"Luminous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last the train ran out into the full, luminous night, and Siegmund saw the meadows deep in moonlight, he quivered with a low anticipation. The elms, great grey shadows, seemed to loiter in their cloaks across the pale fields. He had not seen them so ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... shown by Anzacs to report themselves as sick when urged to do so with a view to the gradual removal of troops without withdrawal of entire units. It is hardly necessary to add that the author is an old literary hand, with a pleasantly clear and luminous style of his own, though one is free to admit he splits his infinitives almost as much as Sir IAN HAMILTON split his forces, and with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... Thought, on the contrary, it is different. When we wish to know about any certain thing there, and we turn our attention thereto, then that thing speaks to us, as it were. The sound it emits at once gives us a most luminous comprehension of every phase of its nature. We attain to a realization of its past history; the whole story of its unfoldment is laid bare and we seem to have lived through all of those experiences together with the thing ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... mysterious beings. And to his regret Vail ceased now to regard his friend any more, but looked about him at the Huckleberry Street angels, who seemed to be pulling him away. He and they vanished slowly, and on the wall there shone some faint luminous letters, which Vanderhuyn tried to read, but the light of the Christmas dawn disturbed his vision, and he was able to see only the latter part, and even that was not clear to his eyes, but he partly read and partly remembered the words, "When ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... ashes, decay, the death of life, the utter annihilation of the living—save only the sparkle of reborn waters slowly covering the baked bed of the stone-edged pool—strange, luminous water, lacking the vital sky tint, enameled with a film of dust, yet, for all that, quickening with imprisoned brilliancy ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... seldom does when he first meets the woman whose words, glances, and presence have the subtle power to fill his thoughts, quicken his pulse, stir his soul, and awaken his whole nature into new life. He usually passes through a luminous haze of congeniality, friendship, Platonic affinity, or even brotherly regard, till something suddenly clears up the mist and he finds, like the first man, lonely in Eden, that there is but one woman for ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the most noticeable surprises of this description occurred in the year 1896, when Professor Roentgen made public his discovery of the X-rays; for through this discovery facts were disclosed such for instance, as the permeability of solid bodies by luminous rays and the possibility of photographic examination of bony tissues in living creatures—facts entirely incompatible with prevailing ideas and teachings. But these facts were not only intrinsically veracious but were capable of occular demonstration, beyond all possibility of doubt, and ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... forward, her hands clasped tightly over Meredith's letter, her face white and strained, her eyes luminous as he ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... his attention too much from the luminous field of philosophic disquisition to the sterile regions of polemic divinity, and the still more thorny paths ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... by Corot the letter L is plainly shown. In the diagram of Fundamental Forms also, the tree-mass, cow and river bank in shadow serve as a sombre foil for the clump of trees upon the opposite shore which are bathed in the soft luminous haze of early morning. This is the real attraction which, grafted upon the heavy structure of the foreground affects us the more through the contrast. In Mr. Pettie's picture of "James II and the Duke of Monmouth," we have the opposition of the two lines, the attraction ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... had in his mind a comprehension both of what he was and of what he was doing which was luminous as the sun. But it was one of the most pathetic aspects of his earthly ministry that he could not tell all his mind to his followers. They were not able to bear it; they were too rude and limited to take it in. He had to carry ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe gazed at her in the light of the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise the meaning ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... before, he joined them and walked beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The situation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. "He struck me," she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, "as a very unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... seats in silence. ZEUS rises from his throne, and the Gods perceive that the mist has now almost entirely evaporated around them, and that the entire scene is luminous with morning radiance. All the Gods lean forward to gaze on ZEUS, who gazes over and beyond them ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... on, after a luminous pause, twisting the top button of his coat. "I'm going to tell you a secret. A big one. For me that Day was ... the beginning of everything.—Hush—listen!"—Her fingers just touched his lips. "I'm feeling—rather shy. And if you don't keep quiet, I can't tell. Of course I always ... loved ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... something to his memory, for he gave a shiver—his nerves were very weak. In another moment the door was opened part way, and the occupant of the rooms stood examining her visitor through the opening with evident suspicion, her small eyes glimmering through the darkness like luminous points. But when she saw the people on the landing, she seemed reassured, and flung the door open. The young man entered a gloomy ante-chamber, divided by a partition, behind which was a small kitchen. The old woman stood silently in front of him, eying him keenly. She was a thin little creature ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... not have looked more sadly and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him— then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... arrived at this point, and was considering whether a light he saw was a luminous fungus, when a strange noise saluted his ear, a sound that for the moment he supposed to have come from the forest. Then it seemed to be in the cave, and he was about to spring up, when he realised that the noise ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... by the rather tense little circle gathered around her, as a compliment; exactly as, no doubt, Greville intended it to be taken. But her look flashed out beyond the confines of the circle and encountered a pair of big luminous eyes, under brows that had a perplexed pucker in them. Whereupon she laughed straight into Rose's face and said, lifting her head a little, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... "Long Live the Empire!" It floated leisurely over the pine trees near the castle tower, and fell down inside the compound of the barracks. Bang! A black ball shot up against the serene autumn sky; burst open straight above my head, streams of luminous green smoke ran down in an umbrella-shape, and finally faded. Then another balloon. It was red with "Long Live the Army and Navy" in white. The wind slowly carried it from the town toward the Aioi village. Probably it would fall into ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... sun sunk beneath the seas, and the moon presented its luminous disk, the holy man had the chariot brought out in which he was accustomed to make excursions among the stars, the same which was employed long ago to convey Elijah up from earth. The saint made Astolpho seat himself beside him, took the reins, and giving the word to the coursers, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Holbach and Sorbire, 1787. Appeared first in English in 1640, omitted in a Latin Edition of Hobbes printed in Amsterdam. In spite of its brevity, Holbach considered this one of Hobbes' most important and luminous works. ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... new cravat, drew himself up to his full height, proud beyond words that his daughter should be so warmly greeted by a celebrity. Proud he certainly had reason to be, for that little Parisian, even beside her resplendent friend, retained her full value for charm and youth and luminous innocence, beneath her twenty years, her rich, golden girlhood, which the joy of meeting caused to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... attempted systems he has analysed. He is hearty in appreciating talent of every kind, but he is discriminating in his judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... markings on its surface, would rapidly change, going through a cycle in twenty-four hours; but its permanent features would be usually masked by lawless accumulations of cloud, mainly aggregated in rude belts parallel to the equator. And these cloudy patches would be the most luminous, the whitest portions; for of course it would be their silver lining that we would ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... contemplation of the luminous figure of the Only Young Man, she had ceased to speculate concerning her own misfortunes. The fact of her disgrace remained in the background, eclipsed—not in evidence except as a dim shadow ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... notochord; the Carboniferous forms exhibiting hardly any such expansion, while the Mesozoic genera present a greater and greater development, until, in the Tertiary forms, the expanded ends become suturally united so as to form a sort of false vertebra. Hermann von Meyer, again, to whose luminous researches we are indebted for our present large knowledge of the organization of the older Labyrinthodonts, has proved that the Carboniferous 'Archegosaurus' had very imperfectly developed vertebral centra, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... through Jane's mind a real thought, as luminous as a shaft of light through a jar of honey. I would have never guessed the name of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... the impulse of the sun's gravitation. It is in reality falling in a great parabolic or elliptical curve through space. But, while a comet approaches the sun it begins to display—stretching out for millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions of miles on the side away from the sun—an immense luminous train called its tail. This train extends back into that part of space from which the comet is moving. Thus the sun at one and the same time is drawing the comet toward itself and driving off from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... rank beside the standard-bearer. He sees and hears nothing, but his luminous gaze sweeps over the heads of the crowd. His skin is still blackened by the smoke of the fire; it is peeling off his hands; his hair and moustache seem to have been cropped very strangely; and the skin is drawn round the burn on his cheek. He is conscious of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... always pure, but generally simple! And how many of those that are imported from France proceed upon the theory that the Seventh is the only Commandment, and that the principal attraction of life lies in the opportunity of breaking it! The matinee-girl is not likely to have a very luminous or truthful idea of existence floating around ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... cluster—the very locality near which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun. The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did he manage to explain its failure to be rendered visible by the incalculable host of glorious suns glaring in all directions about it? No doubt what he finally maintained was merely a centre of gravity common to all the revolving orbs—but here again analogy must ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the public press—when all these stinking, suffocating, deleterious vapors shall be destroyed by the ever-living light of truth, then the grateful people will bless your names, which, pure and luminous, will shine high above the stupidity, conceit, heartlessness, turpitude, selfish ambition, indirect and direct treason darkening now ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... complete state of rehabilitation. His frock coat was new, it had the unfailing smell of new wool freshly dyed; his shoes were painfully new; his gloves were new; his silk hat was resplendently new; his fat jowl was shaved to a luminous pink; his gorgeous moustache was twisted up at the ends to such a degree that when he smiled the points wavered in front of his eyes, causing him to blink with astonishment. He was undeniably dressed up for the occasion. My critical eye, however, discovered a pair of well-worn striped trousers ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the window of a room sat a young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall, a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture, framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... hearts of the Brahmans' young daughters when Siddhartha walked through the lanes of the town with the luminous forehead, with the eye of a ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... was ideal. He was generally ready when we arrived, a luminous figure in white flannels, pacing up and down before a background of sky and forest, blue lake, and distant hills. When it stormed we would go inside to a bright fire. The dictation ended, he would ask his secretary to play the orchestrelle, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Roget on Physiology, with reference to Theology—one of the Bridgewater Treatises, full of facts the most curious, arranged in the most beautifully luminous manner. The infinitely large, and the infinitely small in ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... became a luminous beacon, to attract the vilest characters to seek newness of life; and if there be hope for them, no one ought to despair. Far be it from us to cloud this light, or to tarnish so conspicuous an example. Like a Magdalene or a thief on the cross, his case may be exhibited to encourage ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... immovable principles, bearing upon some of the most vehemently disputed topics of constitutional interest in these momentous times. Assuredly this period has not produced a profounder and more luminous essay. We have heard it asked, what was the proposed object of Mr. Coleridge's labours as a metaphysical philosopher? He once answered that question himself, in language never to be forgotten by those who heard it, and which, whatever may be conjectured of the probability ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... begin by quoting at length a luminous passage from Grimm's great work. In the preface to his second edition ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... time the sun had set and left the world filled with a luminous yellow afterglow. The estuary of the Thames had widened abruptly off Sheerness, and far to the south was the dim line of chalk cliffs that England thrusts toward France. Overhead stretched a translucent yellow-green sky ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... puerility.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 443. He adds (ib. ii. 26):—'Burke himself always aimed at wit, but was not equally happy in public and private. In the former, nothing was so luminous, so striking, so abundant; in private, it was forced, unnatural, and bombast.' See ante, p. 104, where Wilkes said that in his oratory 'there was a strange want ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... which all the common people believed—but the scientific facts so far as they were known. Yet even his imagination failed to realize that this flaming head, with its strange halo of darkness, and its horrible hair of livid green light, was four million times greater than the earth; or that its luminous veil—woven of star-dust so fine that other stars shone through—streamed across one hundred million of miles, thick strewn ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... "the Firmament," which was created on the second day of the world. Tuesday's maid was called Genunita, "Garden," the third day of creation having produced the world of plants. On Wednesday, she was reminded by Nehorita's name, "the Luminous," that it was the day on which God had made the great luminaries, to shed their light in the sky; on Thursday by Ruhshita, "Movement," for on the fifth day the first animated beings were created; on Friday, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Barbara lifted her luminous blue eyes to Eloise and smiled. It was a brave little smile without a hint of self-pity, and it went straight to the older ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... pulled tight enough would end at last by snapping. At the snap, in any case, we mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we had for three or four months been living with had made us feel its presence as a luminous lesson and a daily need. We recognised more than ever that it had been, for high finish, the gem of our collection—we found what a blank it left on the wall. Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn't. That she did soon fill it up—and, heaven help us, ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... were still dimly shining, but Cheon's face was as luminous as a full moon, as, greeting each and all of us with a "Melly Clisymus," he suggested a task for each and all. Some could see about taking the Vealer down from the gallows; six lubras were "rounded up" for the plucking of the pullets, while the rest of us were sent out, through wet ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... dissipation and run from home. But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction. There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the greatest indifference or will only be moved to anger at its presence. Here was this nightingale singing in the rain, seeing but not heeding me; while beneath the hedge, almost directly under the twig it sat on, a black cat was watching it with luminous yellow eyes. I did not see the cat at first, but have no doubt that the nightingale had seen and knew that it was there. High up on the tops of the thorn, a couple of sparrows were silently perched. ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... above the plaintive murmur of the wood pigeons, soon absorbed even the echo of the young human voices passing away. A light breeze stirred the tender green grass, shaking down a shower of pink almond bloom as it swept fan-like through the luminous air,—a skylark half lost in the brilliant blue, began to descend earthwards, flinging out a sparkling fountain of music with every quiver of his jewel- like wings, and away in the sheltered shade of a small ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... understanding in proportion to the heart and understanding we have to apprehend and to love them, those will excite us most intensely which we know most of and love most. But as we may learn to know them all and to love them all, and what is dark to-day may be luminous to-morrow, and things, dumb to-day, to-morrow grow voiceful, and the strange voice of to-day be plain and reproach us to-morrow; who shall adventure to say that this or that is the highest? And if it appear that all these subjects in nature may affect us with equal intensity, and that ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... a sudden I seemed to detect something—a spark, or a glow, or the luminous break of a wave. So swiftly it came and went, that it was gone before I could look. A trick of my vision, thought I. No! there it was again, this time nothing but a spark, close by, on a level, perhaps, with our mizzen. So near ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... strange spectacle in this closing fifteenth century: All the concentrated splendor from the fall of Byzantium hanging over her like a luminous cloud before dispersing as the Renaissance; Lorenzo de' Medici, at Florence, directing the intellectual currents of Europe; Angelo and Raphael creating the world's sublimest masterpieces in art; her great ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... of brush and branches, on which was placed the dead bodies of Black Darnley and his gang, and I thought that I had just applied a match to the dry wood, and that the flames were soaring heavenward, filling the sky with a luminous, blood-red color, and that the corpses, as the fire licked their bodies, began shouting, in derisive tones, for more fuel, when a hand was laid upon my shoulder, and my dreams vanished in an instant. I sprang to my feet, and even then but half awake, I reached for my revolver, and tried to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... One wants a new language to express its charms. Winter's shadows fly away. Clouds that looked dark, heavy, and threatening are followed by rosy sunsets and luminous peaks in the sky which appear like mountains standing round about the New Jerusalem. A warm breath of nature starts from the spicy islands south of the great Gulf, crosses it, then sweeps along Mississippi's mighty valley to the "happy ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... stopped as he swung into Winterbottom Road and began to climb the hill. Just at the crest of the rise, where the pale strip of road met the twilight of the sky, the full moon hung, a golden disc scarcely more luminous than the sky around it. As he moved up the hill, it moved also, till it floated clear of the dark juniper-trees and stood high above them. Crickets were taking up their minor creaking, and there was ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as "accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... In the luminous after-saloon the other party was seated at a table white with snowy damask, and gleaming with silver, which was at once the pride and care of old Mateo, the ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... was a rusty astrolabe on a moss-grown marble pedestal, and by this he found her. Her back was towards him as she faced the western horizon, where clouds of rose and gold were sailing in a sky of warm apple-green which toned above them to a luminous silvery blue. On the edge of the slope in the foreground some cypresses were silhouetted in purplish bronze. She turned as she heard his footsteps, her face so wondrously fair in the half light ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... terror—absolute, undiluted terror—in her unnaturally large eyes. Often when the man spoke to her she shivered. Her eyes seemed constantly trying to escape his gaze, wandering round the room, the terror of a hunted animal in their soft, luminous depths. Once they rested upon mine—I was seated in the corner facing her—and it seemed to me that there was appeal—desperate, frenzied appeal—in that long, tense look which thrilled all my pulses with passionate sympathy. Yet ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in highest spirits they fell into file behind the Seminole and his lantern, who, in the thickening fog, looked like some slim luminous forest-phantom with great misty wings atrail from ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... this pretty piquancy was so instantaneous and so charming that Wallace's face grew luminous with admiration and delight. A smile wreathed his lips, and there came a look into his eyes that made her flush ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... sight of the weapon, but the spiteful crackle of its mechanism was too quick for him. A faintly luminous ray struck him full in the breast and stopped him in his tracks. A thrill of intense cold chased up his spine and a thunderbolt crashed in his brain. The captain caught his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker and a compeer ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... dark, driftless night. The nature of the aurora polaris has not yet been finally demonstrated, though it is generally agreed to be a discharge of electricity occurring in the upper, more rarefied atmosphere. The luminous phenomena are very similar to those seen when a current of electricity is passed through a ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... expand, their intellectual energy redoubled, they become able to read and write without having learnt, almost as it were by intuition, they, only they, can understand in part the ecstasy which God granted you on the luminous path of learning. ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... darkness for a full minute or more, without result. He had turned to me and was about to speak when a faint crack, like the breaking of a thole-pin, was heard, the sound being accompanied by a very distinct luminous ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... now growing faintly luminous, and the deathly grey light of approaching dawn hung in the mists upon the moor. Objects grew visible in bulk at least, if not in form and shape, by the time the little company had reached the end of Weston village and come upon the deep mud dyke which had ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... must look to-night to Edna! This enchanting evening world with its dreaming waves, and myriad spires of fragrant firs stretching toward the luminous sky strewn thickly with pulsing stars. She shook off some thought that insinuated itself into her conscious desire. No, no. Her place was here with Aunt Martha. Her thought must dwell only on the possible artistic achievements of her future; her heart turn to no lover save the good genius ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... make myself understood, is the soul of all the arts. It is the selection of the characteristic token in all the beauties and the grandeurs of the visible True; but it is not the thing itself, it is something better: it is an ideal combination of its principal forms, a luminous tint made up of its brightest colors, an intoxicating balm of its purest perfumes, a delicious elixir of its best juices, a perfect harmony of its sweetest sounds—in short, it is a concentration of all its good qualities. For this Truth, and nothing else, should strive those works ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... the heavenly bodies exists a body, partly transparent and partly luminous, which we call the sidereal heaven. There exists also a heaven wholly transparent, called by some the aqueous or crystalline heaven. If, then, there exists a still higher heaven, it must be wholly luminous. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... luminous, so queenly, she dissipated his cloud of doubts and scruples, and the tremor of the boyish lover came back into his limbs as he turned to meet her. His voice all but failed him as he answered ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... crowned the Scottish arms was popularly attributed to the fact that the monk carried with him the arm of St. Fillan. A legend is that St. Fillan, when Abbot of Pittenweem, transcribed with his own hand the Holy Scriptures, and that his left arm became so luminous that it enabled him to proceed during darkness with his pious work. Lesly asserts that this wonderful limb afterwards came into the possession of Robert Bruce, who enclosed it in a silver shrine, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Thirty-four. Thomas was thirty-nine, tall and swarthy, strong; with set mouth and three wrinkles on his forehead that told of care and dyspepsia. Jeannie was younger; her face winsome, just a trifle anxious, with luminous, gentle eyes, suggestive of patience, truth and loyalty. They looked like country folks, did these two. They examined the surroundings, consulted together—sixty pounds rent a year seemed very high! But they took the house, and T. Carlyle, son of James Carlyle, stone-mason, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... shows a "pinhole" camera in section. At the rear is a ground-glass screen, B, to catch the image. Suppose that A is the lowest point of the flame. A pencil of rays diverging from it strikes the front of the camera, which stops them all except the one which passes through the hole and makes a tiny luminous spot on B, above the centre of the screen, though A is below the axis of the camera. Similarly the tip of the flame (above the axis) would be represented by a dot on the screen below its centre. And so on for all the millions of points of the flame. If we were to ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... looks are attracted by the luminous ray thrown forward by the headlight of the engine. It seems as though we are running on a road of fire. Above me the clouds are racing across with great rapidity, and a few constellations glitter through their rifts, Cassiopeia, the Little Bear, in the ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... quite as honorable. Books (to the editor) represent, each one of them, so much experience, so much thought, so much imagination differently compounded in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play. Each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready for others. Who wants it? Who can make use of it? Who will be dulled by it? Who exalted? It is the reviewer's task to say. He grasps the book, estimates it, calculates its ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... it not at all objectionable that Prince Koltsoff was apparently enamoured of her. Of this she was quite certain. He had a way of looking his devotion. His luminous blue eyes were wonderful in their expressiveness. They could convey almost any impression in the gamut of human emotions, save perhaps kindliness, and among other things they had told ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... upon the ivy-covered wall of a high dilapidated terrace which overlooked the lake. My eyes wandered over the bright expanse of water and the luminous immensity of the sky; they were so well blended in the azure line of the horizon that it would have been impossible to define where the sky commenced, and where the lake terminated. I seemed to float in the pure ether, or to be merged in a universal ocean. But the inward ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... highest point, and a circumference of about three-quarters of a mile. A channel of communication was also opened between the sea and the interior of the crater, which had a diameter of about 650 feet. The vapours and other matters thrown up from the mouth of the volcano formed a luminous column upwards of ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... placid lake. Almost beneath her feet they came, so near She might have tossed a pebble on their backs, When lo, their long necks pierced the waters clear, As down they dove, two shafts of purest light, And chasing fast on their descending tracks, A swarm of spirals luminous and white, Swirled to the gloom ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... of the rest)? But these do not prove the solidity of the "central mass," any more than the storm-clouds prove the solid mass of the atmosphere behind them. Is it the non-coextensiveness of the sun's body with its apparent luminous dimensions, the said "body" appearing "a solid mass, a dark sphere of matter confined within a fiery prison-house, a robe of fiercest flames?" We say that there is indeed a "prisoner" behind, but that having never yet been seen by any physical, mortal eye, what he ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... way in the establishment of libraries, art galleries, museums, institutes of training and research out of what were but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon, something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... through the open door, and there in my sanctum the flicker of a random flame divulged the form of a being, the eyes of whom seemed fixed on mine, piercing me through and through. To say that I was petrified but dimly expresses the situation. I was granitized, and so I remained, until by a more luminous flicker from the burning wood I perceived that the being wore a ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... as it was intended. For the matter of that, which was first, marriage or business? Did Adam have a business when he married? Huh! There! No man could answer that!" Cicily paused in triumph, and, in the elation wrought by developing a successful argument, turned luminous eyes on her aunt, while her red lips bent ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Marjie standing beside me. Her big brown eyes were luminous with tears, and her face was as white as my mother's face was on the day the sea left its burden on the Rockport sands. It was hate that made Jean Pahusca veil his countenance for me a moment before. Something of which hate can never know made me look down at her calmly. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... her to them, as they blinded her to starshine. They too had a quality of reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses and driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. Such were the luminous transfigurations that would come to her at the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the others was a woman with a little girl whom Blythe had not before observed. The child lay on a bright shawl, her head against the woman's knee, her dark Italian eyes gazing straight up into the luminous blue of the sky. There was a curiously high-bred look in the pale features, young and unformed as they were, and Blythe wondered how such a child as that came to belong to the stout, middle-aged woman who did not herself seem ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... without his missing it.' Life of Mackintosh, i. 92. It is worthy of notice that Gibbon scarcely mentions Johnson in his writings. Moreover, in the names that he gives of the members of the Literary Club, 'who form a large and luminous constellation of British stars,' though he mentions eighteen of them, he passes over Boswell. Gibbon's Misc. Works, i.219. See also post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... portico and watched his cab drive off. She gazed toward Washington and did not see the dreamy constellation it made with the shaft of the Monument ghostly luminous as if with a phosphorescence of its own. She felt an outcast indeed. She imagined Polly hurrying back to ask questions that could not be dodged any longer. She had no right to defend herself offensively from the rightful demands of a friend and hostess. Besides, the laws of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... some moments later, Renwick was shown into the drawing room, with the word that the Countess Strahni would see him. She appeared almost immediately, her face a little pallid, her manner restrained, her accents frigidly polite. But the dark eyes were luminous, the brows were drawn inward, and her voice trembled slightly as she ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... thy illumination thou dost reach afar to the boundaries of heaven.[5] 9 Thou art the banner of the vast earth. 10 O God! the men who dwell afar off contemplate thee and rejoice. 11 The great gods fix ...[6] 12 Nourisher of the luminous heavens, who favorest ...[7] 13 He who has not turned his hands (toward thee ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... greatly the resources of genius might overcome the optical and mechanical difficulties of constructing large telescopes, the astronomer would have to depend in the last resource upon his eye. Now, we could not by the force of continued looking bring into view an object too feebly luminous to be seen at the first and keenest moment of vision. But the feeblest light which fell upon the plate was not lost, but taken in and stored up continuously. Each hour the plate gathered up 3,600 times the light energy which it received during ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... poetry and religion. It is certain that the two have very close and vital relations. Dr. Washington Gladden has admirably remarked, "Poetry is indebted to religion for its largest and loftiest inspirations, and religion is indebted to poetry for its subtlest and most luminous interpretations." No doubt a man may be truly, deeply religious who has little or no development on the aesthetic side, to whom poetry makes no special appeal. But it is certain that he whose soul is deaf to the "concord of sweet sounds" ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the flush which church spires catch from the dawn. This deepened slowly to pink and then to red. . . . In a moment the architectural skeletons of the great buildings had been picked out in lines of red light. Then the whole effect mellowed into luminous yellow. The material exposition had been transfigured, and its glorified ghost was in its place. . . . Every night this modern miracle was worked by the rheostat housed in a humble shed somewhere in the inner recesses ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of the Court of King's Bench should chuse to be the orator of this luminous encomium on the constitution, I hope he will get it well by heart before he attempts to deliver it, and not have to apologize to Parliament, as he did in the case of Bolingbroke's encomium, for forgetting his lesson; and, with this ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... birthday, the thirteenth. Mother gave me a clock with a luminous dial which I wanted for my night-table. Of course that is chiefly of use during the long winter nights; embroidered collars; from Father, A Bad Boy's Diary, which one of the nurses lent Hella when she was in hospital; it's such a delightfully funny book, but ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... simplifications which the union of Europe and the democratic federation of the continent will some day bring forth, what will be in France, the form of the social edifice, of whose ill-defined and luminous outlines the thinking man already has a glimpse, through the darkness ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... remarked here that the great Akbar was so fond of polo, but otherwise so busy, that he played the game at night with luminous balls. ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... from her loosened clasp, and, after a moment, she turned and fronted him, proud head up-flung beneath her veil. So stood they within that place of silence, while high above, the great window grew luminous ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... microscope, and anticipated many years Brewster's theory. Hopkinson wrote well on the experiment made by looking at a street lamp through a slight texture of silk. Joscelyn, of New York, investigated the causes of the irradiation manifested by luminous bodies, as for instance the stars. Of late, photographic experiments have occupied much attention, and Draper has advanced the bold idea, supported by experiment, that the agent in the so-called photography, is not light, nor heat, but an agent differing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... by a very luminous speech. He was supported by the Duke of Glocester, the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Barrington), the Earls Moira, Selkirk, and Roslyn, and the Lords Holland, King, and Hood. The opponents of the bill were the Duke of Clarence, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... sententious reply. The lookouts grow more rigid, for whereas formerly they could see nothing, objects on the water are now pencilled out in luminous relief. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... a pretty picture, these two women, as they stood together for a moment on the green with the brilliant September sun throwing golden reflections and luminous shadows on their slender forms. Marguerite, tall and queen-like in her rich gown, and costly jewels, wearing with glorious pride the invisible crown of happy wifehood: Juliette, slim and girlish, dressed all in white, with a soft, ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and silver, cut glass and jewels, and running the full length of the room, flashed and scintillated under the glare of the electric bulbs which encircled the cornice of the gallery and clustered in luminous splendour in the crystal and frosted silver of a huge central chandelier. Spread out on the middle one of these, a dazzle of splintered rainbows, a very plain of living light, lay caskets and cases, boxes and trays, containing those royal gifts of which the newspapers had made so much and the Vanishing ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... hope that the prayer would have a speedy answer. The fires were burning clearer now, leaping up in broad dragon's tongues of flame from the outer edges of the fagot piles to curtain off all that lay beyond. Through the luminous flame-veil the capering savages took on shapes the most weird and grotesque; and when I had a glimpse of the dead men's row, each hideous face in it seemed to wear a grin of ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... laid her fingers upon his lips, her eyes misty and luminous with the light of a new ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... nature, it scarcely ever fails to excite a suspicion of the preternatural in those minds which are not firmly convinced of the uniform agency of secondary causes;—as if the death of some individual in whose fate they are interested happens to be accompanied by the appearance of a luminous meteor, or a comet, or the shock of an earthquake. It would be only necessary to multiply such coincidences indefinitely, and the mind of every philosopher would be disturbed. Now it would be difficult ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Non-conforming authors deserving notice Richard Baxter (1615-1691) is the most voluminous, if not also the most luminous. Controversy engaged his pen almost constantly, but his most permanent works were his Call to the Unconverted and The Saints' Everlasting Rest. John Owen (1616-1683) was a leading Puritan writer, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... herself out of Miss Gannion's arms, rose and stood looking down at her friend. In that moment, confronted by Beatrix's sad, calm face and luminous eyes, the little gray-haired woman suddenly realized that, notwithstanding the difference in their years, Beatrix was looking into mysteries which were far beyond ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... the closing of a door to the divine world; now he is solitary, cut off, and, seemingly to himself, on the desert and distant verge of things; and then his thought throws open the shut portals, he hears the chant of the seraphs in his heart, and he is made luminous by the lighting of a sudden aureole. This soul which I watched seemed to have learned at last the secret love; for, in the anguish begotten by its loss, it followed the departing glory in penitence to the inmost shrine, where it ceased altogether; and because it seemed utterly lost and hopeless ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Under this luminous span, or through it where the crossing gullies ran, Mary Anerley rode at leisure, allowing her pony to choose his pace. That privilege he had long secured, in right of age, wisdom, and remarkable force ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... positiveness, in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed—only lightning striking a stone, heating, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Sun's Rays put out the Fire (Vol. vii., p. 285.).—It is known that solar light contains three distinct kinds of rays, which, when decomposed by a prism, form as many spectra, varying in properties as well as in position, viz. luminous, heating or calorific, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various |
