"Translucent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face showed changes, born of the years. Still lined, still looking just a little worn, it had gained something in decision, gained infinitely more in sensitive refinement. In Scott, the native clay was being replaced by translucent marble. In Catia, it was hardening to something akin ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... come to the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up caroling into the crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them. Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... acquaintance, as in her. No one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision, and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in an instant she was in flames, burned to death before help could come. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... on a setting board, I was slightly surprised at Browne's use of "braces" and the like. Nowadays everyone I know uses strips of smooth, non-sticky, translucent paper or similar material for the purpose, and I had not realised that any other methods had been used in the past. The use of such strips is easy, fast and effective. It permits one to set large numbers of insects almost in an assembly line fashion, working ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... And this time her face was as white as her gown. Her bosom was heaving. Her skin was translucent. To Trennahan's suffused vision she seemed bathed in ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... receding—a very leafy ocean. The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines against the translucent sky—with this exception it is the same—the same clear sky dropping into the depths of the forest, the same outlines, the same forest, the same horizon, day after day, week after week; we hurry to the summit ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the cool, brilliant days which early June brings to the Narragansett country, that the steamer "Eolus" pushed out from Wickford Pier on her afternoon trip to Newport. The sky was of a beautiful translucent blue; the sunshine had a silvery rather than a golden radiance. A sea-wind blew up the Western Passage, so cool as to make the passengers on the upper deck glad to draw their wraps about them. The low line of the mainland beyond Conanicut and down to Beaver Tail glittered with a sort of clear-cut ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... correspondingly long set of exposures and this demand could not be realized as long as the pictures were taken on glass plates. But in that period experiments were undertaken on many sides to substitute a more flexible transparent material for the glass. Translucent papers, gelatine, celluloid, and other substances were tried. It is well known that the invention which was decisive was the film which Eastman in Rochester produced. With it came the great mechanical improvement, the use of the two rollers. One roller holds ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... leafage which one so seldom regards. If he chose to gaze further, there were fair tracts of shadowed sward, with sunny gleamings scattered where the trees were thinner, and above him the heaven of clustering leaves, here of impenetrable dark-green, there translucent-golden. A rustling whisper, in the air and on the ground, was the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... were of yellow silk. The panels of the litter itself were ablaze with the loves of all the gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon—lacquer on cedar. The cedar sliding doors were fitted with hasps of translucent Jaipur enamel and ran in grooves shod with silver. The cushions were of brocaded Delhi silk, and the curtains which once hid any glimpse of the beauty of the king's palace were stiff with gold. Closer investigation ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... he examined to be perfectly isotropic, exercising no influence in depolarizing light. When heated, however, it proved to be remarkably phosphorescent. The translucent varieties were found to transmit a yellowish and to reflect a bluish white light—or, in other words, to exhibit the phenomenon of opalescence. When tabasheer is slightly wetted, it becomes white and opaque; but when thoroughly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... obeyed, already in a phase of crepuscular hypnosis, her surface senses dulled by the potent "wine of China." And watching her closely, Victor permitted himself a smile of satisfaction as he noted the rapidity with which she yielded to the hypnogenic spell of the translucent quartz; how her breathing quickened, then took on a measured tempo like that of a sleeper; how a faint flush warmed the unnatural pallor of her cheeks, how her dilate eyes grew fixed in an unwinking ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... streamed upward across the purple bars and faded in a feather edge of dull red. But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself, which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color—a fine translucent purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... magnificent, and suitable, dress adds authority to man; but an effeminate dress, the garb of luxury and softness, lays open the corruption of the heart without adding to the ornament of the body. In like manner, translucent and flashy elocution weakens the things it clothes. I would, therefore, recommend care about words, but ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... a rose, but set with sharpest spine; You are a pretty bird that pecks at me; You are a little squirrel on a tree, Pelting me with the prickly fruit of the pine; A diamond, torn from a crystal mine, Not like that milky treasure of the sea A smooth, translucent pearl, but skilfully Carven to ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... often had occasion to notice) of so deep and black a black that the iris was indistinguishable from the pupil, and this blackness limited the range of their expression. They could only tell you what Flossie was feeling, never what she was thinking; for thought requires a translucent medium, and the light of Flossie's eyes was all on the surface. On the other hand, the turns and movements of her body were always a sufficient indication of the attitude of her mind. At the present moment, sitting on Keith's knee, her pose was not one of pure complacency. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Jules Guerin for its pink color to harmonize with color scheme. Binds together buildings, its pink harmonizing with pink of walls. Grains of sand in walks translucent. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... in the woods one day found a great nest of Indian pipe. She bent listlessly to pick the waxen mystic blossoms, thinking to herself that they were like some beautiful dead thing; and then she came upon a delicate flush on the side of their clear, translucent pearl, and wondered if it ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... day, when a big side-wheel steamer bound for way ports down the Sound lay at the wharf at Vancouver waiting for the mail. Towering white in the sunshine high above the translucent brine, she looked with her huge wheel-casings, lines of winking windows, and triple tier of decks more like a hotel set afloat than a steamer, and the resemblance was completed by the long tables set out for breakfast in the white and gold saloon. No swarm of voracious passengers had, however, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... it. Stretching up from behind the black mountain, over a third or more of the sky, there was a heavy, sombre blue heap or ledge of clouds, looking almost as solid as rocks. The volumes of which it was composed were perceptible, by translucent lines and fissures; but the mass, as a whole, seemed as solid, bulky, and ponderous in the cloud-world as the mountain was on earth. The mountain and cloud together had an indescribably stern and majestic aspect. Beneath this heavy cloud, there was a fleet or flock of light, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... our Christian work can penetrate. As the diver in his bell sits dry at the bottom of the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens far above him, and is parted from that murderous waste of green death that clings so closely round the translucent crystal walls which keep him safe; so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves all that would overflow to destroy us and our work, and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters some courses in the great building ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... still To the herdsman's oaten quill, Wafted from the plain below; Or the heifer's frequent low; Or the milkmaid in the grove, Singing of one that died for love. Or when the noontide heats oppress, We will seek the dark recess, Where, in the embower'd translucent stream, The cattle shun the sultry beam, And o'er us on the marge reclined, The drowsy fly her horn shall wind, While echo, from her ancient oak, Shall answer to the woodman's stroke; Or the little peasant's song, Wandering lone the glens ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... wanderer where the wild wood ceaseless breathes The sweetly-murmuring strain, from falling rills Or soft autumnal gales; O! seek thou there Some fountain gurgling from the rifted rock, Of pure translucent wave, whose margent green Is loved by gentlest nymphs, and all the train Of that chaste goddess of the silver bow; For silent, shady groves, by purling springs, Delight the train, and through the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... led the master into the impersonal attitude of statecraft. It was a training, sir, in leadership, in social thinking, in, if you please, altruism." The old gentleman thumped the arm of his chair with a translucent palm. "Yes, sir, negro slavery was God's great lesson to the South in altruism and loving-kindness, sir! My boy, I do believe with all my heart that the institution of slavery was placed here in God's country to ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the first man but knew Thee by report, unseen, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widen'd on his view. Who could have thought what darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun? Or who could find, Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood reveal'd, That ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... opal sea I looked on of mist, shot along its upper surface with the rosy gold and pinks of dawn. Then, as that soft, translucent lake ebbed, jutting hills came through it, black and crimson, and as they seemed to mount into the air other lower hills showed through the veil with rounded forest knobs till at last the brightening day dispelled the mist, and ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... the mazes of the wood, at the margins of the water. Verdant spears and blades expanded; fair fans opened and tendrils twined; simultaneous showers of heart-shaped, arrow-shaped, flame-shaped foliage, all pure emerald and translucent beryl, made opulent outpouring of that new life which now pulsed through the Mother's million veins. Diaphanous mist wreaths and tender showers wooed the Spring; under silver gauze of vernal rain rang wild rapture of thrushes, laughter of woodpeckers, chime and chatter ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... lined with colored ceremonial pigment, green and orange stripes across her cheeks. Earrings were strung through her ears. On her feet were tiny slippers of perruh hide, laced around her ankles, and she wore long translucent Martian trousers with a bright sash tied around her waist. Between her small breasts a chain of stone beads rested, good-luck ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... Listen where thou art sitting 860 Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east dusk walked silently down to ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... stone when it is cut. In California, as in other regions where hot springs are found, travertine is not uncommon. It is found notably in the volcanic district of Mono County, and elsewhere, sometimes in the form of Mexican onyx, which is only a translucent variety of the same marble. In its reproduction here the marble has been imitated even to the natural imperfections which roughened the Italian stone. In the concave surfaces of the ornamentation the color has been deepened, so ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... dropped below the fringe of trees, which immediately etched their delicate outlines against a pale, translucent green sky. Two straight, thin columns of smoke rose from the neglected camp-fires. Orde, ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... about sixteen by twenty feet, two-thirds underground, log-walls chinked with moss, a roof of poles sloping upwards, tent-like, but leaving an opening in the middle for a smoke-hole some three feet square, and covered at present by a piece of thin, translucent skin. With the sole exception of the smoke-hole, the whole thing was so covered with earth, and capped with snow, that, expecting a mere cave, one was surprised at the wood-lining within. The ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... their sides, like a pocket comb, a hideous head, and tail, and a generally repulsive appearance. If one did not know they were excellent eating, and most harmless in their habits, one would be tempted to run or take to a tree at sight of them. Their shell is a translucent yellow, with black markings. The female has a red stripe down her back, and red eggs beneath her. She is richer in flavor, and more deadly than the male to one who has a natural diathesis to poisoning ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... man," answered Paul; and then, continuing to speak with enthusiasm, "the indication of minerals is undoubted. See you that serpentine deposit mingled with a variety of other rocks, varying in colour from darkest green to yellow, and from the translucent to the almost transparent? Wherever that is seen, there we have good reason to believe that copper ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... recognized by its effect on paper, making a greasy stain which does not disappear on heating and which renders the paper translucent. Try butter, lard, or olive oil. Also show the presence of fat in peanuts by crushing them in a mortar and rubbing the powder on thin paper. If the substance to be tested contains but little fat, this may ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... his hands clawing desperately at that wall as it flickered twice and momentarily became translucent again. He forced his body between folds of palpable darkness, slid into the vanishing blue cone. Instantly he found himself in his normal world, standing in the center of the sitting room. ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... hot summer air. Here a herd of cattle stood knee-deep in the shallow water, lazily twitching their tails and snuffing at the stream. The birds were silent now in the glowing noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed. There, beside a lock with its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent through a half-shut sluice. Now and then the springs of thought brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and passed like a breaking bubble—but for the most part we were silent, content to converse ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... veldt, a tiny spurt of dust twirled up into the air and came spinning towards them like a huge, translucent top. Gaining momentum as it spun along and picking up more dust as it advanced, it came whirling onward, rising high and higher until it swept down on them, a huge, khaki-colored, balloon-like mass. It caught them in its whirl, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... as a whole is beautiful and memorable enough; but its details are wonderful too, from the niello pavement, and the translucent marble windows of the apse, to the famous tomb of Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal, and the Luca della Robbia reliefs of the Virtues. This tomb is by Antonio Rossellino. It is not quite of the rank of Mino's in the Badia; but ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... if you eat his favourite experiment?" asked Jerry, squelching his way diligently through a bunch of long, slender grapes of a translucent ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... surface itself remained as mysterious as before. Of course they did not touch it with bare hands—all wore insulated mittens—but the dazzling stuff was certainly as hard as steel and as highly polished. It was neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent, "like pink mother-of-pearl," ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... boy you are! Had I been any other woman—but let it go. You are as translucent as a woodland brook, and—at times you babble like one, confident that your music pleases everyone who hears it.... I pray you let me judge whether the errant lady be what a poet's soul would have her.... I am not speaking with any unkind thought or doubt.... But woman ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the long bright summer day: Hark, to that mighty crash! The loosened ice-ridge breaks away— The smitten waters flash. Seaward the glittering mountain rides, While, down its green translucent sides, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... down the wall, now dropping sheer in spray, now trickling in a delicate, glistening sheet. But the greatest wonder of the cave was in the texture of its walls, which appeared to Enoch to be of purest marble of a deep shell pink and translucent creamy white. Moisture had collected on the walls and each tiny globule of water seemed to hold a miniature rainbow in its heart. There was a holy sort of loveliness about the spot, and before he returned to the rugged adventure ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... cools the red-hot iron in a tub of water, vapour rises to the roof of his shop. The blaze from his forge shining on this mist produces the colours mentioned. The amethyst is a precious stone, clear and translucent, with a colour inclining to purple. The presence of coal dust or smoke in the vapour would help to produce the colour of amethyst. The same effect would result, if some smoke or dust were mingled with the mist where the sun's rays reach it at the top ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... it provides a translucent covering, which allows action by the actinic rays of light, which brings the chlorophyll into activity. All plant growth is conducted under the influence of chlorophyll, and the actinic rays of light activate ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had rested over the water and our clean sand-bar grew fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... for ever!" Ellen, a younger and more enthusiastic sister remarked, with fervent admiration. "Look, Ma! was ever anything more gorgeous than that pure white cloud, fringed with brilliant gold, and relieved by the translucent and sparkling sky beyond?" ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... themselves in their most attractive robes—when the very leaves appear as if they were flowers, so varied and brilliant are their hues—when the foliage of the young beeches becomes a pale yellow, and glimmers translucent against the sun—when the maples are dying off of a deep red, and the sumac and sassafras turning respectively crimson and scarlet—when the large drupes of the Osage orange, the purple clusters of the fox-grape, and the golden berries of the persimmon or Virginian ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... under umbrageous trees; exotics perennially in bloom; Swiss tree boxes, from which the lark carolled by day and the nightingale warbled at night; an artificial lake, in which goldfishes swam and upon whose translucent bosom majestic swans glided gracefully—I assure you that Mrs. Denslow has the soul ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... facts, and their causes, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out of that confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrong is done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task of making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the crime ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... spurred on at a gallop, finding some relief in the pounding action of the saddle and in the rush of air past his ears. The moon was late, but when it came it seemed to help him, lightening his mood as it lightened the trail. The big ledges and lowering, lesser peaks lifted into the dark sky weirdly translucent, and their upper edges seemed smooth and graceful as the rims of bubbles. Solid rock seemed melted and transfused with light and air. It was all miraculously beautiful, and the sore-hearted man lifted his eyes to the heights seeing the face of a girl in every moonlit ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... shipping clerk, with an iron safe, a Remington typewriter, a copy-press, sundry chairs and spittoons, a small gas-heater, and many tottering columns of dusty letter-files. The window-panes, encrusted with perennial deposits of Atmosphere, were less transparent than translucent, and so little the latter that electric bulbs burned all day long whenever the skies were overcast. Also, the windows were fixed and set against the outer air—impregnable to any form of assault less impulsive than ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... on wood and is quite common in our woods—both the rose-colored and the translucent-brown. Captain McIlvaine calls Merulius tremellosus and M. rubellus emergency species. He says they are rather tasteless, tough, slightly woody in flavor. They are ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... its inner end, where the water shoaled to four and a quarter fathoms. The scenery was very striking and beautiful—a sheer precipitous cliff, varying from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in height, towering out of the clear translucent water on their larboard hand as they passed in, whilst on their starboard hand the ground sloped gently upward from the water's-edge for a distance of about a mile and a half inland, where it cut the sky-line as an undulating ridge some ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... how the accompaniment surges up in imperious, impetuous strength. Turn to "See, the heavens smile": note how the resonant swinging chords and that lovely figure playing on the top give one an instant vision of vast, translucent sea-depths and the ripples lapping above. Look at "Come unto these yellow sands" and "Full fathom five": he almost gives us the colour of the sea and the shore. These things did not come by accident, nor do they exist only in an enthusiastic fancy. They were meant; they ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... painted lodges Berries we have dried and meat; Come again! e'er comes the winter, Let us hear your horses' feet." And they sprang into their saddles, Swept, white-splashing, through a stream Red and saffron hued, the pageant Crossed the blue translucent gleam. Then unwilling, as they vanished, "Star-Child" slow to camp returned; Told the council of the Blackfeet All the marvels he had learned; Dressed him in his chief's apparel, Rode to where, within the glen, Lay the trail that led him ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... and there the tops of isolated palmettos lifted a cluster of hearse-like plumes. Yet in spite of this dominance of sombre but graceful shadow, the drooping delicacy of dark-tasseled foliage and leafy fringes, and the waving mourning veils of gray, translucent moss, a glorious vivifying Southern sun smiled and glittered everywhere as through tears. The balm of bay, southernwood, pine, and syringa breathed through the long alleys; the stimulating scent of roses moved with every zephyr, and the closer odors of jessamine, honeysuckle, and ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... northern lancet representing the Tree of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are darkness ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of the afternoon they paused upon the banks of a stream of considerable size, which was a tributary to the Big Sandy. Though broad, it was not deep, and could be easily forded. The water flowed quite swiftly, and being perfectly translucent, the bottom could be seen from ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... a ray of light, sweeter than the smallest silver bell that rang the hour of rest—was that slender voice floating on the odorous and translucent air. Nearer and nearer it came, echoing down the valley, "I know it, I know it, ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... The larger proportion of the crews in the various vessels were on shore; but on the decks idly reclined small groups of sailors, and the murmur of their voices stole, indistinguishably blended, upon the translucent air. Behind rose, one above the other, the Seven Hills, on which long afterwards the Emperor Constantine built a second Rome; and over these heights, even then, buildings were scattered of various forms and dates, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to accept Byron's, when we seek a panoramic view of this world. Poetry gains manifold representation of life, we argue, in proportion as the author represses his personal bias, and approximates ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... flood of crimson light welled up, serene and glorious, with luminous shafts of splendour, that, as we looked, met and concentred in one glowing heart of flame—met in one translucent, ineffable depth of purple-red. Calm and radiant it lay there, as though no curse lay in its deep hollows, no passion had ever fed its flames with blood; stronger than the centuries, imperishably and triumphantly cruel—the Great Ruby ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... limpidity; fluorescence; transillumination, translumination^. transparent medium, glass, crystal, lymph, vitrite^, water. V. be transparent &c adj.; transmit light. Adj. transparent, pellucid, lucid, diaphanous, translucent, tralucent^, relucent^; limpid, clear, serene, crystalline, clear as crystal, vitreous, transpicuous^, glassy, hyaline; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... forth, gazing steadily into the dim world—into the bit of future that she thought she saw unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the open spaces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green sky, the rising moon—these things made the picture, but were to all intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a hedge of laurels, and fixed itself ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... slight acquaintance. In thinking the matter over he was greatly perplexed to determine how to introduce the subject. Of course it would not answer to allow the cashier to fathom his secret purpose, and yet he was oppressed with a vague consciousness that only a translucent film hid his thought from the world. Once or twice, in driving over on the unfamiliar errand, weak and irresolute he half resolved to turn back, but greed finally prevailed, and he kept ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... gleamed with joy at sight of the translucent potent stuff—the very stuff of life, its essence and prime principle, without which neither plant nor animal nor man can live—oxygen, mother of all life, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... painted. Boiardo is not a great artist like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods, where we meet crisp-haired damsels tied to pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or enchanted wells, through whose translucent green waters we see brocaded rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever and anon across shallow streams, to the castles where gentil donzelle wave their kerchiefs from the pillared belvedere; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... upon the velvet grass— The porch-rails hold it in translucent drops, And as the cattle from th' enclosure pass, Each one, alternate, slowly halts and crops The tall, green spears, with all their dewy load, Which ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor against the midday sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which it was known for miles up and down the hurrying Clearwater. The other shore was a high, overhanging bank, from whose top drooped a varied leafage of birch, ash, poplar, and hemlock. Under this bank the water was deep and dark, a translucent black with trembling streaks and glints of amber. Fifty yards up-stream a low fall roared musically; but before reaching the fresh tranquillity of the pool, the current bore no signs of its disturbance save a few softly whirling foam clusters. Light airs, perfumed with birch and balsam and warm ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... crazy ambulance,—with some others, two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and sands below and murmuring pines above,—vast colonnades of towering, branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... please Are little gilt bees In amber drops Which look like honey, Translucent and ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... conjectured to be a possible source of the name. Alabaster was also employed in Egypt for Canopic jars and various other sacred and sepulchral objects. A splendid sarcophagus, sculptured in a single block of translucent Oriental alabaster from Alabastron, is in the Soane Museum, London. This was discovered by Giovanni Beizoni, in 1817, in the tomb of Seti I., near Thebes, and was purchased by Sir John Soane, having previously been offered to the British ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this road ourselves. We, too, took the Sacred Way. On the loveliest day imaginable we drove along this smooth white road; we saw the Bay of Salamis; we wound around the sweetheart curve of her shore; the purple hills forming the cup which holds her translucent waters are the background to this famous battle-ground; and beyond, set on the brow of one of these hills like a diadem, is all that remains of the Temple of Mysteries. Broken columns are there, pedestals, fragments of proud ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... refrained, contenting himself with gazing down over the side at the coral rock three feet below the bottom of the boat, and seeing there among the miniature groves of wondrously tinted weeds shoals of silvery fish; translucent shrimps; curiously long snaky, scaly looking objects which wound in and out and undulated among the weeds, while every here and there played about some tiny chubby-looking fish like a fat young John Dory, but gorgeous in colour in the sunlit waters almost ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... other's eyes toward the sunny street. The fallen man lay on the pavement, moving feebly, eyes open. Something moved up to him, a translucent brownish shape, like muddy water. It hovered for a moment, then dropped on the man like a breaking wave, flowed around him. The body shifted, rotating stiffly, then tilted upright. The sun struck through the fluid shape that flowed down now, amber highlights twinkling, ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... that is only to be witnessed within the zone of the tropics. Moreover, there was a young moon, a delicate, crescent-shaped paring, about two days old, hanging low in the western sky, yet capable, in that pure, translucent atmosphere, of yielding quite an appreciable amount of light. The water was still smooth as polished glass, even the swell having gone down so completely that its undulations were not to be detected by even the delicate test of watching the star reflections in ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... nest is blackish; and C. LINCHII, whose nest contains straw and moss as well as gelatine. All three kinds are collected, but those of the first kind are much more valuable than the others. The nest, which is shaped like that of our swallow, consists wholly of a tough, gelatinous, translucent substance, which exudes from the bill of the bird as it builds. We do not understand the physiology of this process. The people generally believe that the substance of the nest is dried seafoam which the birds bring from the sea on returning from ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... depression in its moan. Egremont felt infinitely dispirited. The landscape around him that he had so often looked upon with love and joy, was dull and hard; the trees dingy, the leaden waters motionless, the distant hills rough and austere. Where was that translucent sky, once brilliant as his enamoured fancy; those bowery groves of aromatic fervor wherein he had loved to roam and muse; that river of swift and sparkling light that flowed and flashed like the current of his enchanted ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... finger of a living person, the portion beyond the cord or thread will become red and swollen—if dead, no change is produced. 3. If the hand of a living person is held before a strong light a portion of the margin or edges of the fingers is translucent—if dead, every part of it is opaque. 4. A coal of fire, a piece of hot iron, or the flame of a candle, applied to the skin, if life remains, will blister—if dead it will merely sear. 5. A bright steel needle introduced and allowed to remain for half an hour in living flesh will be still bright—if ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... of quartz (chalcedony or jasper) of a deep green colour, with bright red spots. The finest specimens, which come from South Asia, are of fairly translucent chalcedony; those of jasper are opaque; they are used ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... he minded him of a new book he had in his bag, for literature, he judged, might be her hobby, and had engaged her in conversation, of which his share was meant to impress the tiny, translucent ear that nestled in the dark-brown coils and waves of the pretty head in front ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... pearls, none smaller than a hen's egg; next we place a jewelled staff of ebony in your hand; a golden helmet, having at either side the burnished wings of the imperial eagles of Jove, and bearing upon its crest an opal that glistens like the sun through the slight haze of a translucent cloud, will be placed upon your head; richly decorated sandals of cloth of gold will adorn your feet, and about your waist a girdle of linked diamonds—beside which the far-famed Orloff diamond of the Russian treasury is an insignificant bit of ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... stood out in the fullest prominence; a multitude of official reports and investigations and court records contribute a translucent record. He became invested with a sinister distinction as the most cold-blooded corruptionist, spoliator, and financial pirate of his time; and so thoroughly did he earn this reputation that to the end of his days it confronted him at every step, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... of beauty—the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to help her companion. Her slight firm frame, the graceful decision ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sphere. But Visvamitra, more intent, His mind to sterner penance bent. So many a season rolled away, When Menaka, fair nymph, one day Came down from Paradise to lave Her perfect limbs in Pushkar's wave, The glorious son of Kusik saw That peerless shape without a flaw Flash through the flood's translucent shroud Like lightning gleaming through a cloud. He saw her in that lone retreat, Most beautiful from head to feet, And by Kandarpa's(243) might subdued He thus addressed her as he viewed: "Welcome, sweet nymph! O deign, I pray, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... tint to the exquisite hues which make of the sky one vast, gleaming fire-opal on those marvelous "white nights" when darkness never descends to a depth beyond the point where it leaves all objects with natural forms and colors, and only spiritualizes them with the gentle vagueness of a translucent veil. Small steamers, manned by wooden-faced, blond Finns, connect the unfashionable suburban quarters, lying near the canal's entrance into the Neva on the west, with the fashionable Court quarter on the northern quays at its other entrance into the Neva, seven versts ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Is still to me and you sent? It glowed as when Saint Peter's front, Illumed, forgets its stony wont, And seems to throb translucent. 130 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... country the light was translucent and cold as the waters of a spring, and when the trees waved in the wind their undulation seemed to communicate itself to all the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the gloom of the sylvan tunnel to a translucent twilight, we floated down the swift current ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... call the Goblin mountains; but that would be scarcely reverent to St. Elizabeth, nor to the numberless pretty chatelaines of towers, and princesses of park and glen, who have made German domestic manners sweet and exemplary, and have led their lightly rippling and translucent lives down the glens of ages, until enchantment becomes, perhaps, too canonical in the Almanach ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... as serene as a summer's day, and oddly translucent. Her head with its crown of yellow hair was charming in contour, and her face, ivory in coloring, gave her an ethereal, lily-like appearance, distinctive and unusual. She lived in a world of her own, which ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... the sky, where the sun had dipped below the mountain rim, was a sea of translucent green, weirdly and wildly harmonious with the desolation of the land. On the bleak lake one could hear the lap of waves, while the high, rocky shore to the left was a black wall of shadow. I stood by the beach near our boat, all alone in the wan light, and tried to think ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dogs swim abreast of and between the canoes, driving the fish before them, as sheep-dogs drive sheep, one or another diving under at intervals to intercept such as attempt to escape outward. For in the translucent water they can see the fish far ahead, and, trained to the work, they keep guard against a break from these through the enclosing line. Soon the fish are forced up to the inner end of the cove, where it is shoalest, and then the work ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... St. Andre, or down the coast toward Ventimiglia. He went with them to Monte-Carlo and Mentone, and was their escort again and again when they visited the great war-ships as they lay at anchor in a bay which in its translucent blue was like an ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... like the hands of a high-born lady than those of a Western editor. He attended to them with careful pride, and never alluded to them as a subject for his jokes, until, in his last illness, they had become unnaturally fair, translucent, and attenuated. Then it was that a friend calling upon him at his apartments in Piccadilly, endeavoured to cheer him at a time of great mental depression, and pleasantly reminded him of a ride they had long ago projected through the South-Western ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... I lie under the awning by the engine-room door, lazily reading "Faust." There is a speck on the sky-line—the mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant "ah-ha-a-a" ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... translucent waves, great Thetis, rise! Mother divine, hear, and take back the gift Thou gavest me of valor and renown, And then seek Zeus, but not with loosened zone For dalliance; entreat him to restore Me, Achilles, to the earth, to the black earth, The nourisher of men, not these pale ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... shield I mean, were swamped in the flood of greenish—white radiance shed by her, and it was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now——one could, once—but rest his soul, he is dead and then to look forth ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft like sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aerial shadows of translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst upon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests, violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape had been shed over them, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of carbonate of ammonia the (generally) alternate longitudinal rows of cells in every rootlet, from the root-cap up to the very top of the root (but not as far as I have yet seen in the green stem) become filled with translucent, brownish grains of matter. These rounded grains often cohere and even become confluent. Pure phosphate and nitrate of ammonia produce (though more slowly) the same effect, as does ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... distended with bile. The heart, lungs, and internal organs are shrivelled and bloodless. The stomach is sometimes quite healthy; in other cases it may be collapsed, empty, and ulcerated. The intestines are also contracted, empty, and translucent. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... point where three major shipping routes of the Federation of the Hub crossed within a few hours' flight of one another, the Seventh Star Hotel had floated in space, a great golden sphere, gleaming softly in the void through its translucent shells of battle plastic. The Star had been designed to be much more than a convenient transfer station for travelers and freight; for some years after it was opened to the public, it retained a high rating among the more exotic pleasure resorts of the Hub. The ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... shot with purple and liver-coloured bars hung like a pall. To the north a line of clear light was still visible, but over the foot-hills towards east and south there lay almost invisible a shimmering haze, soft and translucent, and above the haze a heavy curtain, while over the immediate landscape there shone a strange weird light, through which there floated down to earth large white snowflakes. Not a breath of air moved across the face of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... lighted by a large window, now thrown wide open that the sweet spring air might enter, which window was the pride of the Baroness, for it contained more true glass than any window in the palace of the Prince. The glass made now is not transparent, but merely translucent; it indeed admits light after a fashion, but it is thick and cannot be seen through. These panes were almost all (the central casement wholly) of ancient glass, preserved with the greatest care through the ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... face, about the eyes, interfemoral membrane, antehumeral membrane, and that portion of the wing membrane along the sides of the body, white, very translucent; remaining portion of wing membrane sepia, traversed by very distinct reticulations; fur on the upper surface black at the base of the hairs for about half their length, remaining portion light yellowish brown; beneath the same, but ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... smell. These are not only sharply alert to every external indication of danger, but by a curious reversal, which we will consider more carefully later, reflect signals of distress or discomfort from within. Last, but not least, the translucent tissues, the semi-transparent skin, barely veiling the pulsating mesh of myriad blood-vessels, is a superb color index, painting in vivid tints—"yellow, and ashy pale, and hectic red"—the living, ever changing, moving picture of the vigor of the life-centre, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... would distend himself with pneumatic vestments in the rococo vein. From among the billowy developments of this style, and beneath a translucent and illuminated headdress, his eye watched jealously for the respect of the less fashionable world. At other times he emphasised his elegant slenderness in close-fitting garments of black satin. For effects of dignity he would assume broad pneumatic shoulders, from which hung ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... without being at all able to esteem him. It was with a very different feeling that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually transfigured with emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he impressed one as a living soul; and this inward light gave a translucent beauty to the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal advantages of form and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes of un-sounded depth, and a voice whose rich cadences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at the foot of the table, she directed the operations. The children stepped about, serious, responsible, their rosy faces translucent in the long, searching, level rays sent up by the sun, low in The Notch. Dishes clicked lightly, knives and forks jingled, cups were set back with little clinking noises on saucers. All these indoor sounds were oddly diminished and unresonant under the open sky, just as the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... knows how to draw a man even from overseas, and girls out of their wedding-chambers, chased with gold, carven out of translucent amethyst, lies before thee, Cyprian, for thine own possession, tied across the middle with a soft lock of purple lamb's wool, the gift of the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... tints, a little wood, in the centre of which was a reed-fringed pool. The new rushes were beginning to fringe the edges of the tiny lake, but the winter sedge stood pale and sere, and filled the air with a dry rustling. The water was as clear as a translucent gem, and Hugh saw that life was at work on the floor of the pool, sending up rich tresses of green-haired water-weed. The copse was green under foot, full of fresh, uncrumpling leaves. He sat down beside the pool; the silence of the wide fields was broken only by the faint rustling of sedge ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sun, the splendour which appears to us would be invisible, since it contains, as it were, an earth for its central mass, with a circumferential envelope of light and heat, and between the two an atmosphere of water and clouds and translucent air." The luminary of Herschel's fancy could scarcely be more clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of the Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a shining star to any one outside ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... minutes the boy resumed, still with his eyes closed, the windows of the tenement shut, but the light from within shining through the translucent walls. ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... watched her for a while, then turned fiercely to his affair. Through dense shrubberies, over drenched lawns her way was; it led her to the lily-pond, which lay hidden within rhododendron walls, with a narrow cincture of grass path all about it. Dark-brown, still and translucent like an onyx it lay before her. It was her haunt of election when she was troubled, as now she was, when she gave herself time to ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,—how these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... then the noble morning star disclosed herself, swinging in the sky like a blazing jewel in a translucent sea. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... her mind to go off, and finally shrank back, thoroughly disgusted with herself, but unable to bring herself to make the leap. "Shall I hold your hand the first time?" said Nyoda. Holding tightly to Nyoda's hand, Gladys jumped from the board, and sank down, down through the glassy, translucent depths, holding her breath and trying to keep her eyes open as she had been bidden. At first all was darkness, then a mass of bubbles became visible, then light shone through the water and the next moment her head ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... To show the action of saliva on starch. Saliva for experiment may be obtained by chewing a piece of India rubber and collecting the saliva in a test tube. Observe that it is colorless and either transparent or translucent, and when poured from one vessel to another is glairy and more or less adhesive. Its reaction is alkaline ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... purple film displaces the glories of azure and gold, and the twilight shadows the dusky bits of wood, the frowning rocks, and the indentations of shore that might be nereid haunts. The sky turns from its vivid tints to a dreamy gray, then a translucent blue, and a few stars steal slowly out. How lovely it all is! How kind Eugene is proving himself, and she wonders that she never remarked his pleasant traits before! Was it being so much in love with madame that made him captious and irritable, or was it Marcia's little ways ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... himself, and the Gods take their places as before. The air is now translucent, the sky cloudless, while the beechwoods flash with the lustre of dew, and the sea beyond the white ships is like a floor of turquoise. IRIS is seen to rise from the shore, through the gorge in the woods. She approaches, half flying, half climbing, with incredible velocity. She ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... suggested that the camp should be moved a few miles off, and leave the bee tree and its great surplus contents, to the bears; and if they did come about, we should come back and have a few pops at them. The plan was feasible, and all agreed; so, removing a few gallons of the translucent delicacy, the camp was struck, and, following an old trail a few miles, we found a delightful site for recamping under some large oaks on a creek, a tributary of ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the prolonged thunder of the surf, and at intervals sea-birds passed overhead with an occasional piping cry. Wreckage was tumbled about here and there; and innumerable cocoanut shards, huge, brown cups of fuzzy bark, lay underfoot and in the crevices of the rocks. They found a jellyfish—a pulpy translucent mass; and once even caught a sight of a seal in the hollow of a breaker, with sleek and shining head, his barbels bristling, and heard his hoarse croaking bark as he ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for they were friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class, undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... one, of this unique period in our history was an unbridled mania for everything glittering. Never were fireworks so much in vogue, never were diamonds so highly prized. The men, as greedy as the women of these translucent pebbles, displayed them no less lavishly. Possibly the necessity for carrying plunder in the most portable form made gems the fashion in the army. A man was not ridiculous then, as he would be now, if his shirt-frill or his fingers blazed with ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... enthusiast," repairing often to the resounding shore of the ocean, or leaning where a greater than he was by and by to lean, over the Brig of Balgounie, which bends above the deep, dark Don, or walking out pensively to the Bridge of Dee, and watching the calm, translucent, yet strong, victorious river running through its rich green banks and clustering corn-fields to wed the sea. No university in wide Britain can be named with Aberdeen, in point of the wild romantic grandeur of ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... colonists were yet able to follow its descent through the waves. The powerful light it gave forth lighted up the translucent water, while the cavern became gradually obscure. At length this vast effusion of electric light faded away, and soon after the Nautilus, now the tomb of Captain Nemo, reposed ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... a huge sea rise far above my head. I turned aside, caught my breath, and looked again. The wave over-topped the Ghost, and I gazed sheer up and into it. A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... "strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great, strong, with a prevailing ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... above the rim of horizon on the opposite side of the circling bay, sending a glittering track across the water to our very feet. To walk with Stevenson on such a night, and watch "the waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks and burst with a surprising uproar"—to walk with him on such a night and listen to his inimitable talk is the sort of memory that cannot fade. On other nights when the waters of the bay were all alight with the glow of phosphorescence, we walked on the old wooden pier and marvelled ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... drops which the declining sun was showering on an endless procession of pearl-crested waves; nor did she cast one of her customary loving glances at the western sky, where masses of violet clouds, with edges of resplendent gold, enclosed lakes of translucent beryl, in which little rose-colored islands were floating. She retraced her steps to the woods, almost crying. "How strange my answers must appear to her!" murmured she. "How I do wish I could go about openly, like other people! I am so tired of all this concealment!" ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... get the room in focus. For I was inside a room, a room of some translucent substance, windowless, a skylight high above me, through which pink daylight streamed. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I'd come halfway around the planet ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... bestowed on each? Without attempting to penetrate rashly into the designs of God, ought we not to recognize the fact that by reason of their general diversity intelligences could be classed in spheres? From the sphere where the least degree of intelligence gleamed, to the most translucent souls who could see the road by which to ascend to God, was there not an ascending scale of spiritual gift? And did not spirits of the same sphere understand each other like brothers in soul, in flesh, in mind, ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... element of consequence, namely, the color. The rich red of our Triassic sandstones is due to a pellicle of peroxide of iron coating each of the grains. That this is merely surface coloring is shown by the fact that hydro-chloric acid will discharge the color and leave the grains translucent. Unfortunately the most brilliantly colored stone is not the most durable, and it so happens that these brilliant red sandstones are often composed of exceedingly rounded grains. Also some of the very red sandstone ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... rare enough, save the faint hues of the flowerets,—almost as indistinguishable in the general effect as their fairy fragrance on the air. Aloft, the sky is all one blaze of sunshine, that seems to bleach it into palest, most translucent blue. Far to the west some fleecy clouds are rolling up from the horizon, wafted from the peaks of the hidden Rockies. Down in the "swale," the wooden barracks, stables, quarters, and storehouses are all one tint of economical brown, brightened only by the hues of the flag ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King |
