"Translucent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... large blue eyes, as serene as a summer's day, and oddly translucent. Her head with its crown of yellow hair was charming in contour, and her face, ivory in coloring, gave her an ethereal, lily-like appearance, distinctive and unusual. She lived in a world of her own, which was satisfying ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... bits of bark; a small chest of drawers, serving as a washstand; a malicious little looking-glass; a basin and ewer, holding about two quarts; an earthenware mug and soap-dish, the latter containing a thin bit of red translucent soap scented with sassafras; an ordinary wooden chair and a rocking-chair with rockers of divergent aims; a yellow wooden bedstead furnished with a mattress of "excelsior" (calculated to induce early rising), a dingy white spread, a gray blanket ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... banner in the Bible. The necessity for making glass. Its early origin. The crystal of the ancients. What it is made of. The blowing process. An acid and an alkali. Sand as an acid. Lime, soda, and potash as alkalis. The result when united. Transparent and translucent. Opaqueness. Making sheet glass. Why the eye cannot see through rough glass. How sheets are ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Messer Fifanti for close upon three months, during which time my mind had gradually, yet swiftly, been opening out like a bud under the sunlight of much new learning. We sat in the fine garden behind the house, on the lawn, in the shade of mulberry trees laden with yellow translucent fruit, by a pond that was all ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... rode into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near the end of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... POPPED CORN.—The small, translucent varieties of maize known as "pop corn," possessed the property, when gently roasted, of bursting open, or turning inside out, a process which is owing to the following facts: Corn contains an excess of fatty matter. By proper means this fat can be separated ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... insects on a setting board, I was slightly surprised at Browne's use of "braces" and the like. Nowadays everyone I know uses strips of smooth, non-sticky, translucent paper or similar material for the purpose, and I had not realised that any other methods had been used in the past. The use of such strips is easy, fast and effective. It permits one to set large numbers of insects almost in an assembly line fashion, working ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... lessening and the land was taking on those translucent opal tints which make of New Mexico a land of enchantment. The far hills enveloped themselves in a faint, purplish haze through which they seemed to blush unwittingly. The mesa, no longer showing itself an and waste of heat and untracked wilderness, lay soft under a thin ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... health had left her cheek. Its complexion was akin to that of translucent alabaster. The features wore a more fixed and regular aspect, and their play was less buoyant and quick ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... closed, he could see that the strange light burnt upon them. In a way it rendered his eyelids translucent—he was conscious of a dull pulsing redness through which shot a network of lines of fire. He opened his eyes slowly, cautiously, and looked upward. From some point above him, in what he judged must be the ceiling of the room, extended a beam of violet white light, cutting ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... mathematically round, and completely surrounded by lofty mountains. Indeed, already evening had there spread its shadows, although to the rest of the world the sun was still hours high. Through it flowed a river. From the height it looked like a piece of translucent green glass in the still depths; like cotton-wool where the rapids broke; for the great distance robbed it of all motion. This stream issued from a gorge and flowed into another, both so narrow that the lofty mountains seemed ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... season of the year when the American woods array themselves in their most attractive robes—when the very leaves appear as if they were flowers, so varied and brilliant are their hues—when the foliage of the young beeches becomes a pale yellow, and glimmers translucent against the sun—when the maples are dying off of a deep red, and the sumac and sassafras turning respectively crimson and scarlet—when the large drupes of the Osage orange, the purple clusters of the fox-grape, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for they were friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class, undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid bourgeoisie that is essentially alike in all ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... boy you are! Had I been any other woman—but let it go. You are as translucent as a woodland brook, and—at times you babble like one, confident that your music pleases everyone who hears it.... I pray you let me judge whether the errant lady be what a poet's soul would have her.... I am not speaking with any unkind thought or doubt.... But ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to other greater songs like the small pimpernel to a poppy or a hollyhock. Unambitious, yet finished, it has the charm of distinction. The wren is the least self-conscious of our singers. Somewhere among the higher green translucent leaves the little brown barred thing is quietly sitting, busy for the nonce about nothing, dreaming his summer dream, and unknowingly telling it aloud. When shall we have symbols to express as ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... destroys wisdom, grief destroys scholarship, grief destroys endurance; there is no perturbation of the mind like grief." Often we hardly know whether a psychological observation or a metaphor is given to us. In any case we may appreciate the fineness of a saying like this: "Even a most translucent, beautiful, perfectly round and charming pearl can be strung on a thread as soon as it has been pierced; so a mind which longs for salvation, perfectly pure, free from quarrel with any one and full of goodness, will nevertheless ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... is a ventriloquist. If we examine the abdomen by transmitted light, we shall see that the anterior two-thirds of the abdomen are translucent. With a snip of the scissors we will cut off the posterior third, to which are relegated, reduced to the strictly indispensable, the organs necessary to the propagation of the species and the preservation of the individual. The ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... on the outskirts of a corn-field—the same in which I once lost Musidora—I happened upon a "volunteer" mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of a mile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... but why? Why? Because, my dear Sir Patrick, though the germ is there, it's invisible. Nature has given it no danger signal for us. These germs—these bacilli—are translucent bodies, like glass, like water. To make them visible you must stain them. Well, my dear Paddy, do what you will, some of them wont stain. They wont take cochineal: they wont take methylene blue; they wont take gentian violet: they wont take any coloring matter. Consequently, though we ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... of the red Coyote (Sus-k'i a-ho-na), of the South, is represented by Plate V, Fig. 4, which, although of white semi-translucent calcite, has been deeply ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of Lillies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair, Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... of a new book he had in his bag, for literature, he judged, might be her hobby, and had engaged her in conversation, of which his share was meant to impress the tiny, translucent ear that nestled in the dark-brown coils and waves of the pretty head ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... flows, As wisely might'st thou wish thy home had rose On the parch'd surface of unwater'd plains, For that, when long the heavy rain descends, Bursts over guardian banks their whelming tide!— Seldom the wild and wasteful Flood extends, But, spreading plenty, verdure, beauty wide, The cool translucent Stream perpetual bends, And laughs the Vale as the bright ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... From thy translucent waves, great Thetis, rise! Mother divine, hear, and take back the gift Thou gavest me of valor and renown, And then seek Zeus, but not with loosened zone For dalliance; entreat him to restore Me, Achilles, to the earth, to the black earth, The nourisher of men, not these pale shades, Whose shapes ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... 16th verse of the 71st Psalm, (in our Prayer-book version), my thoughts especially revert to the subject of the right appreciation of the Scriptures, and in what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and tail, and a generally repulsive appearance. If one did not know they were excellent eating, and most harmless in their habits, one would be tempted to run or take to a tree at sight of them. Their shell is a translucent yellow, with black markings. The female has a red stripe down her back, and red eggs beneath her. She is richer in flavor, and more deadly than the male to one who has a natural diathesis to poisoning by varos. Many whites ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... reign in robes of magic round me here; But fading, blotted, dim, a picture faint, With spell more silent, only pleads a tear. Plead not! Thou hast my heart, O picture dim! I see the fields, I see the autumn hand Of God upon the maples! Answer Him With weird, translucent glories, ye that stand Like spirits in scarlet and in amethyst! I see the sun break over you: the mist On hills that lift from iron bases grand Their heads superb!—the dream, it ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... fresh has a fat that is solid and pure white; if yellow and soft it should be rejected; the lean is pink and the skin like white translucent parchment. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... hollowed-out yuke bone. Her face was dark, too, dark and lined with colored ceremonial pigment, green and orange stripes across her cheeks. Earrings were strung through her ears. On her feet were tiny slippers of perruh hide, laced around her ankles, and she wore long translucent Martian trousers with a bright sash tied around her waist. Between her small breasts a chain of stone beads rested, good-luck charms for ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... planted with ornamental shrubs and flowers, led to the center pavilion which was roofed by a huge crystal dome. This translucent cover transmitted the light and sunshine necessary for the floricultural display beneath. Stately palms, tall tree ferns in great variety, and gorgeous specimens from the flora of almost every section, formed an immense pyramid of shrubbery. ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... step and looked more keenly at the other, and then for the first time he saw that some great, some radical, some tremendous change had happened. The man before him was no doubt Sandy Graff, but all that was low-browed, evil, foul, was gone, as though it had been washed away, and in its place was a translucent, patient meekness, almost like—There was something so terribly vital in that change that Colonel Singelsby shuddered before it. He looked and looked, and then he passed the back of his hand across ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... a strong thread or small cord be tied tightly round the finger of a living person, the portion beyond the cord or thread will become red and swollen—if dead, no change is produced. 3. If the hand of a living person is held before a strong light a portion of the margin or edges of the fingers is translucent—if dead, every part of it is opaque. 4. A coal of fire, a piece of hot iron, or the flame of a candle, applied to the skin, if life remains, will blister—if dead it will merely sear. 5. A bright steel needle introduced and allowed to remain for half an hour in living flesh will be still bright—if ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... engineering—was doubled back and forth around the edge of a spur projecting from the wall on which we stood, and so descended to the bottom. Once below, our carrioles rolled rapidly down the gorge, which was already dusky with twilight. The stream, of the most exquisite translucent azure-green colour, rolled between us; and the mountain crests towered so far above, that our necks ached as we looked upwards. I have seen but one valley which in depth and sublimity can equal the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... contradictory, when he is likened by one of his friends to the sea, which is one and indivisible, we perceive that the comparison is not inapt. Round the edge are the ever-restless waves; on the surface the foam blown by fitful gusts of wind, the translucent play of sunbeams, and the clamour of storms lashing up the billows; but down in the sombre depths broods the resistless, immovable force which tinges with its reflection the dancing and play above, and is the genius and fascination, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of the shells, which at dawn had been ethereal, almost translucent, was now, in the sunset, turbid and sinister, yet the sunset was very splendid, flaming in crimson streamers over Imbros, tinting the east with rosy reflections and turning the peaks of Asia to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull; "strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great, strong, with a prevailing mild ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... devotion upon that twilight eve. Another stood without, beneath the shadow of a high hedge, and gazed upon the unconscious musician with even deeper admiration; and his dark, expressive features lighted up with an emotion almost of reverence. The stars came forth in the translucent depths of ether; the young moon cast her tremulous light over the garden, yet still the intruder lingered in his place of concealment. Twice he put the boughs aside, as if to approach the room and announce his presence, but again receded, as if irresolute ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... you please Are little gilt bees In amber drops Which look like honey, Translucent ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... touch of sadness on her lips, and a faint shadow of thought on the clear fine brows, the face of Lettice was noticeable for its tranquillity. No storm of passion had ever troubled those translucent eyes: patience sat there, patience and reflection; emotion waited its turn. One could not doubt her capabilities of feeling; but, in spite of her four-and-twenty years, the depths of her heart had never yet been stirred. She had lived a somewhat restricted ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... on it for ever!" Ellen, a younger and more enthusiastic sister remarked, with fervent admiration. "Look, Ma! was ever anything more gorgeous than that pure white cloud, fringed with brilliant gold, and relieved by the translucent and ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the boundless ocean. But all else had changed. The hostile warrior no longer impeded the onward march of civilization, and cultivated fields abounded on every side. Steamers were hourly traversing the translucent waters of the great Mississippi; steam and electricity were carrying people with the rapidity of lightning in every direction; gigantic buildings appeared on the earth's surface, visible in either direction as far as the eye could ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... unusually bright and rather startling in effect, for they seemed the only live thing about her. Gleaming from her still, set face, there was something almost alarming in their brilliancy. They softened with a sudden glow of pleasure as they rested on the translucent green of the wheat-fields under the broad generous sunlight, and then wandered to where the pure vivid yellow of the mustard-flower spread in waves to the base of the hills, now mystically veiled ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... grows in woods on wood and is quite common in our woods—both the rose-colored and the translucent-brown. Captain McIlvaine calls Merulius tremellosus and M. rubellus emergency species. He says they are rather tasteless, tough, slightly woody in flavor. They are ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... peculiar telescope, he gave the signal for a halt, and before you could realise what was going to happen, the native divers had tumbled out of their boats, and were swimming in a weird way down to the bottom of the translucent sea. As a rule, one man was left in each little boat to follow the movements of the divers as they returned to the surface. Not only did these divers wear no mechanical "dress," but they used no stimulants or palliatives of any kind ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... transparent, nor even translucent, it was evident that the apparition before them was not composed of flesh and blood. He looked at each of the four Earth-beings intensely for a moment, then pointed toward the table upon which stood the mechanical educator, and Seaton placed it in front of the peculiar visitor. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... his seat, familiar, to her side; Far from the suitor-train, a brutal crowd, With insolence, and wine, elate and loud: Where the free guest, unnoted, might relate, If haply conscious, of his father's fate. The golden ewer a maid obsequious brings, Replenish'd from the cool, translucent springs; With copious water the bright vase supplies A silver laver of capacious size; They wash. The tables in fair order spread, They heap the glittering canisters with bread: Viands of various kinds allure the taste, Of choicest sort and savour, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... behind each rock and in every shallow, sheltered place in the stream a plentiful gathering of tiny red stones. They were of a pale, ruby cast, and mostly flawed; dainty trifles, translucent and full of light when she held them to the sun. She began a search for a larger specimen. It might mount nicely into a stickpin for Bill, she thought; a memento of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... pots, ornamented these portals on each side; groups of ladies and gentlemen in evening-dress stood and walked amongst the flowers. Within, the long vista of the school-rooms presented a thronging, undulating, murmuring, waving, streaming multitude, all rose, and blue, and half translucent white. There were lustres burning overhead; far off there was a stage, a solemn green ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and were as supple as the best macintosh . . . . . The inner walls of many a Japanese apartment are formed of paper, being nothing more than painted screens; their windows are covered with a fine translucent description of the same material; it enters largely into the manufacture of nearly everything in a Japanese household, and we saw what seemed balls of twine, which were nothing but long shreds of tough paper rolled ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... along the beach till they came to some rocks piled ruggedly and the waves breaking over them. She mounted these, and stepped across them to the entrance of a cavern, where flowed a full water swiftly to the sea, rolling smooth bulks over and over, and with a translucent light in each, showing precious pebbles in the bed of the water below; agates of size, limpid cornelians, plates of polished jet, rubies, diamonds innumerable that were smitten into sheen by slant rays of the level sun, the sun just losing its ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... obscurity of the sea. And what sort of obscurity is that? Not that which comes from mud, or anything added, but that which comes from depth. As far as a man can see down into its blue-green depths they are clear and translucent; but where the light fails and the eye fails, there comes what we call obscurity. The sea is clear, but our sight ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are not only sharply alert to every external indication of danger, but by a curious reversal, which we will consider more carefully later, reflect signals of distress or discomfort from within. Last, but not least, the translucent tissues, the semi-transparent skin, barely veiling the pulsating mesh of myriad blood-vessels, is a superb color index, painting in vivid tints—"yellow, and ashy pale, and hectic red"—the living, ever changing, moving picture of the vigor of the life-centre, the blood-pump, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... green of the great mass, nor of the queer periphery, nor of uninspired devilgrass. It was a green unknown in living plant before; a glassy, translucent green, the green of a cathedral window in the moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle about it seemed subdued and orderly. The fantastic shapes, the tortured writhings, the unnatural extensions into the ocean were no longer manifest, instead, for miles around the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sea-water were then poured in. This had been brought from one of the wharves, at high tide, twenty-four hours previously, and twice drawn off with a siphon,—each time after twelve hours' rest. It was not, however, perfectly translucent, and at the end of a week was still cloudy. On the fifth day after the tank was filled, I began to introduce the animals to their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the north end of the Shore Drive at about five o'clock. At this time of year the days are still comparatively short, and the shadows of the evening were beginning to settle down upon the great city. Lamps were beginning to burn with that mellow radiance which seems almost watery and translucent to the eye. There was a softness in the air which speaks with an infinite delicacy of feeling to the flesh as well as to the soul. Carrie felt that it was a lovely day. She was ripened by it in spirit for many suggestions. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... (Hypericum peiforatum) is a frequent plant in our woods and hedgebanks, having leaves studded with minute translucent vesicles, which seem to perforate their structure, and which contain a terebinthinate ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip of that which they do not immediately comprehend. But to me, plunged chokingly in translucent profundities of aquamarine splendour, not of a truth that in the heights above splendour resides not, chidingly offering a fat whiskerless cheek to the blows of circumstance, this was ever the problem of problems. How to write. How not to write. This way and that the raging fates tug the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... of Orcon. They were the creatures who had given Ludwig Leider refuge and allied themselves with him in his attempt to make trouble for Earth. And they were half-bird, half-human! Their faces, bodies, arms, and legs were human. But they had wings! Translucent, membranous structures, almost gauzy, which stretched out from their shoulders like bat's wings. And their skins, as they surged about in the beams of our light, gleamed a bright orange color, and about their heads waved frilled antennae which were evidently ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... inches long and in many places the animal's hide was over an inch thick. Strips of this were cut off to make whips, and a large section was removed to be made into a table top. These table tops, polished and rendered translucent by the curing processes, are beautiful as well as extremely interesting. The rhino's tongue is even more delicious to eat than ox tongue and rhino tail soup is a great luxury on any white man's table; while the native porters consider rhino meat the finest of any meat to be had in Africa. The conscience ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... Huxley, Assistant Surgeon of the Rattlesnake, and now eminent for the admirable anatomical researches among marine invertebrata which he conducted during the voyage) is very minute, being not more than the 1/24th of an inch in diameter. It is translucent and of a brownish-white hue. Its aspect is that of a Turbo in miniature. The whorls are tumid, the spire prominent; the body whorl is belted by two prominent keels, one of which is continued on the whorls of the spire: between, above, and below these keels are transverse membranous ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... to the east the sun, irradiant and magnified, lay low over the heaving seas. Over its face, like a veil of gold, translucent vapors—the breath of Kokoyah, the god of waters—rose from the melting floes. A strange spell seemed suddenly to have fallen over the earth. Out on the ocean the great bergs, which had majestically moved southward like the phantoms of perished ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green, with other elusive tintings for which no name has ever been found. Above the bridge the pond ran up into fringing groves of fir and maple and lay all darkly translucent in their wavering shadows. Here and there a wild plum leaned out from the bank like a white-clad girl tip-toeing to her own reflection. From the marsh at the head of the pond came the clear, mournfully-sweet ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the bottom of the gorge, watching the play of moonbeams on layer after layer of tremulous silver foliage in the clefts of the black, rocky walls on either side. The moon rode so high in the deep violet-colored sky, that her beams came down almost vertically, making green and translucent the leaves through which they passed, and throwing strongly marked shadows here and there on the flower-embroidered moss of the old bridge. There was that solemn, plaintive stillness in the air which makes the least sound—the hum of an insect's wing, the cracking of a twig, the patter of falling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was back as if his throat were open to the stroke of her words, but there was that growing in his face which was enormous, translucent, even apogean. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of the chickens and turkeys and other birds who incessantly alighted on the head of the Rhinoceros for the purpose of gathering the seeds of the rhododendron-plants which grew there; and these creatures they cooked in the most translucent and satisfactory manner by means of a fire lighted on the end of the Rhinoceros's back. A crowd of Kangaroos and gigantic Cranes accompanied them, from feelings of curiosity and complacency; so that they were never at a loss for company, and went onward, ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... follow in the train of thy Majesty even as I did upon earth. Let my soul be called [into the presence], and let it be found by the side of the lords of right and truth. I have come into the City of God, the region which existed in primeval time, with [my] soul, and with [my] double, and with [my] translucent form, to dwell in this land. The God thereof is the lord of right and truth, he is the lord of the tchefau food of the gods, and he is most holy. His land draweth unto itself every land; the South cometh sailing down the ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... spinning veils of cloud across it—skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes again—in long spaces resting on the sea—the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange massing and curving of the clouds. Between their blackness and the deep purple of the Campagna rose the city—pale phantom—upholding ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... through the great hull, and completely across the fuselage. To the extreme nose it ran, and throughout there were scattered little globes that gave off an intense white light, illuminating all of the interior. Translucent ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... pointing out a hemispherical dome which, redly translucent, surrounded a group of buildings towering high above their neighbors. "Neither those high towers nor those screens were there the last time I was in this town. They're stalling for time down there, that's all ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... with a bell-jar standing in a depth of water. Soon, in this atmosphere saturated with humidity, the threads become enveloped in a watery sheath, which gradually increases and begins to flow. The twisted shape has by this time disappeared; and the channel of the thread reveals a chaplet of translucent orbs, that is to say, a series of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Borodino and on both sides of it, especially to the left where the Voyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into the Kolocha, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning sun were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from the dew, and from the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and the temporal becomes eternal. They are therefore in heaven after death and in palaces there, the useful designs of which are resplendent with gold and precious stones. They look on these things, however, as the shining and translucent external of inward things, namely, of uses, in which they take a pleasure and enjoyment which are the happiness and joy of heaven. The opposite is the lot of those who have looked on riches and wealth just for the sake of riches and wealth and for their own sake, thus on the ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... these the chrysolite, The seventh gem in that basement; The eighth, a beryl, clear and white; The topaz, ninth, its luster lent; Tenth, chrysophrase, both soft and bright; Eleventh, the jacinth, translucent; And twelfth, and noblest to recite, Amethyst, blue with purple blent. The wall above those basements went Jasper, like glass that glistening shone; I saw, as the story doth present,— The Revelation ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... always sweeten those scented woods, and the birds begin to remind you of something you heard in another life, but have forgotten. Jenieve loved to open her door and surprise the east. She stepped out the next morning to fill her pail. There was a lake of translucent cloud beyond the water lake: the first unruffled, and the second wind-stirred. The sun pushed up, a flattened red ball, from the lake of steel ripples to the lake of calm clouds. Nearer, a schooner with its sails down stood black as ebony between two bars of light drawn across the water, which ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... splendors beaming Change and intertwine! Glories over glories streaming All translucent shine! Blessings, praises, adorations Greet Thee from the trembling nations ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, you find yourself there, take the first D-zug for Prague, that lovely city, for in it you will find the Pilsen Urquell, and in the Pilsen Urquell you will find the best Pilsner in Christendom—its colour a phosphorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam like whipped cream, its temperature exactly and invariably right. Not even at Pilsen itself (which the Bohemians call Plezen) is the emperor of malt liquors more stupendously grateful to the palate. Write ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the marching army, dragged out of the camp. The sun was high in the sky; the last cloud had vanished; the blue above was as clear and translucent as it is conceivable anything may be and yet retain its colour—not become clear light. The head of the column was six hundred paces from the silent Pompeian lines which awaited them. Then cohort after cohort ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... wants. It is a sorry day for a young man who can not see any opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else. Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers with on the voyage. After arriving in San Francisco, and after they had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were diamonds. They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines from which the pebbles had been gathered ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a day of beauty—the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to help her companion. Her slight firm frame, the graceful ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines against the translucent sky—with this exception it is the same—the same clear sky dropping into the depths of the forest, the same outlines, the same forest, the same horizon, day after day, week after week; we hurry to the summit of a ridge, expectant of a change, but the wearied eyes, after wandering over ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... of greenish—white radiance shed by her, and it was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now——one could, once—but ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... specimens which he examined to be perfectly isotropic, exercising no influence in depolarizing light. When heated, however, it proved to be remarkably phosphorescent. The translucent varieties were found to transmit a yellowish and to reflect a bluish white light—or, in other words, to exhibit the phenomenon of opalescence. When tabasheer is slightly wetted, it becomes white and opaque; but when thoroughly saturated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... the money standards of the world; the transforming of territories into States by a process as swift and magical almost as that by which the turbid mixture of the chemist is crystallized into its delicate and translucent spars; the building of an empire on the Western coast, looking out toward the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... masks of their faces. But of the lights themselves, of the great latticed columns, of the enormous sponge-like blossoms of the upper surface of the jungle sea, nothing could be seen. They were deep in a tangled maze of translucent flora that was like nothing so much as a forest of giant seaweed transplanted from its natural element. The moss-like carpet beneath their feet was slushy wet and condensed moisture rained steadily from the matted fronds and tendrils above. The air they breathed was ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... which the lancer troop had halted was less than a league from the grove that gave shelter to the two Americans. In the translucent atmosphere of the tableland it looked scarce a mile. The individual forms of troopers could be distinguished, and the two who had taken themselves apart. The taller of these was easily identified as the commanding officer of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... remained as mysterious as before. Of course they did not touch it with bare hands—all wore insulated mittens—but the dazzling stuff was certainly as hard as steel and as highly polished. It was neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent, "like pink mother-of-pearl," ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... will the bright moon shine in its translucent splendor, and never again will you know the happiness and the peace of this beautiful evening, as you waited on that bridge for her who nevermore would come to your ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... and virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders, slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... purpose in the creation—that all the variegated kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as to set off the colour on the surface, while the white, which, if it had been opaque, would have looked somewhat coarse, (as for instance common chalk does,) is rendered just translucent enough to give an impression of extreme purity, but not so translucent as to interfere in the least with the distinctness of any forms into which it is wrought. The colours of variegated marbles are also for the most part very beautiful, especially those composed of purple, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... office of the Comas Consolidated Company was in a towering structure in the metropolis's financial district. On the translucent glass of many doors there was a big C with two smaller C's nested. In the north country everybody called the corporation The ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... the human face—it takes an artist to describe the various faces with their beauty of modelling, their infinite variety of type, their subtlety of expression. You can almost see the flushing of the capillaries under the translucent skin, so fine are the mediums of silk and wool under the magic handling of the talented weavers in brilliant epochs. Not a detail in one of these older canvases of the highest Gothic development ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... flitted Parnassus Apollo, still winging its erratic way where God willed it—a frail, dainty, translucent, wind-blown fleck of white above the gulf—symbol, perhaps of the soul already soaring up out ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... a keyboard; instantly, it appeared on a translucent screen in front of him. He punched another combination, and, at the top of the screen, under the ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... of wind and rain fell upon the water just as we entered that broad part of the passage which bears the name of Muddy Lake. In ordinary weather the waters are here perfectly pure and translucent, but now their agitation brought up the loose earth from the shallow bottom, and made them as turbid as the Missouri, with the exception of a narrow channel in the midst where the current runs deep. Rocky hills now began to show themselves ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... little nostril was pink tinted. The ears were like shells. There was a rigidity in her attitude. She laughed abruptly, perhaps a little nervously, and the abrupt laugh revealed the line of tiny white teeth. Thin arms fell straight to the translucent hands, and there was a recollection of Puritan England in look and in gesture. Her picturesqueness calmed John's ebullient discontent; he decided that she knew nothing of, and was not an accomplice in, his mother's scheme. And, for the sake of his guest, he strove to make himself ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo! Creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find, Whilst flow'r and leaf and insect stood revealed, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... front lawn, and involving gravel walks between flower beds and under umbrageous trees; exotics perennially in bloom; Swiss tree boxes, from which the lark carolled by day and the nightingale warbled at night; an artificial lake, in which goldfishes swam and upon whose translucent bosom majestic swans glided gracefully—I assure you that Mrs. Denslow has the ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... now used for signalling and advertising by night in a variety of ways. Incandescent lamps inside a translucent balloon, and their light controlled by a current key, as in a telegraph circuit, so as to give long and short flashes, according to the Morse code, are employed in the army. Signals at sea are also made by a set of red and white glow-lamps, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... be a queen among the currants, the White Grape is entitled to the crown. When placed upon the table, the dish appears heaped with translucent pearls. The sharp acid of the red varieties is absent, and you feel that if you could live upon them for a time, your blood would grow pure, ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... bright opalescent mist. Green, pink, and other pale colors gleamed as behind a thin layer of crystal. Where the sun shone through a low white cloud upon a distant slope there might have been a great globe of iridescent glass illuminated within. The water was a light, soft, filmy yet translucent blue. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honor's sake, Goddess of the silver lake! Listen ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... vegetable, but chiefly date-palms, that give the highest and most constant return. They cultivate seventy different varieties. There are half a million trees paying taxes—the common variety sixty centimes, the delicate amber-tinted and translucent deglat twice as much; some trees produce more than fifty francs a year. But they require incessant care; "palms must eat and drink," say the Arabs; they drink, in the summer months, a hundred ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Athenais lost nothing with the passing seasons, but grew more perfect, even under the inexplicable shade of dissatisfaction that sometimes veiled it as a translucent cloud that passes before the full moon. "Fair as the wife of Hermas" was a proverb in Antioch; and soon men began to add to it, "Beautiful as the son of Hermas"; for the child developed swiftly ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parload's versatile ink bottle, and on it, leit motif of the whole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into pitiless ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the cluster of fruit on which Mabel had fixed a covetous eye was certainly a tempting one. The rays from two Chinese lanterns, hung near it, brought out its juicy lusciousness with even more than daylight clearness, and Mabel's mouth fairly watered for these translucent grapes. ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... as a whole is beautiful and memorable enough; but its details are wonderful too, from the niello pavement, and the translucent marble windows of the apse, to the famous tomb of Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal, and the Luca della Robbia reliefs of the Virtues. This tomb is by Antonio Rossellino. It is not quite of the rank of Mino's in the Badia; but ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... breath a dozen times, it had expanded into the upper edge of a great throbbing, burning, golden disk, flooding land and sea with its golden radiance—and it was day. The sea changed from purple to a clear translucent green; the vegetation ashore, still black immediately under the sun, merged by a thousand subtle gradations, right and left, into olive-green of every imaginable tint, and finally into a delicate rosy grey in the extreme distance; a multitude of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... which Shirwa Lake lies, and Chikala and Zomba nearly due south from us. People say hippopotami come from Lake Shirwa into Lake Nyassa. There is a great deal of vegetation in Pamalombe, gigantic rushes, duckweed, and great quantities of aquatic plants on the bottom; one slimy translucent plant is washed ashore in abundance. Fish become very fat on these plants; one called "kadiakola" I eat much of; it has a good mass ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... parts we hardly dare step, for fear of crushing something beautiful. We look down upon a bank of green moss, and find snowy, shell-like fungi, so delicate that we hold our breath lest they should float away. Farther on are orange-colored ones, and some shaped like callas, translucent, and in color a pale pink carnelian. Wandering on, we enter a grove of pine-trees, in the midst of which a spring is bubbling up, and the ground is covered with a carpet of ferns, mosses, and wild flowers. By the time we are ready to go home, our baskets are well filled; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... ports of the cabin were discs of scarlet, that pure translucent colour which comes from the reflection of sunset in leagues of still water. The ship lay at anchor under the high green scarp of an island, but on the side of the ports no land was visible—only a circle in ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... less than fifty miles away, Umballa stood before the opening of his elaborate tent, erected at sundown by the river's brink, and scowled at the moon. He saw no beauty in the translucent sky, in the silvery paleness of the world below. He wanted revenge, and the word hissed in his brain as a viper hisses in the ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... height of the blooming season and dripping from overhanging boughs, is equally so. The gold-and-copper pollen turns to rusty tears that mar the petals of satin ivory or inlaid enamel, and a sickly transparency that bodes death comes to the crisp, translucent flower! ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... islanders were like those Chinese who live in great tanka-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,—that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... his hands clawing desperately at that wall as it flickered twice and momentarily became translucent again. He forced his body between folds of palpable darkness, slid into the vanishing blue cone. Instantly he found himself in his normal world, standing in the center of the sitting ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... prevents these being all included; the most important or most commonly used word has therefore been chosen; for instance, "mercury", "tranquil", "diaphanous", "suffocate", "salve", "renown", "fiddle", are not to be found, but "quicksilver", "calm", "translucent", "smother", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... eyes. And this time her face was as white as her gown. Her bosom was heaving. Her skin was translucent. To Trennahan's suffused vision she seemed ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... skill is to be exercised. It enables him to see with the mind's eye through the opaque tissues down to the bone on which they lie, as if the skin were transparent as the cornea, and the organs it covers translucent as the gelatinous pulp ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... or was knotted about her head, without the least disorder, but with a wilfulness of elegant play most harmonious with all the rest of her appearance. To characterise the two in a word, Christina was a beautiful pearl, and Dolly was a translucent opal. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... watching to be placated with food. Opposite the stove, on the white wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons with pierced handles. On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables. The tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the polished brass ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces, and of the reproach ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy |
