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Crystalline   Listen
adjective
Crystalline  adj.  
1.
Consisting, or made, of crystal. "Mount, eagle, to my palace crystalline."
2.
Formed by crystallization; like crystal in texture. "Their crystalline structure."
3.
Imperfectly crystallized; as, granite is only crystalline, while quartz crystal is perfectly crystallized.
4.
Fig.: Resembling crystal; pure; transparent; pellucid. "The crystalline sky."
Crystalline heavens, or Crystalline spheres, in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, two transparent spheres imagined to exist between the region of the fixed stars and the primum mobile (or outer circle of the heavens, which by its motion was supposed to carry round all those within it), in order to explain certain movements of the heavenly bodies.
Crystalline lens (Anat.), the capsular lenslike body in the eye, serving to focus the rays of light. It consists of rodlike cells derived from the external embryonic epithelium.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Crystalline" Quotes from Famous Books



... simplicity of the Greeks is from the powerful passion of the Vikings. The ornament and poetic richness of Ruskin's style are also missing in Arnold's. His style has a classic purity and refinement. He has a terseness, a crystalline clearness, and a precision that have been excelled in the works of few even of the greatest ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... presence, although in some instances near enough for their yellow irides to be visible. While unalarmed they were very silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their whiteness something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to and fro along the face of the cliff, purely for the delight of bathing in the warm lucent air. Gradually a change came over them. One by one those that were on the wing dropped on to some projection, until they had all settled ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... Further, among the heavenly bodies exists a body, partly transparent and partly luminous, which we call the sidereal heaven. There exists also a heaven wholly transparent, called by some the aqueous or crystalline heaven. If, then, there exists a still higher heaven, it must be wholly luminous. But this cannot be, for then the air would be constantly illuminated, and there would be no night. Therefore the empyrean heaven was not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... means of water;—there are some, which having had their component parts brought together, in a fluid state; did then merely become gradually settled; and by the power of attraction, and the mixture of crystalline ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King

... had given up attempting to explain the essential nature of affinities and of crystalline types, we might have supposed that we had at least fixed the identity of the substances with which we deal, and determined the laws of their combination. All at once we find that a simple substance changes face, puts off its characteristic qualities and resumes them at will;—not merely ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... its centre, showing a distinctly concave surface; and, when I contrived to produce a slight but quick movement of the eyeball, a perceptible undulatory movement could be detected. The patient had, in fact, what is known as a tremulous iris, a condition that is seen in cases where the crystalline lens has been extracted for the cure of cataract, or where it has become accidentally displaced, leaving the iris unsupported. In the present case, the complete condition of the iris made it clear that the ordinary ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... slumbering craters full of cracks and fissures from which rose various gases. The air was saturated with the acrid and unpleasant odor of sulphurous acid. The ground was encrusted with sulphur and crystalline concretions. All this incalculable wealth had been accumulating for centuries, and if the sulphur beds of Sicily should ever be exhausted, it is here, in this little known district of New Zealand, that supplies must ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms, the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to my wondering consciousness. The day before had been my one-and-twentieth birthday. Among other ceremonies investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in which my father ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... but in the moving of his sphere,'—The stars were popularly supposed to be fixed in a solid crystalline sphere, and moved in its motion only. The queen, Claudius implies, is his sphere; he could ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... and valleys, and the white smoke of the snow revolving about its pinnacles and spires like volumes of steam, and a volcanic noise of mighty seas bursting against its base and recoiling from the adamant of its crystalline sides in acres of foam. We were heading for it at the rate of thirteen miles an hour as neatly as you point the end of a thread into the eye of a needle. In a few minutes we should have been into it, crumbled against it, dissolved upon the white waters about it, and have met a nameless ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... which serve the double purpose of balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome of the sky. Our devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God should be excited by the spectacle of this vast crystalline brittle expanse, which has been safely set in its position without so much as a crack or any other injury. Above the sky, and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven stories, the uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form of a gigantic ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... propped on the horizon, while the massy dome of clouds fell to the south, disclosing through the scattered web the clear empyrean, and the little stars, which were set at an immeasurable distance in the crystalline fields, showered their small rays on the glittering snow. Even the horses were cheered, and moved on with renovated strength. We entered the forest at Bishopgate, and at the end of the Long Walk I saw the Castle, "the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, girt ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... width of the canyon at the top was about one and a quarter miles, while the breadth of the water itself plunging along the bottom was not more than 125 feet, and the total height of wall was 2500 feet. We had marble at the river margin most of the day, a greyish crystalline rock fluted multitudinously in places by the action of high water and sometimes polished like glass. While this was a grey rock the entire effect of the canyon, for the reason stated above, was red. On the right bank we made our camp on some sand at the mouth of a gulch, and immediately put on ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... then there was a wood of chestnuts carpeted with pale pink ling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range, an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble, crystalline in shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from which they were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley to south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... salts mutually decompose one another whenever the new combinations which result produce an insoluble compound, or one less soluble than the two former. Another uniformity is that called the law of isomorphism; the identity of the crystalline forms of substances which possess in common certain peculiarities of chemical composition.(133) Thus it appears that even heteropathic laws, such laws of combined agency as are not compounded of the laws of the separate agencies, are yet, at least in some ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... put something on," insisted the voice. The man started off down the path, the little girls ran grumbling indoors. The sky was clear, there was still a crystalline, non-luminous light ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... been one of the wild projects of my youth to discover. Possibly it might have looked brighter to me in those days than now; at all events, it had not such brilliancy as to detain me long from the other articles of the museum. The virtuoso pointed out to me a crystalline stone which hung by a gold chain ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... parallel to the Atlantic coast, and ending in northern Alabama, forms the geological axis of the southern states. Bordering the mountains proper is a broad belt of hills known as the Piedmont or Metamorphic region, marked by granite and other crystalline rocks, and having an elevation decreasing from 1,000 to 500 feet. The soil varies according to the underlying rocks, but is thin and washes badly, if carelessly tilled. The oaks, hickories and other hardwoods, form the forests. In Virginia this section meets the lower and flatter country ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey

... hear any sing," agreed little Dan'l in a weak voice. Very soon she was fast asleep. The old man sat holding her, and loving her with a simple crystalline intensity which was fairly heavenly. He himself almost disregarded the heat, being raised above it by sheer exaltation of spirit. All the love which had lain latent in his heart leaped to life before the helplessness of this little child in his arms. He realized himself as much greater and of more ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Doctors Wife—a lady who loved Shelley and Byron. There was magic, there was revelation in the name, and Shelley became my soul's divinity. Why did I love Shelley? Why was I not attracted to Byron? I cannot say. Shelley! Oh, that crystal name, and his poetry also crystalline. I must see it, I must know him. Escaping from the schoolroom, I ransacked the library, and at last my ardour was rewarded. The book—a small pocket edition in red boards, no doubt long out of print—opened at the "Sensitive Plant." Was I disappointed? I think I had expected to understand ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... watched the "old year out and the new year in," and then taken a short nap; yet Jack Frost had been active during my absence, and cooled down the air of the sanctum some degrees below the freezing point, at the same time coating the window panes with his beautiful crystalline figures. The dark walls did look most awful, seen through the dun yellow light of the fog, which met my view upon drawing aside the cabalistically hung curtains. I cast a look at the Rumford grate; its black ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various

... enjoyed the crystalline spring air as he hastened along to catch his avenue car. There was a gleam of triumph behind the blue shields as he murmured, "If she only plays her part as I laid it down yesterday, he is a ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... Wallace rather favours the idea of natural cracks or faults in the surface of the planet; and suggests that the outer crust of Mars may be a crystalline or similar formation which would lend itself to the production of numerous cracks in the surface. He points to a few cracks and faults in the earth's surface, all of small size, as confirming this idea; but the ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... a direct connection with the collapsed-matter problem. When the electron loses its negative charge and reverts to a neutrino, there is a definite accretion of interatomic binding-force, and the molecule, or the crystalline lattice or whatever tends to contract, and when the neutrino becomes a photon, the nucleus of the ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper

... By hym sat dame Ven{us} {with} colour crystalline Whos long here shone as wyre of gold bry{gh}t Cryspe was her skyn her eyen columbyne Rauysshed myne herte her chere was so ly{gh}t Patrones of plesau{n}ce be named wel she my{gh}t A ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous

... physiologist's argument. He says: "Dr. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia, in the year 1869, made the original and remarkable observation that if a part of the body of a frog be immersed in simple syrup, there soon occurs in the crystalline lens of the eyeball an opaque appearance resembling the disease called cataract. He extended his observations to the effects of grape sugar, and obtained the same results. He found that he could induce the cataractic condition invariably by this experiment, or by injecting a ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... faint as he stretched himself in the still morning air upon waking, and hobbled painfully, but as his companion emerged from the darkened shelter into the crystalline brightness he forgot his own misery at sight of him. The big man reeled as though struck when the dazzle from the hills reached him, and he moaned, shielding his sight. Snow-blindness had found ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... little further to the east; and yet even it had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, however, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... heure et un quart a monter du glacier de Lechaud au plan de celui du Talefre. Nous fumes tentes de nous reposer un moment avant d'entrer sur celui-ci. Tout nous invitoit a choisir cette place, un beau gazon arrose par un ruisseau qui sortoit de dessous la neige et qui rouloit son eau crystalline sur un sable argente, et ce qui etoit plus seduisant encore, une vue d'une etendue et d'une beaute dont une description ne peut ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... with a flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth, and for a little space his level rays shoot out and gild the tree tops and the distant hills. The snow springs to life. Dead white no longer, its dry, crystalline particles glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the lovely circle of rose pink over amethyst again stretches round the horizon, slowly fading until once more the pale primrose glows in the south against the purple sky with its silver ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... what latest shape May startle thee by strangeness. Truths escape Time's insufficient garniture; they fade, They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine And free through March frost: May dews crystalline Nourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruit As—not new vesture merely but, to boot, Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall Myth after myth—the husk-like lies I call New truth's corolla-safeguard: Autumn comes, So much ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... in the direction of Yellowstone Park. The snow-crowned peaks looked like vast banks of clouds in the sky, while the craggy portions below the frost-line were mellowed by the distance and softly tinted in the clear, crystalline atmosphere. The mountains formed a grand background to the picture which ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... was in the midst of a disordered flight as the warriors charged screaming back to the forest. The ship was settling swiftly toward the surface of the river and now a crystalline ray of some sort shot out from the forward deck, cutting down the ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis

... toilers with which populous Torre del Greco abounds, that of the coral-fishers is perhaps the most interesting. There is pure romance in the very notion of hunting for the beautiful coloured substance lying hidden in the crystalline depths of the Mediterranean, and its quest is not a little suggestive of azure caverns beneath the waves, peopled by soft-eyed mermaids and strange iridescent fishes. As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to name a harder ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... Aqua Regis, and (I speak it knowingly) by divers other Menstruums be reduc'd into a seeming Liquor, in so much that the Corpuscles of Gold will, with those of the Menstruum, pass through Cap-Paper, and with them also coagulate into a Crystalline Salt. And I have further try'd, that with a small quantity of a certain Saline Substance I prepar'd, I can easily enough sublime Gold into the form of red Crystalls of a considerable length; and many other wayes may Gold be disguis'd, and help to constitute Bodies of very differing ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... green tint I have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... "The crystalline structure of tungsten, hitherto known only indirectly by means of X-rays, stood outlined boldly on a fluorescent screen, showing nine atoms in their correct positions in the space lattice, a cube, with one atom in each corner and ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... peculiar mineral has always proved highly auriferous in this locality, and a careful search will rarely fail to detect "sights" of the precious metal imbedded in its folds, or lying hidden between its crystalline plates. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow. As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in the bow-window, she unconsciously kept her hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking out on the still, white enclosure which made her ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... sea, The azure goddess, blithe and free. Whose face, the mirror of the cloudless sky, Lures to her bosom wooingly? Quick let us build on the dancing waves A floating castle gay, And merrily, merrily, swim away! Who ploughs with venturous keel the brine Of the ocean crystalline— His bride is fortune, the world his own, For him a harvest blooms unsown:— Here, like the wind that swift careers The circling bound of earth and sky, Flits ever-changeful destiny! Of airy chance 'tis the sportive reign, And hope ever broods on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... No words can depict the glory that met our eyes. The glowing fire-masses had divided into glistening, many-colored bands, which were writhing and twisting across the sky both in the south and north. The rays sparkled with the purest, most crystalline rainbow colors, chiefly violet-red or carmine and the clearest green. Most frequently the rays of the arch were red at the ends, and changed higher up into sparkling green, which quite at the top turned darker and went over into blue or violet before disappearing in the blue of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... blossoms and fruit in strange shapes and gaudy colours. Many of the subaqueous plants expanded and retracted their blossoms harmoniously, as if to the strains of music audible only to the mute denizens of the sea—a measured, waving dance, fantastic and wondrously beautiful. Crystalline clearness magnified the detail of the next, the portals of which were coral, dyed extravagantly and variously according to the secret of the sea, with its inexhaustible chemicals. Fish in unimaginable shapes, fantastic hues, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... her, and in the very presence of death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire gnaws with voluptuousness—without pity. It is soon past. The fate is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... as Grecian marbles, domineering as sisters of Caesars, violet eyed, statuesque, cold upon the chiselled surface, but aglow with the white heat of feeling and forceful passion beneath. How blue are their clear veins interlacing beneath a crystalline skin!—for their blood is a more sublimed fluid than that which waters the clay of ordinary humanity. They have with them an unutterable glory of conscious power, the magnificence of a perfect, God-given nature, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... feeling of crystalline purity from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or Orientals. To them, as ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as "bull's-eyes" were ruthlessly destroyed in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha's spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties—in ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien

... Darwin's principal geological work—that relating to the origin of the crystalline schists,—geologists were not at the time prepared to receive his revolutionary teachings. The influence of powerful authority was long exercised, indeed, to stifle his teaching, and only now, when this unfortunate opposition has disappeared, is the true nature and importance of Darwin's purely ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... eat. Of the Baker's-Dozen nobody remained but little George the Paladin, dragging Holland painfully along with him;—and Pragmatic Sanction had gone to water, like ice in a June day, and its beautiful crystalline qualities and prismatic colors were forever vanished from the world. Will the reader note a point or two, a personage or two, in this sordid process,—not for the process's sake, which is very sordid and smells badly, but for his own sake, to elucidate his own course a little in the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... sublime setting of primeval forest and pouring canyon was worthy of the lines; I am sure the dewless, crystalline air never vibrated to strains of more solemn music. Certainly, our poet can never be numbered among the great writers of all time. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart in public; he has never thrown the reins on the neck of the winged ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... gills, as presenting the intermediate state between the spiracula of the grade next below, and the lungs of the step next above, both extremes of which seem combined in the structure of birds and of their quill-feathers; but above all, the convexity of the crystalline lens, so much greater than in birds, quadrupeds, and man, and seeming to collect, in one powerful organ, the hundred-fold microscopic facettes of the insect's light organs; and it will not be easy to resist the conviction, that the same ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... souls! as pure and white And crystalline as rays of light Direct from heaven, their source divine; Refracted through the mist of years, How red my setting sun appears, How lurid looks this soul ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... exceed that of all other flowers. It had thick petals, and at first gave me the idea of an artificial flower, cut by a divinely inspired artist from some unknown precious stone, of the size of a large orange and whiter than milk, and yet, in spite of its opacity, with a crystalline lustre on the surface. Next day I went again, scarcely hoping to find it still unwithered; it was fresh as if only just opened; and after that I went often, sometimes at intervals of several days, and still no faintest ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... electricity. The quantity of electricity generated by the combination of any two units is sufficient to separate any other two which are susceptible of such decomposition. The phenomena of isomorphism showed a relation between the units and crystalline forms; certain units are thus able to replace others in a crystalline body without altering its form, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... on the water, rocking silently; In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labour done—they rest standing—they are too tired; Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play around; The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed—the farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes; White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes. On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight together; In primitive woods, the sounds ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun took the stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their crystalline hardness, their luminous stream, as they poured from his hands like drops of water reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The reflections from so many facets, the thought of their great value, fascinated the gaze of ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... meet - A silvern segregation, globed complete In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet; Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer, Your cousined clusters, emulous to share With you the roseal lightnings burning 'mid their hair; Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:- Look for me in ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson

... the divide there was no ice, so snow, as fine and hard and crystalline as granulated sugar, was poured into the gold-pan by the bushel until enough water was melted for the coffee. Smoke fried bacon and thawed biscuits. Shorty kept the fuel supplied and tended the fire, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... much up and down hill over the numerous ridges that star-fish out from Mt. Kenia. We would climb down steep trails from 200 to 800 feet (measured by aneroid), cross an excellent mountain stream of crystalline dashing water, and climb out again. The trails of course had no notion of easy grades. It was very hard work, especially for men with loads; and it would have been impossible on account of the heat were it not for the numerous streams. On ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... plausible explanation has even been offered as to how the waters they once contained could have vanished. It has been thought that as the mineral substances deep in the interior of our satellite assumed the crystalline form during the progress of cooling, the demand for water of crystallization required for incorporation with the minerals was so great that the oceans of the moon became entirely absorbed. It is, however, unnecessary for our present argument that this theory should be correct. Even if there ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... fete, with the dark-eyed little beauty upon his arm, reached the top of the second flight of stairs; and here, beyond a spacious landing, where two proud-like darkies tended a crystalline punch bowl, four wide archways in a rose-vine lattice framed gliding silhouettes of waltzers, already smoothly at it to the castanets of "La Paloma." Old John Minafer, evidently surfeited, was in the act of leaving these ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... wisely contracted without consideration of "stock." The admirable qualities which make a union one of mutual respect and enduring affection—the generosities, the magnanimities, the courage of soul, the crystalline truthfulness, the endurance of ill fortune and of prosperity—are commonly the persistence of the character of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the 21st of July the operation of extracting the crystalline lens was performed on the left eye. Light became very distressing to his eye. After allowing the eyelids to remain closed for a few minutes, and then opening them, the pupil appeared clear, but he could not bear exposure to light. On my asking him what ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... on ancient volcanic rocks, and has been covered by a stream of basalt, which must have entered the sea when the white shelly bed was lying at the bottom. It is interesting to trace the changes produced by the heat of the overlying lava, on the friable mass, which in parts has been converted into a crystalline limestone, and in other parts into a compact spotted stone Where the lime has been caught up by the scoriaceous fragments of the lower surface of the stream, it is converted into groups of beautifully radiated fibres resembling ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... now crystalline. "By having accepted, from the first, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly, themselves—her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate keeps them from drugging themselves ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... outward face the big rock, gray, lichened and weather-worn, was a miniature cliff as high as the second story of a house; and at this cliff's foot was a dripping spring with a deep, crystalline pool for its basin. There was a time when Thomas Jefferson used to lie flat on his stomach and quench his thirst with his face thrust into the pool. But that was when he had got no farther than the Book of Joshua in his daily-chapter ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... the most wonderful examples of volcanic rock on the globe. Formed of rough and crystalline products of the basic fire of earth, they hold high up in their recesses coral beds once under the sea, and lava in many shapes, tokens of the island's rise from the slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely obliterated by denudation—the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... Gilbert finally walked down to the Four Winds light. The day had begun sombrely in gray cloud and mist, but it had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbor were amber deeps and crystalline shallows, with the fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... spray-laden atmosphere of the place—nor the marvellous profusion of new and wonderful flowers of every conceivable tint that everywhere met the eye, which so powerfully fascinated the beholder; it was the wonderful, exquisite blue colour of the water in the basin itself, which, although of crystalline transparency, receives its marvellous colouring through some freak of sky reflection penetrating through the branches of the overhanging trees. The effect of this wonderful colouring must be seen to be appreciated. And it is seen and admired every day by enthusiastic ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... and yet that the poet simply, by means of the exhibition, and without any subsidiary explanation, communicates to his audience the gift of looking into the inmost recesses of their minds. Hence Goethe has ingeniously compared Shakspeare's characters to watches with crystalline plates and cases, which, while they point out the hours as correctly as other watches, enable us at the same time to perceive the inward springs ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... reporter, was As2O5, while if one desired to test the organs for traces of strychnine, it would be necessary to use "sodium and potassium hydroxide, ammonia and alkaline carbonate, to precipitate the free base strychnine from aqueous solutions of its salts as a white, crystalline solid," while ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele

... he married. Rise, and fade. He shall be lord of Lady Imogen, And happier much by his affliction made. This tablet lay upon his breast, wherein Our pleasure his full fortune doth confine. And so, away! No farther with your din Express impatience, lest you stir up mine. Mount, eagle, to my palace crystalline. ...
— Cymbeline • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]

... on the branch of an acacia, just over her head, a goldfinch began to sing—his thin, sweet, crystalline trill of song. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... The pictures represent the creatures who are slumbering in chaos. Antony bends forward to see him. Then Manes makes his globe revolve, and, attuning his words to the music of a lyre, from which bursts forth crystalline ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... is an example in confirmation, taken from Duclaux's book on Pasteur: Herschel established a relation between the crystalline structure of quartz and the rotatory power of the substance; later on, Biot established it for sugar, tartaric acid, etc.—i.e., for substances in solution, whence he concluded that the rotatory power is due to the form of the molecule itself, not to the arrangement of the molecules in relation ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... call these rocks metamorphic crystalline schists, with dikes and beds of granite, but we will use the popular name for the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various

... me, for I was tired and hungry, so was my horse, and I was anxious to find a resting-place before night. Before me the country stretched away in vast undulations towards the ocean, which was not, however, in sight. Not the faintest stain of vapour appeared on the immense crystalline dome of heaven, while the stillness and transparency of the atmosphere seemed almost preternatural. A blue gleam of water, south-east of where I stood and many leagues distant, I took to be the lake ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... Gravitation Notion of Polarity, how generated Atomic Polarity Structural Arrangements due to Polarity Architecture of Crystals considered as an Introduction to their Action upon Light Notion of Atomic Polarity applied to Crystalline Structure Experimental Illustrations Crystallization of Water Expansion by Heat and by Cold Deportment of Water considered and explained Bearings of Crystallization on Optical Phenomena Refraction Double Refraction ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... result of such optical defects as have been above mentioned; but the more primary and uncomplicated forms of it are also sometimes in a marked degree transmitted in a family. Fourthly, Cataract, or opacity of the crystalline lens, is commonly observed in persons whose parents have been similarly affected, and often at an earlier age in the children than in the parents. Occasionally more than one child in a family is thus afflicted, one of whose parents ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... very clear and crystalline. The light-houses on the ends of the twin piers, though some miles distant, seemed close at hand. White herring gulls, cruising against the blue, flashed white as the sails of a distant ship. A fresh ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... afternoon a dense haze filled the sky. The sun, seen through this, became a globe of glowing ruby, and its glade on the sea looked as if the water had been strown, almost enough to conceal it, with a crystalline ruby dust, or with fine mineral spiculae of vermilion bordering upon crimson. The peculiarity of this ruddy dust was that it seemed to possess body, and, while it glowed, did not in the smallest degree dazzle,—as if the brilliancy of each ruby particle came from the heart of it rather ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... on the banks of Lethe; to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting influence most frequently intervene. The atmosphere seems refined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and more finely harmonized; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being unoccupied, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... that my glance seemed to sweep the circuit of the City, and swept outward over a rolling and low country through which ran wide mirror-like ribbons of water, the great canals of Mars, while afar off melting into the crystalline hazes of the horizon rose dark masses ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... causes of the different effects of air on stone must be numerous, and the investigation of them excessively difficult. With regard, first, to rocks en masse, if their structure be crystalline, or their composition argillaceous, the effect of the air will, I think, ordinarily, be found injurious. Thus, in granite, which has a kind of parallelogrammatic cleavage, water introduces itself into the fissures, and the result, in a sharp frost, will be a disintegration of the rocks ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... pattern desired, but the shape and weight of the blade are fixed wholly by the skilled hand and eye of the smith. Measuring tools are at hand, but are little used. Great care is necessary to avoid over-heating the metal, which would produce a brittle crystalline grain, and to keep the surface free from oxide, which would be injurious if hammered in. In tempering the blade the workman judges of the proper heat by the colour. Water is preferred to oil by the best makers, notwithstanding ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... and lately, these Many dainty mistresses: Stately Julia, prime of all: Sappho next, a principal: Smooth Anthea for a skin White, and heaven-like crystalline: Sweet Electra, and the choice Myrrha for the lute and voice: Next Corinna, for her wit, And the graceful use of it: With Perilla: all are gone; Only Herrick's left alone For to number sorrow by Their ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... granite, the material used in the Treasury Building at Washington. The upper portions of this course are neatly dressed with the chisel. The remainder of the church is to be constructed of white marble, from the Pleasantville quarries, in Westchester county. The crystalline character of this stone produces very beautiful effects in those portions which are most elaborately worked. The style of the edifice is the "decorated Gothic," which was most popular in Europe between the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... large plastine container filled with a white, crystalline powder. Then he selected a couple of bottles filled with a clear, faintly yellow liquid, and took a hypodermic gun from the rack. ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance

... tumult which rang ceaselessly around her, where she stood, plying her painted fan, her own laughter sounded at intervals, distinct in its refreshing purity, for it had always that crystalline quality under a caressing softness; but Duane, who had advanced now to the outer edge of the circle, detected in her voice no hint of that thrilling undertone which he had known, which he alone among men had ever awakened. Her gaiety was careless, irresponsible, childlike ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... and sheaves; Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes, And briery mazes bounding lanes, And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains, And milky stems and sugary veins; For every long-armed woman-vine That round a piteous tree doth twine; For passionate odors, and divine Pistils, and petals crystalline; All purities of shady springs, All shynesses of film-winged things That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings; All modesties of mountain-fawns That leap to covert from wild lawns, And tremble if the day ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... head. The object of this arrangement, perhaps, is to defend it from the action of the water, as there are no eyelids. The globe in front is somewhat depressed, and is furnished behind with a muscle, which serves to lengthen or flatten it, according to the necessities of the animal. The crystalline humour, which in quadrupeds is flattened, is, in fishes, nearly globular. The organ of smelling in fishes is large, and is endued, at its entry, with a dilating and contracting power, which is employed as the wants of the animal may require. It is mostly by the acuteness of their smell that ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... it might after all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidence of Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same soft continuous note of easy eloquence, level and limpid as a stream of crystalline transparence, in the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman and the panegyrical prophecy of the favoured prelate. If this, I say, were all, we might admit that there is nothing—I have already admitted it—in either passage ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... am a tolerably good chemist, and have spoken understandingly. Potassium cyanide, KCN, is a white, crystalline compound, and could hardly be used in a hypodermic syringe save in solution, in which condition it would not have been sufficiently poisonous to have ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... hydrants, and tosses up in our fountains, and hisses in our steam-engines, and showers out the conflagration, and sprinkles from the baptismal font of our churches; and with silver note, and golden sparkle, and crystalline chime, says to hundreds of thousands of our population, in the authentic words of Him who made it—"I WILL: BE ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... we islanders were like those Chinese who live in great tanka-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,—that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... crust of the globe, we find at once two kinds of rocks, the respective work of fire and water: the first poured out from the furnaces within, and cooling, as one may see any mass of metal cool that is poured out from a smelting-furnace today, in solid crystalline masses, without any division into separate layers or leaves; and the latter in successive beds, one over another, the heavier materials below, the lighter above, or sometimes in alternate layers, as special causes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... wrought in the night. The sky overhead was serenely cloudless; the lake beneath, stirring softly under some faint passing breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming, dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by little slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this darkling middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... came the ready query: That since there is silver in these hills, why not also gold, seeing they frequently go together? Then it was found that the mineral formations in which this metal occurs are the crystalline primitive rocks; and with these the Lomond Hills were held to correspond. Then it had been told them, that in days of yore shepherds had found pieces of gold while tending their flocks on the hills, and that gold had been frequently met with in the whole district of country ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various

... it was inferred, from their crystalline character, that the metamorphic rocks of Anglesea were more ancient than any rocks of the adjacent main land; but it has since been shown that they are of the same age with the slates and grits of Carnarvon and Merioneth. Again, slaty cleavage having been first found only in the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... morning I was called by the steward, and, dressing, went on deck, to find that the weather was as it had been all through the preceding day, namely, a light breeze from the westward, with a cloudless sky of crystalline clearness overhead, and a long, low sluggish swell undulating athwart the gently-ruffled surface of the ocean. The island now bore about four points on our weather quarter, some sixteen miles distant; so we filled the main-topsail, got way upon the ship, and hauled up to "full-and-by," ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... declaims it in his high, thin voice, which wavers like a dry flame. And what makes all this so refreshing is that his other great quality is an intensely critical spirit, which stares closely and intently at work, as through a crystalline lens. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of this lake are precipices studded with sword-blades thickly set as teeth in the jaws of a shark; and demons are driving naked ghosts up the frightful slopes. But out of the crimson lake something crystalline rises, like a beautiful, clear water-spout; the stem of a flower,—a miraculous lotus, hearing up a soul to the feet of a priest standing above the verge of the abyss. By virtue of his prayer was shaped the lotus which thus lifted up and saved ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... halved by the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by a glow that was without. The purple waters took the light from above and the waves turned to flames. The fountains that mounted at the bows and fell inboard came as showers of gems. (I heard afterwards it was still foggy in London.) And now, having ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;—her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that frightened her most. How ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... the rain fell during the massica quite copiously, they found water everywhere. The little lakes, formed by the downpours in the valleys, were still well filled, and from the mountains flowed here and there streams, pouring crystalline, cool water in which bathing was excellent and at the same time absolutely safe, for crocodiles live only in the greater waters in which fish, which form their usual ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... acid and glycerol, repeatedly boiling the resulting product with strong alcohol, and allowing it to crystallise. Palmitin exists in scales, which have a peculiar pearly appearance, and are greasy to the touch. After melting and solidifying, palmitin shows no crystalline fracture; when heated to 46 deg. C. it melts to a liquid which becomes solid on further heating, again liquefying when 61.7 deg. C. is reached, and becoming cloudy, with separation of crystalline particles. At 63 deg. C. it is quite clear, and this temperature is taken as the true melting point. ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... carnage sets, And, halting higher, The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats, Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned, That, balked, yet stands at bay. Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline, A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray, And in her lifted hand swings high o'erhead, Above the waste of war, The silver torch-light of the evening star Wherewith to search the faces ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... elsewhere in the interstices of the nascent rock, thus glueing and cementing the particles together into a hard mass; or it may even dissolve the carbonate of lime more extensively, and re-deposit it in a crystalline form. On the beach of the lagoon, where the coral sand is washed into layers by the action of the waves, its grains become thus fused together into strata of a limestone, so hard that they ring when struck with a hammer, and inclined at a gentle ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... his sacrifices extending for many, many long years. There were placed by Keshava thousands and tens of thousands of sacrificial stakes adorned with golden garlands and altars of great splendour. Going thither, O Bharata, Maya brought back the club and the conch-shell and the various crystalline articles that had belonged to king Vrishaparva. And the great Asura, Maya, having gone thither, possessed himself of the whole of the great wealth which was guarded by Yakshas and Rakshasas. Bringing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... take off the film of a cataract from the eye; sometimes even we can take out the crystalline lens and substitute a heavy lens in glasses to be worn by ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough

... Venice lies,— A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline; And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies; As ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... orchard until the long, languid shadows of the trees crept to their feet. It was just after sunset and the distant hills were purple against the melting saffron of the sky in the west and the crystalline blue of the sky in the south. Eastward, just over the fir woods, were clouds, white and high heaped like snow mountains, and the westernmost of them shone with a rosy glow as of sunset on an ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... that where Jupiter is; the seventh is that where Saturn is; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... that entranced him was a pool a mile or two away from Apia to which in the evenings he often went to bathe. There was a little river that bubbled over the rocks in a swift stream, and then, after forming the deep pool, ran on, shallow and crystalline, past a ford made by great stones where the natives came sometimes to bathe or to wash their clothes. The coconut trees, with their frivolous elegance, grew thickly on the banks, all clad with trailing plants, and they were reflected in the green water. It was just ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... small field glass in the company, and as it happened that was in the possession of Captain Shirril, so that the youth had to depend upon his unaided vision. But the atmosphere in the Southwest is generally of crystalline clearness, and he was able to see his friend quite plainly until the hill beyond should hide him ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis

... fountain supported by little naked Loves in marble—flanked by balustrades and bordered by screens of myriad crystalline glass drops—a cool white pavement invited the gay minuet. Beyond, a huge banquet table groaned with delicacies and wines the cost of which would have gone far to rationing the thirty thousand hungry of the nearby City. Indeed, enough was wasted to have fed many. With bizarre and often ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... his munificent endowment of education. It was agreed that I should not be judged by the novelty of my invention, but by the results which I promised, namely, of being able to deposit with a smooth surface 30 dwt. of silver upon a dish-cover, the crystalline structure of the deposit having theretofore been a source of difficulty. In this I succeeded, and I was able to return to my native country and my ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... great, silent land. The reaped fields lay yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendour of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather

... sledges with the bells— Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... carborundum crystal for the sensitive element. Carborundum is a crystalline silicon carbide formed in the ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins

... once, that it is not a naked outline; but, as deep and rich as human nature itself, always revealing new ideas. It is as if the builder had built himself and his age up into it, and as if the edifice had life. Grecian temples are less interesting to me, being so cold and crystalline. I think this is the only church I have seen where there are any statues still left standing in the niches of the exterior walls. We did not go inside. The steeple of St. Michael's is three hundred and three feet high, and no doubt the clouds often envelop the tip of the spire. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... which is the black shadow of the most poetical of human feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He hardly ever describes it, only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives so much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of love. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's speciality. What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love—the romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of chivalry—Turgenev did for the natural, spontaneous, modern love ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... politely cried Major Hawke, as his fair neighbor's wineglass went shivering down in a crystalline wreck. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... with snow, that increased the general gloom, though some of the layers shone ghostly white and crystalline, in the light of the forge, and of two little grates he ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... and yet faintly seen through the crystalline atmosphere, were the many-colored knolls and rolls and cliffs of the Painted Desert. Marls, shales, and sandstones, of all tints, were strewn and piled into a variegated vista of sterile splendor. Here surely enchantment and glamour had made ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... one of those who hold that the best modern English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... of his time, of all times, but also the greatest heart, was that possessed by this Warwickshire poet. As a man thinketh in his heart so he is. As Shakspere was, so he wrote. This crystalline wholesome water dashing over this rocky cliff did not have its origin in yonder pool. Pure water does not flow from a mud-puddle. Here is a man who in twenty years writes in round numbers forty productions—the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... was flat—as flat as a table—with a waning growth of brown grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green—the New Year's flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline atmosphere enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him. Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had his joy, training, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... and likewise her brother, the artist. Miss Balch was a lady of almost crystalline refinement. She was tall and fair, with a delicacy of complexion that stood in no need of retailed bloom. She might have passed for the daughter of a kindly old Saxon chieftain—it was, indeed, generally known that she sprang from the ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... bridges of ice, fashioned by the hard frost, with but little assistance from the hand of man. Bits of wood and stone, a few graceful fern-leaves and sprays of bamboo, and a trickling stream of water produced the most fairy-like crystalline effects imaginable. If only some good fairy could, with a touch of her wand, preserve it all intact until a few months hence, what a delight it would be in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... lies concealed a tiny Fountain of Youth in my soul. You may say that its waters are bitter and saline, instead of being crystalline and clear. And it is true. Yet the fountain flows on, and bubbles, and gurgles and splashes into foam. That is enough for me. I do not wish to dam it up, but to let the water run and remove itself. I have always felt kindly ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... Communication is the prime requisite to procreation. The firefly signals his mate by night, the human male entices his woman with honeyed words and is not the gift of a jewel a crystalline, enduring statement of his ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith

... foot-print on a rock from which he sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy. But in the prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick is described, as the after apostle, raising the dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... strengthened by a more or less rigid skeleton, consisting chiefly of lime or silica. The tissue consists of a very fine network of threads, formed probably by gradual solidification of the threads of protoplasm. The inorganic skeleton is formed by larger and smaller crystals and crystalline threads. In the various families of sponges the quantity of inorganic matter varies greatly; some sponges are nearly devoid of an inorganic skeleton, while other families consist chiefly of lime or silica, the organic tissue ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... divisions have been organized to prosecute work on the archaean rocks, embracing within their field not only all rocks of archaean age, but all metamorphic crystalline schists, of whatever age they may be found. The first division has for its chief Prof. Raphael Pumpelly, assisted by a corps of geologists, and the field of his work is the crystalline schists of the Appalachian region, or eastern portion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... capable of producing musical tones of great purity and of the finest quality. Experiment soon satisfied him that for the best production of the tone it was necessary to strike the bamboo cylinder smartly upon some firm, inelastic substance, such as a bag of sand. The tone produced was of crystalline purity, and by varying the size and length of the cylinders it proved possible to represent a complete musical scale. The instrument was the germ of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... both sides of a fault are often smooth and highly polished by the movement which has taken place in the strata. They then show the phenomenon known as slicken-sides. Many faults have become filled with crystalline minerals in the form of veins of ore, deposited by infiltrating waters ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... long, airy hall, with a row of tables on either hand, covered with glass, whose icy glitter and lack of color gave a deliciously cool aspect to the whole place. Glass in every graceful form and design, some heavy and crystalline, enriched with ornate workmanship by cutter and engraver, some delicate and fragile as a soap-bubble; hock-glasses as green and lucent as sea-water, and with an edge not too thick to part the lips of Titania; glasses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses of snow and ice. To suffer in silence! what torture to a ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... She bent over the table, shaded her eyes with her white, beautifully-kept hands, and peered into the crystalline depths. "There's nothing here," she continued, somewhat fretfully, to Alden, "except you. By some trick of reflection, I could see you as plainly as though it were a ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... the fact that Washington Irving, as far back as a century ago, chronicled the pleasure that one felt during an Atlantic voyage in idle day dreams while lying prone upon the bowsprit and watching the dolphins leaping in the crystalline foam. Since his time so many gifted writers have attempted to do the same thing that on the large Atlantic liners the bowsprit has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up: "Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit." But even without this advantage, ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... nothing to frighten one," said the Swedish girl. And her crystalline laughter filled ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers



Words linked to "Crystalline" :   crystalline lens, crystalised, microcrystalline, limpid, crystallized, crystal clear, polycrystalline, transparent, distinct, pellucid, lucid, noncrystalline, clear



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