"Transparency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warfare. Some soldiers of the "Old Kanawha" division happening to be at home recovering from wounds, had their indignation aroused to such an uncontrollable pitch that they insisted upon ignominiously trampling down the libelous transparency and its bearer. They had seen General Hayes bare his breast a hundred times to the bullet-storm of battle, and thought they were better judges of what constituted courage than men who stayed at home occupying their time in passing resolutions that the war was a "failure." ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... alike in shade and sunshine, grateful for all the consoling beauty which the earth offers to a lonely heart. That serene content which she had learned to call happiness had filled her being until the dark canopy was lifted and the waters took back their transparency under ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... loyal and enthusiastic Irishman who lived in the town. The animal was finally roasted whole in the bull-ring, bonfires and public illuminations concluding the feast. On the Bank was exhibited a magnificent transparency, an original design, showing the Queen in a crimson glory which rose from the smoke produced by the explosion of a Green Bag, underneath which was represented Majocci in a fright, saying, "Non mi ricordo" his invariable answer at trial. In the Corn Market was displayed another huge Green Bag ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... an evil life, was distinctly marked in his faded face. The dull, yellow tint of the complexion, the tarnished dimness of the large blue eyes, the discontented droop of the lips, the languor of the attitude, the pallid transparency of the wasted hands, all told of a life worn threadbare, energies exhausted, chances thrown away, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... serpentine which occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is manufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy," he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Zoeblitz, in color, hardness, and transparency, and, when cut, is ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... advantage. In life, there had been too marked a discrepancy between the extreme warmth of the girl's colouring and the extreme immobility of her expression. Now that the blood had, as it were, been drained away to the last drop, now that temples and nostrils had attained transparency, the fine texture of the skin and the beauty of the curves of lips and chin were visible to every eye. Only one hand, so the LEICHENFRAU babbled on, was convulsively closed, and could not be undone; ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... done a second time with the acetic acid, or the bichloride of mercury. At the same time, it preserves the lights and the half-tones in a way that surprises me upon each new trial (I have not yet been able to obtain one clear proof by gallic acid, with the addition of nitrate of silver). The transparency of the proofs is always admirable, and the clearness of the object yields in nothing to that of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... thin sheets of metal, and also for common objects, such as vases, urns, bottles, and jugs, which have been yielded in abundance by tombs of a somewhat late date in Cyprus.[837] No great store, however, seems to have been set upon transparency, in which the Oriental eye saw no beauty; and the objects which modern research has recovered under this head at Tyre, in Cyprus, and elsewhere, seem the work of comparatively rude artists, and have little aesthetic merit. The shapes, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... woman, crowding fifty. She was in a worse state of dishabille. She hadn't quite made it to bed and was still in her slip. Her stockings had been unhitched from her garters and hung in slack transparency around her fat calves, like the sloughed-off ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... others for the present species, which though not of that value, nor possessing the delicacy or fragrance of the blossoms of some others, is a very desirable plant, not only as an object of curiosity, from the transparency of the base of the corolla, but as it adds much to the brilliancy of a collection, is easily obtained, and ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... corona itself were the most extensive, as well as the most detailed, of any yet secured. One rift imprinted itself on the plates to a distance of nearly a diameter and a half from the limb; and the transparency of the streamers was shown by the delineation through them of the delicate tracery beyond. The singular and picturesque feature was added of a bright comet, self-depicted in all the exquisite grace of swift movement betrayed by the fine curve of its tail, hurrying ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... are charmed by the beauty of form, the grandeur and simplicity of the figures, the richness of the vegetation (though not luxuriant like that of a more southern region), the precision of the outlines in the clear air and the beauty of the colors in their transparency—so the enjoyment of nature is here a purely artistic one, free from everything distracting. Everywhere else the ideas of contrast appear and the enjoyment of nature is elegiac or satiric. It is true that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and you put your hand in your pocket for the fifteen dollars which shall make you its possessor; but a closer inspection is sure to show you either a broad transverse flaw, or a spot where the color fades into transparency. The white topaz, known as the "Siberian diamond," is generally flawless, and the purest specimens are scarcely to be distinguished from the genuine brilliant. A necklace of these, varying from a half to a quarter of an inch in diameter, may be had for about twenty-five dollars. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the colonel had actually been dried alive, the globules of the blood were not decomposed, but simply collected in the capillary vessels of the skin and subjacent tissues where they still preserved their proper color, and could be seen more easily than otherwise, on account of the semi-transparency of the skin. ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... entered a drawing-room, he took his stand in a firm but easy attitude. His appearance was equally removed from bravado and fear. His features, usually placid and pale, had a rigid clearness about them that day we can never forget. They seemed, from their transparency and firmness, like some wondrous imagination of the artist's chisel, in which the marble, fancying itself human, had begun to breathe. The eye was calm and bright—the mouth, the feature round which danger loves to play, though easy, motionless, and with lips apart, had about ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... benefit in speaking often one to another, arises from the success that one individual has with another in leading his thoughts away from the human mind or body, and guiding them [25] with Truth. That individual is the best healer who as- serts himself the least, and thus becomes a transparency for the divine Mind, who is the only physician; the divine Mind ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... if Nature had poured these broad waters into one of her own valleys. It is a most beautiful object at a distance, and not less so on its immediate banks; for the water is very pure, being supplied by a small river, of the choicest transparency, which was turned thitherward for the purpose. And Blenheim owes not merely this water-scenery, but almost all its other beauties, to the contrivance of man. Its natural features are not striking; but Art has effected such wonderful things that the uninstructed visitor would never guess that nearly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... persons who will stand between you and that which you seek: they obtrude themselves; they monopolize your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half- revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion a dog or a boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys,— transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless quality that is akin to trees and growths and the inarticulate forces of nature. With him you are alone, and yet have company; you are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... atmosphere astonishingly clear and frosty, when the utmost splendor of the sky is reflected from a surface of spotless white, attended with the most excessive cold, is peculiar to the northern part of the United States. What, too, can surpass the celestial purity and transparency of the atmosphere in a fine autumnal day, when our vision and our thought seem carried to the third heaven; the gorgeous magnificence of the close, when the sun sinks from our view, surrounded with various masses ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... true that it is deep, and they will best appreciate its simplicity who have most honestly endeavoured to fathom its depth. When we let our little sounding lines out, and find that they do not reach the bottom, we begin to wonder even more at the transparency of the clear abyss. It is not simplicity in Christ, but towards Christ of which the Apostle is speaking; not a quality in Him, but a quality in us towards Him. I wish, then, to turn to the two thoughts that these words ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty- eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... one beautiful afternoon, rambling over the rocky cliffs at the back of the island, we came to a spot where the stillness, and the clear transparency of the water invited us to bathe. It was not deep. As we stood above, on the promontory, we could see the bottom in every part. Under the little headland, which formed the opposite side of the cove, there was a cavern, to which, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... excel in honesty, in candor and transparency; their very carelessness secures their excellence in this respect. And in another much deeper and more essential respect I must likewise call them excellent,—in their childlike goodness, in the purity of heart, the noble affection and fidelity they everywhere manifest ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique, not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect receptivity, and devotion to the truth. In the days of persecution and martyrdom Emerson would have gone to the stake smiling and undismayed, but questioning all the time, even as to the nature of his own emotions. It ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Milan, Italy, are considered the best, on account of their transparency and exceeding strength. Most frequently each string is made up of two or three separate strands, twisted together with the utmost care. But there is another use of the greatest value, and that is as a thread for sewing up wounds in internal surgery, because, being of animal matter, the thread will, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the sea a shadow long and black as night, or rather appearing deep green in the midst of the polished surface, which reflected all the purity of the heavens; in this shadowed part, which had no glitter, could be plainly distinguished through the transparency, myriads upon myriads of fish, all alike, gliding slowly in the same direction, as if bent towards the goal of their perpetual travels. They were cod, performing their evolutions all as parts of a single body, stretched full length in the same direction, exactly parallel, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Was ever transparency so threadbare? Cecilia shrank from herself in contemplating it when she was alone; and Colonel Halkett put the question to Mr. Austin, saying to him privately, with no further reserve: 'It's that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... those of her figure as she bent over her work. He could see the long delicate white hands moving rhythmically, with the assurance of perfected skill, over the web in its varying degrees of whiteness from the filmy transparency of the net foundation to the opacity of the closely wrought pattern. Those hands, in their ceaseless and exquisite industry, had troubled his imagination at times. For too often it had seemed as though they alone were really alive, intelligent, sentient, the rest of the woman dead. The impression ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... changes in the urine are the sole sign of disease. In health the horse's urine is of a deep amber color and has a strong odor. On a feed of grain and hay it may show a uniform transparency, while on a green ration there in an abundant white deposit of carbonate of lime. Of its morbid changes the following are to be looked for: (1) Color: White from deposited salts of lime; brown or red from blood clots or coloring matter; ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... present pontificate these have been generally held in the Hall of Beatifications, a magnificent room with a tribune, above the portico of Saint Peter's, turned into a chapel for the occasion, with innumerable candles and lamps, the transparency of the beatified person, called the Gloria, and standards on which are painted representations of miracles. The last of these ceremonies was held in Saint Peter's, with closed doors, but in the presence of an enormous ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy, staring transparency, in which you cannot distinguish the daubing of the painter from the light that shines through the flimsy colours and gives them brilliancy. Here all is clearly made out with strokes of the pencil, by fair, not by factitious ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Lampblack or pitch can do no more, and the only difference in this respect between them and water is that a very small depth in their case suffices to extinguish all the light. The difference between the highest known transparency and the highest known opacity ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... dried in the heat of the fire, and slowly shifted them one above the other. The flush on his sunburned cheek rose to the roots of his dark hair, and overspread his clumsy features. His appearance did not give token of any very great delicacy of feeling, but he regretted his transparency, and sought ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Off in the distance, two miles away, the woods hung like bluish lace over a field of pure snow. It was a brilliant day. A hundred tints glistened on the white ground and the iron bars of the garden railing. There was a lightness and transparency in the air that only the days of early spring possess. Gabriel Andersen turned his steps toward the fringe of blue lace for a tramp ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... lee of the island, and began to discover that what we took for a long row of pelicans, ranged on the beach, were only low cliffs whitened with salt by the spray of the waves; and about noon we reached the shore, the transparency of the water enabling us to see the ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... experiment; it has this very important limitation—that it is always epithelium with which it has to do, whereas in Wolff's experiment the regeneration takes place from mesoblastic tissue. The cause of the transparency may be a chemical reaction—it depends a good deal upon our definition of that phrase. Is protoplasm a chemical compound? Some have considered it so, and spoken of its marvellously complicated molecule. Of course it is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and other substances within the domain ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... is master of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together into rugged ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... not scrupled to get up a chorus on a motive from his symphony, 'The Influence of Blue in Art.' Monsieur Schaunard has gone farther: he has inserted in the lantern which serves the establishment for sign, a transparency with ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... creatures just like him. His seven foot high figure seemed a bit ungainly by Terrestrial standards, and his strangely white, hairless flesh, suggesting unbaked dough, somehow gave the impression of near-transparency. His eyes were disproportionately large, and the black disc of pupil in the white corneas was intensified by contrast. Yet perhaps his race better deserved the designation homo sapiens than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the accumulated ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... hand—and it takes some time—Mr. Bucket, who has seen through the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby's vinegar at a glance, confers with his familiar demon and bestows his shrewd attention on the Chadbands and Mr. Smallweed. Sir Leicester Dedlock remains immovable, with the same icy surface upon him, except that ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... consequence of its weakness, its violence, and its vice. Thady has never a word of blame for any son of the house he has served generation after generation. Indeed, he is forever praising his succession of masters; but so artfully does the author utilize the device of transparency that the reader is put in possession of the damning facts, one by one, and is soon able to see the truth of the matter which Thady himself has no thought of revealing,—which, indeed, he would probably deny indignantly if it was suggested by any ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... who picked it up. A beautiful stone, like a sapphire; blue but uncut and of a strange pellucid transparency—a jewel undoubtedly; but of a kind we have never seen. We all of us examined it, and were all, I am afraid, a bit disappointed. It was a stone and ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... evidently no intention of saluting the monarch; and Sir Roger de Launay gazed at her in mingled surprise and admiration. She was certainly wonderfully beautiful. Her complexion had the soft clear transparency of a pink sea-shell—her eyes, large and lustrous, were as densely blue as the dark azure in the depths of a wave,—and her hair, of a warm bronze chestnut, caught back with a single band of red coral, seemed to have gathered in its rich curling ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... terga, and then the carina; the rostrum and latera occur only in Scalpellum and Pollicipes, and in a rudimentary condition in Lithotrya, and, perhaps, in the fossil genus Loricula. The valves are formed sometimes of chitine (as in Ibla and Alepas), but usually of shell, which varies from transparency to entire opacity. The shell is generally white, occasionally reddish or purple; exteriorly, the valves are covered by more or less persistent, generally yellow, strong membrane. The scuta and terga are always considerably larger than the other ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... its energy. This primary condition had dictated the red ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reaching the outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of the red, and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground of the corners is put in emerald green; but then, in the corners themselves, the blue is recalled and is given an additional solidity of value by the delicate ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the estimable man who is unhappy in his domestic relations, the man who has an inconsistent wife, or the husband who is minotaurized are simply husbands as they appear in Moliere. Well, then, O goddess of modern taste, do not these expressions seem to you characterized by a transparency chaste ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... maintain their supremacy above even these,—above all. They look like frozen sky. Or one might fancy that a vast heart or core of amethyst was deeply overlaid with colorless crystal, and shone through with a softened, lucent ray. Such transparency, such intense delicacy, such refinement of hue! Sometimes, too, there is seen in the deep hollows, between the lofty billows of blue, a purple that were fit to clothe the royalty of immortal kings, while the blue itself is flecked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the transparency of the tissues permits, perceive the direction of the weapon, whether perpendicular and favourable to my plans, or slanting and therefore valueless. Those ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... with an unusual brilliancy, and the atmosphere had that peculiar crystalline transparency which kills space and brings distant objects close to one's feet. Where then was the terrible white messenger? Why must my head be muffled like a mummy? Why must I keep my mouth shut, while the curiosity mill within me was working overtime grinding ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... over by a violent shock—just as though I had touched a galvanic battery. I looked round.... The face of Alice was—for all its transparency—dark and menacing; there was a dull glow of anger in her eyes, which were suddenly ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... was falling, but from the open door of the vestibule a great sheet of light fell upon the wet pavement, and above it glowed a transparency bearing the words: ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... as it will to everybody else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... so dry as to lose its transparency; as when a tremulous motion of it can be seen over corn fields in a hot summer's day; or when a dry mist, or want of transparency of the air, is visible in very hot weather; the sense of smell is at the same time imperfect from the dryness ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... top of the building, windowless but lighted by a huge double skylight each half of which must have been some eight or ten feet across. The light falling through this skylight passed through plate glass of marvellous transparency. One looked up at the sky as if through the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... her, and dined at the embassies of the world, East and West, in all the capitals of Europe and Asia, but getting restive finally, however, as the years wore on. Feeling the wine-glass, as it were, although he could not see it. Looking through its clear transparency, but feeling pressed, somehow, aware of the closeness. But he continued to sit still, not much ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... deep, tranquil waters of the lake we went, scanning the painted shores with their dwindling remnants of forest. There is something inspiring about the profundity of transparency in these lakes, where they are 15 feet deep their bottoms are no more obscured than in an ordinary eastern brook at 6 inches. On looking down into the far-below world, one gets the sensation of flight as one skims overhead in the swift canoe. And how swift that elegant canoe was ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that evening, and it was about nine o'clock when we called a hackney-coach and started homeward. As we drove on up the Bowery an illuminated transparency caught our eyes. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... goddess was beautiful. Not merely negroidal, in lips, nose, ears, and tight black wool divided on the absolute equator; not racially but uniquely ugly—till he smiled—and spoke. He smiled and spoke with a joy of soul, a transparency of innocence, a rapture of love, that made his ugliness positively endearing even apart from the entranced ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... miniature, an idea of what they are to meet with there, in traversing the Alps and Appenines; to which our northern mountains are not inferior in beauty of line, or variety of summit, number of lakes, and transparency of water; not in colouring of rock, or softness of turf, but in height and extent only. The mountains here are all accessible to the summit, and furnish prospects no less surprising, and with more variety, than the Alps themselves. The tops of the highest Alps are inaccessible, being covered ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... are likened to this stone, as in "crystal eyne" ("Venus and Adonis", l. 633), or "crystal eyes" (Sonnet xlvi, l. 6). There are also "crystal favours",[5] a "crystal gate",[6] and "crystal walls",[7] the two characteristics of brilliancy and transparency suggesting ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... is a circumstance demanding particular attention. After the heaviest parts of the grounds have settled, there are still fine particles suspended for some time, and if the coffee be poured off before these have subsided, the liquor is deficient in that transparency which is one test of its perfection; for coffee not well cleared has always an unpleasant bitter taste. In general, the coffee becomes clear by simply remaining quiet for a few minutes, as we have stated; but those who are anxious to have it as clear as possible ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... which seems to be powdered like the surface of fine ripe fruit, resembles some exquisite key-board of silver and gold, all quivering with music. My four wings, with their delicate net-work of nerves, allow the bright down upon my black back to be seen through their transparency. And like a star upon the forehead of some divinely inspired poet, three exquisitely mounted rubies glitter ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... faded, darkness crept over the valley, and the water, losing its transparency, looked unfathomably deep, and mirrored with tenfold power all the fantastic gloom of the leaning alders, and the weird forms of the hoary willows. And there was no light or sound from any town or village, nor even from a lonely cottage. I had expected to reach at sundown the little town of Aubeterre, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Valence at four, and came that afternoon to Lyons, still along the Rhone. Either the waters of this river assume a transparency in winter which they lose in summer, or I was mistaken in thinking them transparent on our former journey. They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there are three red flagstones on which Barbarossa knelt to do reverence to St. Peter, in the person of the Pope. The guide held a lighted taper on one side of the column, that we might observe its glowing transparency. I could well enter into the feeling of noble triumph which must have animated those great and powerful Doges of past times, in thus being able to beautify their own Christian temple in Venice at the expense of the unbelieving, barbarous Turk, whose usurpation ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... To good Orlando it appeared as he, Mid odorous flowers, upon a grassy bed, Were gazing on that beauteous ivory, Which Love's own hand had tinged with native red; And those two stars of pure transparency, With which he in Love's toils his fancy fed: Of those bright eyes, and that bright face, I say, Which from his breast had torn ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... was an ardent adherent of the Potts faction. Alfred's father was just as strong for Patton. The father was well disposed toward Albert but he was very much disgusted with Albert's fondness for torch-light processions, particularly when Albert bore a transparency on which was painted, in crude letters, a motto most ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... exposition which goes far to justify the claim of the French to be the interpreters of European science to the world, appears in numerous treatises in mathematics and physics. The qualities of lucid arrangement, transparency of style, and terseness of language have extended, however, to other branches of authorship; so that the French have presented a fair claim to precedence in ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... such a system are not, properly speaking, works in color at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of two, three, or four colors, always ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... differentiated from substantiality, from substance as such. But in the presupposition just made there is also this thought—God is spirit, absolute and eternal; spirit which comes not forth from itself in differentiation. This ideality, this subjectivity of spirit, which is transparency, ideality excluding all particular determination, is precisely the universal, pure relation to self, Being ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... work; but beginning to show the faulty vagueness and carelessness of modernism. The stems, though beautifully free, are not thoroughly drawn or rounded; and in the mass of the tree, though well formed, the tremulousness and transparency of leafage are lost. Nor is it possible, by Harding's manner of drawing, to express such ultimate truths; his execution, which, in its way, no one can at all equal (the best chalk drawing of Calame and other foreign masters being quite childish and feeble in comparison), is yet sternly limited ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the call, as it had taken his mind from the brooding that had occupied it so continuously, and, for hours afterward, he smiled almost unconsciously at the quaint transparency, but utter ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... their silent pain Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain— But I will rather say that you remain A world above man's head, to let him see 85 How boundless might his soul's horizon be, How vast, yet of which clear transparency! How it were good to live there, and breathe free! How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war. Need I add that it was a failure—a total failure? As he stood forth fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent transparency, Mr. Cassidy's squint of suspicion widened into a pop-eyed stare of ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... saw them turn and face the wave and wait for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw, wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on the ridiculous—in every genre of writing it preserves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is eminently needed for this office in humorous ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... The river Nile lost its transparency four days before the army reached Sennaar. The day that presents the river troubled, marks the commencement of its augmentation. The day before we observed this change in the Nile, its waters were very clear and transparent. The day after, they were ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... sparkling eager gray eyes which could go black with passion or even excited interest, a long nose so sensitively cut that she could express any mood she chose with her nostrils, which expanded quite alarmingly when she flew into a temper, and a full well-cut mouth. Her skin had the whiteness and transparency peculiar to the women of St. Kitts and Nevis; her head and brow were nobly modelled, and the former she carried high to the day of her death. It was set so far back on her shoulders and on a line ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... middle division formed the centre of the whole scheme, and seemed to represent a shield of silver-white crossed by waving sea-green bars. Westray's attention was attracted by the unusual colouring, and by the transparency of the glass, which shone as with some innate radiance where all was dim. He turned almost unconsciously to ask whose arms were thus represented, but the Rector had left him for a minute, and he heard an irritating "Ha, ha, ha!" ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... considered the most valuable for this purpose. The hide of the wild ass is the finest of all leather, and is so close in the grain that before tanning, when dry and hardened in the sun, it resembles horn in transparency. I have made excellent mocassins with this skin, which ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... was hidden in the imitation of most pleasing nature! What varied expression in his eyes! They were of the azure colour of the heavens, from which they seemed to derive their origin. His teeth, in form, in colour, in transparency, resembled pearls; but his cheeks were too delicately tinged with the hue of the pale rose. His neck, which he was in the habit of keeping uncovered as much as the usages of society permitted, seemed to have been formed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... seer who reads the passing shapes in a globe of crystal, it's plain enough. To any other eye, there is nothing there but transparency." Lescott halted, conscious that he was falling into metaphor which his companion could not understand, then more quietly he went on: "I don't know how you would progress, Samson, in detail and technique, but I know you've got what many men have struggled ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... river's edge in low, sandy cliffs, portions of which have been torn bodily away by the force of the ice in springtime to form miniature islands some yards from the shore.[85] A characteristic of this stream is its marvellous transparency. On a clear day rocks and boulders are visible at a depth of twenty to thirty feet. I have observed a similar effect on the River Rhone and other streams fed to a large extent by glaciers ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... my love to Blanche. Through the lucid transparency of Presence, I believed that she knew all and comprehended all, without the aid of those blundering symbols. We never even spoke of the future; for all time, past and to come, seemed to converge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mockingly about his work. A freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one, clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... three eggs into it; do not turn them, but, while they are frying, keep pouring some of the fat over them with a spoon; when the yelk just begins to look white, which it will in about a couple of minutes, they are done enough; the white must not lose its transparency, but the yelk be seen blushing through it: if they are done nicely, they will look as white and delicate as if they had been poached; take them up with a tin slice, drain the fat from them, trim them neatly, and send them up with the bacon ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the plates I intend to use, let us next consider what a transparency is, that we may understand the nature of the work we are undertaking. You are all aware that if we take a negative, and in contact with it place a sheet of sensitized paper, we obtain a positive picture. Substitute ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... slightest of shrugs executed by perfect shoulders beneath a gown of cynical transparency. Lanyard was aware that the violet eyes, large with apprehension, flashed transiently his way, as if in hope that he might submit some helpful suggestion. But he had none to offer. If the manner in which the search had been conducted were open to criticism, that would have to be made ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... one of those easily-fathomed persons who often succeed in their designs by the very transparency of their method. She had come to London with the purpose of leaving Dora there under the care of her sister Lady Mazerod, and before she had talked to that amiable widow for half an hour the design was as apparent as if ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... view. In this earth, being such, all things that grow grow in a manner proportioned to its nature—trees, flowers, and fruits; and again, in like manner, its mountains and stones possess, in the same proportion, smoothness and transparency and more beautiful colors; of which the well-known stones here that are so highly prized are but fragments, such as sardin-stones, jaspers, and emeralds, and all of that kind. But there, there is nothing subsists that is not of this character, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... of the applications and uses of water, the variety of its forms—its frozen state in that of ice, its fluid state in that of a liquid, its aeriform state in that of clouds and other modes of atmospheric suspension—all these, together with its transparency and cleansing power make it a most appropriate emblem of DIVINE TRUTH. As such, water is much spoken of by the prophets in the Old Testament, and by our Lord in the New. I will here quote some passages ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... noted in the ground glass of the camera that the skin may be seen plainly but the ridge detail is very poor. This difficulty may be due to the poor contrast of the ridges and furrows when using direct lighting. If so, it can be overcome by scraping the skin to transparency and then photographing it by transmitted light (i.e., passing light through the skin). Sometimes, due to the condition of the skin, even though it is tissue thin, it will not be transparent. This can be overcome by soaking the skin in xylene for ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... cataracts, and were entering the fertile territory of the Bassanese. It was now I beheld groves of olives, and vines clustering the summits of the tallest elms; pomegranates in every garden, and vases of citron and orange before almost every door. The softness and transparency of the air soon told me I was arrived in happier climates; and I felt sensations of joy and novelty run through my veins, upon beholding this smiling land of groves and verdure stretched out before me. A few glooming vapours, I can hardly call them clouds, rested upon ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... energetic speech with a peroration of great brilliancy, in which Richard and Harry were exhibited like a transparency in the bright colors of Youth, and Hope, and Passion, and finally sat down amidst what would have been a burst of applause but for the harsh voice of the usher nipping it in the bud by ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Mauconseil must have been very difficult to express; for the water on the right is between a light coloured stone-quay and the tower itself, also very bright; yet the artist, W.B. Cooke, has contrived to give it a fine and natural transparency entirely in keeping with the scenery around. The second is a simple and lovely landscape, with a sky exquisitely managed: but Avignon is still a greater favourite with us. The rich architectural structures on one hand, the silvery river, the picturesque bridge, the distant ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... exudate within the cornea begins to disappear within a week or 10 days, the eye becomes clearer and regains its transparency, until it eventually is fully restored. In unfavorable cases blood vessels form and are seen to traverse the affected part from periphery to center, vision becomes entirely lost, and permanent opacity (albugo or leucoma) remains. When it arises from constitutional causes recurrence is ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... with both hands and began to sob like a Magdalen. Her hands were, in truth, beautiful, more beautiful even than Don Luis had described them to be in his letters. Their whiteness, their pure transparency, the tapering form of the fingers, the roseate hue, the polish and the brilliancy of the pearl-like nails, all were such as might turn the head of ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... brocade; the second, of silk; the third, of wool; the fourth, of linen. The first of these personages carried in his right hand a sword; the second, two golden keys; the third, a pair of scales; the fourth, a spade: and, in order to aid sluggish minds which would not have seen clearly through the transparency of these attributes, there was to be read, in large, black letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade, MY NAME IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS CLERGY; on the hem of the woolen robe, MY NAME ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of our own horses,— which, running on a sandy margin of the road, made but little disturbance,—there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the earth prevailed the same majestic peace; and, in spite of all that the villain of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... blue pompons; bright blue blouses dashed with white, and white leather belts, and red zouave knickerbockers. Their torches were encased in fantastic glass lanterns alternately red, white, and blue. On the occasion of their first parade, when they drew up before the house to receive their transparency, adorned on one side with a villainous portrait of myself superscribed by the motto, "Our Fathers Fought For Freedom, We Are Fighting For The Right," and on the other a cut depicting the rival candidate ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... were formed in the crystalline lens, and anticipated a cure from the operation of couching. These hopes were fallacious. The disease turned out to be in the cornea, and every attempt to restore its transparency was fruitless. In a few months the white cloud covered the whole aperture of the pupil, and Galileo became totally blind. This sudden and unexpected calamity had almost overwhelmed Galileo and his friends. In writing to a correspondent he exclaims, "Alas! ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... walked around her, surveying her with the calculating eye of a man who studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded. In the course of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes. He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and elbow. With his other hand he lifted her forearm and doubled it back. Disgust and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... uniformly dense. It exhibits lines perpendicular to the refracting edge of the prism, such as are produced in the field of an ordinary spectroscope by particles of dust upon the slit. In the present case, these lines may be due to variations in the transparency of the air during the time of exposure, or to instrumental causes, such as irregular running of the driving clock, or slight changes in the motion of the telescope, resulting from the manner in which its polar axis ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... founded on the transparency of matter to the rays a sure and practical method of allowing them to be distinguished, and has thus been enabled to define a specific character analogous to the colour of the rays of light. It is probable also that the different rays do not transport individually ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... wings" strive to delay the surrender of the maiden-citadels of their hearts, are but vexatious obstacles to his legitimate triumph. These, the veteran wooer attempts to carry by storm at once, seeing through their utter transparency:—to the unpractised Damon, however, they assume the proportions ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... variety of substances which, when dissolved in water, make it thick and muddy, and destroy its transparency. ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... not matter at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. It is almost pure crystallized energy. You have, of course, noticed that it looks transparent, but that it is not. You cannot see into its substance a millionth of a micron—the illusion of transparency being purely a surface phenomenon, and peculiar to this one form of substance. I have told you that the ether is a fourth-order substance—this also is a fourth-order substance, but it is crystalline, whereas the ether is probably fluid ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... necessary, for Satan was neither blown nor leg-weary. He stood dripping with sweat, indeed, but poised lightly, his head high, his ears pricked, his nostrils distended to transparency as he drew in great breaths. Even that interval Barry used, for he set to work vigorously massaging the muscles of shoulders and hips and whipping off the sweat from neck and flank. It was several moments, and already Satan's breath came easily, when Black Bart shot down from his watch-post and warned ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... factory-girl, aided by the multiplying power of the wheel, easily makes as much yarn, though not quite so fine, in a day. If it were an object to rival the tenuity of the finest India muslin, machinery could easily accomplish it. But that spider-web fabric is carried so nearly to transparency, that the Emperor Aurengzebe is said to have reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume while she wore seven thicknesses of it. She might have worn twelve hundred yards without burdening herself with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Although we get almost all we know of the examinations of accused parties in the witchcraft proceedings, and of his long contentions with his parish, from him, there is hardly any ground to regret that the parties on the other side had no friends to tell their story. A transparency of character, a sort of instinctive incontinency of mind, which made him let out every thing, or a sort of blindness which prevented his seeing the bearings of what was said and done, make his reports the vehicles of the materials for the defence of the very persons he was prosecuting. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... importance, in which the real glass was enclosed. The chief merit of this invention was, that the moon could be seen equally well on cloudy nights, or when there was none at all, the case enclosing an ingenious transparency of that body, behind which a small lamp was hung. Mr. FLIT could always command a view of any of the celestial bodies by the same means.' Here are a few items of law from 'The Comic Blackstone:' 'The statute of EDWARD the Fourth, prohibiting any but lords from ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... resting her hand on that of her companion. Obediently the doctor stopped his horse. The park was still but for the bird notes, the laughter and babble of the brook far below, and the rustle of the fresh leaves, each one a transparency for a sunbeam. ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... window, could look out between the looped-back curtains across the prairie. High over the sweep of dimly glimmering snow hung a vault of fathomless indigo. It was not such a sky as one sees in England, but rather a clear transparency where the stars, ranged one behind the other, led the gaze back and lost it in infinity, while at intervals a steely scintillation flickered up from horizon to zenith and then back again. Feathery frost-flowers on the window framed the picture like ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... sorr," and something in the thin, piping voice gave him fresh courage. Through the open window of the carriage he saw his captor glance at his watch and begin an impatient sentry-beat up and down under the electric transparency advertising the particular brand of whiskey specialized by the saloon. He was evidently waiting for his colleague to bring in the negro, and ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... seated herself close upon the margin of the cliff, she heard the small waves moving the stones which they washed, and the sound was as the sound of little children's voices, very distant. Looking down, she could see through the wonderful transparency of the water, and the pebbles below it were bright as diamonds, and the sands were burnished like gold. And each tiny silent wavelet as it moved up toward the shore and lost itself at last in its own effort, stretched itself the whole length ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... be done. You have rendered the bill transparent by the operation, and that transparency must be done away to make it appear perfectly natural. Pound some clean chalk and give it enough water till it be of the consistency of tar, add a proportion of gum-arabic to make it adhesive, then take a camel-hair brush and give the inside of both mandibles ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... the game with much interest, knowing that bunco would out in time, by whomever worked. During these months I read from week to week of this great policy, or that record-breaking risk just landed by this or that agent. One in particular made me chuckle at its transparency. A certain friend of the New York Life, a Wall Street man, "has just taken out a $2,000,000 policy." About the same time I began to receive information of the remarkable offers that were being made to ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... remarked how very much Pauline resembled him. True, he was pale, and she was a very Hebe, but the dazzling transparency of the complexion was the same, the silky, nut-brown hair the same, and the classical chiseling of mouth and nose identical. Her eyes were "deeply, darkly," matchlessly blue, and his were hazel; her features were quivering with youthful joyousness and enthusiasm, his might have been ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... it all her own way except for a broad expanse of sea-green sky in the west, deepening through violet to a narrow streak of copper on the horizon. By this time the shadows, especially on the eastern slope, were very sharp and black, and the open spaces very white and radiant, with a strange transparency borrowed from ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... found in a solid state in many minerals, as in marble, &c., and is then called water of Crystallization. It is essential, in many cases, to their solidity and transparency. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... contemplative expression which irradiates the features of the elect is again visible in our painter's figures. In the colouring of both, vivacity is combined with softness, and vigour of chiaro-scuro goes together with transparency of tint. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... which otherwise forms a sticky substance, difficult to remove, which may be readily seen on looking through a positive which has been too hastily finished in the usual way, giving a dark shade, and a want of transparency to the lights. I then place the picture in a bath composed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... away again. I intended to have remarked to you the effect produced by a grove of towering beech, the airy lightness of their foliage admitting a degree of sunshine, which, giving a transparency to the leaves, exhibited an appearance of freshness and elegance that I had never before remarked. I thought of descriptions of Italian scenery. But these evanescent graces seemed the effect of enchantment; ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft |
