"Opaline" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and commonest of all the seven varieties of opal is somewhat after the shape of a kidney (reniform), or other irregular shape, occasionally almost transparent, but more often somewhat translucent, and very often opaque. This seventh class is called "menilite," being really an opaline form of quartz, originally found at Menilmontant, hence its name (Menil, and Greek lithos, stone). It is a curious blue on the exterior of ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... grew silent and thoughtful, as he sat there by Sylvia's side, looking out through the glazed gallery outside upon the spring foliage along the Embankment, the opaline river, and the shot towers and buildings on the opposite bank glowing warm brown against an ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... fad those butterflies are among you lovely ladies," he said to Mrs. Habersham. "But yours are paler than most of them, more opaline. Why?" ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... blacking—which can do much, but, alas! not all things—can make them. His expenditure of a penny will entitle him not only to a cup of coffee, as aforesaid, but also to a glass of fresh water, which has been turned to an opaline color by the shaking into it of a few drops of something which the waiter drops from a bottle with some contrivance at its mouth, the effect of which is to cause only a drop or two of the liquor, whatever it may be, to come out at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... a clear yellow glass, which loses its color upon cooling, and when containing much oxide can be rendered dull under an intermittent flame. With a still larger addition of oxide it becomes opaline yellow on cooling. ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... and warm in the east, while yet the sun's light lingered over the wilderness. Beautiful flowers shone white and pink and yellow in the opaline light of the evening; and 'Tana mechanically plucked a few that touched her as she passed, but she gave little notice to their beauty. All her thought was on the slender footprint of the man in the woods, and ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... glitter of that mosaic; and the small white windows of the dome gained such luminous blues and pale gold glints, from sky without and opal gleams within, that they were changed to stars. The pavement was opaline, too, with a thousand elusive tints and jewelled colours, waving like the sea. It was all I could do not to touch Mr. Barrymore's arm ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... temperature of the softening of glass. When, however, the tube containing the boron becomes raised to the temperature, boron sulphide condenses in the portion of the tube adjacent to the heated portion; at first it is deposited in a state of fusion, and the globules on cooling present an opaline aspect. Further along the tube it is slowly deposited in a porcelain like form, while further still the sublimate of sulphide takes the form of brilliant acicular crystals. The crystals consist of pure B{2}S{3}; the vitreous modification, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... Ilium" of Nadaud's peasant bear the palm. That first view of Carcassonne as we approach it in the railway of itself repays a long and tedious journey. A vision rather than reality, structure of pearly clouds in mid-heaven, seems that opaline pile lightly touched with gold. We expect it to evaporate at evenfall! Vanish it does not, nor wholly bring disillusion, so fair and harmonious are the vistas caught in one circuit of the citadel, mere matter ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... tables where people drank tea and fed the strutting pigeons. Beyond the bubbly domes shimmered a panorama of beauty which by force of its magnificence redeemed the frivolous fairyland from vulgarity, rather than rebuked it. Under the rain of rose and gold, as if seen through opaline gauze, shone sea and hills and distant mountains. On a green height a ruined castle and its vassal rock-village seemed to have fallen from the top and been arrested by some miracle halfway down. Beneath, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the luminous atmosphere of that brilliant day, which threw a golden veil over all its churches, statues, and ruins. Before they had gone far on their homeward ride, all things passed through magical changes. The hills were seen in vapory visions, shifting their hues with opaline glances; and over the green, billowy surface of the broad Campagna was settling a prismatic robe of mist, changing from rose to violet. Earth seemed to be writing, in colored notes, with tenderest modulations, her farewell hymn to the departing God of Light. And the visible music ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... the flaring flame of that element, in which many a sorrowful heart, in its agony, seems to find a parallel of the torture it endures, and to find a saddened pleasure in the contemplation. But at last the watcher turned to his rude couch, and only the radiance of the lamp, diffused through the opaline walls of the hut, gave evidence of the presence of human beings in that desolate, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... room was dim and apparently deserted. Drawn blinds obscured the lucid summer night behind the three windows opposite the door. One small electric globe hung lit under its opaline veil in the corner by the end window ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... breathlessly following her every movement, she suddenly started, seemed to listen for a moment, and then cleaving the brilliant ether in which she was floating, like a flash of light, pierced through the opaline forest, and disappeared. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... text "Isfidaj," the Pers. Isped (or Safed) ab, lit. white water, ceruse used for women's faces suggesting our "Age of Bismuth," Blanc Rosati, Creme de l'Imperatrice, Perline, Opaline, Milk ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... simulated some strange florescence splotched with pearly white and brilliant vermilion. There were rock mullet, too, with delicious flesh, flushed with the pinky tinge peculiar to the Cyprinus family; boxes of whiting with opaline reflections; and baskets of smelts—neat little baskets, pretty as those used for strawberries, and exhaling a strong scent of violets. And meantime the tiny black eyes of the shrimps dotted as with beads of jet their ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... on; and what a show, if we will but give our attention! Barbecues, bonfires, and banners? Not twenty worlds a minute would keep up our bonfire of the sun; and what banners of our fancy could eclipse the meteor pennants of the pole, or the opaline splendors of the everlasting ice? . . . Doubtless we are ostensibly progressing, but there have been prosperity and highjinks before. Nineveh and Tyre, Rome, Spain, and Venice also had their day. We are going, but it is a question of our standing the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... microscope, he was completing with infinite care the preparation of a vial of his liquor. Since the day before, after pounding the nerve substance of a sheep in distilled water, he had been decanting and filtering it. And he had at last obtained a small bottle of a turbid, opaline liquid, irised by bluish gleams, which he regarded for a long time in the light as if he held in his hand the regenerating blood and ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... might have been, since Pliny speaks of murrha as "hardened in the earth by heat," and the poet may only have meant the same thing, though the expression in that case would be somewhat strained. To us, Pliny's description appears to clearly point to some opaline substance; the precious opal has never in modern times been found in masses approaching to the size necessary to make vessels such as we have spoken of. The question is not likely to be settled, and it ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... past. In one generation, almost, we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... August the hills become iridescent, opaline with the translucent yellow of the aspen, the coral and crimson of the fire-weed, the blood-red of huckleberry beds, and the royal purple of the asters, while flowing round all, as solvent and neutral setting, lies the gray-green of the ever-present and ever-enduring sage-brush. ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... and putting on some slight bandages, he declared that it was time now to get out of this wilderness of horrors. He communicated with Ala, and in a few minutes we were speeding, at a high elevation, toward the land of the opaline dome. So far above the morasses we no longer heard the brute voices of its terrible inhabitants, nor saw the swaying of the branches as they looked about in ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... manifest itself. I knew not when it came, but as I looked, the spot had found a tenant. The small, transparent paws of the Singing Mouse displayed no shadow as they waved and swung across this pencil of the pale, mysterious light. Yet its eyes shone opaline and brilliant as it sat, so that I could hardly gaze without a shiver of surprise akin to fear, fascinated as though I looked upon a thing unreal. Thus surrounded, almost one might say thus penetrated, by the translucent shaft of radiance which came through ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough |
