, and forms a substitute for glass, in lanterns of the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... prove the clearness of our mind is by showing its faults; as when a stream discovers the dirt at the bottom, it convinces us of the transparency of the water.—Pope. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... built up by these deposits are exquisite specimens of Nature's work and are filled with water of wonderful transparency; while the variety of forms of these receptacles and their charming colors ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... much diminished and rounded central canal. The effect of strain under mercerisation is chiefly seen in the contour of the surface, which is smooth, and the obliteration at intervals of the canal. Hence the increased transparency and more complete reflection of the light from the surface, and the consequent approximation to the optical properties ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... yet. But it is what we call rough plate. That's the kind that is used where light and not transparency is needed. You often see it in office doors or in skylights of buildings. To get the beautiful polished plate glass that you are talking about this rough plate must be polished over and over again. ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great cities stud its shores; but they are powerless to dim the transparency of its waters. Steam-ships cover the broad bosom of its lakes and estuaries; but they change not the beauty of the water, no more than the fleets of the world mark the waves of the ocean. Any person looking at a map of the region bounding the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war. Need I add that it was a failure—a total failure? As he stood forth fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent transparency, Mr. Cassidy's squint of suspicion widened into a ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... arcs on back cloth L. and R. Flood arc on transparency windows above stairs R. Focus arc through windows C., L. of windows of writing-table and doors down R. into room. ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... Italy, are considered the best, on account of their transparency and exceeding strength. Most frequently each string is made up of two or three separate strands, twisted together with the utmost care. But there is another use of the greatest value, and that is as a thread for sewing up wounds in internal surgery, because, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... mysterious craggy pit, thickly grown around with briers and shrubs, all bearing spiky thorns of the most fish-hooky and ten-penny nail description imaginable. The flat or back-scene, suddenly lighted up from behind, presented, as a transparency, that terrible collection of devils which you may have witnessed in a popular engraving entitled, 'Delirium Tremens.' The Inebriate, taking one parting drink, staggered—fell—rolled over and over down the hill into the abyss, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... enemy but his own, was conducted to a narrow subterraneous dungeon, and left, without book or pen, or any sort of occupation or society, to chew the cud of bitter thought, and count the leaden months as they passed over him, and brought no mitigation of his misery. His Serene Transparency of Wuertemberg, nay the heroic General himself, might have been satisfied, could they have seen him: physical squalor, combined with moral agony, were at work on Schubart; at the end of a year, he was grown so weak, that he could not ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... were part of the booty of Arre; while there are three red flagstones on which Barbarossa knelt to do reverence to St. Peter, in the person of the Pope. The guide held a lighted taper on one side of the column, that we might observe its glowing transparency. I could well enter into the feeling of noble triumph which must have animated those great and powerful Doges of past times, in thus being able to beautify their own Christian temple in Venice at the expense of the unbelieving, barbarous Turk, whose usurpation of ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the shore, Columbus was delighted with the purity and suavity of the atmosphere, the crystal transparency of the sea, and the extraordinary beauty of the vegetation. He beheld also fruits of an unknown kind upon the trees which ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... difficult had to be perfected, that of the glassmaker. Ordinary glass, even ordinary optical glass, would not answer the purpose at all. The two disks, one of crown glass and the other of flint, must be not only of perfect transparency, but absolutely homogeneous through and through, to avoid inequality of refraction, and thus cause all rays passing through them to meet in the same focus. It was only about the beginning of the century that flint disks of more than two ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... eyes, wild in their brightness, stared directly at me. And what eyes they were! The membrane grew red and redder until it was of the color of blood, standing out in frightful contrast with the transparency of the cornea. The pupil gradually dilated until it seemed about to burst out of the socket. The nostrils, which had been sunken and motionless, quivered, swelled, and glowed. The respiration became short, quick and gasping. The ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Which thou inquirest, either in some part That planet must throughout be void, nor fed With its own matter; or, as bodies share Their fat and leanness, in like manner this Must in its volume change the leaves. The first, If it were true, had through the sun's eclipse Been manifested, by transparency Of light, as through aught rare beside effus'd. But this is not. Therefore remains to see The other cause: and if the other fall, Erroneous so must prove what seem'd to thee. If not from side to side this ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... people wilfully complicated life. She put a just value on the restraint which had been a great part of her training, but a pretence which had the transparency of its weakness moved her to a patient kind of scorn, and in that moment she had a flash of insight which showed her that she had sometimes failed to understand her stepmother because she had not suspected the variability ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... clear through the rock behind which he crouched as though it were a transparency. All around him he saw the prone bodies of his men, naked to the view ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... their unambitious limitation, and their pious sense, deserve a friendly acknowledgment. What man has considered the pious images in the prayer-books of the Middle Ages, the unadorned innocence, the piety and purity, the patience of the martyrs, the calm, heavenly transparency of the figures of the holy angels, without being attracted by the simple innocence and humility of these forms, the creation of pious artists' hands? Who has beheld them without tranquil joy at the soft splendor ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... during which the king had lavished his most gracious smiles on those whom he despised at the bottom of his heart, was at length at an end, and Charming led Pazza, no longer to a dungeon, but to a magnificent apartment, where a new surprise awaited her. At the bottom of the room was an illuminated transparency, on which were written lines so bad that a king alone could have been the author of them. These lines, which were published in the official gazette, have been handed down to us by one of those indiscreet persons who suffer no ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... the fairy had been when Willie saw her last, she might have been called fat compared with the condition in which they now found her. She appeared like a mere shadow, with a delicate skin thrown over it. A bad transparency would have been more substantial in appearance. She lay alone on her lonely pallet with a farthing candle beside her, which cast a light sufficient only to make darkness visible. Being near the poor invalid, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... along a narrow, tortuous vicoletto, lighted only by a single lamp burning in the niche of a Madonna. The purity and transparency of the air gave a celestial softness and clearness to the very darkness itself; and one could find one's way without difficulty under such a limpid night. But in a little while we began to pass through a "venella," or, in ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... eggs into it. Do not turn them; but while they are frying, keep pouring some of the fat over them with a spoon. When the yolk just begins to look white, which it will in about two minutes, they are enough, and the white must not be suffered to lose its transparency. Take up the eggs with a tin slice, drain the fat from them, trim them neatly, and send them up with ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... came uncertainly forward, apparently weak, able hardly to stand without leaning upon the desk in front of him; his face waxen and drawn, hollowed at the cheeks and temples, his long hands thin to transparency. Life was betrayed in him only by the eyes. These burned darkly, far back under his brows, and flashed fiercely, as his glance darted swiftly from ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... and infinite! withdrawing from our eyes the veil spread above us by the light of day, giving back transparency to the Heavens, showing us the prodigious reality, the shining casket of the celestial diamonds, the innumerable stars that succeed each other interminably in immeasurable space! Without Night we should know nothing. Without it our eyes would never have divined the sidereal ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the atoms of the material that is in synchronism with the frequency of ultra-violet light, which is invisible to the human eye. All visible colors are absorbed, or more accurately, none are reflected excepting the ultra-violet. Perfect transparency is obtained since there is neither refraction nor diffraction of the visible colors. And ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... tower, the smoking crater of Vesuvius, the bold forms of Mount Lactarius and Cape Minerva, stood out full and clear under the cloudless sky: as we returned, I saw the sun sink behind Capri, which appeared by some optical illusion like a glorious crimson transparency suspended above the horizon: the sky, the earth, the sea, were flushed with the richest rose colour, which gradually softened and darkened into purple: the short twilight faded away, and the full moon, rising over Vesuvius, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... Michael Angelo's, shadow wrought laboriously to an extreme of fineness; but when you look into it, you will find that they have always been drawing more and more form within the space, and never finishing for the sake of added texture, but of added fact. And all those effects of transparency and reflected light, aimed at in common chalk drawings, are wholly spurious. For since, as I told you, all lights are shades compared to higher lights, and lights only as compared to lower ones, it follows that there can be no difference in their quality as such; but that light is opaque when ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... upward. But it is a dull climate. The sea sends us rain on three sides: the winds break loose over the country even on the finest days; the ground exhales vapors that darken the horizon; for several months the air has no transparency. You should see the winter. There are days when you would say it would never be fine again: the darkness seems to come from above like the light; the north-east wind brings us the icy air from the North Pole, and lashes the sea with such fury and roaring that it seems as though ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... I never thought about it, why do you call it wonderful?" If the child answers, it is well, if not the teacher can go on thinking aloud, thinking with the child. "Let's think what other things we can see through." We can never understand it, we can only reach the fact of "transparency" as a wonderful property of certain substances and consider which possess this magic quality. There is water of course, and there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones as glass seems to be. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly, too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... had she grown to the dread of seeing any one not in the immediate circle of her household, that it became impossible to her to leave her home. The clear colorlessness of her face had taken on a transparency and delicacy which did not lessen its beauty, but added to it an unearthly grace. She no longer spent hours alone in her desecrated room; it had grown intolerable to her; but she sat speechless, and almost motionless, in the oriel window overlooking the garden ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... said, I have not the remotest idea of how or why we confronted Nelson and the Lions, I cannot by any effort of memory see us arriving or leaving; but I see myself pausing in my lecture on English history, as a lighted transparency, a straggling crowd and a band bear down upon us suddenly out of nowhere. It is a poor, vicious sort of crowd, the gutter-sweepings of London; pale, stunted lads, haggard, idle slatterns, a handful of women of the street, a trio of tawdry flower girls. Around the band, which turns out to be only ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... birds returns to the spot where they were hatched. After raising a tremendous tumult in this numerous colony, and sustaining continued combat, we came off victorious, making capture of about a thousand eggs, resembling in size, colour, and transparency of shell, those of a duck; and the taking possession of this immense quantity did not occupy more than one hour, which may serve to prove the incalculable number of birds collected together. We did not allow them sufficient time, after ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... sit in the sun and sing of things like crocuses, of nothing less fresh and clean than crocuses. The engaging sprightliness of crocuses; their dear little smell, not to be smelled except by the privileged few; their luminous transparency—I am thinking of the white and the purple; their kind way of not keeping hearts sick for Spring waiting longer than they can just bear; how pleasant to sit with a friend in the sun, a friend who like myself likes to babble of green fields, and talk together ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... manliness. In her judge-like gravity and dignity of deportment; in the extent and accuracy of her legal knowledge; in the depth and appropriateness of her moral reflections; in the luminous order, the logical coherence, and the beautiful transparency of her thoughts, she almost rivals our Chief Justice Marshall. Yet to us, who are in the secret of her sex, all the proprieties, all the inward harmonies, of her character are exquisitely preserved; and the essential grace of womanhood seems to irradiate and consecrate the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Prince expressed clear surprise—a transparency through which his eyes met his friend's with a certain hardness of concussion. "She has arrived from America?" he ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... the calculating eye of a man who studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded. In the course of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes. He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and elbow. With his other hand he lifted her forearm and doubled it back. Disgust and wonder showed in his face, and he dropped ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped up from ceiling to floor. The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness. In this thin medium Therese's form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black paper. It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in the full flood of light which smote my ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of my brains would condescend to anything so flat and stale as the silly and threadbare Old Master deception! And this in the so-called nineteenth century! O sancta simplicitas! When again shall such infantile transparency be mine? When, ah, when? But never mind, dear friend. Though you didn't catch me, we shall meet before ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... on a sudden for the impact of such images of warmth and colour as meet them southward, or for the vigorous light that falls from the sky of this favoured shore. In any other circumstances the transparency and serenity of the air, the perfume of the sea, the radiant houses, the palms and flowers, would have acted upon Somerset as an enchantment, and wrapped him in a reverie; but at present he only saw and felt these things as through ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... reception-day in connection with that of her mamma, seemed like a great basket of roses when all her friends assembled there, seated on low chairs in unstudied attitudes: the white rose of the group was Mademoiselle d'Etaples, a specimen of pale and pensive beauty, frail almost to transparency; the Rose of Bengal was the charming Colette Odinska, a girl of Polish race, but born in Paris; the dark-red rose was Isabelle Ray-Belle she was called triumphantly—whose dimpled cheeks flushed scarlet for almost any cause, some said for very coquetry. Then there were three ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... upon, in large type, to "RALLY!" In vain the great pines at the cross-roads—whose trunks were compelled to bear this and other legends—moaned and protested from their windy watch-towers. But one day, with fife and drum, and flaming transparency, a procession filed into the triangular grove at the head of the gulch. The meeting was called to order by Colonel Starbottle, who, having once enjoyed legislative functions, and being vaguely ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and like a strange vision, out from the undulating ripples rose slowly a creature more fantastic than the boy's wildest dreams. The head was green, with large unwinking, glittering eyes. In slow contortions, the body, of a transparency that showed the light through, writhed like a tremendous ribbon-snake, and a sharp row of serrated fins surmounted all its length, from which, near the head, scarlet streamers floated like a mane. A moment thus it held its head erect, then sank below the surface. The boy sat with ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and you put your hand in your pocket for the fifteen dollars which shall make you its possessor; but a closer inspection is sure to show you either a broad transverse flaw, or a spot where the color fades into transparency. The white topaz, known as the "Siberian diamond," is generally flawless, and the purest specimens are scarcely to be distinguished from the genuine brilliant. A necklace of these, varying from a half to a quarter of an inch in diameter, may be had for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... they occasionally tempt the larger cetacea into the Gulf of Manaar. In the calmer months of the year, when the sea is glassy, and for hours together undisturbed by a ripple, the minute descriptions are rendered perceptible by their beautiful prismatic tinting. So great is their transparency that they are only to be distinguished from the water by the return to the eye of the reflected light that glances from their delicate and polished surfaces. Less frequently they are traced by the faint hues of their tiny peduncles, arms, or tentaculae; and it has been well observed ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... process it will be noted in the ground glass of the camera that the skin may be seen plainly but the ridge detail is very poor. This difficulty may be due to the poor contrast of the ridges and furrows when using direct lighting. If so, it can be overcome by scraping the skin to transparency and then photographing it by transmitted light (i.e., passing light through the skin). Sometimes, due to the condition of the skin, even though it is tissue thin, it will not be transparent. This can be overcome by soaking the skin in xylene ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... the transparency of youthfulness. You know he has never been at school; so his thoughts come out in security of sympathy, without fear of being laughed at. But it ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I had had it in my hand, I should have seen his head and crest all of a bright ruby tint, and the scale-like feathers of its throat glowing almost like fire; but as it flew rapidly here and there, it seemed all of a dull, warm brown, surrounded by a transparency formed by its ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... three miles, every variety that rock, water, and mountain can give, thrown into all the fantastic forms which art may attempt in ornamented grounds, but always fails in. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the water, when not discoloured by rain; its lucid transparency shows, at considerable depths, every pebble no bigger than a pin, every rocky basin alive with trout and eels, that play and dash among the rocks as if endowed with that native vigour which animates, in a superior degree, every inhabitant ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... beautiful. Not merely negroidal, in lips, nose, ears, and tight black wool divided on the absolute equator; not racially but uniquely ugly—till he smiled—and spoke. He smiled and spoke with a joy of soul, a transparency of innocence, a rapture of love, that made his ugliness positively endearing even apart from the entranced recognition ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... horror of it in its own nature, as the special punishment and evidence of sin, and on the other hand, the ocular delight in purity is mingled, as I before observed, with the love of the mere element of light, as a type of wisdom and of truth; whence it seems to me that we admire the transparency of bodies, though probably it is still rather owing to our sense of more perfect order and arrangement of particles, and not to our love of light, that we look upon a piece of rock crystal as purer than a piece of marble, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the multi-coloured glory of three bishops. Mr Hare felt that a good deal of rapture was expected of him; but in his efforts to praise, he felt he was exposing his ignorance. John called attention to the transparency of the green-watered skies; and turning their backs on the bishops, the blue ceiling with the gold stars was declared, all things considered, to be in excellent taste. The benches in the body of the church were for boys; the carved chairs ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... landed on the shores of the Antilles, and afterwards on the coast of South America, they thought themselves transported into those fabulous regions of which poets had sung. The sea sparkled with phosphoric light, and the extraordinary transparency of its waters discovered to the view of the navigator all that had hitherto been hidden in the deep abyss.[7] Here and there appeared little islands perfumed with odoriferous plants, and resembling baskets of flowers, ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... he scooped for it, just as if Nature had poured these broad waters into one of her own valleys. It is a most beautiful object at a distance, and not less so on its immediate banks; for the water is very pure, being supplied by a small river, of the choicest transparency, which was turned thitherward for the purpose. And Blenheim owes not merely this water-scenery, but almost all its other beauties, to the contrivance of man. Its natural features are not striking; but Art has effected such wonderful things that the uninstructed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... accumulation of blood, in particular spots, which is commonly observed in cases of organic disease of the heart. The only very remarkable morbid appearance about the heart was in the aorta, and its valves. The valves had lost their transparency, and were considerably thickened in various spots. The inner surface of the aorta, for about an inch from its commencement, was elevated and thickened, and the external surface singularly roughened and verrucated. This appearance was so peculiar, that no words will give a competent ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... the range of inorganic nature I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful, than a fresh, deep snow-drift, seen under warm light. Its curves are of inconceivable perfection and changefulness; its surface and transparency alike exquisite; its light and shade of inexhaustible variety and inimitable finish,—the shadows sharp, pale, and of heavenly colour, the reflected lights intense and multitudinous, and mingled with the sweet occurrences of transmitted ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... drawing-room, he took his stand in a firm but easy attitude. His appearance was equally removed from bravado and fear. His features, usually placid and pale, had a rigid clearness about them that day we can never forget. They seemed, from their transparency and firmness, like some wondrous imagination of the artist's chisel, in which the marble, fancying itself human, had begun to breathe. The eye was calm and bright—the mouth, the feature round which danger loves to play, though easy, motionless, and with lips apart, had about it ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... of Babylon. For a week before Miss Granger's coming there had been heard the splashing of innumerable pails of water, and the scrubbing of perpetual scrubbing-brushes; windows had been polished to the highest degree of transparency; tin tea-kettles had been sandpapered until they became as silver; there had been quite a run upon the village chandler for mottled ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... her arm, and she slowly withdrew it. Then the figure, from whom she could not detach her eyes, and who appeared more protecting than menacing, took the glass, and walking towards the night-light held it up, as if to test its transparency. This did not seem sufficient; the man, or rather the ghost—for he trod so softly that no sound was heard—then poured out about a spoonful into the glass, and drank it. Valentine witnessed this scene with a sentiment of stupefaction. Every minute ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... differentiated from substantiality, from substance as such. But in the presupposition just made there is also this thought—God is spirit, absolute and eternal; spirit which comes not forth from itself in differentiation. This ideality, this subjectivity of spirit, which is transparency, ideality excluding all particular determination, is precisely the universal, pure relation to self, Being which remains ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together into rugged walls. In a marble country, one should be always more and more astonished ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... sharply on the rods. I raised myself abruptly on my elbow and saw before me the shadowy figure of a woman. At once I recognised Clarimonde. She carried in her hand a small lamp of the shape of those which are placed in tombs, and the light of it gave to her tapering fingers a rosy transparency which, with gradually fainter tints, prolonged itself till it was lost in the milky whiteness of her naked arm. The only garment she had on was the linen shroud which covered her on her death-bed, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the character and conduct of Christ. In all His intercourse with friends and foes, His adherence to truth and righteousness is marked and constant. He was criticised and catechised and calumniated, but His transparency of character was never destroyed. His enemies opposed and threatened, but He never hesitated in the path of duty, or in His devotion to His Father's will. However captious their questions, and whether they related ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... considerable sections where the forest had entirely disappeared. The extended fields, inviting the plough, waved with luxuriant grass. It was truly a delightful region. The climate was salubrious; the atmosphere in cloudless transparency rivalled ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... single casualty. "I want to know what people say, when I'm not there, about who my father was, and why he and mother parted. And I'm sure you can tell me, and will. It's no use asking Tishy Wilson any more about it." Observe the transparency of this young lady. She wasn't going to conceal that she had talked of it ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the glowing transparency of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... article consists in its being free from flaws, cracks, or spots; and if the tube of wood can be seen through the amber, it is considered as very inferior in a Turk's estimation. There is a third sort, which is valueless from its transparency. It is either real or factitious, and often consists merely of the scrapings and refuse morsels, melted into lumps, and manufactured into cheap mouth-pieces. This portion of the Turkish pipe is frequently adorned with precious stones, enamelling, or ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... do they receive the light, but that they do not intercept it; nay, they pass it on, like stained glass, coloured with their own colour, to other things. And there are certain other bodies so overpowering in the purity of the transparency that they become so radiant as to overpower the adjustments of the eye, and you cannot look at them without fatigue of sight; such as are the mirrors. Certain others are so free from transparency, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... the colonies would be prostrate at the footstool of the king. Sometimes she seemed to take for granted that such was already the case. On one occasion she startled the townspeople by a brilliant illumination of the province-house with candles at every pane of glass and a transparency of the king's initials and a crown of light in the great balcony-window. The figure of the aged woman in the most gorgeous of her mildewed velvets and brocades was seen passing from casement to casement, until she paused before the balcony and flourished a huge ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one, clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the corner of every pane; its claws ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... for the guests; the seats can be covered with white cloth; showy pictures, in rich frames, adorn the walls, and pedestals and statuary fill the corners of the room. The writing on the wall can be produced by means of a transparency, the words made large, and the letters in German text, with a halo around the whole sentence. Belshazzar's costume consists of a purple velvet coat trimmed with gold, a large cloak trimmed with ermine, velvet breeches, white ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... to allow astronomers to make complete observations on the lunar surface, the terrestrial atmosphere should possess a transparency seventy times greater than its present power of transmission. But in the void through which the Projectile was now floating, no fluid whatever interposed between the eye of the observer and the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... to take place, and, due to the increased transparency of the star, a supernova is produced. The star blows away most of its gaseous envelope, leaving only the superdense core. In other words, it leaves a white dwarf." He paused and looked at Arcot. "I wonder if that star did ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... by virtue of the air which before sustained it, thrust into the water a glass with the mouth downward, which will carry with it the air it contains, and move this down towards the ball until you see, by the transparency of the glass, that the air has reached the top of it; then gently draw the glass upward, and you will see the ball rise, and afterwards stay on the top of the water, if you carefully part the glass and water ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... as fast and as far as I could. The dog dashed in and tore through the sheet. Where the impact of his body came, the mist bulged in, then broke. For a while there were two sheets, separated by a more or less clearly defined, vertical layer of transparency or maybe blackness rather. The two sheets were in violent commotion, approaching, impinging upon each other, swinging back again to complete separation, and so on. But the violence of the motion consisted by no means in speed: it suggested a very much retarded ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove |
