"Mirror" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but you haven't a good mirror," she laughed; "you don't see yourself as you are. It isn't when you begin to love people that you see their faults, is it? It's really when ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... could perceive something like a vessel. Gradually the gloom seemed to clear away, and a lambent pale blaze to light up that part of the horizon. Not a breath of wind was on the water—the sea was like a mirror—more and more distinct did the vessel appear, till her hull, masts, and yards were clearly visible. They looked and rubbed their eyes to help their vision, for scarcely could they believe that which they did see. In the centre of the pale light, which extended ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... of May; but May was in an April mood,—half cloudy, half shiny,—and belied her name. Sprinkles of silvery rain dotted the way-side dust; flashes of sun caught the drops as they fell, and turned each into a tiny mirror fit for fairy faces. The trees were raining too, showers of willow-catkins and cherry-bud calyxes, which fell noiselessly and strewed the ground. The children kicked the soft brown drifts aside with their feet as ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... habit of singing is sometimes quite independent of love is clear, for a sterile, hybrid canary-bird has been described (31. Mr. Bold, 'Zoologist,' 1843-44, p. 659.) as singing whilst viewing itself in a mirror, and then dashing at its own image; it likewise attacked with fury a female canary, when put into the same cage. The jealousy excited by the act of singing is constantly taken advantage of by bird-catchers; a male, in good song, is hidden and protected, whilst a stuffed bird, surrounded ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... had informed the Bey that I had an elegant Grecian mirror in my house. To-day he sent a request for it, pretending that he wanted it for the cabin of his pleasure-boat, now about to be launched. So it is. If the consuls have a good piece of furniture, or any other good thing which strikes the Bey's fancy, he never hesitates to ask for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... have stood for a group, the girl as the spirit, the man as the body which had risked and suffered all for it, and still held it fast. For the honest face of the soldier reflected that spirit as truly as a mirror. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at herself in the mirror. She was forced to smile at what she saw there, for the best cosmetic in the wide world is the knowledge that the ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... every object is seen with a sharp, clear outline, and the sense of distance is overcome. When a shadow falls it is defined as boldly as on canvas; no generous mist softens or conceals it; everything is shown as frankly as in a mirror. In the noontide heats all nature is as silent here as in the virgin forests of the New World; but when the cool breath of evening begins to be felt, and that luminous darkness which is the glory of a summer night in Central Africa folds softly over the picture, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... corner; and as he appears in the doorway, he has the fireplace on the nearest wall to his right, and the grand piano along the opposite wall to his left. Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it a hand mirror, a fan, a pair of long white gloves, and a little white woollen cloud to wrap a woman's head in. On the other side of the room, near the piano, is a broad, square, softly up-holstered stool. The room is furnished in the most approved South Kensington fashion: that is, it is as like ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... sudden impulse I turned from the lattice to the elegant luxuriousness of my bedchamber, its soft carpets, rich hangings and exquisite harmonies of colour; and coming before the cheval mirror I stood to view and examine myself as I had never done hitherto, surveying my reflection not with the accustomed eyes of Peregrine Vereker, but rather with the coldly appraising eyes of a stranger, and ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... when an eye, placed behind it, sees distinctly the inverted image which it forms. A lens, twenty feet in focal length, will in this manner magnify twenty times; and it was by the same principle that Sir William Herschel discovered a new satellite of Saturn, by using only the mirror of his forty-feet telescope. The instrument presented to Prince Maurice, and which the Marquis Spinola found in the shop of John Lippershey, the spectacle maker of Middleburg, must have been an astronomical telescope consisting of two convex lenses. Upon this supposition, it differed ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... soul was swelling like the sea! Had thine eyes gleamed there with mine own, That soul a mirror true to thee On ev'ry wave ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... train, had flushed her cheeks and lent a deeper shade to her brown eyes. She knew that Bower's was not the only glance that dwelt on her with a curious and somewhat unnerving appraisement. Other men, and not a few women, stared at her. The mirror in her dressing room had told her that she was looking her best, and her heart fluttered a little at the thought that she had succeeded, without effort, in winning the appreciation of a man highly placed in the world of fashion and finance. The ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... Italian steamer, bound from Civita Vecchia to Marseilles. We had been travelling all night. In the morning I was shaving myself in the cabin, when suddenly this man came behind me, glanced for a moment into the small mirror before which I was standing, and then, without a word of warning, tore it from the nail, and dashed it to pieces at my feet. His face was at first livid with passion—it seemed to me rather the passion of fear than of anger—but it changed after a moment, and he seemed ashamed ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... the palace at Fiori. Bianca with a mirror in her hand, having her hair done by a maid. Several maids about, holding perfume-flasks, brushes, and veils, articles of apparel of one sort or another. Beatrice standing beside ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... the wedding, stood before the mirror. Laying aside her dress, she draped her shimmering cloth about her, dragging her hair down in a heavy mass over ears and neck until she seemed herself a bride. And as she stood there, awed with the mystical union of a dead love and a living new born self, there came drifting in at ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... from the window, and the hot air of the room again smote him. The smoking lamp had blackened the chimney, and as he bent to turn it down, he caught his reflection in a small mirror over the table. What the bruises and swelling had left undone the cheap mirror completed. He started back. Was that the boy he knew as himself? Was that Sandy Kilday who had come to America to seek his fortune? ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... house on our side of the street, for the sun was entering my windows slantwise. It was as though some one were alternately opening and shutting a casement, or, more likely, amusing himself by making sunlight flashes with a pocket-mirror. ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... a few minutes would elapse before the arrival of the guests. This was apparent in the rise and fall of Breen's heels, as he seesawed back and forth on the hearth-rug in the satin-lined drawing-room, with his coattails spread to the life less grate, and from the way he glanced nervously at the mirror to see that his cravat was properly tied and that his collar did not ride up ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... draws near middle age, begins to suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt to be a full over-payment ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that they're swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.' She had set him off again, but she had enticed him to eating. 'Pooh! it has all been said before. Stones are easier to move than your English. May I be forgiven for saying it! an invasion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said; "I must be cool, and not seem bubbling over with delight." In fact, I felt just then so elated, partly by the news, partly by the returning health beginning to course through my veins, that I went straight to a mirror, to see if there was anything in my countenance likely to betray my state of mind, and, as soon as I reached it, I stood staring. Then I turned away, and went and sat down, thinking that mine was a very uncomfortable ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... affection. If thou reachest after and seekest, nothing but the will of God and the benefit of thy neighbour, thou wilt entirely enjoy inward liberty. If thine heart were right, then should every creature be a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine. There is no creature so small and vile but that it showeth us the goodness ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... College Observatory has also been employed in various experiments with a slit spectroscope, and is again being used as described below. Mrs. Draper has decided to send to Cambridge a 28 inch reflector and its mountings, and a 15 inch mirror, which is one of the most perfect reflectors constructed by Dr. Draper, and with which his photograph of the moon was taken. The first two instruments mentioned above have been kept at work during the first part of every clear night for several months. It is now intended ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... himself would be puzzled to analyse—contemplates us, in the intervals of his forkings-in, with a benign and admiring look. Our trusty friend and vis-a-vis turns his head, and we behold ourselves reflected in the opposite mirror. 'Tis as we thought: our physiognomy is philanthropical in the extreme. Quite the "mild, angelic air," that Byron talks of, when describing a gentleman in very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... studied law at the Inner Temple, and while there wrote, in conjunction with Thomas Norton, Ferren and Porrex or Gerboduc (1561-2), the first regular English tragedy. A little later he planned The Mirror for Magistrates, which was to have been a series of narratives of distinguished Englishmen, somewhat on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes. Finding the plan too large, he handed it over to others—seven poets in ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... reached the Green Room, as it was called, Oldbuck placed the candle on the toilet table, before a huge mirror with a black japanned frame, surrounded by dressing-boxes of the same, and looked around him with something of a disturbed expression of countenance. "I am seldom in this apartment," he said, "and never without yielding to a melancholy ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... pardoned, has really something terrible about it. It is only to be met by an imperturbable mask of serenity, proof against anything and everything in a patient's aspect. The physician whose face reflects his patient's condition like a mirror may do well enough to examine people for a life-insurance office, but does not belong to the sickroom. The old Doctor did not keep people waiting in dread suspense, while he stayed talking about the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... same way, or upwards. Skilled workers will readily contrive the middles for themselves, by combining the different subjects and putting them together in various positions, either diagonally or at right angles to each other, with the help of the Penelope mirror.[2] ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... risks. So we are ahead of you. We send out a ship with three men aboard when you would risk only one. We are not sentimental, that is all. That is why we are ahead of you." He ordered another drink and stared into the mirror for several minutes, letting us think that over. Then ...
— Last Resort • Stephen Bartholomew
... he would Everyman redeem, Which Adam forfeited by his disobedience: O blessed Godhead, elect and high-divine, Forgive my grievous offence; Here I cry thee mercy in this presence. O ghostly treasure, O ransomer and redeemer Of all the world, hope and conductor, Mirror of joy, and founder of mercy, Which illumineth heaven and earth thereby, Hear my clamorous complaint, though it late be; Receive my prayers; unworthy in this heavy life, Though I be, a sinner most abominable, Yet let my name be written in ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... cash. Every time a grand levee was held during the darkness of the night, the red lustre filled the palace, and it was for this reason designated 'The Red Palace-Illuminator.'"—Tsih-ke, or Miscellaneous Record, quoted in the Kih che-king-yuen, Mirror of Science, b. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... dignitaries of the household—the royal betel-box bearer, the royal cuspidor-carrier, and others bearing on scarlet cushions the royal toothpicks, the royal toothbrush, the royal toilet set, and the royal mirror, all of gold set with jewels. The mothers of the brides, painted like courtesans and hung with jewels, were borne by in sedan-chairs, in which they sat cross-legged on silken cushions. Then, after a dramatic pause, their approach heralded by a burst of barbaric ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... head was covered with tiny close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the chance of helping another human creature, stricken like myself; for the privilege of ministering to a motherless child. Make me to long only for the beauty of holiness, and to be satisfied if I attain to it. Wash my soul pure and clean, and let that be the only mirror in which I see my face. I have tried to be useful. Forgive me if it always seemed so hard and dreary a life. Forgive me if I am too happy because for one short day I have really helped in a beautiful way, and found a friend who saw, because he was blind, the real me underneath; the ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cell was covered with crimson carpet, the festooned window with a lace curtain, and ornamented with a bouquet of flowers. A soft bed, with fine linen and warm coverlids, stood in one corner; a toilet table and mirror draped with lace, in another; a small marble washstand, with its china service, in a third; and a French porcelain stove in the fourth. A crimson-covered easy-chair and tiny stand filled up the middle of ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... he shaved, he saw the confused sickness in his face, reflected by his mirror. Sometimes, for a moment, he felt hot, and then cold, as if his blood still held a tiny trace of Syrtis Fever. If there was such a thing? No—don't start to laugh, he warned himself. Relax. Let the phantoms fade away. Somewhere, that multiple bigness ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... is a reflection." "Everybody's countenance is a mirror transmitting to others, its rays." If one makes a habit of sending out happy, loving thoughts, the face reflects the thought and gains in ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... once dedicated to Bacchus. A gaily-garbed chattering crew of people moved from stall to stall, laughing, gesticulating, and bargaining, and evidently enjoying themselves. A pretty girl was trying ear-rings, and looking at the effect in a mirror held by the vendor, while older folks flocked round a quack medicine dealer, who was loudly proclaiming the ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... was felony at the Common law. 3 Inst. 63 It was not distinguished by ancient authors, except the Mirror, from simple House-breaking, ib. 65. Burglary and House- breaking were called 'Hamsockne.' 'Diximus etiam de pacis violatione et de immunitatibus domus, si quis hoc in posterum fecetit ut perdat ornne quod habet, et sit in regis arbitro utrum vitam habeat.' 'Eac we quasdon be mundbryce ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... manner." For men of science, the census has its interest; and for us also, it possesses an interest of a wholly different significance. The interest and significance of the census for the community lie in this, that it furnishes it with a mirror into which, willy nilly, the whole community, and each one of ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... that room when Marilla sent me in on an errand—no, indeed, I tiptoed through it and held my breath, as if I were in church, and felt relieved when I got out of it. The pictures of George Whitefield and the Duke of Wellington hung there, one on each side of the mirror, and frowned so sternly at me all the time I was in, especially if I dared peep in the mirror, which was the only one in the house that didn't twist my face a little. I always wondered how Marilla dared houseclean that room. And ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... might not suspect what was going on, Shaheen Mahfous and Shanin Saba unloaded with as much noise as possible a dray of paper for Meraat-ul-Gharb, the Daily Mirror. By and by a window on the fourth floor opened and the head ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... Fotis when she saw what she had done, and Apuleius, glancing at a polished mirror from Corinth which hung on the walls, beheld with horror the fate ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... sometimes heard or read of magicians who have pretended to have wonderful mirrors into which persons might look and see all that was before them in this life. If there were such a mirror, it would be a strange thing indeed to look into it and find out what was going to happen to-morrow, or next month, or next year, or twenty years hence. But, there never was any such mirror. As the apostle says, "We ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... he had been towing it. The moon was then passing the meridian. Jupiter was rising in the east. Amid this peaceful scene of nature, sky and ocean rivalled each other in tranquillity, the sea offering to the orbs of night the finest mirror they could ever have in which to reflect their image. As I thought of the deep calm of these elements, compared with all those passions brooding imperceptibly within ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... remained still possible to increase the precision of the measurements. Professor Michelson has undertaken some new researches by a method which is a combination of the principle of the toothed wheel of Fizeau with the revolving mirror of Foucault. The toothed wheel is here replaced, however, by a grating, in which the lines and the spaces between them take the place of the teeth and the gaps, the reflected light only being returned when it strikes on the space between two lines. The illustrious American physicist estimates ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... went into the house, where I found Carlotta preparing the breakfast; she had an old woman with her, who seemed to be doing something which she was not very willing I should see. I sat down carelessly, humming a tune, with my face to a mirror, and my back to Carlotta, so that I was able to watch her motions without her perceiving it. She was standing near the fireplace, the coffee was by her, on the table, and the old woman crouched in the chimney corner, with her bleared eyes fixed on the embers. Carlotta ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... home of the limpid elvs, where the wild swans sing in the gleam of the Northern Lights! Thou land, on whose deep, still lakes Scandinavia's fairy builds her colonnades, and leads her battling, shadowy host over the icy mirror! Glorious Sweden! with thy fragrant Linnaeus, with Jenny's soul-enlivening songs! To thee will we fly with the stork and the swallow, with the restless sea-gull and the wild swans. Thy birch-woods exhale refreshing fragrance under their sober, bending branches; ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... the silvery lake beyond. It was a sight not to be forgotten by the American traveller, for this country has few towns so happily situated as the village of Geneva,—a cluster of houses against a wooded slope with the lake like a mirror below. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... duty among the Jews when the Saviour was still to come, much more is it the duty of Christians, who expect no new revelation, and who, though they look forward in hope, yet see the future only in the mirror of times and persons past, who (in the Angel's words) "wait for that same Jesus: . . . . so to come in like manner as they ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... invariable friend of broad principles of national government." It was also said that his connexions with this paper, and the patronage he afforded it, authorized the opinion that it might fairly be considered "the mirror of his views," and thence was adduced an accusation not less serious in its nature than that which has ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... proof against this bustle and despatch. The look of mingled astonishtnent and anger which had appeared in his face when he turned towards them, faded from it as the words passed from his memory, like breath from a polished mirror; and grasping the weapon which Hugh forced upon him, he proudly took his station at the door, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... in grandeur and sublimity, is this description to the origin of the wisdom of the heathens, as described by their poets and mythologists! In the exalted strains of the Hebrew poetry we read, that "Wisdom is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... Scotchman, born at Perth. He went to London as a shoemaker; but afterwards turned a broker. About 1739 he turned his attention to the teaching of animals. He was very successful, and among the subjects of his experiments were three young cats. Wilson, in his "Eccentric Mirror,"[126] has recorded that "he taught these domestic tigers to strike their paws in such directions on the dulcimer, as to produce several tunes, having music-books before them, and squalling at the same time in different keys ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... gave it to him. Ball's original, it was said, looked like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed, and may indeed have been a proof pulled in some newspaper office. In St. Louis, William Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first learned from Eugene Field that it was from the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... looking-glass, whereon whoso looked saw, not his own image, but only that of the king. A certain courtier who had long enjoyed the king's favor and was thereby enriched beyond any other subject of the realm, said to the king: "Give me, I pray, thy wonderful mirror, so that when absent out of thine august presence I may yet do homage before thy visible shadow, prostrating myself night and morning in the glory of thy benign countenance, as which nothing has so divine splendor, O Noonday ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... tourmaline and, about each window-frame, odd nests of bird or insect—souvenirs of wood-life and his travel with the drove. There, too, on the table were mementos of that first day of his teaching,—the mirror spectacles with which he had seen at once every corner of the schoolroom, the sling-shot and bar of iron he had taken ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... sweet with flowers in the early spring evening, Oriental rugs were spread on the dull mirror of the floor, opened doors gave glimpses of airy colonial interiors, English chintzes crowded with gay colored fruits and flowers, brick fireplaces framed in classic white and showing a brave gleam of brass firedogs in the soft lamplight. Not a book on the long tables, not an etching on the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... forget my errand, but it was not until the afternoon was growing late that we left the higher ground and drove down the shady draw toward the river. The Neosho is a picture here, with still expanses that mirror the trees along its banks, and stony shallows where the water, even in midsummer, prattles merrily in the sunshine, as it ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... dully, "I know he's a machine. Snookums isn't a he any more—he's an it. He has no personality of his own, he only has what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He's not even a psychic mirror, because he doesn't reflect my personality, but a puppet imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And none of these added anything to him, as a personality. How could they? He never ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... surprise and a shock were in store for him. As he entered the room he saw a boy standing in front of the mirror brushing his hair. ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... private sitting-room. Upon that, he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he couldn't find the way up stairs, and led us to the black hole of the establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet, and somebody's pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... a vision of the Isles of the Blessed where dwell the souls of the departed in everlasting bliss; and for full five minutes after the two Englishmen had halted by the margin of the lake, the smooth, unruffled surface of which repeated the picture as in a mirror, they stood gazing, entranced, upon the loveliness of the scene that lay spread ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... at him: the force of surprise, and also of conviction, made me forget myself; and I only recovered wonted consciousness when I saw that his notice was arrested, and that it had caught my movement in a clear little oval mirror fixed in the side of the window recess—by the aid of which reflector Madame often secretly spied persons walking in the garden below. Though of so gay and sanguine a temperament, he was not without a certain nervous sensitiveness which made him ill at ease under a direct, inquiring ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... touch of boyish self-confidence which had been hers on the ride was gone. In its place there was something even more difficult for Randall Byrne to face. If there had been a garish brightness about her when he had first seen her, the brilliancy of a mirror playing in the sun against his feeble eyes, there was now a blending of pastel shades, for the hall was dimly illumined and the shadow tarnished her hair and her pallor was like cold stone; even her eyes were misted by fear. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... pulled forward a cheval-glass, placing it upon a particular spot and tilting the mirror to a certain exact angle. When finally it was adjusted to his satisfaction, he motioned to me to come and look. In the mirror was plainly visible a vertically reversed reflection of L. Hernandez. Standing in front of a long dressing-glass in her bedroom, she deliberately ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... morning, two years later. The doors are all open. SWEEDLE, now blessed with a sprouting moustache, is getting the offices ready. He arranges papers on COKESON'S table; then goes to a covered washstand, raises the lid, and looks at himself in the mirror. While he is gazing his full RUTH HONEYWILL comes in through the outer office and stands in the doorway. There seems a kind of exultation and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fit," he said, as he concluded his task. He led her toward the mirror in the front of the show-room just as M. Garfunkel entered the ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... and is capable of revolving around its own axis, and the other, which is at right angles to it, is capable of describing around the first a plane representing the celestial equator. At the apex of the right angle there is a plane mirror of silvered glass inclined at an angle of 45 deg. with respect to the optical axis, and which sends toward the ocular the image coming from the objective and already reflected by another and similar plane mirror. The objective and this second mirror (which is inclined at an angle of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... assurance from the reflection of her hair in the mirror, and they started gayly forth like two school children out for a lark. He ushered her into a quiet little cafe that had an air of pronounced elegance about it. In a secluded corner behind some palms came the subdued notes of stringed instruments. Derry seemed to be well known ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... And Bertie stood before the glass and surveyed himself. The cheap lodging-house mirror cast a greenish shade over his features, but the little bouquet in his buttonhole came out very well. "Where did I get them? I didn't buy them, if you mean that. They were given ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... to the room occupied by Richard whenever he was with them, but no Richard was there. His valise was all packed ready for his start on the morrow, but there was no line pinned to the frame of the mirror telling Peter Junior where to find him, as was Richard's way in the past. With a fleeting glance around to see if any bit of paper had been blown away, he went to his own room and there he found his mother, waiting. In an instant that long ago morning came to his mind, and as then he went ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... and word was sent up that her escort had arrived, Rose ran down, devoutly hoping that he had not come in a velveteen jacket, top-boots, black gloves, or made any trifling mistake of that sort. A young gentleman was standing before the long mirror, apparently intent upon the arrangement of his hair, and Rose paused suddenly as her eye went from the glossy broadcloth to the white-gloved hands, busy with an unruly lock that would not stay ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... was most placid and beautiful, and the water wonderfully clear. Unlike rivers elsewhere, the Arinos did not show a branch or a twig floating on its waters, not a leaf on its mirror-like surface. That did not mean that branches of trees—sometimes even whole trees—did not fall into the river, but, as I have stated already, the specific gravity of woods in that part of Brazil was so heavy ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... explained to him, while picking up the pieces of the mirror, that the pretty little song of Queen Hortense had become a national air, and even an official one, since the regimental bands had substituted that gentle melody for the fierce 'Marseillaise'; and that our soldiers, strange to say, had not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... trained nurse, the product of modern science, could have been more efficient than the instinct of affection had made Angela. And then the patient's temper was so amiable, her mind, undimmed after eighty-three years of life, was a mirror of God. She thought of her fellow-creatures with a Divine charity; she worshipped her Creator with an implicit faith. For her in many a waking vision the heavens opened and the spirits of departed saints descended from their abode in bliss to hold converse ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... taking his eyes from the spot far down in the valley; and soon the little mirror was flashing out its question over the vale. After a few anxious moments the answering gleam sprang to life among the trees far below. Agar gave a quick little sigh ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... had tried to be just as imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended with all ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... post, and is even favourable to the idea of an empire, until the feeling that he is despised as a politician estranges him from the Prince-President, and resentment at the coup d'etat drives him into the camp of the extreme Republicans. His life may be said to mirror the political movements of France during the first half of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;—each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,—its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror;—and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare,—himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... as we stand together," he said to Baird on an evening when they stood side by side within range of an old-fashioned mirror. "Those things your reflection represents show me the things I was born without. I might make my life a daily crucifixion of self-denial and duty done at all costs, but I could not wear your smile or speak with your voice. I am a man, too," with smothered passion; "I am a man, too! And yet—what ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was arranging her hair before her father's mirror, she saw, in the glass, the old man stoop and take something from the waste-basket. Turning his back to her, he ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... splendid civilization, what is it but a sparkling ripple in the calm eternity of God? Dwellings, stores, banks, churches, streets, and the restless multitudes, are but forms of life,—as it were a rack of cloud drifting across the mirror of absolute being. That which seems to you substantial is only spectral. And as the dress of the fop, and the smile of the coquette, is merely an appearance; so the wealth for which men strain in eager chase, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... down on the bed's edge, the candle trembling in her hand. Then, slowly, she turned her head and looked over her shoulder, moving cautiously, until her fascinated eyes found the glass behind her. The mirror hung there reflecting the flowered wall opposite; a corner of the bed; ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... medicine I used will never last. Most likely he will be as black as ever when he wakes up in the morning—that's one reason why I didn't like to leave the mirror with him. But then again, he MIGHT stay white—I had never used that mixture before. To tell the truth, I was surprised, myself, that it worked so well. But I had to do something, didn't I?—I couldn't possibly scrub the King's kitchen for the rest of my life. ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... something more than the ballot-box, whether in male or female hands, is needed here. And it is the same in social life. The public prints, under a free press, must always hold up a tolerably faithful mirror to the society about them. The picture it displays is no better in social life than in political life. We say the mirror is tolerably faithful, since there are heights of virtue and depths of sin alike unreflected by the daily press. The very purest and the very foulest elements of earthly existence ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... concur with the common reader, for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The "Churchyard" abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas, beginning "Yet even these bones," are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place, yet he that reads them ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... was quickened upon our being told that the handsome sideboard had belonged to the Byrd family. It is believed to be a Hepplewhite, though similar in lines to a rare design of Sheraton's. Above the sideboard a circular, concave mirror of elaborate eighteenth century type accentuates the period furnishing of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... a painted-framed mirror over the wash-stand. The glass was greenish in hue and wavy in lines, but it looked like a reflector and so it remained in position. An enameled basin and earthen jug did duty for toilet purposes. The plain deal chairs were decorated with crocheted ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... welaway is mine heart wo, That the honour of English Tongue is dead; Of which I wont was counsaile haue and reed: O Master dere, and Fadre reuerent: My Master Chaucer Floure of Eloquence, Mirror of fructuous entendement: O vniuersal fadre of Science: Alas that thou thine excellent Prudence In thy Bed mortal mightest not bequeath. What eyl'd Death, alas why would she the fle? O Death, thou didst ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... nothing else, we might still lay down our pen with pride and satisfaction: but they have done more, much more; and while they have amused the reader, they have improved the service: they have held up in their characters a mirror, in which those who have been in error may see their own deformity, and many hints which have been given have afterwards returned to the thoughts of those who have had an influence, have been considered as their own ideas, and have been acted upon. The conduct of Captain ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... York—October of the year 1844—Mr. Nathaniel P. Willis who was then editor of The Evening Mirror, and had been editor of The Dollar Magazine, when it awarded the prize of a hundred dollars to "The Gold Bug," was seated at his desk in the "Mirror" office, when in response to his "Come in," a stranger appeared in his doorway—a woman—a lady in the best sense of a word almost become obsolete. A gentlewoman describes her best of all. She was a gentlewoman, then, past middle age, yet beautiful with the high type ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... and groves and herds of cattle were seen reposing in the grey dawn of midnight, as in a moonlight without shadow. The whole wide canopy of Heaven shed its reflex light upon them, like a pure crystal mirror. No sharp points, no petty details, no hard contrasts—every object was seen softened yet distinct, in its simple outline and natural tones, transparent with an inward light, breathing its own mild lustre. The landscape altogether was ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... old-fashioned staircase, past the wainscoted walls, dark and shining like a mirror, down a long narrow passage with many doors, which but for their gleaming brass handles one would not have known were there, the oldest of the three old servants led little Griselda, so tired and sleepy that her supper had been left almost untasted, to the room ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... a blaze of summer sunshine. The place reeked with heat like a furnace. The smooth sea reflected the glare like a mirror; the white houses dazzled the eyes, and sent fiery darts of pain through them to the brain. The harbour showed no sign of life, the sentinel at the castle nodded at his post, and his excellency the ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... open face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are transformed into the same image ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... them sit up," purred Peachy, setting a curl straight with the aid of her pocket-mirror. "It will be frightfully hard to keep still, for I shall just want to stare round and see their faces, but don't alarm yourselves. I promise not to give so much as a blink. I wouldn't disgrace our stunt for ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... difference between him and the vanished Roger Merton save those eye-glasses and a little hair dye. That was my own face, and my own hair, and, I presumed, my own natural latent idiocy blinking behind those glasses. I turned away from the mirror with mingled feelings. ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... Out of sight of thine own years! In thy mirror, gleaming bright, Glimpse of distant ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... surmounted it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to straighten or alter in his own studied attire, but she had never known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particular mirror. ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Balder's grove, Strandless breaks and hisses, The sun is up, but bay and cove Mirror ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... Calvin took a middle course between Luther and Zwingli,—believing neither in the actual presence of Christ in the consecrated bread, nor regarding it as a mere symbol, but a means by which divine grace is imparted; a mirror in which we may contemplate Christ. Baptism he considered only as an indication of divine grace, and not essential to salvation; thereby differing from Luther and the Catholic church. Yet he was as strenuous in maintaining these sacraments as a Catholic priest, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord |
