"Prismatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of them I met in Venice—at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other form so cool ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... with which God's agency is declared and His ownership asserted. 'I do set My bow.' Neither Noah nor the writer knew anything about refraction or the prismatic spectrum. But perhaps they knew more about the rainbow than people do who know all about how it comes, except that God sets it in the cloud, and that it is His. Let us have the facts which science labels as such, by all means, and the more the better; but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... sea-ice, the ice of a glacier is a marvel of prismatic colour and glassy brilliance. This is more noticeable near the surface when the sun is shining. Deep down in a shaft, or in an ice-cavern, the sapphire reflection gives to the human face ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... seen an opal in Pesth weighing fourteen carats, for which five thousand dollars were refused. They can be purchased at Queretaro at from ten dollars to ten hundred; for the latter price a really splendid gem may be had, emitting a grand display of prismatic tints, and all aglow with fire. The natives, notwithstanding the seeming abundance of the stones, hold very tenaciously to the valuation which they first place upon them. Of course, really choice specimens are always rare, and quickly disposed of. While the ancients considered ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... again—again to shoot away. Our meadow at the bottom of the orchard is like a small frozen sea, now; and that is the present scene of our heroic games. Sometimes, in the splendor of the dying light, we seem sporting upon transparent gold, so prismatic becomes the ice; and the snow takes opaline hues, from the gems that float above as clouds. It is eminently the hour to see objects, just after the sun has disappeared. Oh, such oxygen as we inhale! Often other skaters appear,—young men and boys,—who principally interest me ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the idyllic island of prismatic light and shade, of gay and joyous life. Here Tiberius had his summer palace, and it was from these shores that he sent the historic letter which revolutionized the life of Sejanus. The letter—verbosa et grandis epistola—is still vivid in the historic associations ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... cuts through the waves. The sun shines through it and breaks it up into a number of miniature rainbows—"sun-dogs," the sailors call them. I stood on the fo'csle-head for several hours to-day watching the effect, and surrounded by a halo of prismatic colours. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cyclona's skirts, stockings, shirt waists, night dresses and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed napkins varied ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... poetry. Take us," he had one of his dangerous impulses of complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio twitched and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra Diavolo he cowered, an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his attire accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly packed over a rusted ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... taken forcible possession of two United States forts, of the money in the custom-house, of the custom-house itself, and of other national property in Charleston. He had closed the harbor, by destroying the costly prismatic lenses in the light-houses, and by withdrawing the warning light-ship from Rattlesnake Shoal. He had cut off all communication between us and the city, and had seized the United States mails. His steamboats, laden with war material to be used in ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... of singular prismatic tints, flush after flush suffusing our horizon, does the Era of Hope dawn on towards fulfilment. Questionable! As indeed, with an Era of Hope that rests on mere universal Benevolence, victorious Analysis, Vice cured of its deformity; and, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... reptiles in America, known as the curucu, or bushmaster (Lachesis mutus). The Indians, however, call it the couana couchi. It is of the most beautiful colour. Its body is brightly tinted with all the prismatic colours; and sometimes it is to be seen coiled round the branches of a tree, ready to strike its prey. It is allied, I should say, to the fearful fer de lance, which strikes its prey with so rapid and straight ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through the jewels of fourteenth-century glass; to close the door; to sit beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried cushions, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless embroideries—all the riches of a museum ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... systems. His pupils were the teachers of centuries. Each bump of his brain was the nucleus of a philosophical school. Hardly had he left the world, than the strong and simple light he shed was scattered in various hues by the prismatic minds that had surrounded him or that succeeded him; and in almost every case,—as so often happens when the strands of the solar beam are brilliantly dishevelled,—the actinic ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... symbolized by—, 401-l. Principles, the generative parts of man and woman symbolized the, 401-l. Principles, three result from the four qualities of the four Elements, 783-l. Printing, power and art of, 54-m. Priscillianists believed in two principles, Divinity and Matter and Darkness, 567-l. Prismatic separation of seven colors correspond to the Sephiroth, 727-m. Problem of the Hermetics to transmute metals and possess the elixir of life, 772-l. Problems, most important, are social, 180-u. Problems of populous and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... only corresponds to His, but is of the same quality and nature as His, howsoever different it may be in sweep and in fervour and in degree. The tiniest drop that hangs upon the tip of a thorn will be as perfect a sphere as the sun, and it will have its little rainbow on its round, with all the prismatic colours, the same in tint and order and loveliness, as when the bow spans the heavens. The dew-drop may imitate the sun, and we are to be imitators of God; knit to Him by the one thing in us which is kindred to Him in the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... inexhaustible well of those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early experience—the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic variations of colour. The civilization of the East, its culture and refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the indispensable criteria of classic art. Under the broadening influence of its persistent ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... bright day in January, when the white light of the sun plays caressingly on this pyramid of crystal, illuminating its veins of emerald and sending a refracted ray into its circular air-holes, the prismatic effect is enchanting. Thousands of persons visit Montmorenci every winter for no other object than that of enjoying this sight. It is needless to add that the youthful generation visit the Cone for the more prosaic purpose of toboganning or sledding from its summit away down to the middle ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... and would swell the revenues of the King and Queen of Spain. A brief survey of this first island was all he could afford time for; and after the first exquisite impression of the white beach, and the blue curve of the bay sparkling in the sunshine, and the soft prismatic colours of the acanthus beneath the green wall of the woods had been savoured and enjoyed, he was anxious to push on to the rich lands of the Orient of which he believed this island to be ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... fell into boyish, almost childish, contours. He plucked another glossy leaf with his hard, veinous old hands. His hands would not change to suit his mood, but his limbs relaxed like those of a boy. He stared at the brook gurgling past in brown ripples, shot with dim prismatic lights, showing here clear green water lines, here inky depths, and he thought of the possibility of trout. He wished ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tripping over a sharp ledge of rock, now floundering up to the waistbelt in a treacherous hole; past the base of a beautiful waterfall, where the action of the torrent had worn a hollow basin in the rock, in which it sparkled, cool, transparent, and prismatic, in the rays of the burning sun, and where the view, so unlike the generality of Australian scenery, was perfectly bewitching; on, through more scrub, through swamps, and over stiff mountains, wet, draggled, moody, and cross, crawling along after the little black figure in ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... forgotten any? No doubt. I am growing weary, weary of all this music, opiate music, prismatic music, "dreary music"—as Schumann himself called his early stuff—and the somber peristaltic music of his "lonesome, latter years." Schumann is now for the very young, for the self-illuded. We care more—being sturdy realists—for architecture ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... curucucu. It sometimes reaches to a length of fourteen feet, being the largest known poisonous snake. It is equally remarkable for the glowing radiance of its fearful beauty, displaying as it does, when gliding amid the sunshine, all the prismatic colours. Though generally remaining on the ground, it mounts trees with perfect ease in search of its prey—birds or their eggs; while from the overhanging bough it can dart down on the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Virginia, have been very poor since the distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give Sally a lift over hard places. Always with instant reward, for the smallest bit of sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a magnificent rainbow of happiness. So when the idea came that they might let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl spirit in me, jumped for joy. There was no difficulty made; it ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... or in metal, of birds, of trees; of luxuriant vegetation, picked out in reliefs of lacework; tables covered with jet carvings, representing warriors, queens, and tritons armed with the scaly terminations of a hydra. Cut crystals combining prismatic effects with those of reflection. Mirrors repeated the light of precious stones, and sparkles glittered in the darkest corners. It was impossible to guess whether those many-sided, shining surfaces, where emerald green mingled with the golden hues of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... lighter in body. A rush of power that I have no way of describing to you filled me. I seemed to be a tremendous dynamo in the air several inches above the ground and still ascending. When I noticed everything around me becoming prismatic and more or less translucent, I could have walked on water without sinking, and I had distinct understanding that matters seemed to be disintegrating and dissolving around me. I was frightened but self-conscious and quiet. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... read through and made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true image of the Founder behind all the prismatic refractions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a thousand directions. It is the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... already remarked, as much like a rocket as anything else; and "La Dame Blanche," a triptych of rhythmical flow, spreads a dainty, silky, sheen of white, whispering, glistening, softly falling water over a slightly shelving width of rock, touched here and there with prismatic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... expatiate on this interesting fact; for the mythologies of antiquity furnish no allegory more beautiful; and a Painter who would embody the metaphor of an Artist instructed by Nature, could scarcely imagine any thing more picturesque than the real incident of the Indians instructing West to prepare the prismatic colours. The Indians also taught him to be an expert archer, and he was sometimes in the practice of shooting birds for models, when he thought that their plumage would ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... whose wholesome, courageous temperament probably unfitted her to achieve distinction in the artistic career which she had mapped out for herself. So the super-Alpine glories surrounding that inland sea, and the prismatic hues flashing from many a glacier and rainbow of cataract mist, left her unmoved, solely because the rough-hewn Indian craft bobbing by the side of the great ship called to mind the extraordinary conditions under which she and ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... of little locomotive oars, or combs, as they have been called, from which these animals derive their name of Ctenophorae. The rapid motion of these flappers causes the decomposition of the rays of light along the surface of the body, producing the most striking prismatic effect; and it is no exaggeration to say that no jewel is brighter than these Ctenophorae as they move ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... more glassy and had a look of greater transparency, as if it had been fused at an exceptionally high temperature; and the crystals of alum, sulphur, and other minerals with which it abounded, reflected the light in bright prismatic colours. In some places the transparency was complete, and beneath it might easily be seen the long streaks of that fibrous kind of lava, connected with a superstition of the natives, which is ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... his own sincere and confidential overflowings of thought and feeling upon books, men, and public affairs, less valuable in a literary view than the legerdemain of throwing up bubbles into the air for the sake of watching their prismatic hues, like an Indian juggler with his cups and balls. We of this age, who have formed our notions of epistolary excellence from the chastity of Gray's, the brilliancy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's during her later life, and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... so dense that the objects are seen, like Captain Scoresby's ship, snatched up into the regions of the air, thirty or forty feet above the level of the sea; and in cloudy weather, nearer to the surface, bordered with vivid prismatic colours. Sometimes colonades of temples and churches, with cross-crowned spires, are all represented as floating on the sea, and by a sudden change of representation, the pillars are curved into arcades, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... specially constructed for me—and a well-made hypsometrical apparatus with six boiling-point thermometers, duly tested at the Kew Observatory, were carried in order to determine accurately the altitudes observed. Then I possessed two prismatic and six other excellent compasses, chronometers, six photographic cameras, specially made for me, with the very best Zeiss and Goertz lenses, and some 1,400 glass photographic plates—including some for colour photography. All articles liable to be ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... original tints, and the lofty conical domes seem to be huge sparry crystalizations, hung with dropping stalactites, rather than any work of the human hand. Each of these domes is composed of five thousand separate pieces, and the pendent prismatic blocks, colored and gilded, gradually resolve themselves, as you gaze, into the most intricate and elegant designs. But you must study long ere you have won all the secret of their beauty. To comprehend them, one should spend a whole day, lying on his back, under each ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... you could see the beautiful prismatic tints I have knocked into this ice, you would laugh out of the other side of your bill. The splendour of ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... blue, and violet in the centre! Moreover, the very steam arising from it (reflecting as it did the varied tints beneath) was exquisitely colored, and vanished into air like a dissolving rainbow. All these prismatic pools are clasped by beautifully decorated curbs of silica, and seem to be set in rings of gold, with mineral colors running through them like enamel. So delicate are the touches of the magic water, as the persistent ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... rising and setting of the sun at sea is not nearly so striking a spectacle as the same phenomenon in a rocky landscape. At sea the sky is generally cloudless in the evening, and the sun gradually sinks, without refraction of rays or prismatic play of colours, into its ocean-bed, to pursue its unchanging course the next day. How infinitely more grand is this spectacle when seen from the "Rigi Kulm" in Switzerland! There it is really a spectacle, in contemplating which we feel impelled to fall on our knees in speechless adoration, and ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the good and beautiful, and reminding how beauty lingers amid the most unpromising things of earth! And just as the bow that spans the mantling cloud reminds us of all beautiful things that glow around its antitype that spans the emerald throne on high, so, as we gaze upon the prismatic tints that are reflected from the oily surface, we dream of all that is beautiful in color and gorgeous in tinted radiance, as being hidden amid the elements ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... friend should meet his own, concealment would be no longer possible; yet, for the sake of that promise he had sworn in the past night, it must be maintained at every hazard, every cost. Vacantly he sat and watched the play of the sunshine in the prismatic water of the courtyard fountain, and the splashing, and the pluming, and the murmuring of the doves and pigeons on its edge. He felt meshed in a net from which there was no escape—none—unless, on his homeward passage, a thrust of Arab ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the hedges, arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... specimen of Beauclerc's versatility, but said, "I fear he will fritter away his powers on a hundred different petty objects, and do nothing at last worthy of his abilities. He will scatter and divide the light of his genius, and show us every change of the prismatic colours—curious and beautiful to behold, but dispersing, wasting the light he should concentrate on ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... I doubt if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was a long time coming to them. Precisely when it did, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... changeful, evanescent, athwart sea, plain, and mountain. Here is sore temptation for the colorist; more, perhaps, than by the wealth and combination of tints, he is affected by their celestial quality. All is prismatic, or like those hues produced by the interference of rays of light as seen in the colors of stars. Gorgeous as are these phenomena, they are also as transitory; and although the scene is repeated, it is with such subtile and such great changes as to remove ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... praise is still—"the style is excellent," The sense they humbly take upon content [308] Words are like leaves, and where they most abound Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass. [311] Its gaudy colors spreads on every place, The face of nature we no more survey. All glares alike without distinction gay: But true expression, like the unchanging sun, Clears and improves ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... this world, in the other divine riches. And if gold and silver correspond to precious things of the mind, so must brilliant jewels. The diamond! How wonderful is its affection for light—taking in the rays eagerly, dissolving them, and sending them forth again to gladden the eyes in rich prismatic beauty! And to what mental quality must the diamond correspond? As it loves the sun's rays, in which are heat and light—must it not correspond to the affection of things good and true?—heat being of love, and light of truth or wisdom? The wearer of diamonds, then, should ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... prevail over sense and appetite; to raise man not only to a perception of the harmonies of truth, but also to the love of whatever is good and fair. Not in a darkened mind does the white ray of heavenly light break into prismatic glory; not through the mists of ignorance is the sweet countenance of the divine Saviour best discerned. If some have pursued a sublime art frivolously; have soiled a fair mind by ignoble life,—this leaves the good of the intellect untouched. Some who have made strongest profession of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... a species of vandalism, Bearwarden raised his twelve-bore, and fired an ordinary cartridge that he had not prepared for the dragons, at the space directly over the nearest forming prints. There was a brilliant display of prismatic colours, as in a rainbow, and though the impressions already made remained, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... surrounded by beautiful colours. Mr Brymer came and went just as if I were seeing him through a cut-glass decanter-stopper, but he was not half so striking as Mr Preddle, who came and stood over me looking gigantic, but his face and even his clothes were prismatic. So was the air, which now began to descend rapidly, as if it were some brilliant waterfall coming down from ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colours. In the gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they'd been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... with a new method of Sawing the Twist Part of any Hand-Rail square from the face of the plank, and to a parallel width. Also, a new method of forming the Easings of the Rail by a gauge; preceded by some necessary Problems in Practical Geometry, with the Sections of Prismatic Solids. Illustrated by 29 plates. By R.A. CUPPER, Architect, author of "The Practical Stair-Builder's Guide." ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... said Cephalus. "But he is splendid for fetes. Shows off beautifully in the dark. I'll prod him again and just you note the prismatic coloring of his flames. Get up there, Fido," he added, poking the dragon with his stick a second time. "Wake up, and give ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... the outline of the comb may be seen. In form it is still lenticular, for the little prismatic tubes of which it is composed are unequally prolonged, and they diminish as they get away from the centre towards the extremities. At this moment it might be compared, both in form and in thickness, to a human tongue hanging ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... I am a worshipper of hard facts and however hideous they may be I prefer them to the prismatic colours of romance." ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... fishing smack off the Grand Banks. Super-refined, man-directed hell was making sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... when the shadows fall black and sharp and circular, in dwarfed patches about our feet; on through the cooler hours of the afternoon, when the sun is a burning disc low down in the western sky, or, hiding behind a bank of clouds, throws wide-stretched arms of prismatic colour high up into the heavens; on through the hour of sunset, when all the world is a flaming blaze of gold and crimson; and so into the cool still night, when the moon floods us with a sea of light only one ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought down by dog team from "Up River," was established at the rear extremity of the long building, just inside the entrance ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... had seen the moon swing half across the sky. He had watched with delirious amusement the dead men rise to bury each other. And he had spent hours in wondering what would happen to the last of them. His head felt oddly light, as if it were full of air, a bubble of prismatic colours that might burst into nothingness at any moment. But his body felt as if it were fettered with a thousand chains. He could hear them clanking as ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... cold.—The Lunar and Planetary Reductions were going on steadily.—I was consulted about an Observatory at Oxford, where I supported the introduction of the Heliometer.—The stipend of the Bakerian Lecture was paid to me for my explanation of Brewster's new prismatic fringes.—The business of the Cape Observatory and Survey occupied much of my time.—In 1838 the Rev. H. J. Rose (Editor of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana) had proposed my writing a Paper on Tides, &c.; In Oct. 1840 I gave him notice ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigantic we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by distance. Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings, glitterings—prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues; javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... something crept into my mind and drove the fear out. I did not grasp what this was at first, it was like the first staining of wine on the eastern sky to one who sees a sunrise. And then the thought grew even as the light grows, tinged by prismatic colors, until at length a memory struck into my soul like a shaft of light. I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and grew, and glittered every day with fresh prismatic radiance; while Hypatia sat at home, with a heavy heart, writing her ode to Venus Urania, and ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... half past five P.M. we saw a very beautiful natural phenomenon. A broad white fog-bow first appeared opposite the sun, as was very commonly the case; presently it became strongly tinged with, the prismatic colours, and soon afterward no less than five other complete arches were formed within the main bow, the interior ones being gradually narrower than those without, but the whole of them beautifully coloured. ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... differences are observed that only have arisen from great differences in the circumstances under which the eruption has taken place. In many of the ancient volcanoes, we find the emitted streams are arranged in prismatic forms, constituting basalt, and frequently passing into what under other circumstances would be styled trap by the Wernerians. Now, we know that when streams of lava enter the sea, they spontaneously ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... wonga-wonga and bronze-wing and great fruit-pigeons are, like the "bald-pates" of Jamaica, all favourite birds with sportsmen, and some of the birds are far more brightly coloured than ours. It is, however, noticeable that even the gayest Queensland species, with wings shot with every prismatic hue, are dull-looking birds seen from above, and the late Dr. A. R. Wallace regarded this as affording protection against keen-eyed hawks on the forage. His ingenious theory receives support from the well-known fact that in many of the islands, where pigeons are even more plentiful, but where also ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... the tiny white object up and held it at several angles, to see how the glow of the fire seemed to reflect in faint prismatic colors from ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... light to a golden brown, are chasing the prince oriels, clothed in their glossy feathers of black and orange; Kolo doves, of a changeable violet hue, are gently cooing by the side of the birds of paradise, in whose brilliant plumage are mingled the prismatic colors of the emerald and ruby, the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... everywhere were illumined with the prismatic rays in proper order. The tree branches caught them, the corners of the houses, the window hoods, the straggling bushes, the fences. Everywhere the sublime beauty was repeated until ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... glance the sphere seemed all in one piece, with the central objects cast inside like a toy ship in a sealed bottle. Then a mathematically precise ring of prismatic reflections showed me that the top third of the ball was a separate piece, fitting conically down like the tapered glass stopper of a monstrous perfume bottle. The handle on the top was for the purpose of lifting this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... not much of a student of nature after all, or he would not have called worms "nasty things," but have taken more notice of them as they were turned out of their damp bed, and seen that they were clothed with a skin whose surface reflected colours of prismatic hue, as bright and perfect as those seen upon some pearly shells. He would have seen how wonderfully the worms were constructed for the fulfilment of their apportioned position in the animal kingdom; how, without legs, or the peculiar twist ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... interesting optical appearance presented itself to our view. We had turned towards the east, and the sun shone on our backs, when we saw a very bright rainbow described on the mist before us. The bow, of beautifully distinct prismatic colours, formed about two-thirds of a circle, the extremities of which appeared to rest on the lower portion of the mountain. In the centre of this incomplete circle, there was described a luminous disc, surrounded by the prismatic colours displayed in concentric rings. On the disc itself, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... finished speaking, he knelt down and dipped his head into the cool, bubbling creek. Lifting up his ruddy face, a ray of sunshine, filtering through the tremulous leaves of the cottonwoods, fell full upon his chestnut curls, and each drop of water on his hair became of a sudden a gem of prismatic colour ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... foregoing studies for a new understanding of the prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow. Intimation of new possibilities of experimental research guided by the new conception ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and girls who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to shock people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and precisians, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... exist to a great extent in Canada. Gourlay figured it, twenty years ago, by placing the word in capitals on the arch formed by the prismatic hues of the cloud-spray of Niagara. He could get no better ground than a fog-bank to hoist his flag upon, and the vision and the visionary have alike been ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... himself out, more majorum, in the full Highland costume. I never saw Rob Roy on the stage look half so dignified or ferocious. He glittered from head to foot with dirk, pistol, and skean-dhu; and at least a hundredweight of cairngorms cast a prismatic glory around his person. I ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours are blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into a superb and striking head-dress. The principal fibre traversing its length being split open a convenient distance, and the elastic sides of the aperture pressed apart, the head is inserted ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... a minute, ere, looking around him, he beheld a grotto, or natural cavern, composed of the most splendid spars and crystals, which returned in a thousand prismatic hues the light of a brilliant flame that glowed on an altar of alabaster. This altar, with its fire, formed the central point of the grotto, which was of a round form, and very high in the roof, resembling in some respects the dome ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... stain, tint, tinct[obs3], paint, wash, ingrain, grain, illuminate, emblazon, bedizen, imbue; paint &c. (fine art) 556. Adj. colored &c. v.; colorific[obs3], tingent[obs3], tinctorial[obs3]; chromatic, prismatic; full-colored, high-colored, deep-colored; doubly- dyed; polychromatic; chromatogenous[obs3]; tingible[obs3]. bright, vivid, intense, deep; fresh, unfaded[obs3]; rich, gorgeous; gay. gaudy, florid; gay, garish; rainbow-colored, multihued; showy, flaunting, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... experienced in conjunction, that each of them calls up readily and instantaneously the ideas of the whole group, those ideas sometimes melt and coalesce into one another, and appear not several ideas, but one; in the same manner as, when the seven prismatic colors are presented to the eye in rapid succession, the sensation produced is that of white. But as in this last case it is correct to say that the seven colors when they rapidly follow one another generate white, but not that they actually are white; ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... garden—there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the flood. The wildest theory that can be invented to explain the story of the deluge cannot be wilder than the supposition that the rays of sunlight shining on falling raindrops could have ever failed to show the prismatic colours. The theory I have suggested above, without going so far as strongly to advocate it, far less insist upon it, is free at any rate from objection on this particular score, which cannot be said of the ordinary theory. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... fellow's simile. When an idea gets hold of us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we laugh and ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of Painting, said: "In the last ten years of his career, and occasionally before, Turner was extravagant to an extreme degree; he played equally with nature and with his colors. Light, with all its prismatic varieties, seems to have been the chief object of his studies; individuality of form or color he was wholly indifferent to. The looseness of execution in his latest works has not even the apology of having been attempted on scientific principles; he did not ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... semi-circle. The simple hollow of the cup, the primitive gut (g), has a narrow opening (o). The skin layer (e) consists of long slender cylindrical cells, which bear long vibratory hairs; it is separated by a thin structureless, gelatinous plate (f) from the visceral or gut layer (i), the prismatic cells of which are much smaller and have no cilia. Pemmatodiscus propagates asexually, by simple longitudinal cleavage; on this account it has recently been regarded as the representative of a special order ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... difficulty we continued to advance. The lava was more glassy and transparent-looking, as if it had been fused at a higher temperature than usual; and the crystals of sulphur, alum, and other minerals, with which it abounded, reflected the light in bright prismatic colours. In places it was quite transparent, and we could see beneath it the long streaks of a stringy kind of lava, like brown spun glass, called ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... a minute of wonder, admiration, allurement, but at last he ventured to lift the diamond from the box. It was perfect, so far as he could see; perfect in cutting and color and depth, prismatic, radiant, bewilderingly gorgeous. Its value? Even he could not offer an opinion—only the appraisement of his expert would be worth listening to on that point. But one thing he knew instantly—in the million-dollar stock of precious stones stored ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... leaving six weeks' provision for three men and 150 lbs. of dog-food, was made on the morning of October 1, and besides marking it with a large black flag, Scott was also careful to take angles with a prismatic compass to all the points he could see. Then they started home, and the dogs knowing at once what was meant no longer required any driving. On the homeward march the travelers went for all they were worth, and in spite of perpetual fog covered eighty-five ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... pompous attic story above, and a wide flight of marble steps below. The inside was to be quite as overbearingly classical as the outside. There was to be a sort of arched and columned court under a vast prismatic skylight; lunettes, spandrels, friezes and the like were to abound; and the opportunities for interior decoration were ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... also named the third eyelid, winking eyelid, haw, etc., is placed at the inner angle of the eye, whence it extends over the eyeball to relieve it from foreign bodies which may fall upon it. It has for its framework a fibro-cartilage, irregular in shape, thick, nearly prismatic at its base, and thin anteriorly where it is covered by the conjunctiva; behind, it is loosely attached ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... high with a cargo of roses; but the wonder of it all was, that the whole design was lit up by electricity. Electric sparkles, like drops of dew, shone on the leaves of the flowers; the gondola was lit from end to end with electric stars, which were reflected with prismatic brilliancy in the crystal below; the gondolier's long pole glittered with what appeared to be drops of water tinged by the moonlight, but which was really an electric wire, and in his cap flashed an electric diamond. The whole ornament ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... forth the mourner, "not for me! does the arc of promise wear those radiant hues. Prismatic rays once gilded my existence. With Acme they are for ever fled. But look! how the stream dashes on! Thus have the waters of bitterness passed over ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... receding tide, and a nearer view shows it to be a jelly-like globe, clearer than the crystal of Merlin. Dropped softly into a vessel of water, at first it lies quiescent and almost invisible upon the bottom. A moment after, it rises in quick undulations, flashing prismatic tints with every motion. Again it rests, and we see that it is banded by eight meridians, composed of square, overlapping plates. It swims, and the plates become paddles, propelling the frail craft,— prisms, dividing the sunbeams into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... a beam are stiffness and strength. The formulae for the modulus of elasticity (E) or measure of stiffness of a rectangular prismatic simple beam loaded at the centre and resting freely on supports at ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the west gleamed faintly. The afterglow merged into the first night and at star-break, Venus blazed superbly on high, sending out rays mystically prismatic, as from some enchanted lamp. "Our star," Anthony Dexter had been wont to call it, as they watched for it in the scented dusk. For him, perhaps, it had been indeed the love-star, but she had followed it, with breaking ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... grotesque: he was fond of stern drawing, and generally painted a firm black outline to his figures, which has a very harsh effect. His colouring is equally positive, and his saints are generally arrayed in prismatic tints, relieved by the gold backgrounds which prevailed so constantly in early art. His portrait painted by Duerer at a later period of his life, is characteristic of the man. It is now in the Pinacothek at Munich, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... the drive as they neared the north-west and the familiar landmarks of his childhood came into sight, flooded with the June sunshine—the ruined mine-shafts staring up so starkly, the glory of white cattle in the golden light, the first glimpse of the pale roofs of Cloom itself, prismatic as a wood-pigeon's plumage, all these things struck at his heart with a keener shock than did anything personal, and made thought of his mother sink away from him. Behind the cluster of grey buildings he saw ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the existence of an inconvenience which attends every form of analyzing prism. It is frequently, and especially in projecting apparatus, required to be placed at the focus of a system of lenses, so that the rays may cross in the interior of the prism. This is an unfavorable position for a prismatic analyzer, and in the case of a powerful beam of light, such as that from the electric arc, the crossing of the rays within the prism is not unattended with danger to the cementing substance, and to the surfaces in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... the music changes, Like a prismatic glass, It takes the light and ranges Through all the moods that pass; Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets, And gives the world a glimpse of all The colors ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... aisle to receive what was coming, and a shovel full of earth—all ready. So, while the angular clergyman ruffled into the front of the pew, with Irons on one side, a little in the rear, both books open; the plump little undertaker, diffusing a steam from his moist garments, making a prismatic halo round the candles and lanterns, as he moved successively by them, whispered a word or two to the young gentleman [Mr. Mervyn, the doctor called him], and Mr. Mervyn disappeared. Dr. Walsingham and John Tracy got into contiguous seats, and Bob Martin went out to lend a hand. Then ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... silence of Twilight in the Wilderness. There are Icebergs too, floating in the Arctic Sea, frozen white and mute with horror at the dread secrets of ages; but, responsive to the versatile talent of the hand that creates them, they glow with prismatic light of many colors. Mr. Church irradiates the frozen regions with the coruscations of his own genius, bringing to these lonely, despairing masses of ice the revivifying hope and promise ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... There are books which are luxuries, livres de luxe, whose pages seem builded of more potent words than those of common life. Keats, for example, in poetry, and Landor in prose, are illustrations of this; and perhaps the representative instance, in all English literature, of the prismatic resources of mere words is the poem of "The Eve of St. Agnes." But thus to be crowned monarch of the sunset, to trust one's self with full daring in these realms of glory, demands such a balance of endowments as no one in English literature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... wax sparkled like stars in chandeliers of crystal. These in turn, catching the illumination, glittered in prismatic fragments with all the varied colors of the rainbow, so that a mellow yet brilliant radiance filled the entire apartment. Polished mirrors of a spotless clearness, framed in golden frames and built into the walls, reflected the waxed floors, the rich Oriental ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... intention should have been to enable the observer to see the greatest number of hours; consequently the light should be intercepted by the smallest quantity of glass. Dollond's achromatics contain, however, six lenses, and possess no recommendation but their enlarged field, and their freedom from prismatic colours in that field; points of no consequence in looking through a fixed glass at a fixed and circumscribed object. The field of the Galilean telescope is quite large enough, and, having but two lenses, one of which is a thin concave, it exhibits the object with ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... whether anything more will ever follow, or whether the pause is to be for ever, turns all the sweeter meditations into a whirl of confusion and anxiety and shame. A mother is so near that the reflection of her child's sentiments gets into her mind, but very often with such prismatic changes, and oblique catchings of the light, that even sympathy goes wrong. Mrs. Warrender thus caught from Chatty the representation of an agitated soul in which there was all the sensitive shame of a love that is given ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... bright iris is soon amid the revolving columns of mist that soar from the foaming chasm, and shroud the broad front of the gigantic flood. Both arches of the bow are seldom entirely elicited, but the interior segment is perfect, and its prismatic hues are extremely glowing and vivid. The fragments of a plurality of rainbows are sometimes to be seen in various parts ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... them, with your back toward the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving us the same prismatic effect. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to a creek, and pointed out the place where he had crossed. Jackey said "I threw him down one fellow compass somewhere here." It was immediately found, it was one of Kater's prismatic compasses, the name Chislett, London, engraved on the back. Jackey then went to a place where he "plant him sextant," but the flood had been over the spot and washed it away. When returning I found the trough for an artificial horizon washed upon the banks of the ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... to you how many subjects for the highest order of poetry lie unnoticed all about us? Take that chandelier, for example, the prismatic drops of which are dull in the shade, but sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow in the gaslight. Might not those hidden splendors be compared to that genius whose brilliancy is alone evoked ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... gave one of her innumerable farewell performances, I was again forced to admit that she is the greatest of living lyric sopranos, but took the liberty to express my conviction that "the charm of her voice is almost as purely sensuous as the beauty of a dewdrop or a diamond reflecting the prismatic colors ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... become a pool.' Life without Christ is but a long illusion. 'Sin makes a mock of fools.' How seldom are hopes fulfilled, and how still less frequently are they, when fulfilled, as good as we painted them! The prismatic splendours of the rain bow, which gleam before us and which we toil to catch, are but grey rain-drops when caught. Joys attract and, attained, have incompleteness and a tang of bitterness. The fish is never so heavy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren |
