"Vaporous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the hour of parting, did it delight them. The sun, hastening towards the horizon, ever found a fresh smile. Sometimes he disappeared in the midst of serene calmness, unflecked by a single cloud, sinking gradually beneath a golden sea. At other times he threw out crimson glories, tore his vaporous robe to shreds, and set amidst wavy flames that streaked the skies like the tails of gigantic comets, whose radiant heads lit up the crests of the forest trees. Then, again, extinguishing his rays one by one, he would softly sink to rest on shores of ruddy sand, far-reaching banks ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... hands. He stared into the tinny surface, and it seemed to take on new echoes of light and shade, following the chromatic changes of the music.... Presently rose many-colored smoke, as if exhaled from the enchantments of some oriental mage, and Stannum's eyes strove to penetrate the vaporous thickness. He plunged his gaze into its tinted steamy volutes, and struggled with it until it parted and fell away from him like the sound of falling waters. He could not see the source of the great roaring—the roaring of some cosmical cataract. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... thus: The Splendour, in imprinting its caress upon the icy lips of Adonais, had its caress quenched by the cold, and was itself converted into dampness and deathliness: it was no longer a luminous Splendour, but a vaporous and clammy form of death. The assumption that 'the damp death' stands as a synonym for the 'Splendour' obtains some confirmation from the succeeding phrase about the 'dying meteor'—for this certainly seems used as a simile ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... coated with a transparent and golden varnish, all that ground covered with rapid strokes of the brush lightly laid on with a delicate touch. Notice that green of the trees shot through with red tones, penetrated with quivering air, and the vaporous light of autumn. Notice the delicate water-colour effect of thick oil, the general smoothness of the canvas, the relief of this pouch or hood; notice the full modelling of the little faces with their ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... penetrate the secrets which the gray and shifting veil still hid from his view. Beside him lay the Italian knife, its steely surface shimmering in the vaporous light, there where a dull and ruddy stain had not dimmed its brilliant polish. The murderer gazed at his tool and shuddered feebly. But he picked up the knife and mechanically wiped it in the grass, before he restored it to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... of air in the upper regions first accelerated and then retarded the progress of the vaporous island. It seemed to stop; then it hung for an instant directly on the lower limb of the great ball of light. A sensation of intolerable cold pervaded my entire body. Involuntarily I ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... boat floated on, every sight and sound appeared strange. The music from the fort came sudden and startling through the vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose instantaneously near them, like a light-house. They could see the steam of the factory floating low, seeking some outlet between cloud and water. As they drifted past ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... that she had to give up in favor of the woman—Rose obeyed; and soon her teeth stopped their chattering, and the red blood of youth began once more to course through her veins, while her drenched, simple undergarments sent up vaporous white flags which indicated that the watery legions of the storm king were fast surrendering to ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... dazzling brilliance. A few sharks were seen occasionally, which gradually and unobserved increased to, a squadron. The waders meanwhile continued their sport until the evening waned away. Far over the dusk violet Night spread her vaporous shadows: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... a sign to me! It is a sign! So will I put away every baffling hindrance between Cornelia and myself. Barriers will only be as those vaporous clouds. I shall part them with my strong resolves—I shall—I shall—I—" and he fell asleep with this sense of victory thrilling his whole being. Then the moon rose higher, and soon came in broad white bars through the window ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... have lasted half the night ere the lamps of Elverslope made constellations in the valley, and the green and red lights of the station loomed out on the hill. They drove into the circle of gaslights, among the vaporous steeds of omnibuses and flies, and entered the station, Phoebe's veil down, and Mervyn shading his dazzled eyes from the glare. They were half an hour too soon; and while waiting, it occurred to Phoebe to inquire whether a telegram for Beauchamp had been received. Even so, and ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the semblance of a vaporous tissue—an illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private view of the favored few—till it gradually became visible to the unassisted eye of the profanum vulgus, and finally it flamed ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... wind, which was blowing very mildly, had now begun to dissipate the morning haze. Whole districts vigorously disentangled themselves, and showed against the vaporous distance like promontories in a sunlit sea. Here and there, in the indistinct swarming of houses, a strip of white wall glittered, a row of window panes flared, or a garden supplied a black splotch, of wondrous intensity of hue. And all the rest, the medley of streets and squares, the endless ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... than usual from the profusion of oddities in the midst of which we seem to be lost. Beneath us, lies always the immense blue background: Nagasaki illumined by moonlight, and the expanse of silvered, glittering water, which seems like a vaporous vision suspended in mid-air. Behind us is the great open temple, where the bonzes officiate to the accompaniment of sacred bells and wooden clappers,—looking, from where we sit, more like puppets than anything else, some squatting in rows like ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Neoburgio manus, et contra tendentis os verberaverit. Ita, quae apud concordes vincula caritatis, incitamenta irarum apud infensos erant." (Cited in Kohler, Munzbelustiqungen, xxi. 341; who refers also to Levassor, Histoire de Louis XII.)—Pauli (iii. 542) bedomes qnite vaporous.] a slap that had important consequences ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... the moon shone faintly in the dull, grey heaven; a small, vaporous rain was sinking from the shapeless clouds; the waning night showed bleak and cheerless to the earth, but cast no mournful or reproving influence over the Pagan's mind. He looked round on his solitary lurking place, and beheld no human figure in its lonely recesses. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... galleon, Riding at anchor off the orient sun, Had broken its cable, and stood out to space Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways: And now, back warping from the inclement main, Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, It swung into its azure roads again; When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you Lit, a white halcyon auspice, ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... yet its loveliness is plainly of the earth; but as we return cityward in the eventide the dusky shadows of the gloaming settle over everything. As we gradually approach, the city seems half hidden behind a vaporous veil, as though, in imitation of thousands of its fair occupants, it were hiding its comeliness behind the yashmak; the scores of tapering minarets, and the towers, and the masts of the crowded shipping of all nations rise above the mist, and line with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... and now turned to invite the notice of his grandfather. The thunder-clouds had so encompassed the sun that its rays burst through them almost exclusively in one wide crater, crimsoning, bronzing, and gilding their vaporous and ever-changing walls. Thence they spread earthward, heavenward, leaving remoter masses to writhe darkly on each other and themselves, in and out, in and in, cloaking this hill in blue shadow, bathing that one in green light, while ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... now interspersed with the troops; and everybody knew that no carriages had been, or could be, on the summit of Souter Fell. The multitude was beyond imagination; for the troops filled a space of half a mile, and marched quickly till night hid them—still marching. There was nothing vaporous or indistinct about the appearance of these spectres. So real did they seem, that some of the people went up, the next morning, to look for the hoof-marks of the horses; and awful it was to them to find not one foot-print on heather or grass. The witnesses ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... man she loved, and bade him dispose of her. That very simplicity was another sign of her strength. She was the more priceless on account of it. He went back into the hut. Through the chinks of the shutter the morning stretched a grey finger; the room was filled with a vaporous twilight. ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... under the purple sky as if he were the first man, but half emerged from brutishness, pursuing his mate in a world all fief to him, a world that revealed her as she fled through the door of morning and the door of evening, rolling its vaporous curtains back as she went through. It was Reddin, come forth from his dark house, as his foraging ancestors had done, to take his will of the weaponless and ride down the will of others. He did not confess even to himself why ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... retreat, which had been opened to him as by a fairy's magic wand, the masterpiece of creation, this girl, whose warmly colored tints, whose soft skin—soft, but slightly gilded by the shadows, by I know not what vaporous effusion of love—gleamed as though it reflected the rays of color and light, his anger, his desire for vengeance, his wounded vanity, all ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... slow, reluctant rain, cold as icicle-drops in a rock cavern. People passed and repassed in the streets like ghosts in a bad dream; the twinkling gas-light showed them at one moment rising out of the fog, and then disappearing from view as though suddenly engulfed in a vaporous ebon sea. With muffled, angry shrieks, the metropolitan trains deposited their shoals of shivering, coughing travelers at the several stations, where sleepy officials, rendered vicious by the weather, snatched the tickets from ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... of sunlit mountain; and beyond them, giving wings to the imagination, were mountains, more mountains, distant, incalculably distant, with unseen hollow valleys between; and finally, mountains again, half cloud, melting indistinguishably into the vaporous haze of the sky. Above her, sheer and vast, lay Hemlock Mountain, all its huge bulk a sleeping, passionless calm. Beyond was the solemnity of Windward Mountain's concave shell, full to the brim with brooding blue shadows, a well of mystery in ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... such a large percentage of all kinds of coal, and which indeed forms the actual basis of it. In the shape of coke, of course, we have a fairly pure form of carbon, and this being produced, as we shall see presently, by the driving off of the volatile or vaporous constituents of coal, we are able to perceive by the residue how great a proportion of coal consists of carbon. In fact, the two have almost an identical meaning in the popular mind, and the fact that the great masses of strata, in which ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... Vaporous Westminster, dark and leaning to the great river, for how long he had not seen it, or realized what it meant to him! Custom had blinded his eyes and had nearly closed his mind to it. The day's event had given him back sight and knowledge. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... moon, and I never remember a denser fog. At first, after the lighted cabin, I could distinguish absolutely nothing, except where the beam of light from the cabin lamp struggled past me through the open hatch into a white thickness which I can only liken to vaporous cotton-wool. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was naturally of the morning's practice. They one and all declared it a great nuisance, and ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... ceasing for a little, the earth smoking, the west a low, vaporous yellow, the swollen river sounding, Diego de Arana had summoned by the drum every man in La Navidad. He stood beneath our banner and put his hand upon the staff and spoke earnestly to those gathered before him, in their duty and out of their duty. He told of Caonabo, ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... that the unregulated light, and the vaporous uniform climate that must have continued if the fourth day's command had never issued, though it might have served for a time for the lowest beginnings of life, especially marine or aquatic, would ultimately ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... moves the moon, radiant and pale, Through the calm night, wrapped in a silvery cloud; The jewels of her dress shone through her veil, As shine the stars through their thin vaporous shroud; The brighter jewels of her eyes were hid Beneath their smooth white caskets arching o'er, Which, by the trembling of each ivory lid, Seemed conscious of the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there, Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare Of snags and tangles. Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts Gleams desolate along the sky, night's ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... layers that the bright white body of the sun is seen. Of the innermost region, the heart or nucleus of the sun, we know almost nothing. The central body or nucleus is surrounded by a brilliantly luminous envelope or layer of vaporous matter which is what we see when we look at the sun and which the astronomer ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... knew till now, A sense of want, yea of an infinite need, Cried out within him—rather moaned than cried. And he would sit a silent hour and gaze Upon the distant hills with dazzling snow Upon their peaks, and thence, adown their sides, Streaked vaporous, or starred in solid blue. And then a shadowy sense arose in him, As if behind those world-inclosing hills, There sat a mighty woman, with a face As calm as life, when its intensity Pushes it nigh to death, waiting for him, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not been ever known ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... on the weather, as: 'The moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes the air'; 'The moon, one thinks, looks with a watery eye; and when she weeps, weeps every little flower'; 'Upon the corner of the moon there hangs a vaporous drop profound'; and so forth. Then we have the old proverb: 'So many days old the moon is on Michaelmas Day, so many floods after.' Other beliefs are mentioned by Mr. Harley, such as, that if Christmas comes during a waning moon, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... incongruities grafted upon them. Valerian and violet border the track between swarthy pines with grey mosses hanging down like silver beards from forked branches, and sudden mists shroud the landscape in vaporous folds, torn to shreds by gusts of wind, to melt away into the blue sky, suddenly unveiled in dazzling glimpses between the surging clouds. A long flight of mossy steps ascends to the plateau occupied by the Sanatorium, with wide ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... as it was day it must surely be seen that he was very seriously ill. The spirit of Tarautas would again appear to him—and not merely as a vaporous illusion—and put an end to his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... much like snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallizes also exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallize from their vapors. Now in any of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an intermediate substance; and in crystallizing they are both brought nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... is that apparitions were so long in realizing their possibilities, in improving their advantages. The specters in classic and medieval literature were malarial, vaporous beings without energy to do anything but threaten, and mortals never would have trembled with fear at their frown if they had known how feeble they were. At best a revenant could only rattle a rusty skeleton, or shake a moldy shroud, or clank ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... half-hysterical days during the war—and in that incomprehensible pre-war period at the end of which the birds came to her rescue, there had been little talk of love and dreams of delight and the rest of the vaporous paradise of the mutually infatuated. He could not manifest, nor did she demand, a lover's ardour. It had all been as comfortable and satisfactory as you please. And now, at the most irrelevant moment, according to his masculine mind, came this cry ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... accepted the invitation, despatched a laconic note to Mrs. Ford, and stayed over for Miss Bruce's party. It was a grand affair. Miss Bruce was a very great lady: she treated Miss Crowe with every attention. Lizzie was thought by some persons to look prettier than ever. The vaporous gauze, the sunny hair, the coral, the sapphires, the smile, were displayed with renewed success. The master of the house was unable to dance; he was summoned to sterner duties. Nor could Miss Crowe be induced to perform, having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... human realities, and wide cloud-canopies of uncertain speculation, which also had their interests and their rainbow-colors to him, and could not fail in his life just now, did Sterling pass his year and half at Bayswater. Such vaporous speculations were inevitable for him at present; but it was to be hoped they would subside by and by, and leave the sky clear. All this was but the preliminary to whatever work might lie in him:—and, alas, much other interruption lay ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of geologists, resting its argument on very imposing evidence, teaches that the whole mass of the earth, from being in a molten, or perhaps a vaporous condition, has cooled by radiation in the lapse of millions of ages, until it has reached its present equilibrium of temperature. Astronomical observations give great weight to this interpretation, especially so far as the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was "connected with the aristocracy." I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... angrily over the sea—what is that vaporous Titan? And Hesper set in his rosy garland—why looks he so implacably sweet? It is that one has left that bright home to go forth and do cloudy work, and he has got a stain with which he dare not return. Far in the West fair Lucy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... off the low jungle-bound coast of the peninsula, and above it a great bank of vaporous clouds, pierced by the molten rays of the early morning sun. As I looked around inquiringly, the captain, bowing, said: "Tuan," and I raised my eyes. Again I saw the lofty mountain peak surmounting the cushion of clouds, standing out bold and clear against the almost fierce azure ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... and at that Gorley laughed. Drake stopped on the instant, and for a while there was silence between the pair. A gray beam of light shot through a chink between the logs, and then another and another until the darkness of the hut changed to a vaporous twilight. Then of a sudden the notes of a bugle sounded the reveille. Gorley raised himself upon his elbows and thrust forward his head. Outside he heard the rattle of arms, the chatter of voices, all the hum of a ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... mechanics, the rotation of the sun and its accompanying atmosphere must increase as rapidly as its volume diminishes, the increased centrifugal force generated by the more rapid rotation, overbalancing the action of gravitation, would cause the sun to abandon successive rings of vaporous matter, which are supposed to have condensed by cooling, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... eyes at the smoke-blackened ceiling or out of the door at the willows or into Sothern's rugged face. His fever raged high, his body burning with it, his brain a turbulent melting pot wherein strange fancies passed through odd, vaporous forms. He confused events of a far-off childhood with occurrences of yesterday. He was a little boy, gone black-berrying, and Ygerne Bellaire went with him. His dugout was a cabin in the Yukon where he had lived a year, or it was a speeding train carrying ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came down ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... without assuming the vaporous state—whether it becomes liquid or remains solid—it becomes exceedingly luminous. What I say is applicable to all substances—whether they burn or whether they do not burn—that they are exceedingly bright if they retain their solid state when heated, and that it is to this presence of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... sun was dying out in a riot of colour, and its level rays fell kindlily upon the gaunt pines that were thick about us two, converting them into endless aisles of vaporous gold. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... travel fast, O Humphrey," he said. "Consider then how great is their journey between the time they gather and that day when, worn-out, once more they melt to vaporous gas. You think me long-lived who compared to them exist but a tiny fraction of a second, nearly all of which I have been doomed to pass in sleep. And, Humphrey, I desire to live—I, who have great plans and would shake the world. But my day draws in; a few brief ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... odours arising from decomposing matter, and in the south and west is scarcely ever found flourishing side by side with modern sanitation. Home Rule not only, like pumpkins and vegetable marrows, requires a feculent soil, but like them, and indeed like all watery and vaporous vegetables, it needs the forcing-frame. Left to its own devices the movement would die at once. There is nothing spontaneous about it. It is a weedy sort of exotic, thriving only by filth and forcing. It cannot live an hour in the climate of Armagh. The ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... a fine gossamer veil, not raised above a couple of feet, hardly ruffled by a passing sigh of air. A large bird floated over it on expanded wings, it looked white as a swan in the moonlight, but cast a shadow black as pitch on the vaporous sheet that covered the face of ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Shelley's poem." He broke out with the magnificent lines in "Prometheus Unbound," in which the Earth feels the Spirit of Love, and bursts into speech. "'The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! the boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! the vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha! ha! the animation of delight, which wraps me like an atmosphere of light, and bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.' That's how I ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... him were two of these voices that Thomas looked up to the spandrels in the choir, and he saw that it was the carved angels leaning out of the spandrels that were singing. And as they sang the breath came from their stone lips white and vaporous into the frosty air. ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... was falling, the sun was shining in his vaporous strength, and the great dome of heaven stood fathomless above the pair; but to Christina the world was black and blank as the gloomy hut in which they sat. When first her love blossomed, she saw the world open; she looked into its heart; she saw it alive—saw it burning with that which made ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... offered to take the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish, spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the simple people who lived in the other part of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the vaporous day, Dull on the windless waters falls the pallid ray. So slumb'ringly the glassy river goes, The water-lily dips not as it flows; The swallow, haunter of the charmed spot, Skims through the silence, and awakes it not; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... there in shooting? I need not become on that account one of those detestable men-women with spectacles, masculine coats, and canes. To fire a gun will not prevent my being gentle, lovable, graceful, slender, vaporous (if I may use the ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... was it—yes, that was it! Her head was bowed now—her glorious, proud little head,—and she sat silent, an abashed heap of fluffy frills and ruffles, a tiny bundle of vaporous ruchings and filmy tucks and suchlike vanities, in the green ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... ghastly glow—a dim, indistinct light shone in the centre of the circle! Moving slowly, like a newly awakened spirit, it waved in the very midst of the gasping committee. Back and forth, up and down, it moved—glowing, vaporous, ghostly. Two hundred pairs of bulging eyes saw the horror—and realized that it was ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... ordinary sources of radiant heat, bisulphide of carbon, both in the liquid and vaporous form, is one of the most diathermanous bodies ever known. I thought it worth while to try whether a body reputed to be analogous to carbonic acid, and so pervious to most kinds of heat, would show any change ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... asks if blurred edges, empty shadows and vaporous detail mean quality. They certainly mean mystery, which when applied to an appropriate subject signifies that the artist has joined his art with the imagination of the beholder. He has therefore let it ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... not yet. In their new vaporous condition, in which both had lost some of their prominent qualities, they had acquired new relations, perhaps new duties. At all events, they did not at once ascend to their kindred ether,—but swam, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... azure heavens! Only vaporous wreaths of snowy white Nestle in the grey hill's rugged side; And the golden woods are bathed in light, Dying, if they must, with kingly pride: While the swallows in the blue air wheeling, Circle ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... possible that the earth began as a vaporous, shining sphere, formed by the gathering together of the material of a gaseous ring which had been detached from a cooling and shrinking nebula. Such a vaporous sphere would condense to a liquid, fiery globe, whose surface would ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of 100 lbs. be expanded down to steam of 15 lbs., it will have 35 degrees of heat over that which is required for the maintenance of the vaporous state, or, in other words, it will be surcharged ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... and go, as she now joined the groups of children and scolded them for games too dangerous or too noisy; now seated herself on the grass beside their mothers and took part with grave and thoughtful interest in their talk. Nisida was more beautiful thus than she had been the day before; with the vaporous cloud of perfume that had folded her round from head to foot had disappeared all that mystic poetry which put a sort of constraint upon her admirers and obliged them to lower their glances. She had ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the port, With towering chimneys outlined tall and swart Against the silver pools. Two figures pace The wharf in ghostly silence, face from face. O'er the black line of mountain, silver-clear In faint rose-tint of vaporous evening air, Sinketh the bright suspicion of a wing, The slim curved moon, who in shy triumphing Hideth her face. Above, the rose-tint pales Into a silver opal, hills and dales Of cloudy glory, fading high alone Into a tender blue-grey ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... appear in the same picture which gives the surviving friends. The actinic influence of a ghost on a sensitive plate is not so strong as might be desired; but considering that spirits are so nearly immaterial, that the stars, as Ossian tells us, can be seen through their vaporous outlines, the effect is perhaps as good ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... There, across the moonbeams, he could see a figure moving; the very same figure that he had seen moving across the moonbeams in his own room—the same slender, slight, fragile figure, with the same floating, vaporous drapery. But now he did not feel one particle of wonder or superstitious awe. He understood it all. The woman who had visited him had fled back here, and was now about to return. What should he do? He must retreat. She was evidently coming in his direction. He would go back to his own ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... from the green oblong, bordered by low yew edges, from which as from a flat and spacious shelf carved out of the hill, Monk Lawrence surveyed the slopes below it, the clustered village, the middle distance with its embroidery of fields and trees, with the vaporous stretches of the forest beyond, and in the far distance, a shining line ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the forest looked level, dreamy and still, barren of humanity, given over to its own shy children, nothing moving save the slow-falling leaves. But from beyond a great clump of sumach, set like a torch in the vaporous blue, came a steady stream of words, happily rendered indistinguishable by distance, and I knew that the King's minion was cursing the Italian, the Governor, the Santa Teresa, the Due Return, the minister, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... fraction of it, we spare it no more than a hurried smile in passing, as a trifling incident of our progress toward the grand end which (just then) we have in view. And how often time proves the end a thing which never actually draws one breath of life; a mere embryo, a phantom, vaporous product of our own imagination! So that for one, two, or fifty years, as the case may be, we have derived no benefit from a number of tangible good things, by reason of our strenuous pursuit ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... busily building around me a vaporous rampart of tobacco-smoke, as a barrier to gloomy suggestions from without, when the door suddenly opened, and in walked two gendarmes—one a very self-important-looking brigadier, with thin sharp nose and keen, weasel-like eyes. My immediate impression was that they had come ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of the incense curled upward and played around the straight, slim figure, drew vaporous lines about the still, ivory face—the handsome, sinister face, sometimes partly veiling the long black eyes and sometimes showing them in all their unnatural brightness. So the man stood, looking towards ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... a wilderness of housetops, of smoke-wreathed spires and chimneys, stretched away to a murky, blood-red horizon. Even as they stood there, a deeper color stained the sky, an angry sun began to sink into the piled up masses of thick, vaporous clouds. The girl watched with an air of sullen yet absorbed interest. Her companion's eyes were still fixed wholly and critically upon her. Who was she, he wondered? Why had she left her own country to come to a city where she seemed to have no friends, no manner of interest? In that caravansary ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the autumn of 1862, and found no snow in the bottom of the pit. They took the route by Gimel to Biere, intending to defer the visit to the glaciere to the morning of the second day; but being warned by the appearance known locally as le sappeur qui fume, a vaporous cloud at the mouth of a cavern near the Dent d'Oche, on the other side of the Lake of Geneva, they caught the communal forester at once, and put themselves under his guidance. The distance from Biere is two hours' good walking, and an hour and a half for ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... White people, and do you, Little Flower, tell me what you see there," he called from behind this vaporous veil. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... rose on and on till it gathered into an amber surge in Monte Morello and rippled away again through the Fiesolan hills. Nearer, torrid bell-towers pierced the shimmering reek, like stakes in a sweltering lagoon. In the centre of all, the great dome swam lightly, a gigantic celestial buoy in a vaporous sea. The spell that bound us all was doubly potent that day. The sense of a continuous life that had made the dome and the belfries an inevitable emanation from the clean crumbling earth, lulled us all, and we ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... the marvellous art of carrying and modulating the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off, Chopin was entirely himself. He had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... if he were speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before the fire in his stocking-feet. The steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the liquid menstruum encompassing him."[145] Bode in 1776 arrived independently at the conclusion that "the sun is neither burning nor glowing, but in its essence a dark planetary body, composed like our earth of land and water, varied by mountains and valleys, and enveloped in a vaporous atmosphere";[146] and the learned in general applauded and acquiesced. The view, however, was in 1787 still so far from popular, that the holding of it was alleged as a proof of insanity in Dr. Elliot when accused of a murderous assault on Miss Boydell. His friend Dr. Simmons stated on ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... His eye fell upon the low shelves full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even the carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have lost their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of Corot—a dance of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade—and looked at it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about the picture, a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of joy in the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of half-pleasure and half-envy. It represented something that he had ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... sunset! daylight's crimson veil Floats o'er the mountain tops, while twilight pale Calls up her vaporous shrouds from every vale; ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... enthusiastic. He showed me why I should not have been alarmed, because ghosts, he said, were scientific facts. He then explained to me at length how the gases from the dead arise and form a nebulous vapor or a vaporous nebula. It sounded very simple and plausible when he told me, but I can't seem to remember it. Fortunately I have it all down ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling, white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... planets, while in this vaporous condition to which we have just alluded, would manifestly have a central nucleus, gradually increasing in magnitude and mass, and an atmosphere offering, at its successive limits, phenomena entirely similar ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... numerous graves, which exhibited the lights above described. Wherever she looked, she saw masses of fire lying about; but it was chiefly seen over all new graves, while there was no appearance of it over very old ones. She described it less as a clear flame than as a dense, vaporous mass of fire, holding a middle place between mist and flame. On many graves this light was about four feet high, so that when she stood on the grave it reached to her neck. When she thrust her hand into it, it was as if putting it into a dense, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... taking shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Neaera went out, and as they walked homewards through the forest, purple and vaporous in the evening light, they drew closer together; and Dion looking into her eyes saw there a new gleam, violet, magical, shining, there was the presence of Aphrodite, there was ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... tongues God's deliverances and benefits. His ear must have caught some tones of levity, if not of insincerity, in the lightly-made vow. So he meets it with a douche of cold water in verses 19, 20, because he wishes to condense vaporous resolutions into something more tangible and permanent. Cold, judiciously applied, solidifies. Discouragements, rightly put, encourage. The best way to deepen and confirm good resolutions which have been too ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... organism, it tends, on the one hand, to diminish the humidity of the air by sometimes absorbing moisture from it, and, on the other, to increase that humidity by pouring out into the atmosphere, in a vaporous form, the water it draws up through its roots. This last operation, at the same time, lowers the temperature of the air in contact with or proximity to the wood, by the same law as in other cases of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the working of hemp and furs and alum ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... twilight blows to flame the misty skies, All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam, With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes; I am one with ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... style of the story- book, 'with what success. I go to a region which is a bit of water-side Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a garnish of Portsmouth, and I say, "Will YOU come and be idle with me?" And it answers, "No; for I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron to hammer, and steam to get up, and ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... entanglement due to cohesion; and, as our object now is to examine the influence of chemical union alone, we shall render our experiments more pure by liberating the atoms and molecules entirely from the bonds of cohesion, and employing them in the gaseous or vaporous form. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... paper-lined baskets, and the juice coming from their bruised ripeness stained the stall-front, and steamed, with a strong perfume, in the heat. She would feel quite giddy on those blazing July afternoons when the melons enveloped her with a powerful, vaporous odour of musk; and then with her loosened kerchief, fresh as she was with the springtide of life, she brought sudden temptation to all who saw her. It was she—it was her arms and necks which gave that semblance of amorous vitality ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... import,—that of Northern Odinism more than any other. In that dim Niflheim, for instance, with its well-springs of the waters of the upper world confusedly bubbling, and its metallic ore-veins, and dusk, vaporous atmosphere, whence issued the old Nibelungen heroes of the great Teutonic epos, there is much that is suggestive. May not one discover in this old cosmogonic myth a dim hint of the nebular hypothesis of creation, as it is called? Certainly, Niflheim, the Mistland, and Muspellheim, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of carbon, can be melted or reduced to a molten condition, although some of them require a very high temperature to effect this reduction, as, for example, platinum. When a still higher temperature is applied, the metals may be vaporized, or reduced from a molten state to that of a vaporous condition. In the case of solids, the atoms have not a free path in which to move. It must not be thought, however, that the atoms of a solid are motionless, as there is nothing absolutely motionless in the universe. In the case of the solid, the molecules which compose it, preserve their ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... and was driving dark masses of cloud across the sky; in the west a sullen red flared up from behind the hills, touching the lower edges of the vaporous mountains with purple. In a small, clear space above the red hung the silver sickle of the new moon, and near it shone a single star.... Lydia was like that star, he told himself—as wonderful, ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... quarter of an hour it became evident that that train had at least one great quality—it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swung along the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous mysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with increasing enthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of Galileo would never have had the audacity to deny that that train ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... trifle the worse for wear, relieved here and there by a pale blue ribbon. I used to flatter myself on guessing at people's nationality by their faces, and, as a rule, I guessed aright. This faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived, was a German—such a German, somehow, as I had seen imagined in literature. Was she not a friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a priestess of aesthetics—something in the way of a Bettina, a Rahel? My conjectures, however, were speedily ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... lies like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, . . . . . Where a soft and purple mist, Like a vaporous amethyst, Or an air-dissolved stone, Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curved horizon's bound To the point of heaven's profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath, the leaves unsodden Where the infant frost ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... built of light, grey stone, with steep gables and slender chimneys rising with airy lightness from the level sward by the margin of the beautiful lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre of the fells at the other side, whose snowy peaks show faintly against the sky, tinged with the vaporous red of the western light. As you descend towards the margin of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its taper chimneys and slender gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous sign, and over all the graceful tower and spire of the ancient ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... rivers and rocks, and where should we alight but at one of the gates of the daughters of Belial, at the rear of the City of Destruction, where I noticed that the three gateways of Destruction contracted into one at the back, and opened upon the same place—a murky, vaporous, pestilent place, full of noisome mists, and terrible lowering clouds. "Prithee, good sir," asked I, "what place be this?" "The chambers of Death," replied Sleep. And no sooner had I asked than I could hear some wailing, groaning, and sighing; some deliriously muttering to ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... meeting: the mysterious light of the picture gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders, all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite's mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice, whose fresh ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. Sublimed into imponderable vapour, I mingle and am lost in the endless foods of those vast globular volumes of vaporous mists, which roll upon their flaming orbits through ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... windward side was piled with snow, on the crest of which foam pellets lay, looking yellow by comparison, and melting small holes with their brine. At the door no foot-mark broke the drift; and against the vaporous sky no ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the face, a body that could move lightly, take supple attitudes, dance, posture, bend, or sit up straight, as now, with the perfect rigidity of an idol; a body that could wear rightly cascades of wonderfully tinted draperies, and spangled, vaporous tissues, and barbaric jewels, that do not shine brightly as if reflecting the modern, restless spirit, but that are somnolent and heavy and deep, like the eyes of the Eastern women ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... out by night when the circled moon foretelling rain, was flooding the marsh-land with a silvery, misty radiance, adding a new terror to the face of the landscape; when the exhalations of the marsh were sluggishly spreading a vaporous heaviness over the lowland; while the eerie habitants of the bog (whose time of sleep is by day, their active life at night) the millions of frogs and other creatures were reechoing their cries, announcing the whereabouts of the slimy pools, where foul gases are lord and master; when ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green light, the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... last ray, a streak of gold and purple which fringes the flying clouds. There, now it has entirely disappeared. Bien! bien! twilight commences. Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only the soft vaporous color of pale citron—the last reflection of the sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid delicacy quite indescribable.... The fields lose their color, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... vast and deep ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy compactness, now to disperse into their multitudinous particles and hang like some vaporous cloud from the cliff. Every moment renewed the vision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape; and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge and its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and that those pores are onely fill'd with some kind of juice, or some very pulpy soft substance, and thereby the steams may almost as easily find a passage through such a fluid vehicle as the vaporous bubbles which are generated at the bottom of a Kettle of hot water do find a passage through that fluid ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... better ready.' Item (6): My own adamantine conviction that I stood near by some mystery, which was about to be a big mystery, and which would pay me to pursue. 'A fine bundle of nonsense,' I hear you say; 'as silly a flight of a vaporous brain as ever man conceived'—but stay your words awhile; remember that one who is bred up at the keyhole lets himself, if he be wise, be moved by his impulses, and first opinions. He does not quit them until ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... filled the pass. Another followed it. Anderson pointed to the snowy crags of Mount Macdonald, and there, leaping from ledge to ledge, they saw the summer avalanches descend, roaring as they came, till they sank engulfed in a vaporous whirl ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there passed a whirling phantasmagoria, an interminable procession of figures, of memories, real yet unreal, convincing yet unconvincing. When she did at last lose all awareness of reality the effect was merely to enhance the vividness of those phantoms, to lend substance to her vaporous visions. Constant brooding over the treasure had long since affected Dona Isabel's brain, and as a consequence she often dreamed about it. She dreamed about it again to-night, and, strangely enough, her dreams were pleasant. Sebastian appeared, but for once ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... through the boughs overhead a brilliant star, aloof and splendid, looked coldly down. Along dark spaces Orion had drawn his glittering blade. Above the snowy mountains a melancholy waning moon was swinging. The valley was full of mist, white and shining where the light fell upon it, a vaporous purple where the shadows held sway. So still it was! the only motion in all the world the throbbing stars and her palpitating heart. So solemnly silent! It was a relief, as she trudged on and on, to note ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... smell of the vaporous rooms, and the boiling soapsuds, and the oil and cotton and the moisture from the hot flesh of a thousand men and women makes the best mill in England a sweating-house of this age ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... swarming with fish of various kinds, while the air is filled with birds. In the water may be seen large "schools" of whales, "basking"—as the whalers term it—at intervals, "spouting" forth their vaporous breath, or moving slowly onward,—some of them, every now and then, exhibiting their uncouth gambols. Shoals of porpoises, albacores, bonitos, and other gregarious fishes will appear in the same place,—each ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... and brightening, slowly victorious over the pallid light of the dead sun; till at last she lifted herself out of the vaporous horizon-sea, ascended over the tree-tops, and went walking through the unobstructed sky, mistress of the air, queen of the heavens, lady of the eyes of men. Yet was she lady only because she beheld her lord. She saw the light of her light, and ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... it might almost seem that, in the out-going loveliness of such productions, sentiment made substantial in language, floated abroad in natural self-delivery; as that heat which is not yet flame, gives forth in blue wreaths of vaporous grace, which unfold their delicateness for a moment upon the tranquil air, and then vanish away. It is not an artificial structure built up by intellect after a model foreshaped by fancy, or foreshadowed by the instincts of the ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... for Julia was love; he raged with disappointment at the mere thought of bondage so soon, and especially this bondage. But the sweetness of her stole upon his senses nevertheless, tangling about him like a drifting bit of vaporous mist; he had no sooner detached one section of it than another blew across his eyes, set pulses to beating in his temples, and shook his whole ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... psychic's hand?' I demanded of Miss Brown. 'Yes,' she replied, alertly. Even as I spoke I saw the mysterious limb dart out and seize upon a pencil which lay upon the table. Again and again I saw this 'apparition' emerge from that vaporous cloud and handle the pad in the middle of the table. I could see three fingers on the under-side of the pad as it was held before the psychic's face, and these facts I announced to the other members of the circle, who could ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to overcome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He became convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock, that they were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account. During the first year after he came to live with the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... putting it down to their own want of knowledge. The idea is true. Thought is the great power of the Universe. But to make it practically available we must know something of the principles by which it works—that it is not a mere vaporous indefinable influence floating around and subject to no known laws, but that on the contrary, it follows laws as uncompromising as those of mathematics, while at the same time allowing ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... make many more scientific observations than those they had made, and thus they were obliged to submit to their fate. When they had reached their greatest height, there seemed to open up in the midst of the vaporous mass a brilliant space, from which they could see the blue of heaven. The polariscope, directed towards this region, showed an internal polarisation, but, when pointed to the side where the mist still ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... logical state of the case never made its appeal to her. She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears. Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there would have been every chance ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... aerostatics[obs3], aerodynamics. gasmeter[obs3], gasometer[obs3]; air bladder, swimming bladder, sound (of a fish). V. vaporize, evaporate, evanesce, gasify, emit vapor &c. 336; diffuse. Adj. gaseous, aeriform[obs3], ethereal, aerial, airy, vaporous, volatile, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... you hope," continued the arrogant voice, "ever to be able to build anything upon a vaporous abstraction? What authority can a spook have? What appeal to love, to fear, to reverence, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... the bright celestial spheres, False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams, Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame, The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud, The sinking of the downward-falling star, All these are pictures of the changing moods Borne through the midnight stillness ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was failing, and a gray autumnal haze crept up the tranquil valley. Shadows waned and faded into dimness more diffuse, and light grew soft and vague and vaporous. The gleam of water, and the gloss of grass, and deep relief of trees, began to lose their several phase and mingle into one large twilight blend. And cattle, from their milking sheds, came lowing for more pasture; ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... have nothing better ready.' Item (6): My own adamantine conviction that I stood near by some mystery, which was about to be a big mystery, and which would pay me to pursue. 'A fine bundle of nonsense,' I hear you say; 'as silly a flight of a vaporous brain as ever man conceived'—but stay your words awhile; remember that one who is bred up at the keyhole lets himself, if he be wise, be moved by his impulses, and first opinions. He does not quit them until he knows them to be false. Instinct ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... between Classes. This theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... marble group, "The Seasons" by Sebastien Ruys, about which long green stalks, with lacelike edges, or of the stiffness of carved bronze, bent toward the mirror as toward a stream of limpid water. On the low chairs groups of women crowded together, blending the vaporous hues of their dresses, forming an immense nosegay of living flowers, above which gleamed bare white shoulders, hair studded with diamonds, drops of water on the brunettes, glistening reflections on the blondes, and the same intoxicating perfume, the same confused, pleasant buzzing, made by waves ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a half later, long streaks of electric light would ripple on that surface, and great ships stand at ease there, and ferry-boats rush back and forth. But in this closing dusk it reflected only the gray and yellow vaporous breath of April, and shaggy edges of a wilderness. The high shores sank their shadows farther and farther from the ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and generalizer,—witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German philosophy and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... with pale grey walls and a pale green carpet, and very little in it except, let in as a panel, a delicate low-toned portrait of the mistress of the house, vaguely appearing through vaporous curtains, holding pale flowers, and painted with a rather mysterious effect by that talented young amateur, her cousin, Harry de Freyne. It had been his sole success in art, and had been exhibited at the Grafton Galleries under the name of The Gilded Lily. No one ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... window-shutters, as was her wont when the moon was up, and with her small white hands on the window-sash, looked into the wooded solitudes, lost in haunted darkness in every direction but one, and there massed in vaporous and discoloured foliage, hardly more distinct, or ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... storm yesterday, that seemed to shake earth and heaven, to-day is beautiful. Soft glistening steams are rising from every hill and bog and valley, as the hot sun's rays beat upon them. The world seems wrapped in one vast vaporous mist, most lovely to behold. All the woodland flowers are holding up their heads again, after their past smiting from the cruel rain; the trees are swaying to and fro in the fresh morning breeze, thousands of glittering ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... struggled through the vaporous veil that hid the landscape. Then occurred one of those magical changes peculiar to the climate, yet perhaps pre-eminently notable during that historic winter and spring. By ten o'clock on that 3d of May, 1780, a fervent June-like sun had rent that vaporous veil, and poured its direct ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... the morning one vivid flash, followed, after the interval of a few seconds, by a loud report of thunder, announced that the storm was rapidly approaching. Suddenly the horizon was enveloped in a vaporous fog, and seemed to contract until it was close around us. At the same instant the voice of one of the ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... capabilities are boundless as the vapour into which thou meltest as a holocaust for thy happy devotees. If the pipe could but speak, what mysteries could it reveal! the rapturous visions of the inspired lover, rising in the circular imageries of its vaporous fumes, to beguile his fancies in the absence of his loved one; or the workings of a deep despondency and bitter disappointment, carrying its victim with blind impetuosity to a melancholy contemplation of a drear destruction, until the spirit seizes with avidity the proffered consolation, and ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... 'O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night! Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime, Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light, Make war against proportion'd course of time! Or if thou wilt permit the sun to climb His wonted height, yet ere he go to bed, Knit poisonous ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the mainmast were what a painter would call the deeper shades of the picture, for there the black cook and his equally sable adjunct, the cook's mate, held their vaporous and dish-washing levee; while forth from the cloudy sanctuary occasionally pealed a burst of obstreporous laughter, that the most unpractised hearer might swear came from the lungs of a negro, without the trouble of invading their ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames |
