"Vaporous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bright white body of the sun is seen. Of the innermost region, the heart or nucleus of the sun, we know almost nothing. The central body or nucleus is surrounded by a brilliantly luminous envelope or layer of vaporous matter which is what we see when we look at the sun and which ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... oddities in the midst of which we seem to be lost. Beneath us, lies always the immense blue background: Nagasaki illumined by moonlight, and the expanse of silvered, glittering water, which seems like a vaporous vision suspended in mid-air. Behind us is the great open temple, where the bonzes officiate to the accompaniment of sacred bells and wooden clappers,—looking, from where we sit, more like puppets than anything else, some squatting in rows like peaceful mummies, others executing ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... and service. As the French say, they had made together un bon menage. Save for a few half-hysterical days during the war—and in that incomprehensible pre-war period at the end of which the birds came to her rescue, there had been little talk of love and dreams of delight and the rest of the vaporous paradise of the mutually infatuated. He could not manifest, nor did she demand, a lover's ardour. It had all been as comfortable and satisfactory as you please. And now, at the most irrelevant moment, according to his masculine mind, came this ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... never remember a denser fog. At first, after the lighted cabin, I could distinguish absolutely nothing, except where the beam of light from the cabin lamp struggled past me through the open hatch into a white thickness which I can only liken to vaporous cotton-wool. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... golden varnish, all that ground covered with rapid strokes of the brush lightly laid on with a delicate touch. Notice that green of the trees shot through with red tones, penetrated with quivering air, and the vaporous light of autumn. Notice the delicate water-colour effect of thick oil, the general smoothness of the canvas, the relief of this pouch or hood; notice the full modelling of the little faces with their glances in the confused outlines of the eye and their smiles in the suggested outlines ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... (1800,) I went to bed as usual and woke up about one, as I was in the habit of doing. I found myself in a strange state of cerebral excitement, my preception was keen, my thoughts profound; the sphere of my intelligence seemed increased, I sat up and my eyes were affected with a pale, vaporous, uncertain light, which, however, did, not enable me ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... saw the great wet gleam of the world below. By the time he reached the top, it was as light as it was all the day; but it was with a dull yellow glare, as if the sun were obscured by the smoke and vaporous fumes of a burning world which the rain had been sent to quench. It was a wild, hopeless scene—as if God had turned his face away from the world, and all Nature was therefore drowned in tears—no ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... dry tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that still clung to the sleek upper boughs were no more than a delicate yellow cloud or glowing autumnal atmosphere suffusing the black bole of the tree with a light of pure enchantment. He was surprised that anything so vaporous and colorful should come from the same sap that circulated through the bark and body of the thick tree itself. But then he reflected that, after all, the crown and flame of Sam ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... beauty was flecked. Note well the how and the when, The thing that prompted and sped. Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing, Fixed eye, and the world was prey. No simple world of thy greenblade Spring, Nor world of thy flowerful prime On the topmost Orient peak Above a yet vaporous day. Flesh was it, breast to beak: A four-walled windowless world without ray, Only darkening jets on a river of slime, Where harsh over music as woodland jay, A voice chants, Woe to the weak! And along an insatiate feast, Women and men are one In the cup transforming to beast. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... paying no apparent heed to anything excepting the stockade in front. The daylight brightened, but mist clouds overhung the valley, while floating wreaths of fog drifted between the great rock and the fort gates, occasionally even obscuring the Iroquois in vaporous folds. There was no sound, no sight, of those hidden below, waiting my word. I ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... intenderit Neoburgio manus, et contra tendentis os verberaverit. Ita, quae apud concordes vincula caritatis, incitamenta irarum apud infensos erant." (Cited in Kohler, Munzbelustiqungen, xxi. 341; who refers also to Levassor, Histoire de Louis XII.)—Pauli (iii. 542) bedomes qnite vaporous.] a slap that had important consequences in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... single feature in the cultivation of plants during the winter in which the amateur is more likely to err, and by reason of which a greater amount of injury is sustained, than in the application of water either in its fluid or vaporous state. If applied to the soil in superabundance, the roots, being inactive, are certain to sustain some degree of injury; and if it is applied in excess to the atmosphere in the form of vapour, the exhalations from the leaves of the plants will be checked in consequence ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... and endeavored to escape. But it might not be. The stranger, apparently without effort, was still by his side, and Bess's feet, in her master's apprehensions, were nailed to the ground. By-and-by, however, the atmosphere became clearer. Bright quivering beams burst through the vaporous shroud, and then it was that Dick discovered that the apparition of Tom King was no other than Luke Rookwood. He was mounted on his old horse, Rook, and looked grim and haggard as a ghost vanishing at the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... idea rises haloed through his vaporous imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley gives ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... charming room, with pale grey walls and a pale green carpet, and very little in it except, let in as a panel, a delicate low-toned portrait of the mistress of the house, vaguely appearing through vaporous curtains, holding pale flowers, and painted with a rather mysterious effect by that talented young amateur, her cousin, Harry de Freyne. It had been his sole success in art, and had been exhibited at the Grafton Galleries under ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... northeastern quarter of the sky, along the horizon black, overhead a vast gray wave, in its heart copper-hued, seething, interworking, now a distended sail, now a sail bursted; and the wind could he heard whipping the shreds into fleece, and whirling them a confusion of vaporous banners. Yet glassy, the water reflected the tint of the cloud. The hush holding it was like the drawn breath of a victim waiting the first turn ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... through a lake of quick-silver—when the track of the swift porpoises show like long furrows of dazzling flame, and over the whirling eddies of the keel's deep wake is seen to hover a strange unearthly light,—a thin bluish, devilish, vaporous haze, which, in the silent watch of night, maketh the lonely gazer's flesh to creep, and conjures through the brain every wild legend whispered of the "vasty deep," fascinating the eyes, and holding them with spell-like power, until—until what?—why, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... poor fiend was assuming a vaporous consistency, being about to vanish through the floor in sad disappointment and chagrin, the editor of a political newspaper chanced to enter the office in quest of a scribbler of party paragraphs. The former servant of Dr. Faustus, ...
— The Intelligence Office (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not been ever known ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... charge, and enumerated with too facile tongues God's deliverances and benefits. His ear must have caught some tones of levity, if not of insincerity, in the lightly-made vow. So he meets it with a douche of cold water in verses 19, 20, because he wishes to condense vaporous resolutions into something more tangible and permanent. Cold, judiciously applied, solidifies. Discouragements, rightly put, encourage. The best way to deepen and confirm good resolutions which have been too swiftly and inconsiderately formed, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the smoke, White people, and do you, Little Flower, tell me what you see there," he called from behind this vaporous veil. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath day's azure eyes, Ocean's nursling, Venice lies,— A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo! the sun ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as something real, but fluid and of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... crystallize, if you let it cool slowly enough, in stars, much like snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallizes also exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallize from their vapors. Now in any of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an intermediate substance; and in crystallizing they are both brought nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as possible: the essential part of ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... storm yesterday, that seemed to shake earth and heaven, to-day is beautiful. Soft glistening steams are rising from every hill and bog and valley, as the hot sun's rays beat upon them. The world seems wrapped in one vast vaporous mist, most lovely to behold. All the woodland flowers are holding up their heads again, after their past smiting from the cruel rain; the trees are swaying to and fro in the fresh morning breeze, thousands of glittering drops brightening the air, as they swing themselves ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before the fire in his stocking-feet. The steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of shore palms to lofty blue peaks terraced with rice and red-massed kina plantations, with shining streams and green kananga flowers and tamarinds. The land breeze, fragrant with clove buds and cinnamon, came off to the ship in the vaporous dusk; and, in the blazing sunlight of morning, the Anjer sampans swarmed out with a shrill chatter of brilliant birds, monkeys and naked brown humanity, piled with dark green oranges and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... day at two o'clock under the windows of the hotel, facing the tranquil sea on an open-air bench. He remained for some time without moving, in the heat of the sun gazing mournfully at the Mediterranean. Every now and then, he cast a glance at the lofty mountains with vaporous summits which shuts in Mentone: then, with a very slow movement, he crossed his long legs, so thin that they seemed two bones, around which fluttered the cloth of his trousers, and he opened a book, which was always the same. And then he did not stir ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the planets, while in the vaporous condition to which we have just alluded, would manifestly have a central nucleus gradually increasing in magnitude and mass, and an atmosphere offering, at its successive limits, phenomena entirely similar to those which the solar atmosphere, properly ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... "restoration of the Jews," Such interpretation of the prophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew—"Go ye first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Mars stood still in the centre of the space, and this orb soon occupied the whole area. It assumed at first the form of a vast vaporous globe; then contracted to a comparatively small sphere, glowing as if more than red-hot, and leaving as it contracted two tiny balls revolving round their primary. The latter gradually faded till it gave out no light but that which from some unseen source was cast upon it, one-half consequently ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... an abandon and a feline languor that imposed respect. One of the San Martino girls, dressed in white, like a vaporous fairy, danced with an officer in a blue uniform, a slim, distinguished person with languid eyes and rosy cheeks, who caused a veritable ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... the same direction as the comet; their orbits must cross. When the comet approached the great planet, its tail seemed to divide; the attraction of Jupiter began to take effect. The great star was trying to rob its lord, the sun, of this vaporous body. The next night the comet's tail was split in two. Then the largest and most distant of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... appear. Now, the shipping is afloat, and comes up buoyantly, to look at the wharf. Now, the carts that have come down for coals, load away as hard as they can load. Now, the steamer smokes immensely, and occasionally blows at the paddle-boxes like a vaporous whale- greatly disturbing nervous loungers. Now, both the tide and the breeze have risen, and you are holding your hat on (if you want to see how the ladies hold THEIR hats on, with a stay, passing over ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... for a little, the earth smoking, the west a low, vaporous yellow, the swollen river sounding, Diego de Arana had summoned by the drum every man in La Navidad. He stood beneath our banner and put his hand upon the staff and spoke earnestly to those gathered before him, in their duty and out ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... up and down over the whole region of broad vaporous plains, and scan all the scene. And when Anchises had led his son over it, each point by each, and kindled his spirit with passion for the glories on their way, he tells him thereafter of the war he next must wage, and instructs him ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses render ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... his teeth with a bit of wood, pouring over the side a bright stream of water out of his lips; the fat Rajah dozed in a shabby deck-chair,—and at the turn of every bend the two walls of leaves reappeared running parallel along the banks, with their impenetrable solidity fading at the top to a vaporous mistiness of countless slender twigs growing free, of young delicate branches shooting from the topmost limbs of hoary trunks, of feathery heads of climbers like delicate silver sprays standing up without a quiver. There was not a sign of a clearing anywhere; not a trace of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River. When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls grew audible,—a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their ears, they ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... semblance of a vaporous tissue—an illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private view of the favored few—till it gradually became visible to the unassisted eye of the profanum vulgus, and finally ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... principles of mechanics, the rotation of the sun and its accompanying atmosphere must increase as rapidly as its volume diminishes, the increased centrifugal force generated by the more rapid rotation, overbalancing the action of gravitation, would cause the sun to abandon successive rings of vaporous matter, which are supposed to have condensed by cooling, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... differ, for he drinketh water, and I drink wine; and like as we read of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep '... so if we put on sobriety and attention, we shall find it a sure maxim in knowledge, that the pleasant liquor of wine is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams.' ['I,' says 'Michael,' who is also in favour of 'sobriety,' and critical upon excesses of all kinds, 'I have ever observed, that super-celestial theories and sub-terranean ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that was now peopling the silence of the vast church with melodious sounds, worshipping creatures of the elements? If the winds and the flames of fire are his augels, how much more the grandly consorting tones of the heavenly organ! He would go and see what power informed the vaporous music. ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... two of these voices that Thomas looked up to the spandrels in the choir, and he saw that it was the carved angels leaning out of the spandrels that were singing. And as they sang the breath came from their stone lips white and vaporous ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... crimson stream, thrust this into his hand and strove to guide it to the parchment, chanting at the same time litanies to the infernal powers. The crystal flagons rang like one great harmonica with shrill but spirit-stirring music; volumes of vaporous perfumes diffused themselves through the apartment, and an endless procession of treasure-laden figures defiled before the bewildered youth. He seemed buried in the opulence of the world, as he sat up to his waist in gold and jewels; all the earth's ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... stood like a delicately carven thing, silhouetted against the remote purple of the void. In the profound firmament the stars burned with a tremulous ardour they never show in northern skies. The mystery of this African night rose not from vaporous veils and the long movement of winds, but was breathed out by clearness, brightness, stillness. It was the deepest of all mystery—the mystery of vastness and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... heaviness such as showed in the face, a body that could move lightly, take supple attitudes, dance, posture, bend, or sit up straight, as now, with the perfect rigidity of an idol; a body that could wear rightly cascades of wonderfully tinted draperies, and spangled, vaporous tissues, and barbaric jewels, that do not shine brightly as if reflecting the modern, restless spirit, but that are somnolent and heavy and deep, like the eyes of the Eastern women ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... A true Hindu life-weariness (to use one of Novalis' marvelous phrases) is really the atmosphere which produces the exquisite haze of Morris's pictures. . . . Can any poet shoot his soul's arrow to its best height, when at once bow and string and muscle and nerve are slackened in this vaporous and relaxing air, that comes up out of the old dreams of fate that were false and of passions that were ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... in the tramp of its hoofs, something strange and joyous in the noisy cry of the quails. The stars disappeared in a kind of luminous mist. The moon, not yet at its full, shone with steady lustre. Its light spread in a blue stream over the sky, and fell in a streak of vaporous gold on the thin clouds which went past ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... it, and through the boughs overhead a brilliant star, aloof and splendid, looked coldly down. Along dark spaces Orion had drawn his glittering blade. Above the snowy mountains a melancholy waning moon was swinging. The valley was full of mist, white and shining where the light fell upon it, a vaporous purple where the shadows held sway. So still it was! the only motion in all the world the throbbing stars and her palpitating heart. So solemnly silent! It was a relief, as she trudged on and on, to note a ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the stalwart figure, looking neither to right nor left, and behind him trailed the vaporous aroma of the fine cigar. Raising herself on her couch, the invalid ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... over Jerusalem's low roofs The moon floated, drifting through high vaporous woofs. The moonlight crept and glistened silent, solemn, sweet, Over dome and column, up empty, endless street; In the closed, scented gardens the rose loosed from the stem Her white showery petals; none regarded them; The starry thicket breathed odours ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... of an hour it became evident that that train had at least one great quality—it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swung along the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous mysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with increasing enthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of Galileo would never have had the audacity to deny that that train moved. And one felt, comfortably, that ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the working of hemp and furs and alum ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... purposely broken to be tested at various periods of their service, in various capacities. There is iron-dust on everything; and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other chimneys. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... had vanished; all the forest looked level, dreamy and still, barren of humanity, given over to its own shy children, nothing moving save the slow-falling leaves. But from beyond a great clump of sumach, set like a torch in the vaporous blue, came a steady stream of words, happily rendered indistinguishable by distance, and I knew that the King's minion was cursing the Italian, the Governor, the Santa Teresa, the Due Return, the minister, the forest, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... bright celestial spheres, False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams, Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame, The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud, The sinking of the downward-falling star, All these are pictures of the changing moods Borne through the midnight ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... them, giving wings to the imagination, were mountains, more mountains, distant, incalculably distant, with unseen hollow valleys between; and finally, mountains again, half cloud, melting indistinguishably into the vaporous haze of the sky. Above her, sheer and vast, lay Hemlock Mountain, all its huge bulk a sleeping, passionless calm. Beyond was the solemnity of Windward Mountain's concave shell, full to the brim with brooding blue shadows, a well of mystery in that day of wind-blown sunshine. Beneath ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... aware of what she went on to say. Her mind and body both seemed to have floated into another region of quick-sailing clouds rapidly passing across each other and enveloping everything in a vaporous indistinctness. Meanwhile he remained conscious of his own concentrated desire, his impotence to bring about anything he wished, and his increasing ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... half later, long streaks of electric light would ripple on that surface, and great ships stand at ease there, and ferry-boats rush back and forth. But in this closing dusk it reflected only the gray and yellow vaporous breath of April, and shaggy edges of a wilderness. The high shores sank their shadows farther and farther from the ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... galleon, Riding at anchor off the orient sun, Had broken its cable, and stood out to space Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways: And now, back warping from the inclement main, Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, It swung into its azure roads again; When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid our ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... it was day it must surely be seen that he was very seriously ill. The spirit of Tarautas would again appear to him—and not merely as a vaporous illusion—and put an end ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shelf of basalt, surrounded by a balustrade. Gilbert fastened one of two knotted ropes with which he had supplied himself securely to the mullion; then he crept upon the ledge of basalt and stood there for a few moments contemplating the precipice in silence. In the gloomy and vaporous gulf which his eyes explored, he distinguished a wall of whitish rocks, which seemed to draw him towards them, and to provoke him to an aerial voyage. He took care not to abandon himself to this fatal attraction, and the uneasiness which it caused him disappearing ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... strawberries—were piled up in front of her in paper-lined baskets, and the juice coming from their bruised ripeness stained the stall-front, and steamed, with a strong perfume, in the heat. She would feel quite giddy on those blazing July afternoons when the melons enveloped her with a powerful, vaporous odour of musk; and then with her loosened kerchief, fresh as she was with the springtide of life, she brought sudden temptation to all who saw her. It was she—it was her arms and necks which gave that semblance of amorous vitality to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... asks if blurred edges, empty shadows and vaporous detail mean quality. They certainly mean mystery, which when applied to an appropriate subject signifies that the artist has joined his art with the imagination of the beholder. He has therefore let it out at ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... and looks astern up the river, where another wall of mist is formed. Now the clouds close in all round, and the raft hardly appears to move, but to be standing still in the thick, dark water, crushed down by the heavy gray-black vaporous masses, which drift across the ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... desire for their pictures. Surround this scene with ancient walnut-trees and slim young poplars with their pale-gold leaves; dot graceful buildings here and there along the grassy slopes where sight is lost beneath the vaporous, warm sky, and you will have some idea of one of the points of view of this ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... went, that infernal gong A-ringin' "good-day" as he flew along, An' the smoke from his cigarette came back Like a vaporous snicker along his track. On an' on he sped, gettin' further ahead, His feet keepin' up that onceaseable tread, Till he faded away in the distance, an' when I seed the condemned Eastern rooster again He war thar with the boys at the ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... of landscape who had taken his subject in a way and treated it in a manner so personal as to be really unparalleled. Outside of landscape his interest was clearly not real. In his other works one notes a certain debonnaire irresponsibility. He pursued nothing seriously but out-of-doors, its vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, what Thoreau calls its inaudible panting. His true theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed him; and no one of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... yet prolonged. I wake to hear The distant fog-horn peal: before mine eyes Stands the white wall of mist, Blending with vaporous skies. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... best when he unchained his fancy. His musical grotesques are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy and the new school! But then he was an indifferent critic ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... examine the influence of chemical union alone, we shall render our experiments more pure by liberating the atoms and molecules entirely from the bonds of cohesion, and employing them in the gaseous or vaporous form. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which may literally be ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... The water had not yet become water; it was steam. The metals had not yet become metals; they were rather the vapor of metals. At length they were the liquids of metals, and at last the solids. So, also, the rocks were transformed from the vaporous through the liquid into the solid form—all this while the globe was in process of condensation. It grew smaller in mathematical measurements at the same time that it grew heavier by the accretion of matter. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... have lasted half the night ere the lamps of Elverslope made constellations in the valley, and the green and red lights of the station loomed out on the hill. They drove into the circle of gaslights, among the vaporous steeds of omnibuses and flies, and entered the station, Phoebe's veil down, and Mervyn shading his dazzled eyes from the glare. They were half an hour too soon; and while waiting, it occurred to Phoebe to inquire whether a telegram ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their own want of knowledge. The idea is true. Thought is the great power of the Universe. But to make it practically available we must know something of the principles by which it works—that it is not a mere vaporous indefinable influence floating around and subject to no known laws, but that on the contrary, it follows laws as uncompromising as those of mathematics, while at the same time allowing unlimited freedom ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... without consulting her, the mistress of their charms. Away the witches were sent, with instructions to meet at the pit of Acheron in the morning. There Macbeth was to know his destiny. Vessels and spells the hags were to provide, while Hecate was to catch a vaporous drop that hung on the corner of the moon, before it touched the ground. That drop, distilled by magic sleights, would raise such sprites, that by the strength of their illusion would draw Macbeth to confusion. Such, Hecate declared, would be his doom for spurning fate, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... by a gradual thinning of the vaporous shield, until, at length, we began to perceive the red surface of the planet dimly shining through it. Thinner and rarer it became, and, after the lapse of about eighteen hours, it had completely disappeared, and the huge globe shone out again, reflecting the light of the sun from its continents ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has blown all the fume. The ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... in "Prometheus Unbound," in which the Earth feels the Spirit of Love, and bursts into speech. "'The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! the boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! the vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha! ha! the animation of delight, which wraps me like an atmosphere of light, and bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.' That's how I feel, ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... breath blew the vaporous clouds in the wreaths that usually change shapes while one watches, and the long drifts in the valley at Ishmael's feet hung motionless in the air, the dark side of the opposite slope showed here and there, crossed by the pale zig-zag of the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... I demanded of Miss Brown. 'Yes,' she replied, alertly. Even as I spoke I saw the mysterious limb dart out and seize upon a pencil which lay upon the table. Again and again I saw this 'apparition' emerge from that vaporous cloud and handle the pad in the middle of the table. I could see three fingers on the under-side of the pad as it was held before the psychic's face, and these facts I announced to the other members of the circle, who could not see as plainly as I could. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... nowhere. The sky, and the undulating mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of yellowing ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... marvellous art of carrying and modulating the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off, Chopin was entirely himself. He had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... feelings—had lived an external life to the most of his ability. Now, through falling in love, and reading Byron, he began to know the existence of a world of feeling, if not of thought; while his attempts at conversation with the girls had a condensing if not crystallizing influence upon the merely vaporous sensations which the poetry produced. All that was wanted to give full force to the other influences in adding its own, was the presence of the sultry evenings of summer, with the thunder gathering in the dusky air. The cold days and nights of winter were ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion, protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external soakage they experience, he ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness, The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation, not to be confined! Ha! Ha! the animation of delight, Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of refuse and pungent odours arising from decomposing matter, and in the south and west is scarcely ever found flourishing side by side with modern sanitation. Home Rule not only, like pumpkins and vegetable marrows, requires a feculent soil, but like them, and indeed like all watery and vaporous vegetables, it needs the forcing-frame. Left to its own devices the movement would die at once. There is nothing spontaneous about it. It is a weedy sort of exotic, thriving only by filth and forcing. It cannot live an hour in the climate of Armagh. The cold, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... scarecrow had nothing for it, but to puff away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco-smoke, that the small cottage-kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam struggled mistily through, and could but imperfectly define the image of the cracked and dusty window-pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo, and the other stretched towards the figure, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was, one morning that I remember. Guardmounting was always late enough to let one feel the sun's power; and it was a sultry morning, this. We were in July now, and misty, vaporous clouds moved slowly over the blue sky, seeming to intensify the heat of the unclouded intervals. But wonderful sweet it was; and I under the shade of my flat hat, with a little help from the foliage ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to overcome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He became convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock, that they were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account. During the first year after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimes gave way to a desire to return ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... through the vaporous golden atmosphere of the late autumn sunset, through the pensive stillness of the hushed woods, the distant sound of feminine voices, calling to one another, echoed from the hills, and beyond the hedges was heard the crackling of branches, snapped by invisible hands, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and was driving dark masses of cloud across the sky; in the west a sullen red flared up from behind the hills, touching the lower edges of the vaporous mountains with purple. In a small, clear space above the red hung the silver sickle of the new moon, and near it shone a single star.... Lydia was like that star, he told himself—as wonderful, ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the day, remember), and this one flung down in a heap upon the ground with his head against the bars like a wild beast. Make the rain pour down in torrents outside. Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch's cauldron. Add a smell like that of a thousand old mildewed umbrellas wet through, and a thousand dirty-clothes-bags musty, moist, and fusty, and you will have some idea—a very feeble one, my dear friend, on my word—of this place yesterday week. You know of course that we ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... day. Some people said this was because the pigs were unclean; others said it was because the pigs were sacred. This difference of opinion points to a hazy state of religious thought in which the ideas of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of vaporous solution to which we give the name of taboo. It is quite consistent with this that the pig should have been held to be an embodiment of the divine Adonis, and the analogies of Dionysus and Demeter make it probable that ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... so far as money-needs are concerned, live under a cloudless sky of summer—dreary rather and shallow, it seems to me, however lovely its blue light; when for the poor man a breach is made through a vaporous firmament, he sees deeper into the blue because of the framing clouds—sees up to worlds invisible in the broad glare. I know not how the born-rich, still less those who have given themselves with success to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... be nullified by heavy walnut window casings; red and green carpet, red or blue plush furnishings, or vivid hangings would ruin the effect. Pictures in such a room should be preferably water-colors with pale gray mats, and gold or white frames. Oil paintings are only permissible when dreamy and vaporous in tint. Light, delicate colors in upholstery, creamy madras for curtains. The carpet may be a little darker, verging on some of the delicate, woody browns. Any bric-a-brac should be in pale shades of ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... penetrate the secrets which the gray and shifting veil still hid from his view. Beside him lay the Italian knife, its steely surface shimmering in the vaporous light, there where a dull and ruddy stain had not dimmed its brilliant polish. The murderer gazed at his tool and shuddered feebly. But he picked up the knife and mechanically wiped it in the grass, before he restored ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... priceless gifts. Thus my love is incomplete. Sometimes in the enigmatic depth of your sad look, in your playful words mocking at their own meaning, I gain glimpses of a being trying to rend asunder the languorous grace of her body, to emerge in a chaste fire of pain through a vaporous veil of smiles. Illusion is the first appearance of Truth. She advances towards her lover in disguise. But a time comes when she throws off her ornaments and veils and stands clothed in naked dignity. I grope for that ultimate you, that ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which he wrote after ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... not how far your continued neglect Her nature, as well as her heart, might affect. Till at last, by degrees, that serene atmosphere Of her unconscious purity, faint and yet dear, Like the indistinct golden and vaporous fleece Which surrounded and hid the celestials in Greece From the glances of men, would disperse and depart At the sighs of a sick and delirious heart,— For jealousy is to a woman, be sure, A disease heal'd too oft by a criminal cure; And the heart left ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... of a painted city, a wilderness of housetops, of smoke-wreathed spires and chimneys, stretched away to a murky, blood-red horizon. Even as they stood there, a deeper color stained the sky, an angry sun began to sink into the piled up masses of thick, vaporous clouds. The girl watched with an air of sullen yet absorbed interest. Her companion's eyes were still fixed wholly and critically upon her. Who was she, he wondered? Why had she left her own country ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as I should have expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was "connected with the aristocracy." I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... of the sun, which we see, is enveloped by several layers of gases and vaporous matter, in the same manner as our globe is enveloped by its atmosphere (see Fig. 10, p. 131). These are transparent, just as our atmosphere is transparent; and so we see the white bright body of the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... of the incense curled upward and played around the straight, slim figure, drew vaporous lines about the still, ivory face—the handsome, sinister face, sometimes partly veiling the long black eyes and sometimes showing them in all their unnatural brightness. So the man stood, looking ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... fragrant odour of the almond-trees, the nightingales are calling to each other from the rock-crevices, behind the fortress: all breathes of life and love; and beautiful nature, full of this feeling, covers herself with a veil of mists. And how wonderfully has that vaporous ocean poured itself over the Caspian! The sea below gleams wavingly, like steel damasked with gold on an escutcheon—that above swells like a silver surge lighted by the full moon, which rolls along the sky like a cup of gold, while the stars glitter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... blue and vaporous vistas of the shop, were caught by a circle of brightness that shone with a curious egg-like lustre. It was round and white, gleaming in the sheen of a hanging light, a bright island in a surf of tobacco smoke. He came more close, and found it was ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... soldier shifted his position, stretched out a stiff knee with a grimace of pain, and pulled the tall lad bodily into his lap like a child. For some time the two were silent, the sun shining down warmly on them through the faint, vaporous green of the tiny leaves. The old horse cropped the young shoots with a contented, ruminative air, once in a while pausing to hang his head drowsily, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... although the glare of the great furnaces in the neighbourhood of Glasgow glowed somewhat ominously large as the night wore on, we retired to rest rather in hope than resignation. But dismal, indeed, was the prospect when we awoke. A vaporous grey mist had entirely usurped the heavens, and the plash of weary rain resounded through the pluvious metropolis of the west. Fortunately, we were not ignorant of the fact, that Glasgow is under the peculiar tutelage of the Pleiades; and accordingly we proceeded to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... still clung to me, breathing and steeped in that fragrant, summer-like atmosphere, I had long intervals of perfect inactivity and silence, while I sat or reclined, not thinking but in a reverie, while many dreams of pleasures to come drifted in a vague, vaporous manner through my brain. The very character of the room—its delicate richness, the exquisitely harmonious disposition of colors and objects, and the illusions of nature produced on the mind—seemed to lend itself to this unaccustomed mood, and ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me—the silence of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... and such an ague had me, that for a long time my wandering finger-tips, all ataxic with agitation, eluded every delicate effort which I made, and I could nothing do. Of course, I know that an odour of peach-blossom in the air, resulting in death, could only be associated with some vaporous effluvium of cyanogen, or of hydrocyanic ('prussic') acid, or of both; and when I at last managed to examine some of the dust under the microscope, I was not therefore surprised to find, among the general mass of purplish ash, a number of bright-yellow particles, which could only be minute crystals ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... will not clothe myself in wreck—wear gems Sawed from cramped finger-bones of women drowned; Feel chilly vaporous hands of ireful ghosts Clutching my necklace: trick my maiden breast With orphans' heritage. Let your ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... thou fallest in my humour, royal Harmachis. As thou sayest, we dream; and while we dream yet can the vision change. For the phantasies of dreams are wonderful, seeing that they have no stability, but vary like the vaporous edge of sunset clouds, building now this thing, and now that; being now dark and heavy, and now alight with splendour. Therefore, before we wake to-morrow tell me one word. Is that vision of last night, wherein I seemed to be quite shamed, and thou ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the R. A. Effect; he felt, too, the pull of a body that had coiled about his ship. No intangible, vaporous thing, this. The glass of his control room was obscured by a clinging, glowing mass while still the little cruiser ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... of them, was perhaps as much as they could well digest in the remnant of their lives. We were invited into the laundry, where a great washing and drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous with the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state, and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the strange element into our ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dropped behind the black serration of the western city. Now the River with all the lower world loses substance, becomes vaporous and unreal. Moving so fast then? But the definite sky remains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of iron clouds. The heaven alone is trite and plain. The wharves, the factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... where a liquid is employed, the refrigerating action is produced by the change in physical state from the liquid to the vaporous form. It is, of course, well known that such a change can only be brought about by the acquirement of heat; and for the purpose of refrigeration (by which must be understood the abstraction of heat at temperatures below the normal) it is obvious that, other things being equal, that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... on. I looked up involuntarily to see if it had begun to rain; but there was nothing of the kind, though what I saw above me was a lowering canopy of cloud, dark, threatening, with a faint reddish tint diffused upon the vaporous darkness. It was, however, quite sufficiently clear to see everything, and there was a good deal to see. I was in a street of what seemed a great and very populous place. There were shops on either side, full apparently ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... group, "The Seasons" by Sebastien Ruys, about which long green stalks, with lacelike edges, or of the stiffness of carved bronze, bent toward the mirror as toward a stream of limpid water. On the low chairs groups of women crowded together, blending the vaporous hues of their dresses, forming an immense nosegay of living flowers, above which gleamed bare white shoulders, hair studded with diamonds, drops of water on the brunettes, glistening reflections on the blondes, and the same intoxicating perfume, the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... and the projecting crags, deep hollows and lofty pinnacles outlining the coast with its numerous waterfalls, lochs and shadowy creeks. A thin and delicate haze of mist hung over the land like a pale violet veil through which the sun shot beams of rose and gold, giving a vaporous unsubstantial effect to the scenery as though it were gliding with us like a cloud pageant on the surface of the calm water. The shores of Loch Scavaig began to be dimly seen in the distance, and presently Captain Derrick approached Mr. Harland, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... virtues are legion; and thy capabilities are boundless as the vapour into which thou meltest as a holocaust for thy happy devotees. If the pipe could but speak, what mysteries could it reveal! the rapturous visions of the inspired lover, rising in the circular imageries of its vaporous fumes, to beguile his fancies in the absence of his loved one; or the workings of a deep despondency and bitter disappointment, carrying its victim with blind impetuosity to a melancholy contemplation of a drear destruction, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... memories of ruins and tombs, of lost liberty and love. Another pause, and some strophes of unbridled gayety burst forth; then again the principal phrase, detaching itself like a flower from its stem, among myriads of winged notes, clusters of vaporous sounds, long spirals of transparent fioritures. Still the violins grew bolder and more impetuous. Franz rose from his seat while watching these men standing with their violins pressed against their breasts, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... chauffeur by whose side he was seated a little stiffly, for his limbs were numbed with the cold and exhaustion. The morning had broken with a grey and uncertain light. A vaporous veil of mist seemed to have taken the place of the darkness. Even from the top of the hill where the car had come to a standstill, there was little ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... places. The inference from these various facts is irresistible. They tell us that the visible surface of the sun is not a solid mass, is not even a liquid mass, but that the globe, so far as we can see it, consists of matter in the gaseous, or vaporous, condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... crimson veil Floats o'er the mountain tops, while twilight pale Calls up her vaporous shrouds from every ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... the unregulated light, and the vaporous uniform climate that must have continued if the fourth day's command had never issued, though it might have served for a time for the lowest beginnings of life, especially marine or aquatic, would ultimately have rendered any advance in the series of ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... blonde creature about twenty-five years old, dressed in a floating Watteau-like garment of vaporous blue, painted with faded pink roses. She was seated in a large carved and gilded chair, opposite an excessively Louis-Quinze mirror, while her pale golden hair was being brushed out by a brown, inanimate-looking maid. Her little oval ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... shuffling sound below. He stopped and looked down cautiously. There, across the moonbeams, he could see a figure moving; the very same figure that he had seen moving across the moonbeams in his own room—the same slender, slight, fragile figure, with the same floating, vaporous drapery. But now he did not feel one particle of wonder or superstitious awe. He understood it all. The woman who had visited him had fled back here, and was now about to return. What should he do? He must retreat. She was evidently coming in his direction. He would go back to his own room, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... was of times legendary, when dragons and demons moved about the earth in more palpable forms than they usually maintain to-day. A great mist overspread the Empire and men's minds were vaporous, nor was their purpose keen. Later, deities and well-disposed Forces began to exercise their powers. The mist was turned into a benevolent system of rivers and canals, and iron, rice and the silk-worm then appeared. Next, ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... and London was full of faint undercurrents of romance, and of soft and rapidly changing effects of light. I went out in the afternoon and spent an hour in the National Gallery. When I came out my mind was so full of painted canvas that I never looked at the unpainted sky, or at the vaporous Square through which streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into the stone garden of the lions. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sun's rays. Behind them it rose a straight hundred feet, and before stretched a vast panorama. The sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! The vaporous exultation not to be confined! .........the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... condition which you must learn as regards the candle, without which you would not be able fully to understand the philosophy of it, and that is the vaporous condition of the fuel. In order that you may understand that, let me shew you a very pretty, but very common-place experiment. If you blow a candle out cleverly, you will see the vapour rise from it. You have, I know, often smelt the vapour of a blown-out candle—and ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... Presently its light flooded the landscape, and strange and romantic vistas appeared between the redwoods aisles, and the tops of the forest trees far below them showed in a brilliant gray light, soft and furry. The whole world seemed to be lifted and swimming in vaporous brightness. There was not a breath of air in the garden; roses and wallflowers stood erect in a sort of luminous enchantment. Moonlight sank through the low twisted branches of the near-by oaks and fell tangled with black and lacy shade through ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... us like the breath of God, as we left the house and closed the door behind us. The moon was shining from the edge of a vaporous mountain, which gradually drew away from her, leaving her alone in the midst of a lake of blue. But we had not gone many paces from the house when Miss Oldcastle began to tremble violently, and could scarcely get along with all the help I could give her. Nor, for the space of six weeks did ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... possible that the earth began as a vaporous, shining sphere, formed by the gathering together of the material of a gaseous ring which had been detached from a cooling and shrinking nebula. Such a vaporous sphere would condense to a liquid, fiery globe, whose surface would become cold and solid, while the interior would long ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... smell of the vaporous rooms, and the boiling soapsuds, and the oil and cotton and the moisture from the hot flesh of a thousand men and women makes the best mill in England a sweating-house of this age ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... therefore make a more or less definite impression upon the camera, and so provide us with what are known as "spirit photographs". When there is not sufficient power available to produce a perfect materialization we sometimes get the vaporous-looking form which constitutes our second class, and in such a case the "spirits" usually warn their sitters that the forms which appear must not be touched. In the rarer case of a full materialization there is sufficient ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... indeed, does individuality begin? Is it the Hidden Source and Spring alone that is the individual, the Unit, or is it the flowing fountain that fills the ocean, or the ocean itself, or its waves, or the drops, or the vaporous particles, that are the individuals? The Sea and the River—these are each One; but the drops of each are many. The tree is one; but its leaves are a multitude: they drop with the frosts, and fall upon his roots; but the tree still continues ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... every now and then into a slow, reluctant rain, cold as icicle-drops in a rock cavern. People passed and repassed in the streets like ghosts in a bad dream; the twinkling gas-light showed them at one moment rising out of the fog, and then disappearing from view as though suddenly engulfed in a vaporous ebon sea. With muffled, angry shrieks, the metropolitan trains deposited their shoals of shivering, coughing travelers at the several stations, where sleepy officials, rendered vicious by the weather, snatched the tickets from their hands with offensive haste and roughness. Omnibus conductors ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... dotted with chalets, a cozy little domain hidden away from the busy world in a cloistered nook among giant precipices topped with snowy peaks that seemed to float like islands above the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them from the lower world. Down from vague and vaporous heights, little ruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling, and found their way to the verge of one of those tremendous overhanging walls, whence they plunged, a shaft of silver, shivered to atoms in mid-descent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it, and that those pores are onely fill'd with some kind of juice, or some very pulpy soft substance, and thereby the steams may almost as easily find a passage through such a fluid vehicle as the vaporous bubbles which are generated at the bottom of a Kettle of hot water do find a passage through that fluid medium ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... "spiritual realms" suggests to the average mind a vaporous space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago, "The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our mental operations are silently, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... and our traveller entered another valley, where, from the sulphur-springs and hills, rose numerous columns of smoke. Ascending the neighbouring hills, she saw a truly remarkable scene: basins filled with bubbling waters, and vaporous shafts leaping up from the fissures in the hills and plains. By keeping to windward, she was able to approach very near these phenomenal objects; the ground was lukewarm in a few places, and she could hold her ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... gathering for some time. Domed, terraced and pinnacled, they rose in gloomy grandeur on the far horizon. But Miss Prescott had not been the first to notice them. For some reason Mr. Bell, after gazing at the vaporous masses for a few minutes, looked rather troubled. He summoned Juan, who was feeding his beloved burro, and waved his hand toward the clouds, the same ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... not supposed to be capable of devouring the gross material substance of the offering; but his vaporous body appropriated the smoke of the burnt sacrifice, the visible and odorous exhalations of other offerings. The blood of the victim was particularly useful because it was thought to be the special seat of its soul or life. A West African negro replied to an European sceptic: "Of course, the spirit ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of a wild night, when there is moonlight enough by fits, I see him tearing around this little valley, just on the top edge—all round; the lady's hair and the horses mane and tail driving far behind, and mingling, vaporous, with the stormy clouds. About he goes, in wild careering gallop; now lost as the moon goes in, then visible far round when she looks out again—an airy, pale-grey spectre, which few eyes but mine could see; for, as far as I am aware, no one of the family but myself has ever possessed ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... that apparitions were so long in realizing their possibilities, in improving their advantages. The specters in classic and medieval literature were malarial, vaporous beings without energy to do anything but threaten, and mortals never would have trembled with fear at their frown if they had known how feeble they were. At best a revenant could only rattle a rusty skeleton, or shake a ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... her hands against her forehead and made an effort to rouse herself. As she did so, her face contracted with an expression of disgust, and she remembered the ether. The soft, vaporous odour drifted towards her from a small table strewn with medicine bottles, and taking care to hold the cork tightly in her fingers she squeezed ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... moves the moon, radiant and pale, Through the calm night, wrapped in a silvery cloud; The jewels of her dress shone through her veil, As shine the stars through their thin vaporous shroud; The brighter jewels of her eyes were hid Beneath their smooth white caskets arching o'er, Which, by the trembling of each ivory lid, Seemed conscious of the treasures that ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy |
