"Luminosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... word for which we have no exact equivalent, the dominant note of the Italian sky, when the sun is well up, being its intense luminosity. ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... in which there seems to be an imperfect relation between Nature's effects and those of pigments, we will briefly refer to the great discrepancy occasioned by the luminosity of light. In all the lower effects of light, in the illumination of Nature and the revelation of colored surfaces, in the exquisite play and power of reflected light and color, and in the depth and richness ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... emphasizing them. Keeping in mind the fact that the Palace contains little American art earlier than 1905, American artists are showing marked individualities, even in their acceptance of popular precepts. The virile men of the day love luminosity; it dominates all else, and marks their canvases with light; they restrain the too bold stroke of the radical Impressionist, but outline with firmness, so that details are more easily imagined by the observer, even when ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... in the head of the centre light saw the nebuly coat shining among the darker painted glass with a luminosity which was even more striking in daylight than in the dusk ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... school when the master enters unexpectedly, and there near the open doors of his headquarters stood the master himself. Even without that sudden silence, and the scramble to their feet of those upon the benches, I felt that I should have known instantly that he was present. There was a pale luminosity about his ivory face which drew the eye towards it, and though his dress might be the plainest of a hundred, his appearance would be the first which one would notice. There he was, with his little plump, heavy-shouldered figure, his green coat with the red collar and cuffs, his white, well-formed ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... refracting telescope at Ferndene, Gateshead, and which he described as having a head like "a fan-shaped projection of light, with ear-like appendages, at each side, which sympathetically complemented each other at every change either of form or luminosity." ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... leaned to help him in to the boat. Gudrun again watched Gerald climb out of the water, but this time slowly, heavily, with the blind clambering motions of an amphibious beast, clumsy. Again the moon shone with faint luminosity on his white wet figure, on the stooping back and the rounded loins. But it looked defeated now, his body, it clambered and fell with slow clumsiness. He was breathing hoarsely too, like an animal that is suffering. He sat slack and motionless in the ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... He even assigned to each an approximate period of half a century. "I adhere to the conviction," he wrote later to Humboldt, "that Procyon and Sirius form real binary systems, consisting of a visible and an invisible star. There is no reason to suppose luminosity an essential quality of cosmical bodies. The visibility of countless stars is no argument against the invisibility of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... locomotives could be heard from the nearby station; toward Carabanchel the lantern lights were paling in the dark fields, which could be glimpsed by the vague luminosity of nascent day. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... are clear, whose eyes are kind, whose eyes are full of pity and of sweetness—O Thou Lovely One, with thy beautiful face, with thy beautiful eye—O Thou Pure One, whose luminosity is without spot, whose knowledge is without shado—O Thou forever shining like that Sun whose glory no power may repel—Thou Sun-like in the course of Thy mercy, pourest ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the hardness, flatness, and rigidity that are desirable you can get with the bristle brush. When you work too much with sables, the overworking brings a waxy and woodeny surface, which is against all the qualities of atmosphere and luminosity, and of freshness and freedom ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... mediocre. He introduced a discordant pathological note, but the music of Richard Strauss may save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines, amplifies, comments, and in nodules of luminosity, makes clear that which is dark, ennobles much that is vain, withal it never insists on leading; the composer appears to follow the poet.) Laforgue's Salome tries to sport with the head of John the Baptist, stumbles, loses her footing, and falls from the machicolated wall on jagged rocks below, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... luminous even when still contained in the mother's womb. If I happen by accident to crush a female big with germs that have reached maturity, a shiny streak runs along my fingers, as though I had broken some vessel filled with a phosphorescent fluid. The lens shows me that I am wrong. The luminosity comes from the cluster of eggs forced out of the ovary. Besides, as laying-time approaches, the phosphorescence of the eggs is already made manifest through this clumsy midwifery. A soft opalescent light shines through the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the same chemical materials as those with which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the dazzling brilliance of the noonday sun is due to the vapor of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint luminosity of the remotest cloudlike nebula is the glow of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... horizon of our northern middle latitudes, in summer, where the Milky Way breaks up into vast sheets of nebulous luminosity, lying over and between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius, there is a remarkable assemblage of "coal-sacks,'' though none is of great size. One of them, near a conspicuous star-cluster in Scorpio, M80, is interesting for having been the first of these strange objects noted by Herschel. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... hands and threw it into the air, it appeared like sparkles of fire, so long did it retain its brilliancy. The slightest movement in the water caused a flash of light. Jerry and I agreed that we had never seen anything more beautiful. The doctor told us that this phosphorescence or luminosity of the ocean is caused by a minute animal, scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, though sufficient to tinge the water of a brown or reddish colour. Other marine substances are, however, luminous. While we were waiting to step into the boat, the bay having ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... Pyrophorus, the large tropical firefly which has the seat of its luminosity on the upper surface of the thorax, nothing definite appears to be known; but it has been said that this instinct is altogether nocturnal. The Pyrophorus is only found in the sub-tropical portion of the Argentine country, and I have never met with it. With the widely-separated ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... symbol grew from a tiny point on the stage until it became a living pillar of luminosity that seemed to ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... his research papers. The ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice at ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Russian sons of Anak, Friedrich Wilhelm grudged not to send German smiths, millwrights, drill-sergeants, cannoneers, engineers; having plenty of them. By whom, as Peter well calculated, the inert opaque Russian mass might be kindled into luminosity and vitality; and drilled to know the Art of War, for one thing. Which followed accordingly. And it is observable, ever since, that the Russian Art of War has a tincture of GERMAN in it (solid German, as contradistinguished from unsolid Revolutionary-French); ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... the name heaven is applied to a body that participates in any property of the heavenly body, as sublimity and luminosity, actual or potential. Thus Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii) holds as one heaven all the space between the waters and the moon's orb, calling it the aerial. According to him, then, there are three heavens, the aerial, the starry, and one higher than both these, of which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... various chemical and some very intense physiological reactions. Its salts are luminous in the dark, but this luminosity, at first very bright, gradually diminishes as the salts get older. We have here to do with a secondary reaction correlative to the production of the emanation, after which radium undergoes the transformations which will be ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... diminished intensity of light; the shades of blue became darker, and, in extreme cases, almost black-blue. According to our observations, the obscurations of the sky by the interposition of clouds produced no other modifications of tints than those due to a diminution of luminosity. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... large, lambent, blue eyes. All these things rushed over the thrilled little secretary with an effect, as already described, of a certain bewilderment, that left no single, dominant impression. What remained with him, perhaps, most vividly, he says, was the quality of the big blue eyes, their luminosity, their far-seeing expression, their kindliness. They were the eyes of the true visionary, but in such a personality they proclaimed the mystic who had retained his health of soul and body. Mr. Skale was surely a visionary, but just as surely a wholesome man of action—probably ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower. Properly speaking, science ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... lines of these were broken, converging into strange criss-crosses of luminosity, as the beams fell in shapeless heaps. Dark fire, sweeping through the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor, a veritable hell for those below! A taste of the hell that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... though only recorded once in the seventeenth—as due to the accumulation of electricity on the surface of polar snows, and its discharge to the equator through the upper atmosphere. Erasmus Darwin suggested that the luminosity might be due to the ignition of hydrogen, which was supposed by many philosophers to form the upper atmosphere. Dalton, who first measured the height of the aurora, estimating it at about one hundred miles, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... aspect, had been excavated by modern archaeologists. 314 and 316, Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsis, and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her father, are typical imaginary classic compositions and variations on the artist's favourite theme—the effects of sunlight on an atmosphere of varying luminosity and on the limpid, rippling waves of the sea. We now come to the grand monarque of the arts at Paris during the century, Charles Lebrun (1619-1690), founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that finally eclipsed the old Painters' Guild ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... men speechless. When they were at last able to avert their eyes a fresh surprise awaited them; the reflection of the moon in the mirror was red—not an ordinary red—not merely a colour—but red with a lurid luminosity that vibrated with life—with a life that all three men at once recognized as emanating from nothing physical—from ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away corporeal grossness according to the doctrines of Lao Tzu. Later on, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had successfully passed through the ordeal of life, and who had left the slough ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... afternoon was waning and the light was low; the child's face, with its clear fairness, seemed to gleam out in the room like a lamp with a pale luminosity of ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... pure Brahman is devoid of any form or mode. The notion of d@rs'yatva (objectivity) carries with it also the notion of ja@datva (materiality) or its nature as non-consciousness (ajnanatva) and non-selfness (anatmatva) which consists in the want of self-luminosity of objects of consciousness. The relation of consciousness (jnana) to its objects cannot be regarded as real but as mere illusory impositions, for as we shall see later, it is not possible to determine the relation between knowledge and ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... it—plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a thing? ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... recall him in old age, pacing up and down my room, pondering out some serious problem of life), when half a century ago he came over to London for the first time on a visit from Paris, was struck by the contrast between the light luminosity of one city and the prevailing gloomy dirt of the other. The contrast may not be so pronounced to-day. Yet that same dirt—which has its beautiful side no doubt—remains the note of London, brown dirt all over the streets, black dirt all ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the falling, just before dawn of the 11th, of an extraordinarily brilliant meteor that flamed with a curious red and green light as it entered the earth's atmosphere. This meteor did not burn itself out, but fell, still retaining its luminosity, from a point near the zenith, to ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... compare with the beauty of Hili-li vegetation in October and November. I should imagine from what he says that the coloring of vegetation is in great part the merest tintage, the large admixture of white giving to it a startling luminosity, and permitting the fullest effect of those neutral tints which are capable of combinations at once so restful and so pleasing to the refined eye. In the vegetation of Florida there is luminosity; but chromatic depth, as in most tropical coloring, is the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... and we sped on. Now we were coming fast to the end of the passage. Before us was a high arch, and through it I glimpsed a dim, shifting luminosity as of mist filled with rainbows. We reached the portal and I looked into a chamber that might have been transported from that enchanted palace of the Jinn King that rises beyond the magic ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... so on, amounts to something like a million sterling for the set of horse-shoes, so the faint suggestion of dawn observable in our day cannot do otherwise than multiply itself into sunshine yet. Meantime, happy insect is he whose luminosity dispels a modicum of the general darkness, besides shedding light on his own path as he buzzes along in philosophic meditation, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in the nearer sky—moving blobs of silver luminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or more moving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescent look faded, became grey-white. Took definite shape. Waving arms and legs! Bones bereft of flesh. Human skeletons! Limbs ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me—a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world—a preoccupation ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... starch, it is possible to tell whether maltose or levulose and fructose are formed; if the former, only those plates containing P. phosphorescens will become luminous; if the latter, only those containing P. Pflugeri. The more recent researches of Molisch have shown that the luminosity of ordinary butcher's meat under appropriate conditions is quite a common occurrence. Thus of samples of meat bought in Prague and kept in a cool room for about two days, luminosity was present in 52% of the samples in the case of beef, 50% ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... good remained to form among themselves a heavenly society; but the evil were cast into the hells. Afterwards I saw that that flaming radiance descended to the lower parts of the earth there to a considerable depth, and then it appeared at one time in a flaming [lustre] verging to luminosity, at another time in a luminosity verging into obscurity, and at another in obscurity: and I was told by the angels that that appearance is according to the reception of truth from good, and of falsity from evil, with those who inhabit the lower parts ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... attempted to establish actual communication with her. Thus, a few days ago, a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they were to describe enormous geometric figures, drawn in characters of reflecting luminosity, among which was the proposition regarding the 'square of the hypothenuse,' commonly called the 'Ass's Bridge' by the French. 'Every intelligent being,' said the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... separates a rational process, resulting in manly resolve, from a weakly sentiment that finds occasional hysterical utterance. The Monroe Doctrine, as popularly apprehended and indorsed, is a rather nebulous generality, which has condensed about the Isthmus into a faint point of more defined luminosity. To those who will regard, it is the harbinger of the day, incompletely seen in the vision of the great discoverer, when the East and the West shall be brought into closer communion by the realization of the strait that baffled his eager search. But, with the strait, time has ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... yellow shades into green," which is certainly a change of hue, and then speaks of "a brighter shade" in spite of his evident intention to suggest a stronger chroma, which is neither a shade nor brighter luminosity. ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... on the sea-shore, where in calm, hot weather the luminosity looks like pale golden-green oil, so thick that you can ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... question might then have been asked—"Why do we not see it?"—we, especially, who occupy the mid region of the cluster—the very locality near which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun. The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did he manage to explain its failure to be rendered visible by the incalculable host of glorious suns glaring in all directions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... frustrated and desperate composure of the man who can only be of use while he is sitting still and keeping his head. The vision screen was now a blur of writhing mist, lighted by the sun and torn at by emptiness. There was luminosity where the ships had encountered each other. It was sunshine upon thin smoke. It was like the insanely enlarging head of a newborn comet, whose tail would be formed presently by light-pressure. The Plumie ship was almost invisible behind the ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... indeed she shone like a jewel, thanks to the lustre of her eyes in artificial light. Whether from humidity or some quality of their substance, I do not know, but they reflected the rays as I have rarely seen eyes do; and in their luminosity her whole face seemed to have part, so that her presence had an effect of warm brilliancy that lured and dazzled you. To see her emerge from the darkness of the Faringfield coach, or from her sedan-chair, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... here, Mr. Goil. You can see the debris floating down there." I pointed, and Goil looked at the little pin points of light reflecting from a great volume of dust, nebula-like in its dim luminosity. "When the crew starts actual operation, we will turn on the magnification screens and get some close-up ...
— Jack of No Trades • Charles Cottrell
... following rule: "There is a trianal series of graduations in the peculiar potencies of colors, the center and climax of electrical action, which cools the nerves, being in violet; the climax of electrical action, which is soothing to the vascular system, being in blue; the climax of luminosity being in yellow; and the climax of thermism or heat being in red. This is not an imaginary division of qualities, but a real one, the flamelike red color having a principle of warmth in itself; the blue and violet, a principle ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... night. There was a clearness in the still frosty air which gave to the starry host a vivid luminosity, and seemed to reveal an infinite variety of deep distances instead of the usual aspect of bright spots on a black surface. Besides the light they shed, the aurora was shooting up into the zenith with a brilliancy that almost equalled ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... prospect of the luminosity excited in a vacuum tube by the alternating currents from a dynamo or an induction coil becoming an illuminant. Crookes has obtained exquisitely beautiful glows by the phosphorescence of gems and other minerals in a vacuum bulb like that ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... the composition of the mixture, the calculated illuminating power is in every case equal to or actually greater than that of pure ethylene until a certain degree of dilution is attained. This intrinsic luminosity of ethylene remains almost constant when the latter is diluted with carbonic oxide, until the ethylene forms only 40 per cent. of the mixture, after which it rapidly diminishes to zero when the ethylene forms only 20 per cent. of the mixture. When the ethylene ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... the nebula, as seen in a moderately good telescope. The nebula is of a faint bluish colour, impossible to represent in a drawing. Its brightness is much greater in some places than in others; the central parts are, generally speaking, the most brilliant, and the luminosity gradually fades away as the edge of the nebula is approached. In fact, we can hardly say that the nebula has any definite boundary, for with each increase of telescopic power faint new branches can be seen. There seems to be an empty space in the nebula immediately surrounding ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... appearance of the zodiacal light; it can, therefore, be observed successfully in the temperate latitudes only by patient and long-continued watching. But in tropical regions, the deep azure of the sky, and the brief twilight, give it a distinctness and luminosity never witnessed elsewhere. In Egypt, we are told it is clearly 'visible every night, except when the light of the moon is too great, from January to June;' and in India its appearance is described as that of 'a pyramid of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the process of ventilation had been permitted to proceed for nearly a week, the air in the subterranean passages was found to be fresh enough to be breathed without much difficulty, and to allow of the torches burning in it with scarcely diminished luminosity, and the search for the treasure chamber was resumed. And now it was discovered that the labyrinth of passages and chambers extended far beyond the area covered by the superstructure, many of the chambers having ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Wasn't there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first suspected?—wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of sunlight falling ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess Durbeyfield's arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to the night ride in The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak, and the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the ridge towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale wherein she had of late been a stranger—which she would have to climb over to reach her birthplace. The ascent was gradual on this ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... there, a pale light began to blossom forth on the sky before them among the stars and extended a flat arc through them. It had a greenish tinge which gradually worked downward. But the arc became ever brighter until the stars paled in it. It sent a luminosity also into other regions of the heavens which shed greenish beams softly and actively among the stars. Then, sheaves of vari-colored light stood in burning radiance on the height of the arc like the spikes of a crown. Mildly it flowed through the neighboring regions of the heavens, it flashed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Indian D box, half-asleep, yet conscious. The moon came up into a pretty cloudless sky, and she was bright, but not bright enough to out-shine the enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic current. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... teeth, 'What man hath joined together man can pull asunder!'—and containing a kind of black mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brush appropriately called the 'dauber.' Having daubed, we polish, breathing our precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity. The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, as Keats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully, but not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishly ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... why the Nigran fleet was decreasing so rapidly—certainly they had not caused all that damage! Then suddenly they found the answer. One of their ships—then another—and another fell victim to a pale red ray that showed up like a ghostly pillar of luminosity coming from nowhere and going nowhere! The answer? The invaders' ships were becoming invisible! The invisibility detectors were being overloaded now, and the hunt was hard, while the Nigrans were slipping past them and silently destroying Solarian ships! The molecular motion rays were ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... phenomena associated with fungi that are of greater interest than those which relate to luminosity. The fact that fungi under some conditions are luminous has long been known, since schoolboys in our juvenile days were in the habit of secreting fragments of rotten wood penetrated by mycelium, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... the mountains, hills, and rocks, appear to the sight like holes and clefts in the rocks, some extended and wide, and some straitened and narrow, and many of them rugged. They all, when looked into, appear dark and dusky; but the infernal spirits that are in them are in such a luminosity as arises from burning coals. Their eyes are adapted to the reception of that light, and for the reason that while they lived in the world they were in thick darkness in respect to Divine truths, because of their denying them, and were in a sort ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... in the world, my dear man," Chad enquired in objection to this luminosity, "have I done to ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away all corporeal grossness by following the doctrines of Lao Tz[)u]. By and by, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had left the slough of humanity behind them. These transcendental notions were entirely corrupted at a very early date by the introduction of belief in an elixir of life, and later still ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... our hut, the elements without seemed desirous of celebrating the occasion with equal emphasis and greater decorum. The eastern sky was massed with swaying auroral light, the most vivid and beautiful display that I had ever seen—fold on fold the arches and curtains of vibrating luminosity rose and spread across the sky, to slowly fade and yet ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... cannot be found in Rubens, Sarto, Guido Reni, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raffael, Michelangelo, or Trajan's Column. For further information consult "The Discourses" of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., whose recipes are made palatable by a quality infrequent in his dishes, luminosity. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... feel the measure of truth with which objects in shadow are represented; we are insensibly more familiar with them in nature than with objects directly sun-illuminated, the value as well as the definition of which are far vaguer to us on account of their blending and infinite heightening by a luminosity absolutely overpowering. In a word, in sunlit landscapes objects in shadow are what customarily and unconsciously we see and note and know, and the illusion is greater if the relation between them and the objects in sunlight, whose value habitually ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... to the battle in my brain? Not so; far away I could see faint corruscations of sparks; star shells; coloured fire balls from pistols; searchlights playing up and down the coast. Our fellows were being hard beset to hold on to what they had won; there, where the horizon stood out with spectral luminosity. What a contrast; the direct fear, joy, and excitement of the fighting men out there in the searchlights and the dull anguish of waiting here in the darkness; imagining horrors; praying the Almighty our men ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... perhaps ofttimes, dwelt on the luminosity of the atmosphere in southern and south-western France. To-night not a breath was stirring, the outer radiance was the radiance of stars only, yet so limpid, so lustrous the air that cloudless moonlight could hardly have made every object seem clearer, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in one moment the interior consciousness becomes at-one-with-self, God, and from that inconceivable height of profound vision we again look upon Nature. Behold Sun, Moon and planets in all the original magnificence of their nebulous luminosity; from nebulous rings we proceed, stage after stage, each producing its own degrees of life. On, on we pass the ages, the geological cycles of inconceivable duration in time, but only a mere instant in eternity; and on and on, as the changes roll, until we see ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,—a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... owner to invite his friends to meet and watch the development of the flowers, and enjoy to the full their almost over-powering but delicious fragrance. So bright are the colours of the flowers, that a sort of luminosity seems to surround them when at their best. Flowers in autumn. ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... Colour and Its Production. Light, Colour, Dispersion of White Light Methods of Producing the Spectrum, Glass Prism and Diffraction Grating Spectroscopes, The Spectrum, Wave Motion of Light, Recomposition of White Light, Hue, Luminosity, Purity of Colours, The Polariscope, Phosphorescence, Fluorescence, Interference.—II., Cause of Colour in Coloured Bodies. Transmitted Colours, Absorption Spectra of Colouring Matters.—III., Colour Phenomena and Theories. Mixing Colours, White Light from Coloured ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... just the combination calculated to lead a spirited and brave people through such a trying crisis as the American Revolution. His star was not dark and bright by turns—did not reveal itself in uncertain and fitful glimmerings—but shone with a full and steady luminosity across the troubled night of a nation's beginning. Under these broad and beneficent rays the Ship of State was guided, through a sea of chaos, to safe anchorage. The voyage across those seven eventful years was one that tried men's souls. Often, appalling ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... fierce sky. It was not exactly dark, though in this part of the city, there was neither gas nor electricity, and surely on such a night as this, neither moon nor stars dared show their faces in such a grayness of sky; but a sort of all-diffused luminosity was in the air, as though the sea of atmosphere was charged with ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... example out of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical theory—the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that the world would grow more and more liberal ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
