"Kaleidoscopic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... change of Premiers proceeds with kaleidoscopic rapidity. The attitude of the successive Prime Ministers has been described as (1) Tender and affectionate neutrality toward the Entente Powers; (2) Malevolent impartiality toward the Central Powers; (3) ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... at night through one of the great junctions on the Upper Indian railways, say Saharampur or Umballa or Delhi, can ever forget such sounds and sights of pandemonium? Or who would care to miss during the daylight hours the open window on to the kaleidoscopic scenes of Indian life at every halt? Here a turbaned Rajput chief with his whiskers fiercely twirled back under his ears descends from the train to be greeted and garlanded by a throng of expectant retainers who look as if they had stepped straight out of an old Moghul picture. Or a fat and prosperous ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field becomes in the mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Poland's downfall. The Trio in A flat, with its kaleidoscopic modulations, produces an impression of vague unrest and suppressed sorrow. There is loftiness of spirit and daring ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... that I had plenty to think of from the time that I left Brook Street until I set out to meet Lord Linchmere at Paddington. The whole fantastic business kept arranging and rearranging itself in kaleidoscopic forms inside my brain, until I had thought out a dozen explanations, each of them more grotesquely improbable than the last. And yet I felt that the truth must be something grotesquely improbable also. At last I gave up all attempts at finding a solution, and contented ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soon forgot their weariness as they gazed, at times fairly fascinated by the wondrous visions that were theirs to witness. Never did they see a glorious display exactly repeated. There was always a kaleidoscopic change; yet each was very suggestive and beautiful. Sometimes they mounted up and up from below the horizon like vast arrays of soldiers, rank following rank in quick succession, arranged in all the gorgeous hues of the rainbow. They advanced, they receded, they fought, they conquered, they retreated, ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original contracts it had ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... by like winged moments. Thoughts of time, distance, monotony, fatigue, purpose, were shut out from his mind. A rushing kaleidoscopic dance of images filled his consciousness, but they were all of Mescal. Safety for her had unsealed ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the characters in their variety. We enter the banker's gilded saloon and the hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest's retired home and the laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a summer's night. The light, instead of being a bright glare, was soft and mellow, and fell from crescent-shaped lanterns on the staffs of pages, who moved in a measured way among the throng, producing a kaleidoscopic effect. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... bit the brilliant kaleidoscopic effect fell apart and resolved itself into light groups against the dark foliage or flashing masses of carriages and people and horses, and then even the blurs on the distance were gone, and the place was still and the wedding was over. The long afternoon was before them, with its ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... The spectators, who, unlike our party, had no personal interest in the soldiery, saw only troops and battalions in the concrete, straight lines of red, straight lines of blue, white lines formed of innumerable knee-breeches, black lines formed of many gaiters, coming and going in kaleidoscopic change. Who thought of every point in the line as an isolated man, each dwelling all to himself in the hermitage of his own mind? One person did, a young man far removed from the barrow where the Garlands and Miller Loveday stood. The natural expression of his ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... exploded into a kaleidoscopic flash of lights and colors, then cleared again. This time, a man looked out of it. He was well into middle age; close to his three hundredth year. His hair, a uniform iron-gray, was beginning to thin in front, and he was acquiring the beginnings of a double ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... tale? I have forgot the tale!— A Lady all for love forlorn; A Rosebud, and a Nightingale That bruised his bosom on a thorn; A pot of rubies buried deep; A glen, a corpse, a child asleep; A Monk, that was no monk at all, I' the moonlight by a castle-wall;— Kaleidoscopic hints, to be Worked up in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... more things, flattering and echoed by his followers. It made the blood tingle in David's veins to know that these men of plain, honest, country stock, like himself, believed in him and in his honor. In kaleidoscopic quickness there passed in review his life,—the days when he and his mother had struggled with a wretched poverty that the neighbors had only half suspected, the first turning point in his life, when he was taken unto the hearth and home of strong-hearted people, ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... you can't undo it, and that's all there is about it." Charley had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!" He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his mind into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... week of Peter Margerison's first term at school, Urquhart suddenly stepped, a radiant figure on the heroic scale, out of the kaleidoscopic maze of bemusing lights and colours that was Peter's ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... a scene of ceaseless animation. Its courtyard was a kaleidoscopic whirl of color, shifting as the sun shifted and the shadow of the walls offered shade. Indians with bodies bare above the dropped blankets, moved stately or squatted on their heels watching the emigrants as they bartered for supplies. Trappers in fringed and ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... about the yellow branch of the human race is, not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of the altered conditions ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... cried the Reverend Harper Freeman, waving his hand toward the kaleidoscopic gathering. "There's your Dominion Day oration for you, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not only had the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a situation, but also had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to describe them vividly. I don't know how many of those men at Verz Cruz tried to describe the kaleidoscopic life of the city during the American occupation, but I know that Davis's story was far and away the most faithful and satisfying picture. The story was photographic, even to the ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... of their hair waving in the breeze created by their quick motions; the stranger, who has the treble bell, does likewise, but in his right mind and coat. Their ever-changing shadows mingle on the wall in an endless variety of kaleidoscopic forms, and the eyes of all the seven are religiously fixed on a diagram like a large addition sum, which is chalked ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic energy. Weakness in social ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... to Latham in a mere kaleidoscopic instant, then he was propelling himself forward. His shoulder took Kueelo squarely in the middle. Kueelo screamed as he went back. He tried to get the shiny tube up. Latham got hold of the Martian's wrist and jerked it sharply against his knee. Kueelo ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the original home of the human race. It will be wise to touch lightly on matters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that most kaleidoscopic of studies. The submerged continents which it calls from the vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again. Let us therefore refrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they might almost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... one man running forth with his household gods before another, while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... when I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain, unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during a couple of decades, in a manner so confusing that for the present I abandon such an attempt. All I know of the date of the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... an impulse—in a flash—one of those kaleidoscopic impulses we have, but back of it was the wish to help some one, and the curiosity to see if her love, aided by the opportunity, would suffice to reform the kind of girl ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... He might have said, with even greater truth than Juvenal, 'quidquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli.' He does not go beneath the surface, but almost every aspect of the kaleidoscopic world of Rome receives his attention at one time or another. His attitude is, on the whole, satirical, though his satire is not inspired by deep or sincere indignation. He is too easy in his morals and too good-humoured ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... opposite, one. The Semitic religions might furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire) becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... that it is competent to account for all the changes which we know to have taken place; others hold that its probable influence has been over-rated; and others, again, think that it has been one of the many causes that have brought about the kaleidoscopic variety of organic nature. Huxley remained to the last among those who distinguished in the clearest way between natural selection as an exceedingly ingenious and probable hypothesis, and a proved cause; and he was always careful, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... wheeling being very good indeed. The mountains off to the left are variegated and beautiful on the lower and intermediate slopes, and are crested with snow; scudding cloudlets, whose multiform shadows are continually climbing up and over the mountains, produce a pleasing kaleidoscopic effect, and here and there a sunny, glistening peak rises superior to the changeful ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... perfect that it looks as if he had been melted and poured molten into a khaki casing. The sombre dirt colour is relieved by the scarlet and gold upon his peaked cap and collar, and the long string of kaleidoscopic ribbons on his breast which tells of many tented fields—and maybe as many "fields of cloth-of-gold," for it does not take war alone now to decorate the breast, or to bind spur-straps across the instep of a knight. The brigadier ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... personal peculiarities much more closely than their elders—that the iris of both orbs was speckled with green and golden spots, which seemed to mix and dilate occasionally, and gave them a decidedly kaleidoscopic effect. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of transfusing rainbows. ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... bodies of the feminine gender, fixed for one brief week apiece on the theatrical "concave," moved quickly in the direction of "the road." These more or less heavenly lights were Miss Odette Tyler and Miss Eugenie Blair, who appeared at those kaleidoscopic theaters called "combination houses." Miss Tyler used to be something of a Broadway "favorite"—a term that has lost a good deal of its significance. She appeared in the little Yorkville Theater on the highroad to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... hardy fisherman of Louisburgh, the Micmacs of Sydney, the negroes of Deer's Castle, the Acadians of Chizzetcook, and as we shall see anon with other sectional specimens, just as they present their kaleidoscopic hues in the local settlements of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... is the problem of this kaleidoscopic drama, which is handled with all the author's well-known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... that seemed its own. The gloomy walls were warmed by bright-fringed bookshelves, topped with trifles of light feminine coloring and adornment. Low easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful tables, a dainty desk, gayly colored baskets of worsteds or mysterious kaleidoscopic fragments, and vases of flowers pervaded the apartment with a mingled sense of grace and comfort. There was a womanly refinement in its careless negligence, and even the delicate wrapper of Japanese silk, gathered at the waist and falling in easy folds to the ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... first week had passed without developments, interest in Donna and her affairs began to dwindle, for not infrequently matters move in kaleidoscopic fashion in San Pasqual, and the population, generally speaking, soon finds itself absorbed in other and more important matters. Mrs. Pennycook was quick to note that Donna (to quote Mr. Hennage) was "next to her game," and with ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... exquisite piece of weaving brings out plainly the marvellous sheen which is a feature of this rug. The innumerable small figures which appear throughout the rug, with their blending of soft hues, present a kaleidoscopic effect. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... Behind the forest of Soigne where he now was, the fields and roads were full of running men and galloping horses. The dull green of Belgian uniforms, the yellow facings of the Dutch, the black of Brunswickers, all mingled together in a moving kaleidoscopic mass of colour: men were flying unpursued yet panic-stricken towards Brussels, carrying tidings of an awful disaster to the allied armies in their haggard faces, their ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... it, found it securely fastened in some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote unsympathetic men beneath ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... by the intersection of the lines of the converging streets, one could not only see Greeley Square but a large part of Herald Square, with its then huge theatrical sign of fire and its measure of store lights and lamps of vehicles. It was a kaleidoscopic and inspiring scene. The broad, converging walks were alive with people. A perfect jam of vehicles marked the spot where the horse and cable cars intersected. Overhead was the elevated station, its lights augmented every few minutes by long trains of brightly lighted cars filled with ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, and the Arabian Nights, at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, we cry, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary and Romantic verse, and ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the memory of Sir W. Guise, Bart., is rather kaleidoscopic in effect, owing to its being mainly an armorial window, and, secondarily, historical. The historical portion represents the Coronation of Henry III. in Gloucester Cathedral in 1216, by Gualo (the Papal legate) and Peter de Rupibus, or des Roches, Bishop of Winchester. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... face underwent a kaleidoscopic change as these terrible words rant? in his ears. With the bound of of a wounded antelope he sprang to the summit of the nearest mountain, and stood there with arms erect against the sky, like a ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... emptiness of that gray-black expanse was changing. Far to the east a pink flush was spreading on the hills. It wavered and flowed, and it changed, as they watched, to deep areas of orange and red. The delicate pink swept in waves over valleys and hills, a vast kaleidoscopic coloration that rioted over a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... in public taste. Humor—or the sense of humor—alters while we are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it produced ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a land of kaleidoscopic changes and startling dramatic incidents. An Oriental empire, even when built up by strong hands and watched over with constant vigilance, scarcely ever falls to pieces in the slow and gradual process of decay arising from the ties that bind it together becoming relaxed or its constituent ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of the Expedition to the adjoining Noxas tribe, whose manners and customs are of extraordinary interest. This remarkable race are noted not merely for their addiction to the dance, but for the kaleidoscopic rapidity with which the dances themselves are changed from season to season. Only a few years ago the entire tribe were under the spell of the Ognat, which in turn gave place to the Tortskof and the Zaj, the last named being an exercise in which violent contortions of the body were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... of mind and courage devolve not only the instruction for health, equipment, rationing, march, or attack, of each of his subordinates, but the graver weight of prompt and correct decision and immediate action under every one of the kaleidoscopic changes of a campaign or a battle-field. It required more knowledge of the requisites of war, as well as a broader judgment of character, than Mr. Lincoln had had opportunity to form of the several soldiers of the army, to insure ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... of the adventures of the errant garment to date. Meanwhile Colette's countenance underwent kaleidoscopic changes. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... above—the rocks he had already noted laid along the inside of the wall—these, and the smell of blood and fire, the horrid, sweaty contact of struggling bodies, the press and jam of the battle that surged round them, all gave Stern a kaleidoscopic picture of war—war as it once was, in the long ago—war, naked and terrible, such as he ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... full swing now,—a kaleidoscopic confusion of colour, shifting into fresh harmonies with every bar; four hundred people circling ceaselessly over a surface ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... (page 128, measure 1) a delectable episode. Over a murmurous accompanying figure given out by violas, 'cellos, harp, and horn, a clarinet sings a variant of the Melisande theme. The harmonic changes are kaleidoscopic, the orchestral color of prismatic variety. The ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... crept into the young woman's life, Aurora more frequently insisted upon going to the opera. A strange fascination attracted her thither, and on each succeeding evening she found some new beauty in the bassoon, some new phase in his kaleidoscopic character to wonder at, some new accomplishment to admire. On one occasion—it was at the opera bouffe—this musical prodigy exhibited a playfulness and an exuberance of wit and humor that Aurora had never dreamed of. He ran the gamut of vocal conceit, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... and kaleidoscopic before Ste. Marie's eyes, and in his ears there was a rushing of great winds, but he set his teeth and clung with all the strength he had to the tree which sheltered him. His first feeling, after that initial ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... floor, twelve-score couples swung and swayed to the intoxicating rhythms of an unseen orchestra; kaleidoscopic in their amazingly variegated costuming of colour, drifting past the lonely, diabolical little figure, an endless chain ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Calico Mountains, a picturesque clump of buttes, and the glimpse of them we get from the north explains why they were so named. And such colors! Their brilliant hues change like kaleidoscopic patterns with the sun's motion. On our right a trail diverges to Coyote Holes, made grewsome by one of many tragedies that have occurred in the region. This time it was a hold-up. A desert waif out of luck and ready cash waylaid the paymaster of Calico mines and ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... recesses of the snow burdened woods. All this and much more had the folk of the village, and everything that went to make up a sweet, clean, uneventful life. And then into this Arcadia dropped one day a stranger, with an amazing experience of the outer world, a kaleidoscopic brain, an extraordinary personal magnetism and a unique combination of ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... experience as this tour had proved could not but have a pronounced and important effect. The burden of a continuous succession of events in which he was the central figure; the strain of a steady succession of brilliant spectacles presenting a kaleidoscopic variety of sight and sound and splendour and incident; the weight of a constant burden of ceremonial and state observances in a land where the slightest carelessness, or indifference, or cordiality—at the wrong ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... scattered through the ranks of his own men, intent on upholding the homestead laws, he would be helpless to drive them out. The pictures of the different valleys suitable for ranch sites, scattered here and there over his extensive range, traveled through his mind in kaleidoscopic procession—and he visioned a squatter outfit established on every one. If they locked him up at this ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... which was decidedly picturesque. This was surrounded by tiny shops and foreign banks, and was always alive with color and incident. The vegetables displayed on the sidewalk stands, the gay hues of the women's gowns, the gaudy kerchiefs of the men, gave it a kaleidoscopic effect that made it as fascinating to us as a trip abroad. The section was known as Little Italy, and so far as we were concerned was as interesting ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... our time is to induce men and women to collect their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women—nay, to remember that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their knees—why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have their place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sources, most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the experience of yesterday being strangely intermingled with the dim suggestions of early years, the tones heard in childhood sounding through the diapason of sorrowing maturity; and all these kaleidoscopic fragments are recomposed into images that seem to have a corresponding ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... settlement, where the sward was carpeted with wild flowers and where the soothing tinkle of many rivulets formed by melting snow were conducive to lazy reverie. From here one could see for a great distance along the coast to the westward, and on bright days the snowy range of cliffs and kaleidoscopic effects of colour cast by cloud and sunshine over the sea ice formed a charming picture. Stepan passed most of his time on these cliffs watching in vain, like a male sister Anne, for ships, for, like most Russians, the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... in the Muski were so kaleidoscopic that it is impossible to give more than a suggestion of their character. A few representative scenes can be given and around these the imagination must picture a constantly changing throng, not hurrying as in busy American cities, but moving leisurely in the Eastern manner. The crowd ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... master have thought of an author who, as Montaigne does, jots down everything in kaleidoscopic manner, just as changeful accident brings it into his head? In Essay ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... conscience, and his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, coming to inhale the aroma and absorb the poison of Paris, adding thereto strange intoxications, and forming, in the immense agglomeration of the old French city, a sort of peculiar syndicate, an ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... through the open door by which the unlucky Wolfgang had passed with his demoniacal bride, and went on and on through the vast gloomy chambers lighted by the ghastly moonshine: the noise of the organ in the chapel, the lights in the kaleidoscopic windows, directed him towards that edifice. He rushed to the door: 'twas barred! He knocked: the beadles were deaf. He applied his inestimable relic to the lock, and—whiz! crash! clang! bang! whang!—the gate flew open! the organ went off in a ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... constant requisition. The rascal is a really great writer in his abominable way, but his dialect was that of the lowest resorts, and he lets us see that the copious argot which now puzzles the stranger by its kaleidoscopic changes was just as vivid and changeable in the miserable days of the eleventh Louis. In the Paris of our day the slang varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the boarding-house in Balzac's ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... river will rise four or five feet in a single night, upsetting all calculation, and making navigation risky in the extreme. When, by chance, the sun is able to penetrate into the depths of this canon, the kaleidoscopic effects are exquisite, and cause the most indifferent to ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... carriages appeared filled with people. It was a warm July day, brilliant with sunshine, and splendid in the greenery of summer foliage. The throngs of spectators, tier upon tier, as it were, presented a kaleidoscopic effect of movement and color, in the undulating appearance of silks and muslins of different hues, as the eye traversed the multitude; in the swaying and bobbing of hundreds of umbrellas and parasols of various colors; in the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... played the latest jazz on his flute. During his performance the lights were extinguished except for the spotlight on the flute-player and another roving beam that threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... he reflected. One bad season would not seriously involve a wary old bird like Horace Gower. He was too secure behind manifold bulwarks. Still in the end,—more spectacular things had come to pass in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic coast. MacRae's face was hard in the moonlight. His eyes were somber. It was an ugly feeling to nurse. For thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must have rankled in his father's breast—with just cause, MacRae told himself moodily. No wonder old Donald had been a grave and silent man; a ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... with excitement. I think she saw in imagination fifty Helens dancing before he eyes in a kaleidoscopic assortment of dresses. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... and revels, whereby he made his way along the path of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... but hesitation undid him. Face to face with Mrs. Toplady and May, he drove to the station, and, as was inevitable, performed the rest of the journey in their company. The afternoon had tired him; alone, he would have closed his eyes, and tried to shut out the kaleidoscopic sensation which resulted from theatrical costumes, brilliant illustrations of the feminine mode, blue sky and sunny glades; but May Tomalin was as fresh as if new-risen, and still talked, talked. Enthusiastic in admiration ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... midst of that kaleidoscopic picture, formed of French, Belgian and English uniforms, intermingled with the varied and gaudy robes of the local nymphs; as we mused in the midst of dense clouds of tobacco smoke, we could not help reflecting that ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... with an air of seriousness and yet with a nonchalance which shows a semi-conscious sense of the unreality of their proposals. In regard to Korea and China and Formosa, they have hatched political and business schemes innumerable. The kaleidoscopic character of Japanese politics is in part due to the rapid succession of visionary schemes. One idea reigns for a season, only to be displaced by another, causing constant readjustment of political parties. Frequent ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... back by daylight or at latest by noon next day. As they paddled up stream against a strong current his thoughts were busy with the events of the past few weeks, particularly those of the last four days. He marvelled at their kaleidoscopic nature. It seemed ages ago that he had fought a fist battle with this stalky, good-natured chap whose muscular shoulders were swinging in rhythm with his own; yet it was only a month. Now here they were, miles from civilization, heading into the night-obscured ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and the church itself is bare and cold and unfriendly. Hemmed in by all this coloured glass, so able and so direct, one sighs for a momentary glimpse of the rose window at Chartres, or even of the too heavily kaleidoscopic patterns of Brussels Cathedral. No matter, the Gouda windows in their way are very fine, and in the sixth, depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes, there is a very fascinating little Duereresque tower on a rock ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... from nature. Keep your eyes open. Observe all poses which may hint of possible schemes of light and shade, of composition, or of color. It is marvellous how constantly groupings and poses and effects of all kinds occur in every-day life. Humanity is kaleidoscopic in its succession of changes; one after another giving a phase new and different, but equally suggestive of a picture if you will take the hint. The picture which originates in a natural occurrence is always true if it is sincerely ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... become kaleidoscopic, only saved from dire confusion by one steady, consistent color, which tinged and killed by its brilliancy the hundred other rainbow fragments. Such was life for him—such at least it had become—a gay chaos in which the one important thing was himself; a game, partly instructive, partly ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... they might escape him in the crowd. Now that he no longer wandered objectless, but looked ahead and walked with a will and a purpose, street-corner "constabeels" ceased to trouble him; there were too many people in those thronged, kaleidoscopic streets for any but the loafers to be noticed. He drew nearer and nearer to the troopers, ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... wild elephants, charging huge boars, and tweaking ferocious bears by the nose, while I had seized a huge boa-constrictor by the tail, and was going away after him at the rate of some twenty miles an hour. This sort of work continued with various kaleidoscopic changes during the remainder of that trying night. Nowell, and Alfred, and Solon came into the scene. Nowell was riding on a wild buffalo; Alfred had mounted on the shoulders of a bear; and Solon, with the ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... a blessed week of work—a "human warious" week, with something piquant lurking at every turn. A week so busy, so kaleidoscopic in its quick succession of events that my own troubles and grievances were pushed into a neglected corner of my mind and made to languish there, unfed by tears ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... latter city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... just been gathered, for the raindrops of the previous night still sparkled among their petals, jeweling with brilliancy their kaleidoscopic riot of color. ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... curtained with sumptuous djerbi, striped in rainbow tints. Over the djerbi, to protect her from the sun, or wind and blowing sand, were hung heavy rugs made by the women of the Djebel Amour mountains, the red and blue folds ornamented by long strands and woollen tassels of kaleidoscopic colours. Sanda's camel (like that of Ben Hadj and the one which carried the two negresses) was a mehari, an animal of race, as superior to ordinary beasts of burden as an eagle is nobler than a domestic fowl. There was a musician among the camel-drivers, chosen ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Via dell' Angelo Custode—Guardian Angel Street. It is an altogether insignificant little church, and strangers scarcely ever visit it. But going down the Tritone, when your ears are splitting, and your eyes are confused with the kaleidoscopic figures of the scurrying crowd, you may lift the heavy leathern curtain, and leave the hurly-burly outside, and find yourself all alone in the quiet presence of death, the end of all hurly-burly and confusion. It is quite possible that under the high, still light ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the United States," 6 vols. (1849-1852), is another early work that is still of value, although it is written with a Federalist bias. J. B. McMaster's "History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War," 8 vols. (1883-1913), presents a kaleidoscopic series of pictures gathered largely from contemporary newspapers, throwing light upon, and adding color to the story. E. M. Avery's "History of the United States," of which seven volumes have been published (1904-1910), is remarkable for its illustrations and reproductions of prints, ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... pride, pomp, and circumstance, and its red tape, its aides-de-camp, and its adjutant-birds, its stirring associations, and its stupid architecture; from the pensioned aristocracy of Chowringhee the Magnificent; from the carnival concourse of the Esplanade, with its kaleidoscopic surprises; from the grim patronage of Fort William, with its in-every-department well-regulated fee-faw-fum; in fine, from Clive, and Hastings, and Wellington, and Gough, and Hardinge, and Napier, and Bentinck, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... "It is a kaleidoscopic miscellany of anecdote, grave and gay; brief bits of biography and impressionistic portrayal of types, charming glimpses into Parisian life and character, and, above all, descriptions of the city's chief, and, to outward view, sole occupation—the art of enjoying oneself. Tourists ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... particulier" of the Grand Hotel restaurant, Woods pours out to the young man, stories of days of toil and danger; lynching scenes, gambling rows, "shooting scrapes," and all kaleidoscopic scenes of the "flush days of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... it. Never did I think I should have a good draught of poetry again." Ruskin somewhere considered it the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, "with enough imagination to set up a dozen lesser poets"; and Stedman calls it "a representative and original creation: representative in a versatile, kaleidoscopic presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most idiosyncratic of its author's poems. An audacious speculative freedom pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old.... 'Aurora ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the twentieth. Etienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events. Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and political reform. As a young man he was a director in that powerful secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of deputies, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... service. We must do something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back. People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... was a great house, if of little architectural merit, and the ball had all the traditional spectacular splendor common to such festivities. The pillared hall and double staircase, the suites of spacious rooms, were filled with a glittering kaleidoscopic crowd of fair and magnificently bejewelled women and presumably brave, certainly well-groomed and handsome men. The excellence of the music, the masses of flowers, the number of great names and well-advertised society beauties ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... traversing to the other side of it, the climbing of the ridge, would afford pleasant excursions, while the opportunity for careful though difficult photography would be unrivalled. Even in thick weather the clouds are mostly below; and their rapid movement, the kaleidoscopic changes which their coming and going, their thickening and thinning, their rising and falling produce, are a never-failing source of interest and pleasure. The changes of light and shade, the gradations of color, were sometimes wonderfully delicate and charming. Seen ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... comedy depends for its appeal upon musical volume, numbers of people, sometimes shifting scenery, a kaleidoscopic effect of pretty girls in ever changing costumes and dancing about to catchy music, it does not have to lean upon a fascinating plot or brilliant dialogue, in order to succeed. But of course, as we shall see, a good story ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... winter consisted more generally of small simple snow-crystals or ice-needles, than of the beautiful snow-flakes whose grand kaleidoscopic forms the inhabitants of the north so often have an opportunity of admiring. Already with a gentle wind and with a pretty clear atmosphere the lower strata of the atmosphere were full of these regular ice-needles, which refracted the rays of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... was shaken with the boom of cannon. Once, twice, thrice. Directly the boat-whistles took up the roar, making a hideous din. The fleet had moved. Spouting rockets and Roman candles, which painted above it a kaleidoscopic archway of fire, welcomed by answering javelins of light and red and orange and blue and green flares from the shore; the fleet bombarded the bridge, escorted Neptune in his car, manoeuvred and massed and charged on the blazing city with a ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... ever is in that kaleidoscopic, gigantic and fascinating lottery, the modern press. The sensation for which an editor to-day would sell his soul, is to-morrow worthless. The greatest fool in the office will sometimes stumble stupidly upon the most important news of the day, while the cleverest reporter ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain of nervous tension had come to an end with ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... there was here congregated a huge crowd of men belonging to the army in one or other capacity without being combatants, and the eye fond of picturesque impressions could feast with delight on the gay, ever-changing kaleidoscopic effects of the wide plain; while the distant scenery was also interesting enough in itself. Between the widely scattered villages and suburbs of the city, which contained 180,000 inhabitants, beautiful parks and gardens shone in ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... in guise of perfect hypocrisy. It is, indeed, this unique contrast of a quaint element, childish crudities and nursery indecencies and "vain and amatorious" phrase jostling the finest and highest views of life and character, shown in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the marvellous picture with many a "rich truth in a tale's presence", pointed by a rough dry humour which compares well with "wut; "the alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the baldest prose ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... kindergarten subject is its kaleidoscopic character; it presents, like all truth, so many sides that you can give every one that which he likes or is fitted to receive. Take the aggressively self-made man who thinks our general scheme of education unprofitable,—show ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... hit upon a happier plan than in writing this story of Yorkshire factory life. The whole book is all aglow with life, the scenes varying continually with kaleidoscopic rapidity."—Pall Mall Gazette. ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... and it explodes and resolves itself into powder. These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's drops of the learned and polite world. See how the papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service! How kind the "Critical Notices"—where small authorship comes to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy—always ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had reached the point where it was beginning ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... performance. It is only in this way that I can produce the right kind of singing tone in cantabile passages. Sometimes I use one touch in one voice and an entirely different touch in another voice. The combinations are kaleidoscopic in their multiplicity. ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... needs be destructive in another, and while some of the allurements of her strong individuality will disappear, her moral and physical status will be greatly improved. Her ragged, half-naked people will don proper attire, sacrificing the gaudy colors which now make every out-door scene kaleidoscopic; a modern grain thresher will take the place of weary animals plodding in a circle, treading out the grain; half-clad women at the fountains will disappear, and iron pipes will convey water for domestic use ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... he was acting strangely for one who had reached the supposedly practical view of life where all sentiment is barred from social intercourse with the fair sex, but he also realized that he was powerless to check the surge of what he now felt within. With kaleidoscopic rapidity there flashed through his mind every occasion when he had been with Miss Fox, from the first meeting beneath the elm-tree in the Captain's yard to the present time, and he recognized what it was that had sent scurrying his practical views of life. He was in love, not ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... As with kaleidoscopic swiftness the details of my "affair" passed through my memory, it was only by an effort that I restrained an indecorous shout. He was correct. I could call to mind no single feature that had been "regular," from the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti |
