"Prismatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... needle-peaked giants of amethystine rock, their tops laced with flying silvery clouds. The whole air seemed to be surcharged with tints, ranging between the palest rose and the deepest violet—tints never without blue, and never without red, but varying in the degrees of the two. It is this prismatic hue diffused over every object which gives one of the most noticeable ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... saw it then. There is the huge, high entrance to the outer caves where we are standing, with a massive lintel of rocks overhead, all black but for a few purple and gray tints scattered across the blackness. Behind us the sea is glistening, and prismatic colors play upon the cliffs. Shadows fall from rocks we cannot see. Olivia stands before me, pale and terrified, the water running from her heavy dress, which clings about her slender figure. She shrinks away from ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... cleared off, owing to a marked fall in the temperature. We had no longer to do with completely frozen vapour, but had to deal with the phenomenon called frost-rime, which often occurs in these high latitudes. Captain Len Guy recognized it by the quantity of prismatic threads, the point following the wind which roughened the light ice-crust deposited on the sides ot the iceberg. Navigators know better than to confound this frost-rime with the hoar frost of the temperate zones, which only freezes when it has been deposited on the surface ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... already described in a preceding chapter, now assumed, if possible, a more brilliant aspect—flooded with light, rendered more effective by an additional chandelier, a gem of countless scintillations, distracting in variety and prismatic design. The courtly reception, high-born dignity and ease exhibited in every smile, gesture, word and action of the distinguished occupants, might recall vivid conceptions of the days when beauty and chivalry were conspicuous in homage to royalty ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... distinctive character; then, after a short interval, the search-lights were suddenly flashed on to the city of Sirapion; the beautiful buildings with their domes, towers, and minarets looking exquisitely ethereal as they were bathed in the beams of the glowing and ever-changing prismatic light. The beams were next directed downwards upon the assembly, and we gained a truer appreciation of the immense ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... 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
... owe its marvelous effects to reflections from the sky, for no sky ever had such an intense blue, filled with lambent light. Then its greens, blues, and purples, seen from the lovely mountain roads, especially from the road leading from Monte Carlo, seem more like leaping prismatic flame than a vast expanse of water. Then the old gold, red, and orange colored sails of the boats, gliding like magic through the water, add their picturesque touches to the scene. The sound of boatmen calling to one another ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... trifle up and now perceived that through the vapors a dim yet steady glow was beginning to shine, and on each side of it there stretched a line of other, smaller, blue-green lights. These, haloed by the vapor with the most beautiful prismatic rings, extended in an irregular ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... 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 historical task of Christianity to assume ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... eyes. Just across the black, silent sweep of the river three giant prismatic searchlights were playing high toward the polestar, such searchlights as the gods might be using in some monstrous game. They wavered here and there, shifting and dodging, faded and sprang up again, till Bennie, dizzy, closed his eyes. The lights were still dancing in ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... order to steady herself on her feet, the last filmy veil that hid the face of the moon glided ethereally by. The moon was on the wane, golden and mysterious, and now, as she appeared high in the heaven, surrounded by a halo of prismatic light, she threw a cold radiance on everything around, picking out every tree and cottage with unfailing sharpness and casting black, impenetrable shadows which made the light, by contrast, appear yet more ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... curious 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 some ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... prose light of common day is breaking into prismatic rays. Into the dusty highway of Ancient History all at once sweeps the pageantry of Mythology. Philemon bends above old Baucis at the High School gate, though hitherto they have been sycamores. Olympus is just beyond the clouds. The Elysian Fields lie only the surrender ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... 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 ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... be piled in a vast circle of glaciers, belting the planet along the line between perpetual day and night, and that where the sunbeams touched these icy deposits near the edge of the light hemisphere a marvelous spectacle of prismatic hills of crystal ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... Krauss, but apparently different from it. In the South African form the cells are shorter, narrower, and more cylindrical, and the branches are terminated by two lanceolate tags, which are not present in the Australian species, in which latter the cells also are wider, longer, and prismatic, or subhexagonal, ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... was fond of hearing the sound of his own voice and liked exercising it on the subject of himself, had been telling Archie a few anecdotes about his professional past. From these the latter had conceived a picture of Roscoe Sherriff's life as a prismatic thing of energy and adventure and well-paid withal—just the sort of life, in fact, which he would have enjoyed leading himself. He wished that he, too, like the Press-agent, could go about the place "slipping ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Confine with folds of air the lingering fires; O'er Eve's pale forms diffuse phosphoric light, And deck with lambent flames the shrine of Night. So, warm'd and kindled by meridian skies, 180 And view'd in darkness with dilated eyes, BOLOGNA'S chalks with faint ignition blaze, BECCARI'S shells emit prismatic rays. So to the sacred Sun in MEMNON's fane, Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain; 185 —Touch'd by his orient beam, responsive rings The living lyre, and vibrates all it's strings; Accordant ailes the tender tones prolong, And holy ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the snow 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 everything quivered ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... seems to me that you may as well expect of the blind to depict for you his impressions of the prismatic glories of the rainbow, or of the deaf to orate on the beauties of a Beethoven symphony, as to expect of one who lacks the sense of religion, the spirit of faith, to expound, or even to understand, the ideals of the Jew, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... kind of brain, the nucleus has been dropped into it, the pearl begins to grow, and to assume prismatic hues. So he is happy, and even the frozen-out angler might be happy if he could write a novel in the absence of salmon. Unluckily, my brain is not capable of this aesthetic malady, and to save my life, or to "milk a fine warm cow rain," ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the view of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement. He was dressed in a slashed doublet of spun gold, so fine in its texture that the prismatic colors gleamed over it, as if on a surface of mother of pearl; and over this brilliant doublet his hair and beard fell full halfway to the ground in waving curls, so exquisitely delicate, that Gluck could hardly tell where they ended; they seemed ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... green, then a deep blue and again a dirty gray as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud, and as a gust of wind caught the top of the combers decapitating them at one mad rush, the spray was dashed high in the air, flashing out all the prismatic colours. Here and yonder, the white caps rose, disappeared and came again, and the waves grew and then diminished in size. Then others rose, towering, became larger, majestic, terrible; the milk-like comb rose proudly, soared a brief moment, then fell ignominiously, and the wave diminished passed ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... Samples of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic colorings. State troopers were warning the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... more rare in northern countries than in Provence, Italy, and Spain. They are seen particularly (and this fact is singular enough) when the sky is clear, and the weather seems to be most fair and settled. Under the torrid zone beautiful prismatic colours appear almost every night, and even at the time of the greatest droughts; often in the space of a few minutes they disappear several times, because, doubtless, the superior currents change the state of the floating vapours, by which the light is ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... in an approved and conventional fashion.... They [his compositions] are interesting, and more than that: they are extremely characteristic in harmonic colouring. Their size has nothing to do with their merits. A few lines by Gautier stuffed with prismatic words and yet as vague as mist-wreaths may in artistic worth surpass whole cantos of more famous poets; and Mr. MacDowell has Gautier's sense of colour and knowledge of the power of suggestion." His performance "was worthy of the warmest praise ... seeing gorgeous or delicate colours and hearing ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... objects of inferior moment, darken and concentrate the view. The waters between pour over the right-hand and left-hand summit, rushing down and uniting among the craggiest and abruptest of rocks. Oh for a whole mountain- side of that living foam! The sun impresses a faint prismatic hue. These falls, compared with those of the Missouri, are nothing,—nothing but the merest miniature; and yet they assist me in forming some conception of that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of light from behind fell upon them. A maid was lighting the gas in the drawing-room. Mostyn saw the cut-glass pendants of the crystal chandelier blaze in prismatic splendor. His mind was far from the lined countenance before him. He was heavy with indecision. His sister's confident derision clung to him like a menace ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... fire- flies broke from some thicket of shade and danced drowsily by in sparkling tangles of gold and green; here and there from great open squares and branch-shadowed gardens gleamed the stone face of an obelisk, or the white column of a fountain; while over all things streamed the long prismatic rays flung forth from the revolving lights in the Twelve Towers of the Sacred Temple, like flaming spears ranged lengthwise against the limitless depth of the midnight horizon. With straining necks, tossed manes, and foam flying from their nostrils, Sah-luma's fiery coursers dashed onward at ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the picture it presents, without feeling as if you had peeped into another world? Every outline is preserved, every tint is freshened and purified, in the cool, glimmering reflection. There is a grace and a softness in the prismatic lymph that give a new form and color to the common and familiar objects it has printed in its still, pellucid depths. Every little basin of clear water by the roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There is a vastness of depth, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... 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 ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... it would go, for five minutes without stopping; apparently with the view of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement. He was dressed in a stashed doublet of spun gold, so fine in its texture, that the prismatic colours gleamed over it, as if on a surface of mother-of-pearl; and, over this brilliant doublet, his hair and beard fell full halfway to the ground, in waving curls, so exquisitely delicate that Gluck could hardly tell where they ended; they seemed to melt into air. The features ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... refraction of light by a convex lens the rays passing through different parts of the lens are brought to a focus at slightly different distances—this is called SPHERICAL ABERRATION; at the same time the coloured rays are separated by the prismatic action of the lens and likewise brought to a focus at different ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... first-found ammonite. It was a beautiful specimen, graceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly more delicate in its sculpturing; and its bright cream-coloured tint, dimly burnished by the prismatic hues of the original pearl, contrasted exquisitely with the dark grey of the matrix which enclosed it. I broke open many a similar nodule during our stay at this delightful quarry, and there were few of them in which I did not detect some organism of the ancient world—scales ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and as I lay wedged and bent on their up-bulging sides, beguiling the hard, cold time in gazing into the starry sky and across the sparkling bay, magnificent upright bars of light in bright prismatic colors suddenly appeared, marching swiftly in close succession along the northern horizon from west to east as if in diligent haste, an auroral display very different from any I had ever before beheld. Once long ago in Wisconsin I saw the heavens draped in rich purple ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... 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 ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... white chalk, which curves round to, and is joined by a most extraordinary mixture of vertical strata, composed of coloured sands and ocherous earths blending into every variety of tint, and so vivid and beautiful in colour, that they have been not unfrequently compared to the prismatic hues of the rainbow. It was on this spot the Fomone, a frigate of fifty guns, returning home, after an absence of three years, with some Persian princes on board, in June, 1811, struck upon the rocks ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... in 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 ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... of Spectrum Analysis Prismatic Analysis of the Light of Incandescent Vapours Discontinuous Spectra Spectrum Bands proved by Bunsen and Kirchhoff to be characteristic of the Vapour Discovery of Rubidium, Caesium, and Thallium Relation ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... 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 ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... 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 ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the general level of the neighbouring fields. The stone itself consists of a massive unhewn block of the secondary greenstone-trap of the district, many large boulders of which lie in the bed of the neighbouring river. In form it is somewhat prismatic, or irregularly triangular, with its angles very rounded. This large monolith is nearly twelve feet in circumference, about four feet five inches in width, and three feet three inches in thickness. Its ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... and moral ends. Its aim and purpose is to make reason 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
... 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
... or speculum, as it was called. It is to Sir Isaac Newton that the world is indebted for the reflecting telescope in its best form. That philosopher had set himself to investigate the causes of the rainbow-like, or prismatic colours which for a long time had been such a source of annoyance to telescopic observers; and he pointed out that, as the colours were produced in the passage of the rays of light through the glass, they would be entirely absent if the light ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... and at His side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as soon as the crown that He is placing on her head shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts of heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial beings, angels are crowding in, breaking the lines of the prismatic aureole, as though the ardour of their joy could scarcely be repressed; while the everlasting light of God sheds radiance from above, and far below, lies earth with diminished sun and moon. The boldness of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... and scientific point of view, the whole country lying about the basanite roots of Snaefell is most interesting. At the feet of its southern slopes are to be seen wonderful ranges of columnar basalt, prismatic caverns, ancient craters, and specimens of almost every formation that can result from the agency of subterranean fires; while each glen, and bay, and headland, in the neighbourhood, teems with traditionary lore. On the north-western side of the mountain stretches the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... it did with Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Not that they were in any wise exempt from sorrow and pain; the poet, least of all, would choose to be translated, even if he might, to some enchanted region remote from all the mingled experiences of humanity; it is the common lot of destiny, with its prismatic blending of failure and success, of purpose and achievement, of hope and defeat, of love and sorrow, out of which the poet draws his song. ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... minute, nevertheless, I reopened my eyes, for through my eyelashes I still beheld her, all sparkling with prismatic colours, and surrounded with such a penumbra as one beholds in gazing ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... out to the right, past the shimmering silver disk of the propeller. Under the blue haze of ice-crystals in the air, the ice lay away in a vast undulating plain of black and yellow, broken with splotches of prismatic whiteness, lying away in frozen desolation to the rim of the cold violet sky. Rising against that sky I ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... 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, in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... aneroids—which had been 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 ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... fallen from Arctic skies, living, 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... metallic appearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic; abdomen pointed, The Death's—headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... water of the sea palpitated with the beating of the great heart of Ocean from which it flowed. Trees were still erect, clasped by the salt waves, but quite dead; and all around their base were hung fringes of marine growth, touched with prismatic tints when seen through the glittering water, but brown and hideous when gathered, as the trophy remaining in the hand which has dared to seize old Proteus by the locks. All around this avenue, into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the sufferer; "if 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 your tail is ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... a half later, when breakfast was ready and waiting. He stood near the window for a few moments, meditatively looking about him. The sunlight made the metal cover of the hot dish shine like beautifully polished silver; it flashed on the rims of white teacups, and, playing some prismatic trick with the glass sugar basin, sent a stream of rainbow tints across the two rolls and the two boiled eggs. An appetizing meal—and as comfortable, yes, as luxurious a room as any one could ask for. Through the open door and across the landing, he had a peep into the ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... limestone to near the bottom of the Llandeilo rocks. Another coral, the Favosites Gothlandica (Figure 537), is also met with in profusion in large hemispherical masses, which break up into columnar and prismatic fragments, like that here figured (Figure 537, b). Another common form in the Wenlock limestone is the Omphyma turbinatum (Figure 538), which, like many of its modern companions, reminds us of some cup-corals; but all the Silurian genera belong to ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Epochs 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 ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... 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
... vertical tubes run the rows 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Redmond's attention strayed to the corner where Margaret sat, the light from the painted window reached her, staining her white gown with patches of prismatic color—a bordering of crimson and blue and violet—and giving a golden tinge to her dead-brown hair; and as Hugh looks at her he tells himself again that he has never seen any one to compare with her—his pearl ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the poetical diction, the unprosaic terms and figures of the Teutonic School. The alliterative poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is "not prismatic but diaphanous." Those who could understand anything could understand it, and the chansons de geste easily found currency in the market-place, when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of honour in "bower and hall." The Teutonic poetry, even at its ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... 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
... arrangement with blocks. The jar V, is provided with a cover of copper, E, screwing into the glass. This cover carries two vertical plates of sheet-iron, A, A', against which are fixed the prismatic blocks, B, B, by means of India rubber bands. The terminal, C, carried by the cover constitutes the positive pole. The zinc is formed of a single pencil, D, passing into a tube fixed to the center of the cover. The India rubber, G, is folded back upon this tube so ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity, or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their making. The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my books is not paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids. All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as my mind does ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... into a 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 ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... a furtive smile played upon the canon's lips and his eyes were extraordinarily animated. Don Cayetano busied himself in giving various forms—now rhomboidal, now prismatic—to a little ball of bread. But Dona Perfecta was pale and kept her eyes fixed on the canon with observant insistence. Rosarito looked with amazement at her cousin. The latter, bending toward her, whispered under ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... night, a brilliant Will-o'-the-wisp rose and floated above the feathery foliage, drawn in myriads to its light, they revolved about it in an immense mystical wheel, misty-white, glistening, and touched with prismatic colour. Floating fire and wheel were visible only to the stars, and the wakeful eyes of giant scaly monsters lying quiescent in the black waters below; but they were very beautiful nevertheless. The modest ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... having attained sufficient altitude to penetrate its depths, while overhead all was warmth and light. Quivering on the tops of the timber, the horizontal sunbeams created, in their refraction, brilliant prismatic colorings, and filled the air with motes like golden dust. Our horsemen heeded not the sunshine or the shade. Occupied each with his own train of thought, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you—for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... from circumstance to circumstance of the destiny Janet had marked for herself, each one rounded in my mind of a blood colour like the edge about prismatic hues. I lived through them a thousand times before they occurred, as the wretch who ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... must be set apart, and used for no other purpose. The five "sacred colors" are the prismatic hues arranged in a certain way, as these colors are very magnetic. By "malignant influences" are meant any disturbances through strifes, quarrels, bad feelings, etc., as these are said to impress themselves ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... the berg. It was evidently of Arctic origin, for it was much larger than any of the many "pinnacles" in sight. It was composed of ice, which, wherever the snow had failed to lodge, appeared hard, transparent, and prismatic in the rays of the sun. Its sides were steep and precipitous, and at first the members of the party began to fear that they should be unable to mount the steep escarpment of eight or ten feet high, which formed its base, which was further defended ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... still in the distance, where an intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain). Very quiet she is,—so quiet that a radiant ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... wheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer; details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into the purple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil on water; the bit of classic egg-and-dart border on the door-cap; the aged texture of the weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the wide woodshed entrance, on the kitchen side; ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... colour; Su-dhumra-varna, Deep-purple colour; Ugra or Sphulingini, Hot, Passionate, or Sparkling; Pradipta, Shining, Clear. These are the literal meanings; the mystic meanings are very different, and among other things denote the septenary prismatic colours and other septenaries ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... my little song has not cast a gloom over you, Rex?" she said, holding out her hands to him as she arose to bid him good-night—those small white hands upon one of which his engagement-ring glowed with a thousand prismatic hues. ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... belief that he had been an officer in the dragoons, that he had spent a large fortune, and now condescended to take a part in periodical literature with the culture of a gentleman and the grace of an amateur. How this vapid charlatan in a braided surtout and prismatic necktie could so long veil his real character from, and retain the regard of, such men as Procter and Talfourd and Coleridge is amazing. Lamb calls him the "kind and light-hearted Janus," and thought he liked him. The contributors often ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the 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 ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the governor of South Carolina had inaugurated. He had 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... tips of my outstretched fingers were the prismatic tints with which the crystal daily registered the decline of the day; but not for all my striving and all my wit could I get within reach. They were as remote as the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... marital misfortunes, deserves much sympathy for her physical fate. Just lately her leg was broken again and her surgeons fear that her lameness must be perpetual. Yet the talk about her going on the stage has some basis, and no one who ever talked with her, and enjoyed the prismatic play of her facial expression and the flexions of her vibrant voice, could doubt her fitness for certain popular roles. Nor need her lameness defeat her of success. A play of mingled pathos and humor could be written for a lame heroine. One excellent writer ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... with prismatic colors like a huge curtain, gorgeously illuminated in its ample folds by the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... most common of these interior cell crystals are those composed of calcium oxalate and calcium carbonate. Others composed of calcium phosphate, calcium sulphate and silica are sometimes found. These crystals may occur singly or in clusters of greater or less size. In shape they are prismatic ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... impatient imagination a building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this plunge and float strange ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree; and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them, every drop also radiated light, prismatic, and scintillating an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene—as of a mighty light informing the least atom of this tearful human existence—that the profoundest depths ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... apparent places. It was thus when the discovery of the different expansibilities of metals by heat, gave us the means of correcting our chronometrical measurements of astronomical periods. It was thus when the lines of the prismatic spectrum were used to distinguish the heavenly bodies that are of like nature with the sun from those which are not. It was thus when, as recently, an electro-telegraphic instrument was invented for the more accurate registration ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... again to raise them, that so I might escape the distraction of outward things, for I felt the spell more and more, and I hardly knew what I did; but a minute afterwards I again looked up, for I perceived her beauty still shining across my dropped lashes as if with prismatic glory, and encircled by the crimson halo that, to the gazer, surrounds the sun. How beautiful she was! Painters, when in their chase of the ideal they have followed it to the skies and carried off therefrom the divine image of Our Lady, never drew near this fabulous ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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 as foils to my husband, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... cried Gedge excitedly; and in spite of several risks of overturning, he steered the novel toboggan sledge down the gigantic slide, with the wild, metallic, hissing sound rising and falling on the keen wind that fanned their cheeks, and a glistening prismatic, icy dust rising behind them ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... alternations of beauteous scenes above; surely there will be developments and variety in light, colour, music, harmony, and the rest of those "pleasures for evermore," which are everywhere emanations from the direct love of "Him who first loved us,"—His gifts, who even here bestows prismatic hues upon icebergs in the arctic circle, and a rosy flush to the peaks of Jebel ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... 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
... irresolute. The Augustas were clinging together in obvious terror, their heads were pressed close to one another, and the jewels in their hair formed a curious shimmering mass of diamonds and rubies which caught the rays of the sun and threw back blinding sparks of prismatic colours. Dea Flavia was not near them. She was standing alone up against the dividing wall of the tribune, and leaning back against it, with eyes closed, and hand pressed against ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... preserved, with a few exceptions, throughout the first season's work. It was the duty of Prof. and Jones to make a traverse (or meander) of the river as we descended. They were to sight ahead at each bend with prismatic compasses and make estimates of the length of each sight, height of walls, width of stream, etc., and Cap was to put the results on paper. The Major on his first boat, kept a general lookout and gave commands according to circumstances. He remembered the general ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... our thoughts should be more rapid than they can be distinctly apprehended, confusion must ensue, and their rapidity would render them useless. Our perceptions are regulated by the same law. If the prismatic colours be painted on a surface which is revolved with great rapidity, the individual colours will not be apparent. The succession of sounds to a definite number, may be severally distinguished, in a certain interval: but if the ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... 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 black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of his ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... in Fig. 37 may represent the positions of two prominent objects whose position is marked upon an ordnance map of the neighbourhood, or they may be flagstaffs specially set up and noted on the map; and let C represent the boat from which the bearings of A and B are taken by a prismatic compass, which is marked from 0 to 360. Let the magnetic variation be N. 15 W., and the observed bearings A 290, B 320, then the position stands as in Fig. 38, or, correcting for magnetic variation, as in Fig. 39, from which it will ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... was 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 known ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... soda-pyroxene, being essentially a sodium and ferric metasilicate, NAFe(SiO3)2. In its crystallographic characters it is close to ordinary pyroxene (augite and diopside), being monoclinic and having nearly the same angle between the prismatic cleavages. There are, however, important differences in the optical characters: the birefringence of acmite is negative, the pleochroism is strong and the extinction angle on the plane of symmetry measured to the vertical axis is small (3 deg. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... when gradually 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 spoke her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... member of his audience think in simultaneous terms of glamour and adventure—with perfect personal safety, of course!—and of steaks, chops and roasts. The more gifted viewers back on Earth might even envision filets mignon. The infinitesimal diamond with its prismatic glitterings, of course, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... sufficiently harmless purposes—shaving-soap, cement, inks—"five gallons of good ink for fifteen cents"—tooth-powders, etc. Some of them are arrant nonsense; such as "tea—better than the Chinese," which is as if he promised something wetter than water; "to make thieves' vinegar;" "prismatic diamond crystals for windows;" "to make yellow butter"—is the butter blue where the man lives? Others are of a sort calculated to attract foolish rustic rascals who would like to gain an easy living by cheating, if they were ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... our Ruhmkorff's coil, increased tenfold by the myriad of prismatic masses of rock, sent its jets of fire in every direction, and I could fancy myself traveling through a huge hollow diamond, the rays of which produced myriads of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... One is left by the 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 rainbow hues. Suddenly two lines of gossamer are dropped from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of a log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show, inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than a match for the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... crow's-nest on the evening of the 15th, watching for signs of land to the westward, and he reported an interesting phenomenon. The sun set amid a glow of prismatic colours on a line of clouds just above the horizon. A minute later Worsley saw a golden glow, which expanded as he watched it, and presently the sun appeared again and rose a semi-diameter clear above the western horizon. He hailed Crean, who from a position on the floe 90 ft. below ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... me in the other, and the instant I saw him I knew him to be dead. He was the only figure visible. The whole body of the vessel was frosted by the snow into the glassy aspect of the spars and rigging, and the sunshine striking down made a beautiful prismatic picture ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... shadows. Trennahan flung back the curtains and opened the window, closing the lower inside blinds. A cloud hurried across the face of the sun, as if light had no place in that ghastly room. About the limp body and sprawling hands clung the delicate prismatic tapestry of the spiders. It was rent in twain, and it quivered, and threatened to drop and trail upon the floor. The little weavers were racing about, full of anger and consternation, bent on repair. A number had already gathered up the broken strands ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 giant's teapot lid, and allowing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... material! Chemists tell us that the black bit of coal in your grate and the diamond on your finger are varying forms of the one substance. What about a power that shall take all the black coals in the world and transmute them into flashing diamonds, prismatic with the reflected light that comes from His face, and made gems on His strong right hand? The universe will wonder at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... until 1865 A.D. The answer came from the diagonal joints themselves, on discovering that the stone between them was opposite to the butt end of the portcullis of the first ascending passage, or to the hole whence the prismatic stone of concealment through 3000 years had dropped out almost before Al Mamoun's eyes. Here, therefore, was a secret sign in the pavement of the entrance-passage, appreciable only to a careful eye and a measurement by angle, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... putting Newton's head into my picture—"a fellow," said he, "who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle." And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was impossible to resist him, and we all drank "Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics." It was delightful to see the good-humour of Wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation, and laughing as heartily as ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... discipline of thought was concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure. For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all. The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... morning, with hardly so much as a fleecy white cloud in all the expanse of sky; glorious sunlight was flashing its prismatic colors over a lake surface barely ruffled by the faintest breeze. Never did Nature smile more brightly back into my eyes than then, as I gazed out over the broad plain where the glow of the summer ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... sun was rising; long liquescent lines of light of purest amber-color were streaming through the snowy woods; the shadows of the fence rails alternated with bars of dazzling glister; elusive prismatic gleams of rose and lilac and blue shimmered on every slope—thus the winter flowered. Tiny snow-birds were hopping about; a great dog came down from the little snow-thatched cabin, and was stretching himself elastically and ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 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 by Beauty's ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of the fieriest hair, had figged 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
... of the "parlour." They offered to the eye a strange mixture of the East and West—reminiscences of the old home in "Illinoy" and trophies of the new camping-out on the frontier. From the ceiling hung a heavy lamp with prismatic danglers, surrounded by a globe on which were depicted stags in the act of leaping six-barred gates. By way of complement to this gorgeous centrepiece, the paper on the walls showed, in infinitely recurring duplicate, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... 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, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve in a prismatic shimmer. ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... 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 and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... but for Mr. Sheridan's coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them, might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or may not mean, I went to Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase, which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the revolutionary forces which are now at ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... her for a moment; then kisses her hand. She presses his and turns away with her eyes so wet that she sees Drinkwater, coming in through the arch just then, with a prismatic halo round him. Even when she sees him clearly, she hardly recognizes him; for he is ludicrously clean and smoothly brushed; and his hair, formerly mud color, ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... the 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 husband and his cloud of cousins. I ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... room for the tower; and in the north nave is a closed-up pointed doorway, which must have belonged to the earlier chapel dedicated to St. Meriadec. The apsis is terminated by a straight wall. The three naves are separated below the choir by prismatic pillars supporting light and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... valleys and around the trees flitted the shining fragments,—a diamond dust swept by the freshening breeze. The torrent rolled on toward them; along its length a vapor rose, tinted by the sun with every color of his light; the decomposing rays flashing prismatic fires along the many-tinted scarf of waters. The rugged ledge on which they stood was carpeted by several kinds of lichen, forming a noble mat variegated by moisture and lustrous like the sheen of a silken fabric. Shrubs, already in bloom, crowned the rocks with garlands. Their waving foliage, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... the liquor I had had would not be denied. In vain I drew my hands across my drooping eyelids, in vain I tried to master my knees that knocked together. The spell of the love-drink that Heru, blushing, had held to my lips was on me. Its soft, overwhelming influence rose like a prismatic fog between me and my enemy, everything again became hazy and dreamlike, and feebly calling on Heru, my chin dropped upon my chest, my limbs relaxed, and I slipped down in drowsy ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... alone. No steam vents, no hot springs surround it, and all the volcanic power of the region is concentrated here. Sparks of electric fire mingle with the dazzling sheaf of lighted fluid, every drop of which refracts the prismatic colours. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... and by the terror it inspires in horses, has well-nigh abolished driving; and following the old country roads, as it does, with an occasional short-cut though the deep, green- lighted woods or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of a picturesque variety entirely satisfying. After a year of fervent opposition and protest, the whole community—whether of summer or of winter folks—now gladly accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottager and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... expected to find at a depth of two or three feet, such water to be first filtered and then boiled before use. And while the digging was proceeding, Earle and Dick took up a position on the summit of a low knoll a few yards away, and examined their surroundings through their prismatic glasses. ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... pearl, or rather of the emerald, whose luminous transparency they seemed to emulate. The pupil is a fine black, and above each eye is a semilunar mark of the richest garnet. The body, nearly transparent, or of a pellucid green, is glossed with all the variety of prismatic tints, and thickly dotted with brown. At almost every effort of respiration, the little creature tossed its arms in apparent agony, and clung more firmly to the finger; while the dark-brown spots upon the body alternately faded and revived, diminishing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... our earthly days invested! 'With Thee'—then I am constantly in the presence of a sovereign Law and its Giver; 'with Thee'—then all my actions are registered and weighed yonder; 'with Thee'—then 'Thou, God, seest me.' Brethren! it is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity round this poor glass of time that gives it all its dignity, all its meaning. The lives that are lived ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... centre of the plain, and towering nearly two hundred feet above the general level, has all the semblance of an artificial work—not of human hands, but a cairn constructed by giants. Just such does it appear—a vast pyramidal cone, composed of huge prismatic blocks of granite, black almost as a coal—the dark colour being occasioned by an iron admixture in the rock. For two-thirds of its slope, a thick growth of cedar covers the mound with a skirting of darkest green. Above this appear the dark naked prisms—piled ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... river-wall to watch the blanchisseuses at work. It has a curious interest, this spectacle of primitive toil: the deep channel of the Roxelane winding under the palm-crowned heights of the Fort; the blinding whiteness of linen laid out to bleach for miles upon the huge bowlders of porphyry and prismatic basalt; and the dark bronze-limbed women, with faces hidden under immense straw hats, and knees in the rushing torrent,—all form a scene that makes one think of the earliest civilizations. Even here, in this modern colony, it is nearly three centuries old; and it will probably continue thus at ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... several waterfalls rush into the sea, with a roar, which quite fills the air. The singular appearance of these cataracts is greatly increased when illuminated by the rising sun, the spray, exhibiting the most beautiful prismatic colours. Below them huge masses of ice are formed, which seem to lean against the sides of the rocks, and to be continually increasing during the winter, but when melted by the power of a summer's sun, and disengaged by their weight, are carried off by the tides, ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... 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 down from two of the sides of the hexagonal ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... military trappings of the handsome cavaliers, (there was war at that time between the glorious empire of Fairydom and the weak and infatuated republic of Elfland on its southern borders, and the epaulette and spurs were the only pass to the hearts of the fair,) imbuing them with an infinitude of prismatic hues, all softened into a kind of timed starlight, exquisite as the dying voice of music. In this gorgeous saloon, at the head of which sat, well pleased, the benevolent old King Paterflor and his modest and still lovely queen Sweetbine, all were noble and accomplished and beautiful ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced waist of thinnest batiste. A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove, showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... purple had been explored; from them he had come back deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly: she had ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and frightful," "suffused with crocus, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... looks, and the doubt 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 unsought, mingled with ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Where the light happened to fall upon these the effect was bewilderingly beautiful, the rays being reflected and refracted from and through the crystals of which they were composed until they shone and sparkled like columns of prismatic fire. ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... of the rain-wet sky there indeed now was flung the bow of promise. But this titanic land did all things gigantically. This was no mere prismatic arch bridging the clouds. The colors all were there, yes, and of an unspeakable brilliance and individual distinctness in the scale; but they lay like a vast painted mist, a mural of some celestial artist flung en masse ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... shade, tinge, tincture, tint; pigment, paint, dye, stain. Associated Words: chromatics, colorific, colorist, chromatism, chromatology, lake, decolorant, mordant, intinctivity, iridescent, iridescence, prismatic, pigmentation, fugacious, fugitive, fugacity, monochromatic, monochrome, polychromy, polychromatic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... been attempted in flowers, but with poor success. It will look like a ribbon—a very handsome ribbon, no doubt; but the arc-en-ciel evades reproduction, even in the transcendent prismatic colors of flowers. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... 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
... changes do come over the Village like the waves of the sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a phase touches it but leaves it the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the song and the country become as one, I see it as music, I hear it as light; Prismatic and shimmering, trembling to tone, The land of desire, my soul's delight. And always it beats in my listening ears With the gentle thud of a horse's stride, With the swift-falling steps of many dogs, Following, following at my side. O Roads that journey to fairyland! ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... forth in Ophiuchus. It surpassed in brilliancy stars of the first magnitude, and outshone the planet Jupiter, which was in its proximity. Kepler observed this star, and described it as 'sparkling like a diamond with prismatic tints.' It soon began to decline after its appearance; in March 1605 it had shrunk to the dimensions of a third-magnitude star, and in a year later it became entirely lost to view. Other stars of the same class, though of a less conspicuous character, have been ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I could ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... May weather, probably the trout average two to the pound, and a pounder or two may be in the dish. But three to the pound is decidedly nearer the average, at least in April. The flies commonly used are larger than what are employed in Loch Leven. A teal wing and red body, a grouse hackle, and the prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites; but it is said that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally successful. In my own brief experience I have found the trout "dour," occasionally they would rise freely ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... admirable place, a cleft between two vast towers of rock with turret-shaped tops. I got on a ledge of rock at their foot, where I could lie and let the waves wash up around me, and look up at the proud turrets rising into the prismatic light. This evening was very fine; all the sky covered with crowding clouds, profound, but not sullen of mood, the moon wading, the stars peeping, the wind sighing very softly. We lay on the high rocks and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of value which are used as money are salt, metal, skins, cotton, glass, tobacco, wax, coffee beans, and korarima. Cattle and slaves are also used as units of value from time to time amongst the Oromo. Salt is used as money in prismatic pieces, twenty-two centimeters long and three centimeters to five millimeters broad at the bottom, which weigh from seven hundred and fifty grams to one and one half kilograms each. It is carried in bundles of twenty to thirty pieces, wound in leaves.[286] The Galla use ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of a miracle could have prevented the rainbow from making its appearance before 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. I am not yet able, however, to ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor |
