"Diaphanous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have not been translated; it is hardly likely they ever will be,—at least, the greater number. They were not made for Paris. They are not at ease in a French garb,—nor, for that matter, in any other than their own diaphanous, sun-tinted, vowelly Provencal, unless they could find their expression in some folk-speech, as the Germans say, that could utter things of daily life without euphuistic windings, without fear of ridicule for things of home expressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... limpidity; fluorescence; transillumination, translumination[obs3]. transparent medium, glass, crystal, lymph, vitrite[obs3], water. V. be transparent &c. adj.; transmit light. Adj. transparent, pellucid, lucid, diaphanous, translucent, tralucent|, relucent[obs3]; limpid, clear, serene, crystalline, clear as crystal, vitreous, transpicuous[obs3], glassy, hyaline; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... themselves to right and left like officiating priestesses. The veiled figure stands with her back against the curtain, the others being in profile. Her head is swathed in folds of diaphanous white, through which the features are visible, like ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... what truth it possesses; an hour of rest between two ordeals, a smile between two sobs, and—the right to love each other. To love each other until that fatal separation which she felt was coming, until that end which was fast advancing; her poor, frail body being now only the diaphanous prison of her soul. She did not complain, as she felt the hour gently approach when, with a last kiss, a last sigh, she must ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... drenching fog. At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light vapor—a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a cloud—had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would have said: "Look quickly! in a moment it will ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... old man, who had treasured up so long some mystery, probably a very diaphanous one, for Emily's own dear sake in the world's esteem, and from the long bad habit of reserve, fell back into his chair as if he had been shot; but he did not faint, nor gasp, nor utter a sound; he only ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... emperor was unharmed by the missiles, a monumental statue situated within a few feet of him was shattered to pieces. In the sunny afternoons the pretty senoritas come to the plaza with their heads and necks lightly shrouded in Spanish veils, and otherwise clothed in diaphanous garments, short enough to show their shapely ankles in white hose, and their small feet in high-heeled, pointed slippers. He must be indeed calloused who can withstand, unmoved, the battery of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... the appearance of Miss Sallianna—Miss Sallianna arrayed in all her beauties and attractions, including a huge breastpin, a dress of enormous pattern, and a scarf around her delicate waist, azure-hued and diaphanous like the sky, veiled with ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... insupportable. And so, in chatting and thinking and waiting for the engineer, Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans walked about beneath the forest of screws, whose gyratory movement gave their arms the appearance of semi-diaphanous disks. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its cathedral, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... made a little chaplet of the fragrant leaves and flowers to adorn her smooth dark hair, and also a pretty knot for her breast. Her skirt was ruffled to her slender waist with tiniest frills of the diaphanous muslin. Elmira in her party gown looked like a double ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... crawled like insects across the wide emptiness of it. Here among the startled jackdaws I lounged smoking and ruminating upon the bells, oily Cerberus, and his lonely task, and inhaling the misty air from the winding canals in the fertile green fields below—appraising the values of the pale diaphanous sky of misty blue, harmonizing so exquisitely with the tender greens of the landscape which had charmed Cuyp and Memling, until the blue was suffused with molten gold, and over all the landscape spread a tender and lovely radiance, which in turn became changed to ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... a sound should be made! Oh, what if a bound should be laid To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, — To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, — [91] Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light, Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem But a bubble that broke in a dream, If a bound ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of an indescribable sweetening of the address, that had been sweet, with a rose-shadow of gentle apology cast over every approach; of a deepening of the atmosphere of his reverence, which yet as it deepened grew more diaphanous. And when now the episode of angelic visitation was over, with his usual wisdom he understood the wrench her abrupt departure must have given his whole being, and allowed him plenty of time to recover himself from it. Once he came upon him ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... several words to express the same or nearly the same meaning. Want of space prevents these being all included; the most important or most commonly used word has therefore been chosen; for instance, "mercury", "tranquil", "diaphanous", "suffocate", "salve", "renown", "fiddle", are not to be found, but "quicksilver", "calm", "translucent", "smother", "ointment", "fame", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... floats a long cradle, formed by the coils of a serpent, all whose heads, bending forward at the same time, overshadow a god who lies there asleep. He is young, beardless, more beautiful than a girl, and covered with diaphanous veils. The pearls of his tiara shine softly, like moons; a chaplet of stars winds itself many times above his breast, and, with one hand under his head and the other arm extended, he reposes with a dreamy and intoxicated air. A woman squatted before ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... are both formed of a dry, broad membrane, diaphanous and as fine as the white skin on the outside of an onion, which is capable of vibrating over its whole area. Their shape is that of the segment of a circle, cut away at the upper end. This segment is bent at a right angle along ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... aspects were clothed happily, all ideas wore a smile, all shades were diaphanous. The appointed hour was about to strike. In fact, at the end of a few minutes the belfry of St. Cloud let fall slowly ten strokes from its sonorous jaws. There was something melancholy in this brazen voice pouring out its lamentations in the middle of the night; but each of those strokes, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... appear unnaturally large, and almost Dantesque in their mournful gleaming. Even the lips seemed shrunken, changed in their classic contour; and the ungloved hand that clasped the folds of lace across her bosom was wasted, wan, diaphanous. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... then," she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... apple-blossom was just beginning to break upon the blue. The nights were calm and moonlit; the dawns were visions of mysterious and incredible beauty, wherein mountain and forest and lake were but the garments, diaphanous, impalpable, of some delicate, indwelling light and fire spirit, which breathed and pulsed through the solidity of rock, no less visibly than through the crystal leagues of air or ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contains a list of oils collected by John, abbot of Monza, in the cemeteries of Rome, and offered by him to Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards. Special mention is made in the document of the oil from the tomb of S. Cornelius; and de Rossi asserts that the fragments of a diaphanous oil-basin found in the exploration of this crypt were soaked with an ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... I've got everything," he said, standing in diaphanous contemplation. The one thing that worried him a little was the studs. They had looked over twenty different varieties, flat ones and solid gold ones, spirals, encrusted studs, and studs that anchored with a queer twist. Finally they had allowed themselves to ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... of the semicircle there arose, towards the region away from the sun, two long luminous streaks which limited the tail. Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance seemed dark, very rare, and very diaphanous. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... countenance was not the beauty of the Saxons. It was a radiant face, one of those that seem to have been touched in their cradle by a sunbeam, and to have retained all their brilliancy and suffused and mantling lustre. One marks sometimes such faces, diaphanous with delicate splendour, in the southern regions of France. Her eye, too, was the rare eye of Aquitaine; soft and long, with lashes drooping over the cheek, dark as her ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... but to the exigencies of the place; as any similar impressiveness is due in Signorelli's Annunciation to the quality of his form, and in Botticelli's Annunciation to the pervading character of his heads and gestures. These pale angels and St. Dominicks and Magdalens, these diaphanous, dazzling Christs and Virgins of Angelico's, shining out of the dark corner of the cell made darker, deeper, by the dark green or inky purple ground on which they are painted, are less the spiritual conception ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... unfold With broader span and more elusive sweep The radiant vistas of a world divine. But O my soul! what vision rises now! Far, far away, white blazing like the sun, In deepest distance and on highest height, Through walls diaphanous, and atmosphere Flecked with unnumbered forms of missive power, Out-going fleetly and returning slow, A Presence shines I may not penetrate; But on a throne, with smile ineffable, I see a form my conscious spirit knows. Jesus, my Saviour! Jesus, Lamb of God! Jesus who taketh from ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... all what is called Berlin iron-work; but these delicate arabesques were made in Vienna, and seemed to have been fashioned by the fairies who, the stories tell us, are condemned by a jealous Carabosse to collect the eyes of ants, or weave a fabric so diaphanous that a nutshell can contain it. Madame Rabourdin's graceful figure, made more slender still by the black draperies, was shown to advantage by a carefully cut dress, the two sides of which met at the shoulders in a single strap without sleeves. At every motion she ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... she fell now into a languid habit where tears swam in flood about the lids of her eyes, where the eyes were too heavy for clear sight and the very blood sluggish with sorrow. She grew pale again, hollow-eyed, diaphanous—a prism for an unearthly ray. Her beauty took on its elfin guise; she walked a ghost. Night and day she felt for the ring; though she knew it was not there, her hand was always in her vest, her bosom always numb and cold. Sometimes her urgent need was more ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... windows flooding down, turning the dancing guests into pirouetting ghosts in diaphanous blue and ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... military officers present, David Promoter's rich and sombre vestment was very noticeable. No one could deny that he was a singularly handsome and distinguished-looking man. It was upon his arm Mary Campbell entered, and her delicate beauty, enhanced by a white robe of some diaphanous material, made a telling contrast to the young minister's tall form, and ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... looked glorified. The afternoon autumn sun shone full through the great window and lighted her up till she looked like a spirit. Lighted her white diaphanous dress till it seemed to take shape as an ethereal robe; lighted her red hair till it looked like a celestial crown; lighted her great dark eyes till their black beauty became swept ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... really be far stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light! In due course of ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will ourselves—at least, I will—bend unseen over the future poet, and lend him inspiration ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... before, in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin. I did not go along, but I read about it all in the papers and received weekly from the scene of conflict a pound or so of mail matter, consisting of hundreds of diaphanous sheets of paper, each covered with my daughters' fashionable humpbacked handwriting. Hastings, my stenographer, became very expert at deciphering and transcribing it on ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... where the Sun is; the fifth is that where Mars is; the sixth is that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have in itself, according to each part, that which its material desires. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... that of Jane Austen, to express a fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the present I know nothing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. When now and then a young shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some girl of those flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become the creative historian of the place; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not a mere supposition may be inferred from the fact that at the lower elevation of only 8000 feet, instead of 14,000 feet, the Coronal streamers were seen by Professor Newcomb's party, far less extended than Langley saw them. Perhaps the best proof of the importance of a diaphanous sky is to be found in the fact that on the summit of Pike's Peak, the Corona remained visible for fully 4 minutes after the total phase had come to an end. A comparison of the descriptions shows that ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... their glance, as she looked about a theatre in search of a friend, made her eyes the most terrible, also the softest, in short, the most extraordinary eyes in the world. Rouge had destroyed by this time the diaphanous tints of her cheeks, the flesh of which was still delicate; but although she could no longer blush or turn pale, she had a thin nose with rosy, passionate nostrils, made to express irony,—the mocking irony of Moliere's women-servants. Her sensual ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... body—I have been witness to the birth—each contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it becomes denser though still translucent, as it seemingly absorbs some of the fluid by which it is surrounded. The model of the future ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... diaphanous, limpid, perspicuous, unadorned, distinct, lucid, plain, unambiguous, evident, manifest, straightforward, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... dresses, light and diaphanous materials are worn; silk dresses are not suitable for dancing. Black and scarlet, black and violet, or white, are worn in mourning; but ladies in deep mourning should not go to balls at all. ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... and Beatrice would be so enchanting in a poet who should not confine us in the Tower of Hunger and compel us to share Ugolino's revolting repast? Dante would have less charm, if he had less power. Have the fleshly naiads, the muscular Tritons, the wanton Zephyrs, the diaphanous transparency of our water-sprites and sylphs? Is it not because the modern imagination does not fear to picture the ghastly forms of vampires, ogres, ghouls, snake-charmers and jinns prowling about graveyards, that it can give to its fairies that incorporeal ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... account of this diaphanous, indescribable, exquisite something, I am to be calmly thrown over; calmly told to go about my business!" He began to walk up and down the pathway, with feverish steps, talking rapidly, and representing Hadria's conduct in different lights, each one making it appear ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... unchallenged escape. The shores unfolded in a panorama without form. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights following us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn we overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made a course east by north to where the red glints of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... can be done on silk, parchment, paper, linen, &c., after they have been made transparent, which may be accomplished in the following manner:— stretch your paper, or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each,) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of varnish and the designs. Silk, linen, or other stuffs, should be more carefully stretched, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... and snow white things, delicate and diaphanous and fit to be worn by angels. Then the dresses arrived, and were laid out on the bed and inspected. There was a black gown and a grey gown and a confection in pale blue. If Jones had been asked to price them he would have said a hundred dollars. Like ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... which should give access to the beach. It was all very foolish and romantic, no doubt, for they might have met just as conveniently in the conservatory of Clyffe House, where their privacy would have been equally respected, and where Miss Alix's satin shoes and diaphanous draperies would have exposed her to no risk of a chill. Lovers are like that, however, and had they not been so on this occasion, I should have had ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... marched a squad of tall, clean-shaven priests with great gold hoops in their ears. They blew mightily upon long, curved horns, and were followed by perhaps a dozen lithe, posturing girls, half clothed in diaphanous yellow robes. These priestesses swung golden censers which flung bluish clouds of aromatic smoke high into the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... diaphanous milord want with us?" exclaimed the Colonel, turning to assure himself that the horseman who had followed them from the bridge was ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... melancholy and loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the firmament ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... who were nourished on a literature which is at all events hearty even when it chances to be stupid—on what grounds can the organisers of improvement expect an English man or woman to take a sudden fancy to the diaphanous ghosts of the new American fiction? I dislike out-of-the-way words, and so perhaps, instead of "diaphanous ghosts," I had better say "transparent wraiths," or "marionettes of superfine manufacture," or anything the reader likes that ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... opacous, not transparent or diaphanous like Chrystall or glasse,[1] as Empedocles thought, who held the Moone to bee a globe of pure congealed aire, like haile inclosed in a spheare of ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... them. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles invade or transfuse them, replacing the diaphanous phosphorescent spirit fluid, and they grade into supple white and rosy ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... camera. Manton, whose features were familiar through published interviews in many publicity campaigns, was placed to one side opposite Phelps. Millard was given charge of a group containing a number of giddy extra girls in somewhat diaphanous costume, and seemed ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... Marina, each flower-like and charming under her gauzy veil of tenderest coloring. It was indeed a rare vision to the populace, these young patrician beauties whose faces never, save in most exceptional fetes, had been seen unveiled beyond their mother's drawing-rooms, floating toward them in a diaphanous mist which turned their living loveliness into ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... was now content to draw the woolen threads spun from Omphale's distaff; and the shoulders whereon had rested the pillars of the heavens, from which he had for a time freed Atlas, were now clasped in Omphale's arms, and afterward, to do her pleasure, covered with a diaphanous raiment of purple. Need I relate what Paris did in obedience to the great deity? or Helen? or Clytemnestra? or AEgisthus? These are things that are well known to all the world. Nor do I care to speak of Achilles, or of Scylla, of Ariadne or Leander, of Dido, or of many others, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... twine, similar to the gold cord of our officers' sword-knots. Moreover, they are hollow. The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full of a viscous moisture resembling a strong solution of gum arabic. I can see a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling through the broken ends. Under the pressure of the thin glass slide that covers them on the stage of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled ribbons, traversed from end to end, through the middle, by a dark streak, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... may concede 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the Alps of Death descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there is a world of whiteness—frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aerial onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... tales had enjoyed only a fleeting succes d'estime. Her style was, like her temperament, delicately constructed and of extreme refinement, not the style to appeal to the masses. It was "searched," a little precieuse, and the tales themselves were diaphanous enough, polished little contes, the points subtle, the action turning upon ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... fishes, for instance,—that are literally transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs. The heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Every hair at the vertical, I should resort to hysterical screams Did a diaphanous Lady (or Sir) tickle Me on the cheek in the midst of my dreams; Yet when, at Yule, I hear people converse on all Manner of spooks round the log in the grate, Often I wish that I too had a personal Psychic experience I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "a" it ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... heav'n her self was giv'n, That in my heart her beams did passe As some the sun keep in a glasse, So that her beauties thorow me Did hurt my rival-enemy. But fate, alas! decreed it so, That I was engine to my woe: For, as a corner'd christal spot, My heart diaphanous was not; But solid stuffe, where her eye flings Quick fire upon the catching strings: Yet, as at triumphs in the night, You see the Prince's Arms in light, So, when I once was set on flame, I burnt all ore ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... of blue canton flannel were bordered with trailing convolvulus in pink cretonne, and the diaphanous folds of white muslin curtains held in the centre an embroidered anchor which dragged inward, as the breeze rushed in through open windows. An arched recess in the wall, whence a door communicated with the adjoining chamber, was concealed by a portiere of blue that matched the lambrequins, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... responsive kindliness of his enquiring "How?" was beyond question genuine. Once more, in the warm and dark-glowing comfort of her home, the contrast between the masculine, thick rough overcoat and the feminine, diaphanous, useless kimono appealed to her soul. It seemed to justify, even to call for, confidence from her ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... humour, to engage your fancy, to divert it awhile from Switzerland, by which you appear and partly on my account to be offended, I began with reflections upon England: I raised up another cloud in the region of them, light enough to be fantastic and diaphanous, and to catch some little irradiation from its western sun. Do not run after it farther; it has vanished already. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... each other. Mr. Van Ostend stepped quickly to the door and, opening it, stood on the threshold. Something very like a diaphanous white cloud enwrapped him; two thin arms, visible through it, went suddenly round his neck; then his ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... for the pink robe, was her pleasure when she caught sight of Mary's colors, as she undid the parcel: when she lifted the dress on her arm for a first effect, she was enraptured with it—aerial in texture, of the hue of a smoky rose, deep, and cloudy with overlying folds, yet diaphanous, a darkness ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified. A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces, grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had snatched up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... two years ago he told her he hoped never to see her ugly old face again. And that delicate little creature in the box next to her—that pale diaphanous face?' ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... within the atmosphere of His mind, at first unconscious of themselves or each other. Presently, desire of separate existence awoke in these shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew upon them, and hence at last the fall into physical life, the realisation in concrete form of their diaphanous individualities. And that original cause of man's separation from deity, this desire of subdivision, how it has gone on operating, more and more! We call it differentiation, but the mystic would describe it as dividing ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... pasha who's taking toll of the officers inside there —Achmet Pasha. They call him the Ropemaker, because so many pass through his hands to the Nile. The Old Muslin I call him, because he's so diaphanous. Thinks nobody can see through him, and there's nobody that can't. If you stay long in Egypt, you'll find that Achmet is the worst, and Nahoum the Armenian the deepest, pasha in all this sickening land. Achmet is cruel as a tiger to any one that stands in his way; Nahoum, the whale, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the slow condensation of a radiating mass of gas under the action of gravity, is wholly inadequate to explain the observed phenomena. If the old view were correct, the earlier history of a star, from the giant stage of a cool and diaphanous gas to the period of highest temperature, would be run through within eighty thousand years, whereas we have the best of evidence that many thousands of centuries would not suffice. Some other source of energy is imperatively needed. If 5 per cent of a star's ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... your paper, or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... in the red sunset light, which rose slowly from the hulls and lower spars of the shipping, and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset, portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth between either ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... porpoises leaped from it and raced us, as if, even to them, their native element had become hateful, or as if they sensed something ominous and fearsome abroad from which they sought shelter in our company. One slender little opal-hued diaphanous-winged bird-fish came aboard, and before he was picked up had the happy life grilled out of him on our scorching iron deck, hot almost as boiler plates. Poor little chap! he found with us anything but sanctuary; but perhaps he lived ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... I ascribe it to your partiality for that detestable wine called Port. Confine yourself to Hock and Moselle, sirrah: I fear me, you have a base hankering after mutton and beef. Restrict yourself to salads, and do not sin even with an omelette more than once a week. Coridon must be visionary and diaphanous, or he is no Coridon for me. Remove my night-gloves, and assist me to rise: it is past four o'clock, and the sun must have, by this time, sufficiently aired this ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and in that case there would not be a sign next morning of any of the clothes. Heavy things, such as sheets or table cloths, might be safely looked for under lee of the nearest gorse hedge, but it would be impossible even to guess where the lighter and more diaphanous articles had been whisked to. A week afterwards the shepherds used to bring in stray cuffs and collars, and upon one occasion "Judy," the calf, was discovered in a paddock hard by, breakfasting off my best pocket handkerchiefs with an excellent appetite. Of course everything was dirty, and needed ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... of Ashes is very strongly Tasted, and easily soluble in Water; whereas the other part of the same Ashes is insipid and indissoluble in the same Liquor: Not to add, that the one substance is Opacous, and the other somewhat Diaphanous, nor that they differ in Divers other Particulars; If we consider those things, I say, we shall hardly think that both these Substances are Elementary Earth; And as to what is sometimes objected, that their Saline Tast is only an Effect of Incineration ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... Her beautiful chestnut hair was softly parted and arranged in a mass of graceful curls at the back of the head. She wore a house-gown of white muslin sprigged with violets, and a long Marie Antoinette fichu, pale green and diaphanous. Where it crossed she fastened a bunch of violets. She looked like a vision of spring, a grateful vision for a ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge of the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... passage of Theodoret shows, that the windows of the ancients were made of trellis or wicker before the invention of glass; though not universally; for in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Portichi were found windows of a diaphanous thin slate, such as the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... diaphanous transparency of colouring is not used from lack of technical ability, but to approach more nearly to his ideal of celestial and divine visions, and succeed in a species of ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... realistic superstition. They combined to form a marvellous picture—those contrasts of splendour and squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure as aether, golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into a diaphanous green which suggested a resection of Kaf, that unseen mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert, changed face twice a year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as Hope, beautified ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... seen as it expanded itself, feeding and growing on the solid matter within its reach. The central fury overtook the lagging perimeter forces, engulfed them, then blossomed out, thinned, and became a diaphanous curtain rippling and shimmering in an uncertainty of direction. It waned, leaving a residual flicker that might have been ...
— Jack of No Trades • Charles Cottrell
... with the experiments of M. Delaroche and Melloni, on the transmission of light and heat through diaphanous bodies—the more calorific rays feeling more and more the influence of thickness, showing that more motion was imparted to the particles of the diaphanous substance by the rays possessing more material momentum, and ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... unpleasant thought, too, for an "honest" woman to advertise so brazenly. The tight skirts and diaphanous garments were plainly a return to "sex." The ultra feminine felt they were going to lose something in this agitation for equality. They do not want rights—they want privileges—like the servants who prefer tips to wages. This is not surprising. Keepers of wild animals tell us that when an ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... do her marketing, brought her home in their cars—and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... but for an instant, and consider the mysterious fashion in which they manage to act in concert and combine their labour, when simultaneously carving two opposite sides of a comb, and unable therefore to see each other. Take a finished comb to the light, fix your eyes on the diaphanous wax; you will see, most clearly designed, an entire network of sharply cut prisms, a whole system of concordances so infallible that one might almost believe them to ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... all that toggery!" said Patty, bluntly, and Mona sighed as she saw Patty's diaphanous frock. Then, led by Mrs. Hastings, they went down to the drawing-room. They put Susan through a few lessons in introductions, practised calling her "Aunt Rachel," and bolstered up her failing courage by telling her how ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... side, thus to keep watch at once over the dead and the dangerous. The moon was half-way down the west, a pale, thoughtful moon, mottling the desert with shadows. Of a sudden she was eclipsed, remaining visible, but sending forth no light: a thick, diaphanous film covered her patient beauty, and she looked troubled. The film swept a little aside, and I saw the edge of it against her clearness—the jagged outline of a bat-like wing, torn and hooked. Came a cold wind with a burning sting—and Lilith was upon me. Her hands were still ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... on the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from Opaque, or refracted in the passage through Diaphanous Bodies, produceth in living Creatures, in whom God hath placed such Organs, an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, but the Body it selfe without us; ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... clouds of spray show dark against them. With both Falls the colour of the water is the ever- altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a great double rainbow, very ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... from the comment of Benjamin Keach, which gives both the conceit of the ancients and the endorsement of it at a comparatively recent era. "Pearls," naturalists tell us, "have a strange birth and original. Pliny saith, Shell fish is the wonderful geniture of a pearl congealed into a diaphanous stone, and the shell is called the mother of pearl. Now at a certain time of the year this shell fish opens itself, and takes in a certain moist dew, after which they grow big until they bring forth the pearl. By which it seems they have ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... instead of the thrones and diadems of the elect, was an immutable realm in which there was neither death nor life, clear ether merely, charged with beatitudes. And so, when the disciples disputed among themselves, Mary dreamed of diaphanous hours and immaculate days that knew no night, and in this wise lived until from the terrace of Jerusalem's Temple the Master bade her return to Bethany ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... above him, the beautiful female figure, with an air of solicitous care, guards him in his reverie. Her face stands out in full relief, the hair and diaphanous drapery waft back, mingling with the clouds, while the figure fades into dim outline in the massive peaks and mountains, seeming to pervade the air and the soil ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... marble. There are they who revisit, in their wrath or their remorse, the places wherein erst they suffered or wrought evil. There is one who, every Halloween, flits into the dining-hall, and hovers before the portrait which Hans Holbein made of him, and flings his diaphanous grey form against the canvas, hoping, maybe, to catch from it the fiery flesh-tints and the solid limbs that were his, and so to be re-incarnate. He flies against the painting, only to find himself t'other side of the wall it hangs ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the Rue de Prony, bearing a box which she said contained all that would be wanted by Mademoiselle. Marien had the curiosity to look into it. It contained a robe of oriental muslin, light as air, diaphanous—and so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... moonlight than in the daylight (in which, from that spot, they always looked exactly as though cut out of cardboard); why Providence had not arranged for perpetual full-moon; why the world looked such a place of peaceful, glorious beauty by moonlight, the bare cruel mountains like diaphanous clouds of tenderest soothing mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a fairy palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when all was so abominable by day; and, as ever—why his darling, Lenore Stukeley, had had to marry de Warrenne and die in the full flower and ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... surface streamed the noon sun warmly. Under its light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,—circular, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint, diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of the life ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... were married at the Embassy, and afterwards at an English church, the bride looking her most charming self in a costume of diaphanous chiffon and lace and the most fascinating of French hats, and the bridegroom his worst in his stiff conventional garments. They were a very radiant couple, however, and the dejeuner held after the ceremony at the "Hotel Britannique" ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... weather-beaten hut struck an isolated note of life, and across the valley Matterhorn towered,—solitary, superb,—his rugged head and shoulders thrust heavenward through a diaphanous scarf of cloud. Suddenly Quita Lenox fronted her husband, and his face softened to a smile that hovered in the eyes an appreciable time before it reached ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... formal character than the entertainments that have been mentioned. They require evening dress. Of late years, however, evening dress is almost as much worn at grand dinners as at balls and evening parties, only the material is not of so diaphanous a character. Lace and muslin are out of place. Invitations to evening parties should be sent from a week to two weeks in advance, and in all cases they should be ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... of morbidity or depression. Yet, what was I to think? I was not sick or mad; and the Thing had come to me twice. I turned from the married lovers and made my way to the veranda, where I might be alone to consider the pomander whose perfume was like a diaphanous presence ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... to witness some of its performances, I at length, at her earnest request, saw her operate upon it. The writing was almost unintelligible, and undoubtedly produced by the vibrating impulse given to the machine by her nervous, feeble, diaphanous hands. Finding my scepticism invincible by these means, my friend implored me to think in my own mind a question, and see if Planchette would not answer it. I yielded at last to her all but hysterical importunity, and thought of an heraldic question concerning the crest on a ring which ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... example of the savage on the borderland of grace and culture, but now I only glanced at him, and then to where at his side a girl was crouching, a gem of human loveliness against that dusky setting. It was Heru, my ravished princess, and, still clad in her diaphanous Hither robes, her face white with anxiety, her eyes bright as stars, the embodiment of helpless, flowery beauty, my heart turned ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris—who stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged—that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... gather in my eyes just because of the beauty of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the women about me seemed suddenly coarse and insincere. Some wonderful red stones, brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the diaphanous black driftings of her dress. She asked me if the stones were not very pretty, and said she gathered them in ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... door-way, stood Lida. She was dressed in a style quite different from her usual one. Instead of a fashionable coiffure, she wore her hair in a thick plait hanging down her back. Instead of an elegant costume she was wearing a loose gown of diaphanous texture, the simplicity of which alluringly heightened the beauty of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... not glide like us, But walk in eerie paces; They're solid, not diaphanous, With arms! ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... of the book. [440] What a rare tale is that of the Ensorcelled Prince, alias The Young King of the Black Isles, who though he sat in a palace where fountains limbecked water "clear as pearls and diaphanous gems," and wore "silken stuff purfled with Egyptian gold," was from his midriff downwards not man but marble! Who is not shocked at the behaviour of the Three Ladies of Baghdad! In what fearful peril the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... thought that outward decency may be bought too dearly at times. I included Jacobus, myself, the whole population of the island, in the same contemptuous disgust as though we had been partners in an ignoble transaction. And the remembered vision at sea, diaphanous and blue, of the Pearl of the Ocean at sixty miles off; the unsubstantial, clear marvel of it as if evoked by the art of a beautiful and pure magic, turned into a thing of horrors too. Was this the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... month's time I checked with John Bostick. Bostick had been able to duplicate Callahan's work, and we had three more, flimsy, diaphanous sheets that could not be torn by human hands. That was all I needed. Now I knew that anyone could duplicate the Tearproof Paper, and I had at least one, good, substantial working example for my patent application. The knowledge gave ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... fire from Horace was another easychair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and silks of their pleasure palaces, or riot in wild revel, to sink at last in sodden stupor. Sprawled thus they would lie, until the dressing machines we guided would lift them gently from their damasked couches, bathe them with warm and fragrant waters, clothe their soft carcasses in diaphanous, iridescent webs, and start them on a new ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Diaphanous gold, Veiling the Woolworth, argently Rising slender and stark Mellifluous-shrill as a vender's cry, And towers squatting graven and cold On the velvet bales of the dark, And the Singer's appraising Indolent idol's eye, And night like ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... bell-flower; the elf seized it in his little diaphanous alabaster floral hands, waved it three times round his dazzling head, so that the little bell sent a peal round the hills, and then threw it upon the ground. It dilated immediately, took the shape of a galley with masts and yards, although no larger than the moon's disk ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... to take the Colonel's orders I climbed up on the parapet. Night had now fallen completely, but the moon was rising. Indeed, it would have been almost as light as day but for a slight mist which was spreading a diaphanous veil before our eyes. In the foreground to the right I could barely guess the dim outline of the battered mill and the burnt farm flanking the trench occupied by the foot Chasseurs. Further off, however, I could vaguely ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... obviously artificial as Watteau. It would have been hard to find a happier or more expressive combination. And when Rousseau and republicanism had won the race, we find the ladies of the Directoire illustrating the national illusions with clinging and diaphanous draperies; and asserting their affinity with the high ideals of ancient Greece by wearing sandals instead of shoes, and rings on their bare white toes. The reaction from the magnificent formalism of court dress to this abrupt nudity ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... touched the lower edge of the upper cloud-stratum. It consisted of fine diaphanous vapour drifting swiftly from the westwards. The wind had been steadily rising all this time and it was now blowing a sharp breeze—twenty-eight an hour by my gauge. Already it was very cold, though my altimeter only marked nine thousand. The engines were working beautifully, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Nika, standing like a beautiful dream. She was draped in white silk from the Isle of Cos, and through this diaphanous dress the outlines of her lovely form were seen. Around her waist circled a zone of gems—ruby, sapphire, emerald, hyacinth, garnet, topaz, aqua marine—blended together in magnificent confusion. A splendid opal glinted above her brow, and her hair, like sunlight ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... she went on. "Much more beautiful than before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and, kept in the background with her ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... stream in a Northern forest. For years the choicest fruits of all the earth had been served daily upon his table. Yet as he looked back to-day no shining trout that had ever risen to his fly had stirred his emotions like the diaphanous minnows, caught, with a crooked pin, in the crooked creek; no luscious fruit had ever matched in sweetness the sour grapes and bitter nuts gathered from the native woods—by him and ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the adjacent sees, and the archbishops in their rich raiment of velvet and cloth of silver, carried in their hands tapers of perfumed wax; Oriental myrrh and aloes burned in golden censers, and veiled the lofty dome with a light and diaphanous vapour which gave an unearthly aspect to the building; the organ pealed forth its deep and thrilling tones; and amid this scene of excitement, splendour, and suffering, the Cardinal de Gondy celebrated the mass, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the propagation of light through the planetary spaces, and by the explanation, so simple and so complete, of the phenomena of diffraction in the wave theory of light"; and he adds: "The laws of double refraction prove with no less certainty that the ether exists in all diaphanous media." Thus the ether was no longer an hypothesis, but in some sort a tangible reality. But the ethereal fluid of which the existence was thus proclaimed ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... to drive no one out," he said, lifting a diaphanous hand. "To his own master let each man stand or fall. But you ask us—us, the appointed guardians of the Faith—the ecclesia docens—the historic episcopate—to deny and betray the Faith! You ask us to assent formally to the effacing of all difference between Faith and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... your remarks on Portia, etc., is so good that I wish to keep it: but still I think I shall enclose you a scrap to justify my complaint. It was almost by Intuition, not on Theory, that I deciphered what I did. Pray you amend this. My MS. is bad enough, and on that very account I would avoid diaphanous ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... pure and diaphanous, augmented the sensation of withdrawal and quietude; not a cloud on the horizon, not a spot of smoke in the air; silence and repose everywhere. The dome of St. Peter's had the colour of a cloud, the shrubberies on ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... next morning her star is surely in the ascendant. Cecil sleeps late. Floyd is down on the porch, reading and smoking, when the flutter of a diaphanous robe, with billowy laces, attracts his eyes and he smiles ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed party,—we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... We meet people like this from time to time who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. This young girl was very pretty, with the diaphanous beauty of a phantom; and she ate with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... watery-white or gray; sporangia crowded, ovoid or cylindric, stipitate or sessile, blue-gray, often capped with white; stipe variable in length and structure, where well developed pure white, often flattened, expanded and diaphanous, connate with others through the irregular reticulate or sheet-like hypothallus; columella none; capillitium ample, the lime knots angular or rounded, white connected by hyaline threads; spores in mass black, by transmitted light dark violet, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... what drawings of animal life he made! There are two, for instance, in the Basel Museum which could not be surpassed; studies in silver-point and water-colours of lambs and a bat outstretched. No reproduction could give the exquisite texture of the bat's wings, the wandering red veins, the almost diaphanous membrane, the furry body,—a miracle of patience and softness. It is all purest Nature. Like Topsy one can but "'spec' it growed" rather than ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... fragile tea-cups of turquoise china, adorned by medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping of the ivy leaves against the casements, and looking into the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... predominate, and the plain drab tones are blithe, airy, gracious, graceful and piquant as a beautiful young Quaker woman clothed in the garb of simplicity and humility—but a woman still. Corot coquettes with color—with pale lilac, silver gray, and diaphanous green. He poetizes everything he touches—quiet ponds, clumps of bushes, whitewashed cottages, simple swards, yellow cows, blowsy peasants, woodland openings, stretching meadows and winding streams—they are all full of divine ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... sword-edges of shade,—and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask, romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background is the present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is diaphanous on heaving ribs. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forms swayed in unison with the exquisite love music, every step, every motion perfectly attuned. It seemed as though no guiding were necessary. Slowly gliding, turning, reversing, he in his faultless uniform, she in her sweeping, diaphanous sable, seemed, without effort or the faintest exertion, fairly floating upon air. No wonder they sat or stood and gazed—these elders along the bordering benches—these others among the dancers—these few, wordless, at the windows. Then, with the Lorelei melody lingering to the last, the sweet, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... side of the skin, all round the circumference, so as to make a line of least resistance. The perfect insect will only have to heave with its shoulder and strike a few blows with its head in order to raise the circular door and knock it off like the lid of a box. The passage of exit shows through the diaphanous skin of the pea as a large circular spot, which is darkened by the obscurity of the interior. What passes behind it is invisible, hidden as, it is behind a sort ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent |
