"Kaleidoscope" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Babylonian-Assyrian religion. The priests of Marduk could view with equanimity the rise and growth of Assyria's power. The influence of E-Sagila and E-Zida was not affected by such a shifting of the political kaleidoscope. Babylon remained the religious center of the country. When one day, a Persian conqueror—Cyrus—entered the precincts of E-Sagila, his first step was to acknowledge Marduk and Nabu as the supreme powers in the world; and the successors of Alexander continue ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... electric light, in which the magnificent jewels of the titled and wealthy women seemed to glow with a subdued and chastened fire. A dance was in progress, and Stafford, as he stood by the doorway and looked mechanically and dully at the whirling crowd, the kaleidoscope of colour formed by the rich dresses, the fluttering fans, and the dashes of black represented by the men's clothes, thought vaguely that he had never seen anything more magnificent, more elegant of wealth and success. But through it all, weird and ghost-like shone Ida's girlish ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... to large, bright vistas, and lead her into a life of beauty. But this was a dream and Franklin was the fact, and to-night he seemed the only fact worth looking at. Wasn't dun-colour, after all, preferable to the trivial kaleidoscope of shifting tints which was all that the future, apart from Franklin, seemed to offer her? Might not dun-colour, even, illuminated by joy, turn to gold, like highway dust when the sun shines upon it? ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the world burst into fragments, and, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, slid swiftly into a new pattern. "Ah, the poor soul! The poor soul!" She saw him more clearly, she understood him better, than in life. "All ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... twilight had faded and the June night begun, the wharf was dimly lighted and there was the usual crowd of customs officers, porters, and men and women waiting to see friends. All moved and changed like figures in a kaleidoscope before Jewel's unwinking gaze; but the long minutes dragged by until at last her father and mother appeared among the passengers who came in procession down the steep incline ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... peculiarity;—nothing is more mysterious than a Finnish bed. In the daytime every bed is shut up. The two wooden ends are pushed together within three feet of one another, kaleidoscope fashion, the mattress, pillows, and bedclothes being doubled between; but more than that, many of the little beds pull also out into double ones from the sides—altogether the capacities of a Suomi ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... cyclone *Deca ten decasyllable, decalogue *Demos people democracy, epidemic *Derma skin epidermis, taxidermist *Dis, di twice, doubly dichromatic, digraph *Didonai, dosis give dose, apodosis, anecdote *Dynamis power dynamite, dynasty *Eidos form, thing seen idol, kaleidoscope, anthropoid *Ethnos race, nation ethnic, ethnology Eu well euphemism, eulogy *Gamos marriage cryptogam, bigamy *Ge earth geography, geometry Genos family, race gentle, engender Gramma writing monogram, grammar Grapho write telegraph, lithograph *Haima blood hematite, hemorrhage, anemia *Heteros ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... shaded by a fine old ilex tree. From where I sprawled upon a bed of borrowed cushions in the room, reading a chap-book I had lately purchased—The Rare Things of Abu Nawwas—I saw the colour and the movement of that street as at the far end of a dark kaleidoscope, for all the space ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... valleys. They passed, moving northwest, over large and small lakes, all evidently part of the same great system, and continued to sweep along for several days with a beautiful panorama, as varying as a kaleidoscope, spread beneath their eyes. They observed that the character of the country gradually changed. The symmetrically rounded mountains and hills began to show angles, while great slabs of rock were split from the faces. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin—too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... perambulators already, to say nothing of the butcher's cart! I wish the Number Seven lady would go out for a walk, and let me see her autumn clothes. She wears all the colours of the rainbow, and looks like a walking kaleidoscope... Whitey! Oh, Whitey!" ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... will immediately have what will stand, with most people, for very satisfactory Gothic. The slightest possible acquaintance with existing forms will enable any architect to vary his patterns of foliation with as much ease as he would those of a kaleidoscope, and to produce a building which the present European public will think magnificent, though there may not be, from foundation to coping, one ray of invention, or any other intellectual merit, in the whole mass of it. But floral decoration, and the disposition of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... his eyes studying the swift kaleidoscope of the doorway. When she reappeared in it, her face was alight with color. "Come." She held out her hand. "I want you to meet him. He likes them—oh, very much!" She pressed her hands together lightly. "I think he will buy ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... merchant, the courtesan. The very coarseness is a part of the picture; though it strikes us more forcibly than it did those to whom the tales were told and for whom they were written down. It is a kaleidoscope of the errors and failings and virtues of the men whose daily life it records; it is also a picture of the wonderfully rich fantasy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Conde and the famous Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those five or six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope; Conde and Turenne always on opposite sides—for each changed his party as often as the other; battles prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and vice practised by both sexes ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... subject, the picture well within the frame, low relief, a Velasquez study of tones and a Japanese study of spaces. Let us, dear and patient reader, particularly dwell upon the spacing. A Whistler, or a good Japanese print, might be described as a kaleidoscope suddenly arrested and transfixed at the moment of most exquisite relations in the pieces of glass. An Intimate Play of a kindred sort would start to turning the kaleidoscope again, losing fine relations only to gain those which are more exquisite ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... clear objective picture is never vitiated by the desire to preach. He has no system of ethics, politics, or anything else to teach. Doubtless Shakespeare had his own views on all important matters of life and death; but in the drama the artist's business is to present us with the kaleidoscope of life, not to insist upon our interpreting it to certain ends, of which he is to be the arbiter. You cannot, perhaps, read Lear without being a better man, or Hamlet without being a wiser; but you are permitted to be ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... amusement and education. Years before kindergarten methods were adopted—although unknown, probably, to parents—scientific and philosophic toys were doing good work, and driving home elementary truths. There were curious cylindrical mirrors, the inevitable kaleidoscope, and the water imps, an amusing toy, for the imps, inserted in a bowl or bottle of water, bobbed about in a curious way when the india-rubber cap which covered the neck was pressed and manipulated by the fingers. The modern picture theatre, with all its attractions to grown-up folks, ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... My dream kaleidoscope Changed still again, and framed love's dearest hope - The trinity of home; and life was good And ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... different, every time more lovely than before. My dreams were twined together like a wreath of flowers; but no! there was no connexion between them. They were wonderful phantoms, falling like colours from the kaleidoscope, and as impossible to retain. Notwithstanding all this, I awoke sorrowful this morning; my awakening took from my childish soul its favourite toy.... I went into Ammalat's tent; he was still asleep. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... valuable, not only as relics of the past, but as guides and prophets for the future. They know the pattern of every turn of life's kaleidoscope. The colors merely fall into new shapes; the ground-work is just the same. The good which a calm, kind, and cheerful old man can do is incalculable. And whilst he does good to others, he enjoys himself. He looks not ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... matter? Who cares, so long as my old friends remember me? Who would have thought, my dear madam, that the map of Europe would have been painted the colors it is to-day? It was a kaleidoscope—the clatter of many stools, and I fell down between them all. Still plain Karl Steinmetz—still very much at your service. Shall I send my check for five ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... fists became motionless, his head flapped over on one side, and the twinkling black eyes were fixed upon Otto as though they would read him through. If we could recall the fancies that flitted through our brains at that early stage of existence, what a wonderful kaleidoscope ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... or aspect of life man uses as a lens through which to look into the mystery of things. Conceived of as the will of the world, God is one, and we have the monotheism of Moses. Seen through instinct and the kaleidoscope of the senses, God is multiple, and the result is polytheism and its gods without number. For the reason, God is a dualism made up of matter and mind, as in the faith of Zoroaster and many other cults. But when the social life of man becomes the prism of faith, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... edges of soft materials being turned under and secured with the basting lines. Similarity in shape and size is to be avoided when placing the pieces, and the effect aimed at that of the colouring of a kaleidoscope in its variety and brightness. In order to obtain queer shapes and corners, it is not necessary to carefully cut them out and fit them into their various spaces; in fact, it is better not to do so, but to lay one material partly over another, and by so doing ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... of Spain were part of the duty of the colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth, I do not in the least care. If it is ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... is rather affectedly called "The Heptaplasiesoptron," or fancy reflective proscenium, which is placed in the long room fronting the orchestra of the Rotunda. It is entirely lined with looking glass, and has in all probability originated in the curious effect produced by the kaleidoscope, and the looking glass curtains lately exhibited at our theatres. This splendid exhibition is fitted up with ornamented draperies, and presents a fountain of real water illuminated, revolving pillars, palm trees, serpents, foliage, and variegated lamps; and the mirrors are so ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of the wind above him rose to a screaming, and suddenly it was as though he were tumbling down the entire length of the stairway, fragments of sky and stone and faces flashing past in a kaleidoscope, and the screaming all around him. He almost reached for his bludgeon, but then he realized that he was not Tebron Marl ... he was Lee Rynason, and the screaming was Horng and he was being driven out of those thoughts, tumbling through a thousand memories so ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... without count. Also they would mix and fall into new patterns, like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. There was no end to them, and each was lovelier, or grander, or fraught with a more sweet entrancement, than the last. And still she who brought them, she who opened his eyes, who caused his ears ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... altered by a very slight change in the privileged image—my body. This image occupies the centre. By it all the others are conditioned; at each of its movements everything changes as though by a turn of a kaleidoscope. Here, on the other hand, are the same images, but referred each one to itself, influencing each other no doubt, but in such a manner that the effect is always in proportion to the cause; this is what I term the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... a multitude of gay creatures that Mr. Falkirk's favourite allusion to Enchanted ground would have been more than usually appropriate. All the colours in the rainbow, gleaming by turns in all possible alternations and degrees of light and shadow; a moving kaleidoscope of humanity; the eye at least was entertained. And Stuart endeavoured to find entertainment for the ear of his companion. They wandered up and down, in and out; not meeting many people; in the changing lights it was easy to miss anybody at pleasure. In the course of ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... it quite an intellectual treat," said she, "our police are such intelligent creatures. I went all over the museum myself once; and it felt exactly like being in a kaleidoscope—everything so ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... in the kaleidoscope of Fortune that associates a Prime Minister of the Sandwich Islands—where the only pictorial Art is a kind of illumination laboriously executed by the natives on each other's skins, thus forming a free peripatetic gallery—with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... first. Perhaps while you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that charmed you ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... what he was about. Adventure had followed so fast upon adventure that he was in a more or less dazed condition, and felt as little capable of connecting event with event as if he had been asked to recall the changing pictures of a kaleidoscope. That affair of the packet, now, was it or was it not serious, and would he ever know what it meant ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... the pace of life was a march. When America was born, the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed. Now the pace is a race. New York is a kaleidoscope. I myself can remember it a wholly different thing. One passes down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down—a few days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "Life's a kaleidoscope," Mary said. "I'm tired. Let's sit down."—They were half-way up the park by that time.—"Oh, here on the grass. What does it matter?" When they were thus disposed she went back to her figure. "There's just a little turn, by some big wrist that we don't know ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... was conscious of conducting with skill. Everywhere he was meeting English people of his own order, all delighted to see him, all pleased with his notice. His few days in Paris were merely a change in the kaleidoscope from London. The life—everything else—was the same. This time he was like a man cast upon a desert island. He sat at his little table, sipping a glass of vermouth, and conscious that no man in Paris had fewer friends. The clubs were closed to him, there were ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... innuendoes, she gave him a couch, a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics, a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dram-phial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful of naphtha for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice, a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with a movable balance-wheel, a box of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... are more favorable sometimes than at others. It has always existed and always will exist, independent of earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. Nature is ever changing; the movements of the atmosphere more resemble the kaleidoscope than any thing else. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage. Reaction was a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... was a low wall loosely constructed of these same unhewn blocks, and the shapes that evolved themselves out of this wall, beside which grew two or three stunted trees, were more grotesque and extraordinary than I could describe. They varied like the colours in a kaleidoscope with the wavering and increasing light. At one time it seemed to me that one of the trees was a gipsy woman enveloped in a cloak, extending her arm towards me threateningly; at another, two weird dogs seemed to be ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... leather or rich embroidered silk heavily mounted with silver. Above all this gorgeousness sat the caballeros and the donas, in velvet and silk, gold lace and Spanish, jewels and mantillas, and silver-weighted sombreros; a confused mass of color and motion; a living picture, shifting like a kaleidoscope. Nor was this all: brown, soberly-dressed old men and women in satin-padded carretas,—heavy ox-carts on wheels made from solid sections of trees, and driven by a ganan seated on one of the animals; the populace in cheap finery, some on foot, others astride old mules or broken-winded horses, ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... deer, left the herd to die alone. Sometimes she would fill up the picture with scenes from his supposed life, at one time of one character, and at another time of another; but they were merely sports of the Imagination, changing figures of a kaleidoscope which employed without satisfying the mind. Of the truth of her general hypothesis she was quite convinced, nor without hope that her old friend would be restored to society and the position which she considered his due. As children instinctively know those who love them, so must Holden have originally ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... day and they favoured it the next. One day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the only things on which he was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... vividness, yet without any true constructive power, but with the mind adrift, blindly and passively following the laws of association, and with reason and will in torpor; the mental images being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in dreaming, reverie, somnambulism, and intoxication. Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in the adjective fantastic. Imagination ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... myself the gold had but little attraction, but the adventure was very dear to my heart. Once more the clarion call of Romance rang in my ears, and I leapt to its summons. And indeed, I reflected, it was a wonderful kaleidoscope of a world, wherein I, but a half-year back cooling my heels in a highland burn, should be now part and parcel of this great Argonaut army. Already my native uncouthness was a thing of the past, and the quaint mannerisms of my Scots tongue were ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the little old woman still dance; they have not grown tired of this ever-changing kaleidoscope of human nature, this paradise of the free, where many would rather struggle on half starved than live a life of ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... Kaleidoscope kalejdoskopo. Kangaroo didelfo. Keel kilo. Keen (sharp) akra. Keep teni, gardi. Keep silence silentigxi. Keeper gardanto. Keepsake memorajxo. Keg bareleto. Kennel hundejo. Kernel kerno. Kettle bolilo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... of the opera were a jangle of chords and discords, and the hum of voices was like the murmur of a far-off sea. My eyes remained fixed upon the stage. It was like looking through a broken kaleidoscope. I wanted to be alone, alone with my pipe. I was glad when we at last entered the carriage. Mrs. Wentworth immediately began to extol the singers, and Phyllis, with that tact which is given only to kind-hearted women, answered most of the indirect questions ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... every topic put in its best place, with such a light and vigorous hand, that we have the same pleasure we have felt in fairy tales, when some person under trial is helped by a kind fairy to sort the silks and feathers to their different places, till the glittering confusion assumes the order,—of a kaleidoscope. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... toy were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: the showy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, with here and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively the field of vision; the trifling touch that will disenchant the fairest patterns; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... only the left hand star (or you might call it a bisected lozenge) placed on the diadem, but obliquely placed as regards the curve of that diadem. Two or three other arrangements are striking, though not equally so, both from their regularity and from their repeating each other, as the forms in a kaleidoscope.] of stars: he is now a vision 'to dream of, not to tell:' he is ready for the worship of those that are tormented in sleep: and the stages of his solemn uncovering by astronomy, first by Sir W. Herschel, secondly, by his son, and finally by Lord Rosse, is ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... seems like a kaleidoscope, changing its relations at each experience, whether of joy or sorrow. How beautiful is life, when we learn how much we can be to each other, and how varied may be the relations we bear ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... Parisians. Almost each day, after the 24th of February, brought tidings of change in all the relations betwixt man and man. There was fighting one day, embracing the next; every rotation of the hand brought to view a wonderful and unexpected change of figures in the political kaleidoscope. Day after day, in endless succession, there were mouthings of tumid, florid, and often unintelligible speeches, and of still more unintelligible and mysterious theories for the regeneration of mankind. Every speech and newspaper ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... these things come to her; and she stood there now, thinking of that procession of unvalued valuables, with an expression so mixed and changeful it resembled a kaleidoscope. Love for Solomon, pride in Solomon, respect for Solomon's judgment and power to pay, gratitude for his unfailing kindness and generosity, impatience with his always giving her this one big valuable permanent thing, when he knew so well that she ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... fine hand is everywhere. Reliable dependants, old prospecting friends and clients, keep him informed by private cipher of every changing turn of the brilliant Virginia City kaleidoscope. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... combined endlessly, like the pieces of a kaleidoscope, to confuse him in his search. Tonty was not at hand to take care of the colony while he groped for the lost river. He moved his wretched people from their camp, with all goods saved off the wreck in the bay, to ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... was coming on, and the chill winds went through my khaki drill uniform. The sky was overcast, and the bay, generally a kaleidoscope of Eastern blues and greens, ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... attention, and they visited the farm and the dairy, and the Temple of Love, and the Swiss Cottage, and the Presbytery, and the Music Pavilion, and the Mill, until they were all mixed up, and Patty declared that her mind was nothing but a kaleidoscope full of ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... a good move, and Margaret was fain to take to some other subject of conversation, lest the pause should seem long. They had not gone far before the society kaleidoscope was once more in motion, and Barker was talking his best. They rolled along, passing most things on the road, and when they came to a bit of hill, he walked his horses, on pretence of keeping them cool, but in reality to ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... hurried over the points of interest in the early days of Montana. But any picture of its shifting life can only be a view of one of the combinations of the kaleidoscope. The discovery of new mines, and the abandonment of old ones, the fresh advent of gold-seekers and the exodus of the winners of fortunes, the increase of facilities for travel and of all the comforts of life, are daily and perceptibly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... gateway that guarded the spacious grounds, feeling like one in a troubled dream. He could shape nothing clearly: his past, present, and future seemed shaken out of place like the vari-colored figures of a kaleidoscope. To give up all his hopes, to shut out the beautiful vista opening before him and settle down forever to—to—"hogs on the hoof!" And yet it was his only chance to cheer, to gladden, perhaps to save gentle Aunt Win's life,—to bring ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... coloured maps of the political boundaries of south-western Asia for the last three thousand years. The shapes and colours come and go—now it is Persia, now it is Macedonia, now the Eastern Empire, now the Arab, now the Turk who is ascendant. The colours change as if they were in a kaleidoscope; they advance, recede, split, vanish. But through all that time there exists obstinately an Armenia, an essential Persia, an Arabia; they, too, advance or recede a little. I do not claim that they are eternal things, but they are far more permanent things than any ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... instruments. This over-stress appears far stronger in the music of Franck's followers, above all in their frequent use of the whole tone "scale" which can have no other rationale than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A] With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... for him a gay cartoon of events, caricaturing various episodes in the social kaleidoscope which might interest him. He gossiped cynically, but without malice, about people they both knew, about engagements, marriages, and divorces, plans and ambitions; about those absent from the metropolis and the newcomers to be welcomed. He commented ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the deep blue of the sky like froth upon some placid stream. Imagine a sound of fresh voices, mellowed by a little distance, from where, to and fro, walking, trotting, darting, but ever moving like the particles in a kaleidoscope, many squads of players were practicing on the football field. Such, then, is the picture that would have rewarded your gaze had you passed through the gate and stood near the simple granite shaft which rises under the shade of the trees ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... disturbed.... It was uncanny. She seemed to have been away for years. And yet, as she looked about and got the familiar scent of the funny little lavender sachets made by Mrs. Nye, she found it hard to believe that Marty and Gilbert Palgrave, the house in New York, all the kaleidoscope of Crystal rooms and restaurants, all the murmur of voices and music and traffic were not the elusive memories of last night's dream. But for the longing for Marty that amounted to an absorbing, ever-present homesickness, it was difficult to ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... in the Square where he had sat so many nights with his head in his hands, one of those quick outbursts of enthusiasm took possession of him, the kind that sets young hearts singing with joy when some sudden shift of hope's kaleidoscope opens a wide horizon brilliant with the light of future success. With an exclamation of boyish glee he plumped himself down upon the hard planks of the bench, and jumped up again, pirouetting on his toe ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... nearer, because, after all, she was going to find things out, and to find things out was jolly. The new warmth and singing in her heart had not destroyed, but rather heightened, her sense of the extraordinary interest of all things that be. And very mysterious to her that morning was the kaleidoscope of Oxford Street and its innumerable girls, and women, each going about her business, with a life of her own that was not Nedda's. For men she had little use just now, they had acquired a certain insignificance, not having gray-black eyes that smoked and flared, nor Harris tweed suits that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... paralyzed, her limbs stiff and immovable. Like the dizzy whirl of a kaleidoscope, the picture before her resolved itself ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... indeed "not color but conflagration," and though the tints are richer and more varied toward morning and at sunset, the glorious kaleidoscope goes on all day long. Yet "it is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... then slate and pencils are brought out, and the drawing begins. Indian heads, Eskimo children in fur parkies, summer landscapes, anything and everything takes its turn upon the slate, which appears a real kaleidoscope under the artist's hands. Jennie often laughs till the tears run down her face at some comical drawing or story, or the musician's efforts to speak Eskimo as she does, and both enjoy ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... World's Fair, kindly gave me permission to touch the exhibits, and with an eagerness as insatiable as that with which Pizarro seized the treasures of Peru, I took in the glories of the Fair with my fingers. It was a sort of tangible kaleidoscope, this white city of the West. Everything fascinated me, especially the French bronzes. They were so lifelike, I thought they were angel visions which the artist had caught and bound ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... one. Most of the shawls are of the Persian pattern familiar to us. The groundwork is a solid color (white and yellow seem to be the most popular), and there are a good many of blue, green, orange and pink. A crowd of Hindus in this part of the country suggest a kaleidoscope as they move about with their brilliant ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... life. She does not smite the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by Victor Hugo's picture of the human soul. Her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book, and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the spirits of ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... and absurdities of actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing, the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for Anthony and bidding against each other. The next shift of the kaleidoscope is to semi-philosophical fantasies—the Sphinx, the Chimaera, basilisks, unicorns, microscopic mysteries. The Saint is nearly bewildered into blasphemy; but at last the night wanes, the sun rises, and the face of Christ beams from it. The ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the coast, thinking little where I placed my feet and much of the eating that lay at Dalton Post House; and of other things thousands of miles from this bleak waste, where men exist in the hope of ultimate living, with kaleidoscope death by their side; other things that had to do with women's faces, bills of fare from which bacon and beans were rigidly excluded, and comforts of the flesh that some day I ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... turn of the political kaleidoscope was a pivotal point in the life of Ary Scheffer. So long as the Duke of Orleans was a simple country gentleman, Scheffer was the intimate friend of the family, but how could the King of France admit into his family circle a mere low-born painter? Certainly not they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... face with eyes of almost Indian blackness. For a moment they shone fiercely in the lamplight. They were alive with demoniac purpose. A purpose he had come so many weary miles to fulfil. Then, in a moment, the whole picture changed with the rapidity of a kaleidoscope. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... wedding ring round and round, looking down on the carpet. She remembers the pattern that night in her dreams, a red Maltese cross on a blue ground. The blue and red swim before her eyes now like the colours in a kaleidoscope. A solitary tear rises in her left eye and falls on ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... those arithmetical problems about permutations, which so much astonish the unlearned. The French cook, who boasted that he could make fifteen different dishes out of a nettle-top, was not a greater master of his art. The mind of Petrarch was a kaleidoscope. At every turn it presents us with new forms, always fantastic, occasionally beautiful; and we can scarcely believe that all these varieties have been produced by the same worthless fragments of glass. The sameness of his images is, indeed, in some degree, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... move. Once it was said that they were moved by spirits, then by vortexes, now by self-evolved forces. It is hard that we should be called upon to change our faith with every new moon. The same man sometimes propounds theories almost as rapidly as the changes of the kaleidoscope. The amiable Sir Charles Lyell, England's most distinguished geologist, has published ten editions of his "Principles of Geology," which so differ as to make it hard to believe that it is the work of the same mind. "In ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... thinker who imagines that the great Designer of all things has set the whole planet in a ferment, and strained every nation to exhaustion, in order that this or that frontier be moved, or some fresh combination be formed in the kaleidoscope of nations. No, the causes of the convulsion, and its objects, are more profound than that. They are essentially religious, not political. They lie far deeper than the national squabbles of the day. A thousand years hence ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... contention. The first of January was approaching. The final proclamation of emancipation would bring to an end the temporary alliance of the Administration and the Abolitionists. Who could say what new pattern of affairs the political kaleidoscope might not soon reveal? Surely the Jacobin cue was to busy themselves, straightway, making trouble for the President. Principles being unavailable, practices might do. And who was satisfied with the way the war was going? To rouse the party ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... full-length statue of Sir David Brewster looks down upon the classic ground which he loved so well. An audacious Radical swarmed up upon the pedestal and balanced the obnoxious notice on the marble arms of the professor. Thus converted into a political partisan, the revered inventor of the kaleidoscope became the centre of a furious struggle, the vanquished politicians making the most desperate efforts to destroy the symbol of their opponents' victory, while the others offered an equally vigorous resistance to their attacks. The struggle ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... none of these afflictions in an omnibus; sameness there can never be. The passengers change as often in the course of one journey as the figures in a kaleidoscope, and though not so glittering, are far more amusing. We believe there is no instance on record, of a man's having gone to sleep in one of these vehicles. As to long stories, would any man venture to tell a long story in ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... He heard without hearing. The platforms ran with a roar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls with flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the breasts. These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that the dominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that the tailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries of "The Sleeper. What has happened to the Sleeper?" and it seemed as though the rushing platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of human faces, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... cannot help thinking, with me, that history is merely the constant recurrence of similar things, just as in a kaleidoscope the same bits of glass are represented, but in different combinations, he will not be able to share all this lively interest; nor, however, will he censure it. But there is a ridiculous and absurd claim, made by many people, to regard history as a part of philosophy, nay, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... neck, Lloyd picked up the sandalwood box again and shook it. "Heah's a lot of loose beads of all kinds, with as many colahs as a kaleidoscope. You do bead-work, don't you, Mary? You may have these if you ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... kaleidoscope may be of any convenient size, varying from six to ten inches in length, fitted with two lenses—one at the object end, to throw light from a lamp through the instrument, and the other at the eye end, through which the image is projected on a screen, placed at the proper focal distance. Any ingenious ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... still worse, the habit of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... The kaleidoscope shifted: Mattie faded out of the purview, and in her stead sat the Misses Winton, who had helped to pass the time in Europe last year, but whose presence had a contrary effect to-day. And she wondered how they could ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the hollow of her hand! The audience seemed to me like wine that I could drink, or spill upon the ground.... It was splendid! "How long can I hold them?" I thought. "For ever!" Then I laughed. That was the best Ophelia laugh of my life—my life that is such a perfect kaleidoscope, with the people and the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the immortal spark of control lay somewhere within him. Unbridled passion of mind and body had made him very ill. Very well, then, it behooved him to exorcise the demon while this tormenting clarity of vision whirled the dread kaleidoscope of his careless life ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... qualities are not the names of intuitions, but are abstractions or generalisations of the most general and necessary elements of my active Experience by reference to which I mentally construct my world. The transmutations of Energy are not a never-repeated accidental kaleidoscope. They proceed according to constant, definite, measurable laws, and though subordinate variations are infinite and make up the details of my Presentment, the general laws and conditions according to which all Energy transmutes are definite, ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... a corner, sitting upon the small of his small back, munching at an unlighted cigar and otherwise manifesting a biting gloom. Ray drew Lindley's attention to this tableau of pain. "Here's a three of us!" he said. He turned to look down into the rhythmic kaleidoscope of dancers. "And there goes the girl we all ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... the reader has arranged his scenery he may give his attention exclusively to the dialogue because he knows there will be no change in the scene. In the story the reader may need to be constantly alert, as when his hero takes a long and perilous journey the scenes may change with the quickness of a kaleidoscope, and yet all be important to the narrative. The more complex the story, the greater the variety in scene, and consequently the greater the opportunities for study. It is interesting work for children to pick out the scenes, to count them ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... parts; at all events he copied the Eastern method of putting tale within tale, like the Eastern balls of carved ivory. The stories, as usual, illustrate the method of popular fiction. A certain number of incidents are shaken into many varying combinations, like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope. Probably the possible combinations, like possible musical combinations, are not unlimited in number, but children may be less sensitive in the matter of fairies than Mr. John Stuart Mill was as ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... fever had reached a consistent high level, lending him a singular buoyancy of body and of spirit, but his reason was gone. He walked faster and faster, his vision keen under the dark canopy, his mind racing with disordered ideas, a kaleidoscope of long displaced memories. Often he stopped short, puzzled, vainly striving to stem the fugitive currents of conceits in his efforts to remember what purpose had brought him here. His head throbbed. He kept step with each pulsing ache—it seemed to help. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... a long lane that has no turning, and before many months another change came in the kaleidoscope of this young king's fortunes. Pope Innocent the Third had been named by the Empress Constance as guardian of her orphaned boy. To him Walter the Chancellor appealed for aid. Knights and galleys were soon in readiness. Palermo was stormed. Count Diephold was overthrown and imprisoned ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... be seen at work with the regularity of a threshing machine and the variety of a kaleidoscope any day from 8 o'c. a.m. to 8 o'c. p.m. on presentation of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... religious feuds described above and bring about a rearrangement of political parties. The British people has good reason to know that the discussion of fiscal questions that vitally touch every trade and every consumer, does act like the turning of a kaleidoscope upon party groupings; and we may fairly well assume that so far-seeing a statesman as Bismarck must have ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... only imagine that Doris had reconsidered her refusal of the invitation which had originally included them both, and—either tired of being left alone, or angry with him for not writing—had devised this coup de main, this violent shake to the kaleidoscope. But what an extraordinary step! It could only cover them both with ridicule. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward |
