"Diaphanous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh red ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... borderland between the visible and the invisible, are very closely twisted twine, similar to the gold cord of our officers' sword-knots. Moreover, they are hollow. The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full of a viscous moisture resembling a strong solution of gum arabic. I can see a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling through the broken ends. Under the pressure of the thin glass slide that covers them on the stage of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled ribbons, traversed from end to end, through the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... passed some days of invincible melancholy and loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the firmament ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... bone osteopathy, periosteum *Pais, paidos child paideutics, pedagogue, encyclopedia Pas, pan all diapason, panacea, pantheism Pathos suffering allopathy, pathology Petros rock petroleum, saltpeter *Phaino show, be visible diaphanous, phenomenon, epiphany, fantastic Philos loving bibliophile, Philadelphia *Phobos fear hydrophobia, Anglophobe Phone sound telephone, symphony *Phos light phosphorous, photograph *Physis nature physiognomy, physiology *Plasma form cataplasm, protoplasm *Pneuma air, breath pneumatic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and Penn, who went out to take an observation, could discover no trace of the vanished rebels. The eastern sky was like a sheet of diaphanous silver, faintly crimsoned above the edges of the hills with streaks of the brightening dawn. All the valley below was inundated by a lake of level mist, whose subtle wave made islands of the hills, and shining inlets of the intervales. Above this sea of white silence rose the mountain ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... and the clouds of spray show dark against them. With both Falls the colour of the water is the ever- altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... He is also of opinion that the dingy, smoky appearance of the sky, in very dry seasons, arises from the want of moisture sufficient to let the light through, and render the atmosphere transparent; because he had observed several bodies more diaphanous when wet than dry; and did never recollect that the air had that ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... morn, for it appeared to me symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed. At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun's disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... of blue, with red and black stripes, and fringed ends. A border of the same robe, adorned with smaller loops, crosses the bosom, and between its blue and red bands the white tint of the skin displays itself, showing that the material of the robe was diaphanous. Relief work in stucco was represented by fragments of a life-sized figure, since pieced together by M. Gillieron, which must have been that of some Minoan King. The head wears a fleur-de-lys crown and peacock plumes, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... forms swayed in unison with the exquisite love music, every step, every motion perfectly attuned. It seemed as though no guiding were necessary. Slowly gliding, turning, reversing, he in his faultless uniform, she in her sweeping, diaphanous sable, seemed, without effort or the faintest exertion, fairly floating upon air. No wonder they sat or stood and gazed—these elders along the bordering benches—these others among the dancers—these few, wordless, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... the long valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the gilded cupola of ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the beholder. The body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian ever achieved. Only in the late Venere del Pardo, which so ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... two, for instance, in the Basel Museum which could not be surpassed; studies in silver-point and water-colours of lambs and a bat outstretched. No reproduction could give the exquisite texture of the bat's wings, the wandering red veins, the almost diaphanous membrane, the furry body,—a miracle of patience and softness. It is all purest Nature. Like Topsy one can but "'spec' it growed" rather than ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... wide emptiness of it. Here among the startled jackdaws I lounged smoking and ruminating upon the bells, oily Cerberus, and his lonely task, and inhaling the misty air from the winding canals in the fertile green fields below—appraising the values of the pale diaphanous sky of misty blue, harmonizing so exquisitely with the tender greens of the landscape which had charmed Cuyp and Memling, until the blue was suffused with molten gold, and over all the landscape spread a tender and lovely radiance, which ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... unafraid, Some strange enchantment doth the forest hold— Was that a sungleam, or a wand of gold By tricksy Puck or wanton Ariel swayed? Old oaks and beeches open wide their doors And hamadryads veiled in golden sheen Floating diaphanous o'er robes of green Walk with still feet the ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... instance,—that are literally transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs. The heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... this diaphanous and snowy mass, I well remember feeling myself to be a mere shadowy spot on a field of light; the courage was not in me to put on a transparent white dress: something thin I must wear—the weather and rooms being too hot ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... was not insupportable. And so, in chatting and thinking and waiting for the engineer, Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans walked about beneath the forest of screws, whose gyratory movement gave their arms the appearance of semi-diaphanous disks. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... themselves to right and left like officiating priestesses. The veiled figure stands with her back against the curtain, the others being in profile. Her head is swathed in folds of diaphanous white, through which the features are visible, like ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... enclose you a scrap to justify my complaint. It was almost by Intuition, not on Theory, that I deciphered what I did. Pray you amend this. My MS. is bad enough, and on that very account I would avoid diaphanous ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... The shores unfolded in a panorama without form. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights following us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn we overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made a course east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... sound until after I spoke to it; but I could see the grey diaphanous form standing before me ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... things are not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly—for I can't go through the catalogue—I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at evening; they battle ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... thought he smiled bitterly. Mere tricks of his desire! Illusions! . . . Upon turning his head he recognized the falsity of his hope. Nobody was following his footsteps; he was the only being going down the center of the avenue. Near him, in the diaphanous white of a guardian angel, was a nurse. Poor blind man! . . . Desnoyers was passing on when a quick movement on the part of the white-clad woman, an evident desire to escape notice, to hide her face by looking at the plants, attracted his attention. He was slow in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... attended with no beneficial result to humanity at large, were doubtless well intended by their author. He was the first man who brought optical science under the command of mathematics, by the discovery of the law of refraction of the ordinary ray through diaphanous bodies; and probably there is scarcely a name on record, the bearer of which has given a greater impulse to mathematical and philosophical inquiry than Des Cartes. Although, as a mathematician, he published ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... but for an instant, and consider the mysterious fashion in which they manage to act in concert and combine their labour, when simultaneously carving two opposite sides of a comb, and unable therefore to see each other. Take a finished comb to the light, fix your eyes on the diaphanous wax; you will see, most clearly designed, an entire network of sharply cut prisms, a whole system of concordances so infallible that one might almost believe them to be ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... that, after resisting repeated entreaties on her part to witness some of its performances, I at length, at her earnest request, saw her operate upon it. The writing was almost unintelligible, and undoubtedly produced by the vibrating impulse given to the machine by her nervous, feeble, diaphanous hands. Finding my scepticism invincible by these means, my friend implored me to think in my own mind a question, and see if Planchette would not answer it. I yielded at last to her all but hysterical importunity, and thought of an heraldic question concerning ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... fire from Horace was another easychair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into Hume. ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Mrs. Abe Tutts's diaphanous "tea-gown" laid out on the breeze, thereby revealing the fact that she was wearing Congress ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... art where thou dost stand, With step arrested, on the bridge that joins The Past and Future—thy one hand waving Farewell to Summer, whose fond kiss hath set Thy yellow cheeks aglow, the other stretched To greet advancing Winter! Nor can thy veil, tissue diaphanous Of crimsoned haze, conceal thy lustrous eyes;— Those eyes in whose dark depths a tear-drop lurks Ready to fall, for Beauty loved and lost. From thy point gazing, maiden, let us, too, Once more behold the panorama fair Of the lost year. See where, far down yon slope That meets the sun, doth quick ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris—who stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out, bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged—that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... within a few feet of him was shattered to pieces. In the sunny afternoons the pretty senoritas come to the plaza with their heads and necks lightly shrouded in Spanish veils, and otherwise clothed in diaphanous garments, short enough to show their shapely ankles in white hose, and their small feet in high-heeled, pointed slippers. He must be indeed calloused who can withstand, unmoved, the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Walter sat for a long time in the heat of the noonday regarding one another with undisguised interest. They were in the midst of a plain of moorland, over which a haze of heat hung like a diaphanous veil. Over the edge there appeared, like a plain of blue mist, the strath, with the whitewashed farmhouses glimmering up like patches of snow on a March hillside. The minister came down from the dyke and sat beside the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Indian stand motionless before these silent walls? The cool atmosphere woos him with its transparency and its perfumes; the radiant stars send down upon the sleeping earth rays of diaphanous mildness; the white constellations illumine the darkness with their enchanting light; his heart believes in those sympathetic communications which brave ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... diameter, which glowed as a small mountain with the customary plain and colored glasses, bottles, labels, and mirrors. The floor was a composition of small, shaded red-and-green marbles; the ceiling a daub of pinky, fleshy nudes floating among diaphanous clouds; the walls were alternate panels of cerise and brown set in rosewood. Mr. Kerrigan, when other duties were not pressing, was usually to be found standing chatting with several friends and surveying the wonders of his bar trade, which was very large. On the day of Mr. Gilgan's call he ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... he told her he hoped never to see her ugly old face again. And that delicate little creature in the box next to her—that pale diaphanous face?' ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... Jewish beauty. This remarkable effect was produced by the depth of the eye-socket, under which the eye moved free from its setting; the arch of the brow was so accurate as to resemble the groining of a vault. When youth lends this beautiful hollow its pure and diaphanous coloring, and edges it with closely-set eyebrows, when the light stealing into the circular cavity beneath lingers there with a rosy hue, there are tender treasures in it to delight a lover, beauties to drive a painter to despair. Those luminous curves, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... are both formed of a dry, broad membrane, diaphanous and as fine as the white skin on the outside of an onion, which is capable of vibrating over its whole area. Their shape is that of the segment of a circle, cut away at the upper end. This segment is bent at a right angle along a strong ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... ancients and the endorsement of it at a comparatively recent era. "Pearls," naturalists tell us, "have a strange birth and original. Pliny saith, Shell fish is the wonderful geniture of a pearl congealed into a diaphanous stone, and the shell is called the mother of pearl. Now at a certain time of the year this shell fish opens itself, and takes in a certain moist dew, after which they grow big until they bring forth ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... taking the hand she held out; it was a small white hand—small without being frail or diaphanous. "And you are Miss Gordon, I suppose? I am sorry Gordon is away, but no doubt we shall be able to find somewhere to ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... beauty of the Saxons. It was a radiant face, one of those that seem to have been touched in their cradle by a sunbeam, and to have retained all their brilliancy and suffused and mantling lustre. One marks sometimes such faces, diaphanous with delicate splendour, in the southern regions of France. Her eye, too, was the rare eye of Aquitaine; soft and long, with lashes drooping over the cheek, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... region where prawns and shrimps are the inhabitants. The caves look huge, and would hold an army of them. The rocks jut boldly out, and throw strange shadows on the pool. The light falls effectively from above, and in and out and round about go the prawns, with black eyes glaring from their diaphanous helmets, in colourless, translucent, if not transparent ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... begun, that I felt a moisture gather in my eyes just because of the beauty of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the women about me seemed suddenly coarse and insincere. Some wonderful red stones, brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the diaphanous black driftings of her dress. She asked me if the stones were not very pretty, and said she gathered them in ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... than ourselves, after several generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light! In due course of ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will ourselves—at least, I will—bend unseen over the future poet, and lend him inspiration while he ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the daylight (in which, from that spot, they always looked exactly as though cut out of cardboard); why Providence had not arranged for perpetual full-moon; why the world looked such a place of peaceful, glorious beauty by moonlight, the bare cruel mountains like diaphanous clouds of tenderest soothing mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a fairy palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when all was so abominable by day; and, as ever—why his darling, Lenore Stukeley, had had to marry de Warrenne ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... of the sun, or of a window or door or other opening. The third is Reflected light; and there is a 4th which is that which passes through [semi] transparent bodies, as linen or paper or the like, but not transparent like glass, or crystal, or other diaphanous bodies, which produce the same effect as though nothing intervened between the shaded object and the light that falls upon it; and this we will ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... obtained from Selukine, massed against walls draped with green, made an exquisite setting for her entertainment and her own beauty. She glided here and there among the amber lights, welcoming her guests and setting them at the little green-clad card tables, a diaphanous vision of gold-and-orange chiffons, her perfect neck and shoulders ablaze with diamonds, and her little flat-coiffed black head, rather snakelike on its long throat, banded by ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... His clear diaphanous transparency of colouring is not used from lack of technical ability, but to approach more nearly to his ideal of celestial and divine visions, and succeed in a ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... succes d'estime. Her style was, like her temperament, delicately constructed and of extreme refinement, not the style to appeal to the masses. It was "searched," a little precieuse, and the tales themselves were diaphanous enough, polished little contes, the points subtle, the action turning ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... to them, I found they were merely turret-like eminences of hard bluish clay, the carapace of the desert, which the wind has carved into quaint semblances of human dwellings. In the evening light they catch the last rays of the sun and shine like diaphanous spectres upon the darkened ground, but at sunrise, when the yellow sands sparkle with light, they tower up grim and menacing: a mournful, ghoul-haunted region, like those veritable townships ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... effort of the imagination we can picture a prismatic color sphere, using only the colors of light. In a cylindrical chamber is hung a diaphanous ball similar to a huge soap bubble, which can display color on its surface without obscuring its interior. Then, at the proper points of the surrounding wall, three pure beams of colored light are admitted,—one red, another ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... about her diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing floating, no mist. She was an apparition; rose-coloured and fresh, and full of health. Yet, under the optical condition in which Ursus and Gwynplaine were placed, she looked like a vision. There are fleshy phantoms, called ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... becomes the diaphanous veil through which glint realities of which all phenomena are expressions."—Croydon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... who had treasured up so long some mystery, probably a very diaphanous one, for Emily's own dear sake in the world's esteem, and from the long bad habit of reserve, fell back into his chair as if he had been shot; but he did not faint, nor gasp, nor utter a sound; he only looked at her so long and sorrowfully, that she ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... amongst the brilliant green corn. It lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We traveled on, therefore, by the quickest and easiest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... early dawn there was plenty to see. Even though you did not watch the citron-coloured sky overhead as it slowly changed its diaphanous draperies for others that were rose, then crimson, and then gold, finally casting off these two, and showing its blue magnificence unadorned. There were the soldiers on guard at the doors, their yellow helmets shining in the sun, their ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... arose, towards the region away from the Sun, two long luminous streaks which limited the tail. Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance appeared to be dark, of great rarity, and very diaphanous. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... her soul, which is lighter than the most luminous ether. Truly there is in this figure an unheard-of force of ascension, and in order to obtain this effect Titian has not had recourse to slender forms, diaphanous draperies, and transparent colours. His Madonna is a very true, very living, and very real woman, with a beauty as solid as that of the Venus de Milo, or the sleeping woman in the Tribune of Florence. Large, full drapery flows about her in numerous folds; her flanks are wide enough ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... down, turning the dancing guests into pirouetting ghosts in diaphanous blue and green, scarlet ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... to drive no one out," he said, lifting a diaphanous hand. "To his own master let each man stand or fall. But you ask us—us, the appointed guardians of the Faith—the ecclesia docens—the historic episcopate—to deny and betray the Faith! You ask us to assent formally to the effacing of all difference ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... school of critics which rather finds the difficulty in picturing a life which has keen perceptions, robust emotions, and a solid surrounding all constructed in so diaphanous a material. Let us remember that everything depends upon its comparison with the ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... calling for aid. Bursting through the thicket, he discovers Sir Guyon, lying on the ground, watched over by a spirit of such transcendent beauty that the palmer realizes it must be an angel even before he notes its diaphanous wings. This ministering spirit assures the palmer that Sir Guyon will soon recover, adding that although unseen he will continue to watch over him, and will help him to escape from all the dangers along his path. Then the heavenly spirit vanishes, and, while the palmer is bending over the fainting ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... to form the hinges for these. In twenty seconds I counted seventy expansions and dilatations of this apparatus. The chaplet and the bag that holds it are flesh-coloured; the rest of the body is gelatinous and diaphanous. They live in families, and swim with great rapidity in the same manner ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... sleep. From the walls of a great palace whose entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, wearily languorous, expressing bodily ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... circumference, so as to make a line of least resistance. The perfect insect will only have to heave with its shoulder and strike a few blows with its head in order to raise the circular door and knock it off like the lid of a box. The passage of exit shows through the diaphanous skin of the pea as a large circular spot, which is darkened by the obscurity of the interior. What passes behind it is invisible, hidden as, it is behind a sort of ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... desires, he proceeds himself to give it the finishing touches, improving the details of form and expression, managing the different effects produced by two different materials—one, the plastic model, being opaque; the other, the marble, being considerably diaphanous; giving the proper varieties of texture in the flesh, hair, and drapery, and, more especially, ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... not transparent or diaphanous like Chrystall or glasse,[1] as Empedocles thought, who held the Moone to bee a globe of pure congealed aire, like haile inclosed in a spheare of fire, ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... that his fusion with all nature renders the poet's personality so diaphanous that his presence is unobtrusive in poetry of ideas, but we may still object to his thrusting himself into realistic poetry. Shelley's poet-heroes we will tolerate, as translucent mediums of his thought, but we are not inclined to ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... vast amount of latent force and energy here, but it takes a cannon to put it in action. Of course there are exceptions enough. Our friend Henry Bright is a slender, diaphanous young gentleman, of a nervous temperament, with no beer or roast beef apparent in his mind or person; and there are doubtless many like him. The English are unfortunate in noses. Their noses are unspiritual, thick at the end; and there ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... china, adorned by medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping of the ivy leaves against the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... there are often several words to express the same or nearly the same meaning. Want of space 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
... feet and shook out the folds of her diaphanous gown, daring alike in its shapelessness and scantiness. She lit a cigarette and laid her hand upon ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... club, which preserved an ice-cold stream in a Northern forest. For years the choicest fruits of all the earth had been served daily upon his table. Yet as he looked back to-day no shining trout that had ever risen to his fly had stirred his emotions like the diaphanous minnows, caught, with a crooked pin, in the crooked creek; no luscious fruit had ever matched in sweetness the sour grapes and bitter nuts gathered from the native woods—by him and Peter in ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fetes Galantes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... view to the west—a scene of theatrical clarity with a single theatrical smear. From a hollow far below slothful smoke filtered through the matted, sombre, dew-bespangled foliage, rose a few feet, and drifted abruptly, dissolving from diaphanous blue to nothingness. The resonant whooping of a swamp pheasant, antiphonal to a bell-voiced, crimson-crowned fruit pigeon in a giant fig-tree, the screeches of a sulphur-crested cockatoo as it tumbled ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of the thrones and diadems of the elect, was an immutable realm in which there was neither death nor life, clear ether merely, charged with beatitudes. And so, when the disciples disputed among themselves, Mary dreamed of diaphanous hours and immaculate days that knew no night, and in this wise lived until from the terrace of Jerusalem's Temple the Master bade her return to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... European sisters. Altogether, the girl's outer and visible aspect is not unattractive to the eye of the traveler, however faulty to the eye of the traveler's wife. When about to dance, the Alme puts on a lighter and more diaphanous dress, eschews her slippers, and with a slow and measured step advances to the centre of the room—her lithe figure undulating with a grace peculiarly serpentile. The music is that of a reed pipe or a tambourine—a number of attendants assisting with castanets. Perhaps the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... got everything," he said, standing in diaphanous contemplation. The one thing that worried him a little was the studs. They had looked over twenty different varieties, flat ones and solid gold ones, spirals, encrusted studs, and studs that anchored with a queer twist. Finally they had ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... gloomy air out of Stygian deeps, as are the thoughts of spirits like Randal Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mrs. Burton Jones' garden party, the Bainbridge event for which Miss Davis was, presumably, staying over. Mary, in a new frock of sheerest grey and most diaphanous white, and a hat which lay like a breath of mist against the gold of her hair, had come down early. In the course of an observant career, she had learned that, in one respect at least, men are like worms. They are inclined to be early. Mary had often ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... scandal, but I thought that outward decency may be bought too dearly at times. I included Jacobus, myself, the whole population of the island, in the same contemptuous disgust as though we had been partners in an ignoble transaction. And the remembered vision at sea, diaphanous and blue, of the Pearl of the Ocean at sixty miles off; the unsubstantial, clear marvel of it as if evoked by the art of a beautiful and pure magic, turned into a thing of horrors too. Was this the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... take into the mind and analyze a character like Courtlandt's, sought the line of least resistance for their understanding, and built some precious exploits which included dusky island-princesses, diaphanous dancers, and ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... a sound should be made! Oh, what if a bound should be laid To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, — To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, — [91] Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light, Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem But a bubble ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... d'Artagnan all aspects were clothed happily, all ideas wore a smile, all shades were diaphanous. The appointed hour was about to strike. In fact, at the end of a few minutes the belfry of St. Cloud let fall slowly ten strokes from its sonorous jaws. There was something melancholy in this brazen voice pouring out its lamentations in the middle of the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to the front porch and gazed skyward. The wind—as the saying is—had "catched in," and was blowing briskly from the north-west, chasing diaphanous clouds across the blue zenith. The roofs still shone wet and dazzling, and there were puddles in the street. But he knew the afternoon was going to be a fine one. He took pleasure in this when, a few moments ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... is sightless because, through so much weeping, there remains no more moisture, not even the crystalline and moisture through which, as a diaphanous medium, the visual ray was transmitted, and the external light and visible species were introduced, so that the heart became compressed because all the moist substance, whose office it is to keep united the various parts and opposites, was absorbed, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... part of the practical work of these experiments fell to the share of Signor Lo Bianco. The success that attended his efforts is remarkable. To-day you may see at the laboratory all manner of filmy, diaphanous creatures preserved in alcohol, retaining every jot of their natural contour, and thus offering unexampled opportunities for study en masse, or for being sectioned for the microscope. The methods by which this surprising result has been ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... exactly like that of shadows made by the sun at noonday, with this only difference, that one lies flat on the ground, the other is erect, and one is dark, the other light or diaphanous. Our vulgar idea of ghosts, especially with regard to their not being tangible, corresponds ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... black, the anterior with a small diaphanous spot near the base, below the median nervure; a larger one before the middle extending from the sub-costal to the radial nervure, divided by the median nervure into two unequal portions, the extremity of the cell marked by a crescent-shaped, metallic blue spot, beyond which are two diaphanous ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... occasion, though, the moon was rising higher and higher, pouring down a flood of silver light, which lit up the denser part with its soft diaphanous rays. ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Moors, then," she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... not without some Reason, that I ascribe Colour (in the sense formerly explan'd) chiefly to the Superficial parts of Bodies, for not to question how much Opacous Corpuscles may abound even in those Bodies we call Diaphanous, it seems plain that of Opacous bodies we do indeed see little else than the Superficies, for if we found the beams of Light that rebound from the Object to the Eye, to peirce deep into the Colour'd body, we should not judge it Opacous, but either ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... next morning her star is surely in the ascendant. Cecil sleeps late. Floyd is down on the porch, reading and smoking, when the flutter of a diaphanous robe, with billowy laces, attracts his eyes and ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... spring in that region. One had sat down to a tinkling piano, and was striking a few chords, more to her own pleasure than that of the company. Two or three were looking out into the garden, where the diaphanous veil of twilight had so speedily thickened to the crape of night, its darkness filled with thousands of small isolated splendours—fire-flies, those "golden boats" never seen "on a sunny sea," but haunting the eves of the young summer, pulsing, pulsing through the dusky air with seeming ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... of an indescribable sweetening of the address, that had been sweet, with a rose-shadow of gentle apology cast over every approach; of a deepening of the atmosphere of his reverence, which yet as it deepened grew more diaphanous. And when now the episode of angelic visitation was over, with his usual wisdom he understood the wrench her abrupt departure must have given his whole being, and allowed him plenty of time to recover himself from it. Once he came upon him weeping: not with faintest ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... streamed the noon sun warmly. Under its light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,—circular, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint, diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... again. When she smiled she was irresistible: a laughing face protruding from a cloud of diaphanous drapery. "Now, shall I tell you how I came to know that?" she asked, poising a glace cherry on her dessert fork in front of her. "Shall I explain my trick, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... mists which float above the meadows of a September morning. As the soldiers turned to look back, an invisible hand seemed to lift from the landscape the last of these veils—a delicate vapor, like a diaphanous gauze through which the glow of precious jewels excites our curiosity. Not a cloud could be seen on the wide horizon to mark by its silvery whiteness that the vast blue arch was the firmament; it seemed, on the contrary, a dais of silk, held up by the summits of the mountains and placed in the atmosphere, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... goddesses, who disported themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... craft was passing in the shadow of a great tree—stealing over the dark, unruffled depth. A girl dressed in white, with a large diaphanous white hat and a general air of brisk English daintiness, was paddling slowly and with no ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... had come—why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and there to concrete form—as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is caught by a thorn. So they build around it—as flesh around spirit. But it was ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... doleful music of the band suggested lost souls wailing on the borders of Cocytus or the Stygian creek. Young caballeros dressed in white, the concijales with their silver-headed canes and baggy trousers, and the "taos" in diaphanous and flimsy shirts that they had not yet learned to tuck inside, stood by to watch the senoritas on their way to church. The girls walked rather stiffly in their tight shoes; but as soon as mass was over, shoes and ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... eyes, blinding him for an instant; then he saw her. A huge four-posted bed with silken hangings occupied a recess in the room. Across its foot a low couch was drawn. She had thrown herself there. Her head was pillowed on crimson gold-embroidered cushions; her diaphanous draperies, billowing foamlike over her, half concealed, half revealed her lovely form; her hair waved away from her brows, and spread like a shower of gold over the cushions. One bare arm hung to the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation of a section of the picture: the highest light being some infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... it floats a long cradle, formed by the coils of a serpent, all whose heads, bending forward at the same time, overshadow a god who lies there asleep. He is young, beardless, more beautiful than a girl, and covered with diaphanous veils. The pearls of his tiara shine softly, like moons; a chaplet of stars winds itself many times above his breast, and, with one hand under his head and the other arm extended, he reposes with a dreamy and intoxicated air. A woman squatted ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... where the Alps of Death descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there is a world of whiteness—frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aerial onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... easel, working assiduously, was one who seemed to be the artist himself, his face turned from me towards his canvas. Posed before him, in an attitude of indolent grace, was a woman, arrayed in clinging diaphanous drapery, a few priceless jewels gleaming here and there like stars upon her bosom and arms— her hair, falling in loose waves from a band of pale blue velvet fastened across it, was of a warm brown hue like an autumn leaf with the sun ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... next morning of any of the clothes. Heavy things, such as sheets or table cloths, might be safely looked for under lee of the nearest gorse hedge, but it would be impossible even to guess where the lighter and more diaphanous articles had been whisked to. A week afterwards the shepherds used to bring in stray cuffs and collars, and upon one occasion "Judy," the calf, was discovered in a paddock hard by, breakfasting off my best pocket handkerchiefs with an excellent appetite. ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... spiritualized Northern blue—colors water and sky. A cannon- shot suddenly shakes the heavy air: it is our farewell to the American shore;—we move. Back floats the wharf, and becomes vapory with a bluish tinge. Diaphanous mists seem to have caught the sky color; and even the great red storehouses take a faint blue tint as they recede. The horizon now has a greenish glow, Everywhere else the effect is that of looking through very light- ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... upon the city, the evening-star hanging like a jonquil blossom. They are dimmed by the unwonted radiance which spreads around and above Carlton House. As viewed from aloft the glare rises through the skylights, floods the forecourt towards Pall Mall, and kindles with a diaphanous glow the huge tents in the gardens that overlook the Mall. The hour has arrived of the Prince ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... diminishes the temperature rises. But each September day is shorter than the one before it, and, hour by hour, the rays of the sun part with some of their power. Towards the end of the month the nights are cooler than they have been for some time. At sunset the village smoke begins to hang low in a diaphanous cloud—a sure sign of the approaching cold weather. The night dews are heavy. In the morning the blades of grass and the webs of the spiders are bespangled with pearly dewdrops. Cool zephyrs greet the rising ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... unaesthetic sex, as Schopenhauer calls it?" But Gertrude has set her heart on his doing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with never having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the eyes ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... of oils collected by John, abbot of Monza, in the cemeteries of Rome, and offered by him to Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards. Special mention is made in the document of the oil from the tomb of S. Cornelius; and de Rossi asserts that the fragments of a diaphanous oil-basin found in the exploration of this crypt were soaked with an ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... foolish and romantic, no doubt, for they might have met just as conveniently in the conservatory of Clyffe House, where their privacy would have been equally respected, and where Miss Alix's satin shoes and diaphanous draperies would have exposed her to no risk of a chill. Lovers are like that, however, and had they not been so on this occasion, I should have had no story ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... diaphanous succeed Dense garments made of fur, And overcoats maintain the lead— Among the things that were! The wisely-rented sealskin sacque, By many a dame possessed, Be quickly relegated back To its ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... his own person, and in that strange glare, he was interpreting the picture to us. He stood, not thrown back like Macbeth, but drawn forward, on tiptoe, with neck reached out, form erect, but lax, one arm extended, and one long diaphanous finger pointing over our heads at something he saw behind us, but towards which, in the extremity of our terror, we dared not turn our eyes. He saw it,—more than saw it,—we knew, as we noted the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the power of transmitting light:—some rather fine trade distinctions are drawn between the stones in this class, technical distinctions made specially for purposes of classification, thus:—a "non-diaphanous" stone is one which is quite opaque, no light of any kind passing through its substance; a "diaphanous" stone is one which is altogether transparent; "semi-diaphanous" means one not altogether transparent, and sometimes called "sub-transparent." ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... limpidity; fluorescence; transillumination, translumination[obs3]. transparent medium, glass, crystal, lymph, vitrite[obs3], water. V. be transparent &c. adj.; transmit light. Adj. transparent, pellucid, lucid, diaphanous, translucent, tralucent|, relucent[obs3]; limpid, clear, serene, crystalline, clear as crystal, vitreous, transpicuous[obs3], glassy, hyaline; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the woods, a few rods away. The rain, which had fallen heavily for hours, light and fine now, drew a shimmering veil before the trees,—a veil like a Japanese bead-hanging, which hides nothing, only the rain veil was more diaphanous than anything fashioned by human hands. It did not conceal, but enhanced the charm of everything behind it, lending a glamour that turned the woods ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... as herself, with low walls hung with Imari plaques and with pretty little Swiss brackets bearing blue Kaga ware, or the pure white Coalport china. In a low chair beneath a red shaded standing lamp sat Ida, in a diaphanous evening dress of mousseline de soie, the ruddy light tinging her sweet childlike face, and glowing on her golden curls. She sprang up as her sister entered, and threw ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cultivation was added to the scents of the woods. Just then the Angelus was ringing at Blangy, and the sounds of the bell, mingling with the wild concert of the forest, gave harmony to the silence. Here and there were rising vapors, white, diaphanous. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... clothing and smiling faces. It was the express wish of Sophia that none of the company should wear white. "That distinction," she said, "ought to be reserved for the bride;" and among the maids in pink and blue and primrose, she stood a very lily of womanhood. Her diaphanous, floating robe of Dacca muslin; her Indian veil of silver tissue, filmy as light; her gleaming pearls and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... we had been pressing on at a good rate towards the undulating plain beneath us. The mountains we had crossed now loomed high above our heads, and Sheba's Breasts were veiled modestly in diaphanous wreaths of mist. As we went the country grew more and more lovely. The vegetation was luxuriant, without being tropical; the sun was bright and warm, but not burning; and a gracious breeze blew softly along the odorous slopes of the mountains. Indeed, this new land was ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... sixth is that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... turning over the leaves of the book. [440] What a rare tale is that of the Ensorcelled Prince, alias The Young King of the Black Isles, who though he sat in a palace where fountains limbecked water "clear as pearls and diaphanous gems," and wore "silken stuff purfled with Egyptian gold," was from his midriff downwards not man but marble! Who is not shocked at the behaviour of the Three Ladies of Baghdad! In what fearful peril the caliph and the Kalendars placed themselves when, in spite of warning, they would ask questions! ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up through the stable-yard into the front court. There the great iron gates rose before him, diaphanous-looking and flimsy in the starlight. He went up to them and shook them; and a loose shield jangled fiercely overhead. Then he peered through, holding the bars, and saw the familiar patch of grass beyond the gravel sweep, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... he could see that a diaphanous gauze of dust overhung it and the air was heavy with the most volatile particles. The sandy earth had been ground and worked to the depth of over a foot. How difficult had it been for the rearmost ranks to cover this ploughed soil! The track was a mile in width, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... invidious ceremony called picking up. This was heralded by Mr. Britling, clad in the diaphanous flannels and bearing a hockey stick, advancing with loud shouts to the centre of the hockey field. "Pick up! Pick up!" ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... parchment, paper, linen, &c., after they have been made transparent, which may be accomplished in the following manner:— stretch your paper, or whatever it may be, on a frame or drawing board, then apply two successive coats (a day between each,) of diaphanous liquor, and after leaving it to dry for several days, cover it with a thin layer of very clear size, and when dry it will be in a fit state to receive the coat of varnish and the designs. Silk, linen, or other stuffs, should be more carefully stretched, and receive a thicker ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young |
