"Kaleidoscope" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is perhaps the busiest part of the day in the bazaar. Then is one most struck with the varied and picturesque types of Oriental humanity, the continuously changing kaleidoscope of native races from Archangel to the Persian Gulf, the ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... political kaleidoscope was a pivotal point in the life of Ary Scheffer. So long as the Duke of Orleans was a simple country gentleman, Scheffer was the intimate friend of the family, but how could the King of France admit into his family circle a mere low-born painter? ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... there were charming houses in which a person of Ray's undoubted ability, even though without the knack of making the best use of it, could always be sure of a quiet corner for watching decorously the social kaleidoscope. But the kaleidoscope of the goose-green, what in the world was that, and what such delusive thrift as drives about the land (with a fearful account for flys from the inn) to leave cards on the country magnates? This solicitude for Limbert's subject-matter ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... reach. The mental bursts, the trouble the United States was having, Palveri, Queen Elizabeth, Burris, Mike Sand, Dr. O'Connor, Sir Lewis Carter and even Luba Ardanko juggled and flowed in his mind like pieces out of a kaleidoscope. But they refused to form any pattern ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... like the pieces of a kaleidoscope, to confuse him in his search. Tonty was not at hand to take care of the colony while he groped for the lost river. He moved his wretched people from their camp, with all goods saved off the wreck in the bay, to a better ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... awarded for two of the most important discoveries made in Europe, in any branch of science, during the two preceding years; and in 1819, Dr. Brewster received from the Royal Society the Rumford gold and silver medals, for his discoveries on the Polarization of Light. In 1816 he invented the Kaleidoscope, the patent-right of which was evaded, so that the inventor gained little beyond fame, though the large sale of the instrument must have produced considerable profit. In 1819, in conjunction with Dr. Jameson, he established the "Edinburgh Philosophical Journal"; and subsequently ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the telephone in its cradle and turned again to the Master Selector. Among the kaleidoscope of voices and figures not all were scenes of frustration and discontent. Yet enough of them were so that Mrs. Mimms was seriously disturbed. Then again, the apparatus had its indiscriminate faults: at one scene Mrs. Mimms blushed deeply and ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... time. The same gentleman, in his "New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel "invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope. The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there are only two in the library of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose prescriptive aid none ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the procession, As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... like wine that I could drink, or spill upon the ground.... It was splendid! "How long can I hold them?" I thought. "For ever!" Then I laughed. That was the best Ophelia laugh of my life—my life that is such a perfect kaleidoscope, with the people and the places turning ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... a toy were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: the showy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, with here and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the debauchee- poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." The work is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture; gorgeous palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadlywolds; gardens fairer than those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon enchanted mountains; valleys of the Shadow of Death; air-voyages and promenades in the abysses ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... for what seemed hours, but my chief memory of that afternoon was of the clouds of the northern horizon. They were a deep bluish-grey colour—a typical "water-sky"—but I have never seen clouds moving so fast. It was like trying to steer by one particular phase in a kaleidoscope. When all were satisfied that twenty miles had ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... dream kaleidoscope Changed still again, and framed love's dearest hope - The trinity of home; and life was good And all ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... would open doors to large, bright vistas, and lead her into a life of beauty. But this was a dream and Franklin was the fact, and to-night he seemed the only fact worth looking at. Wasn't dun-colour, after all, preferable to the trivial kaleidoscope of shifting tints which was all that the future, apart from Franklin, seemed to offer her? Might not dun-colour, even, illuminated by joy, turn to gold, like highway dust when the sun shines upon it? Althea wondered, leaning back in her chair and gazing ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... answers are given to old questions and new questions rise that never have been answered before, if forms of faith in which men once trusted are outgrown, man's unsettlement seems to be complete. The whole world then is like a huge kaleidoscope turning round and round and, as it turns, the manifold elements in human experience, even its religious doctrines and practices, arrange and rearrange themselves in endless permutations. How then in such a world can religion mean to us what it has meant to the saints who of old, amid ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face. And her face was a kaleidoscope. At the first, tense and fearful, it was like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon falling through the trap. Next, and quickly, came surprise and relief in that there was no hurt. And, finally, her face was proudly happy with a smile of triumph. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... on molecular facts; molecular facts are not dependent on mental. They may seem to be so, but this is only seeming. They are as much the outcome of molecular groupings and movements as the figures in a kaleidoscope are of the groupings and movements of the colored bits of glass. They are things entirely by the way; and they can as little be considered links in any chain of causes as can the figure in a kaleidoscope be called the cause of ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... doorway, leaned against the woodwork, and folding his arms, surveyed the scene before him with the apathetic interest of the large and mystified. The long room was crowded with jumbled atoms of colour, like a damaged kaleidoscope; with talk and laughter; with the whisper of sweeping skirts, and the clink of spurs. Then the first provocative bars set every foot in motion; and the kaleidoscope effect ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... decorous exterior, anxiously studied its own advantage. It was the trying hour when the spoils were to be divided. The States themselves preferred the profit of their enemy England to that of their half-friend Spain. Franklin did not appreciate this quick turning of the kaleidoscope, with the instant change of all the previous political proximities; in view of his age, his infirmities, his recent experience in France, and his habitual generous faith in his fellow men, this failure should give rise neither to ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... their prestige on some other contention. The first of January was approaching. The final proclamation of emancipation would bring to an end the temporary alliance of the Administration and the Abolitionists. Who could say what new pattern of affairs the political kaleidoscope might not soon reveal? Surely the Jacobin cue was to busy themselves, straightway, making trouble for the President. Principles being unavailable, practices might do. And who was satisfied with the way the war was going? To rouse the party against the Administration on the ground ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... well-filled benches below. Beyond the benches, and extending far across the grass to the very steps of the old Dewey House, was a moving, shifting crowd, changing in form and color, as the brightly-dressed girls came and went, like the varying slides of a kaleidoscope. Back of the glee club, again, the open windows of the reading-room were filled with faces of old graduates who knew the place, and who chose this point of vantage either to protect their gowns and their elderly necks from the ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his brother—well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of King and Carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying, lost in contemplation—all of which was harmless enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the kaleidoscope of its details abruptly ceased. But through it all the voices of the prophets had rung more insistently with each defeat. The covenant in the wilderness was unforgetable; in the chained links of slavery they saw the steps of a throne, the triumph ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... Then the sun, shining out of a sky of intense blue, on water vividly green, catches the tiled color-chips of the sprawling town; glints on dome and minaret, and makes such a city as might be seen in a kaleidoscope. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... leave my dear companion lying on the steps to wait for me. Such a fearful house! An enormous stained-glass window in the hall, the shape of a church window, only not with saints and angels in it; more like the pattern of a kaleidoscope that one peeps into with one eye, and then bunches of roses and silly daisies in some of the panes, which, I am sure, are unsuitable to a stained-glass window. There were ugly negro figures from Venice, holding plates, ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... yellow,—and at every flick of the tail a trenchant flash of intense scarlet. All these colors set in frames of jet-black plumage, and suddenly hurled through blue sky and green foliage, made the hillside a brilliant moving kaleidoscope. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... in its own saffron. His heart beat high with a feeling of the hazard of the ocean. He tried to fancy what would happen to the huge dock as it adventured through tropic seas. His imagination readily conjured up a kaleidoscope of incidents—cannibal proas, shark fights, sea serpents, ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... splendours of Venice's past, and let Paul feel the atmosphere of that subtle time of passion and life. Of here a love-scene, and there a murder. Of wisdom and vice, and intoxicating emotion, all blended in a kaleidoscope ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... that should be Anthony's, I had the place to myself. But about midnight a head was unexpectedly thrust through the door-flap. It looked ghostly in the haze of colour made by the gorgeous applique work of high roof and octagon walls, which gave an effect of sitting at the bottom of a giant kaleidoscope. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... on! she's dazzled with hints Of oranges, ribbons, and color'd prints, A Kaleidoscope jumble of shapes and tints, And human faces all flashing, Bright and brief as the sparks from the flints, That ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... evening effect. Thousands,—millions, it seemed to Patty,—of electric lights in various wonderful devices, and in every possible colour, made the place as light as day, and the varied gorgeousness of the whole scene made it seem, as Patty said, like a big kaleidoscope. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... every opening between the houses stretch stairways, as you know called ghauts, some broad and some narrow. We judge that they are there, though we cannot see the steps, for every inch is covered by a moving mass of people, clothed in the colours of the rainbow. You have often turned a kaleidoscope over and over, and watched the bits of coloured glass falling into strange patterns. Half shut your eyes and make a tube of your hands and see if this doesn't remind ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... that odd something occurred to Ishmael which suddenly puts a person in a new light—the slipping of the plane, the freakish turn of the kaleidoscope which makes the new light strike at a fresh angle something seen before and makes it different. He fell in love with Georgie in that moment, staring at her bent neck and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Again the kaleidoscope of changeful life is turned. The Empire falls. The Bourbons are restored. Louis Philippe returns to the palaces of his fathers. In rank, he takes his stand next to the throne. In wealth, he is the richest ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the better one. Other countries built themselves slowly. In the days of their building, the pace of life was a march. When America was born, the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed. Now the pace is a race. New York is a kaleidoscope. I myself can remember it a wholly different thing. One passes down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down—a few days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky. It is wonderful, but ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now she lacked self-assurance, but there was that in what she had already experienced which left her a little less than timid. She wanted pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was confused as to what these things might be. Every hour the kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new lustre upon something, and therewith it became for her the desired—the all. Another shift of the box, and some other had become the beautiful, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... with cattle grazing upon them; wheat fields, vegetables of all sorts, vineyards, all pass before my eyes as in a kaleidoscope. A fine country indeed for farmers. Plenty of water—even too much of it,—wood in abundance within ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... with a hearse like a four-post bed hung with black velvet and silver; or the peripatetic showman with his company of white rats establishes himself on the pavement opposite, till admonished to move on by the sergent de ville. What an ever-shifting panorama! What a kaleidoscope of color and character! What a study for the humorist, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... in which the eye could distinguish nothing save a terrible turning and twisting of the backs of wild beasts. The spectacle lost the appearance of reality, and became as it were an orgy of blood, a dreadful dream, a gigantic kaleidoscope of mad fancy. The measure was surpassed. Amidst roars, howls, whines, here and there on the seats of the spectators were heard the terrified and spasmodic laughter of women, whose strength had given way at last. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... A sado, with a team of three tiny ponies, dashes up the long avenue leading to the palm-fringed hills, the mighty Amherstia trees forming aisles of dark green foliage, brightened with the vivid glow of orange red blossoms. The broad road is a kaleidoscope of brilliant colour, for native costume vies with the dazzling tints of tropical Nature as we advance further into the Preangers. The gay headgear, worn turbanwise, with two ends standing upright above plaited folds, and magenta kabajas, with slandangs of apple green, amber ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... and fashion allowed quite a lot. The affair might have been described as a study in shoulder-blades. It was a very great show, and Mr. Prohack appreciated all of it, the women, the men, the lionesses, the lions, the kaleidoscope of them, the lights, the reflections in the mirrors and in the waxed floors, the discreetly hidden music, the grandiose buffet, the efficient valetry. He soon got used to not recognising, and not being recognised by, the visitors ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... forth into a statement of his notions; what, precisely, they were, is a matter that may here be omitted. The kaleidoscope of Irish politics has made many new patterns since Larry outlined his views for Christian, and the pattern of 1907 interests us no more. The affinity that exists between politics and eggs is not limited to the function of the latter in emphasising criticism of the former; ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleidoscope's vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park had taken water, and though in such a scene as that which spread its soft allure before us, it ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... thrown back, and he stood in the attitude of an avenging angel. Morrel, overpowered, turned around in the arm-chair; a delicious torpor permeated every vein. A change of ideas presented themselves to his brain, like a new design on the kaleidoscope. Enervated, prostrate, and breathless, he became unconscious of outward objects; he seemed to be entering that vague delirium preceding death. He wished once again to press the count's hand, but his own was immovable. He wished to articulate ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... argument to prove the great necessity of Religion as a Help in Life. But I would take my stand, in imagination, at some corner of yonder tumultuous street. How multiform the crowds that sweep by me; how diverse the faces; what a kaleidoscope of human conditions! And yet, when you attempt to classify them, how few are the actual types of men—how many fall into a common group; and when you try them by the profoundest standard—that of a common experience ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that charmed you still more, becomes a fixed ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... scoffer, and the debauchee-poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor, and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." The whole is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture; gorgeous palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly wolds; gardens fairer than those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... within tale, like the Eastern balls of carved ivory. The stories, as usual, illustrate the method of popular fiction. A certain number of incidents are shaken into many varying combinations, like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope. Probably the possible combinations, like possible musical combinations, are not unlimited in number, but children may be less sensitive in the matter of fairies than Mr. John Stuart Mill was as ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... conception of the possible. He had learned the value of colour before Queen was born, and in the Albany had translated principle into practice. But the hues of the boudoir made the gaudiest effects of Regency furniture appear sombre. The place resembled a gigantic and glittering kaleidoscope deranged and arrested. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... at the object end, to throw light from a lamp through the instrument, and the other at the eye end, through which the image is projected on a screen, placed at the proper focal distance. Any ingenious boy can fit these lenses to an ordinary kaleidoscope, and fit it to a stand, which may be ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... analogy to the mythical cosmography of the Hindus than to any thing properly geographical. Both, no doubt, were originally based in the main on real features. In the Hindu cosmography these genuine features are symmetrised as in a kaleidoscope; in the European cartography they are squeezed together in a manner that one can only compare to a pig in brawn. Here and there some feature strangely compressed and distorted is just recognisable. A splendid example of this kind of map is that famous one at Hereford, executed ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... say, 'No, never!' I know this, that in regard to all the recognised and associated forms of Christian work which cluster round a Christian congregation, it is the same handful of people that do them all. It is just like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, there are not many of them though you can shake them up into a great number of patterns, but they are always the very same bits. So I could go through pew after pew, if it would not be very personal, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... after item. Am I in rags, that I should endure this thing? And I get sick of my everlasting "No, thank you"—the monotony shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests. I feel angry with myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... assented, and they seated themselves near the railing, where they could look down on the human kaleidoscope below. ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... spectacle brilliant and dazzling. Boxes shone with brave hues; gems gleamed over-plentifully; here and there, accentuating the picture, the gorgeous colors of some eastern prince stood out like the brighter bits in a kaleidoscope. Steele's glance swept over royalty, rank and condition. It took in persons who were more than persons—personages; it passed over the impassive face of a dark ameer who looked as if he might have stepped from one of the pages of The Arabian Nights, and lingered on ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... those strange feverish weeks that preceded my wedding-day, they seemed to me like the dreams of a dying man. Shifting colors, confused images, moments of clear light, hours of long darkness—all things gross, refined, material, and spiritual were shaken up in my life like the fragments in a kaleidoscope, ever changing into new forms and bewildering patterns. My brain was clear; yet I often questioned myself whether I was not going mad—whether all the careful methodical plans I formed were but the hazy fancies ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Pauline, but the variations themselves are inventively varied. The complex temperament of Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to manhood, but as circumstances meet him. They give him a shock, as a slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind changes. But as with the bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the elements of Bordello's mind remain the same. It is only towards the end of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... it is a superficial thinker who imagines that the great Designer of all things has set the whole planet in a ferment, and strained every nation to exhaustion, in order that this or that frontier be moved, or some fresh combination be formed in the kaleidoscope of nations. No, the causes of the convulsion, and its objects, are more profound than that. They are essentially religious, not political. They lie far deeper than the national squabbles of the day. A thousand years hence those national results may matter little, ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first wilted, rolled into compact form and then dried on great stone floors that are shielded from the sun. The hundreds of pickers with their brightly colored gowns and white bundles, form a wonderful kaleidoscope picture. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Later he found himself in a cloud-burst of confetti, on the "city square" and when he had cleared his eyes of the red and white snow, he saw Fran disappearing like a bit of crimson glass at the bottom of a human kaleidoscope. Fran had thrown the confetti, then fled—how much brighter she was than all the other shifting ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gateway that guarded the spacious grounds, feeling like one in a troubled dream. He could shape nothing clearly: his past, present, and future seemed shaken out of place like the vari-colored figures of a kaleidoscope. To give up all his hopes, to shut out the beautiful vista opening before him and settle down forever to—to—"hogs on the hoof!" And yet it was his only chance to cheer, to gladden, perhaps to save gentle Aunt Win's life,—to bring ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... bench in the Square where he had sat so many nights with his head in his hands, one of those quick outbursts of enthusiasm took possession of him, the kind that sets young hearts singing with joy when some sudden shift of hope's kaleidoscope opens a wide horizon brilliant with the light of future success. With an exclamation of boyish glee he plumped himself down upon the hard planks of the bench, and jumped up again, pirouetting on his toe and slanting ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... so long as my old friends remember me? Who would have thought, my dear madam, that the map of Europe would have been painted the colors it is to-day? It was a kaleidoscope—the clatter of many stools, and I fell down between them all. Still plain Karl Steinmetz—still very much at your service. Shall I send my check for five guineas ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... lodging disclosed another peculiarity;—nothing is more mysterious than a Finnish bed. In the daytime every bed is shut up. The two wooden ends are pushed together within three feet of one another, kaleidoscope fashion, the mattress, pillows, and bedclothes being doubled between; but more than that, many of the little beds pull also out into double ones from the sides—altogether the capacities of a Suomi couch are wondrous ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... it quite an intellectual treat," said she, "our police are such intelligent creatures. I went all over the museum myself once; and it felt exactly like being in a kaleidoscope—everything ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... across my knees. Heavens, how they spelled! They finished all the words I ever heard and spelled like lightning through a lot of others the meaning of which I couldn't imagine. Father never gave them out at home. They spelled epiphany, gaberdine, ichthyology, gewgaw, kaleidoscope, and troubadour. Then Laddie spelled one word two different ways; and the Princess went him one better, for ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... this gorgeousness sat the caballeros and the donas, in velvet and silk, gold lace and Spanish, jewels and mantillas, and silver-weighted sombreros; a confused mass of color and motion; a living picture, shifting like a kaleidoscope. Nor was this all: brown, soberly-dressed old men and women in satin-padded carretas,—heavy ox-carts on wheels made from solid sections of trees, and driven by a ganan seated on one of the animals; the populace in cheap finery, ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... through the rock-window. To tell the truth, not one of them was thinking about the sun. I rode beside Princess Mary. On the way home, we had to ford the Podkumok. Mountain streams, even the smallest, are dangerous; especially so, because the bottom is a perfect kaleidoscope: it changes every day owing to the pressure of the current; where yesterday there was a rock, to-day there is a cavity. I took Princess Mary's horse by the bridle and led it into the water, which came no higher than its knees. ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... grave, or was it but the fancy of a wounded head? The impression lingered so vividly that he stood in a reverie, and the words of his hosts fell unheeded on his ears. He knew the face, he had heard the voice of old, but in the kaleidoscope of memory he could see no name to fit them, no incident wherewith they might ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... what looked to her a perfectly aimless fashion—until one would wheel and dart out into the open, always with a fleeing animal lumbering before. Other horsemen would meet him and take up the chase, and he would turn and ride leisurely back into the haze and confusion. It was like a kaleidoscope, for the scene shifted constantly and was ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in more tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render something ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 24th of February, brought tidings of change in all the relations betwixt man and man. There was fighting one day, embracing the next; every rotation of the hand brought to view a wonderful and unexpected change of figures in the political kaleidoscope. Day after day, in endless succession, there were mouthings of tumid, florid, and often unintelligible speeches, and of still more unintelligible and mysterious theories for the regeneration of mankind. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... in the rear of Fredericksburg. Countless surmises spread in the ranks as to the character and direction of the attack; though the whims of those who uttered them were variant as the reflections of a kaleidoscope. But the sun, that through the pines that morning, shone upon burnished barrels, polished breast-plates, and countenances of brave men, radiant, as if reflecting their holy purpose, has never, since ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... season was coming on, and the chill winds went through my khaki drill uniform. The sky was overcast, and the bay, generally a kaleidoscope of Eastern blues and greens, was ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a labour of love. The patches came exclusively from people's raiment. There was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; 'My Johnny's ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which threw its gloom over every object, abstract and concrete, and which induced the tendency to exaggerate any strange or unpleasant experience of which he had been the victim. It was useless to try to think of anything else; his brain felt as if it had resolved itself into a kaleidoscope, through which those three scenes shifted eternally. Finally, he fell asleep, and did not awaken until it was time to dress for dinner. Before he left his room, Weir's maid knocked at his door and handed him a note, in which the lady of Rhyd-Alwyn apologized for leaving him to himself for an entire ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... paralyzed, her limbs stiff and immovable. Like the dizzy whirl of a kaleidoscope, the picture before her resolved itself ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... immediately began was brilliant but desultory, for Mr. Smithers, with an airy lightness for which he is remarkable, introduced topic after topic, perhaps for the purpose of showing off Mr. T-'s versatility, and perhaps for the deeper and more sinister purpose of shaking the kaleidoscope of talk so thoroughly, that the real topic which we were met to discuss should not make an undue impression on the mind of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... everywhere. Reliable dependants, old prospecting friends and clients, keep him informed by private cipher of every changing turn of the brilliant Virginia City kaleidoscope. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... took advantage of the opportunity to advance their own interests by placing on the market, articles of use and ornament from all parts of India. Eager crowds, garbed in all the hues of the rainbow created a kaleidoscope of colour as they jostled one another among the booths, bent on bargaining or on sight-seeing. Merry-go-rounds, puppet shows, monkey-dances, juggling, and cocoanut shies, entertained adults as well as children, while the noise and ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... endless. Even if we did not have new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be exhausted on them. I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but I can never reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say that you may not exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... moment with the benign but vacant eye of the tired hostess, to whom her guests have become mere whirling spots in a kaleidoscope of fatigue; then her attention became suddenly fixed, and she seized on Miss Bart with a confidential gesture. "My dear Lily, I haven't had time for a word with you, and now I suppose you are just off. Have you seen Evie? ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... many another bugbear, the foul offspring of credulity and fear on the one side—of superstition and hypocrisy on the other. No; life is merely a thing of chances, and its incidents the mere combinations that result from its evolutions, just like the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope, which, when viewed naked, have neither order nor beauty, but when seen through our own mistaken impressions, appear to have properties which they do not possess, and to produce results that are deceptive, and which would mislead us if we drew any absolute inference ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... no more help talking so—given the right circumstances to draw her forth—than she could help breathing. Her whole nature was fluid to the truth, as the atoms she spoke of. Talking with her, you saw, as in a divine kaleidoscope, the gleams and shiftings and combinings of heavenly and internal things; shown in simplest movings and relations of most real and ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... some fiery octopus through thousands of miles of space—huge arms of flaming gas that writhed out as though to reach and drag back the whirling planets to the parent body. All about the mighty sphere, stretching far into space, a wan glow seemed to ebb and flow, a kaleidoscope of swiftly changing color. It was the zodiacal light, an aurora ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... assured himself that all his charges had retired, he joined "Bull" Hendricks for a chat and smoke over the day's happenings. Few things had escaped their keen eyes during that crowded hour, when conditions and formations changed with the swiftness of a kaleidoscope. And now that it was all over, they could recall every play, every gain, every fumble, every pass, with a precision that would have been astounding to any one less versed than they in every turn and ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... at Epsom or Flemington—generally Flemington, where the staring Australian sun pours down on an emerald course, on a score of horses straining upon the start, the colours of the jockeys' coats and caps changing in the struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange harmonies of colour. The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and a race-course might seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the bookmaker had his own standards, and that he thought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... platforms ran with a roar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls with flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the breasts. These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that the dominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that the tailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries of "The Sleeper. What has happened to the Sleeper?" and it seemed as though the rushing platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of human ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... race-course, had not an eye so well trained that he could readily distinguish the colors or locate with certainty the position of the "pink—green sleeves—white cap"—the racing jacket of "Count Donato," as Anna was known to the Jockey Club. He could make out nothing more than a kaleidoscope of color changing swiftly upon a verdant arena, this and an unbroken line of people stretching away to the very confines of the woodlands and a rampart wall of stands and boxes and tents. For him there were ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... chimes, long dusty roads lined with regimental trees, blouses, fishwomen's caps, sabots, savoury and unsavoury smells, France dissolving into Belgium, Belgium into France, France into Belgium again; in short, one bewildering kaleidoscope! A day and two nights had gone, during all which time I had been on my legs, and had travelled nigh six hundred miles! Dream or no dream, it had been a very welcome show or panorama, new ideas and ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... the classic ground which he loved so well. An audacious Radical swarmed up upon the pedestal and balanced the obnoxious notice on the marble arms of the professor. Thus converted into a political partisan, the revered inventor of the kaleidoscope became the centre of a furious struggle, the vanquished politicians making the most desperate efforts to destroy the symbol of their opponents' victory, while the others offered an equally vigorous ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... early Gothic—of what do they remind one so strongly as of the marvels of old stained glass, that rich, pure kaleidoscope which has lived so long in the atmosphere of incense ascending from censer and from heart. The same scale, rich and simple, unafraid of unshaded colour, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes, representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rocks; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disk; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus- flowers, rising out of them; an ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... reached his room, he did not light the lamp, but crossed to the window and stood looking out into the darkness. The day's impressions, motley as the changes of a kaleidoscope, seethed in his brain, clamoured to be recalled and set in order; but he kept them back; he could not face the task. He felt averse to any mental effort, in need of a repose as absolute as the very essence of silence itself. The sky was ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... hall was still full of arrivals, while up the wide central staircase trooped masks and dominos in a changing kaleidoscope of form and colour. Eager heads thrust this way and that, picturesque figures grouping and greeting, cavaliers of all periods, maidens of all nations, monks, barbarians, cardinals, queens, and clowns—sometimes the wisest heads under the most foolish caps—while here and there a few favoured paper-folk ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... for Government and my wife via Kuka, as caravans are expected to leave Bornou for Moursuk about this time. My rooms were full of visitors to-day. First came the commander-in-chief, Shroma. I showed him all my treasures, portable peepshow, kaleidoscope, &c. &c. He was marvellously pleased. I treated him also with sugar, but coffee he positively refused as too bitter. He brought with him some twenty of his troops and a chosen aide-de-camp. He is just the man for a negro commander, full of cunning and address, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin—too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships drawn up on dazzling beaches, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... him, and lashed and roweled him with excitement. His world resolved itself to a round green table, columns of tri-colored chips, and five ever-changing cards that came and went and came again before his tired eyes like the changing, weaving colors of the kaleidoscope. Midnight struck, then one o'clock, then two, three, and four. Still his passion rode him like a hag, spurring the jaded body, ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... looking-glass; where the huge chandeliers shine with a thousand pendants and a thousand jets, and where, because foreign crowds tread bare marble floors, they have on theirs a tufted velvet, and so revolve rejoicing on the biggest carpet in the world, like the medley of a vast kaleidoscope—old people with one foot in the grave, children in arms, a bride with veil and orange-blossoms, cripples, heroes, dwarfs and beauties, all together. Not on any such scene of the Season let us look, where the doors are locked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... life he had followed the current; the easy way was his way, and he came back to it again and again. His thoughts shifted and formed and shifted again like the bits of color in a kaleidoscope. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... for finding an exact niche for Chesterton lies in the fact that he is a bit of everything, and, what is more, these bits are very big and make a large kaleidoscope. He is a theological professor who is so entirely sensible that the public hardly discovers the fact; he does not wear a cap and gown, and quote quite easily from all the Fathers of the ancient Church. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white, warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched with sudden rain like escaping steam, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... ideas as may occur to me, in order that you may have the picking and choosing amongst them, with the chance of finding something to your mind—something which may assist you to a decision. Artists in arabesque get an idea by watching the shifting forms of the kaleidoscope; in the same manner you hope—if I will but turn my mind about a little—that some lucky adjustment of its fragments of observation may help you to a serviceable thought or two. At all events, you shall not have to complain of too much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... depression. The bare fact of the worthlessness of wealth was all at once borne in upon him with overpowering weight. This magnificent house which his hard earnings had purchased,—this ballroom with its painted panels and sculptured friezes, crowded just now with kaleidoscope pictures of men and women whirling round and round in a maze of music and movement,—the thousand precious and costly things he had gathered about him in his journey through life,—must all pass out of his possession in a few brief years, and there was ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... and quick as the change of a kaleidoscope, this parallelism was terminated,—not as regarded each other, but with respect to the course of the Catamaran By a single flutter of their tails, the whole school was seen simultaneously turning head ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... was even more marked than on the path below. It was a brilliant kaleidoscope of colour. Nothing but colour—colour. Very rarely could a man in European clothes (the richer Dalmatians) be noticed, and he seemed strangely out ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... you know you are a most wonderful girl? Your figure is perfect, your style refreshing, and you have a most interesting face. It is as ever-changing as a kaleidoscope—sometimes merry, then stern, often sympathetic, and always sad when at rest. One would think you had had some sorrow ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... Furniss can be seen at work with the regularity of a threshing machine and the variety of a kaleidoscope any day from 8 o'c. a.m. to 8 o'c. p.m. on presentation of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... wide, rather charming smile. Beyond that he did not go—not yet convinced. The Forsyte in him stood out for greater certainty. And on the stage the ballet whirled its kaleidoscope of snow-white, salmon-pink, and emerald-green and violet and seemed suddenly to freeze into a stilly spangled pyramid. Applause broke out, and it was over! Maroon curtains had cut it off. The semi-circle of men and women round the barrier broke up, the young woman's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ten decasyllable, decalogue *Demos people democracy, epidemic *Derma skin epidermis, taxidermist *Dis, di twice, doubly dichromatic, digraph *Didonai, dosis give dose, apodosis, anecdote *Dynamis power dynamite, dynasty *Eidos form, thing seen idol, kaleidoscope, anthropoid *Ethnos race, nation ethnic, ethnology Eu well euphemism, eulogy *Gamos marriage cryptogam, bigamy *Ge earth geography, geometry Genos family, race gentle, engender Gramma writing monogram, grammar Grapho write telegraph, lithograph *Haima blood ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... but awful procession, overwhelming us by its grandeur and yet no less by its horror. It is a kaleidoscope on a colossal scale, whose pieces appear like fragments of a broken universe. Empires rise and fall. Thrones are erected and overturned. The mightiest creations of man vanish. Yea, they have all waxed "old as doth a garment,'' and "as a vesture'' ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... like a kaleidoscope, that ingenious toy which was the delight of the Victorian nursery. Like the glass fragments in its slide, different in colour and shape, men's lives lie about without seeming connection; then Fate gives the instrument a shake, and behold! the fragments slide into position and form ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... be transposed into that of "at home." In sensation no permanent home can be found, because change is the law of this vibratory existence. That fact is the first one which must be learned by the disciple. It is useless to pause and weep for a scene in a kaleidoscope which ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... traditional simplicity. His judgment was keen and shrewd, and for many years the cracker-box philosophers of the village store impatiently awaited the sorting of the mail chiefly that they might learn what "Old Horace" had to say about some new picture in the kaleidoscope of politics. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... military depots where they would change their clothes and all their way of life—these pictures of preparation for war flashed through the carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers' overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean, this surging ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of the opera were a jangle of chords and discords, and the hum of voices was like the murmur of a far-off sea. My eyes remained fixed upon the stage. It was like looking through a broken kaleidoscope. I wanted to be alone, alone with my pipe. I was glad when we at last entered the carriage. Mrs. Wentworth immediately began to extol the singers, and Phyllis, with that tact which is given only to kind-hearted women, answered most of the indirect questions put to ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... ready utterances have generally mastered certain lines of fact and principles of knowledge which they have at command, and which, with native power and art of expression, they present in fresh forms and new combinations. They do not so much add new stores of fact to the kaleidoscope of oratory,—they place the familiar ones in new positions, and produce new pictures ad infinitum. Sometimes a genius, urged by a great impulse, may dash out in an untried course of thought; but this ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... the second Ruef trial. He found it a kaleidoscope of dramatic and tragic events. Heney, who had been the target for a volley of insinuations from Ruef's attorneys, was nervous and distraught. Several times he had been goaded into altercation; had struck back with a bitterness that showed his mounting anger. Stanley ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... the kaleidoscope, and I find myself at Wimbledon, staying with a friend—now, alas! passed away—who had then a pretty house not far from the Common, and with whom I often spent a few days when ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... stare at the girl, and no sooner had he turned his back upon her than the picture in his mind changed like a scene in a kaleidoscope. He now saw a tall, finely developed figure and a face delicately oval, with a low, wide forehead, arched brows, a straight, slightly tip-tilted nose, a mouth sweet and full, dimpled cheeks, and a strong chin set above a faultless throat. His imagination, in casting off its first impression, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... no place in it; it would be a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in a kaleidoscope. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... her gaze. To the naked eye the units composing it showed as vertical lines of grey, brown, and black, blotted with bright delicate colour, and splashed here and there with white, the whole mingling, uniting, breaking into fresh combinations kaleidoscope fashion. Through the opera-glasses figures of men, women, and horses detached themselves, becoming quaintly distinct, neat as toys, an assemblage of elegant highly finished marionnettes. There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... fluttering colors. I do not mean flags and streamers, but colors in the air itself! Colors the most exquisite that ever the eye looked upon! They changed, flickered, melted, brightened, flowed over one another in iridescent waves, mingled, separated, turned the whole atmosphere into a spectral kaleidoscope. And it was evident that, in some inexplicable way, the approaching squadrons were the sources of this marvelous display. Presently from the craft that carried us, answering colors flashed out, as if the air around us had suddenly been changed to crystal with a thousand quivering ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... Nervousness in the pulpit compelled him to retire from clerical life and devote himself to scientific work, and in 1808 he became editor of the "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia." His chief scientific interest was optics, and he invented the kaleidoscope, and improved Wheatstone's stereoscope by introducing the divided lenses. In 1815 he was elected a member of the Royal Society, and, later, was awarded the Rumford gold and silver medals for his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... country is that change is a quicker process there than elsewhere. As the revolution recedes into the past the process of change slackens speed. Russia is no longer the dizzying kaleidoscope that it was in 1917. No longer does it change visibly from week to week as it changed in 19l8. Already, to get a clear vision of the direction in which it is changing, it is necessary to visit it at intervals of six months, ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... letters of Cicero and Pliny, of ancient, and Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Madame de Svign, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, of modern times, are generally received as some of the best specimens extant of epistolary composition. The letters of Charles Lamb are a series of brilliances, though of kaleidoscope variety; they have wit without buffoonery, and seriousness without melancholy. He closes one of them by subscribing himself his friend's "afflicted, headachey, sorethroaty, humble ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... bell rang again and again. Every time it rang, a new impetus seemed to seize the dancer. Her feet in the heavy boots seemed scarcely to touch the ground; the green of the velveteen was like the colour of a kaleidoscope, and the gold of her curls glittered and sparkled under the cap. The crowd swayed with the rhythm; they grew drunk with it and their bodies quivered as they watched. The ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the surface in the whirlpool of my brain. No wonder!—events are but as gleanings compared to the harvest of many years, although so negligently gathered into store. I have been puzzling myself these last two hours to find out what a man's brain is like. It is like a kaleidoscope, thought I; it contains various ideas of peculiar colours, and as you shift them round and past, you have a new pattern every moment. But no, it was not like a kaleidoscope, for the patterns of a kaleidoscope are regular, and there is very little regularity ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... her charm and beauty against his voiceless secrecy. She was no longer a make-believe queen, but a royal ruler, beloved by her subjects, adored by her throne-mate. Then the glittering ball that followed!—the blazing lights, the splendid pantomime, the great shifting kaleidoscope of beauteous ladies and knightly men in gold and satin and coats of mail! And, above all, the maddening mystery of that king at her side whose glances were now melting with melancholy, now ablaze with eagerness, and whose whispered words, muffled behind his mask, were not those of a monarch, but ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales, and miscalled the Arabian Nights, is unique as a study of anthropology. It is a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos—of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) with the baldest prose (the Egyptian of to-day) and finally, its contrast of the highest and purest morality with the orgies of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... made even his well-seasoned head spin. The "chain lightning" of the bush was outclassed with the cinematograph whiskey of the city, that made its moving throngs and streets pass before his eyes like a kaleidoscope. A day or two in camp soon restored their balance. The training en route bore fruit; their commandant was so impressed that some of these regiments were equipped and officered, in a few weeks ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... at rest, for no sooner did he close his eyes than the "fever of futile protest" asserted itself in turbulent visions of paper, paint and plastering. Dados danced around in carnival dress; wall decorations went waltzing up and down, changing in shape, size and color like the figures in a kaleidoscope; Chinese pagodas on painted paper dissolved into brazen sconces, and candelabra sat where no light would ever shine; glazed plaques turned into Panama hats and cotton umbrellas, the classic figures in the frieze began to chase the peacocks furiously across the ceilings, the storks hopped ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... passed. The fever had reached a consistent high level, lending him a singular buoyancy of body and of spirit, but his reason was gone. He walked faster and faster, his vision keen under the dark canopy, his mind racing with disordered ideas, a kaleidoscope of long displaced memories. Often he stopped short, puzzled, vainly striving to stem the fugitive currents of conceits in his efforts to remember what purpose had brought him here. His head throbbed. He kept step with each pulsing ache—it seemed to ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... can never unite with words to express any notion at all, and the only form artistically admissible is absolute or instrumental music. The pleasure which it imparts is the same as that which we derive from a kaleidoscope, except in so far as it is ennobled by the fact of its emanating from a human mind instead of from a machine. The union of music with words is a morganatic marriage, in which the words must suffer violence. With this the author ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... Had she offered herself to me at that moment, I should have married her on the spot, and now there was shattered my boyish contempt for all that was weak and gentle, however beautiful. The ideas which composed my mind rattled and tumbled about like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, and in a flash they formed a softer and more harmonious design. The world was something more to me than a happy hunting-ground, life more than an exciting adventure. The world was the home of Gladys Todd; ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... in alliance with Prussia fought England and Austria. During the Seven Years War Prussia, allied to England, fought Austria allied to France. England, allied to France and Turkey, fought Russia in the Crimea. Turn the kaleidoscope of history and you see the English driven out of Normandy, Napoleon defiling Moscow, the Russians attacking Montmartre. Any schoolboy, can trace the changing partners in the grand alliances of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... any true constructive power, but with the mind adrift, blindly and passively following the laws of association, and with reason and will in torpor; the mental images being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in dreaming, reverie, somnambulism, and intoxication. Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in the adjective fantastic. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new, fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious anticipations were as boundless as they were various and conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hour passed, the insecurity of Alf's situation grew upon me, till I could think of nothing else. Philosopher-seer, I might say—as it has pleased heaven to fashion me, I confess I could arrive at no definite forecast of the order which the outlaw's affairs would assume at the next turn of the kaleidoscope. But I knew that it was in the nature of the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... lozenge) placed on the diadem, but obliquely placed as regards the curve of that diadem. Two or three other arrangements are striking, though not equally so, both from their regularity and from their repeating each other, as the forms in a kaleidoscope.] of stars: he is now a vision 'to dream of, not to tell:' he is ready for the worship of those that are tormented in sleep: and the stages of his solemn uncovering by astronomy, first by Sir W. Herschel, secondly, by his son, and finally by Lord Rosse, is like the reversing of some heavenly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... storm signals still showed in the south where the heavy clouds hung over the horizon. Overhead the sun shone, making kaleidoscope effects of the spring flowers in the checkered beds. Against the gray wall of the terraced garden the peach trees had been trained in foreign fashion and were ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey |
