"Phosphorescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... She was slim and tall, about twenty-seven years of age, with beautiful black hair and finely-formed features. Her almond-shaped eyes were likewise dark, but had a phosphorescent gleam, which gave her the name of Luciola, or the fire-fly. She was dressed in a red satin dress, and wore a jaunty black felt hat. There was quite a romantic legend connected with the pretty girl: ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... his torch unlighted, and moved along; there was a little illumination from the phosphorescent markers at some of the corners, and from the stars. He could just make his way without ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... torture, under the pale glimmer of the phosphorescent mushrooms must have lasted for hours, but I no longer had the perception of time or peril. Only the appalling fear of the flesh kept me grasping tightly to the rock without making ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... meridian; noonday, tide; cloudless, clear; unclouded, unobscured[obs3]. gairish[obs3], garish; resplendent, transplendent[obs3]; refulgent, effulgent; fulgid[obs3], fulgent[obs3]; relucent[obs3], splendid, blazing, in a blaze, ablaze, rutilant[obs3], meteoric, phosphorescent; aglow. bright as silver; light as day, bright as day, light as noonday, bright as noonday, bright as the sun at noonday. actinic; photogenic[obs2], graphic; heliographic; heliophagous[obs3]. Phr. " a day for gods to stoop and men to soar " [Tennyson]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... commence to hiss and burn with a greenish flame; a cloud obscures the moon wholly, and the scene is lighted only by the fire under the melting-pot, the owl's eyes, and the phosphorescent glow of the decaying oaks. As he casts the bullets, Caspar calls out their number, which the echoes repeat. Strange phenomena accompany each moulding; night-birds come flying from the dark woods and gather around the fire; a black boar crashes through ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Night came down upon them and seemed to crush the spirit out of them. As they emerged from the wood, the moon rose and flooded the broad plain with weird, phosphorescent light. They struggled on, swaying with sleep, past the ghostly outlines of poplars and hayricks, past quiet, deserted cottages and empty stables. There was something almost unearthly about that march in the moonlight. The accumulated fatigue ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... men were engaged with their meal, Dr Hopley came on deck and found her leaning over the stern, looking down at the waves which shone with sparkling phosphorescent light. An almost imperceptible breeze had sprung up, and the way made by the vessel as she passed through the water was indicated by a stream of ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... mention it. Chromidrosis, or colored sweat, is an interesting anomaly exemplified in numerous reports. Black sweat has been mentioned by Bartholinus, who remarked that the secretion resembled ink; in other cases Galeazzi and Zacutus Lusitanus said the perspiration resembled sooty water. Phosphorescent sweat has been recorded. Paullini and the Ephemerides mention perspiration which was of a leek-green color, and Borellus has observed deep green perspiration. Marcard mentions green perspiration of the feet, possibly ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... was so fine, and the gentle breeze setting in from the ocean was so cool and grateful, after the excessive heat of the day, that we continued for some time loitering along the shore. The sea was highly phosphorescent; that is, during the earlier part of the evening, and before the mist or haze before spoken of cleared up. The tiny wavelets, as they rippled upon the beach in rapid succession, sparkled with phosphoric fire, and out in the lagoon, wherever a coral patch rose to the surface, or the water ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... two the blazing fire had given place to a heap of wood ashes, over which, as the rising wind swept round the place, what seemed to be a faint phosphorescent light played for a few moments and ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... moment. Hold tight," I said in a choking voice, as I rubbed the match on the bottom of the box, making a phosphorescent line of light, then another, and another, before impatiently throwing the match from me and seeing its dim light die away in ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... musquitoes vex not, and lesser tormentors of the rampant kind are inactive, it is no slight boon to have such an interval, during some part of which you may sleep in peace. As for the night, you may use it for eating ices, or strolling on the Marina, or pulling out on the phosphorescent waters of the bay; but unless you be very fresh, you will hardly think of using that as the time for turning in. And thus are rendered grateful those slumbers which are induced by the prevailing spirit of noon. Of course, under such conditions of existence, there is no great probability ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... World, and seriously of Alexandra's ambitions. I sat thinking with my arms folded on the table till I fell asleep. Then I felt at first that I was lifted up on the Mountain again, and leaving that presently, was carried out into space far away among the stars. Phosphorescent mists and cloud masses passed over the region, and among these appeared various figures, the last of which was, that of a certain ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... formidable, and quiet, like one of those old Pharaohs who are celebrated in the ballads sung by blind men at the street corners. She remembered also her thin, wretched mother, wandering like a hungry cat about the house, which she filled with the tones of her sharp voice, and the glitter of her phosphorescent eyes. They said in the neighbourhood that she was a witch, and changed into an owl at night, and flew to see her lovers. It was a lie. Thais knew well, having often watched her, that her mother practised no magic arts, but that she was eaten up with avarice, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... be right behind; although it's a pity the water isn't phosphorescent. Then I could follow your incandescent heel like that chap Byron wrote about—don't ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Pyrosoma was caught by us in the deep-sea trawl. It was like a great sac, with its walls of jelly about an inch in thickness. It was four feet long and ten inches in diameter. When a Pyrosoma is stimulated by having its surface touched, the phosphorescent light breaks out just at the spot stimulated, and then spreads over the surface of the colony to the surrounding animals. I wrote my name with my finger on the surface of the giant Pyrosoma as it lay on deck, and my name came out in a few seconds in letters of fire." ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... the complete enjoyment that comes from understanding. Confident as we are that Prometheus captured his fire from Heaven, we ought to learn something of its attributes before we accept it at his hands, that we may be able to distinguish a true spark of the divine flame from a phosphorescent will-o'-the-wisp. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... secret visit that he had lately made to Doom, the Forbidden; of how he had crossed the river on a raft, the moon being in its dark quarter; of his landing upon a shaking wharf, where each foot-fall left a print of phosphorescent fire on the rotting planks; then of the marvels that he had seen there—vast warehouses covering whole acres of ground and filled with incalculable store of goods; lofty buildings, whose chimney-pots were in the clouds; palaces of sculptured stone, now empty and despoiled, the habitation ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never penetrated, and modern guessers cannot conjecture through. There is, indeed, 'oak and triple brass' upon his breast who steeps his lips in the chalice of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... element of beauty or power is lacking." From this rough pulpit of masonry we gazed at the booming breakers rolling in with their crests of gleaming silver, that were shattered to fragments immediately below us. Their long sprays of phosphorescent blossoms vanished like stars in the golden light of dawn. The sea was now bathed in a flood of mellow light and its gradations of color revealed palest amethyst along the horizon, while nearer it glowed with brightest ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... the little green Euglena (Fig. 9), whose presence in standing ponds and puddles often imparts a greenish color to the water. Then in the salt water near the surface there are often myriads of minute Noctiluca whose wonderfully phosphorescent little bodies glow like coals of fire when the water is disturbed at night. Although this class contains fewer forms than the preceding some of these have within recent years been found to be of great importance because they live as parasites on man and other animals. The trypanosome whose ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... before us. Rubies were there like great drops of the blood that the chest and its treasure had wrung from the hearts of men; sapphires, mirroring the blue of the tropic sky; emeralds, green as the island verdure; pearls, white as the milk of the cocoanuts and softly luminous as the phosphorescent foam which broke on the beach in the darkness. And there were diamonds that caught gleams of all the others' beauty, and then mocked them ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... fishes, nevertheless, having well-developed organs of vision, have been taken from such depths (over a mile) as to preclude the possibility of a single ray of daylight.[7] These fishes, however, are phosphorescent, and thus furnish their own light. Moreover, I am inclined to believe that the vast depths of the ocean, in certain localities, lie bathed in a continuous phosphorescent glow, so that creatures living there neither lose their color nor ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... a shouting band of the youth of Spain, strapping boys with bushy locks, crisp and black almost to blueness, and gay young girls with flexible forms and dark Arab eyes that shine with a phosphorescent light in the shadows. They troop on with clacking castinets. The challenge of the mozos rings out on the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... any desired depth through the medium of a "messenger." Small crustaceans were plentiful on the surface, but they were if anything more numerous at depths of fifty to one hundred fathoms. Amongst the latter were some strongly phosphorescent forms. The flying birds were "logged" daily by the biologists. Emperor and Adelie penguins were occasionally seen, among the floes as well as sea-leopards, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... always floating about a foot or two from the surface, sometimes standing still as though he was looking for something on the ground, and sometimes moving very quickly. It was a will-o'-the-wisp—a phosphorescent exhalation. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... uneasily at its berth as we made our way aboard, and with shouts of men and clang of bells it was soon tossing on the dark waters of the bay. Out from the shelter of the wharves the wind buffeted us wildly, and the black waves were threshed into phosphorescent foam against the sides of the tug, while their crests, self-luminous, stretched away in changing ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... south-westerly gale, it seems more hopeless than the shade of Hades. The south-westerly mood of the great West Wind is a lightless mood, without sun, moon, or stars, with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent flashes of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up on each side of the ship, fling bluish gleams upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as she runs, chased by enormous ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... limbo. Jack finds a way for himself, but he does not calculate for my height above the saddle; and I am directed forward, all braced up for a crouch and holding my switch upright in front of me. It is curiously interesting. In the forest, the dead wood is phosphorescent; some nights the whole ground is strewn with it, so that it seems like a grating over a pale hell; doubtless this is one of the things that feed the night fears of the natives; and I am free to confess that in a night of trackless darkness where all else is void, these pallid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M. Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... was flying with a pair of mechanical wings strapped to his shoulders, not more than two hundred feet above them. With a shout of triumph he swooped down. In his hand was a small cylinder, about the mouth of which a phosphorescent violet light ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Seattle—a handsome town, with its terraces of lights twinkling in the gloaming. Passengers soon distribute themselves through the darkness. I am left alone on the after-deck to watch the big, shadowy ships that are moored near us, and the exquisite phosphorescent light in the water—a wave of ink with the luminous trail of a struck match smouldering across it. Far into the night there was the thundering of freight rolling up and down the decks, and the ring of ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... considerable colony who were then reveling in the dregs of the Empire and the last orgies of a tottering court, eventually cost her her place. A republican so aristocratic was not to be tolerated by the true-born Americans who paid court to De Morny for the phosphorescent splendors of St. Cloud and the Tuileries, and Miss Helen lost their favor. But she had already saved enough money for the Conservatoire and a little attic in a very tall house in a narrow street that trickled into the ceaseless flow of the Rue Lafayette. Here for four years she trotted backwards ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... the man with the match, took the pebble and polished it to complete dryness on the lining of his overcoat. Then he struck the match, which emitted a faint phosphorescent glow, and ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... she had on a dress of deep blue velvet, over which her yellow hair was allowed to fall loosely. She wore black stockings and satin shoes; a knot of cherry-colored ribbon was poised in her hair like a butterfly, and gave a little color to her pale cheeks, while her large eyes shone with a phosphorescent light. ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... warm water, to put them in alcohol with the precautions that we shall point out, and to prepare a note which indicates the latitude of the place where they are taken, if they live solitary or in society, if they are phosphorescent, if they inhabit a certain depth or the surface of the sea. The colors of gelatinous animals not keeping well in liquor, it is very ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... the tentacle struck him a heavy blow on the chest, throwing him back with such force as to bowl Gunga over, and whirling the pistols out of his hands into a slimy, bulbous growth nearby, where they stuck in the phosphorescent cavities the force of their impact ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... laughed. Have you not happened, yourself, to notice the same peculiarity in certain people?... It is a sign either of an evil disposition or of deep and constant grief. From behind his half-lowered eyelashes they shone with a kind of phosphorescent gleam—if I may so express myself—which was not the reflection of a fervid soul or of a playful fancy, but a glitter like to that of smooth steel, blinding but cold. His glance—brief, but piercing and heavy—left the unpleasant impression of an indiscreet question and might have seemed insolent ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... a moment. The thing was motionless. It was in a patch of shadow, but, as though gleaming with moonlight, it seemed to shine. Its glow was silvery, with a greenish cast almost phosphorescent. Was it standing on the path? I could not tell. It was too far away; too much in shadow. But I plainly saw that it had the shape of a man. Wraith, or substance? That also, was not ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... upon the Earth who has not been struck by the phosphorescent lights that glide through the somber night, leaving a brilliant silver or golden track—the luminous, ephemeral trail of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Love? I can feel Love in music. I can feel it in poetry. I can see it in sunshine, in the wet woods, and in the phosphorescent sea. But in actual life! I think of things in too abstract a way ever to feel in love with anybody. So I don't think anybody could really fall in love with me. It is like religious faith. I have no faith, and yet I believe in faith. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to go and buy her clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her. There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies—evidently forced—talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes, but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with a strange greenish light. This picture ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... a kind of twilight. Bickley produced carriage candles from his pocket and fumbled for matches. While he was doing so I noticed two things—firstly, that the place really did smell like a scent-shop, and, secondly, that the coffins seemed to glow with a kind of phosphorescent light of their own, not very strong, but sufficient to reveal their outlines in the gloom. Then the candles ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... branch of natural history is expounded in most agreeable style by this delightful book. Mr. Holder furnishes a great mass of information concerning fire-flies, luminous beetles and other insects, the phosphorescent animals and animalculae of the sea, and even of plants and flowers that give light. He has revealed a world of new wonders to those who are inquisitive about certain mysteries of great interest, concerning which no other naturalist has ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... laughter, all quiet aboard, for the fishermen believe that the fish can hear; all quiet around, where the deep black of the watery pavement is brightened by the reflection of stars. Then out of the white phosphorescent patches come minute points of silver and countless faint popping sounds, The herrings are at play about the nets. You see them in numbers exceeding imagination, shoals on shoals. "Pull up now, there's a heavy strike," cries the skipper, and the nets are hauled ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... screams that seemed smothered violently; and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I became conscious that my chamber was invaded—that I was not alone. I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings. Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped —two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They, spattered, liquidly, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had—turned to gouts of blood as they fell—I needed no light to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in a large cave, the walls of which were glowing with greenish, phosphorescent light. Strewn about the floor were seemingly dead carcasses of animals. And what carcasses there were! Blubber-coated things that looked like giant tadpoles, gazelle-like creatures with a single, long slim horn growing from delicate small skulls, four-legged beasts and six-legged ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... kinks; during my watch again, but this time no earthly power could have saved it. I had taken all manner of precautions to prevent the end doing any damage when the smash came, for come I knew it must. We now return to the six-wire cable. As I sat watching the cable to-night, large phosphorescent globes kept rolling from it and fading ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... decay. I have often tried, but always in vain, to coax these mycelia into developing some fungus, by placing them in damp rooms, etc. When camping in the mountains, I frequently caused the natives to bring phosphorescent wood into my tent, for the pleasure of watching its soft undulating light, which appears to pale and glow with every motion of the atmosphere; but except in this difference of intensity, it presents ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... point: "The trained clairvoyant vision sees the human aura as a nebulous hazy substance, like a luminous cloud, surrounding the person for two or three feet on each side of his body, becoming more dense near the body, and gradually becoming less dense as it extends away from the body. It has a phosphorescent appearance, with a peculiar tremulous motion manifesting through its substance. The clairvoyant sees the human aura as composed of all the colors of the spectrum, the combination shifting with the changing ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... Occasionally we had lovely phosphorescent effects, and as we neared Scotland, millions of pink and brown jelly-fish filled the water. At Thurso we hailed a boat to send telegrams ashore—such a collection!—to let our various friends know we had returned in safety from Ultima Thule. That night as we passed ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... on the deck of the Beagle this evening we remarked large luminous spots in the water. They appeared to be about 12 inches in circumference, were very numerous, and perfectly stationary. The light they emitted was phosphorescent, but far brighter than I had ever before witnessed; it was so vivid as to be distinctly visible for nearly a quarter ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky. "The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms," as the Purana says of the ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hill-side. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed,—as if the moon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... days of the Roentgen rays there were many facts which suggested that phosphorescence had something to do with the production of these rays It then occurred to several French physicists that X-rays might be produced if phosphorescent substances were exposed to sunlight. Becquerel began to experiment with a view to testing this supposition. He placed uranium on a photographic plate which had first been wrapped in black paper in order to screen it from the light. After this plate had remained in the bright sunlight for several ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the black masses of storm clouds that obscured the sky as they swept along before the gale, nature aided us in a measure. A soft light emanated from the movement of the ocean. Each mighty sea, all phosphorescent and glowing with the tiny lights of myriads of animalculae, threatened to overwhelm us with a deluge of fire. Higher and higher, thinner and thinner, the crest grew as it began to curve and overtop preparatory to breaking, until with a roar it fell over ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... horror. (The Hamilton Wright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!) William Dean Howells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner, was spiritually of that company. For all his phosphorescent heresies, he was what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in the national tradition. He was easiest intrigued, not by force and originality, but by a sickly, Ladies' Home Journal sort of piquancy; ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... undertaken for the purpose of exploring the abysses of the ocean, we know that life manifests itself abundantly over the bottom, and that at a depth of five and six thousand meters light is distributed by innumerable phosphorescent animals. Different nations have endeavored to rival each other in the effort to effect these important discoveries, and several scientific missions have been sent to different points of the globe by the English and American ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... my heart like a great spiritual plummet They dropped down to depths not often stirred. And from those depths came up some shining sands of truth, worth keeping among treasures; having a phosphorescent light in them, which can shine in dark places, and, making them light ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... move, but in the clear moonlight I could see its body expand and contract in breathing; its yellow eyes seeming to radiate a phosphorescent light. I felt no fear, nor any inclination to retreat, yet I was now facing a beast that few men had ever succeeded in seeing. Thus we stood looking at each other, scarcely moving an eyelid, while the great silent monster looked at us. I slid my right hand down to the ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... sputtered dismal circles of dingy glare in the damp fog; in front, a vague slope of wet night, in which she knew lay the road and the salt marshes; and far beyond, distinct, the sea-line next the sky, a great yellow phosphorescent belt, apparently higher than their heads. Nearer, unseen, the night-tide was sent in: it came with a regular muffled throb that shook the ground. Doctor Dennis went down, and groped about ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... six feet high, and so still that you could hear the beating of your heart. Achmet's slippers went scuf-scuf-scuf. Boris swayed from side to side, his tongue lolling, his eyes phosphorescent. He resembled those ghost-hounds of old stories, terrific beasts that follow the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... frightened even to stir, and panic-stricken lest the violent beating of his heart should arouse the mysterious visitor. But at length, impelled by an irresistible impulse, he sat up in bed and opened his eyes. The room was aglow with a phosphorescent light, and in the depths of the glittering mirror he saw a startling reproduction ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... seemed to be bearing something away with them on their black wings; and as the light sank and paled on the horizon, and the stars began to condense themselves into sparks amid the sea of green, like those that fleet phosphorescent when the prow of the vessel troubles the summer sea, and then the falling stars of September shot across the darkening sky, he felt that a change was near, that for him winter was coming before its ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the sea roared and its wave crests gleamed with phosphorescent light, as the furious wind ripped off their tops and sent them ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of painful thought floated the broken gleams of a golden phantasy, the rainbow-coloured memories of a secret love. They came like a light upon the darkened waves, yet a light too feeble to dissipate the under gloom. Like the phosphorescent flashes in the sea at midnight, which the lonely voyager, watching with interest as they glow in the white wake of the keel, guesses that they may be the heralds of a storm,—so these bright reminiscences of happier days only gave a weird beauty to the tumult of the sick ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... transparency on which the slender shafts of the columns, the elegant curves of the girders, and the geometrical tracery of the roofs were minutely outlined. Florent feasted his eyes on this mighty diagram washed in with Indian ink on phosphorescent vellum, and his mind reverted to his old fancy of a colossal machine with wheels and levers and beams espied in the crimson glow of the fires blazing beneath its boilers. At each consecutive hour of the day the changing ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... fair above, Midnight, fierce and dark beneath,— All on high the smile of love, All below the frown of death: Waves that whirl in angry spite With a phosphorescent light Gleaming ghastly on the night,— Like the pallid sneer of Doom, So malicious, cold, and white, Luring to this watery tomb, Where in fury and in fright Winds and waves together fight Hideously amid ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks," Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather," some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... those who have no little games of their own are wont to look on sympathetically, or, better still, to turn away the understanding eye. The long, lazy, somnolent days and the magic nights, star-spangled above and lit with phosphorescent seas below, lend themselves to the dangerous kind of flirtation that says little and looks much, and if there is any place in the world where Cupid is rampant and "Psyche may meet unblamed her Eros," it is on the deck of a liner ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... crystalline brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white, A million moons in the dark ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... me. Her hand hurt my wrist as she dragged me aft. I scrambled clumsily into the recess of the counter, and put my head out. The night air was very chilly and full of brine; a little boat towing by a long painter was sheering about in the phosphorescent wake of the ship. The sea itself was pallid in the light of the moon, invisible to me. A little astern of us, on our port quarter, a vessel under a press of canvas seemed to stand still; looming up like an immense pale ghost. She might have been coming up with us, or else we had just passed her—I ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... every particle in nature throws off a gaseous emanation, partaking of its particular shape. These gaseous particles are not discernible with the material eye, excepting when by chance they coalesce, and then a phosphorescent light ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... settled within. The river was like a stream of golden fire, each ripple with a kind of phosphorescent gleam as the foam slipped away. For the oars were beating it up in every direction. The air was tensely clear. There was Lake St. Clair spread out in the distance, touching a sky of golden blue, if such colors fuse. And the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... feet on which we floated, reflecting therein their sharply reversed outlines, and presenting the mirage of fearful precipices, over which we hung:—- the stars also were reversed in their order, making, in the depths of the imaginary abyss, a sprinkling of tiny phosphorescent lights. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... know, who say that this is but a legend; who will tell you that the shadowy shapes that you may see with your own eyes on stormy nights, waving their gleaming arms behind the ruined buttresses are but of phosphorescent foam, tossed by the raging waves above the cliffs; and that the sweet, sad harmony cleaving the trouble of the night is but the aeolian ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the household knew that a dead body lay in the cellar?—nay more, that, although it lay still and dead enough all day, it would come half alive at nightfall, and, turning the whole house into a sepulchre by its presence, go creeping about like a cat all over it in the dark—perhaps with phosphorescent eyes? So it was not surprising that the painter abandoned his studio early, and that the three found themselves together in the gorgeous room formerly described, as soon as twilight began ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... island as he strode across the fore-deck. He stopped, stared at the looming black line of land beneath the tropical stars. Again light flashed from a point of rock far above the dim white line of phosphorescent surf, spelling out the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... France might do in the future was unknown; yet it was unthinkable that aught could be worse than this glorious reign of Louis, the Grand Monarque, this crumbling clod, this resolving excrescence, this phosphorescent, disintegrating fungus of a diseased ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... or specks of cosmic dust, as comets are composed of. Nebulae are vast cometary clouds, with particles more or less widely separated, giving off gases through meteoric collisions, internal or external, and perhaps glowing also with electrical or phosphorescent light. Gravity eventually brings the nebular particles into closer aggregations, and increased collisions finally vaporize the entire mass, forming planetary nebulae and gaseous stars. Continued condensation may make the stellar mass hotter and more luminous for a time, but eventually leads to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... cordage. A faint gleam came through the glass below the compass-box. The wheel and the heaps of coiled rope beyond rose and fell with the motion of the vessel, now against the stars, now black against the phosphorescent foam that trailed along the sea like shining lace. But the human figures, he next saw, were now doing nothing, not even pacing the deck; they were no longer of unusual size either. Quietly leaning over the rail, father and son side by side, they were guiltless of anything more uncommon ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... days when the sea was smooth as glass. Our white sails hung idly beneath the scorching skies. Sea weed floated on the oily surface, as, day by day, we lay seemingly motionless on the bosom of the deep. The moon rose out of a phosphorescent sea and cast its long golden gleams on the azure blue, while the stars shone like isles of light in the sky. There was a dread in the infinite spaces about. Again, there was scurrying, fleecy clouds and our ship was scudding ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... writer, by that time off the hill and in the plain below, saw the heavens gloriously alive with the pageantry of conflict. The vault was pitted with woolly tufts of shrapnel and beautiful dead-whitesmoke-wreaths from the phosphorescent bombs. These spread their sinuous toils high and low and seemed to fill the skies. On both sides the aerial combatants were going home to roost, exchanging challenges by the way. And all the time, hidden in a hundred woods and brakes, the Archies sang in chorus. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... boatman complied and the Richard began to lift her hull from the sea, the dark waters ahead were brightened by a phosphorescent flash. Directly across their course lay the Fuor d'Italia. Twisting the steering wheel with only the slightest pressure of his fingers to avoid turning the Richard over, Bronson opened the cut-out and stepped hard on the throttle. The speed-craft dipped, then raised ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... slow beat of the water on the shingle came to the ear over the light lap against the boat. The mere stretched miles away. It seemed to be as still as a white feather on the face of the dead, and to be alive with light. Where the swift but silent current was cut asunder by a rock, the phosphorescent gleams sent up sheets of brightness. The boat, which rolled slowly, half-afloat and half-ashore, was bordered by a fringe of silver. When at one moment a gentle breeze lifted the water into ripples, countless stars floated, down a white ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... glowworm glows at night, or when the head of a match glows as you rub it on your wet hand in the dark, we call the light phosphorescence. The name "phosphorus" means light-bearing, and anything like the element phosphorus, that glows without actively burning, is said to be phosphorescent. Match heads have phosphorus in them. Phosphorescence is almost always caused by chemical change. The energy released is a dim light, not heat or electricity. Sometimes millions of microscopic sea animals make the sea water in warm regions phosphorescent. They, like fireflies, ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... enough, one huge member was unshod and stockingless; the elastic-slit congress gaiter, lost in the shuffle, lay out of the radius of Ambrose's long leg. Miss Aphrodite picked it up and, stooping, slipped it over his mighty toes, noticing as she did so the thick coating of phosphorescent paint that still ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... had ascended some way, all trees disappeared. The scenery was as wild and desolate as any in Scotland. On all sides heathery slopes, in the evening light a broken patch of sand showed white, almost phosphorescent, through contrast with the black ling. A melancholy bird piped. Otherwise all was still. The richly-wooded weald, with here and there a light twinkling on it, lay far below, stretching to Lewes. When the high-road nearly reached the summit, it was carried in a curve along the edge of a ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... upon a watery sky, but like a large radiant sphere hanging in space. The view from the wheel-house was magnificent. The towering waves which came up behind us heaped together by mighty winds, looked like hills of green glass, and the phosphorescent light like fiery lamps within—the moonlight glittered upon our broad foamy wake—our masts and spars and rigging stood out in sharp relief against the sky, while for once our canvas looked white. Far in the distance the sharp bow would plunge down into the foam, and then our good ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Truly there has been an element of the unusual throughout this whole affair with Weir. Once or twice I have felt as if about to sail out of the calm, prosaic waters of this every-day nineteenth-century life, and embark upon the phosphorescent sea of our sensational novelists—psychological, so-called. It is rather soon for the cabinet to break, however. It suggests an anti-climax, which would be inartistic. But such material was never intended to be thrown away by ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... drum. The sheets were jerking at the belaying pins, the blocks rattling in sharp snappings like castanets. You could hear the hiss and seething of the sea alongside, and see it flash by in sudden white patches of phosphorescent foam, while all over head was black with the flying scud. The English second mate was stamping with vexation, and, with all his h's misplaced, storming at the men: ''An'somely the weather mainbrace—'an'somely, I tell you!—'Alf a dozen of you clap on to the main ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... their hands met; the guitar slipped down unheeded; the grasp grew closer, grew warmer—ah, Helen, was it Lilian of whom you thought, whom you would save?—and then an arm was around her; shining eyes, only half guessed in the glimmer that the phosphorescent swells sent through the darkness, hung over her rosy upturned beauty; she was drawn forward unresisting, her head was on his breast, she, heard the heavy throbbing of his heart, and his lips lay on hers and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the Arafura Sea, where for days she sailed in water milky white and green and purple. It was my good fortune to enter the sea on the last quarter of the moon, the advantage being that in the dark nights I witnessed the phosphorescent light effect at night in its greatest splendor. The sea, where the sloop disturbed it, seemed all ablaze, so that by its light I could see the smallest articles on deck, and her wake was a ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Valhalla. The goddess was further supposed to have a great affection for gold, which was called the "flame of the sea," and was used to illuminate her halls. This belief originated with the sailors, and sprang from the striking phosphorescent gleam of the waves. To win Ran's good graces, the Northmen were careful to hide some gold about them whenever any special danger threatened them on ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... to see what would be our luck. The light sent a silver lane through the night, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separation of the darkness, and vanished on the other side. Leaning overside, I could see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep, a phosphorescent and flashing cloud. It came inboard, and was suspended over the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. The mass of blubber and plasm pulsed with ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... representation of the hour when his Maker was made flesh that he might redeem a world? Nothing but chiaro-scuro and foreshortening. This overwhelming scene would give him a fine chance to do two things: first, to represent a phosphorescent light from the body of the child; and second, to show off some foreshortened angels. Now, as to these angels, I have simply to remark that I should prefer a seraph's head to his heels; and that a group of archangels, kicking from the canvas with such ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... illuminated pearls were their tiny lamps, and when I touched them how they rolled themselves into a coil that resembled the pin of pearls my mother wore on her bosom, only they were more beautiful; thinking that their lights translated into words were even more beautiful than their phosphorescent hues, for they said, "Come ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Sleep mourners of the newly dead Until rayed Aureoles bright, flare, And sparkle like Asian stars. Hyperaspists of templed night, And yawning caverns cold and bleak, Forsake the crown of addling Care; Whilst afrites in bright jeweled cars, Lured by the phosphorescent light, Scale an immarcescible peak. When giant uncus' of the damn'd Shake Palsy's wand of brooding Fear, And Hecate spins her daughters round The whirling halls of spastic gloom; When afreets prance on blister'd sand As blood-shot ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... silent, awestruck by this extraordinary spectacle. Then a man standing beside me remarked that there was no smoke. I had not thought of that before, but it was true—indeed, the fire appeared phosphorescent. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... daybreak, the gaunt, steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood—in its harshly angular immensity as majestic as the blackened skeleton of a burnt-out world glimpsed against the phosphorescent pallor of the last ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... in infinite space. Above, below, on all sides, was a leaden atmosphere. Neither sun, nor moon, nor stars illumined it, but only some dull, phosphorescent light, which seemed to be born of the murky, stagnant air. It was such a strange, sickly, wavering gleam as she had seen above decaying wood, fish, and other substances. All around was absolute stillness. Not a swallow waved his wing nor an insect hummed in that ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... full of stars. In the dark depths of the water might have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the thunder of the surf on the reef filled the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... noiseless tread of an Indian, looking steadily upward at the eyes which assumed a curious, phosphorescent glare, that scintillated with a greenish light, as the relative position of the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... had his rifle in his hand, ready to sell his life as dearly as he could; but the Arabs did not issue from their cover, and they sped on at a sharp trot unmolested, Strachan keeping a correct course by a compass he had, with an ingenious phosphorescent contrivance, by which he could distinguish the north point. When an hour had elapsed they all began to breathe more freely, for it is uncanny work expecting to be attacked every minute in the dark. But ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... unequal massive towers of St. Mary's Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... the larifla. We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... ground like moonlight coming and going behind the clouds, from a minute thread-like fungus invisible in the day-time to the unassisted eye; and here and there thick dumpy mushrooms displayed a sharp, clear dome of light, whose intensity never varied or changed till the break of day; long phosphorescent caterpillars and centipedes crawled out of every corner, leaving a trail of light behind them, while fire-flies darted about above like ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... by mountains, sleeps tranquilly in the stillness of the elements, as if it had not joined the chorus of the tempest on the night before. As first rays of dawn appear in the eastern sky and awaken the phosphorescent myriads in the water, long, grey shadows appear in the dim distance, almost on the border of the horizon. They are shadows of fishermen's boats at ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... weirdly horrible with the frost and the phosphorescent light of the moon; the birds sat tucked in their nest, pressing close together to keep themselves warm. Yet still the frost penetrated their feathers, got into their skin and made their feet, bills, and backs feel cold. The errant light of the moon was ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... upon him before he can extricate himself, and is first made aware of their presence by feeling sharp stinging pains in various places, especially the neck, caused by their bites. A small firefly (a species of Lampyris) is plentiful, showing out at night like a twinkling phosphorescent spark, slowly flitting about from tree to tree or resting on the leaves wet with dew. Nor must I omit a very splendid day-flying moth (Cocytia durvillei) which is common on the skirts of the woods and thickets; several even came on board the ship ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... not fash thyself about the lad, du liebe dummkopf, for he will come right very speedily. Didst remark not what he said about the 'herb Pantagruelion,' which, in the vulgar, meaneth only hemp? And surely you noted the warm flush of his cheek, the dilatation of his eye, and its phosphorescent glow? Dr. Thorne would soon enough tell you what these things signify. The boy is not crazy, Ned, but drunk,—drunk in the decorous delirium of a Damascene Pacha, propped against a Georgian maid, and fanned by Houris of Bethlehem Judah. He has been reading ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... writers which its use was said to bring about, and when fully equipped consisted simply of a writing-table with all the appliances and conveniences thereof treated with phosphorus in such a manner that in the blackest of darkness they could all be seen readily. The ink even was phosphorescent. The paper was luminous in the dark. The penholders, pens, pen-wipers, mucilage-bottle, everything, in fact, that an author really needs for the production of literature, save ideas, were so prepared that they could not fail to be visible to the weakest eye in ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... thing: the Glow-worm's eggs are luminous even when still contained in the mother's womb. If I happen by accident to crush a female big with germs that have reached maturity, a shiny streak runs along my fingers, as though I had broken some vessel filled with a phosphorescent fluid. The lens shows me that I am wrong. The luminosity comes from the cluster of eggs forced out of the ovary. Besides, as laying-time approaches, the phosphorescence of the eggs is already made manifest without this clumsy midwifery. A soft opalescent light ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... strange, huge pleasure-trip of steamships, sailing in a lordly column of three; at night, sailing always, it seemed, in a harbour of brilliant lights under multitudinous stars and over thickly sown beds of tiny phosphorescent stars that were blown about like flowers in a wind-storm by the frothing wake of the ships; by day, through a brilliant sunlit sea, a cool breeze—so cool that only at noon was the heat tropical—and over smooth water, blue as sapphire. Music night and morning, on each ship, and music coming across ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... midnight hour when the moon hangs low And the stars beam forth with a mystic glow; When the mermaids float on the rolling tide And Neptune entangles his beaming bride,— It is there in that phosphorescent wave I would gladly sink in an ocean grave— To rise and fall with the songs of the sea And live in the chant of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... was impenetrable, black and choking. There was no sound, except for the occasional soft spatter of water that dripped to the stone floor from the mouldy ceiling. Then through a narrow, barred window came the moonlight in a mottled shaft of phosphorescent green, and licked its way across the floor, to the edge of the bier. It shone on two kneeling, crouching figures, and full on the face of ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... night set in, fishermen's lights were seen moving along the beach in all directions, and gliding about in canoes, while the sea was filled with myriads of phosphorescent animalcula. After watching this scene for two or three hours in the calm and still night, a storm that had been gathering reached us; but it lasted only for a short time, and cleared off after a shower, which gave the air a freshness that was delightful after the sultry heat we had experienced ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Barry remained on deck with him. A red sun had dipped below the sea line two hours before, and a faint breeze sprang up at his setting. Now the Barang leaned slightly to full canvas and snored easily through the phosphorescent seas with a pleasant tinkling of running wavelets along her sides. Overhead the heavens were luminous with sparks of ultra brilliance; the decks and sails of the ancient brigantine were bathed in soft radiance, ruled across and along with bars of blackest shadow. A softly noisy chorus ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle |
