"Scintillation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the morning in charmed transition between the hot yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and elaborate, and everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... plodding thoughts. The liveliness of the interruption, and its futility, often please; dulce est desipere in loco; and yet those who must endure the society of inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort of scintillation can become. There is something inherently vulgar about it; perhaps because our train of thought cannot be very entertaining in itself when we are so glad to break in upon it with irrelevant nullities. The same undertone of disgust mingles with other ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... yellowish sheen—like gold or burnished brass—but the scintillation of the sun's rays, as they glanced from its surface, hindered the spectators from making out its shape, or being able to say exactly ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... had a scintillation in the night: listen and approve!' said Amanda, coming into the room where her comrades sat upon the floor, in the first stages of despair, at the impossibility of getting the accumulated rubbish of three months' travel into a couple ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... final trembling flame remained in the lamp; I followed it with all my power of vision; I gasped for breath; I concentrated upon it all the power of my soul, as upon the last scintillation of light I was ever destined to see: and then I was to be lost forever in Cimmerian and ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... skull, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal bonhomie, counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes which trembled in their orbits like two louis-d'or upon quicksilver. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... looking at St. Pierre's wife again, felt his heart beating hard in his breast at the look which was in her eyes. It was not the scintillation of laughter, and the flame in her cheeks was not embarrassment. She was not amused. The ludicrousness of her mislaid plans had not struck her as they had struck him. She had placed the binoculars on the table, and slowly she came to him. Her hands reached ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... this is of the nocturne! The undulating accompaniment, the scintillation of the treble, suggests the gliding, gently rocking motion of the vessel and the phosphorescence in its wake; while the second theme of the nocturne would, even without any suggestion from the passage in ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... over a space of many thousand square miles. Here the magical effect of light is owing to the forces of organic nature. Foaming with light, the eddying waves flash in phosphorent sparks over the wide expanse of waters, where every scintillation is the vital manifestation of an invisible animal world.' Beneath the surface larger forms are seen, brilliantly illuminated, and lighting up the mystic depths of the sea. Fiery balls and flaming ribbons shoot past; and submarine moons shine with a soft and steady light amidst the crowds of meteors. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... irritated: in the intervals, the abdominal rings were obscured. The flash was almost coinstantaneous in the two rings, but it was just perceptible first in the anterior one. The shining matter was fluid and very adhesive: little spots, where the skin had been torn, continued bright with a slight scintillation, whilst the uninjured parts were obscured. When the insect was decapitated the rings remained uninterruptedly bright, but not so brilliant as before: local irritation with a needle always increased the vividness ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... into mathematical points, dimensionless. Sirius blazed in blue-white splendor, dominating the lesser members of his constellation, a minute but intensely brilliant diamond upon a field of black velvet—his refulgence unmarred by any trace of scintillation ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... glint and scintillation in the sunlight of something on the ground on the other side of the trunk, and separated from him only by the breadth thereof, at the same instant that his ear detected the whirring rattle which told the fact that an immense rattlesnake had coiled itself therefor, and had just ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could not compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... as Dr. Johnson says, taken from cookery; but it is so used elsewhere by Shakspere that we cannot regard it here as a scintillation ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... in a crucible, and then to add the tin and the zinc; finally the cupro-manganese is added just at the moment of pouring, as in the Manhes process; then the reaction on the oxides is very effective, there is a boiling with scintillation similar to the action produced in the Bessemer and Martin process when ferro-manganese is added ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... bright ornament, clasp, or aiguillette, on Kate's dress. They were hunters and foresters from below; servants in the household of a beneficent lady; and in some pursuit of flying game had wandered beyond their ordinary limits. Struck by the sudden scintillation from Kate's dress played upon by the morning sun, they rode up to the thicket. Great was their surprise, great their pity, to see a young officer in uniform stretched within the bushes upon the ground, and perhaps dying. Borderers from childhood on this dreadful frontier, sacred to winter and death, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a faint scintillation in the diamonds in Ena's brooch and ear-rings as she tossed her head. "If you do that you must recall that I was afraid of it from ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... means more crafty persons had long rode on the backs of mankind. Thus the friendship and intercourse of sir Thomas More and Erasmus were founded on their mutual zeal in behalf of those ecclesiastical frauds which for so many ages had subdued every scintillation of reason. They were, in their days, among the adherents of Popish superstition, what Symmachus had been to the Roman polytheists in the age of Theodosius—what Peter the Hermit was to the fanatics of the darker ages—and what Burke was to the bigotted politicians at the dawn ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions, exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is overspread by a glow of generous ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the light in the forked tree that fell like moonlight athwart the saloon. In the centre of the broad gleam was a sylph-like form, keeping time to the music in a sort of phantom style of movement; twisting, shimmering folds that appeared to effuse a scintillation of opal shades. 'Twas the chaconne; slow, graceful and full of romance, the full major lifting and seeming to float, at last dying imperceptibly into the minor passacaille. About were seated, carelessly and after ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... and frequently flagellated "Glowworm," however, continued to glow fearfully, impelled to eruptive scintillation by the crank, and the vocal lady "walked with Billy," and presently the minstrel came through the trees with his hat in his hand, his dark eyes very ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... that my hero was so very illiberal, though, as a Loyalist and a Churchman, I admit that he must have been adverse to the generalizing philanthropy of that admired sentiment, "Education untainted by the bigotry of proselytism," which, if it be any thing more than a brilliant scintillation of wit, intended, by its happy antithesis, to revive the dying embers of festive hilarity, must mean that the ends of education are destroyed if they produce any effect; or, in other words, that though the lower classes are to be taught ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West |
