"Kaleidoscopical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these desultory musings went directly to the Bibliotheque Nationale. The study he pursued was of deep interest to him; it concerned a butterfly of vast proportions and kaleidoscopic in color, long ago pinned away and labeled among others of lesser brilliancy. It had cast a fine shadow in its brief flight. But the species was now extinct, at least so the historian of this particular butterfly declared. Hybrid? Such ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... they are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be in constant requisition. The rascal is a really great writer in his abominable way, but his dialect was that of the lowest resorts, and he lets us see that the copious argot which now puzzles the stranger by its kaleidoscopic changes was just as vivid and changeable in the miserable days of the eleventh Louis. In the Paris of our day the slang varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one knows who invents the constant ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... to the memory of Sir W. Guise, Bart., is rather kaleidoscopic in effect, owing to its being mainly an armorial window, and, secondarily, historical. The historical portion represents the Coronation of Henry III. in Gloucester Cathedral in 1216, by Gualo (the Papal legate) ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... picture I made out of their kaleidoscopic chatter; beautifully inaccurate, impossibly romantic picture, in which big muscley men had fights with yawping painted savages that always got gloriously licked, in the approved story-book manner! I could shut my eyes and see it all very plainly, away off there half-way to the moon. And I used ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... many more, I remember it with less prodigal admiration only because others are as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be comprehended within its single outline; it was a kind of kaleidoscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it assume from each altered point of view, through the presentation of a different face, and the rearrangement of its peaks and pinnacles and the three battlemented towers, with the spires that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... and account for his having become on the stage the most popular figure in the piece; but that Fiesco should be willing to trust himself and his cause to such a scamp, and that such remarkable results should be achieved by the black man's kaleidoscopic activity, brings into the play an element of buffoonery that injures it on the serious side. The daring play of master and man excites a certain interest in their game, but it is impossible to care very much ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... it securely fastened in some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote unsympathetic men beneath the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... vein rather of sorrow than of anger. There was more sting in the speech of Mr. DAVISON, and one Churchillian phrase: "They could not maintain constitutional government on the theoretical inexactitudes of kaleidoscopic politicians," which evidently pleased ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... and I used to remark as a little child—for children observe the minutiae of personal peculiarities much more closely than their elders—that the iris of both orbs was speckled with green and golden spots, which seemed to mix and dilate occasionally, and gave them a decidedly kaleidoscopic effect. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... must become pathogenic. That the change was real and pregnant I had no doubt whatever. My consciousness was expanding and I had caught it in the very act. I had of course read much concerning the changes of personality, swift, kaleidoscopic—had come across something of it in my practice—and had listened to the folk-lorist holding forth like a man inspired upon ways and means of reaching concealed regions of the human consciousness, and opening it to the knowledge of things called magical, so that one became free of a larger universe. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the centre of the retail quarter. Close at hand a vast dry goods house, built in the old "iron-front" style, towered from the pavement, and through its hundreds of windows presented to view a world of stuffs and fabrics, upholsteries and textiles, kaleidoscopic, gleaming in the fierce brilliance of a multitude of lights. From each street doorway was pouring an army of "shoppers," women for the most part; and these—since the store catered to a rich clientele—fashionably dressed. Many of them stood for a moment on the threshold of the storm-doorways, turning ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... swaying gracefully, there the billow-like lights and shadows of the supple, feathery bamboo, and everywhere ideal paradises of refreshment and repose. As we drift on the flowing thoroughfare toward the golden spires of Bangkok, kaleidoscopic surprises of summer salute ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... rusticitas—and what industry and commerce they practised was the perquisite and prerogative of local guilds. Custom was king of all things, and custom had assorted men in compartments in which they generally stayed. The kaleidoscopic coming and going of a society based on monetary exchanges—its speedy riches and speedy bankruptcies, its embarrassment of alternative careers all open to talents—these were unthought and undreamed of. The same uniformity and the same isolation ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... said that as the highest form of musical composition was a Funeral March he was in favour of making black obligatory for all persons who attended high-class symphonic concerts. The kaleidoscopic colours affected by modern women of fashion distracted serious artists and sometimes made them play wrong notes. An exception might perhaps be allowed in favour of dark purple, because of its association with mourning, but the glaring colour schemes now in vogue were to be deprecated as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... scheme; they discuss contingencies; they make enormous plans; all with an air of seriousness and yet with a nonchalance which shows a semi-conscious sense of the unreality of their proposals. In regard to Korea and China and Formosa, they have hatched political and business schemes innumerable. The kaleidoscopic character of Japanese politics is in part due to the rapid succession of visionary schemes. One idea reigns for a season, only to be displaced by another, causing constant readjustment of political parties. Frequent attacks on government foreign policy depend for their force on lordly ideas ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... homestead laws, he would be helpless to drive them out. The pictures of the different valleys suitable for ranch sites, scattered here and there over his extensive range, traveled through his mind in kaleidoscopic procession—and he visioned a squatter outfit established on every one. If they locked him up at this time ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back. People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... forgot that it was August—in short, everything of the present altogether. His mind flew back to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had resulted from his not having been able to make up his mind which of the many fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic change was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from the modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who had never thought specially of the matter, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Association in September 1845, by Mr C. Winston. Two circles of Early Decorated glass are to be seen in the west window, but they are merely composed of coloured pieces arranged in geometrical patterns. The general arrangement of the great window is, as has been already said, kaleidoscopic, the fragments which compose it being too scattered to admit of being put together again in their original form. The effect, however, is striking, particularly at some distance from the west end. There are remains of the original glass in the west windows ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... stockmen in crowds to the town ship every Tuesday. These men were indiscreet and indiscriminate drinkers, and often a vagrant was left behind to finish a spree that surrounded him with unheard-of reptiles and strange kaleidoscopic animals unknown to the zoologist. It must be admitted, too, that Joel Ham, B.A., was in a measure responsible for the boys' unlawful knowledge. Twice at holiday times, when he was not restricted at the Drovers' Arms, he had continued his libations until it was necessary for ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... with their own observation and delight. Already some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction; they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box fragments ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... huge boars, and tweaking ferocious bears by the nose, while I had seized a huge boa-constrictor by the tail, and was going away after him at the rate of some twenty miles an hour. This sort of work continued with various kaleidoscopic changes during the remainder of that trying night. Nowell, and Alfred, and Solon came into the scene. Nowell was riding on a wild buffalo; Alfred had mounted on the shoulders of a bear; and Solon, with the greatest gravity, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the characters in their variety. We enter the banker's gilded saloon and the hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest's retired home and the laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber of Deputies, and afterwards ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... racket was incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth blowing brutishly from puffed cheeks, so the man cursed and left her for another girl. Beyond the puffing ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... embraces Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well as ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... time, on, lay in his memory a mass of unassimilated matter to be thought out in the long weeks of idleness on the Peking's blistering deck. The crowd, huge, wild, packed from building to curb, the merry, merry flags waving them on, the little kaleidoscopic flashes of expressions which he caught, when he stopped to look at them, on the grim faces to right and left,—all these impressions and many more were jumbled in his brain. He remembered the excitement ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... law that renders decadence and ruin in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery couleur de rose. The gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... great master have thought of an author who, as Montaigne does, jots down everything in kaleidoscopic manner, just as changeful accident brings it into his head? In Essay III. ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... embroider, braid, quilt. Adj. variegated &c. v.; many-colored, many-hued; divers-colored, party-colored; dichromatic, polychromatic; bicolor[obs3], tricolor, versicolor[obs3]; of all the colors of the rainbow, of all manner of colors; kaleidoscopic. iridescent; opaline[obs3], opalescent; prismatic, nacreous, pearly, shot, gorge de pigeon, chatoyant[obs3]; irisated[obs3], pavonine[obs3]. pied, piebald; motley; mottled, marbled; pepper and salt, paned, dappled, clouded, cymophanous[obs3]. mosaic, tesselated, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... road is sloping; just at this point it is very sloping indeed, therefore the bath-chair darted forward, and spun downward with incredible speed. I have a kaleidoscopic picture in my brain which seems to consist of a lot of waving arms—the poor General's arms waving for help, the Squire's arms sawing the air as he raced in pursuit, further back in the road the valet's arms thrown to the sky in an agony of dismay, while down towards me, ever faster ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... As with kaleidoscopic swiftness the details of my "affair" passed through my memory, it was only by an effort that I restrained an indecorous shout. He was correct. I could call to mind no single feature that had been "regular," from the thief who was not a thief and had flown out of my window like ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... old friendship; with the every-day clothes the boys of old have shed responsibilities and dignities and are once more irresponsibly the boys of old. From California and Florida, even from China and France, they come swarming into the Puritan place, while in and out through the light-hearted kaleidoscopic crowd hurry slim youngsters in floating black gown and scholar's cap—the text of all this celebration, the graduating class. Because of them it is commencement, it is they who step now over the threshold and carry Yale's ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... to its foot. Such sentiments, however, will find sympathy and understanding in those Nations where the people themselves are honestly desirous of peace but must constantly align themselves on one side or the other in the kaleidoscopic jockeying for position which is characteristic of European and Asiatic relations today. For the peace-loving Nations, and there are many of them, find that their very identity depends on their moving and moving again on the chess board of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... greatly to the volume of water. Sometimes the river will rise four or five feet in a single night, upsetting all calculation, and making navigation risky in the extreme. When, by chance, the sun is able to penetrate into the depths of this canon, the kaleidoscopic effects are exquisite, and cause the most indifferent to ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... distance. With a shout of rage the fellow turned and flung his own weapon at his assailant, felling him like an ox, then he in turn was blotted out by a surge of rioters. But there was little time for observation, as the scene was changing with kaleidoscopic rapidity and there was the ever-present necessity of self- protection. Seeing Clyde's helpless condition, ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... accord with the increased pace of the throng, presently I likewise entered, unchallenged for any admission fee. Once across the threshold, I halted, taken all aback by the hubbub and the kaleidoscopic spectacle that beat upon my ears ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... a picturesque, ever changing group, a kaleidoscopic mass of life and color, where Chinese from civilized Canton drank, and gambled, and smoked with wild natives from the hills or from the depths ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... stiffly, for there were several guards in white and gold uniforms pacing to and fro on the battlement-like walls. He led the two adventurers through a door in the base of the dome. At first they were dazed by a brilliant light from above, and looking up they beheld a marvel of kaleidoscopic colors formed by a myriad of electric-lighted prisms sloping gradually from the floor to the apex of the dome. Thorndyke could compare it to nothing but a stupendous diamond, the very heart of ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... full swing now,—a kaleidoscopic confusion of colour, shifting into fresh harmonies with every bar; four hundred people circling ceaselessly over a surface as of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... as this tour had proved could not but have a pronounced and important effect. The burden of a continuous succession of events in which he was the central figure; the strain of a steady succession of brilliant spectacles presenting a kaleidoscopic variety of sight and sound and splendour and incident; the weight of a constant burden of ceremonial and state observances in a land where the slightest carelessness, or indifference, or cordiality—at the wrong moment—meant ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... face grow warm. She was glad they were in the shadow, so the man could not see it too clearly. For a moment she looked about her, at the host of skilful waiters, at the crowd of brightly dressed pleasure-seekers, at the kaleidoscopic changes, at the lights and shadows. From somewhere invisible the string orchestra, which for a time had been silent, started up anew, while her answering pulses beat to swifter measure. The air was a familiar one, heard everywhere ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... politely and moved away. Behind that calm, impenetrable mask, however, was turmoil, kaleidoscopic, whirling too quickly for the brain to grasp or hold definite shapes. The boy here! And the girl with those beads round her throat! For the subsidence of this turmoil it was needful to have space; so Cleigh strode out of the lobby into the fading day, made his way across the bridge, ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... a blessed week of work—a "human warious" week, with something piquant lurking at every turn. A week so busy, so kaleidoscopic in its quick succession of events that my own troubles and grievances were pushed into a neglected corner of my mind and made to languish there, unfed by ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... note pealed out! Once more it died and from the clustered spheres a kaleidoscopic blaze shot as though drawn from the majestic sound itself. The many-coloured rays darted across the white waters and sought the face of the irised Veil. As they touched, it sparkled, flamed, wavered, and shook with ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... his horse, for in the scenes resulting from the kaleidoscopic change that had taken place he would be more ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... uttered not in the friendliest possible terms, was addressed to a young gentleman with a very pimply face, and kaleidoscopic coloured socks, of the genus Slacker, who had suddenly found the painting of Sergeant Broughton ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... back by daylight or at latest by noon next day. As they paddled up stream against a strong current his thoughts were busy with the events of the past few weeks, particularly those of the last four days. He marvelled at their kaleidoscopic nature. It seemed ages ago that he had fought a fist battle with this stalky, good-natured chap whose muscular shoulders were swinging in rhythm with his own; yet it was only a month. Now here they were, miles from ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... home last summer and particularly since my return here there loomed up before me more clearly and more sharply than ever before the kaleidoscopic scenes of my literary life. Among other things I also brought out Catiline. The contents of the book as regards details I had almost forgotten; but by reading it through anew I found that it ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... science can discover, we still need a spiritual interpretation of the facts. All our experiences are made up of two elements: first, the outward circumstance, and second, the inward interpretation. On the one side is our environment, the world we live in, the things that befall us, the kaleidoscopic changes of fortune in the scenery of which our lives are set. On the other side are the inward interpretations that we give to this outward circumstance. Experience is compounded ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... ivory, and blue. The effect of light and shade upon this exquisite piece of weaving brings out plainly the marvellous sheen which is a feature of this rug. The innumerable small figures which appear throughout the rug, with their blending of soft hues, present a kaleidoscopic effect. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... Entrance to the Exposition leads directly into Administration Avenue. The Horticultural Gardens first attract attention by their kaleidoscopic patches of blooming flowers. Then the eye travels on past the Palace of Horticulture to the massive bulwark of the Palaces of Education and Food Products in the walls of which two great half-domed portals form the principal points of interest. Across the way lies the Laguna ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... Germans this was the period of the Migrations, as it is called, in round numbers the two hundred years from 400 to 600, at the close of which we find them settled in those regions which they have, generally speaking, occupied ever since. During these two centuries kaleidoscopic changes had been taking place in the position of the various Germanic tribes. Impelled partly by a native love of wandering, partly by the pressure of hostile peoples of other race, they moved with astonishing rapidity ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... excitement. I think she saw in imagination fifty Helens dancing before he eyes in a kaleidoscopic ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... gentlemen with stout hearts; that in addition to what one Christian Book calls "whoring after strange gods" India strives after purity. He knew that India's ideals are all imperishable, and her crimes but a kaleidoscopic phase. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... deal of comment. Some mornings it was a dull (almost Indian) red, then it would be vermilion, then a rich purple, and once when they came down for family prayers, according to the simple rites of the Free American Reformed Episcopalian Church, they found it a bright emerald-green. These kaleidoscopic changes naturally amused the party very much, and bets on the subject were freely made every evening. The only person who did not enter into the joke was little Virginia, who, for some unexplained ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... circumstance, and its red tape, its aides-de-camp, and its adjutant-birds, its stirring associations, and its stupid architecture; from the pensioned aristocracy of Chowringhee the Magnificent; from the carnival concourse of the Esplanade, with its kaleidoscopic surprises; from the grim patronage of Fort William, with its in-every-department well-regulated fee-faw-fum; in fine, from Clive, and Hastings, and Wellington, and Gough, and Hardinge, and Napier, and Bentinck, and Ellenborough, and Dalhousie, and all the John Company that has come of them; from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... upon a happier plan than in writing this story of Yorkshire factory life. The whole book is all aglow with life, the scenes varying continually with kaleidoscopic rapidity."—Pall Mall Gazette. ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... to her, trying to find words, which should fittingly express my sentiments, but she forestalled me with a kaleidoscopic change of manner that ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... night's rest was, however, out of the question, for the passing steamers tossed me about in a most unceremonious manner, seeming to me in my dreams to be chanting for their lullaby, "Rock-a- by baby on the tree-top." Indeed, the baby on the tree-top was in an enviable position compared with my kaleidoscopic movements among the swashy seas. Many visions were before me that night, of the numerous little sufferers who are daily slung backwards and forwards in those pernicious instruments of torture ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... of its mannerisms, its use and abuse of metaphor, its laboured evolution and expression of the idea, and its length and heaviness of period, adapts itself to the matter, and alters with kaleidoscopic celerity, according as there is description, analysis, or dramatization. Thus blending with the subject, it loses a good deal of its proper virtue, which explains why it does not afford the pleasure of form enjoyed in such writers as George Sand, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... her own viewpoint, too, which was exceedingly different from those of the others. The strain of weeks of questioning, weeks of mental suffering, was relieved by the river woman's serious statement and Parson Rasba's look of bewilderment at the kaleidoscopic matrimonial adventuring. At the same time, his wonder and Mrs. Caope's unconscious statement stirred up in her thoughts ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... depends for its appeal upon musical volume, numbers of people, sometimes shifting scenery, a kaleidoscopic effect of pretty girls in ever changing costumes and dancing about to catchy music, it does not have to lean upon a fascinating plot or brilliant dialogue, in order to succeed. But of course, as we shall see, a good story and funny dialogue make a ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... our time is to induce men and women to collect their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women—nay, to remember that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their knees—why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have their place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a sense of deep admiration for this nameless adventurer of a bygone day. What a brute of a man he must have been and what a glorious tale of battle and kaleidoscopic vicissitudes of fortune must once have been locked within that whitened skull! Tarzan stooped to examine the shreds of clothing that still lay about the bones. Every particle of leather had disappeared, doubtless eaten by Ska. No boots remained, if the man had worn boots, but there ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... kaleidoscopic flash of lights and colors, then cleared again. This time, a man looked out of it. He was well into middle age; close to his three hundredth year. His hair, a uniform iron-gray, was beginning to thin in front, and he was acquiring the beginnings of a double chin. His name was Tortha Karf, ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... us are Calico Mountains, a picturesque clump of buttes, and the glimpse of them we get from the north explains why they were so named. And such colors! Their brilliant hues change like kaleidoscopic patterns with the sun's motion. On our right a trail diverges to Coyote Holes, made grewsome by one of many tragedies that have occurred in the region. This time it was a hold-up. A desert waif out ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... poetry, literary criticism, and philosophy, and to all these forms he has brought sympathy, erudition, a fresh point of view, and a radiant style. He has imagination and he understands the gentle art of arranging facts in kaleidoscopic patterns so that they may attract and not repel the reader. America, indeed, has not produced a round dozen authors who equal him as a brilliant stylist with a great deal to say. And yet this man, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... twelve-score couples swung and swayed to the intoxicating rhythms of an unseen orchestra; kaleidoscopic in their amazingly variegated costuming of colour, drifting past the lonely, diabolical little figure, an endless chain of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... extensive and less avoidable than ever. Why this distinction? And if parental responsibility is a "fetish" when it refers to a father, why is it not the same when it refers to a mother? In the schemes of Mr. H. G. Wells, kaleidoscopic in their glitter and inconsistency, there remains from year to year this one permanent element, that while the mother must attend to her business, it is no business of the father. This is the essential feature, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... city worker have always been occupied in making things or parts of things out of such impressionable materials as iron, wood, clay, cloth, leather, gold, and the like, to fit, suit, and satisfy a various and increasingly complex set of human desires; or they have been dealing direct with a kaleidoscopic human mind, either in regard to things or in regard to troubles and ideals of the mind itself. This constant dealing with persons in business will account even more than mere congestion of population for the complex organization of city life. The highly organized social institutions of the city, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... ever is in that kaleidoscopic, gigantic and fascinating lottery, the modern press. The sensation for which an editor to-day would sell his soul, is to-morrow worthless. The greatest fool in the office will sometimes stumble stupidly upon the most important news of the day, while ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... way to a system of lines emphasising construction as completely as possible. The contrasts between masses of ornament and blank walls, which play so great a part in earlier Gothic, disappear; and the only contrast is between the orderly lines of the stone and the kaleidoscopic decoration of the windows. Architecture loses much of its fancy and its delicacy, but becomes more logical, more ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... variable, inconstant, unstable, unsteadfast, reversible, alterable, revocable, mobile, convertible, transmutable, commutable, kaleidoscopic, transformable, impermanent; volatile, fickle, mercurial, protean, irresolute, capricious, vacillating, fitful, inconstant, erratic, eccentric, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Read some of the poems of the people listed above, then imagine the same moods in the films. Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, Pompeian mosaics in kaleidoscopic but logical succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors and scenery, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... the Sioux and Comanches, the cowboy life, the wild horse, and the antelope. Histories, many of them, have been written about the Western country alluded to, but most if not practically all by outsiders who knew not personally that life of kaleidoscopic allurement. But ere it shall have vanished forever we are likely to have truthful, complete, and charming portrayals of it produced by men who actually knew the life and have the power to describe it."—Henry Edward Rood, in ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... looked rich; visitors used to pass that way casually, and the townspeople regarded them with a kind of awe, as if they were the king-pins of the whole social fabric; but even these magnates were only pleasing incidents in the kaleidoscopic show. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... type of these people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Charley had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!" He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his mind into a painful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... must be aroused from the written, or printed page to living tone by the hand or voice of the interpreter, and but a fragment at a time can be made perceptible to the listener's ear. Like a panorama, it comes and goes before the imagination, its kaleidoscopic tints and forms now sharply contrasted, now almost imperceptibly graduated one into the other, but all shaping themselves into a logical union, stamped with the design of a creative mind. Properly to inspect the successive musical images, and grasp their significance, in parts and ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... had just been gathered, for the raindrops of the previous night still sparkled among their petals, jeweling with brilliancy their kaleidoscopic ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... hurries to a thrilling climax. One glittering pageant treads on the heels of another, each more gorgeous and resplendent than the last, until the stage, set to represent a fantastical hall with a bewildering vista of carved columns, golden lions, and rich draperies, is filled with such a kaleidoscopic mass of colors and groupings as only an Oriental mind could conceive. Finally all the preceding strokes are eclipsed by the coming of the Queen. But no time is lost; the spectacle does not make the action halt for a moment. Sheba makes her gifts and uncovers ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... not studied these effects, however, with enough attention, we have not allowed them to penetrate enough into the soul, to think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning. The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue to it, when the various emotional values ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... faithful in describing the species McGibbet and Malcolm, and in contrasting them with the hardy fisherman of Louisburgh, the Micmacs of Sydney, the negroes of Deer's Castle, the Acadians of Chizzetcook, and as we shall see anon with other sectional specimens, just as they present their kaleidoscopic hues in the local ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured "professor" in an alley-way of Boston, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Mark, by John Russell (Alfred A. Knopf). This uneven volume of short stories by a writer of real though undisciplined talent is full of color and kaleidoscopic hurrying of events. Apart from "The Adversary," which is successful to a degree, the book is uncertain in its rendering of character, though Mr. Russell's handling of plot leaves ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out of the mines than was their fair share. In making the ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... colours textures, and appointments formed the background of their days, the food they ate was a thing produced by art, the servants who attended them were completely-trained mechanisms. To sit by a window and watch the kaleidoscopic human tide passing by on its way to its pleasure, to reach its work, to spend its money in unending shops, to show itself and its equipage in the park, was a wonderful thing to Lady Anstruthers. It all seemed to be a part of the life and quality of Betty, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Bombay and Colombo—each has marked traits that differentiate it from all other cities, but several have marked likenesses. Cairo differs from all these in having no traits in common with any of them. It stands alone as the most kaleidoscopic of cities, the most bizarre in its mingling of the Orient and ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... cultivated countless kinds of perennials, his son reigned in his stead. The horticultural taste proved hereditary, but in the younger man it took the impress of the fashion of his day. Away went the "herbaceous stuff" on to rubbish heaps, and the borders were soon gay with geraniums, and kaleidoscopic with calceolarias. But "the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges," and, perhaps, a real love for flowers could never, in the nature of things, have been finally satisfied by the dozen or by the score; so it came to pass that the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of the ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... last it ended, and, passing through the cavernous, gloomy opening, he was soon swallowed up in a great crowd of mighty dignitaries. Acres of the same crimson carpet covered the platform, its far limits bordered by khaki soldiers. On it moved a kaleidoscopic gallery of tarbooshes, red tabs and top hats. Never before had top hats been used officially in Egypt, and, resurrected from long neglect, were mostly relics of a past decade. Mac thought they were about as suitable for the climate as a cellular shirt in the Antarctic. Most of the company ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... wood received her; she wandered forward with a delightful sense of well-being. The thought of London came to her—the heat and the dust and the fumes of petrol—the chattering crowds under the parched trees—the kaleidoscopic glitter of fashion at its crudest and most amazing. She knew exactly what they were all doing at that precise moment. She visualized the shifting, restless feverish throng with a vividness that embraced every detail. ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... revels, whereby he made his way along the path of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. A California ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the feminine gender, fixed for one brief week apiece on the theatrical "concave," moved quickly in the direction of "the road." These more or less heavenly lights were Miss Odette Tyler and Miss Eugenie Blair, who appeared at those kaleidoscopic theaters called "combination houses." Miss Tyler used to be something of a Broadway "favorite"—a term that has lost a good deal of its significance. She appeared in the little Yorkville Theater on the highroad to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, in a play of her own, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Euphrates and the Nile. These centres of civilization were founded on the fertility of the river valleys and the fact of their easy cultivation. Just when the people began to develop these civilizations and whence they came are not determined. It is out of the kaleidoscopic picture of wandering humanity seeking food and shelter, the stronger tribes pushing and crowding the weaker, that these permanent seats of culture became established. Ceasing to wander after food, they settled ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... at as historic monuments; never more to be flaunted in the front of battle! The education of the day was that which taught a man the introspection whereby he recognized the Divine within himself—under any aspect, under any tuition, whether of Brahma, Confucius, or Christ. Truth was kaleidoscopic, and varied with the media through which it was viewed. As for the child, every aspect of truth and error should be allowed to play upon his mind. Let him acquire ordinary school learning for fifteen years, and then send ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... then, which Ruskin, with kaleidoscopic suddenness and variety, brings before the astonished gaze of his readers, let them confidently hold this guiding clue. They will find that Ruskin's "facts" are often not facts at all; they will discover that many of Ruskin's choicest theories have been dismissed to the limbo of exploded hypotheses; ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... enterprise. He was in conference with Merry, the British minister, and with Yrujo, the Spanish minister; and each received a different impression as to the scope of his plans. At one time Burr talked madly of seizing the government at Washington. The kaleidoscopic changes of his plans baffle consistent explanation. One thing only is clear: he needed funds. These he obtained in part from his son-in-law, Joseph Alston, a wealthy planter in South Carolina, and in part from the credulous Blennerhassett, who was persuaded to purchase a million acres on the Washita ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... us a kaleidoscopic picture of the life of a human being who from childhood showed tendencies so antisocial, so criminalistic, that it is hard to get away from the belief that most of the attributes which went to make him just what he is, must have ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the Arcadia in English we shall ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... arrival in London they all went down to Eastbury together—the Major, and she and George. But in the course of those three days the Major took Janet about a good deal, and introduced her to nearly all the orthodox sights of the Great City—and a strange kaleidoscopic jumble they seemed at the time, only to be afterwards rearranged by memory as portions of a bright and sunny picture the like of which she scarcely dared hope ever to ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... into another, different, or even opposite, one. The Semitic religions might furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire) becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... face with Mrs. Toplady and May, he drove to the station, and, as was inevitable, performed the rest of the journey in their company. The afternoon had tired him; alone, he would have closed his eyes, and tried to shut out the kaleidoscopic sensation which resulted from theatrical costumes, brilliant illustrations of the feminine mode, blue sky and sunny glades; but May Tomalin was as fresh as if new-risen, and still talked, talked. Enthusiastic in admiration of Lady Honeybourne, she heard with much interest that Dymchurch's ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... evening, wherein an unexpected and indescribable sweetness had crept into the young woman's life, Aurora more frequently insisted upon going to the opera. A strange fascination attracted her thither, and on each succeeding evening she found some new beauty in the bassoon, some new phase in his kaleidoscopic character to wonder at, some new accomplishment to admire. On one occasion—it was at the opera bouffe—this musical prodigy exhibited a playfulness and an exuberance of wit and humor that Aurora had never dreamed of. He ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field becomes in the mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the resurrection of the Forum Romanum must ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... set himself to think, though, amid the kaleidoscopic movement of the hotel dining-room, he got little beyond the stage of "mulling." Such symptoms of decision as showed themselves through the evening lay in his looking up the dates of sailing of the more important liners, and the situation of the Carral country ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King |
