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Vermilion   Listen
noun
Vermilion  n.  
1.
(Chem.) A bright red pigment consisting of mercuric sulphide, obtained either from the mineral cinnabar or artificially. It has a fine red color, and is much used in coloring sealing wax, in printing, etc. Note: The kermes insect has long been used for dyeing red or scarlet. It was formerly known as the worm dye, vermiculus, or vermiculum, and the cloth was called vermiculatia. Hence came the French vermeil for any red dye, and hence the modern name vermilion, although the substance it denotes is very different from the kermes, being a compound of mercury and sulphur.
2.
Hence, a red color like the pigment; a lively and brilliant red; as, cheeks of vermilion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vermilion" Quotes from Famous Books



... And he'll not stay his hand; The poor Jews are fair game In a great "Christian" Land; But the Lord of the Pencil Vermilion ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various

... seen him. But I found one of the duke's secretaries, a pleasant young fellow... not such as we used to be. But the duke was kind enough to interest himself. Perhaps my name has lived in the land. I was called Curricle Kemp, as I may have told you, because I drove a vermilion one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... large gilt frame screwed upon the street-door, in which were displayed, upon a black velvet ground, two portraits of naval dress, coats with faces looking out of them, and telescopes attached; one of a young gentleman in a very vermilion uniform flourishing a sabre; and one of a literary character with a high forehead, a pen and ink, six books, and a curtain. There was, moreover, a touching representation of a young lady reading a manuscript in an unfathomable forest, and a charming whole length ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... developed in sensitiveness. But even this superficial impression varies in quality. The eye is strongly attracted by light, clear colours, and still more strongly attracted by those colours which are warm as well as clear; vermilion has the charm of flame, which has always attracted human beings. Keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye in time as a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note the ear, and the gazer turns away to seek relief in blue ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... colouring, I had some of the water brought on shore, and, on examination with the microscope, it proved to be filled with infusoria, probably similar to those which have been noticed near the shores of South America, and whose abundance has imparted a name to the "Vermilion Sea" off the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... marked with vermilion spots all the many known active volcanos within the limits of this same map. Their entire absence from every one of the great subsiding areas, coloured either pale or dark blue, is most striking and not less so is the coincidence of the chief ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... important events of its history. At the session of the Legislature at Vandalia in the winter of 1830-31, a petition—borne to the State capital by Thomas Orendorff and James Latta—was duly presented, praying for the organization of a new county to be taken from Tazewell and Vermilion. The territory embraced in the proposed county included the present limits of McLean and large portions of neighboring counties organized at a later day. In accordance with the petition, a bill was passed, and its approval by the Governor on ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... turned aside Kate's veil of real Flanders point; and the two innocents, like silly sheep, were staring into each other's eyes without either apology or rebuke. It did seem as though Kate were not without knowledge of the courtly beau: a rich and glowing vermilion came across her neck and face, like the gorgeous blush of evening upon the cold bosom of a snow-cloud. But the youth eyed her with a cool and deliberate glance, stepping aside carelessly as he passed by. She seemed to writhe with some concealed anguish; ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... made this helmet with my own hands in the shape of a fish's head, covering it with the skin of a seal. To make it more terrible I have put on it the horns of a bull and I have given it a boar's jaws; I have hung from it a horse's tail dyed vermilion. When in the gloomy twilight I threw it over my shoulders no inhabitant of this island had courage to withstand its sight. Women and children, young men and old men fled distracted at its approach, and I carried terror among the whole race of ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... marched twenty miles, crossed the Vermilion River, went into camp on high ground on the north bank, and burned the ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... loveliness, which had before struck me, and which even lent force to those looks of dreadful menace that were fixed upon me. There were the high forehead—the proud lip, curled in scorn,—the brilliant teeth, glistening between the quivering vermilion,—and the swan-like arching of the dazzling neck; there also was the dark glory of the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... another weasel, coming from the same hole, ran up, and attempted awhile to sport with it, and then, after exhibiting every appearance of grief, suddenly ran off into the wood, and returned with a flower of a beautiful vermilion colour, which it carefully inserted into the mouth of the dead animal. The effect was sudden, the weasel instantaneously got upon its legs, and was preparing to escape; when the lady exclaimed to the page, to strike it again, and he aimed a second blow, that caused ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... and vermilion!" said Sir Patrick; "though I never thought of it before, I dare say she will suit me as well as another: but then you must persuade the ould Orpheus to draw out a few notes of rather a more magical description than those he is so fond of ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... were inseparable from her personality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the bold stony promontory and the incoming West Sea. The handsome marchioness in geranium-red and diamonds, who was visible to him on his host's right hand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sunsets that he had watched so many times over Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in the foreground. Between his eyes and the judge who sat next to Nichola, with a chin so raw that he must have shaved every quarter ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... had heard, had blazed a vermilion trail along the Great White Way, but his sister was of the opposite temperament, interested in social work, and had attracted much attention by organizing a settlement in the slums of Stratfield for the uplift of the workers in ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... out from his face at prodigious length; his hat is a bottle, his gloves are buckskin gauntlets, and his trousers are those of a circus-rider. The woman does not hide her face with a mask, for her face is her fortune, and she cannot afford to hide it: she is painted tastefully with vermilion and white; abundant false curls cluster at her neck, and are surmounted by a dainty little punchinello cap in pink silk and gilding; her dress is every color of the rainbow, and reaches to her knees; blue gaiters with pink rosettes are on her feet, and kid gloves are on her hands. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... unknown woman. Howbeit as halfe ashamed I drew towards her, and shee turned her selfe and sayd, Behold how he resembleth the very same grace as his mother Salvia doth, behold his countenance and stature, agreeing thereto in each poynt, behold his comely state, his fine slendernesse, his Vermilion colour, his haire yellow by nature, his gray and quicke eye, like to the Eagle, and his trim and comely gate, which do sufficiently prove him to be the naturall childe of Salvia. And moreover she sayd, O Lucius, I have nourished thee with myne owne ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius

... compound of vermilion and cinnabar, which marks the Imperial diplomas from Leo I. (A.D. 470) to the fall of the Greek empire, (Bibliotheque Raisonnee de la Diplomatique, tom. i. p. 504—515 Lami, de Eruditione Apostolorum, tom. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... hair instead of pearl t'adorn it Glistered with dew, as one that seemed to scorn it; Her breath as fragrant as the morning rose, Her mind pure, and her tongue untaught to gloze. Yet proud she was (for lofty pride that dwells In towered courts is oft in shepherds' cells.) And too too well the fair vermilion knew, And silver tincture of her cheeks, that drew The love of every swain. On her this god Enamoured was, and with his snaky rod Did charm her nimble feet, and made her stay, The while upon a hillock down he lay And sweetly on ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe

... account of these experiments is most instructive. It is quite charming to mentally follow the patient experimenter covering the edges of a single cell or the extreme margin of a growing comb with a thin layer of vermilion wax, and soon proving that many bees work in succession at a single cell by the rapid diffusion of the vermilion colouring as delicately as a painter could have done it, atoms of the coloured wax being removed and worked into the growing cells all round.[10] "It was really curious," ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... not beguile Jim's dampened spirits. He went aboard feeling that he'd like to rip the idiotic things down; but the yacht, at least, offered a place where he could think. The sunset light on the water blazed vermilion—just the color that Jim all at once discovered he hated. He looked down the companionway, but finally he decided to stretch out on deck for a few minutes' rest. He was ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... three by the clock when again they took up the trail. It was 3.45 when they swam what is now the Vermilion River, the last water-course of any size on their way. The dew was again beginning to gather when, well to the south, they approached the bordering hills that concealed the site of Sioux Falls settlement. Then for the first time since they began that last relay Landor ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... search of a bough. On the way she saw Satish, who had got possession of his aunt's vermilion, and was seated, daubing neck, nose, chin, and breast with the red powder. At this sight Kamal forgot the Boisnavi, the bough, Kunda ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

... in the calendar of old Japan was the seventh of July; or, as the Japanese people put it, "the seventh day of the seventh month." It was a vermilion day in the almanacs, to which every child looked forward with eyes sparkling, hands clapping, and fingers counting, as each night rolled the time nearer. All manner of fruits and other eatable vegetables were prepared, and cakes baked, in the household. The boys plucked ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis

... admitted into that famous body, which Saladin the Great had instituted, and known as Mamelukes. Their privileges were many. They were highly favoured by the sultan, wearing his emblazonments of pure gold, only adding bars of vermilion, with birds or roses or griffins for difference, and acting as his body-guard in time of war, and watching over his safety ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar

... dedicated to one of the seven planets and painted with the color attributed by religion to this planet. They were, beginning with the lowest: Saturn (black), Venus (white), Jupiter (purple), Mercury (blue), Mars (vermilion), the moon (silver), the sun (gold). The highest tower contained a chapel with a table of gold and magnificent couch whereon a priestess ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... Kate had more time for preparing it, at the rate of four or five scenes a day, drawn and painted—being the career of a very good little girl, whose parents were killed in a railway accident, (a most fearful picture was that—all blunders being filled up by spots of vermilion blood and orange-coloured flame!) and then came all the wonderful exertions by which she maintained her brothers and sisters, taught them, and kept ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge

... silently this subtle call. The curve of a Dryad's face, seen dimly in the green wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks, and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses in ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... tie round their little middles,' he said. And he did, and the bows stuck up on the tops of their backs. One of the guinea-pigs was never seen again, and the same with the tortoise when we had done his shell with vermilion paint. He crawled away and returned no more. Perhaps someone collected him and thought he was an expensive kind unknown in ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit

... used to watch and watch it! Some days it was purple, some days had more of the vermilion—I could take an affidavit that after a heavy night's supper it was more swollen, ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... aprons, of dusty men with stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, counting and checking and reporting to other men in narrow glass offices against the wall. Outside stood the great wagons laden with the white deal boxes bound with iron hoops and bearing in vermilion letters the inscription ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... to ... hurt Waldstricker," she replied, gripping the arms of her chair. Then she rose suddenly, throwing up her head. The intensity of her emotion fanned the dull coals of hate in her eyes to a hard brilliance and touched her white cheeks with vermilion. Vivid, active, her beautiful face, passion-drawn and cruel, red curls writhing and twisting upon her shoulders, Tess seemed a veritable fury crying for ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... headlong; and he speaks God's message boldly. From the poor idol-ridden labourer, offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar and painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man. The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him, that his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold for slaves. The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he told him in return, that he should be buried with the burial ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... proceeded to the head of Lake Michigan, ascended the Fox River, portaged to the Wisconsin, and on the 17th of June reached the Mississippi. They descended this broad and rapid stream as far as the mouth of the Arkansas. It now seemed clear that the great river emptied, not into the Vermilion Sea[11] as was currently conjectured, but into the Gulf of Mexico; and fearing to fall into the hands of the Spaniards, the explorers decided to retrace their steps. They reached Green Bay before the end of September, and here the Jesuit remained ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... rustic ruddied with vermilion clay First led, O Bacchus, thy swift choric throng, And won for record of thy festal day Some fold's chief goat, fit meed of ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... humpiness in the shoulders, and a pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... her—have seen the blood flowing from St. John's severed head, have seen the aureolas shining, the Virgin ever returning and gazing at her with her blue, living eyes, and looking as though she were on the point of opening her vermilion lips in order to speak to her. For some months Bernadette spent her evenings in this wise, half asleep in front of that sumptuous, vaguely defined altar, in the incipiency of a divine dream which she carried away with her, and finished in bed, slumbering peacefully under the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... well know what his speech signifies." This ended, the dark plain trembled so mightily, that the memory of the terror even now bathes me with sweat. The tearful land gave forth a wind that flashed a vermilion light which vanquished every sense of mine, and I fell as ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... the boxes of a puzzle, the Tartar City enclosing the Imperial City, and that in turn the Forbidden City. If you stand under the many-storied tower that surmounts the Chien-Men, you look straight along the road that leads through the vermilion walls, right into the Purple City, the heart of Peking. In Marco Polo's time the middle door of the great portal was never opened save to admit the emperor, and that was still true a few months ago, but last winter a day came when the bars rolled back, ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... shall never afford With a gay vermilion bonnet, Of course I might happen to marry a lord, But it's no good counting on it. I have never reclined on the seat behind, And hurtled across the map, But my days are blest with a mind at rest, For I ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... palest to the deepest Red or Scarlet, which has no intermixture of Blue, are pale and deep Masticut, Orpament, English Oker, brown Oker, Red Lead, and Vermilion, burnt English Oker, and burnt brown Oker, which last have a mixture of dark or dirty ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by vermilion or by gold. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots—a huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel. ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson

... her mouth to the middle of each cheek were two parallel lines, and below these several upright stripes; on various parts of her back and shoulders were curiously entwined circles, and the form of a snake was depicted in vermilion down each arm. Unlike the others, she wore no ornament except a simple necklace of monkeys' teeth. This beauty was particularly active in manufacturing the intoxicating drink, ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne

... draws back terrified lest some atom of their molten substance should spatter over the edge of the precipice. Sometimes the whole lake is in motion. Waves of fire toss and battle with each other and dash in clouds of bright vermilion spray against the black sides of the pit. Sometimes one of these sides falls in with a roar that echoes back and forth, and mighty rocks are swallowed in the liquid mass of fire that closes over them in a whirlpool, like water over ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... water stood ready under the nickelled faucets. Soaps of many colours lay at hand. Nail-scrubbers, manicuring tools, towels, sponges, creams, talcum powders, dentifrices, hair-lotions, blue bottles (with vermilion labels marked poison), green bottles marked ammonia, bottles with bulbs and sprays, cases of razors, festoons of strops—all these stood or lay on shelves at my elbow as I proceeded to wash my hands and face with a piece of yellow primrose soap ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... uses see Reduction of Ag and Au, pages 165 and 170; amalgams, page 137; laboratory work, page 68. It is also employed for thermometers and barometers, and as the source of the red pigment vermilion, which is artificial HgS. ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams

... not think it can be doubted that it is pleasing to Him when we do this; for He has Himself prepared for us, nearly every morning and evening, windows painted with Divine art, in blue and gold and vermilion: windows lighted from within by the lustre of that heaven which we may assume, at least with more certainty than any consecrated ground, to be one of His dwelling-places. Again, in every mountain side, and cliff of rude sea shore, He has heaped stones one upon another of greater magnitude ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... to Coronado, and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma. They were in a hall about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which evidently ran across the whole front of the building. The walls were hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals, geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design and disposed without regard to order. A doorway led into a small central room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, one ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... some former scrimmage. Reaching to the edge of each ear was a collar as stiff as pasteboard. His derby was tilted over his left eyebrow, shading a face brimming over with fun and expectancy. Below this was a vermilion-colored necktie and a black coat and trousers. His shoes sported three coats of blacking, which only partly concealed ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith

... him mingled together, which being colde, is congealed into that substance which the Apothecaries call Sanguis Draconis, (that is) Dragons blood, otherwise called Cinnabaris, although there be an other kinde of Cinnabaris, commonly called Cinoper or Vermilion, which the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... uses, Where you may cease pretence and be yourself. . . . And this embroidery, hanging on this wall, Hung there forever,—these so soundless glidings Of dragons golden-scaled, sheer birds of azure, Coilings of leaves in pale vermilion, griffins Drawing their rainbow wings through involutions Of mauve chrysanthemums and lotus flowers,— This goblin wood where someone cries enchantment,— This says, just such an involuted beauty Of thought and coiling thought, dream linked with dream, Image to image gliding, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken

... the ecstatic pealing of the bells overhead, the great roar of welcome roll out over the wide space, reverberate back from Westminster Hall and the Government Buildings opposite, and die down into heart-shaking silence again, as the vermilion flash was seen at the Abbey doors. The great space was filled in every foot with a crowd that was of one heart and soul in its welcome of this formal act ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... "Elephant's Breath." This gradually merges into a very pale, warm gray, the line of demarcation between it and the very dark brown, which constitutes the general color of the body, being very abrupt. The bill is of a vermilion red, and surmounted by a bright orange-colored crest, with a black border as positively marked as if of black tape. At this season we usually see the drakes flying together, and the ducks in separate ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... red, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, crimson, pink, lake, maroon, carnation, couleur de rose[Fr], rose du Barry[obs3]; magenta, damask, purple; flesh color, flesh tint; color; fresh color, high color; warmth; gules[Heraldry]. ruby, carbuncle; rose; rust, iron mold. [Dyes ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... we had heard characterized as degenerate and debased. They were clad in leggins and moccasins of buckskin, and wore blankets, which were thrown around them in the manner of the Roman toga, so as to leave their right arms bare. The youngest among them were painted on their necks, with a bright vermilion color, and had their faces transversely streaked, with alternate red and black stripes. From their faces and eyebrows, they pluck out the hair with the most assiduous care. They also shave or pull it out from their heads, with the exception of a tuft about three fingers width, extending from ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake

... magic should not be wanting, and magic of the most instructive kind. As soon as the season of fertility approaches he begins his rites with the avowed object of making and multiplying the plants, and chiefly the animals, by which he lives; he paints the figure of the emu on the sand with vermilion drawn from his own blood; he puts on emu feathers and gazes about him vacantly in stupid fashion like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like the chrysalis of a Witchetty grub—his favourite food, and ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... the rose to deep vermilion hue Adds that sweet odour gracious Nature gives, When his proud glory gladdens every view, And no base worm within his beauties lives, We nothing question of what sex it be, Nor ask more of it than that it should lend His lovely gaze for ravish'd eye to see, And on the ...
— Sonnets of Shakespeare's Ghost • Gregory Thornton

... long way up to the Mandans!" sang John at the second camp above the Council Bluffs. "Wonder if we ever will get there before winter! Here we are, just below the Vermilion, over nine hundred and fifty miles up the river, and over three weeks out, but we're only halfway to the Yellowstone, and still a good deal more than six hundred miles below the Mandan Villages, though I've counted fifty-three towns and cities we've passed in the river, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough

... stole into his own tepee by night—told his father of his triumph—got a quantity of vermilion and returned to the hills. When he and Red Arrow had bedaubed themselves and their ponies most liberally, they wrapped the scalp to a lance which he had brought out, then moved slowly forward in the morning light on their jaded ponies to the village, yelling the long, high notes of the ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington

... man smiled, whether in resignation or contempt, it was difficult to tell. "Look," said he, "I have in that Japanese vase two roses gathered yesterday evening in the bud from the governor's garden; this morning they have blown and spread their vermilion chalice beneath my gaze; with every opening petal they unfold the treasures of their perfumes, filling my chamber with a fragrance that embalms it. Look now on these two roses; even among roses these are beautiful, and the rose is the most beautiful of flowers. Why, then, do you bid me desire ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... variety of any kind, and to have matched and paired from it" (8/52. Mr. Blyth in the 'Indian Field' 1858 page 255.), it might have been predicted that selection would have been largely practised in the formation of new breeds; and this is the case. In an old Chinese work it is said that fish with vermilion scales were first raised in confinement during the Sung dynasty (which commenced A.D. 960), "and now they are cultivated in families everywhere for the sake of ornament." In another and more ancient work, it is said that "there is not a household where the gold-fish is not cultivated, in RIVALRY ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... attention to two gentlemen dressed in black, and mounted each in a peculiar and characteristic manner. One of them is a large, bloated, but rather handsome, and decidedly aristocratic looking man, with a vermilion face, mounted upon a splendid charger, whose blood and action must have been trained to that kind of subdued but elegant bearing that would seem to indicate, upon the part of the animal, a consciousness that he too owed a duty to the Church and Constitution, and had a just right ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... there, which he had learnt to grind and prepare, the crushed lapis lazuli first calcined by heat according to the modern degenerate practice, with the cheap German blue beside it, and the indigo beyond; the prasinum; the vermilion and red lead ready mixed, and the rubrica beside it; the yellow orpiment, and, most important of all, the white pigments, powdered chalk and egg shells, lying by the biacca. In a separate compartment covered carefully from chance ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... of an hour Hallward stopped painting, looked for a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and frowning. "It is quite finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... remained enough to enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things. The fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am, placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the downy fruit. It looked like something in the "Arabian Nights;" heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes, in the greatest profusion. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... tones of nature and the feelings of man; and therefore, in many instances, they coloured not only the marble buildings exposed to view outside, but even the marble statues carefully secluded in the niches within. The Parthenon was thus tinted with vermilion, blue, and gold, which seems to us, who now see only the golden hue with which the suns of ages have dyed its pure Pentelic marble, a barbarous superfluity, but which, to the people of the time, was necessary on account of the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... anything else. They thought of him in the court of his great dust-colored mansion at Ocana, where the broad eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with arabesques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at a table under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral that was building in those days, full of a smell of scaffolding and stone dust, there must have stood a tremendous catafalque ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... difficulty in keeping my seat until I got to Raleigh. Here I dismounted and sat in the corner groceries for an hour or more, talking to acquaintances. Finally, like the dog returning to his vomit, I crossed the street and went into a saloon. Had the door opened into the vermilion lake of fire I would have passed through it if I had been sure of getting a drink, so sudden and uncontrollable was the appetite awakened. Only a few minutes before I had with religious solemnity assured two ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... tree-top. On every side, high or low, the deep-green gloom was splashed with color from the gorgeous orchids and other epiphytes, which flowered out into grotesque or monstrous wing-petaled shapes of vermilion and purple and orange and rose and white, eyed with velvet black ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... roseate oval two flame-tipped shadows appeared, stood for a moment, and then seemed to float out upon its surface. The shadows wavered; the tips of flame that nimbused them with flickering points of vermilion pulsed outward, drew back, darted forth again, and once more withdrew themselves—and as they did so the shadows thickened—and suddenly there before us ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... and rump are a shining, changing green; its tail not quite so bright; a black bar runs across the tail towards the extremity, and the outside feathers are partly white, as in the boclora; its belly is entirely vermilion, a bar of white separating it from the green on ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... crossbarred with black and red; his legs were painted in zebra stripes of yellow and black; the patches of white that were native to his coat were outlined with black and profusely decorated with red hands and horseshoes painted in vermilion; on his neck was a band of beadwork, carrying a little bundle of sacred medicine; and, last, he had on each ankle a string of sleigh-bells that jingled at each prancing step. A very goblin of a horse! His jockey was, as before, Chaska, the Indian boy, stripped to the breechclout, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... cattees of vermilion are worth from three to six hundred. Paint for women's faces, the hundred cattees are worth twenty-eight. Cooper in plates, 125 Flemish pounds are worth from 90 to 100. Lead in small bars, the 100 cattees from 60 to 88. Lead in sheets is in greater request, the thinner the better, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... to the calling voice of flutes, Glides my heart into thy fingers, O my Love! Where the night-wind, like a lover, leans above His jasmine-gardens and sirisha-bowers; And on ripe boughs of many-coloured fruits Bright parrots cluster like vermilion flowers. ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... Romans. Some of them wore large silver crosses, medals, and other trinkets, on their backs and breasts; and a few had bandeaus, ornamented with feathers. Dr. Aaron, a grey-headed Mohawk, had touched his cheeks and forehead with a few spots of vermilion, in honour of Sunday: he wore a surplice, and preached at considerable length; but his delivery was ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... the Sulpicians a grant of land near Montreal, named by him Saint-Sulpice, but ultimately known under the name of Lachine. In 1669 Courcelle gave him letters patent for an exploring journey towards the Ohio and the Meschacebe, or Mississippi. By way of these rivers he hoped to reach the Vermilion Sea, or Gulf of California, and thus open a new road to China via the Pacific ocean. At the same time the Abbes Dollier and de Galinee, Sulpicians, had prepared for a remote mission to the Outaouais. It was thought advisable to combine the two expeditions. Thus it happened that La Salle ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais

... may be new, that it may be christened 'diabolicus.' Milton must allude to this very individual when he talks of 'squat like a toad'; its colours are by Werner ("Nomenclature of Colours", 1821) ink black, vermilion red and buff orange." ("More Letters", I. page 12.) In the "Journal of Researches" (1876, page 97.) its colours are described as follows: "If we imagine, first, that it had been steeped in the blackest ink, and then, when dry, allowed to crawl over ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... failing! Up he vaulteth, Fresh as when he first began; All in coat of bright vermilion, 'Quipped as Shaw, the Lifeguardsman; Right and left his whizzing broadsword, Like a sturdy flail, he throws; Cutting out a path unto thee ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... painted The Islands vermilion, We've pearled on half-shares in the Bay, We've shouted on seven-ounce nuggets, We've starved on a Seedeeboy's pay; We've laughed at the world as we found it — Its women and cities and men — From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum To the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... Histoires, and I am not sure that the volume I have seen contains the whole of it. L'Empire de l'Inconstance (Paris, 1635), by the Sieur de Ville, and published "at the entry of the little gallery of Prisoners under the sign of the Vermilion Roses," has a most admirable title to start with, and a table of over thirty Histoires, a dozen letters, and two "amorous judgments" at the end. Les Fortunes Diverses de Chrysomire et de Kalinde (Paris, 1635), by a certain Humbert, blazons "love and war" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... before them in a black turban and a voluminous black cloak. Her flat, vermilion lips were parted in a social smile; but her Tartar eyes remained inscrutable. Her face, wedge-shaped, dead white, with its look of being made from some material more rigid than flesh, was as startling as the countenance of an Oriental image, in its frame of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... Pharthia proud in Romaine spoile, 1431 Shall pay her ransome vnto Caesars Ghost: Which vnreuenged roues by the Stygian strond, Exclaming on our sluggish negligence. Leaue to lament braue Romans, loe I come, Like to the God of battell, mad with rage, To die their riuers with vermilion red: Ile fill Armenians playnes and Medians hils, With carkases of bastard Scithian broode, And there proud Princes will I bring to Rome, 1440 Chained in fetters to my charriot wheeles: Desire of ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous

... with us in comes an old fakeer of a specially villainous type. His body is plastered all over with mud; he has nothing on but mud. His hair is matted and powdered with ashes, his face is daubed with vermilion and yellow, his wicked old eyes squint viciously, and he shows all his teeth, crimson with betel, and snarls his various wants. The women say "Chee!" Then he rolls in the dust, and squirms, and wriggles, and howls; ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... On the judgment hall being turned into a church, the Umbrella remained, and in fact occupied the place of the canopy over thrones and the like in our own country. Beatiano, an Italian herald, says that "a vermilion Umbrella in ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster

... the nutmeg plantations had already brought out their mace to dry, and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... down into a carved bottomland, several miles wide, filled with minarets, peaks, vermilion towers, and strange striped labyrinths of many colours above which the sky showed an unbelievable blue. The trunks of colossal trees lay about in numbers. Apparently they had all been cross-cut in sections ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... downtown park. The great bulk of the Captain, which starvation seemed to increase—drawing irony instead of pity to his petitions for aid—was heaped against the arm of the bench in a shapeless mass. His red face, spotted by tufts of vermilion, week-old whiskers and topped by a sagging white straw hat, looked, in the gloom, like one of those structures that you may observe in a dark Third avenue window, challenging your imagination to say whether it be something recent in the way of ladies' hats or a strawberry shortcake. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... number of men hurrying along the passage of blue pillars behind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen beard, a tall man in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red carrying staves, and all these people had anxious ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... new to him. He was vaguely troubled by its splendour. No tender memories stirred his American bosom at the Place du Chatelet, nor even by Notre Dame. The Palais de Justice with its clock and turrets and stalking sentinels in blue and vermilion, the Place St. Michel with its jumble of omnibuses and ugly water-spitting griffins, the hill of the Boulevard St. Michel, the tooting trams, the policemen dawdling two by two, and the table-lined terraces of the Cafe Vacehett were nothing to him, as yet, nor did ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... whose women veil only their mouths; and the green-turbaned Derkaouas, merciless fanatics, who turn their heads and spit upon the ground at the sight of a Christian. Every day the "Holy woman," with wild eyes and vermilion-painted cheeks, is to be seen prophesying in some public place. And the "Holy man," too, who is incessantly walking like the wandering Jew, always in a hurry and all the while ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... curiously for some time, telegraphed across the table to Miss Linda, and nodded and winked, and pointed to her own neck, on which was a smart necklace of the lightest blue glass beads finishing in a neat tassel. Linda had a similar ornament of a vermilion colour, whereas Caroline wore a handsome new collar and a brooch, which looked all the smarter for the shabby frock over which they were placed. As soon as she saw her sister's signals the poor little thing blushed deeply again; down ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... read, how the sermons had impressed themselves upon his heart as he listened, and yet here he was, himself, in hell! He turned over the pages again quickly unable to get away from the picture that grew in his mind, the vermilion towers and minarets, the crags and peaks, the "little brook, whose crimson'd wave, yet lifts my hair with horror," he could see it all as if he had lived there many years. Strange he had not thought before of the likeness of his life to this. He ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... blossoms and all manner sweet-scented blooms and herbs. Every tree was girt about with fruits and there coursed down water from four daises, which faced one another and occupied the four corners of the garden. He looked at the first Liwn and found written around it with vermilion these two couplets, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... with two or even three coats of red lead, and give each time to dry hard. Then melt in an iron pot a mixture of two parts beeswax, two parts tallow, and one part pine resin; mix thoroughly, and apply hot one or two coats. This mixture may be tinted with vermilion or chrome green. It is not necessary to use any poisonous substance, as it is only by its softness and gradual wear that it is kept clean. Second, mix red lead and granular metallic zinc, ground fine, or such a mineral as we have mentioned—crystalline ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... Wegler: Dilute egg albumen with an equal weight of water, rapidly stir with a glass rod until it foams, and then filter through linen. Mix the filtrate with a sufficient quantity of finely levigated vermilion until a rather thick liquid is obtained. Write with a quill, or gold pen, and then touch the reverse side of the fabric with a hot iron, coagulating the albumen. It is claimed that marks so made are affected by neither soaps, acids nor alkalies. This ink, or rather paint, is said to keep ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... but a limited number of colours in his possession, and he used them in all their purity without ever modifying the tones. From this it follows that his colouring has more vivacity than harmony. The cheeks of the Virgin and those of the Child are of a bright vermilion which the old master, from a naive preference for clear definitions, has placed on each face in two circumferences as exact as if they had been traced out by a pair ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole tubes of burnt sienna and vermilion; when you tread on gorgeous paths heavy with golden leaves? Oh, why are we not as lovely in our autumn of life as nature is in hers? Why, when she decks herself in the gayest coloring, do we don our soberest garb? We do not gain in splendor as we grow older. We lose our beauties ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren

... and of hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months' fasting or prayer. Whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven at the day of judgment; his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion, and odoriferous as musk; and the loss of his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim." Gibbon, vol. ix. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... warm fur coat, and started toward the barn to harness Jack into the worn, old-fashioned sleigh, which sleigh was built high in the back, and had a curved dasher of monstrous proportions, ornamented with a prancing horse in an impossible attitude, done in bright vermilion ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... genii. The ziggurat rose to a height of some 141 feet above the esplanade. It had seven storeys dedicated to the gods of the seven planets, each storey being painted in the special colour of its god—the first white, the second black, the third purple, the fourth blue, the fifth a vermilion red; the sixth was coated with silver, and the seventh gilded. There was no chamber in the centre of the tower, but a small gilded chapel probably stood at its base, which was used for the worship of Assuf or of Ishtar. The harem, or Bit-riduti, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... childhood that rich aroma of musk which his mother-in-law (for she may be called so) exhaled. As the sky grows redder and redder towards sunset, so, in the decline of her years, the cheeks of my Lady Dowager blushed more deeply. Her face was illuminated with vermilion, which appeared the brighter from the white paint employed to set it off. She wore the ringlets which had been in fashion in King Charles's time; whereas the ladies of King William's had head-dresses like the towers ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... I left the town, my oil colors were about used up. I had made nearly a hundred sketches, and not caring to send to Rome for more paints, I used my time making pencil sketches. Among the tubes of oil colors left, of course there was the vermilion, that will outlast for a landscape painter all others, I managed to paint a jackass's head for the landlord of the inn where I boarded, with my refuse colors:—after all were gone, there still remained the vermilion. ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... a hearty laugh and, stripping off their upper garments, to the immense admiration of the natives. They themselves applied paint in rings, zigzags, and other forms to their white shirts; painted a large saucer-like circle round the eyes with vermilion, so as to give themselves something the appearance of the great idols; and having thus transmogrified themselves, each gravely took his place upon his perch; where, leaning back against the prow behind them, they were by ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty

... through the dancing spray, and chasing the white-crusted waves with serpents of gold. The face was clouded with thought, a shade too sombre, yet there glowed over it something like a reflection from the iris-hues beneath. A voice of using was borne away into the purple and vermilion haze that twilight began to fold over the bosom of ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous

... sisters, Aholah and Aholibah, who had been in Egypt and had adopted unmoral ways of life Ezekiel tells that when Aholibah "doted upon the Assyrians" she "saw men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with vermilion, girded with girdles upon their loins".[387] Traces of the red colour on the walls of Assyrian temples and palaces have been observed by excavators. The winged gods "like burning coals" were ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... the candle-light And shadows on the wall; and there was silence, Or sound but far and weak. By the bedside your daytime toys were gathered: The bright bell-ringing wheel, Dolls clad in violent yellow and vermilion, Strings of gay-coloured beads.... But you were far and far from these beside you, Entranced with other joys In fresh fields, among other children running: Your voice, I knew, must peal Purely among their high unearthly ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman

... would not think me very ill-natured if you knew all I feel at the cruelty and villany of European settlers: but this very morning I found that part of the purchase of Maryland from the savage proprietors (for we do not massacre, we are such good Christians as only to cheat) was a quantity of vermilion and a parcel of Jews-harps! Indeed, if I pleased, I might have another study; it is my fault if I am not a commentator and a corrector of the press. The Marquis de St. Simon, whom I mentioned to you, at a very first visit proposed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... he stands With empty hands; Upon it perfumed offerings burn Wreathing with smoke the sacrificial urn. Not one of all these has he given, No flame of his has leapt to Heaven Firesouled, vermilion-hearted, Forked, and darted, Consuming what a few spare pence Have cheaply bought, to fling from hence ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... spirit. If of thee Charon complain, Now mayst thou know the import of his words." This said, the gloomy region trembling shook So terribly, that yet with clammy dews Fear chills my brow. The sad earth gave a blast, That, lightening, shot forth a vermilion flame, Which all my senses conquer'd quite, and I Down dropp'd, as ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... his glory, throwing a rosy blush, as it touched one peak and then another along the Catskill mountains, which he could see clothed in all their autumnal glory above the intervening hills. Long lines of clouds lay along the highest peaks of these mountains, painted with all the hues of vermilion and gold, but soon faded to a leaden hue, as they began ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes

... regret for one baby's smile. Man's dogma has proved vain as his philosophy. Age after age has composed some vision of continued life, and sought to allay its fear or sorrow with suitable imaginations. Mummies of death outlive their granite; vermilion and the scalping-knife lie ready for the happy hunting grounds; beside the royal carcass two score of concubines and warriors are buried quick; Walhalla rings with clashing swords whose wounds close up again at sunset; heroes tread the fields of shadowy asphodel, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson



Words linked to "Vermilion" :   cinnabar, Chinese-red, orange red, redden



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