"Luminous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seen a large body of water, had striven to picture the majesty of a wave, and now I stood with poetry rolling about me—now a deep-blue elegy, now a limpid lyric, varying in hue with the shifting of a luminous fleece-work, far above. To have been born and brought up amid great scenes were surely a privilege, but to come upon them for the first time when the mind is ripe, when the senses are yearning for a new impression, is ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... white and transparent, seemed this night to have a certain luminous quality. Her cheeks were flushed, her gray eyes shone mistily under the black lashes and blacker brows, and the scarlet outline of her lips was marked as in a drawing. She wore a gown of palest rose, covered with yellow cob-webby lace, which was her grandmother's, the satin of the ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... step of a master: his current of thought running deep, strong, and clear, and carrying us through page after page full of nice and subtile discrimination, without over-refinement, and of illustrations apt and luminous, yet without a touch of false brilliancy or mere smartness; which is saying a good deal, in these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... active intellects of the country had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and there, waiting to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Saxham against his will. He resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... scarcely possible to give an adequate description of the magnificence, solemnity, and desolate repose of the awful solitudes through which they passed on this evening. They were, however, at times enlightened by the appearance of glow worms, which were so luminous that they could almost see to read by their golden splendour, and sometimes by the moonbeams, which trembled upon the leaves and branches of the trees. A fragrance also was exhaled from the forest, more odiferous than the perfume of violets ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... its author, that quality of symmetry, that symmetria prisca recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air.... Everyone who knows Browning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... has discovered stars hitherto unknown and inaccessible to all our means of mensuration; it has penetrated distances so great, that luminous and necessarily immense bodies present themselves to us only like ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... stunned ears, and the eyes that he feared were fixed upon him. He gasped for words, he felt like a drunkard who clutches the air as he reels over a precipice, and the shades of his ancestors seemed to crowd menacingly around him. He strove against his fears until a thin face with luminous eyes shone through the drifting wrack like ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... "that when any luminous rays cross a medium such as the air, they are deflected out of the straight line; in other words, they undergo refraction. Well! When stars are occulted by the moon, their rays, on grazing the edge of her disc, exhibit not the least deviation, nor offer the slightest ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs floating lazily in a luminous mist, the only visible manifestation of life being a delicate but rhythmical deepening of the central hue. The wash of my wading seems not to affect them. I become conscious of the sudden appearance and swift disappearance of lesser spheres of startling brilliance. They emerge from nothingness, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... a gate, and an interior was suddenly revealed to him. Near the window of a room sat a young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall, a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture, framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to him. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... is something indescribably beautiful in the firwood. The sun dives among the trees, and paints their boles with patches of luminous saffron, or falling over a level clearing, glorifies it with its orange dye, so visibly contrasting with the blue-purple shadow on the western rim of unreclaimed forest, deep and luscious as the bloom on a plum. The birds then are hastening ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... this Indian's hut, where instead of lamp, candle, or torch, three or four of these luminous insects make all the dwelling bright. See the Indian hunter preparing for a journey, or a raid upon the forest beasts, by fastening to his hands and feet the little lantern-flies that shall make the pathway ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... which therefore receded with instinctive recoil, They were averse to look toward that which they could not see without seeing God; and thus they were hardened in ignorance, through a reaction of human depravity against the too luminous approach of the Divine ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... thy splendour, fair luminous bow? From light's golden chalice thy radiance must flow; Thou look'st from the throne of thy beauty above On this desolate earth, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the ferryman out of his hut, to look upon the beautiful moonlight scene. It was cold, but pure, and brilliantly light. The chaste moon was sailing through the heavens, and the stars diminished in their lustre by the power of the luminous ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, "you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world—I am staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you—and I don't love you a bit: that's my side of the case. Now yours: you are a farmer just beginning; and you ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the speaker, fixing his luminous eyes upon the manager. "However, we shall probably see ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the light of the electric candle-lamps on the table, which, sending their shaded light upwards reflected from the white cloth, made her face luminous in the shadow of her cloudy hair, he was struck again by a baffling resemblance to someone he had known. Now and again during the months since they had known each other her face had seemed familiar; then the likeness had disappeared; he had forgotten to ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... buoyant humor of a lover treading a newborn world. A smile was in his eyes, tender, luminous, cheerful. He thought of the woman whom he had not seen for many months, and he was buoyed up by the fine spiritual edge which does not know defeat. Win or lose, it was clear ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... good Venetian gold; and who, in innocence or wile, had one day given him sight of the girl's fair face with its tender flush like a flower in spring, painted with rare skill by the greatest artist of Venice. The breeze might have toyed with that mist of golden hair, and the great dark eyes—softly luminous—had the expectancy of a gazelle awaiting the joy of the daydawn. She was daughter to one of the most ancient and noble of the patrician houses, in direct descent, so the Cornari claimed, of the Cornelii ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. Addison never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... contained the snakes into the big exhibition cage, and, when the three men joined them, the weirdness of the surroundings made a profound impression upon the Stranger. All of the lights in the Arena were extinguished, with the exception of the small cluster directly over their heads, and pairs of luminous spots from the great semicircle of cages at the outer edge of the building reminded him that the human beings in the cage were not the only interested ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... rounded ankles and raven hair That floats at will on the wanton wind, And the round brown arms to the breezes bare, And breasts like the mounds where the waters meet, [4] And feet as fleet as the red deer's feet, And faces that glow like the full, round moon When she laughs in the luminous skies ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... in me, Mr. Speaker, after the able, luminous, learned, and eloquent speech you have just heard, to attempt to throw any new ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... gown fell from sloping, well powdered shoulders and its filminess softened wonderfully the lines which were beginning to harden her face. She had dressed with the eagerness of a debutante, and her eyes were luminous, her cheeks delicately flushed with the excitement of it and with happiness at the ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... the luminous pathway made by her high-powered headlights. If only she could reach a piece of road that combined two things—an embankment of some sort, and a curve just sharp enough to throw those headlights behind off at a tangent for ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... come at once," said Miss Weesa's mistress in so clear and even a tone that Evilena, who was startled at the news, was oppressed by a sudden fear that all the warmth in the nature of her fascinating Marquise was centered in the luminous golden ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... would seem to be something strange and mysterious about his death, as there was in his life. His head was massive, and his face handsome without being attractive. [Footnote: This, however, was near the close of his life.] The brow was finely chiseled, and the eyes beneath it were dark, luminous and fathomless. I never saw him smile, except ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... thoughts range over the literature of Elizabeth and James's times, and of the time of Charles II.; over a large portion of modern literature; over the distinguishing character of men, their peculiarities of mind and manners; over the wonders of poetry, the subtleties of metaphysics, and the luminous regions of art. In painting, his criticisms (it is prettily said by Leigh Hunt) cast a light upon the subject like the glory reflected "from a painted window." I myself have, in my library, eighteen volumes of Hazlitt's works, and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... lands of Les Arcs half hid the distant heights of Toulon; and, to the right, headland after headland led the eye almost to the frontier of Italy along the finest coast-line in the world. Every shade of blue was on sky or sea or mountain, while the deep morning shadows were transparent and almost luminous. From the pinewoods a scent of resin swept seaward, mingled with the subtle odour of the tropic foliage near the shore. The sky was cloudless. This was indeed the smiling land ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The situation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. "He struck me," she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, "as a very unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't know what ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... frieze jacket and boots of a Servian peasant, heard with a reverential inclination of the head the elegantly polished discourse of the gold-bedizened prelate, but nought relaxed one single muscle of that adamantine visage; the finer but more luminous features of Petronievitch were evidently under the control of a less powerful will. At certain passages of the discourse, his intelligent eye was moistened with tears. Two deacons then prayed successively for the Sultan, the Emperor ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... leading him that he might lighten Clementina's heart of its doubts with the least delay. He had reasoned that if she would share for his sake the life that he should live for righteousness' sake they would be equally blest in it, and it would be equally consecrated in both. But this luminous conclusion faded in his thought as he hurried on, and he found himself in her presence with something like a hope that she would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... being ciphered: not a very luminous document: how could it be? The great men at home seem to forget that they cannot draw wise counsels from their servants unless they confide in them and give them all the factors of the problem. If a ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... not forget Mrs. Pine-Avon's eyes, though he remembered nothing of her other facial details. They were round, inquiring, luminous. How that chestnut hair of hers had shone: it required no tiara to set it off, like that of the dowager he had seen there, who had put ten thousand pounds upon her head to make herself look worse than she would ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... mould. All who have read the autobiographic Apologia will remember the fine passage in which its author tells us that ever since his conversion there have been two, and only two, absolutely self-luminous beings in the whole universe of being to him,—God and his own soul. Now, I do not remember that Newman even once speaks about Teresa in any of his books, but I always think of him and her together ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... known world. Their height has been diminished to the eye by the great elevation of the plains from which they rise. They consist, according to Long, of ridges, knobs, and peaks, variously disposed. The more elevated parts are covered with perpetual snows, which contribute to give them a luminous, and, at a great distance, even a brilliant appearance; whence they derive, among some of the first discoverers, the name of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... expanse, with the blue sky propped over it like a dome or cover. This conception was giving way. The wise men who watched the sky at night, who saw the sweeping circles of the fixed stars and the wandering path of the strange luminous bodies called planets, began to suspect a mighty secret,—that the observing eye saw only half the heavens, and that the course of the stars and the earth itself rounded out was below the darkness of the horizon. From this theory that the earth was a great sphere floating in space followed the ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving reader,—and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed, —I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nursery-tales, they scrupulously shunned, eying them with a mysterious awe! What heavenly twilights belong to that golden month!—the air so lucidly serene, as the purple of the clouds fades gradually away, and up soars, broad, round, intense, and luminous, the full moon which belongs to the joyous season! The fields then are greener than in the heats of July and June,—they have got back the luxury of a second spring. And still, beside the paths of the travellers, lingered on the hedges the clustering honeysuckle—the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Kitchener's men. He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa—"Little wars compared to this," as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more "luminous" than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness, except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the roads ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... sententious reply. The lookouts grow more rigid, for whereas formerly they could see nothing, objects on the water are now pencilled out in luminous relief. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... simple appearances, they saw nothing in the movement of the stars but an unknown play of luminous bodies rolling round the earth, which they believed the central point of all the spheres; but as soon as they discovered the rotundity of our planet, the consequences of this first fact led them to new considerations; and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... distinguished from their powers individually on the eye, which are those of light alone. Thus, although orange and blue are equal powers with respect to each other, as regards the eye they are totally different and opposed. Orange is a luminous colour, and has a powerfully irritating effect, while blue is a shadowy colour, possessing a soothing quality—and it is the same, in various degrees, with ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... dog's low whine that first stirred into action the man by the bunk. He looked down and his eyes grew luminous. He saw the fireless hearth, the drifted snow, and the half-dead dog keeping watchful guard over a pile of inert fur and feathers on the floor—a pile frozen stiff and mutely witnessing to a ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... the audible complaints of Pope; though sometimes he pleads as well as judges, and infers as well as proves; yet even Blackstone has not taken on himself to deliver a decision. His happy genius has only honoured literary history by the masterly force and luminous arrangement of investigation, to which, since the time of Bayle, it has been ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... dark-browed and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion in her face, there appeared before the spectators crowding into every available corner, the slim, youthful figure—was it boy or girl?—the serene and luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth raising its whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-robed, subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance must have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may be called the lay spectators, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... She was so luminous, so queenly, she dissipated his cloud of doubts and scruples, and the tremor of the boyish lover came back into his limbs as he turned to meet her. His voice all but failed him as he answered to ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... purge and work it by Rlodnr, of four divers digestions, continuing the last digestion for fourteen days in one and a swift proportion, until it be Dlasod fixed, a most red and luminous body, the image of resurrection. Take also Lulo of Red Roxtan, and work him through the four fiery degrees, until thou have his Audcal, and then gather him. Then double every degree of your Rlodnr, and by the law of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... his face, and relief swept over it slowly. "I thought something might be wrong. I didn't think of you." And looking down, as all men will in moments of relaxation from a strain, he did not see the eyes of Lou Macon grow softly luminous as ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... last, are in no haste; placid as a lake, they flow with an almost invisible motion. The low opposite shore was covered with verdure, and dotted with red houses half-effaced by the smoke from the chimneys. A golden bar of sunshine shot across the plain; it was grand, luminous, superb. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... bright side of the moon, and the telescopes of the town are busy observing my phenomena; after which it is as though I had rolled over on my dark side, there to lie forgotten till once more the sun entered the proper side of the zodiac. But let me except always the few steadily luminous spirits I know, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. If any one wishes to become famous in a community, let him buy a small farm on the edge of it and cultivate fruits, berries, and flowers, which he freely gives away or ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... applied in the modern cream separator. Presently there was only a small super-heated core of gaseous matter remaining within a huge vacant interior left by the contraction of the cooling gases. The equal attraction of the solid crust from all directions maintained this luminous core in the exact center of the hollow globe. What remains of it is the sun you saw today—a relatively tiny thing at the exact center of the earth. Equally to every part of this inner world it diffuses its perpetual noonday light and ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this escort— creatures of flesh and blood—lessened the dread of my incomprehensible tempter. Rather, a hundred times, front and defy those seven Eastern slaves—I, haughty son of the Anglo-Saxon who conquers all races because he fears no odds—than have seen again on the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless shadow! Besides: Lilian—Lilian! for one chance of saving her life, however wild and chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not a foot from the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing. The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion. Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, which runs to blasphemy rather than indecency. And after all, since men will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there is an audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... lips—before she ever turned her eyes on me. She would have to wear some sort of sailor costume, a blue woollen shirt open at the throat. . . . Dominic's hooded cloak would envelop her amply, and her face under the black hood would have a luminous quality, adolescent charm, and an enigmatic expression. The confined space of the little vessel's quarterdeck would lend itself to her cross-legged attitudes, and the blue sea would balance gently her characteristic immobility that seemed to hide ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... whose appearance suggested a more complete state of rehabilitation. His frock coat was new, it had the unfailing smell of new wool freshly dyed; his shoes were painfully new; his gloves were new; his silk hat was resplendently new; his fat jowl was shaved to a luminous pink; his gorgeous moustache was twisted up at the ends to such a degree that when he smiled the points wavered in front of his eyes, causing him to blink with astonishment. He was undeniably dressed ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... to go through a series of periodic changes. After having become invisible, they reappeared as two luminous straight bands, projecting from each side of the planet; during the next seven or eight years they gradually opened out, and assumed a crescentic form; they afterwards began to contract, and on the expiration of a similar period, during which time they gradually decreased in ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... to sing appealed to her in vain. The sun set, the stars came out; and under the beams of their countless lamps and the beckonings of a slender new moon, the "Marco Polo" sailed into the Bay of Naples, past Vesuvius, whose dusky curl of smoke could be seen outlined against the luminous sky, and brought her ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling washerwomen on the bank. Now and again we might be half-wakened by some church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away. But these luminous intervals were only partially luminous. A little more of us was called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was my birthday, the thirteenth. Mother gave me a clock with a luminous dial which I wanted for my night-table. Of course that is chiefly of use during the long winter nights; embroidered collars; from Father, A Bad Boy's Diary, which one of the nurses lent Hella when she was in hospital; it's such a delightfully funny book, but Father says it's stupid because no boy ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... our ideas of the species of substances being, as I have showed, nothing but certain collections of simple ideas united in one subject, and so co-existing together; v.g. our idea of flame is a body hot, luminous, and moving upward; of gold, a body heavy to a certain degree, yellow, malleable, and fusible: for these, or some such complex ideas as these, in men's minds, do these two names of the different substances, flame and gold, stand for. ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... omission if the author did not give an account of the aurora as seen from his winter station. The scientific man indeed knows that this neglect has, in most cases, been occasioned by the great infrequency of the strongly luminous aurora just in the Franklin archipelago on the north coast of America, where most of the Arctic winterings of this century have taken place, but scarcely any journey of exploration has at all events ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... druggist take a strong vial of clear glass, or a pill bottle with screw or cork top and put into it a piece of phosphorus about the size of a pea and fill the bottle one-third full of pure olive oil that has been heated for 15 minutes—but not boiled. Cork tightly and the result will be a luminous light in the upper portion of the bottle. If the light becomes dim, uncork and recork again. The lamp will retain its brilliancy for about 6 months. This makes a perfectly safe lamp to carry. These lamps ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the captain, moving away. Thorpe followed him a short distance, discussing the landing. The cripple stood all night, his bright, luminous eyes gazing clear and unwinking at the moonlight, listening to his Heart ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... ended sublimely. On a journey, he felt ill; he came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet which his favourite disciple, Ananda, spread for him. His body began to be luminous from within. He died transfigured, his body irradiating ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... the same luminous style of exposition, with which his printed books have made all readers in America and England familiar. Yet it has more than that. You cannot listen to him without thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the solid beautiful nature than of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... by heaven, I swear, a thousand times more lovely!" If she had a child it would likely be found sprawling among the coals, and helping itself to handfuls of ashes. The little creature would be sure to escape the suspicion of ever having been washed. Ask the luminous-eyed mother for anything, for a knife to cut your tobacco, for a cup to get a drink of water, and the sweet sloven would be obliged to ransack two-thirds of the articles of the house ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... The luminous wedge varies in length with the progress of the seasons: sometimes but little more than its point is visible; at others, it is seen extending over a space of 120 degrees. Astronomically speaking, the axis of the zodiacal light is said to lie in the plane of the solar equator, with an angle of more ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... prepared, and they possessed conspicuous merits of form as well as of matter, but they were not the speeches of a brilliant orator. No one could reason more clearly, more powerfully, or more persuasively. He was a supreme master of terse, luminous, weighty, and accurate English. He had much skill in bringing into vivid relief the salient points of an obscure and complicated subject, condensing an argument into a phrase, and illustrating it by graphic felicities of language that clung to the memory. But he hated rhetoric. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... in crimson cashmere, which lent its warm glow to her tender cheeks, and even seemed to impart a rosy reflection to the gloss of her hair, was ravishing. To-night, too, her face wore a new expression, one of triumphant tenderness, which caused her to look fairly luminous. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... saw at his club a gentleman of his acquaintance, named Austin, who was famous for his intimate knowledge of London life, both in its tenebrous and luminous phases. Villiers, still full of his encounter in Soho and its consequences, thought Austin might possibly be able to shed some light on Herbert's history, and so after some casual talk ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... don't grasp," Shelby added. "One personal talk with the average voter will outweigh enough high-toned editorials to sink a ship. When the reformer begins to rub shoulders in all sorts of places with all sorts of men his halo won't be so luminous; perhaps he won't call himself a reformer at all—just politician, perhaps; but ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the tale:—great joy unto the camp! To Russian, Tartar, English, French, Cossacque, O'er whom Suwarrow shone like a gas lamp, Presaging a most luminous attack; Or like a wisp along the marsh so damp, Which leads beholders on a boggy walk, He flitted to and fro a dancing light, Which all who saw it follow'd, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... attain divine union by the way of meditation alone, or even by the affections, or by any luminous or understood prayer. There are several reasons. These ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The incredibly lazy, involved and unintelligent description of the trial of Cowperwood I have already mentioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive and luminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the whole tedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligations of the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of the habits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... is the subject of a learned, luminous, and to us very instructive dissertation. It is truly said that of the adverse criticism which we meet with on the poem "much resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic to make that initial abandonment to the conditions which the poet demands: a determination to insist that his heaven, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... hesitate to begin by quoting at length a luminous passage from Grimm's great work. In the preface to his second edition he writes ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... keen interest by critical audience. Austen's speech pleasantly differed from some familiar of late from same quarter. Luminous, lucid, temperate yet firm, it did much to uplift debate with tone ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... animalcules; these little beings, organized, alive, endowed with locomotive power, a quality of shining whenever they please, and illuminating every body with which they come in contact, and of laying aside their luminous appearance at pleasure; all these ideas crowded upon us, and bade us admire the Creator, even in his minutest works." However florid the language of this gentleman on the subject, his account and opinions are strongly enforced by the recent discoveries of the French naturalists related by Mr ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... sense of right and wrong wanted her to. She had a fine mind, a pure heart: she had been through the highest schools of the land, and that higher, heavenly school of sufferin', where God is the teacher, and had graduated from 'em with her lofty purposes refined and made luminous with some thin' ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... to glance outside. By the aid of a sort of luminous dusk he distinguished at first a semicircle of walls indented by winding stairs; and opposite to him, at the top of five or six stone steps, a sort of black portal, opening into an immense corridor, whose first arches only ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... the stars are wholly or partly girded and intersected by seas, which assist in giving them, their luminous and twinkling appearance. To us your earth has the appearance to the-naked eye ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Vairocana who is the chief deity of the Shingon sect in Japan and is represented by the gigantic image in the temple at Nara. In Java he seems to have been regarded as the principal and supreme Buddha. The name occurs in the Mahavastu as the designation of an otherwise unknown Buddha of luminous attributes and in the Lotus we hear of a distant Buddha-world called Vairocana-rasmi-pratimandita, embellished by the rays of the sun.[77] Vairocana is clearly a derivative of Virocana, a recognized title of the sun in Sanskrit, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... lay Waiting for dawn. Across the ocean stirred A luminous haze, not light, but whispering light, So softly yet, the islands had not heard. The mystery of sleep was in the trees And on the weary stars. A little cry That broke the silence seemed a sacrilege. Then thro' the palm trees glided like a ghost A dusky ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... nature and the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that "Troilus and Cressida" which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... album-full of certificates—operated in all the scientific branches of amputation, from the scalp-lock to the heel-tap, upon Emperors, Kings, Queens, and common folks; but upon his science in the dental way, he spread and grew luminous! In short, Dr. Wangbanger had not been long in Rockbottom before his "gift of gab," and unadulterated propensity to elongate the blanket, set every body, including poor Bill Whiffletree, in a furor to have their teeth cut, filed, scraped, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... down upon the Elms. There was a harvest moon that night, a glorious rounded moon more golden than silver. The garden slumbered, wrapped in mellow light, even the shadows gleamed faintly luminous. The breeze, roaming at will, shook drowsy perfume from the lingering flowers, but for all it aped the summer it was unmistakably an autumn breeze, melancholy, earth-scented. It stirred the curtains at Mary's window; rustled through ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... up in the sky, passing over some big city, when the sound rose to his ears, and he paused, sailing on stretched wings, to listen. Looking down into the immense space below, he saw, plainly outlined against the luminous patch above the city, the form of a large flying creature moving by with rapid strokes. The pulsations of its great wings made the air tremble so that he both heard and felt them. It may have been that the vapours of the city distorted the thing, just as the earth's atmosphere magnifies ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... terror—absolute, undiluted terror—in her unnaturally large eyes. Often when the man spoke to her she shivered. Her eyes seemed constantly trying to escape his gaze, wandering round the room, the terror of a hunted animal in their soft, luminous depths. Once they rested upon mine—I was seated in the corner facing her—and it seemed to me that there was appeal—desperate, frenzied appeal—in that long, tense look which thrilled all my pulses with passionate sympathy. Yet she held herself all the while stiff ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren— she who had lomied ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the medusa, the phosphorescence appears at the moment that the chain closes, though the exciters are not in immediate contact with the organs of the animal. The fingers with which we touch it remain luminous for two or three minutes, as is observed in breaking the shell of the pholades. If we rub wood with the body of a medusa, and the part rubbed ceases shining, the phosphorescence returns if we pass a dry ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Catholic priest save in the utter selfishness of his creed? Beside the sordid accumulation of gain to which his life was devoted the priest's mission among crowded alleys and fever-stricken lanes seemed luminous and grand. A moral suicide, with no redeeming feature. The barns bursting with fatness, the comfortable houses, gain added to gain—to what end? I was beginning to give very short answers indeed to his questions, and was already meditating a ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... was a task that it wrung his heart to perform. His horse must be put out of pain. He took off his coat, rolled it over his horse's head, inserted his gun under its folds to deaden the sound and to hide those luminous eyes turned ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... midnight when she walked down the side streets that led to the car line which took her home. Overhead the fog hung, covering the city with a luminous rack which here and there parted, showing segments of dark, star-dotted sky. Passing men looked at her, some meeting a defiant stare, others a face so chastely unresponsive that they averted their eyes as if rebuked. On the car she took an outside seat, for she loved the swift passage through ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... winter's day had faded into a blue and luminous night, resplendent with stars, and still our belated train tarried. However, the situation was improved, for later advices stated that the Boers had cleared off from the vicinity of the railway-line, ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... strive to read the Almighty's plan in the historic page. In the farthest east appeared the first faint light of civilization's dawn, and westward ever since the star of empire hath ta'en its way, while each succeeding nation that rose in its luminous paths like flowers in the footsteps of our dear Lord, has reached a higher plane and wrought out a grander destiny. The cycle is complete— the star now blazes in the world's extreme west and by the law of progress which has preserved for forty centuries, here if anywhere, must we ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... establishment of libraries, art galleries, museums, institutes of training and research out of what were but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon, something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon the hill, something for ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... Mr. Robinson, president of the board of trade, in reply, deprecated the motion as tending to excite hopes which could not be realized. He was followed by Messrs. Baring and Ricardo, the latter of whom entered into a luminous exposition of the principles of political economy, and condemned all restrictions on the freedom of the corn-trade as injurious in their tendency. The landed interests, however, prevailed, and the motion for the committee was carried. On the following evening, however, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... blackness of a February midnight that he rode up through the lighted gatehouse to his home. Above the terrace as he came up the road the tall hall-window glimmered faintly like a gigantic luminous door hung in space; and the lower window of his father's room shone and faded ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... fashion, whom anything like enthusiasm moved to a sneer. In the House of Commons, a flash of his eye, a wave of his arm, had sometimes cowed Murray. But, in the House of Peers, his utmost vehemence and pathos produced less effect than the moderation, the reasonableness, the luminous order and the serene dignity, which characterised the speeches of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... conception like the apocalyptic hero appeal to the common herd? These formidable shapes emerge from the dusk, offspring of momentous epochs; they stand aloof at first, but presently their luminous grandeur is dulled, their haughty contour sullied and obliterated by attrition. They are dragged down to the level of their lowest adorers, for the whole flock adapts its pace to that of the weakest lamb. No self-respecting ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... plants, and even stones, move. We should observe, in a period of time not longer than a minute or two appear to us now, a plant start from seed, grow up, flower, bring fruit, and die. Sun and moon would be luminous bands traversing the sky; day and night alternate seconds of light and darkness. Much of nature, all moving things, would be invisible to us. If I moved my arm, it would disappear, to reappear again when I held ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Mr. Seward made a deep impression upon the mind of the President. In conflicts of opinion the superior mind, the subtle address, the fixed purpose, the gentle yet strong will, must in the end prevail. Mr. Seward gave to the President the most luminous exposition of his own views, warm, generous, patriotic in tone. He set before him the glory of an Administration which should completely re-establish the union of the States, and re-unite the hearts of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... permission of the governor or the jailer's company. He comes in at the window, and traces in my room a square the shape of the window, which lights up the hangings of my bed and floods the very floor. This luminous square increases from ten o'clock till midday, and decreases from one till three slowly, as if, having hastened to my presence, it sorrowed at bidding me farewell. When its last ray disappears I have enjoyed its presence for five hours. Is ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's [Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition, Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... illustrate the clever way in which popular songs were given an ecclesiastical or Plain Song character, has here added to his luminous lecture the following precious original composition, reproduced in facsimile, in which through ingenious contrapuntal treatment he gives a mock sacred form to an old French ditty, "I Have Some Good Tobacco ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... silent figures in the inside nodding to the horse's steps. I presume they were asleep; by the shawl about her head and shoulders, one of them should be a woman. Soon, by concurrent steps, the day began to break and the fog to subside and roll away. The east grew luminous and was barred with chilly colours, and the Castle on its rock, and the spires and chimneys of the upper town, took gradual shape, and arose, like islands, out of the receding cloud. All about me was still and sylvan; the road mounting and winding, with nowhere a sign of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... She looked at him long. "I wonder if you'll ever forgive me for hurting you like this. Try, won't you, Peter?" Her eyes were luminous with unshed tears. "Will you get me a glass of—water. On the table by my bed." She waited as he eagerly fetched it, grateful that he could do even this much. "Thanks. Now, a handkerchief—over there on the bureau." Again she waited, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... too, had adorned with varicoloured paperwork the candelabra, girandoles and mirrors which drew twinkles from the long waxed floor, and softened whatever might have been garish in the decorations. Certainly the panels took a new beauty, a luminous delicacy, in their artificial rays; and Dorothea, when, after much greeting and hand-shaking, she joined one of the groups inspecting them, felt a sort of proprietary pleasure in the praises ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and fields that tingle with new birth, The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth Comes up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon, Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet The river with its stately sweep and wheel Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, grey like steel. From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam, Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet, The sleepless toads ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... clear luminous eyes on the shifting countenance of her cousin, "your offer is, no doubt, kindly meant—but I cannot accept it. I would not, Helen, if you offered me half your fortune, live in a house so unblessed, as I fear—as I fear yours ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture. And I hope that while our extended observations among these brown people have given no shallow insight into their life and thought, neither the pictures nor the descriptive matter will be ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... pencil, lit a reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous, beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of Chelsea; looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the whole thickness of some learned counsel's treatise upon Torts did not screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room, very empty ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Fitzpatrick, and all the eminent men of that time with whom he lived when he was young. He said what I have often heard before, that Fitzpatrick was the most agreeable of them all, but Hare the most brilliant. Burke's conversation was delightful, so luminous and instructive. He was very passionate, and Adair said that the first time he ever saw him he unluckily asked him some question about the wild parts of Ireland, when Burke broke out, 'You are a fool and a blockhead; there are no wild parts in Ireland.' He was extremely terrified, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... visited this country in 1884, he called upon Mr. Whittier, and this is the impression he received of his personality: "The peculiarity of his face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with thick black eyelashes curiously curved inward. This bar of vivid black across the countenance was startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white beard and hair, offering a sort of contradiction ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... time that we described the Demeny chronophotographic apparatus we remarked that it had the advantage of permitting of the projection of very luminous images of large dimensions; but it is certain that the cases are somewhat limited in which there is any need of using a screen 24 or 25 feet square, and, as a general thing, one 6 or 10 feet square suffices. The manufacturer of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... light seems to thicken and become yet more generously fruitful without losing its soft mellow brightness. Everything seems to settle into conscious repose. The winds breathe gently or are wholly at rest. The few clouds visible are downy and luminous and combed out fine on the edges. Gulls here and there, winnowing the air on easy wing, are brought into striking relief; and every stroke of the paddles of Indian hunters in their canoes is told by a quick, glancing flash. Bird ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... where wells abound Out of all men's sight; Or in lower pools that see All their marges clothed all round With the innumerable lily, Whence the golden-girdled bee Flits through flowering rush to fret White or duskier violet, Fair as those that in far years With their buds left luminous And their little leaves made wet From the warmer dew of tears, Mother's tears in extreme need, Hid the limbs of Iamus, Of thy brother's seed; For his heart was piteous Toward him, even as thine heart now Pitiful toward us; Thine, O goddess, turning hither A benignant blameless brow; Seeing ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I permitted them to tie my feet and hands, and lash me round with ropes, as they thought proper. They would then place me in the Chees-a-kee lodge, which would immediately commence shaking and swaying to and fro, indicating the presence of my guardian spirit: frequently I saw a bright, luminous light at the top of the lodge, and the words of the spirit would be audible to the spectators outside, who could not understand what was said; while mentally, I understood ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... her eyes large and luminous, a new, quiet color coming into her face "there are times when our tasks seem stupendous, when we are filled with an overpowering consciousness of the importance of them; when we feel that we are carrying ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... simplifications which the union of Europe and the democratic federation of the continent will some day bring forth, what will be in France, the form of the social edifice, of whose ill-defined and luminous outlines the thinking man already has a glimpse, through ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Political History of the Twentieth Century, the late Mimble—or, as he would have been called in the time of which he writes, Mister Mimble—has this luminous sentence: "With the single exception of Coblentz, there was no European government the Liberator did not upset, and which he did not erect into a pure Smitharchy; and though some of them afterward relapsed temporarily into the crude forms ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... twilights, has she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness of the lake, the dusky, rimming hills, the bare, slim blackness of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,—the whole luminous etching? How often, mid-morning in spring, has she sat with her book in a green shade west of the library, and lifted her eyes to see above the daffodil-bank of Longfellow's fountain the blue lake waters laughing between the upspringing trunks of the tall oak trees? Wherever ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... invaded the valley of Chamonix, and gradually each of the summits which overlook it on the west. The chain of Mont Blanc alone remained luminous, and seemed encircled by a golden halo. Soon the shadows crept up the Gouter and Mont Maudit. They still respected the giant of the Alps. We watched this gradual disappearance of the light with admiration. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... figure flung itself into the shop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted back as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons, a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. He had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor; he had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the shop and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and uttered the exclamation of a ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... which may be compared to a luminous pyramid, terminating in Deity, and having for its basis the rational soul of man and its spontaneous unperverted conceptions,—of this philosophy, August, magnificent, and divine, Plato may be justly called the primary leader and hierophant, through whom, like ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... and a home in England, and with renewed pathos of look and manner ratified the proffer which Sir Robert had made of his heart and hand to her who alone on this earth had reminded him of that angelic parent. "I nave seen her beloved face, luminous in purity and tender pity, reflected in yours, ever-honored Miss Beaufort, when your noble heart, more than once, looked in compassion on her son. And I then felt, with a wondering bewilderment, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... you a proof of the respectful affection you allow me to bear you. If I am reproached for impotence in this attempt to draw from the depths of mysticism a book which seeks to give, in the lucid transparency of our beautiful language, the luminous poesy of the Orient, to you the blame! Did you not command this struggle (resembling that of Jacob) by telling me that the most imperfect sketch of this Figure, dreamed of by you, as it has been by me since childhood, would still be something ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... sombre gorge with bridge and aqueduct, affords superb views of the unrivalled plains. Waterfalls foam over granite cliffs; a sinuous river flings a silver chain round the symmetrical base of Kaleidon, and from our lofty vantage point we gaze into the luminous green of a million palms, where the warm heart of a deep forest opens to display the lustre and colour of molten emeralds. The Soendanese quarter of the island gives place to the ancient Javanese territory, and Malay characteristics, though ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... but could see only the rich verdure waving to the wind in the warm transparency of the atmosphere. He should have taken his child to town as soon as the illness had appeared. But who could have foretold this? He raised his eyes to heaven and they lingered upon the luminous azure; then came another pigeon. He shook his head and, striking his fist against his thigh, slung his spade back upon his shoulder and turned in the direction ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... with clenched teeth. Luminous fuses, like roman candles, burst forth in every direction, exploding in dust over our heads. A moment later a dazzling signal light rocket bursts fifty yards high, just above our trenches, lighting them up as clear as day for several seconds. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... a nervous writer; his civil administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many victories over practised politicians, will require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day. The contemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them. Time must first ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... it up here," she said, "with no light but the stars, and that strange luminous glow ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... That monarch, after having delivered his country from innumerable enemies, rescued Vienna and subdued the Turks, retired to this place at certain seasons, and thence dispensed those acts of his luminous and benevolent mind which rendered his name great and his ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... that moment the whole room seemed to be filled with a strange light, and he saw the wonderful figure of a man with a shining face and eyes that seemed infinitely sad and at the same time infinitely luminous. The figure held a lyre, and said to him ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... lifted by four of them who started off at a slow march. The moon had gone down, leaving the muddy, deserted streets in darkness, but the body on the stretcher appeared to be luminous, so dazzlingly white was the silk, and it was a weird sight to see, passing along through the night, the semi-luminous form of this corpse, borne by those men, the dusky skin of whose faces and hands could scarcely be distinguished from their ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... naturalist feels convinced that it is in that which is called the lowest classes of the two organic kingdoms—i.e., in those which comprise the most simply organized beings—that we can collect facts the most luminous and observations the most decisive on the production and the reproduction of the living beings in question; on the causes of the formation of the organs of these wonderful beings; and on those of their developments, of their diversity ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... about it. There were differences of opinion, he said, as to the cause, for men of physical science, not less than doctors, were prone to differ. For himself, he had only noted the facts and knew not the cause. The luminous trees appeared only at that part of the ridge where the sun was just going to rise—elsewhere the trees were projected as dark objects, in the usual way, against the bright sky. Not only were the trees thus apparently self-luminous, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... nominated for a seat in Parliament and was defeated. Next year he ran again and was elected. The political canvass had given freedom to his wings; he had learned to think on his feet, to meet interruption, to parry in debate. The air became luminous with reasons. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a pretty frame, with its outline marked by the dewy rose-vine covered with hundreds of pure, half- opened buds and swaying tendrils, and she stood there in it, a fair image of the morning in her innocent white gown. Her luminous eyes still mirrored the shadowy visions of dreamland, mingled with dancing lights of hope and joyful anticipation; while on her fresh cheeks, which had not yet lost the roundness of childhood, there glowed, as in the eastern skies, the faint ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was by now growing faintly luminous, and the deathly grey light of approaching dawn hung in the mists upon the moor. Objects grew visible in bulk at least, if not in form and shape, by the time the little company had reached the end of Weston village and come upon the deep mud dyke which had been Wentworth's objective—a ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... her, his small pig-eyes hating and cringing, while in her eyes, turned to Smoke, the anger melted into luminous softness. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... little medallions: two perfect pieces of colour and design. The kneeling monk on the right is Lippo Lippi himself. Near it is the Madonna adoring, No. 79, of which I have spoken, with herself so luminous and the background so dark; the other—No. 82—is less remarkable. No. 81, above it, is by Browning's Pacchiorotto (who worked in distemper); close by is the Masaccio, which has a deep, quiet beauty; and beneath it is a richly coloured predella by Andrea del Sarto, the work of a few hours, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... trilling its note on the night-air: all was quiet and serene in the city: yet still the fight raged. The dull, heavy reports of the distant artillery boomed louder across the water, and the dark curtain of smoke that nearly concealed the ships and fort, grew luminous with incessant flashes. The fight still raged. At last the frequency of the discharges perceptibly lessened, and gradually, toward ten o'clock, ceased altogether. The ships of the enemy were now seen moving from their position, and making their way slowly, as if ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... general feeling that the king of the Jews was yet to be born, and that they were soon to see the long expected and promised Messiah. Herod was greatly troubled by the tidings that a child had been born under remarkable circumstances. The star spoken of was supposed to be a luminous meteor the wise men had seen in their own country before they set out on their journey for Bethlehem, and which now guided them to the house where the young child was. Notwithstanding the common surroundings, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... much-mooted question of companionship. Test the truth of them all by their imaginary application to the child you know best. When you can, find the principles that your own mother did employ in your education, and examine the result of what she did. Some of the principles will suddenly become luminous to you, I am sure; and some things that happened in ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne |
