"Rainbow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... throw up the arms and bravely yield. But Mike also learned that this is not always necessary to a man with courage, and that very often escape lies in the last moment, the very last, when endurance seems no longer possible. His deliverance did not burst upon him in rainbow colours out of the sky complete. It was a very slow affair. He heard that an old woman had died who lived in Parker's Alley and sold old clothes, old iron, bottles, and such like trash. Parker's Alley was not very easy to find. Going up High Street from the bridge, you first turned ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... I mounted and tried the horse. Presently I rode him out of the town and away across the heaths, and had no fault to find with him. Indeed, by the time that I brought him back I did not care if he was of all the colours of the rainbow, for he was the best horse ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Physics explains the principles of natural things and the properties of the material world; it discourses on the nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, of stones, of plants and animals, and teaches the causes of all the meteors, the rainbow, the will o' the wisps, the comets, lightning, thunder, thunderbolts, rain, snow, ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... eighth day the souls of the pilgrims resumed their journey, and in four days came to a spot whence they looked down upon a line of light, in colour like a rainbow, only brighter and clearer. One day more brought them to the place, and they saw that this was the column of light which binds together the whole universe. The ends of the column were fastened to heaven, and from them hung the distaff of Necessity, on which all the heavenly ...
— The Republic • Plato
... suspecting how Venus and Apollo guard it from all harm. It is only on the twelfth day after Patroclus' death, that the gods interfere in behalf of the Trojans, by sending Iris to Priam to guide him to Achilles' tent, where they assure him his prayers will obtain his son's body. The rainbow goddess not only serves as guide to the mourning father, but brings him unseen into Achilles' tent, where, falling at the hero's feet, the aged Priam sues in such touching terms that the Greek warrior's heart ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... uncommonly serene at the moment of Ferdinand's birth. "The sun, which had been obscured with clouds during the whole day, suddenly broke forth with unwonted splendor. A crown was also beheld in the sky, composed of various brilliant colors like those of a rainbow. All which appearances were interpreted by the spectators as an omen, that the child then born would be the most illustrious among men." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 153.) Garibay postpones the nativity of Ferdinand to the year 1453, and L. Marineo, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... houses, and more especially Westminster Abbey, are of all the colors in the rainbow, and much smaller than the persons entering them, and yet in every figure there is spirit, in every face expression, and throughout, William, Harold, and Odo, bear countenances which are not to be mistaken. Harold has moustaches, which none of the Normans ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sea, ... splendid and strong, yet beautiful as the rose or the rainbow; full of food, nourisher of man, purger of the world, creating ...
— Where We Live - A Home Geography • Emilie Van Beil Jacobs
... that, though the sun had risen nearly three hours ago, it had but just climbed above the brow of the eastern slope. There was a luxurious and dank growth of trees, with a tangle of underwood and boggy soil beneath them. A vapor was shining in rainbow colors against the brightening sky. In the depth of the valley, but hidden by the thicket, ran a noisy stream—too noisy to be any thing else than shallow. There had been no frost since the sharp and keen wintry weather in December, and the heavy rains which had fallen since ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... just above the water, a sort of cloud floated in the atmosphere. But it was not a mass of vapor, and this became only too evident, when, under the first solar rays, which broke in piercing it, a beautiful rainbow spread from ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... beautiful! that rainbow span, O'er dim Crane-neck was bended; One bright foot touched the eastern hills, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Zillah cared little for reputation, she knew not its value—little for wealth, for the finest and rarest jewels of the world sparkled in gorgeous variety upon her person, so that she moved more like a rainbow than a living woman—little, very little for the tribe of Levi, and less than all for Ichabod. His black eyes she likened to burnt cinders; she saw no beauty in a beard striped and mottled with grey, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... both coined and melted into bars; Spanish doubloons, Indian rupees, French louis, English guineas; cups and candelabra; chains and watches; jewels too, in whose depths flashed rainbow hues, amethysts, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, strings upon ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... a rainbow's birth, Spread his wings and sank to earth; Entered, in flesh, the empty cell, Lived there, and played the craftsman well; And morning, evening, noon and night, Praised God in place of Theocrite. And from a boy, to youth he grew: The man put ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... shows a ladder of silver crusted with emeralds. The round-house, spars, masts, every spot where a peak or angle catches the light, have flushed into liquid, jeweled beauty; and each point, a prism and mirror, catches, multiplies and reflects the other splendor. A rainbow, a fleecy mist over the lake, made prismal by the sunlight, a bunch of sub-aqueous moss, a soap-bubble, are all examples in our daily experience of that transforming power of water in the display of color. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in a different color, which gave the effect of a distracted rainbow: ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... again her face assumed a mournful cast. She led the way to a hall of black marble, in the centre of which the fountain threw up its water to the height of twelve, or fourteen feet, and fell into a spacious basin. The water of it, when in a body, shone with all the colours of the rainbow, and the sparkling drops which were thrown out on every side were brilliant as ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... shops; even the most commonplace necessities of life appear in a startling magic light through this artistic power of setting forth everything to advantage. Ordinary articles of food attract us by the new light in which they are placed; even uncooked fish lie so delightfully dressed that the rainbow gleam of their scales attracts us; raw meat lies, as if painted, on neat and many-colored porcelain plates, garlanded about with parsley—yes, everything seems painted, reminding us of the highly polished yet modest pictures of Franz Mieris. But the human beings whom we ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the very word is warm; The hum of bees is in it, and the sight Of sunny fountains glancing silver light, And the rejoicing world, and every charm Of happy nature in her hour of love, Fruits, flowers, and flies, in rainbow-glory bright: The smile of God glows graciously above, And genial earth is grateful; day by day Old faces come again with blossoms gay, Gemming in gladness meadow, garden, grove: Haste with thy harvest, then, my softened ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow-falls in the river, A moment white—then melt forever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.— Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... her like ought on earth might read, I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies, Upon a virgin brydes adorned head, With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies; Or like the circlet of a Turtle true, In which all colours of the rainbow bee; Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new, In which all pure perfection one may see. But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone Of earthly things, to judge of things divine: Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none Can deeme, but ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and staircases at Mrs. Gresham's house were very crowded when Phineas arrived there. Men of all shades of politics were there, and the wives and daughters of such men; and there was a streak of royalty in one of the saloons, and a whole rainbow of foreign ministers with their stars, and two blue ribbons were to be seen together on the first landing-place, with a stout lady between them carrying diamonds enough to load a pannier. Everybody was there. Phineas found that even Lord Chiltern was ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... found her, with a wrap thrown over her head, gazing out through one of the deep embrasures over the misty country to a line of hills in the far distance. The view was magnificent, lighted here and there by sunshine striking through scudding cloud-drifts. And a splendid rainbow spanned it like a ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the brown chief of Oithona. He "was," etc. After detaining this "brown chief" some time, the bards conclude by giving him their advice to "raise his fair locks;" then to "spread them on the arch of the rainbow;" and to "smile through the tears of the storm." Of this kind of thing there are no less than nine pages; and we can so far venture an opinion in their favour, that they look very like Macpherson; and we are positive they are pretty nearly ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... altars, as the months roll on, Ay he and his staunch wife. No fairer bride E'er clasped her lord in royal palaces: And her heart's love her brother-husband won. In such blest union joined the immortal pair Whom queenly Rhea bore, and heaven obeys: One couch the maiden of the rainbow decks With myrrh-dipt hands for ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet; she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally have some gift? The girl was very pretty, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... she charged him with what she had overheard. But somehow or other he laughed at her, and explained it all away to her satisfaction. He could always make her believe whatever he pleased. If he had told her the rainbow was only a few yards of striped Leamington ribbon, she would have believed him! He didn't stay more than an hour, and was off again in a hurry. We didn't see him again until the last of the week. It was the news of ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... terraces of black and orange and red and yellow and green and blue and white, shattered by the convulsions of nature, and crumbling under the repeated blows of human violence, still glittered like a ruined rainbow in the ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of personality to the utmost ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... important shops in the length of thoroughfare known as Fore Street and in Church Square (which is the same street with a corkscrew twist in it) 'Bias showed much appreciation. He was especially allured by the rainbow-tinted goods in Mr Shake Benny's window, and by the cards recommending them for sale. If you admire Lord Rosebery, Now is Your Time—He ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... admiration. Across the river a shower had fallen, and the clouds, clearing away abruptly, had left there a twin rainbow of matchless perfection. Its double arch was poised as accurately over the town as if it had been painted there. Each hoop was flawless in form, lovely in hue, tenderly luminous, exquisite in purity. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... There was a king sitting in a golden chair, having clothes of gold and of green, and his chief people were sitting around him, and his musicians were playing. And no one could know what colour were the dresses of the musicians, for every colour of the rainbow was in them. And there was a great table in the middle of the room, having every sort of thing on it, one better ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... of the funeral arrived; the hour appointed was half-past two. All the morning rain fell, and about mid-day began a violent thunder storm, which lasted for an hour. Then the sky began to clear, and as Lashmar started for Rivenoak be saw a fine rainbow across great sullen clouds, slowly breaking upon depths of azure. The gates of the park stood wide open, and many carriages were moving up the drive. Afterwards, it became known that no member of the Ogram family had ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... persist in finding that story tedious, and the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings—not of the stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy Feverel and Richmond Roy—but creatures of gossamer and rainbow, phantasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiriting points ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... is that Theresa passed in those few moments to a new existence—to a being wholly different from her former self. The rainbow tints had faded from her sky, and the stars in her futurity had ceased to shine. What to her were all her mental gifts, when they had failed to win the love she valued? And now the nature so impulsive and ingenuous was impelled ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... on a little farther, and, in a short time, oh, perhaps about as long as it takes you to peel an orange, and put some salt on it, they came to a most beautiful place. I wish you could have seen it! At first Alice thought the rainbow had fallen from the sky, there were so many colors. There was red and green and blue and orange and violet and yellow and pink and purple and even some of that skilligimink color, that once turned ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... the sun or the moon, but results from the concentric weaving. The oblique eyes have no reference to a Mongolian origin, as they only follow the direction of the ray upon which they are woven, and the headdress does not refer to the rainbow or the aurora because it is arched, but is arched because the construction forced it into this shape. The proportion of the figure is not so very bad because the Moki artist did not know better, but because the surface of the tray did not afford room to project the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... vessel from deck to bows, and every detail stood out in miraculous sharpness. Farther ahead there was a multi-coloured twilight. It seemed as if the prow kept pushing itself noiselessly into a wall of opalescent green which parted, glistening, and grew to an ethereal, rainbow-like translucency close ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven's croak In symphony austere: Thither the rainbow comes, the cloud, And mists that spread the flying shroud, And sunbeams, and the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... bourgeoises, vile-smelling lavoirs, cheap fruit-shops and plebeian cremeries, its slimy cobblestones, its gutters running not with laughing waters, and sending up scents not of spicy isles ensphered by sun-illumined seas—was a rainbow arch over which she passed with airy tread toward the Krug studio. For had she not at last finished for ever the detestable photograph-coloring which had been a daily crucifixion of all her artistic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the gods of the winds in person, and as Iris, or the rainbow, is a sign of winds, they are made to ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the noisy retinue of the pharaoh sailed near, the frightened birds flew up and, circling above the boats, joined their cries with the mighty sound of people. Above this all hung a transparent sky and light so full of life that in the flood of it the black earth assumed a brightness, and the stones rainbow colors. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... With her rainbow's lovely form; Her thunner an' her leetnin', An' her grandeur in the storm: With her sunshine an' her shower, An' her whirlin' of the dust, An' the maiden with her flagon, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... speed of an arrow, whilst two rainbows faintly spanned the boiling flood. Down, down among the caverned rocks and foaming waters went the beautiful form, whilst her guardian angels received her spirit and soared above the rainbow's arch, up through the concave of the skies ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... angles, this light is converted into colors. For an angle of a certain kind makes red, another green, blue or yellow, and so on of all the colors, as we perceive in the prism, on which the reflected rays of the sun forms the different colors of the rainbow; the species visible is then nothing else than the ray of light which returns from the object on which it breaks to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... wrapped, with his staff he silently pointed To the golden legend written in glittering star-points under, Shining in crystal ferns, and translucent berries of holly. Yet as I pondered the words of ineffable awe and wonder, A mist of rainbow brightness obscured them, and hid them wholly, While wrapt in his vision he stood, like ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... as it takes the shadow of a cloud to run across a rippling field of corn, for so long the vision remained; and then it melted into the darkness, even as a rainbow ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... looks like frozen mist, and is wonderful, and almost at any time between sunrise and sunset a "sun dog" can be seen with its scintillating rainbow tints, that are brilliant yet exquisitely delicate in coloring. Our houses are really very warm—the thick logs are plastered inside and papered, every window has a storm sash and every room a double floor, and our big stoves can burn immense logs. But ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... food in the tumuli testifies to the natural instinct implanted by the Creator in the human heart with regard to a future existence. The idea that the soul of the departed is about to take a long journey is constant and deeply rooted; the rainbow and the milky way have often been supposed to be the paths trod by the departed, who require sustenance for so long a journey. The Aztecs laid a water-bottle beside the bodies to be used on the way to Mictlan, the land of the dead. Bow ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... and there were bright tongues of fiery cloud burning and quivering about them; and the river, brighter than all, fell, in a wavering column of pure gold, from precipice to precipice, with the double arch of a broad purple rainbow stretched across it, flushing and fading alternately in the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... was a young man who had a new pipe. He was smoking peacefully in the shade of an arbor hung with blue grapes. His wife was young and pretty; she had rolled up her sleeves as far as her elbows and was drawing water from the well. The wooden bucket bounded against the edge, and shed tears like a rainbow. The young man was happy smoking his pipe, because he saw the birds flying hither and thither, because his dear old mother was still among the living, because his old father was hale, and because he loved with all his heart his young wife, and was proud of her lithesomeness and ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... are moribund. Man's inborn monkeyishness is obtaining the upper hand and bearing him back to his natural filth,—and the glimmerings of the Ideal as shown forth in a few examples of heroic and noble living are like the flash of the rainbow-arch spanning ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... The rainbow view, from hill to hill expand, Its radiant arches o'er the laughing land; 'Midst the grey cloud, a happy omen shows; With peace and safety every colour glows: The quiet valley smiles beneath its beams, And owns its beauties in her gliding streams. Daphne ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry. He described at some length what he thought that spirit was. "Tuned to the spiritual" was one of the phrases he used. "Desire-compelling, with the elusiveness of the rainbow's end," was another. Dr. Farelly grew despondent. If Theophilus expected life in Dunailin to be in the least like one of Mr. Yeats' plays, he was doomed to a bitter disappointment and would probably leave ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... and those that swim in the waters, and of those that fly in the regions of the air on high, excepting their blood, for therein is the life. But I will give you a sign that I have left off my anger by my bow." [whereby is meant the rainbow, for they determined that the rainbow was the bow of God]. And when God had said and promised thus, he ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... villagers among whom he had come to settle he seemed to have mysterious peculiarities, chiefly owing to his advent from an unknown region called "North'ard." He invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at the wheel-wrights'; he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes of his calling, or in order to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Millions of servants executed his wishes—still more were ready to receive his orders. The first were clothed in glittering robes, whiter than snow—for white was the colour of the Great King, as the emblem of purity. Others were clothed in armour, shining like the colours of the rainbow, and carried flaming swords in their hands. Each, at his master's nod, flew like lightning to accomplish his will. All his servants—faithful, vigilant, bold, and ardent—were united in friendship, and could imagine no happiness greater than ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... be fairer to the eye than these "summer isles of Eden" lying all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes, with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... or delight, but figure is taken in also, and has its part in it, as in painting, weaving, needleworks, &c.;—those which are taken notice of do most commonly belong to MIXED MODES, as being made up of ideas of divers kinds, viz. figure and colour, such as beauty, rainbow, &c. ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... winter is not cold in Normandy, especially by the sea. As long as the westerly winds sweep across the Atlantic, the air is soft though damp, with fine mists hanging in it, which shine with rainbow tints in the sunlight. Sometimes Christmas and the New Year find the air still genial, in spite of the short days and the long rainy nights. Strong gales may blow, but so long as they do not come from the dry east or frosty north there is no real ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... and Phoebe never got along once they were married. It was Manton's fault. Like all explorers he was unhappy over his lot and looked beyond the rainbow. In fact, he told me once that the only reason he went in for exploring space was to get away from ...
— Spacemen Never Die! • Morris Hershman
... watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three boys stretched on the grass, and was gone ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... the descendants of the Puritan fathers. The fully grown elm presents to the sun a darkly absorbent hue, and to the passer-by who rests beneath its shade the most grateful and restful color in all the rainbow's palette. ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... that section. The first appearance of these singular and most extraordinary pictures on the glass was at the residence of William Showalter, where the window panes all at once showed the colors of the rainbow, on which two days later the heads of people and animals were clearly visible. On the glass of another house a head and face resembling President Lincoln's were to be seen. On another the form of a young girl bending ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... the rapture and the freedom of the torrent on the hill! I shall wander o'er the meadows where the fairest blossoms call: Though the ledges seize and fling me headlong from the rocky wall, I shall leave a rainbow hanging o'er the ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... apiece. How would you like that? They make lots for the soldiers, out of skeins of long yarn; mamma says you are a famous fellow for spinning splendid yarns yourself. Ours is dark blue; but mamma says, yours are all the colors of the rainbow, and a great deal of black besides; and everybody is delighted with them, and all the soldiers love you, ...
— The Two Story Mittens and the Little Play Mittens - Being the Fourth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... both of us were left among the ranks of the briefless army of the stove. This would not do. Our souls burned within us with a noble thirst for legal fame and fees. We held a consultation (without an agent) at the Rainbow, and finally determined that since Edinburgh would not hear us, Jedburgh should have the privilege of monopolising our maiden eloquence at the ensuing justiciary circuit. Jedburgh presents a capital field to the ambition of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... island, where they looked white and glorious as little angels. Rupert was seized with a strong desire to join them, and begged the old man to bathe him also in the stream. But he was answered, "It is not yet time." Just then a rainbow spanned the island, and in its arch was enthroned the child Jesus, dressed in a coat that Rupert knew to be his own. And the child said to the others, "See this coat; it is one which my brother Rupert has just sent to me. He has given us many gifts from his love; shall ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... wax sparkled like stars in chandeliers of crystal. These in turn, catching the illumination, glittered in prismatic fragments with all the varied colors of the rainbow, so that a mellow yet brilliant radiance filled the entire apartment. Polished mirrors of a spotless clearness, framed in golden frames and built into the walls, reflected the waxed floors, the rich Oriental carpets, and the sumptuous paintings that hung against ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... lake,—this being in a sort of bay,—in the slightly agitated mirror, the variegated trees were reflected dreamily and indistinctly; a broad belt of bright and diversified colors shining in the water beneath. Sometimes the image of a tree might be almost traced; then nothing but this sweep of broken rainbow. It was like the recollection of the real scene in an observer's mind,—a ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... consciousness that the husband she had lost ought to have been a better man did not lessen her mourning at all. On the contrary, this fact seemed at first to set off the dead husband in his young wife's eyes, and to be the necessary cloud to the rainbow. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... considered as their own the victory of Constantius, preferred his glory to that of his father. [88] Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, immediately composed the description of a celestial cross, encircled with a splendid rainbow; which during the festival of Pentecost, about the third hour of the day, had appeared over the Mount of Olives, to the edification of the devout pilgrims, and the people of the holy city. [89] The size of the meteor was gradually magnified; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always reticent. I have known them ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... concerted gasp of outrage. Men leaped to their feet. Large knives came out of elaborate holsters. Figures in all the colors of the rainbow—all badly soiled—roared their indignation and charged at Hoddan. They waved knives as ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... forms that made me shudder or smile. It was not a big boy bullying a little one, but a young wolf with glistening teeth and a lamb cowering before him; or, it was a dog faithful and famishing—or a star going slowly into eclipse—or a rainbow fading—or a flower blooming—or a sun rising—or a waning moon. The revelations of the spectacles determined my feeling for the boys, and for all whom I saw through them. No shyness, nor awkwardness, nor silence, could separate me from those who looked lovely as lilies to ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... confused and broken colour and form—a kind of chaos out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall—each contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to fill the space. Lenorme was seated—not at his easel, but at a grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs of it. For they had walked straight in without giving his servant time ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... of nature—and all her aspects were beautiful there—had a new charm for the eyes of Fanny Markland. The silvery waters cast upward by the fountain fell back in rainbow showers, ruffling the tiny lake beneath, and filling the air with a low, dreamy murmur. Never had that lovely creation of art, blending with nature, looked so like an ideal thing as now—a very growth of fairy-land. The play of the waters in the air was as the glad motions of ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... has adduced from Blefkenius, Scheffer, and others, such as those of the Laplanders about the domestic spirits which wake them at night, and summon them to go and fish; of Thor, the deity of thunder, who has power of life and death, health and sickness, and who, armed with the rainbow, shoots his arrows at those evil demons that live on the tops of rocks and mountains, and infest the lakes; of the Jubles or Juhlafolket, vagrant troops of spirits, which roam the air, and wander up and down by forests and mountains, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... understand that it will be necessary to explain what a rainbow is. As I stated previously, light is merely vibration. Now colors are formed by the different lengths of the vibrations, just the same as the different musical notes are made by the different vibratory lengths. To understand this more fully, I make a sketch (Fig. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... while the Velebits flushed a pinkish purple with blue-purple shadows, the silhouette only showing in places beneath heavy masses of cloud, in which some of the summits were hidden. Falling showers here and there softened and veiled the strong light and shade, relieved by the prismatic hues of a rainbow. As the sun sank lower the mountains and clouds gradually became a pallid grey, while the sky to westward passed through many gradations of colour and tone as the clouds slowly dispersed and night fell. Far away over the darkening water ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... edge of a midsummer dawn In troubled dreams I went from land to land, Each seven-colored like the rainbow's arc, Regions where never fancy's foot had trod Till then; yet all the strangeness seemed not strange, At which I wondered, reasoning in my dream With twofold sense, well knowing that I slept. At last I came to this our cloud-hung earth, And somewhere ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of slender white streaks between the contrasting masses of colour, as adopted in the Great Exhibition building of 1851. It is also well worthy of remark that the brightest colours are often used in broad masses, and when so, are always arranged chromatically, in the sequence of the rainbow's hues, and are hence never displeasing to the eye. The hues, though bright, are subdued by the imperfect light: the countenances of the images are all calm, and their expression solemn. Whichever way you turn, the eye ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Cain and Seth, two races. The great wickedness. Noah God's chosen man. The Ark. The flood. The sacrifice and rainbow covenant. Confirmation of tradition and geology. Teachings of the period. Topics ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... her neck the diamond necklace of old family jewels, and held it in the pool of her rosy palms, as though it were a mass of clear separate raindrops rainbow-kindled. It was looped about the tips of her two upright thumbs; part of it had slipped through the palms and flashed like a pendent ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... that led westward, drying his eyes, and winking hard to make them swallow the tears which sought to hide from him a spectacle that was calling aloud to be seen. For lo! the street-end was filled with the glory of a magnificent rainbow. All across its opening stretched and stood the wide arch of a wonderful rainbow. Hector could not see the sun; he saw only what it was making; and the old story came back to him, how the men of ancient time took the heavenly bow for a promise that there ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... since that hope denied in worlds of strife, Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life! The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, And ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the father and mother are taking a ride on a summer afternoon after a shower, with little Johnny sitting upon the seat between them in the chaise. The parents are engaged in conversation with each other, we will suppose, and would not like to be interrupted. Johnny presently spies a rainbow on a cloud in the east, and, after uttering an exclamation of delight, asks his mother what made the rainbow. She hears the question, and her mind, glancing for a moment at the difficulty of giving an intelligible ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... its best reliefs, and its oldest monument. It was evening, and I could no longer see to draw, though pencillings of light still fell on the pavement through the larger windows, whose colors were softened like those of the lunar rainbow; and still the edges of the stalls were gilded with the last gleams of sunset, though the seats were filled already with those phantoms which twilight seems to create in such a place. The monuments looked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... words, and I sink almost a second time to death while I recall these sad scenes to my memory. Oh, my beloved father! Indeed you made me miserable beyond all words, but how truly did I even then forgive you, and how entirely did you possess my whole heart while I endeavoured, as a rainbow gleams upon a cataract,[D][27] ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... mind to ascertain absolute truth. This arose out of the imperfections of knowledge obtained through the senses. Sense perception {227} was held in much doubt. The world is full of delusions. Man thinks he sees when he does not. The rainbow is but an illusion when we attempt to analyze it. The eye deceives, the ear hears what does not exist; even touch and taste frequently deceive us. What, then, can be relied upon as accurate in determining knowledge? To this the Greek mind answers, "Nothing"; it reaches ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... spray cast by the infinite I hung an instant there, and threw my ray To make the rainbow. A microcosm I Reflecting all. Then back I fell again, And though I perished not, I was ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... the only attractive bit of water about Deepdale. The stream emptied into Rainbow Lake, some miles below the town, and Rainbow Lake fully justified its name. It was a favorite scene of canoeing and motor-boat parties, and many summer residences dotted its shores. In summer white tents of campers gleamed beneath the trees on ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... the Arno winding its way between—all this he saw, but he saw more than this. For it seemed to him that the Spirit of Beauty hovered above the fair city, and he almost heard the rustle of her wings and caught a glimpse of her rainbow-tinted robe in the ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... to her carriage by Talleyrand and Duroc, she sank down overcome by emotion. Yet, amid her tears and humiliation, the old Prussian pride had flashed forth in one of her replies as the rainbow amidst the rain-storm. When Napoleon expressed his surprise that she should have dared to make war on him with means so utterly inadequate, she at once retorted: "Sire, I must confess to Your Majesty, the glory of Frederick the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... aghast. On her delicate gray dress the double line of pearls glistened like huge drops of dew on a spider-web. The rope hung down below her waist, and each pearl had a light in its heart as if it held the ghost of a rainbow. "It can't be true! It's a dream!" the girl stammered. She loved pearls, and knew that these were marvels beyond common knowledge. But oh, if they could have come ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... power of love! how good an angel of light thou art, how rosy an aureole in the dusk, how bright a rainbow on the cloud ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a sweet delirium. When he walked, he seemed to tread on air: when he forged, his hammer felt a feather in his hand. The mountains in the way looked molehills, and the rainbow tangible, to Youth, and Health, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the piano; so that, at the start, a very definite limitation is imposed upon magnitude of plan. You cannot suggest on the piano, with any adequacy of effect, a mountain-side in flames, or the prismatic arch of a rainbow, or the towering architecture of cloud forms; so MacDowell has confined himself within the bounds of such canvases as he paints upon in his "Four Little Poems" ("The Eagle," "The Brook," "Moonshine," "Winter"), in his first orchestral suite, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... white blossoms fondly murmuring, And founts, that in the blessed sunshine sing; Hail to thee! maiden, with the bright blue eyes! And showery robe, all steeped in starry dew; Hail to thee! as thou ridest through the skies, Upon thy rainbow car of ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... cruised about this lovely lake, which is of the bluest water and the greenest shadows you ever saw. One sees a hundred feet down; the water is as clear as crystal. J. talked fishing with the pilot, who promised to take him out fishing with him. He caught a beautiful rainbow-trout (as they are called here) from the launch. When he gets home he will tell you how big the biggest ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... gleaming before us under a rainbow mist that hallowed every shape. There seemed affinity between the earth and the sky. I've never seen that particular soft unity out of Devon. And every ship, however black or modern, on those pale waters, had the look of a dream ship. The tall green woods, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and dazzling, rising up from them! Behold you now this same Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over all the Eastern World. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the individual items; and here it is that the foreign student is often at a loss. For instance, class a includes Earth, in its cosmogonic sense, as the mother of mankind; Heaven, in its original sense of God; the Dual Principle in nature; the Sun, Moon and Stars; Wind; Clouds; Rainbow; Thunder and Lightning; Rain; Fire, &c. But Earth is itself a geographical category; and all strange phenomena relating to many of the items under class a are recorded under class d. Category No. 6, marked as Political ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... jollity of the slowly-moving crowds, and the incredible illustrations displayed on the newspaper kiosks, and the moon creeping up the velvet sky, and the thousands of little tables at which the jolly crowds halted to drink liquids coloured like the rainbow—what with all that, and what with the curious gay feeling in the air, Henry felt that possibly Berlin, or Boston, or even Timbuctoo, might be a suitable and proper place for an engaged young man, but that decidedly Paris ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... descends, is received by Spring, and the Elements, 59. Addresses the Nymphs of Fire. Star-light Night seen in the Camera Obscura, 81. I. Love created the Universe. Chaos explodes. All the Stars revolve. God. 97. II. Shooting Stars. Lightning. Rainbow. Colours of the Morning and Evening Skies. Exterior Atmosphere of inflammable Air. Twilight. Fire-balls. Aurora Borealis. Planets. Comets. Fixed Stars. Sun's Orb, 115. III. 1. Fires at the Earth's Centre. Animal ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... hot day, with great thunderhead, black and creamy white clouds rolling down from the canyon country. No rain had fallen at the Ford, though storms near by had cooled the air. At sunset Slone saw a rainbow bending down, ruddy and gold, connecting the purple of cloud ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... feathers live in hot countries, where it is sunny almost the whole year. In fact, it is the bright light of the sun in those countries that gives the colors to the feathers of the birds, which are as lovely as the colors of the rainbow. ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... pushed over the haggard No Man's Land, while reckless poppies scattered through the ranks of green, to be followed by the shyer starry sisters in blue and white. Irrepressibly these floral throngs advanced over the shell torn spaces, crowding, mingling and bending together in a rainbow riot beneath the winds that blew them. They were ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... shouldering the precipice, walk upon a ledge or projecting shelf of from one to three feet wide, the current below boiling and whirling along the while, of dazzling brilliance; I at one moment counted five rainbow arches, perfect and imperfect. What a succession of "Maidens of the Mist" might a lover of romance conjure up from these vexed waters ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... he be going now?" thought Don, as he caught sight of a refulgent rainbow spanning the falls, and his eyes rested upon the brilliant, sun-illumined greens of fern, bush, and grass, with pendent mosses, all luxuriating in the heat and moisture of ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... those wild violet rays That burn beyond the rainbow's circle dim, Bound by dark nights and driven by pale days, The sightless ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... darkened, and swallowed them; nor should I have known the issue, if suddenly, on the very cloud where the strife had been, there had not beamed forth a rainbow—not a common rainbow, Ebbo, but a perfect ring, a soft-glancing, many-tinted crown of victory. Then I knew the saint had won, and ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the shore, with long, irised tresses streaming from its tops, some of its outer fringes borne away in scud to refresh the wind, all the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty of rainbow light. Gulls and albatrosses, strong, glad life in the midst of the stormy beauty, skimmed the waves against the wind, seemingly without effort, oftentimes flying nearly a mile without a single wing-beat, gracefully swaying ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir |
