"Opalescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eastern horizon, which appeared to recede as day brightened. A bank of thin, fleecy clouds was turning rose. To the south and west the sky was dark; but every moment it changed, the blue turning bluer. The eastern sky was opalescent. Then in one place gathered a golden light, and slowly concentrated till it was like fire. The rosy bank of cloud turned to silver and pearl, and behind it shot up a great circle of gold. Above the dark horizon gleamed an intensely bright disk. It was the sun. It rose swiftly, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare—when you ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... until scarce a leaf of the weather-beaten poplars stirred. From the tangle of roses, sweet fern and bayberry that overgrew the fields the note of a thrush rose clear on the quiet air. A whirling bevy of gulls circled the bar, left naked and opalescent by the receding tide. Peace was everywhere, divine peace, save in the breasts of those who gazed only to find a mockery ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... a deck chair, on top of the broad wall of the dock, a cool dawn breeze playing over him. He looked across the motley sea toward an opalescent sky reddening ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... aristocraticness about him that his fellows lacked. The lines of his figure were more rounded than theirs, the skin smooth, well oiled, and free from disease. On his chest, suspended from a single string of porpoise-teeth around his throat, hung a big crescent carved out of opalescent pearl-shell. A row of pure white cowrie shells banded his brow. From his hair drooped a long, lone feather. Above the swelling calf of one leg he wore, as a garter, a single string of white beads. The ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... the nature of this planet, which is the favorite of the sun, for first he inundates it with a splendor unknown to the earth, and then generously covers it with a gorgeous screen of cloud which cuts off his scorching beams but suffers the light to pass, filtered to opalescent ether?" ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... and Maya weary. The new leaves of opalescent tint shed odors of faint and passionate sweetness; the birds sang love-songs that smote the sense like a caress; a warm wind yearned and complained in the pine boughs far above her; yet her heart grew heavy, and her eyes dim; she was sick for home;—not for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the phrases to describe that sunset sky, so clear and blue overhead that one felt it was only the scant range of human vision that hid the unveiled heavenly glories beyond the arch,—so gorgeous at the horizon, where it met the opalescent sea,—so rosy in the east, where, like a great golden shield, stood the moon gazing across the world triumphantly at the sinking sun,—the dewy freshness of the woods, where lingered the intoxicating perfumes distilled by the blazing noontide from fir and spruce,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... went deeper into the Gardens of Twilight, which were ever-changing, opalescent, ever-blushing with new and momentary beauty, ever-vanishing before the steady gaze to reveal beneath more silent worlds of mystic being. Like vapour, now gorgeous and now delicate, they wavered, or as the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... cabins at her back, she could watch in a dry windlessness the jovial riot of the seas. Now the steamer would stagger to some cross-blow of the waves; now, making a friend of them, swerved into a trough of opalescent green, and emerged again to take, like some fine-spirited horse, the liquid fence, flecked with bubbles, that lay in its course. The wind that had raised this gale still blew from the westward, and on the undefended deck great parcels of water, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Mother-of-Pearl, this Enoshima. In every shop, behind the' lettered draperies there are miracles of shell-work for sale at absurdly small prices. The glazed cases laid flat upon the matted platforms, the shelved cabinets set against the walls, are all opalescent with nacreous things—extraordinary surprises, incredible ingenuities; strings of mother-of-pearl fish, strings of mother-of-pearl birds, all shimmering with rainbow colours. There are little kittens of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent, were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like pulses of sullen ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of raw whiting. The flesh is white, delicate, partly translucent, easy for our stomachs to digest and no less suited to the grub's dissolvent. It turns into an opalescent fluid, which runs like water. In fact, it liquefies in much the same way as hard-boiled white of egg. The worms at first wax fat, as long as the conditions allow of some solid eyots remaining; then, when foothold ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... begotten their music in "Le Sacre du printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and disappears, to ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... brief radiance of colour to the dull gray roof and smoke-stained chimneys of many thoroughfares. Shadows thickened in the eastern skies as if fold after fold of finest crape were drawn over the field of watery and opalescent light the fallen sun had left behind it. In one great thoroughfare running east and west the sky-line of the houses stood distinct, and bathed in light of many colours; whilst down below there was a wall of shadow. Two parallel walls of shadow rose ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... he welcomed the coming of the bright orb, invisible yet from where he stood; but the cold grey mist that hung around was becoming here and there, in patches, shot with a soft delicious rosy hue, which made the grey around turn opalescent rapidly, beginning to flash out pale yellow, which, as the middy watched, ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... my eyes was enacted a more wonderful change than the gradual transformation of transparent absinthe into an opaque opalescent liquid. Simard, under the influence of the drink, was slowly becoming the Simard I had known ten years before. Remarkable! Absinthe having in earlier years made a beast of the man was now forming a man out of the beast. His staring eyes took on an expression of human comradeship. The whole mystery ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... made of oyster shells which are thin and flat; these cut in three-inch squares make a window peculiarly adapted to withstand the heavy storms and earthquakes; it transmits a pleasant opalescent light. ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... of calm weather, with a film of haze over the sky. The water lay like quicksilver, heavy and inert. Toward afternoon it became opalescent. The very substance of the liquid itself seemed impregnated with dyes ranging in shade from wine colour to the most delicate lilac. Through a smoke veil the sun hung, a ball of red, while beneath every island, every rock, every tree, every wild fowl floating idly in a medium apparently ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... their peculiar booming notes. Running water murmured coolly in the ditch that flanked the road. Cattle, full of repletion, stood in contented lethargy by the watering place, ruminating, switching listlessly at the evening flies which scarcely annoyed them. The vivid opalescent lights of the western sky grew fainter, faded. Simultaneously the zenith shaded from turquoise to sapphire. In the northeast, low over the plains, gleaming silver against the dark velvet background of the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... Tara?" Instantly there flashed a vision of the walled lane leading to New College; Dyan's embittered mood and bewildering change of front.... Looking back now, the thing seemed glaringly obvious; but, through the opalescent mist of his own dreams, he had seen Dyan in one relation only. Just as well perhaps. Even at this distance, the idea amazed and angered him. Tara! The arrogance ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... legs firmly on the edges of the shell, it lifted its tail quite clear, and crawled up the weed a perfect dragon-fly, forgetful of that grim husk it was leaving behind. A few minutes later, the good sun having dried its wings, it went darting and hurtling over the pool, a gemlike, opalescent shining thing, reflected gloriously in the polished ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the big chandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceiling. Only one of them was lit, and its Murano-glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shone opalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This chandelier lighted up the opposite wall and that piece of ceiling with the goddess and the green peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner of the huge room, where, in the shadow of a kind of canopy, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... finally large ones began to show signs of distress. Screaming and laughing at the top of their voices, the Moros pursued; the men harpooning the largest fish, the women skilfully dipping up the smaller ones with nets. Helplessly the beautiful, rainbow-tinted creatures floated about, their opalescent hues fading soon after the Moros took them from the water. Monsters over a yard long fought for their freedom; giant crabs and shrimp struggled in the nets. A liendoeng (water-snake), brilliantly striped with red and black, made the women scream with fright. Dashing among them, ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... huge convoluted masses of light brown trachyte, of tufa either pure white or white veined with crimson, of black and gray columnar basalts, of red, orange, green, and black scoria, with adornments of obsidian, amygdaloids, rosettes of quartz crystal and opalescent chalcedony. A thousand stony needles lifted their ragged points as if to defy the lightning. The only vegetation was a spiny cactus, clinging closely to the rocks, wearing their grayish and yellowish colors, lending no verdure to the scene, and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... you may cut it off at the wrist if you like—I won't even wince. I have no further use for it, I believe!" Howard folded it to his heart, and felt the little pulse beat in the slender wrist; and presently the sun went down, a ball of fire into the opalescent sea-line. ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... over his shoulder, saw the other wherry bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A hail came ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... five stars And the opalescent hue Of the aureole brightness cast— Red, hardly red, and blue, scarce blue,— Round th' immaculate frosty moon, Splintering light in glacial spars, When November's loudening blast Sweeps heaven's floor till burnished More crystal than at August noon, So we ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... fascinates me; I dote upon it. It is so pliable, so dreamy, and so opalescent that I can scarce restrain my enthusiasm. But if I should fit one of my boys out with the equipment necessary for a blacksmith, and then he should become a preacher, I'd find the situation embarrassing. My reputation as a ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... short, but he suffered no pain. The sweet-scented grass of the field, the scattered trees, the great shadowy hills, all, to him, was alive, was filled with religion; all was sweet with a mystery of adoring love which bent even the crescent moon towards the heights in the opalescent sky. Don Giuseppe Flores whispered in his heart that it would be sweet to die thus with the day, praying in ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the tints ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on cooling deposits crystalline plates of starch. For the determination of starch in barley the finely-ground sample is boiled for three-quarters of an hour with about thirty times its weight of a one per cent solution of salicylic acid, the resulting colorless opalescent liquid filtered with the aid of suction, and the starch therein inverted by means of hydrochloric acid. The dextrose formed is estimated by Fehling's solution. The results are one to two per cent higher than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... his eyes to see a necklace of opalescent jewels gathering about his neck; he tore at it and the phosphorescent water gleamed all about him with feathery pendants. And when his head thrust above water, the moment's respite had allowed the skiff ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... he were expected at the castle as his arrival created no surprise. Two fairies advanced and took him by the hand. Walter thought they were the loveliest ladies he had ever seen. One was fair and dressed in cloudy gauze which changed in colour from blue to green and mauve like opalescent waters; the other was dark and wore a dress of rose colour that changed into orange and red like leaping flames of fire. These were the geniuses of water and fire. Walter did not know this at the time; at least he only guessed it; he was too young to speculate as to the nature of the strange ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone tendered it some extremely rude words. Then, Haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... it all, he heard a rattling at the window. He looked up, and saw the face of Herr Carovius pressed so tightly against the pane that his nose was as flat as a pancake, while his glasses looked like two opalescent grease spots ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... wharf, a hundred tiny homes all but hidden in the foliage of the ferns. These gradually came into view as the ship, after skirting along the reef, steered through a break in the foam, a pass in the treacherous coral, and glided through opalescent and glassy shallows to a quay where all Papeete waited to ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the long roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... enchantments: where it is not dreams, but the reflections of dreams, that obsess; where passion is less the desire of life than of the shadow of life. It is a world of images and refractions, of visions and presentiments, a world which swims in dim and opalescent mists—where gestures are adored and every footfall is charged with indescribable intimations; where, "even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of unbound hair, there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... they were, overlooking the surrounding country, they almost forgot their troubles under Nature's hypnotism. The sky overhead was opalescent; the ranges, dotted with grazing cattle and unbroken horses, were bathed in sunshine. Away below them, the little town, with its long Main Street of business houses and its stretch of regular shade trees, drowsed in an adolescent contentment. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... brought me here, into this fairyland of opalescent lights and intoxicating perfumes? What could he have to say—to show? Ah in another moment I knew. He had seized my hands, and love, ardent love, came pouring from ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... long period ending in the thirteenth century, are represented by the contents of some twenty cases. The first three of these receptacles bear no dates. The ornaments which they contain are of bronze, amber, silver, and glass (the latter having become converted into opalescent silicic acid), and were found in Praeneste (modern Palestrina, Italy), and in the territory which was ancient Etruria. Case No. 4 bears date 700 B.C., and here is a rich treasure of primitive Etruscan and Phoenician ornaments of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... the opalescent lights were beginning to show in the sky, and their reflection in the water, as he stooped his tall head to enter the covered gondola. It was all too beautiful and wonderful to take in at once, and then he only wanted wings the sooner to arrive, not eyes to see the passing objects. Afterwards ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter's dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek. Holmes nestled in silence into his heavy coat, and I was glad to do the same, for the air was most bitter and neither of us had broken our fast. It was not until we had consumed some hot tea at the station, and taken our places in the Kentish train, that we were sufficiently thawed, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to face then with Mrs. Hattie and her daughter. These two ladies, also, were pictures of radiant loveliness—especially were they radiant, for every beam of light found an answering flash in the shimmering iridescence of their beads and jewels and opalescent sequins. ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... these perfumes are never to be filled into wet bottles, for if in any way damp from water, a minute portion of the ottos are separated, which gives an opalescent appearance to the mixture. Indeed, all bottles should be spirit rinsed prior to being filled with any perfume, but especially with those containing essences of orange ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... remarkable looking to the full as his daughter, with the same luminously green eyes. But the orbs which in the maid shone as steadily clear as the depths of the sea, in the father glittered opalescent where he sat in the dusk, like the eyes of Grimalkin cornered by dogs in some gloomy ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat, burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... large reception-rooms in hotels and public institutions the plan is frequently adopted of having all light provided by small table lamps with opalescent shades. These provide a medium glow throughout the entire room that is pleasing, and avoid entirely the garishness usually associated with such rooms. One of the mistakes of the day is the use of high-power lights, which are so intense that they require to be screened or shaded, ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... the shoulder of the Alphubel, glowed as if set suddenly on fire. This was immediately dimmed by turning the Nicol through an angle of 90 deg.. It was not the stoppage of the light of the sky behind the mountains alone which produced this startling effect; the air between them and me was highly opalescent, and the quenching of this intermediate glare augmented remarkably the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... grinning. The little cage sank swiftly; floor after floor seemed to be rising with marvellous speed; the whole building was winging straight into the sky. There were soaring lights, figures and the opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black inscriptions. Other lifts were springing heavenward. All the lofty corridors rang with cries. " Up! " Down! " " Down! " " Up! " The boy's hand grasped a lever and his machine ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... products. For testing a sample of 0.2 to 0.4 grm. of a liquid, and from 0.8 to 1.0 grm. of a solid fat being used, which is dissolved in 10 c.c. chloroform and treated with 20 c.c. mercury iodo-chloride solution run into it from a burette, if the liquid appear opalescent a further measure of chloroform is introduced, while the amount of mercury iodo-chloride must be such as to produce a brownish coloration of the chloroform for two subsequent hours. The excess of iodine is determined, on addition of from 10 to 15 c.c. potassium iodide ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... have been hours or seconds, she seemed to gather into herself again, but could not wrench her eyes from the crystal ball, which looked opalescent now, and filmy, so that she shaded her eyes mechanically with the black scarf of her dinner-dress, to shut out the reflections of the room. But they were not reflections, for there was bright blue in the ball, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... her was cloying velvet blackness—not the closed-in blackness of a room, where one feels the embrace of the four walls, but the blackness of infinite space through which sweep mysterious currents of air. After a long time she turned sharp to the left. After a long time more she perceived a faint, opalescent glimmer in the distance ahead. This she knew to be ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... outside a humble cafe; a little table beneath it at which Paragot and myself were seated. I sipped luxuriously a celestial liquor which I have since learned was grenadine syrup and water; in front of Paragot was a curious opalescent milky fluid of which he drank great quantities during those two ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... maximum range in ease and rapidity of its utilization. The thyroid is still another device of life for procuring more and more variation and differentiation, its goal, as far as we can peer through the opalescent screen upon which ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... you lean wistfully over the gate, there runs a stone wall topped by a green hedge; and on the right, first furrows of pale fawn, then below, furrows of deeper brown, and mulberry, and red ploughed earth stretching down to waving fields of green, and thence to the sea, grey, misty, opalescent, melting into the pearly white clouds, so that one cannot tell where sea ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... love, a carcanet With all the rainbow splendor set, Of diamonds that drink the sun. Of emeralds that feed upon His light as doth the evergreen, A memory of spring between This frost of whiter pearls than snow, And warmth of violets below A wreath of opalescent mist, Where blooms the tender amethyst. Here, too, the captives of the mine— The sapphire and the ruby—shine, Rekindling each a hidden spark, Unquenched by buried ages dark, Nor dimmed beneath the jewelled skies, Save by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... thence to derogatory grey. Here is a jade-coloured conglomeration of life resembling nothing in the world more than a loose handful of worms without beginning and without end, interloped and writhing and glowing as it writhes with opalescent fires; and here a tiny leafless shrub, jointed with each alternate joint, ivory, white, and ruby-red respectively; again this tracery of gold and green and salmon pink decorating a shiny stone, in formal and consistent pattern. What ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield |
