"Translucent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life. If I put my hand on that firm, round throat I shall find it cold as marble. No, no, my friend, blood does not run beneath that ivory skin; the purple tide of life does not swell those veins, nor stir those fibres which interlace like net-work below the translucent amber of the brow and breast. This part palpitates with life, but that other part is not living; life and death jostle each other in every detail. Here, you have a woman; there, a statue; here again, a dead body. Your creation ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... again. We must regain the lost state. But it is to the giant and spiritual childhood of the young immortals we must return, when into their clear and translucent souls first fell the rays of the father-beings. The men of old were intimates of wind and wave and playmates of many a brightness long since forgotten. The rapture of the fire was their rest; their outgoing was still consciously through ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... has what is really a third eyelid, a thin translucent membrane, which naturalists call the nictitating, or winking, membrane. It may be drawn over the eye independently of the other lids. You may have seen ducks, chickens or other birds drawing this milky film back and forth over their eyes ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... surface itself remained as mysterious as before. Of course they did not touch it with bare hands—all wore insulated mittens—but the dazzling stuff was certainly as hard as steel and as highly polished. It was neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent, "like pink mother-of-pearl," as ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... northern lancet representing the Tree of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose folds of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... end of the Shore Drive at about five o'clock. At this time of year the days are still comparatively short, and the shadows of the evening were beginning to settle down upon the great city. Lamps were beginning to burn with that mellow radiance which seems almost watery and translucent to the eye. There was a softness in the air which speaks with an infinite delicacy of feeling to the flesh as well as to the soul. Carrie felt that it was a lovely day. She was ripened by it in spirit for many suggestions. As they drove along the smooth pavement ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... knotted about her head, without the least disorder, but with a wilfulness of elegant play most harmonious with all the rest of her appearance. To characterise the two in a word, Christina was a beautiful pearl, and Dolly was a translucent opal. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above my head. I turned aside, caught my breath, and looked again. The wave over-topped the Ghost, and I gazed sheer up and into it. A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by a ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... it provides a translucent covering, which allows action by the actinic rays of light, which brings the chlorophyll into activity. All plant growth is conducted under the influence of chlorophyll, and the actinic rays of light activate this. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... hilly labyrinth on a series of terraces, falling off like steps to the river on our left. They had been burned over, and the young grass was sprouting up, under the freshening influence of the early rain, in a carpet of translucent green. At a distance of four leagues from San Juan, after descending from terrace to terrace, we again reached the river, now flowing through a valley three hundred yards broad, and about fifty feet below the general level ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... speedy time! Behold, before thou pass From age to age, what thou hast sought to see, One in whom all the excellencies be, In whom heaven looks itself as in a glass. Time, look thou too in this translucent glass, And thy youth past in this pure mirror see! As the world's beauty in his infancy, What it was then, and thou before it was. Pass on and to posterity tell this— Yet see thou tell but truly what hath been. Say to our nephews that thou once hast seen In perfect human ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... a still later hour, over against the harvest moon, see them rise congruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominous gloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafage which do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structure sunders them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some are tall and straight, springing like fountains arrested in the moment when they turn to fall; others bend oblique ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... on wood and is quite common in our woods—both the rose-colored and the translucent-brown. Captain McIlvaine calls Merulius tremellosus and M. rubellus emergency species. He says they are rather tasteless, tough, slightly woody in flavor. They are found in ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... of life has been attained in various ways. The religious experience itself, when intense, may give to the individual apart from a reasoned judgment, or from any actual change in his physical surroundings, a translucent insight during which he sees deeply, calmly, joyously into the beautiful eternal order of things. This mystic insight has been experienced on occasion by quite normal and prosaic men and women. While it lasts, reality seems to take on new colors and ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... such grace and ease did they pirouette through their reconnaisance that Jeb was reminded of an aerial quadrille being danced five thousand feet above the earth; or, seeming to tire of this, one of them would change the play to hide-and-seek, point toward the translucent blue and scoot behind a cloud, with the others following. It was a cordial invitation for the Boche to come up and fight! Jeb did not see them again for several minutes, but he noticed that one of the kite balloons suddenly ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... the furthermost was a little paring of silver light, the coronet of the rising moon. But the glory of the full orb was in the retrospect; for, closing the savage vista of the ravine, stood up far away a cluster of jagged pinnacles—opal, translucent, lustrous as the peaks of icebergs that are the frozen music of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... plain—some great fortified town, grave on its hill-top, broke the level lines—"A rose-red city, half as old as time." Or, again, it was the sea in some glow of sunset, the white reflections of the sails slipping down and down through the translucent pinks and blues, till the eye lost itself in the infinity of shades and tints, which the breeze—oh, the freshness of it!—was painting each moment anew at its caprice—painting and blotting, over and over again, as the water swung ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hand. He declined with thanks to join the captain's excursion party, and early next day rode south into the upper basin of the Park, which contains over 400 springs and geysers; many of the springs in their peculiar shapes, translucent waters, and variety and richness of color, are of exquisite beauty. Alfonso visited emerald and sapphire springs, where it is said nymphs, elfs, and fairies came to bathe, and don their dainty dress of ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... scarious, dry and chaffy; punctate, having translucent glands, so that the leaf appears, when held toward the light, as though full of holes; membranous, thin, soft, and rather translucent; ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... variety of quartz (chalcedony or jasper) of a deep green colour, with bright red spots. The finest specimens, which come from South Asia, are of fairly translucent chalcedony; those of jasper are opaque; they are used ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... floor stood a solid old oak table, whereon smoked a most inviting supper, served in an incongruous array of quaint and curious dishes and antique vessels—fine glass, splendid silver, broken delft, and translucent porcelain that drew a cry of admiration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... "Loben ist nicht lieben." And always as the days flew by and she resumed her special work in music at home, the figure grew more heroic and dignified the longer she mused upon it, while over all shone the desert sun and the white translucent light, with the San Francisco mountains calmly lifting up their cool blackness against ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... the wild spirits of the storm had drawn a translucent drapery of vapour from the dark thundercloud hovering overhead to where the fringe of the forest broke the blood-stained bar upon the horizon's verge, and this luminous orange-coloured curtain was crossed every moment upwards and downwards by silvery shafts of lightning. Such an effect of sunset ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Harold; "some of our country-men excel in those things, as they do in the art of the silversmith. Look at those translucent enamels worked on silver fret-work—there in the Gorham exhibit; and those fine pitchers and vases made of silver worked into open engraved designs, having pieces of colored glass blown into it; and those ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... wicked, dusky denizens of a tropical jungle—those creatures whose blood he suspects of being something deeper than red, who really look as if they were made from the earth and were going back to it, and who have nothing of that translucent pallor suggestive of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... was an opal sea I looked on of mist, shot along its upper surface with the rosy gold and pinks of dawn. Then, as that soft, translucent lake ebbed, jutting hills came through it, black and crimson, and as they seemed to mount into the air other lower hills showed through the veil with rounded forest knobs till at last the brightening day dispelled ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... 'It enjoys a translucent air, but withal so temperate that its winters are sunny, and its summers cool; and life passes there without sorrow, since hostile seasons are feared by none. Hence, too, man himself is here freer of soul than ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... in wood; one supported by a dolphin suggested the mythical origin of the harp, another was poised upon a dolphin's back, and the third was a water nymph nestled among the rocks and spray. The music desk contained a picture of sunrise on Lake Erie. All of the carving was colored with translucent greens and blues enhancing the graceful undulations and wave movements. The panels were all designed to illustrate some of the most important views of the waterways of New York State. The first represented New York harbor, the next East river spanned by Brooklyn bridge, another ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near the end ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... creation—that all the variegated kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as to set off the colour on the surface, while the white, which, if it had been opaque, would have looked somewhat coarse, (as for instance common chalk does,) is rendered just translucent enough to give an impression of extreme purity, but not so translucent as to interfere in the least with the distinctness of any forms into which it is wrought. The colours of variegated marbles are also ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... fallen away altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all beautiful; the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands and channelled zones of the alabaster, and the time-stains on its translucent masses darkened into fields of rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it through deep sea. The light fades away into the recess of the chamber towards the altar, and the eye can ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... when our first parent knew Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath the curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find, Whilst fly and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... much of interest to the tourist along the banks and in neighborhood of this well-known river. As we stand upon the elevations of the Cotswolds and look over "Sabrina fair," the lower part of its valley is seen as a broad and fertile plain, and the Severn's "glassy, cool, translucent wave," as the poet has it, flows through a land of meadows, orchards, and cornfields, with the hills of the Forest of Dean rising on the western horizon. Alongside the river is the cathedral city of Gloucester, the depot for a rich agricultural region and for the mining wealth of Dean Forest, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... him of a new book he had in his bag, for literature, he judged, might be her hobby, and had engaged her in conversation, of which his share was meant to impress the tiny, translucent ear that nestled in the dark-brown coils and waves of the pretty head in front ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... was past tea-time, slanted from over the roof of the red house, and painted up that small procession—the deep blue frock of little Gyp, the glint of gold in the chestnut of her hair; the daisy-starred grass; the dark birds with translucent red dewlaps, and checkered tails and the tulip background, puce and red and yellow. When she had lured them to the open gate, little Gyp raised herself, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up caroling into the crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them. Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and his shirt sleeves ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... couple each remark with some allusion to his love or some deduction which heightened compliment into poetry. He bade her mark the light gossamer as it floated on the air; now soaring high—high into the translucent atmosphere; now suddenly stooping, and sailing away beneath the boughs, which ever and anon it hung with a silken web, that by the next morn, would glitter with a thousand dew drops. "And, so," said he fancifully, "does Love ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... knowledge; thus the Saint reaches the purity wherein God is seen. Such prayer irradiates the worshipper, and from the mount of such high communion descending to the plains of earth, the very face of flesh shines with supernal glory, translucent to the flame that burns within. Happy they who know the reality which no words may convey to those who know it not. Those whose eyes have seen "the King in His beauty"[306] will ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... with colored ceremonial pigment, green and orange stripes across her cheeks. Earrings were strung through her ears. On her feet were tiny slippers of perruh hide, laced around her ankles, and she wore long translucent Martian trousers with a bright sash tied around her waist. Between her small breasts a chain of stone beads rested, good-luck charms for the ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... surface of the sun, the splendour which appears to us would be invisible, since it contains, as it were, an earth for its central mass, with a circumferential envelope of light and heat, and between the two an atmosphere of water and clouds and translucent air." The luminary of Herschel's fancy could scarcely be more clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of the Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a shining ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... you please Are little gilt bees In amber drops Which look like honey, Translucent and ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... and fired thousands of Roman candles at their objective, which returned the fire with rockets innumerable, and an elaborate display of fireworks, burning continually Bengal lights of various colours within its translucent walls, and spouting gold and silver rain on its assailants. It really was a gorgeous feast of colour for the eye, a most entrancing spectacle, with all this polychrome glow seen against the dead-white field of snow which covered ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Rabbit, Sheet 7). To dissect out the auditory labyrinth without injury is a difficult performance, but its structure may be made out very satisfactorily by paring away successive slices of the otic mass. Such a section is shown by Figure 3b; through the translucent hyaline cartilage the utriculus and horizontal canal can be darkly seen. The ductus endolymphaticus (vide Rabbit) is indicated by a dotted line in our figure. It is situated internal to the right-angle between the ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... in his course and a landing on Asteroid Moira. Here he'd found a honeycomb of caves, all leading from one large main tunnel. The cavern walls had been of a translucent, quartz-like substance, ranging in color from yellowish-brown to violet-grey. It looked vaguely familiar, yet he could not place it. There was not time to examine it ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... After incredible scramblings the two succeeded in surmounting the ranges and in dropping sheer to the mile-wide round valley through which flowed the river—the broad, swift mountain river, with the snow-white rapids and the swirling translucent green of very thick grass. They were very glad to reach the grass at the bottom, but a little doubtful on how to get out. The big mountains took root at the very edge of the tiny round valley; the river flowed out of a gorge at one end and into ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... yours," rejoined the philosopher. "You are both calculating distances, as you would in the low dense atmosphere of Louisiana. Remember you are now four thousand feet above the level of the sea, and surrounded by one of the purest and most translucent atmospheres in the world. Objects can be seen double the distance that you could see them on the banks of the Mississippi. That butte, which you think is only ten miles off, appears to me fifteen, or rather more; and I therefore calculate that it is at least ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... boulders, foaming and shouting, rushed through the heather on its way towards the Marches. Under Ruscino it had its brown mountain colour still, but as it ran it grew green as emeralds, blue as sapphires, silver and white and gray like a dove's wings; it was unsullied and translucent; the white clouds were reflected on it. It went through a country lonely, almost deserted, only at great distances from one another was there a group of homesteads, a cluster of stacks, a conical cabin in some places where the woods gave place ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... against the mainmast there had been one young giant in particular. Clad in a white linen shirt and a pair of blue serge trousers, and innocent alike of beard and moustache, this young fellow had had full, red lips, blue, boyish, and exceedingly translucent eyes, and a face intoxicated in excelsis with the happiness of youth; while leaning across his knees as they had rested sprawling over the deck there had been a young female trimmer of fish, a wench as massive ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... of any kind passing through its substance; a "diaphanous" stone is one which is altogether transparent; "semi-diaphanous" means one not altogether transparent, and sometimes called "sub-transparent." A "translucent" stone is one in which, though light passes through its substance, sight is not possible through it; whilst in a "sub-translucent" stone, light passes through it, but only in a ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... whose nest is blackish; and C. LINCHII, whose nest contains straw and moss as well as gelatine. All three kinds are collected, but those of the first kind are much more valuable than the others. The nest, which is shaped like that of our swallow, consists wholly of a tough, gelatinous, translucent substance, which exudes from the bill of the bird as it builds. We do not understand the physiology of this process. The people generally believe that the substance of the nest is dried seafoam which the birds bring from the sea on returning ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... talking lovers' nonsense," he hastened to add. "I mean that there is something about human beings—not just the everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittently—as though a light shone through something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it is a divinity revealed to me by other people—And even by myself in my ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... that struck me were, first, the colossal width of the river. As we gazed across the translucent surface, reflecting as in a looking-glass the fringe of trees along the edge, the first impression was that your eyes actually perceived the opposite bank; but we were undeceived by one of the residents, ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... a spot in the woods That is "forever England" to me. A clump of beech trees Steeped in silence, Whose shade and solitude Shuts me in with my dreams. The sunshine slants through Their limpid leaves And turns them to translucent jade, Just as it does in an English spring. Violets are there, and I pluck them, Remembering the bluebells In ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... as light is sometimes seen through a translucent substance, but he saw it so plainly that there could be no error. When he looked aloft at the impenetrable gloom, he was sensible of the same dim light upon the water. He tested his accuracy of vision by looking in different directions, ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... gleams of a steady fire of ambition under the light, self-possessed air of assumed indifference, and see how easily already his humor began to play, with that clear and sweet ripeness that warms some of his more famous pages, like late sunshine striking through clusters of mellow and translucent grapes. Yet our grasp of his mental situation at this point would not be complete, without recognition of the graver emotions that sometimes throbbed beneath the surface. The doubt, the hesitancy that sometimes must have weighed upon his lonely, self-reliant spirit with weary movelessness, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... several buildings: a few small stone houses suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke funnels which seemed perhaps a smelter; a huge, dome-like spread of translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mine-shaft. It looked more like the dome of an observatory—an inverted bowl fully a hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... as one sometimes sees a little brawling and muddy brook flowing into a clear stream, and following along in its course, but ever keeping its little band of dirty brown water separate from the translucent river, even so there followed with the news of the great event, a little whisper of uncomfortable gossip. It always accompanied the main story, cropping up everywhere, whispered, muttered, doubted, but never ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... was troubled; her lovely countenance, pale with a translucent pallor, was contracted with a touching expression of melancholy. She looked like Our Lady of Sorrows. Two tears rose slowly to her eyes, and began to ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... the sky in great masses of copper color and gold, parting every here and there, and showing glimpses of clear translucent ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... a belief that it is only found in their island; but in this I apprehend they are misinformed, as specimens of equal merit have been brought from Quilon and Cochin on the southern coast of Hindostan. The cat's-eye is a greenish translucent quartz, and when cut en cabochon it presents a moving internal reflection which is ascribed to the presence of filaments of asbestos. Its perfection is estimated by the natives in proportion to the narrowness and sharpness of the ray and the pure olive-tint ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the first man but knew Thee by report, unseen, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widen'd on his view. Who could have thought what darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... a rose, but set with sharpest spine; You are a pretty bird that pecks at me; You are a little squirrel on a tree, Pelting me with the prickly fruit of the pine; A diamond, torn from a crystal mine, Not like that milky treasure of the sea A smooth, translucent pearl, but skilfully Carven to cut, ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... relaxed slightly—but no more than slightly—and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... the pouch formed of the secondary larva's skin. Of these two bags without outlet, one of which is enclosed within the other, the outer is transparent, flexible, colourless and extremely delicate; the second is brittle, almost as delicate as the first, but much less translucent because of its yellow colouring, which makes it resemble a thin flake of amber. On this second sac are found the stigmatic warts, the thoracic studs and so forth, which we noted on the pseudochrysalis. Lastly, within its cavity we catch a glimpse of something ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... rich with the painted papier-mache of Cashmere. The shoulder-pads were of yellow silk. The panels of the litter itself were ablaze with the loves of all the gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon—lacquer on cedar. The cedar sliding doors were fitted with hasps of translucent Jaipur enamel and ran in grooves shod with silver. The cushions were of brocaded Delhi silk, and the curtains which once hid any glimpse of the beauty of the king's palace were stiff with gold. Closer ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... freezes in the ditches appears of a dark colour, because it lies without intervening water on the dead brown leaves. Their tint shows through the translucent crystal, but near the edge of the ice three white lines or bands run round. If by any chance the ice gets broken or upturned, these white bands are seen to be caused by flanges projecting from the under surface, almost like stands. They ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... mist. Green, pink, and other pale colors gleamed as behind a thin layer of crystal. Where the sun shone through a low white cloud upon a distant slope there might have been a great globe of iridescent glass illuminated within. The water was a light, soft, filmy yet translucent blue. Concha gazed ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... dense fibrous membrane lined by a delicate serous membrane, which is reflected over the heart; the inner layer is firmly adherent to the heart, the outer to the fibrous sac, and there is an intervening space, known as the pericardial space, in which a small amount of serum—a thin translucent liquid—is ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... crab) and must not be left to be devoured by rude, big-mouthed rock-cod or the like, and in another moment or two your line is tautened out, and a purple-scaled beauty is fighting gamely for his life in the translucent waters of the lagoon, followed half-way to the surface by his companions, whom, later on, you place beside him in the bottom of the canoe. And even to look at them is a joy, for they are graceful in shape, lovely in colour, and each scale ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... window down, for the current of air had become too strong and cool to be pleasant. The color of the sunlight changed to green, and then at noon, from the zenith, a glorious red light shimmered down and veiled the earth with such a beautiful translucent haze that the poor American for a moment almost ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... from the great red entrance arch, along a smooth path bordering the central stretch of still, translucent water, the lovely dome rose fairy-like from the masses of trees that, in their turn, formed a background of solemn green for gorgeous patches of colour, in bloom and leaf, which glowed on either side as ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... current-producing force, in this case the wave-producing force, to penetrate into the substance of the wire. In one of his experiments Dr. Hertz surrounded a wire by a glass tube chemically silvered. The coating was so thin as to be translucent. Through this metallic layer a current could be induced in the wire in its interior. Any mechanical layer of metal took up the induction itself, and protected the central wire. This gave a clue to the thickness of metal ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... peaks. And along this central line itself all the lesser heights we see converging on the supreme peak of Kinchinjunga. The scene, too, will be dazzling in the glorious sunshine and suffused with that purply-blue translucent atmosphere which gives to the whole a fairy-like, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... "Wasteland Wanderings": "I gathered a number of floating, delicate leaves, and endeavored to secure the entire stem also; but this was too difficult a task for an August afternoon. The under side of the stem and leaf are purplish brown and were covered with translucent jelly, embedded in which were millions of what I took to be insects' eggs. They certainly had that appearance. I was far more interested to find that, usually, beneath each leaf there was hiding a little pike. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... needed materials are: a roll of scotch photographic tape 1 inch wide to outline the areas of the fingerprints on the negatives to be used; some stiff cardboard approximately 1/32 inch thick on which to mount the prepared charts; a tube of rubber cement; and a bottle of translucent ink, other than black ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... gleaming orb of the tropic moon was blinding as the sun. Away to the faint translucent line of the horizon rolled an infinity of shining sea. Straight ahead rose a dark conical mass. It was the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... through the regular use of the translucent sphere is to cultivate a personal degree of clairvoyant power, so that visions of things or events, past, present, and future, may appear clearly to the interior vision, or eye of the soul. In the pursuit of this effort only, the crystal becomes at once both ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... colouring that a summer's mid-morning throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue, iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all colour save ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... shiver"—is nevertheless shown to be not unintelligible; granting of course the sensitiveness to light of some forms of nervous tissue. For he shows that there are, in several of the lower animals, rudiments of eyes, consisting merely of pigment cells covered with a translucent skin, which may possibly serve to distinguish light from darkness, but nothing more. Then we have an optic nerve and pigment cells; then we find a hollow filled with gelatinous substance of a convex form—the first ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... heavenly sphere. But Visvamitra, more intent, His mind to sterner penance bent. So many a season rolled away, When Menaka, fair nymph, one day Came down from Paradise to lave Her perfect limbs in Pushkar's wave, The glorious son of Kusik saw That peerless shape without a flaw Flash through the flood's translucent shroud Like lightning gleaming through a cloud. He saw her in that lone retreat, Most beautiful from head to feet, And by Kandarpa's(243) might subdued He thus addressed her as he viewed: "Welcome, sweet ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... trees, so named by early explorers for their waving, rubbery tentacles, multiplied a millionfold, that performed the duties of leaves. Water gurgled and chuckled everywhere, spread in vast dim ponds and lakes writhing with tormented roots, up-heaved by unseen, uncatalogued leviathans, rippled by translucent discs of loathsome, luminescent jelly that quivered from place to place in pursuit of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... passage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible, translucent, intangible, worse than death. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... be a queen among the currants, the White Grape is entitled to the crown. When placed upon the table, the dish appears heaped with translucent pearls. The sharp acid of the red varieties is absent, and you feel that if you could live upon them for a time, your blood would grow ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... protection of the passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or such arcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir F. Bramwell's upper footpaths on the model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no reason but the existing filth why the roadways should not have translucent velaria to pull over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably need less labour to manipulate such contrivances than is required at present for the constant conflict with slush and dust. Now, of course, we tolerate the rain, because ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... solid, and its color is a translucent green. Each shell contains two seeds, rounded on one side and flat on the other. The seeds lie with the flat sides together, and, in one highly prized variety, the two seeds grow together, forming one: this is known ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... did it, no one quite knew; but all that was visible was an enormous sphere, of translucent brightness and a ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... Mr. Huxley, Assistant Surgeon of the Rattlesnake, and now eminent for the admirable anatomical researches among marine invertebrata which he conducted during the voyage) is very minute, being not more than the 1/24th of an inch in diameter. It is translucent and of a brownish-white hue. Its aspect is that of a Turbo in miniature. The whorls are tumid, the spire prominent; the body whorl is belted by two prominent keels, one of which is continued on the whorls of the spire: between, above, and below these keels are ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... shortness of the skirt—short riding-skirts were something of a novelty then. The fine gold hair, twisted tight at the back of the shapely head, was like a coiled mass of burnished metal, some safe-keeping device of mint or gold-worker till the season of coining or fashioning should come round. The translucent flesh-tints, pearl-white flushing into pink—"Bouguereau realized at last," as Nannie Wetmore was in the habit of summing up her cousin's complexion—was as marvellous as ever. The delicate firmness of profile gave to the face the artificial ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Onthophagus taurus, "as though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous horns like those of the Aurochs"? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before, enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and hung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the rose clambering ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... along this southwestern promontory of the Isle of Peace, and looks down upon the green translucent water which forever bathes the marble slopes of the Pirates' Cave, it is natural to think of the ten wrecks with which the past winter has strewn this shore. Though almost all trace of their presence is already gone, yet their mere memory lends to these cliffs ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... dressed and cooked to a uniform rich brown, apparently roasted, hanging exposed in the markets of the very narrow streets in Canton, shaded from the hot sun under awnings admitting light overhead through translucent oyster-shell latticework. Perhaps these fowl had been cooked in hot oil and before serving would be similarly heated. At any rate it is perfectly clear that among these people many very fundamental sanitary practices are ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... lintels of grottos, before which dangled translucent ferns of delicate form, yet so rich and intense with life that crozier-tipped fronds took the hue of flowers—coral-red, golden-bronze, and yellow; while golden dust clung to hairy undersides like pollen to the thighs of hive-returning bees. Deep in perpetual shadow lived a shy plant with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... warmth. The roof is laid on top of the uprights, the logs being drawn in gradually in pyramid shape to a flat top. In the middle of the top is the [.r]alok or smoke hole, an opening about two feet square. In a kasgi thirty feet square the ralok is twenty feet above the floor. It is covered with a translucent curtain of walrus gut. The dead are always taken out through this opening, and never by the entrance. The most important feature of the room is the in['g]lak, a wide shelf supported by posts at intervals. It stands about five feet high extending around the room. This serves the double ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... are large and square and irregular, with prominence of the middle incisors, and a marked separation or crowding of them. The interstitial types have small irregular upper teeth, with turned, stumpy or missing lateral incisors. The thymus types have youthful, milky white teeth that are thin and translucent, and scalloped or crescentic at the grinding edge. The teeth of the adrenal type are all well-developed, tend to have a yellowish color, with a reddish tinge to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... which, alas! is mine, Bids to the front in radiant defile A trooping host whose pomps incarnadine The faded trophies of the dying day, And, lest I fail before so brave array, She decks the quiet clouds where fancies dwell With sweet translucent gleam and melting hue To woo my swooning sense with softer spell Of blissful pink ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... light was wonderful. The pool shone strangely, deeply green; the rocks about it might have been delicately carved in ivory. And across the pool, clear-cut against the utter darkness of the Spear Point Rock, stood Aphrodite the Beautiful, clad in some green translucent draperies, her black hair loose about her, her white arms outstretched to the moonlight, her face—exquisite as a flower—upturned to meet the glory. She was like a dream too wonderful to be true, save for the passion that lived in her eyes. ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... front lawn, and involving gravel walks between flower beds and under umbrageous trees; exotics perennially in bloom; Swiss tree boxes, from which the lark carolled by day and the nightingale warbled at night; an artificial lake, in which goldfishes swam and upon whose translucent bosom majestic swans glided gracefully—I assure you that Mrs. Denslow has the soul ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... with wordless moans and frighted aspect from her pillow,—or if it dared, standing afar off, to cast its pallid shadow there, still there was neither rest nor refreshing in the troubled spell. Nor could the thirst that consumed her quench itself with red wine or crystal water, translucent grapes or the crimson fruits that summer kisses into sweetness with her heats; forever longing, and forever unsated, it parched her lips and burnt her gasping mouth, but there was no draught to allay it. And even so food failed of its office. Kindly hands brought to her, whose queenliness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... SABRINA fair Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of Lillies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair, Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... drawls nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more translucent in the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... brown coating of chloride melts into a translucent enamel, and the heat should be withdrawn when a cherry-red color is produced. It the heat is continued longer, the plate assumes a lighter color, and becomes less sensitive; and the enamel will ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... this stone as being brought from Cappadocia, and says that it was as hard as marble, white and translucent, cxxiv. c. 22.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... growing thinner and thinner, but still visible to a great height. Far as the eye could reach, in the circle in the centre of which we floated, there was the same shining, unbroken surface; except when here and there some flying-fish leaped out of the translucent sea, or the fin of some monster of the deep appeared as he swam near ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... would permit. Nature has been profusely lavish, in producing, in the neighbourhood of this place, all the varied powers of landscape that the most luxuriant fancy can suggest. But, while enjoying the picturesque beauties of the scene, or sheltering in the translucent stream from the fervour of meridian heat, you are suddenly chilled with fear, from the terrific aspect of the alligator, or crested snake, and a number of venomous reptiles, with which this country abounds. There is one in particular called the cowk cowk; ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... on it for ever!" Ellen, a younger and more enthusiastic sister remarked, with fervent admiration. "Look, Ma! was ever anything more gorgeous than that pure white cloud, fringed with brilliant gold, and relieved by the translucent and sparkling ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... tumors, caused by retention of the secretions from the mucous glands, sometimes develop in the mouth, nose, pharynx, and vulva of cattle. They are called "mucous cysts." These are of sizes varying from peas to pigeon eggs, are roundish and translucent, and surrounded by a delicate, vascular membrane. They contain a siruplike substance more or less thick and transparent and whitish yellow ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her. Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory ship sped full sail on the back ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... but the place held me and I stayed. I sat down in an arm-chair before the fireplace and the stone birds. Very odd those gawky things, like prehistoric Great Auks, looked in the moonlight. I remember that the alabaster moon shimmered like translucent pearl, and I fell to wondering about its history. Had the old Sabaens used such a jewel in their rites in the ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... His amatory verses are exquisitely graceful, but they have no strong ardor, no deep tenderness, nor even much light and joyous gayety; but as works of refined art, of the most skillful felicities of language and of measure, of translucent expression, and of agreeable images embodied in words which imprint themselves indelibly on the memory, they are unrivaled. In the Satires of Horace there is none of the lofty moral indignation, the fierce vehemence of invective, which characterized the later satirists. It is the folly ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... been before her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... toad-stone are clearly due to their having calmly transferred the marvellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imaginary toad-stone. The only stone in the above list which has a real existence is that in the fish's head. Fish have a pair of beautiful translucent stones in their heads—the ear-stones or otoliths—by the laminated structure of which we can now determine the age of a fish just as a tree's age is told by the annual rings of growth in the wood of its stem. The fresh-water crayfish ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of American drama several times before with very good results. Mr. Howard's brain was of that peculiar caliber which does not originate an idea, but which inserts a solid bone construction as well as keen little sparklets into the fabric of another's labor, and makes the whole translucent where before it may have been opaque. On Broadway he was called a play doctor, and Mr. Vandeford was not the first manager who had shut him up with quarts of refreshment to tinker on the play of many a ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... water. Soon, in this atmosphere saturated with humidity, the threads become enveloped in a watery sheath, which gradually increases and begins to flow. The twisted shape has by this time disappeared; and the channel of the thread reveals a chaplet of translucent orbs, that is to say, a ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... show the action of saliva on starch. Saliva for experiment may be obtained by chewing a piece of India rubber and collecting the saliva in a test tube. Observe that it is colorless and either transparent or translucent, and when poured from one vessel to another is glairy and more or less adhesive. Its reaction is alkaline to ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... it is in all respects a fortunate work; as remarkable a one almost for him to write as a volume of his essays for any one else. Comparatively to his other books, it is as flesh and blood to spirit; Emersonian flesh and blood, it is true, and semi-translucent; but still it completes the man for us: he would have remained too problematical without it. Those who have never personally known him may finish and solidify their impressions of him here. He likes England and the English, too; and that sympathy ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... is slightly acid and edible. The trunk exudes an abundant gum, of the odor of turpentine, translucent, greenish-yellow, forming small masses slightly soluble in alcohol, soluble in water, with which a mucilage is formed. The juice of the leaves is used for asthma. The sap is used in Bombay to remove opacities of the cornea. There is another species in the Philippines, G. floribunda, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... earth two thousand years ago some Grecian goddess would have stolen him. Bro. Bill couldn't make an ugly face if he tried. If he ever catches sight of his own personal pulchritude as reflected in some translucent lake, I much fear that he'll meet with the fate of Narcissus. Some of you Prohibs don't know who Narcissus was. Well, he was one of those ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... philosophical, and take another. For my part, when I'm bogging about these dark woods, far away in the silent, somber shadows, I rejoice in sunshine; and would prefer it of choice, rather than all other celestial and translucent luminaries: but when the gentle fanning zephyrs of the shadowy night breathe soft among the trembling leaves and sprays of the darkening forests, then I rejoice in moonshine: and when the moonshine dims and pales away, with the waning silvery queen of heaven in her azure zone, I look ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... east the sun, irradiant and magnified, lay low over the heaving seas. Over its face, like a veil of gold, translucent vapors—the breath of Kokoyah, the god of waters—rose from the melting floes. A strange spell seemed suddenly to have fallen over the earth. Out on the ocean the great bergs, which had majestically moved southward like the phantoms ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... which first affected his feet, but one day, owing to the irritation of a slight balanitis, the prepuce swelled at once; it proceeded through the penis integument to the scrotum; the penis itself retracted, leaving the integument and scrotum to assume a translucent, puffy, cork-screw appearance and attitude; from its labyrinthic passage the urine slowly dribbles during urination in a scalding stream. In addition to the physical sufferings, he is tormented by the knowledge that his friends attribute all his disease ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in the flood of greenish—white radiance shed by her, and it was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now——one could, once—but rest his soul, he is dead and then to ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... red-hot iron in a tub of water, vapour rises to the roof of his shop. The blaze from his forge shining on this mist produces the colours mentioned. The amethyst is a precious stone, clear and translucent, with a colour inclining to purple. The presence of coal dust or smoke in the vapour would help to produce the colour of amethyst. The same effect would result, if some smoke or dust were mingled with the mist where the sun's rays reach it at ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... easy to see what is meant by the rule if we will take an ordinary negative, such as a landscape with clear sky, and hold it first six inches from a gas-flame and then six feet. It will be found in the first case that the sky portion is translucent while the clear glass will, of course, be clear; in the second the sky will be opaque and the clear glass still clear. The contrasts have been rendered greater by removing the negative further from the light-source. As this is true in the extreme ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
... toward the boundless ocean. But all else had changed. The hostile warrior no longer impeded the onward march of civilization, and cultivated fields abounded on every side. Steamers were hourly traversing the translucent waters of the great Mississippi; steam and electricity were carrying people with the rapidity of lightning in every direction; gigantic buildings appeared on the earth's surface, visible in either direction as far as the eye could reach; on every corner was a proud descendant ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... have among them a rudimentary one, like the germs of wings in the chrysalis, by which the spiritual world becomes sometimes an object of perception; there may be natures in which the walls of the material are so fine and translucent that the spiritual is seen through them as through a glass darkly. It may be, too, that the love which is stronger than death has a power sometimes to make itself heard and felt through the walls of our mortality, when it would plead for the defenseless ones it has left behind. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... placid, and beautiful with the austere and almost unearthly beauty of the youthful dead. The lips were slightly parted, the eyes half closed and drowsy, shaded with sweeping lashes; and a wealth of dark hair in massive plaits served as a foil to the translucent skin. ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... closely resembles that of his insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests a survival ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... sort, girls of more vigorous organization, who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a strong hand to manage them;—then young growing misses of every shade of Saxon complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes, some of them so translucent-looking, that it seemed as if you could see the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls were objects of sight; brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue which often carries with it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too much to say of George Eliot. She has sounded depths and explored sinuosities of the human heart which were utterly unknown to the author of "Clarissa Harlowe." It is like looking into the translucent brook—you see the wriggling tad, the darting minnow, the leisurely trout, the motionless pike, while in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalculae ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... increase; the deep bowels of the rocks render up their tribute. Forms which were dull and hideous become endowed with grace and beauty, and vegetable existence rises to the scale of celestial life. Then, too, Genius appears clad in a panoply of translucent armour, grasping in his hand the whole terrestrial surface, and making every rood of earth subservient to his purposes;—Genius, the child of Civilization, the mother of the Arts!" The last little bit, taken from the "Pedigree of Progress," ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... shrank back, thoroughly disgusted with herself, but unable to bring herself to make the leap. "Shall I hold your hand the first time?" said Nyoda. Holding tightly to Nyoda's hand, Gladys jumped from the board, and sank down, down through the glassy, translucent depths, holding her breath and trying to keep her eyes open as she had been bidden. At first all was darkness, then a mass of bubbles became visible, then light shone through the water and the next moment her head shot out above the surface, and Nyoda pulled her up on the dock. It had all ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... the end of the passage as he came nearer. Then he saw something that held him stone still with a clutch of weird fear. He had reached the end of the narrow passage, and dimly made out a domed room in the rock, white with translucent encrustation. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... rich red of our Triassic sandstones is due to a pellicle of peroxide of iron coating each of the grains. That this is merely surface coloring is shown by the fact that hydro-chloric acid will discharge the color and leave the grains translucent. Unfortunately the most brilliantly colored stone is not the most durable, and it so happens that these brilliant red sandstones are often composed of exceedingly rounded grains. Also some of the very red sandstone has an interfilling ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... gold with the barges and the wherries plying upon it, and the great houses on the banks and their gardens coming down to the water-gates, and the forest of chimneys and roofs and steeples behind, and all of a translucent blue colour. The sounds of the City, too, came to us plainly across the water—the chiming of bells and the firing of some sunset gun, and even the noise of wheels and the barking of dogs and the crowing of cocks—all ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... were closed, he could see that the strange light burnt upon them. In a way it rendered his eyelids translucent—he was conscious of a dull pulsing redness through which shot a network of lines of fire. He opened his eyes slowly, cautiously, and looked upward. From some point above him, in what he judged must be the ceiling of the ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... crown; but the lower part of his face showed changes, born of the years. Still lined, still looking just a little worn, it had gained something in decision, gained infinitely more in sensitive refinement. In Scott, the native clay was being replaced by translucent marble. In Catia, it was hardening to something akin ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... subterranean winds." See how the accompaniment surges up in imperious, impetuous strength. Turn to "See, the heavens smile": note how the resonant swinging chords and that lovely figure playing on the top give one an instant vision of vast, translucent sea-depths and the ripples lapping above. Look at "Come unto these yellow sands" and "Full fathom five": he almost gives us the colour of the sea and the shore. These things did not come by accident, nor do they exist only in an enthusiastic ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... spoke, the sound of a bell broke over the translucent air and the slumbering lake: it was the bell that every eve and morn summoned that innocent and pious family to prayer. The old man's face changed as he heard it—changed from its customary indolent, absent, listless aspect, into an expression ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sun was reducing the gloom of the sylvan tunnel to a translucent twilight, we floated down the swift current ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... No; but why? Why? Because, my dear Sir Patrick, though the germ is there, it's invisible. Nature has given it no danger signal for us. These germs—these bacilli—are translucent bodies, like glass, like water. To make them visible you must stain them. Well, my dear Paddy, do what you will, some of them wont stain. They wont take cochineal: they wont take methylene blue; they wont take gentian violet: ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... ruddy her young body glowed In sunny shallows, splashing them to spray; But when on rippled, silver sand she lay, And over her the little green waves flowed, Coldly translucent and moon-coloured showed Her frail young beauty, as if rapt away From all the light and laughter of the day To some twilit, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honor's sake, Goddess of the silver lake! ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... plain are however but dwarfs compared with the giant trees of the American forest, watered by ocean rivers. The tholh would seem to live without moisture: it is fed by no annual or periodic rain, no springs. And yet it buds, opens its pretty yellow flowers, sheds its fine large drops of translucent gum, flourishes all the year round, and tempts with its prickly leaves as with richest herbage, the hungry camel. Indeed, about this part of the route the camels get nothing else to feed on. We have seen no living creatures these last five days. On one part of our route our people ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Her voice in some translucent star, Remote, beyond my sight, Was singing marvellously far; And yet so strangely near to jar, As jars too ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent, unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a solitary star, eternal as God. And the night wind through the pines, that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant clicking of countless castanets, the castanets ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... &c, are smaller in size, partly of an opaque character, and partly translucent (or, as it is technically called "bright"), and harder and more cracked, but those from Siam and the neighbouring countries are very "bright," soft, and fine grained; they are much sought after for carvings and ornamental work. Tusks from Mozambique and the Cape of Good Hope seldom exceed 70 lbs. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... crystal gulfs were gleaming Ocean depths, with wonders teeming; Shapes of terror, huge, unsightly, Loom'd thro' vaulted roof translucent." ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... with ornamental shrubs and flowers, led to the center pavilion which was roofed by a huge crystal dome. This translucent cover transmitted the light and sunshine necessary for the floricultural display beneath. Stately palms, tall tree ferns in great variety, and gorgeous specimens from the flora of almost every section, formed an immense pyramid of shrubbery. The luxuriously ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, foliage penetration (vegetation is translucent in the near infrared (NIR) regime), and target imaging/recognition. Lidar detects shape directly and shape fluctuations such as vibration and motion and has proven very hard to spoof. Magnetic anomaly detectors will continue to find application in areas of anti-mine and anti-submarine ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... the other as if to lead her. But she evaded the invitation by holding her tightly-drawn skirt with both hands, and bending her head forward as if she had not noticed it. The next moment the road, and even the whole outer world, disappeared behind them, and they seemed floating in a choking green translucent mist. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... used for signalling and advertising by night in a variety of ways. Incandescent lamps inside a translucent balloon, and their light controlled by a current key, as in a telegraph circuit, so as to give long and short flashes, according to the Morse code, are employed in the army. Signals at sea are also made by a set of red and white glow-lamps, which are combined according to the code in use. The ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... by its effect on paper, making a greasy stain which does not disappear on heating and which renders the paper translucent. Try butter, lard, or olive oil. Also show the presence of fat in peanuts by crushing them in a mortar and rubbing the powder on thin paper. If the substance to be tested contains but little fat, this may be dissolved out with ether. If a drop of ether containing the fat is placed on paper, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... come back to the streamside, slender and virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders, slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village street. Convinced after three ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... the dazzling sunlight into a chamber that seems at first to be lost in a vast, impenetrable gloom. He pauses and gazes upward; above him, as little by little his eyes get their adjustment, a faint pearly light seems streaming downward. It is coming through the translucent marble slabs of the roof of the great temple.[*] Then out of the gloom gleam shapes, objects,—a face. He catches the glitter of great jewels and of massy gold, as parts of the rich garments and armor ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of beauty—the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to help her companion. Her slight firm frame, ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the sky, where the sun had dipped below the mountain rim, was a sea of translucent green, weirdly and wildly harmonious with the desolation of the land. On the bleak lake one could hear the lap of waves, while the high, rocky shore to the left was a black wall of shadow. I stood by the beach near our boat, all alone in the wan light, and tried to think calmly ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull; "strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great, strong, with a prevailing mild seriousness all along its course, but clear and quiet; sometimes, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... girl obeyed, already in a phase of crepuscular hypnosis, her surface senses dulled by the potent "wine of China." And watching her closely, Victor permitted himself a smile of satisfaction as he noted the rapidity with which she yielded to the hypnogenic spell of the translucent quartz; how her breathing quickened, then took on a measured tempo like that of a sleeper; how a faint flush warmed the unnatural pallor of her cheeks, how her dilate eyes grew fixed in an unwinking stare, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... removed for ever the slur upon skyscrapers. The Woolworth Building does not scrape the sky; it greets it, salutes it with a beau geste. And I would say something similar of the Bush Building, with its alabaster chapel in the air which becomes translucent at night; and the Madison Square Tower (whose clock face, I noticed, has the amazing diameter of three storeys); and the Burroughs Welcome Building on 41st Street, with its lovely perpendicular lines; and that immense cube ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... quite astounded at the odd treatment which it was receiving; and for a few seconds remained motionless upon the log; but a warm sunbeam glancing down upon it soon restored it to its senses; and perceiving that it was once more free, it stretched its translucent wings and rose suddenly into the air. It mounted straight upward, to a height of thirty or forty feet; and then commenced circling around, as we could see by the white ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... splendors beaming Change and intertwine! Glories over glories streaming All translucent shine! Blessings, praises, adorations Greet Thee from the trembling ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... of his appeal.—There was a rustle of silk behind him, an incoming of perfumes, a light footstep. He started, as did Alice, and beheld—Miss Marcia Sandford! She was tastefully dressed, as usual, and she bore herself with superb composure. In coming from the sunlight into the semi-translucent gloom which pervades modern drawing-rooms, people are not easily recognized, and the lady swept majestically across the floor, and took a seat, without a sign of consciousness, near the couple whose conversation she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... at the wheel; therefore it seemed to J. Pinkney Bloom, who was the only other passenger, that it should be his to play the part of host to the boat's new guests, who were, doubtless, on a scenery-viewing expedition. He stepped forward, with that translucent, child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the fierce dull face of the landward sea. Stained and stifled and soiled, made earthier than earth is and duller, Grimly she puts back light as rejected, a thing put away: No transparent rapture, a molten music of colour; No translucent love taken and given of the day. Fettered and marred and begrimed is the light's live self on her falling, As the light of a man's life lighted the fume of a dungeon mars: Only she knows of the wind, when her wrath gives ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne |
