"Opal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those warm, beautiful nights when everything seems carved of precious stones. Sleuth Wood away to the south looked as though cut out of green beryl, and the waters that mirrored them shone like pale opal. The roses he was gathering were like glowing rubies, and the lilies had the dull lustre of pearl. Everything had taken upon itself the look of something imperishable, except a glow-worm, whose faint flame burnt on steadily among the shadows, moving slowly hither and thither, the only thing ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of civil war, mingled in the melee, tooth and nail, or rather fin and tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or there came the dull report of the sportsmen in the marsh, or they exchanged first a laugh and then a yawn with some other unseen party becalmed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... one great principle which regulated that of the middle ages, namely, that chiaroscuro and colour are incompatible in their highest degrees. Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy. There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl, nor in a well-designed painted window; only various hues of perfect colour. The best pictures, by subduing their colour and conventionalising their chiaroscuro, reconcile both in their diminished ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... has kissed the lips of June: All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon, Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist Of opal and ruby and pearl ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... The opal lights in the western sky were the only reminders left of the sunny day, when Uncle Bob, seated comfortably in the big armchair, listened to Margaret Elizabeth's confession, the flames dancing and ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... was! A reddening of the eastern sky; a low band of crimson; then rays like an aurora shooting upwards into the mid heavens; then such tints of transparent opal and heavenly azure overspread the skies all around, that Martin drank in the beauty with all his soul, and almost wept for joy, as he thought it a foretaste of the new heavens and the new earth, wherein he hoped ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the smooth road at a lively pace the glowing sunset painted scarlet the white turbaned head of the distant mountain, while it bronzed and gilded the clouds in the west. Opal fires burned all over the sky, as the twilight threw its amber hues about us, and presently the men halted, each taking out a funny little painted paper lantern from under the seat, and lighted ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... was altered; he was altered; everything was altered. He remembered the ecstasy of their excursion to Switzerland. He remembered the rapture with which, on their honeymoon, he had clasped a new opal bracelet on her exciting arm. He could not possibly have such sensations now. What was the meaning of life? Was life worth living? The fact was—he was growing old. Useless to pretend to himself ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... suddenly transported, as it were, from the quiet of so sober a town as that of Philadelphia to the tropical enchantment of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, the night brilliant with a full moon that swung in an opal sky, the warm and luminous darkness replete with the mysteries of a tropical night, and burdened with the odors of a land breeze, he suddenly discovered himself to be overtaken with so vehement a desire for some unwonted excitement that, had the opportunity presented ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops. Dyson gave a long deep sigh, and dropped into his chair, and put his hands over his eyes to think. The jewel was like an opal, but from a long experience of the shop-windows he knew there was no such thing as an opal one-quarter or one-eighth of its size. He looked at the stone again, with a feeling that was almost awe, and placed it gently on the table under the lamp, and watched the wonderful flame that ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... flat calm. Meanwhile, during the afternoon, a sail had hove in sight in the north-western board, steering south-east; and when the sun went down in a clear haze of ruddy gold, the sails of the stranger, reddened by the last beams of the luminary, glowed against the clear opal tints of the north-western sky at a distance of some eight miles, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... cheeks coin-spotted with smirch and stain! O trafficked hearts that break in twain! — And yet what wonder at my sisters' crime? So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime, Men love not women as in olden time. Ah, not in these cold merchantable days Deem men their life an opal gray, where plays The one red Sweet of gracious ladies'-praise. Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye — Says, 'Here, you Lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy: Come, heart for heart — a trade? What! weeping? why?' ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... and burnt-orange, and her beauty was further enhanced by a gray hat planned to match her dress, with a plume of shaded orange and blue. On her fingers were four or five rings, far too many—an opal, an emerald, a ruby, and a diamond—flashing visibly as ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... discovered in the heavens, could then easily be found elsewhere in nature on a large or small scale-as, for instance, in the blue of distant hills when the air is sufficiently opaque, or in the colour of the colourless, slightly milky opal which looks a deep blue when one sees it against a dark background, and a reddish yellow when one holds it against the light. The same phenomenon may be produced artificially through the clouding of glass with suitable substances, as one finds in various glass handicraft objects. The aesthetic ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... beauty or brightness. Pure earths are white when in powder; and the same earths, which are the constituents of clay and sand, form, when crystallized, the emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, and opal. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... sea was dark and vivid blue, and the berg sparkled in the sun with prismatic reflections that gave all the hues of the rainbow to its prominences, while the bulk glowed like a fire opal. Between it and the schooner the sea ran in a lasher of diminishing turmoil. Hansen had carelessly sailed too close. The momentum of the Karluk and its slight wave disturbance must have sufficed to upset the equilibrium of ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... often believe that you love me. But how can I count on you? I am your mistress, alas! but you are not my lover. It is for you that Shakespeare has written these sad words: 'Make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal.' And I, Octave," she added, pointing to her mourning costume, "I am reduced to a single color, and I shall not change ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... light above new turned furrows; amid the jewel glint of water in the sun; in the diamond sparkle of the morning; against the changing opal skies of evening; the bees and all their winged kin floated and darted, flashed and danced, and whirled, from flower to flower and field to field, from blossom to blossom and tree to tree, bearing ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... was climbing now and its pallid disk was slowly flushing to the wakefulness of fiery rose. The sky overhead was livening to turquoise light and here and there along the upper slopes were gossamer dashes of opal and amethyst, but this beauty of unveiling turrets and gold-touched crests was lost on eyes in which dwelt a nightmare from which there was no hope ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... and its compounds with a hissing noise, as well in the flame of oxidation as in that of reduction. There is formed a clear bead which, with a certain degree of saturation, is clear when cold, but appears milk-white when overcharged, and of an opal, enamel appearance, when heated intermittingly, or with a vacillating flame, that changes frequently from the oxidating to the reducing flame. Baryta and its compounds produce the same ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... and a newer understanding. Harpeth Valley lay like the tender palm of a huge master hand with the knuckles of rough blue hills knotted around it, and dotted over the fostering meadows were comfortable homes, each with its morning altar fire sending up opal wreaths of mist smoke from the red brick or stone chimneys. Long creek lines marked their way across the fields which were growing tender green with the upbringing ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... undimmed of their splendour. He would lie for an hour by the side of a hill-streamlet; he would stand gazing into a muddy pool, left on the road by last night's rain. Once, in such a brown-yellow pool, he beheld a glory—the sun, encircled with a halo vast and wide, varied like the ring of opal colours seen about the moon when she floats through white clouds, only larger and brighter than that. Looking up, he could see nothing but a chaos of black clouds, brilliant towards the sun: the colours he could not see, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... them, and gazing ever more intently towards the island they saw rising upwards the pure white snow-like bird—upwards and upwards, ever higher, till at last, with the sound of its own joyous song, it faded and melted into the opal radiance of ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... Queensland Opal Periodical (London) Wind o' the Autumn Periodical (London) Daffodils Periodical (Edinburgh) A Queen of Yore Periodical (Sydney) Drought Periodical (London) The Shadow on the Blind ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... then waver and deepen until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the ghost-dance of their gods. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... far (But also to the owls the visions change)— No dawn is like the next, and nothing sings Of sameness—very hours have wings And leave no word of whose hand touched the range Of Kara Dagh with opal and with cinnabar. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... all shades, and little Maltese terriers. One of these was a perfect beauty. Its hair was like spun glass, of a bluish, pinkish gray, snow-white in the partings. When it trotted about, it looked like an opal, or a piece of live Venetian glass. Its name ought to have been "Jewel," ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... they were towing seemed to anchor them in one place; and at last, just as the steamer was still quite half a mile away, a peculiar change came over the sea. The sun was still shining brightly, but the other boat grew dim and enlarged-looking, as if it were magnified and set in a bluish opal. There was the long range of ice cliff, but it was ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... which has been a hardship to the individual, has proved a boon to himself and to the cause of humanity. Science teaches us that ordinary mud has in it elements which, arranged according to the higher laws of nature, produce the opal, the sapphire, and the diamond. Likewise does history teach us that from the morass of poverty the commonest types of men have passed from stage to stage through the refining processes of experience till they have dazzled the world with their magnificence. Whether it be a slave like AEsop, a beggar ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such as Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a long slim mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and exquisite; or he sent her a little necklace of rough stones, amethyst and opal and brilliants and garnet. He spoke other languages easily and fluently, his nature was curiously gracious and insinuating. With all that, he was undefinably an outsider. He belonged to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... place. 'Don't! It makes me want to get out there again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and brick-red and sulphur—cockatoo-crest—sulphur—against brown, with a nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky.' He began to walk up and down. 'And yet, you know, ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... opal eyeballs rolled from side to side as, looking rather awkward in his ill-fitting European dress, he tried hard to emulate the dignity of his bronze followers in baju and sarong, each man with the handle of his kris carefully ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... think I'm going to forget all about it. No siree; if there's any way I can learn whether a jeweler in Riverport or Mechanicsburg has been buying an opal lately, I'm bound to get on ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... Maren shot her craft into a little cove, opal and pearl in the pageantry of breaking light, and drawing it high on shore, went gathering little sticks for ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... bits, and try to paint those, with all their undulations and edges of fracture, as they lie still on the table; if they cannot, of course they need not try the rushing crystal and foaming fracture of the stream. If they can manage the glass bottle, let them next buy a fragment or two of yellow fire-opal; it is quite a common and cheap mineral, and presents, as closely as anything can, the milky bloom and color of a torrent wave: and if they can conquer the opal, they may at last have some chance with the stream, as far as the stream is in any wise possible. But, as I have just said, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... glory of bluewater before them, the tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco—that city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... windows, gleamed smooth and glistening as white marble, or, again, in expectation of a gay stroll through the crisp, clean snow which draped the fields with its downy folds and reflected the morning light in opal tints like the glossy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... these were little irregular rainbow-coloured halos of their own interrupting and variegating the continuous bands of the corona; while throughout all was discernible a perpetual variability, like the flashing or shooting of colour in the opal, the mother-of-pearl, or similarly tinted translucent substances when exposed to the irregular play of bright light—only that in this case the tints were incomparably more brilliant, the change more striking, if not more rapid. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... I know deep in thine inmost folds, Within an opal hollow, there abides The lady of the mist, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... he. "Ah yes, I recall the case; it was concerned with an opal tiara. I think it was before your time, Watson. I can only say, madam, that I shall be happy to devote the same care to your case as I did to that of your friend. As to reward, my profession is its own reward; but you are at liberty to defray whatever expenses I may be ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether and the brown and green foliage shone in a brilliance of hue suggesting the brown and blue lustre of the opal. I had already seen her approaching from a distance, her white bare feet noiselessly pressing the soft moss. I gazed intently at her face; at the young fresh complexion; the softly waved lustrous blonde ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... mark nothing but the speed with which the clouds above and the dim earth below went rushing past. Soon he began to see that the sky was very lovely with mottled clouds all about the moon on which she threw faint colours like those of an opal. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... Like those far waters calling me: When, my heart answering to the call, I followed down the seaward stream, By silent pool and singing fall; Till with a quiet, keen content, I watched the sun, a crimson ball, Shoot through grey seas a fiery gleam, Then sink in opal deeps ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... bless my soul, this is a fairy spot! A way-up place, surely! From the depths of Africa and the society of Boers and Kaffirs to an enchanted palace! This must be the bridal chamber of the establishment. I believe they have made a mistake and think me the King of the Pearl and Opal Islands. I wish dear old Jordan could see this. I wish, O God, I wish my Grace, my queen, could see this, that I might first crown her with flowers, and then fall down ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... office. You did not open the window and let in the dust, for the room was automatically ventilated, and you turned a switch marked "hot" and "cold." The office would furnish you a guide who would show you the establishment; and you might see your bread being kneaded by electricity, upon an opal glass table, and your eggs being tested by electric light; you might peer into huge refrigerators, ventilated by electric fans, and in which each tiny lamb chop reposed in a separate holder. Upon your own floor was a pantry, provided with hot and cold ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... rich profusion. Between the green, green slope and the blue, blue sea lay a stretch of sand that looked like a carpet of jewelled cloth of gold, for it was not greyish as our northern sand is, but yellow and changing—opal-coloured like sunshine and rainbows. And at the very moment when the wild, whirling, blinding, deafening, tumbling upside-downness of the carpet-moving stopped, the children had the happiness of seeing ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... to breathe the freshened air just as the first touches of the sun quickened to an opal splendour the pallor of that daybreak. All the earth was steaming, and the Bagnanza, suddenly swollen, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... a peculiar warble, and at its sound a score of fishes thrust their heads above the surface of the water. Some of them were gold-fish and some silver-fish, but others had opal tints that were very pretty. Their faces were jolly in expression and their eyes, Chubbins thought, must be diamonds, because ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... from the first, and we will give up our hearts to Angelico without drawback or reservation. His color is, in its sphere and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if deeper, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... horizon's opal wall The dark blue summits rise, And o'er them rifts of misty sunshine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... proportions, described by Ruskin in a burst of pure poetry as "a multitude of pillars and grey-hooded domes clustered into a long, low pyramid of coloured light: a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaics and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory—sculpture, fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... before him, the hood of her capote, with its rich purple, dropping from the fluttering yellow hair that the moonlight deepened into gold, and the fire-opal clasp rising and falling with her breath, like an imprisoned flame. He touched her hand, still warm and soft, with his own, which was icy. She withdrew it, turned her eyes, whose fair, faint lustre, the pale forget-me-not blue, was darkened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... drew from her delicate finger a ring of twisted gold, in which was set an opal wrought into the shape of a heart, and in it palpitated, like throbbing blood, one scarlet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... speed. When he looked in the glass, he found his lip so much swelled that his moustache stuck out in front like the bowsprit of a ship. At breakfast he joined the Englishman, who had an eye with as many colours as an opal, not to mention a ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... unity the sole emblem! In whom all colours that our eyes can see In rainbow, moonbow, or in opal gem, Unite in living oneness, purity, And operative power! whose every part Is beauty to the eyes, and truth unto the heart! Outspread in yellow sands, blue sea and air, Green growing corn, and scarlet poppies there;— Regent ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... here that's wanted, missis. Name of Wix or Daverill. Man about five-and-forty. Dark hair and light eyes. Side-draw on the mouth. Goes with a lurch. Two upper front eye-teeth missing. Carries a gold hunting-watch on a steel chain. Wears opal ring of apparent value. Stammers slightly." So the police-officer reads from his warrant or instructions, which he offers to show to Miss Hawkins, who scarcely glances ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... when they reached the beautiful island of Capri, a pink ethereal sunset that flooded headland and rock, orange orchard and vineyard, in a faint and luminous opal glow. Their vessel anchored outside the quay of the Marina Grande, and signaled for a boat to take them off. A little skiff put out from the beach, and into this they and their luggage were transferred. The transparent crystal water over which they rowed was clear ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... "Concarneau," Charles Milcendeau's "Washerwomen," on the opposite wall, and last but not least, Ren Mnard's "Opal Sea" - a small picture of great beauty - deserve recognition. Pierre Roche has a statuette of Loe Fuller in this gallery which is conspicuous by its daring ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... seraphic apparition. Her hair, of velvet blackness, fell in curls half-way down her shoulders; her brow, white as alabaster and polished as a mirror, reflected the rays of the sun; her beautiful and finely arched black eye-brows melted into the opal of her temples; her eyelids were fast down, and the curled black fringe of lashes veiled a glowing and liquid glance of divine emotion; the nose, straight, slender, and cut by two easy nostrils, gave to her profile that character of antique beauty ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the water of a pregnant woman is white and has little specks in it, like those in a sunbeam, ascending and descending in it, of an opal colour, and when the sediment is disturbed by shaking the urine, it looks like carded wool. In the middle of gestation it turns yellow, then red and lastly black, with a red film. At night on going to bed, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... In my anxiety to get clear, I cocked her nose up until the automatic alarm-bell rang, and I actually began to slide backwards. My sopped and dripping wings had made me heavier than I thought, but presently I was in lighter cloud, and soon had cleared the first layer. There was a second—opal-coloured and fleecy—at a great height above my head, a white, unbroken ceiling above, and a dark, unbroken floor below, with the monoplane labouring upwards upon a vast spiral between them. It is deadly lonely in these cloud-spaces. Once a great flight of some small water-birds ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... holes in it, in each of which an empty ball was fastened, hollow within, and open o' top, like a little lamp; its circumference about two hands' breadth. Each ball was of precious stone; one an amethyst, another an African carbuncle, the third an opal, and the fourth an anthracites. They were full of burning water five times distilled in a serpentine limbec, and inconsumptible, like the oil formerly put into Pallas' golden lamp at Acropolis ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal!—I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere; for that's it that always makes a good ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... of great illuminations Of dreamy doctrine caught from poets of old, Because of delicate imaginations, Because I am proud, or subtle, or merely cold. Natheless my soul's bright passions interchange As the red flames in opal drowse and speak: In beautiful twilight paths the elusive strange Phantoms of personality I seek. If better than the last embraces I Love the lit riddles of the eyes, the faint Appeal of merely courteous fingers,—why, Though 'tis a quest of souls, and I acquaint ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... North, the wild sky is blazing; Islands of opal float on silver seas; Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing; Pale ports of amber, golden argosies. Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing; Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky; Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing, Like ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the Opie farm any more; it is Opal Farm from to-night!" I cried, "and no one shall buy it unless they promise to leave in the old windows and let the meadow and crab orchard stay as they are, besides giving me right of way through it quite down to ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... stupefaction comes over me—for a hundred or two kilometres away men are killing one another—women are searching for some trace of their homes—the ground is teeming with corpses—the air is foetid with the smell of death! And yet we enjoy the opal sunset at Versailles and smile at the quaint appearance of the ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... from the sacred pyre Of sacrifice or holy death, Pale twisting wreaths of opal breath, ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... a cloud rising to him from a distance; like a great opal it hung motionless between earth and heaven. Coming nearer he saw the giant himself stretched out for a day's journey across the sand. His head lay under the colours of the dawn, and his feet were covered with the dusk of evening, and over his ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... five—Americans, republicans, with no law of primogeniture to conserve the estate beyond a single lifetime—were to live like a little royal household. And the father had made all his money in fifteen years in Opal Street. This country of ours, and the ways of it, are certainly pretty nearly the queerest under the sun, when one looks it all through and thinks ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the "Ring," is Pompilia's narrative. Here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual subtlety of Guido's plea stands quite unrivalled ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... film deepening to a milky colour and lying over the surface in heavy folds. I was about to start up and touch the glass with my hand, when beneath this milky colour and from the heart of the whirling film, there began to gleam an underlying brilliance after the fashion of the light in an opal, but with this difference, that the light here was blue— a steel blue so vivid that the pain of it forced me to shut my eyes. When I opened them again, this light had increased in intensity. The ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... really odd things about the whole affair were that the lowest third of the case was filled with a liquid, thickish and emerald green and possessing a curious iridescence, and that just beneath the niche was fixed a strip of ebony tilted upwards and bearing in distinct opal lettering the word: ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... are among the most magnificent in Greece. A beauty worthy of life dwells over the vine-clad hills, while the mountain kings that rise about are hoary with age and fame. The eye wanders from the purple-laden cliffs of Kylene to the opal mantles of the sea and from the peaks of Parnassus to the lofty range of Kiona. This is the background of one of Palamas' "Hundred Voices," a collection of short lyrics in the ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... sons of gentle Mrs Constable, were Jasper, otherwise John; Sapphire, whose real name was Robert; Garnet, baptised Wallace; Opal, whose name was ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... he, sitting silently opposite her, dreamed—the old dream that comes to most good men and true once in their lives. He scarcely moved until the dawn lightened with opal the dreary plain, bringing back the horizon and day, when he woke from his dream with a sigh, and then a laugh. Then he listened for the sound of distant hoofs, and hearing them, crept noiselessly from the coach. A compact body of horsemen were ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... hands, "are of immense value. Some of the finest opals ever seen are in this necklace; they were taken from the crown of an Indian price and bequeathed to one of our ancestors. So much is said about the unlucky stone—the pierre du malheur, as the French call the opal—that I did not ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... peculiar to each sense; for whatever of each kind is present in any subject, excludes all other of that sort: v.g. no one subject can have two smells or two colours at the same time. To this, perhaps will be said, Has not an opal, or the infusion of LIGNUM NEPHRITICUM, two colours at the same time? To which I answer, that these bodies, to eyes differently, placed, may at the same time afford different colours: but I take liberty also ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... azure sea is flowing, 'Mid long peninsulas of shining sand, From opal unto pearl the moon is growing, Dropped like a shell ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering opal in gray-brown rock. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... strange roof"—and I laughed, contentedly. "Meanwhile, about that ring—it should be, I think, a heavy, Byzantine ring, with the stones sunk deep in the dull gold. Yes, we'll have six stones in it; say, R, a ruby; O, an opal; B, a beryl; E, an emerald; R, a ruby again, I suppose; and T, a topaz. Elena, that's the very ring I mean to buy as soon as I've had breakfast, tomorrow, as a token of my mortgage on the desire of the world, and as the badge of your impendent ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... its strata the hidden secrets of many by-gone geological ages. Here on the north flank of the mountain are two thousand feet of stratifications. On the ledges, tier above tier and story above story, are seen the opal and agate stumps and trunks of twenty ancient forests, some of the trunks being ten feet ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... were in less doubt in this case than we were with regard to the amethysts, as the appearance of the stone seemed to indicate that it possessed a value. We dealt with this as we did with the amethysts, and found that we had chanced upon a particularly rich opal deposit." ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... boy drew near and watched it, quivered and glanced with the ever-changing colours of a liquid opal. He dipped his hands in it and wet his lips. It seemed as if a lively breeze passed ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... was sealed with red wax, and when she removed the enveloping pasteboard, she found a heavy gold ring, bearing a large beautifully tinted opal, surrounded with small diamonds. On the inside was engraved "Douglass and Regina," with the date of the day on which he had left the parsonage ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... reddish-yellow or colourless on cooling, unaltered in the reducing flame; bismuth, yellowish-brown, light-yellow or colourless on cooling; in the reducing flame, almost colourless, blackish-grey when cold; silver, light yellowish to opal, somewhat opaque when cold; whitish-grey in the reducing flame; manganese, amethyst red, colourless in the reducing flame. If the hot bead is colourless and remains clear on cooling, we may suspect the presence of antimony, aluminium, zinc, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Nephew, not being prepared to answer this difficult query, leads his relative gently up to a "Nocturne in Opal and Silver." The Uncle conveys his opinion of it by a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... ordering a present to be laid on the carpet of several necklaces of valuable beads, copper bars, and coloured cotton handkerchief. It was most amusing to witness his delight at a string of fifty little "berrets" (opal beads the size of marbles) which I had brought into the country for the first time, and were accordingly extremely valuable. No sooner had he surveyed them with undisguised delight than he requested me to give him another string of opals for his wife, or she would be in a bad ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger. And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would not accept this ring from ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... is Mrs. Butler!! I do hope some day somewhere you may see The Remnants of an Army and Recruits for the Connaught Rangers. The first is in the Academy Notes, which I send you. The second is at least as fine. [Sketch.] The landscape effect is the opal-like sky and bright light full of moisture after rain—heavy clouds hang above—the mountains are a leaden blue—and the sky of all exquisite pale shades of bright colour. Down the wet moor road comes the group. Two very tall, dark-eyed Connaught "boys"—one with a set face and his hands in ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... you so silent, Opal? You haven't said a word to-day that you didn't absolutely have to say. If all American girls are as dreamy as you, I wonder why our English lords are so irresistibly attracted across the water when in search ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... they were conducted by chief officers of the court to a pavilion which faced the western sky, now glowing like an opal with every shade of the iris, and then becoming of a light green colour varied only by some slight clouds burnished with gold. A troop of maidens brought flowers as bright as themselves, and then a company of pages advanced, and kneeling, offered to the Queen ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... did upon that fatal night. Couched in her amber cushions, she seemed to shine as a star on the twilight's glow. Perfume came from her hair and robes, music fell from her lips, and in her heavenly eyes all lights changed and gathered as in the ominous opal's disc. ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... upon the origin of the opal, but no one seems to know why it is considered unlucky. Women who laugh at superstitions of all kinds are afraid to wear an opal, and a certain jeweller at the head of one of the largest establishments ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... gleam of the sacred fire. "The Spirit of the Age," moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson's realm did the boy bring such an opal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... morning air. My apartment was in the southeast angle of the Chateau, and my bedroom windows—overlooking the inner court—commanded the view along the range of the Alpilles to the Luberoun and Mont-Ventour, a pale great opal afloat in waves of clouds; while from the windows of my sitting-room I saw over Mont-Majour and Arles far across the level Camargue to the hazy horizon below which lay ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... on the deck, longing for the tonic of pure air. The morning was misty—it had rained during the night—and clouds hung heavy and low over the city. Out from this gray smother the city gleamed like a veiled opal. Neither Felix nor her aunt was to be seen. When she went down to breakfast, after a brisk tramp back and forth across the deck, she was rosy and dewy, her triumphant youth showing no sign of her vigils. She was saying to herself: "Now I've come, it's too idiotic not to enjoy it. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a rich assortment of colour. Every piece in it was a treasure in her eyes. But much as she loved the bits of painted china, she loved the glass better. There were red bits, and green of many shades, and blue, yellow, amber, purple and opal. Each piece, before arranging it in its allotted place on the thwart, she would lift to her eyes and survey the world through it. Some near treetops, and the blue sky piled with white fleeces of summer clouds, were all of the world she could see from her retreat; but viewed through ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sweeps, and the ground behind sloped abruptly down to the plains. The ranges were all flat-topped and devoid of timber, but the vegetation resembled that of the country at their base, and the fragments of rock scattered over them were similar: that is to say, milky quartz, wood opal, granite, and other rocks (none of which occurred in the stratification of these ranges), were to be found on their summits as on the plains, and in equal proportion, as if the whole country had once been perfectly level, and that the hills had been forced up. Such indeed was the impression ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... on towards that brightening cast. At every onward step proud domes arose In prospect,—diamond gleams, and golden glows Of amber 'gainst their faces levelling. Joyous, and many as the leaves in spring, Still onward; still the splendour gradual swell'd. Rich opal domes were seen, on high upheld By jasper pillars, letting through their shafts A blush of coral. Copious wonder-draughts Each gazer drank; and deeper drank more near: 850 For what poor mortals fragment up, as mere As marble was there lavish, to the vast ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... Zik is heavy and the sky is opal in its effects. The chemists have thus far found in nature ninety elementary substances, and it is partly due to this large variety that the Zikites have surpassed their fellow men ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... more, I told him, I would show him a seal of composition, engraved after a very valuable antique; upon which I pulled out my watch with a rich gold chain, adorned with three seals set in gold, and an opal ring. He viewed each of them with great eagerness, handled the chain, admired the chased case, and observed that the whole must have cost me a vast sum of money. I affected indifference, and replied in a careless manner, "Some trifle of sixty or seventy guineas." He stared in my face for ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... gleamed like an opal in a setting of velvety ranges under turquoise skies. About its walls were the clustered adobes of the Mexicans, like children creeping close to the feet of the one mother; and beyond that the illimitable ranges of mesa and ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various |
