"Iridescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... obligation which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the objective fulfilment of its founder's intention in it. At any rate, in March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful "familiar letters" concerning the Escorial ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... When all the chromatophores are dilated, a dark color will predominate; when they are contracted, the skin becomes lighter in color. Besides the pigment-cells just described, Heincke discovered another kind of chromatophore, which was filled with iridescent crystals. They were only visible, as spots of metallic lustre, when the cells were in a state of contraction. He observed these latter chromatophores in a fish belonging to Gobius, the classical name of which is Gobius ruthensparri.[94] ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... wonderful pageant, caught the many hues as they dropped from heaven, and tossed them on high in joyous, iridescent waves. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... the right sort of place to train a boy in. Surround him with beautiful things, make a real perception of beauty the beacon light of his life, when he is young, and he will be safe. For there are so many things that are beautiful and poisonous like iridescent fungi, and it is so hard to differentiate between the true and the false. But everything here is so pure and unworldly that I think we manage to show our boys what is the highest. We fail at times, but on ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... as bidden, Quickly brought the lighted tapers, Made the suitor's eyeballs glisten, Made his cheeks look fresh and ruddy; Eyes were neither blue nor sable, Sparkled like the foam of waters, Like the reed-grass on the margin, Colored as the ocean-jewels, Iridescent as ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Claude and the Virginian and the Marine were up very early, standing in the bow, watching the Anchises mount the fresh blowing hills of water, her prow, as it rose and fell, always a dull triangle against the glitter. Their escorts looked like dream ships, soft and iridescent as shell in the pearl-coloured tints of the morning. Only the dark smudges of smoke told that they were mechanical realities with ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... west was pitch black except for the iridescent twinkle of the fiery stars which studded that section of the heavens. As he watched, a faint glow suffused the western sky, gradually growing brighter, the full moon majestically lifted itself above the horizon, casting its pale, ethereal radiance upon the dying world beneath. It was ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... at an attractive illustration of an immense butterfly, with wings of iridescent blue and green. He could not stay, but he left the cherished volume ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Wady Simkh (of "Wild Sumach"), that drains the great gap between the Pinnacles and the Buttresses of the 'Urnub-Tihmah section. After riding some two miles, we found to the south-east fragments of dark, iridescent, and metallic quartz: they emerge from the plain like walls, bearing north-south, with 36 degrees of westing and a westward dip of 15 degrees to 20 degrees—exactly the conditions which Australia seeks, and which produced the huge "Welcome Nugget" of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... extraordinary number of miniature jugs. Jugs, jugs everywhere, and nothing but jugs; blue jugs, yellow jugs, brown jugs, red jugs; Worcester jugs with delicate white figures against a background of blue; jugs worth a penny sterling at the village emporium; plain jugs, iridescent jugs; jugs with one handle, with two, with three, with none at all. Their variety was as puzzling as their number, but Rhoda gazed at them with all the pride of the collector. "Jugs"—unrivalled by postcards, stamps, ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... into the hollow along the bed of the brook, till the valley was filled with thick mist and every leaf and twig dripped with moisture. Through the mist the dawn broke pearly gray at first and then iridescent; and, when the first sunrays penetrated the white haze and gilded every leaf-edge, turning the tree-tops to gold and making every waterdrop a diamond, no lovelier ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... intentions, as contrasts and affinities grow sharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modifications in the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour must needs have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the forces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of society make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, the forces that bring together the really functional people will tend more and more ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it. All things here are of a weird convertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on the port tack, under everything that we could set, to her royals; but the wind was so scant that even the light upper sails flapped and rustled monotonously to the sleepy heave and roll of the ship, and it was only by glancing through a port at the small, iridescent air-bubbles that drifted astern at the rate of about a knot and a half in the hour that we were able to detect the fact of our own forward movement at all. We had been on deck just an hour—for two bells had barely been struck— when the first faint suggestion ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... of red, rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad, unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent glass that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again, they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes and valleys, ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... never anything like this. He put his hand down into the molten sea and scooped up handfuls of what seemed drops of liquid fire. And as his fingers dipped into the water they shone like rods of red-hot iron. Over the gleaming iridescent surface, sparks of fire darted like lightning, and from the little boat's sides flashed out flames of gold and rose and amber. It was grand. And no wonder they all joined—Chinese, Malayan, and Canadian—in making the dark cliffs and the gleaming sea echo ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... colouring that a summer's mid-morning throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue, iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all colour save one all-pervading sense ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and canyon and mountain, was a bright opalescent mist. Green, pink, and other pale colors gleamed as behind a thin layer of crystal. Where the sun shone through a low white cloud upon a distant slope there might have been a great globe of iridescent glass illuminated within. The water was a light, soft, filmy yet translucent blue. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... the leafy hills and listless vales Of iridescent Autumn—this the oak Against whose lichened bole I leant and looked Away the sunny hours of afternoon. Here are the bitter-sweet and elder sprays I fingered, dreaming to the muted flow Of breezes overhead—and ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... outward curve and indentation of the soft red shelving bank! how well he knew the colouring of the cool scene in the rising day, the iridescent light upon the lapping waves, the glistening of the jasper red of the damp beach, and the earthen pinks of the upper cliffs! The sea birds with low pathetic note called out to him concerning their memories of the first dawn in which ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking grasses; then the thing shuddered, and fell over into the black ooze of the bog. Little bubbles of iridescent air appeared from the mud; the bones were slowly engulfed, and, as the last fragments sank out of sight, up from the depths and along the bank crept a creature, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... they are prophesying all sorts of a roseate and iridescent future for you. One might almost imagine that the prophets are inspired by that kind of gratitude which is a lively ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... attachment to the piano and he can adjust it to get the air of his choice without having to ask any one to play for him. In the drawing-room an electric fountain may be playing, its jets reflecting the prismatic colors of the rainbow as the waters fall in iridescent sparkle among the lights. Such a fountain is composed of a small electric motor and a centrifugal pump, the latter being placed in the interior of a basin and connected directly to the motor shaft. The ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... turned out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... enjoyment that the sound material affords. To such listeners, a comparatively meaningless succession of tones and chords is sufficiently enjoyable, so long as each separate particle, each beat or measure, is euphonious in itself. The other class, more discriminating in its tastes, looks beneath this iridescent surface and strives to fathom the underlying purpose of it all; not content with the testimony of the ear alone, such hearers enlist the higher, nobler powers of Reason, and no amount of pleasant sounds could compensate them for the absence of well-ordered ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... much more slender, viz., the Dryophis acuminata. This grows to a length of four feet eight inches, the tail alone being twenty-two inches; but the diameter of the thickest part of the body is little more than a quarter of an inch. It is of light-brown colour, with iridescent shades variegated with obscurer markings, and looks like a piece of whipcord. One individual which I caught of this species had a protuberance near the middle of the body. Upon opening it, I found a half-digested lizard which was much more ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... then, it cannot be doubted that several symbolic motives are inwoven into the iridescent fabric of the play. But it is a great mistake to regard it as essentially and inseparably a piece of symbolism. Essentially it is a history of a sickly conscience, worked out in terms of pure psychology. Or rather, it is a study of a sickly ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... Toulouse continues to be charming; the more so that it merges its flatness in the distant Cevennes on one side, and on the other, far away on your right, in the richer range of the Pyrenees. Olives and cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces on the roofs of houses, soft, iridescent mountains, a warm yellow light—what more could the difficult tourist want? He left his luggage at the station, warily determined to look at the inn before committing himself to it. It was so evident (even to a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... shown specimens of the mineral which he had to seek. These were a few small lumps of shining stone—some being blue in colour and some yellow. In others both colours were present. When freshly broken, the blue specimens were beautifully iridescent, and showed tints such as are seen in the peacock's tail. Upon arriving at the headquarter military kraal next morning, he mustered his regiment, and found it to be about four hundred and fifty strong (effective). There were several hundred more at the kraal, but they ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... and fro in every direction, unconsciously vying with each other to attract the eye of the onlooker. The pure blue of the Lake, with its emerald ring and varying shades of color, added to by the iridescent gleam that possesses the surface when it is slightly rippled by a gentle breeze, contrasting with the active, vivid, moving boats of differing sizes, splashed with every conceivable color by the hats and costumes of the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... rush aloft, starring the black void with iridescent fire; and everybody went to the lawn's edge where, below on the bay, a dozen motor-boats, dressed fore and aft with necklaces of electric lights, crossed the line at the crack of a cannon in a race for ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Perched upon the summit—quite near the north pole—was an insect, a wasp, much smaller than the egg itself. And as I looked, I saw it at the climax of its diminutive life; for it reared up, resting on the tips of two legs and the iridescent wings, and sunk its ovipositor deep into the crystalline surface. As I watched, an egg was deposited, about the latitude of New York, and with a tremor the tiny wasp withdrew ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... with the October coloring. The oak in regal purple stood outlined against the beech in cloth-of-gold, while green-flecked hickory and elm, and iridescent silver and scarlet ash, and flaming maple added to the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... trees of the park, and seen remarkably well from the wide veranda of Mrs. Wilder's bungalow, where the guests sat after a long dinner, remarking upon the heat and oppressiveness of the tropic night. The fire-flies danced over the trees like iridescent sparks hung on invisible gauze, and even came into the lighted drawing-room, to sparkle with less radiance against the plain white walls. Fans whirred round and round like large tee-totums set near the ceiling, and even the electric ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Hare, who was neither, could just see Mary over the top of it. About it were four tall vases of cut roses, two of white, two of red. Button-holes in white and red lay at three covers, gigantic American Beauties, red, with flowing white ribbons, at two. And napery, silver, iridescent glass, all the materialities, were well worthy of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... from the horizon to the zenith and bade fair to cover the whole vault of heaven. An undulating vapor of molten metal seemed pouring down on the roofs of the town; and in the descending crepuscule yellow and violet rays flashed through a trembling and iridescent glow. One long streak brighter than the others pointed towards a street which opened on the river-front, and at the end of this street the water flamed away between the tall slim poplar-trunks, and beyond the stream lay a strip of luxuriant ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... islet is a medley of comminuted shells. We collected cowries of four kinds, large and small, crabs and balani, lobsters and sea-urchins (erinacei) with short spines; diminutive rock-oysters and a large variety with iridescent mother-o'-pearl, pink, red and yellow. The latter yields a white seed-pearl, and here, perhaps, we might attempt ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... any of his other works. They are fresh and untrammeled in their development, and as full of sunlight as the nocturnes are of darkness. The one in A flat major was dedicated to the Countess de Loban as a wedding present, and was a farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby" impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the hypnotic ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, tawdry sweep ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... bird is no great distance. Then the Wood-pigeon's iridescent hues, the eyes on the Peacock's tail, the Kingfisher's sea-blue, the Flamingo's carmine are more or less closely connected with the urinary excretions? Why not? Nature, that sublime economist, delights in these vast antitheses which upset all our conceptions ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... chair and looked out to where the fountain was flinging its iridescent drapery to the wind. She gazed at his strong, clean-cut profile in ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... over to ourself, and are stricken with the most perfect iridescent sorrow. We even ransack our memory to try to think of someone who has been ungrateful to us, so that we can throw a little vigorous bitterness ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... shell most in vogue among Fuegian belles for neck adornment is a pearl oyster (Margarita violacea) of an iridescent purplish colour, and about half an inch in diameter. It is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... with his plumage. His dark brown head fairly shone, his sable breast and back grew glossy, and his wings took on faint, changing tints of purple and blue. His jet rudder, daily dressed to its iridescent tip by his ebony beak, was flicked jauntily as he strode around on his long black legs. And all this alert, engaging beauty won the friendship of the farm-house, including even that of the little girl's big brothers, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... arcade of loggias and by every window of the palace facade which was the crowning glory of the villa. The amethystine Sabine Hills and the immense Campagna encircle the Eternal City, from whose mists the dome of Saint Peter's seems to rise a buoyant, iridescent bubble. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... and me, were in proper conjunction. Then he flashed, and only then. But the flashes were more brilliant than the rainbow—purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond, dazzling, blinding, iridescent. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... heavens! Who was playing! The unison passages that mount and recede were iridescent columns of mist painted by the moonlight and swaying rhythmically in the breeze. Here was something rare. No longer conscious of the technical side of the playing, so spiritualized was it, so crystalline the touch, Davos forgot his manners ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... but of every conceivable green, or rather of hues ranging from pale yellow through all greens into cobalt blue; and as the wind stirs the leaves, and sweeps the lights and shadows over hill and glen, all is ever-changing, iridescent, like a peacock's neck; till the whole island, from peak to shore, seems some glorious jewel—an emerald with tints of sapphire and topaz, hanging between blue sea and white surf below, and blue sky and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... completed. The rotted mantels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines, and the panelling above them was extremely good. So was the delicate fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass still clings, iridescent now like oil on water. Under the eaves the carpenter had indulged in a Greek border, and over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collapsing roof, you see what is left of an axe embedded in a pile ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... so," said Hester, tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasized by a long clerical coat and a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... every idea is called up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in the field I'll see Phoebe to-day:" to such considerations does a man turn after contemplation of his soul. On seeing a couple of magpies, the white and black of their plumage showing silver and iridescent green in the sun as they swooped over the field, he took steps to justify the omen by setting off across the moors in quest ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... about them, and, like the imponderables, seemed to act on one's being without passing through the senses. Sometimes one thought one heard the joyous tripping of some amorously- teasing Peri; sometimes there were modulations velvety and iridescent as the robe of a salamander; sometimes one heard accents of deep despondency, as if souls in torment did not find the loving prayers necessary for their final deliverance. At other times there breathed forth from his fingers ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... fell from the trees in tiny shining globules of iridescent light, close by him an owl fluttered in a tangle of branches, uttering its dreadful cry of joy as ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... 2. Glass plain (iridescent from decay), ribbed, or moulded, in great variety of forms-bowls, jugs, cups, &c. Mostly late Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine, and especially common and of fine quality ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an iridescent bubble suspended ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... flower-crowned faces set in the amphitheatre of jet, and vast shadows dropped upon the high-flung tiers and shrouded them. But on the skirts of the rays the fretted stalls in which we sat with the fair-haired ones blazed out, iridescent, like jewels. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... and bright as the sun on the desert; we know that the Greeks made their Parian marble glow in rainbow tints; Moorish architecture was nothing if not colorful, and the Venice Ruskin loved was fairly iridescent—a thing of fire-opal and pearl. In Italian Renaissance architecture up to its latest phase, the color element was always present; but it was snuffed out under the leaden colored northern skies. Paris is grey, London is brown, New York is white, and Chicago the color of cinders. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wonderfully and purely white. Saturn, distinct among all the heavenly bodies, throbbed with a van-colored changing glow like a bulbous opal, and about it, with a strange shimmer, visibly swirled its iridescent rings. ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... said, "even in Florence, the sky is too high. At Venice it is everywhere; it caresses the earth and the water. It envelops lovingly the leaden domes and the marble facades, and throws into the iridescent atmosphere its pearls and its crystals. The beauty of Venice is in its sky and its women. What pretty creatures the Venetian women are! Their forms are so slender and supple under their black shawls. If nothing remained of these women except a bone, one would find in that bone the charm ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... reason, her dearest bit of vanity. The tint of the clear iris suggested sea shallows on a day of light cloud—more green than blue; yet with just enough of the sky's own colour to lend the charm of a constant variability, that harmonised admirably with her iridescent changes ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantasmagoria of splendor, "the magic-lantern of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind, but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far shore, where the villages were groups ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... knows best in dreams, lazily, idly, and yet with purpose and resolve. She was swinging far above the pain, the rebellion, the surrender. That was left for ever; the time of her tears, of her loneliness was over. Above her, yet distant, was a golden cloud, soft, iridescent, and in the heart of this lay, she knew, the solution of the mystery; when she reached it the puzzle would be resolved, and in a wonderful tranquillity she could rest after her journey. Nearer and nearer she swung; the cloud was a blaze of gold so that she must not look, but could feel ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... iron speedily corrode to nothingness in this damp and saline air. Unwittingly the blacks handed down specimens of their handicraft—the pearl shell fish-hooks, a thousand times more durable in this climate than hooks of steel. Geologists tell us that shells with iridescent colours are found in clays of such ancient date that if stated in centuries an indefinite number of millions would have to be assigned to them. It is not strange, then, that some of my pearl shell hooks are as lustrous and sharp to-day as when the careless ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... pigment in the substance of the feathers, but upon the way the light strikes them. It is the same with the beautiful tints we see on a soap-bubble. The film of water itself is colorless, but it becomes iridescent. You might divide all the colors of birds into two classes—those that depend upon pigments in the feathers, and those that depend upon the play of ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine—for they were soft and smooth, and every feather lay neatly in its place. And the feathers were of the most lovely mixed changing colors, like the rainbow, or iridescent glass, or the beautiful scum that sometimes floats on water that is not at ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... graced the entrance-way—a purely Grecian pile—he stood upon a broad esplanade paved with polished stone; around him a restless exclamatory multitude, in gayest colors, relieved against the iridescent spray flying crystal-white from fountains; before him, off to the southwest, dustless paths radiated out into a garden, and beyond that into a forest, over which rested a veil of pale-blue vapor. Ben-Hur gazed wistfully, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... cannot anywhere see a lovelier piece of Giottesque colour, though here you have to mourn over the smallness of the piece, and its isolation. For the face of St. Francis himself is repainted, and all the blue sky; but the clouds and four sustaining angels are hardly retouched at all, and their iridescent and exquisitely graceful wings are left with really very tender and delicate care by the restorer of the sky. And no one but Giotto or ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Collectively they weigh just a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish. Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler" for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the grayling is ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the dull, iridescent, rope-like thing with the toe of his boot, raised a straw hat in ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... at finding scraps of iridescent glass lachrymals, containing all the glories of Persian magnificence, while pathetically hinting of the tears of a Roman woman (precious only to herself, whatever her flatterers might aver) two ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... but empty. Some tables had been set for cards, but the cards were untouched. Either the attractions of the ballroom had remained omnipotent, or no one had penetrated to this refuge of the bored—no one save this tall and stately woman robed in shimmering, iridescent green, who stood with her face to the night, breathing the chill air as one who had been on the verge of suffocation. It was evidently she who had flung up the window. Her gloved hands leaned upon the woodwork ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... wary trout, hinted at in the last sketch, is to be further illustrated in this and some following chapters. We shall get at more of the meaning of those dark water-lines, and I hope, also, not entirely miss the significance of the gold and silver spots and the glancing iridescent hues. The trout is dark and obscure above, but behind this foil there are wondrous tints that reward the believing eye. Those who seek him in his wild remote haunts are quite sure to get the full force of the sombre and uninviting aspects,—the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... was going to eat, provided she got them and they were good. Besides, it would be like finding an old lost friend to look into her mirror (it was cracked and turned one's complexion pale green, with iridescent spots; but that was a detail) and see a bare-necked, white-armed ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... may so closely belong to this basis that it helps it along. Thus all that we know about dawn—not only of a summer morning—helps us to see, and seeing to rejoice, in Corot's silvery mist or Monet's iridescent shimmers. All that we know and feel about the patient majesty of labor in the fields, next the earth, helps us to get the slow, large rhythm, the rich gloom of Millet's pictures. But it is the rhythm and the gloom that are the beauty, and the idea ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo, now the man's philosophy has perished like a bubble, his influence has utterly disappeared, for his books are ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Breathe through my soul tonight, You in your gown, impossibly white— I marvel greatly that it fail To glow and pale With iridescent light— How can it hang in silent nun-like folds? Think of the flaming mystery it holds, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... soon would tangle your line in the roots or break your rod in the alders. But all the time they are fighting against each other, making it easy to bring them up to the net and land them—a pair of beauties, evenly matched in weight and in splendour, gleaming with rich iridescent hues of orange and green and peacock-blue and crimson. A few feet beyond you find another, a smaller fish, and then one a little larger; and so you go on up the stream, threading the boat through the alders, with patience and infinite ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... it gets the effect of the thing—faith, sirs, it's right on to the end of it every time! The writing of some folk is nothing but a froth of words—lucky if it glistens without, like a blobber of iridescent foam. But in this sketch there's a perception at the back of every sentence. It displays, indeed, too nervous a sense ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... XI. PHYSICS.—Iridescent Crystals.—By LORD RAYLEIGH.—An abstract of a lecture by the distinguished physicist, detailing some interesting experiments applicable to the colored reflection observed in crystals of chloride of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... bashful Violet's tremulous head; While from her bud the playful Tulip breaks, And young Carnations peep with blushing cheeks; Bid the closed Petals from nocturnal cold 450 The virgin Style in silken curtains fold, Shake into viewless air the morning dews, And wave in light their iridescent hues; While from on high the bursting Anthers trust To the mild breezes their prolific dust; 455 Or bend in rapture o'er the central Fair, Love out their hour, and leave their lives in air. So in his silken sepulchre the Worm, Warm'd ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... of Arthur for the mystic, the supernatural, was understood by his wife. Here was frosty music, dazzling music, in which the spangled North, with its iridescent auroras, its snow-driven soundless seas and its arctic cold, were imagined by this woman. She quickly discerned the Sun theme and the theme of the Shadow, and alternately blushed and wept at the wonderfully sympathetic tonal transposition of her idea. That this slight thing should have ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent, standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk, the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks, sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... attended by four extraordinary sun-dogs. A large bright halo encompassed him, on the top of which the segment of a larger circle rested, forming a sort of heavy brilliant crown. At the bottom of the circle, and depending from it, was a mass of soft, glowing, iridescent vapor. On either side, like fragments of the larger circle, were two brilliant arcs. Altogether, it was the most portentous storm-breeding sun I ever beheld. In a dark hemlock wood in a valley, the owls were hooting ominously, and the crows dismally cawing. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... probably not have been worth mentioning, except as a novelty, if they had come from oysters alone. The Virginia oyster pearl lacks luster. But the mussel, particularly the one found in the James river, yields an iridescent pearl of some ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... was, by the way, because she's still living. But there's something—I don't know; it's rather difficult to explain—But you know how pouring champagne into a glass makes it froth up into a million iridescent little bubbles? Well, there was none of that in our married life. There was no fizz in it, no sparkle, no taste, phew! The days were all one color—flat and stale and gray as the devil. And that's why I wanted to get away and forget. You can't forget unless you play. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... like the jewel on the breast of dawn: Not though high heaven should rend would deeper awe Fill me than penetrates my spirit thus, Nor all those signs the Patmian prophet saw Seem a new heaven and earth so marvelous; But, clad thenceforth in iridescent dyes, The fair world glistens, and in after days The memory of kind lips and laughing eyes Lives in my step and lightens all my face, — So they who found the Earthly Paradise Still breathed, returned, of that sweet, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... plates (p, Fig. 9), of which there are about twenty or thirty on each band; and these vibrate very rapidly, so that two hundred or more paddles drive the tiny ball through the water. This is the cause of the prismatic colors; for iridescent tints are produced by the play of light upon the glittering plates, as they incessantly change their angle. Sometimes they move all at once, sometimes only a few at a time, and it is evident the creature controls them ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... greatly augmented purity of the water. A second specimen of water, taken from the Bay of Biscay, held in suspension fine particles of a peculiar kind; the size of them was such as to render the water richly iridescent. It showed itself green, blue, or salmon-coloured, according to the direction of the line of vision. Finally, we come to our last two bottles, the one taken opposite St. Catherine's lighthouse, in the Isle of Wight, the other at Spithead. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... early morning when we set out, disdaining our trim "Tree-with-Wings" from the deck of which Triplett watched our short three-mile swim across the still water. At every stroke flocks of iridescent dew-fish rose about us uttering their brittle note, "Klicketty-inkle! Klicketty-inkle!" [Footnote: One of the pleasantest sights imaginable is that of the natives gathering these little creatures as they rise to the surface at dawn. The dew-fish or ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... that of Lavinia D. Wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our age, the London Crystal Palace of 1851—his father having lately gone out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was eight years old and my brother scarce more ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... faint answer, to reflect every passing mood of cloud and sky, even to hold the little clouds as a mother might, upon its deep and tender bosom. There were lily-pads to look after, too, bird-shadows and iridescent dragon flies, sunset lights to deepen and spread afar, and, at night, all the starry hosts of heaven to receive and give back, in luminous ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... he did regretfully pick up his cap and rifle, and call the dog, who turned protestingly from her-who-dispensed-savory-pieces-of-meat, he found that he had suffered the fate of all who hesitate, for a glance through the window showed him that, although the glowing, iridescent reflection from the western sky still lingered in the mountain top, embroidering its edge with gold, it was fast fading, and already Night had spread her dusky mantle over the eastern slope. Already darkness had blotted ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the iridescent wings of this chap," and Uncle Jeff pointed to a fine specimen. "I don't wonder the old Egyptians loved this creature and carved their scarabs in ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... a mischievous sly smile. "Yes, it is," she continued. "And, oh, Uncle Sey, where the restorer has—er—restored it, you know, it comes out in the photograph with a sort of brilliant iridescent ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... in one place; "buff or light brown," in another place; "chocolate-colored and silky to the touch and slightly iridescent"; "gray"; "red-rust color"; "reddish raindrops and gray sand"; "dirty gray"; "quite red"; "yellow-brown, with a tinge of pink"; ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... gathered ignorantly, is the source of the smell. We strew some leaves on the basin of a neighbouring fountain, and amuse ourselves by seeing them swim about as if they were bewitched, parting at the same time with a whitish fluid, which, spreading on the surface of the water, gives it an iridescent hue. The Fuchsia arborescens of Japan flowers here, they say, every month, just as we see him in all his pink luxuriance, and makes himself quite at home; and here is that little blue vegetable butterfly, the Polygala! Who can overlook his winged petals, peeping out of their myrtle-looking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... on the earth again she blinked and peered at the world in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved in substantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubbling iridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescent golden—could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancing surface on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface of golden light, velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strange beautiful elevations ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the last one you pass in the single street of the village, as you go to the woods. It is a gabled house with a slate roof, which takes iridescent tints in the sun like a pigeon's breast. The weather-vane above that roof has won more consideration for me among the country people than all my works upon history and philology. There is not a single child who does not know Monsieur Bonnard's ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... stones—but instinct had told her that even one would spoil the effect she wished to make to-night. She wore only a long rope of pearls, which would have suited a bride; and as she stood in the shadow of her bamboo temple, the pearls drank iridescent lights: green from the jade-coloured trees, pink from roses trailing over arbours, and gold from the California ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... emigrated," a Dublin novelist told us, "and the dreamers are left. The heads of the older ones are filled with poetry and legends; they see nothing as it is, but always through some iridescent-tinted medium. Their waking moments, when not tormented by hunger, are spent in heaven, and they all live in a dream, whether it be of the next world or of a revolution. Effort is to them useless, submission to everybody and ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... again," said to one another the gods. And looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger than a star shine beautifully but faintly, and up and up from it looking larger and larger came a flock of white, innumerable swans, singing and singing and singing, till ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... of water. It was coming from a tall fountain which was playing in the centre of the outer hall. Above it was a pendentive roof, richly carved and coloured. A suggestion of turquoise-blue and the gleam of iridescent tiles showed through the clear water in the octagonal basin set in the floor. The jets of water came from a large ball of blue faience resting on the top of a slender spiral column. The fountain was only one of the beautiful features of that ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... somewhere near the value of the five hundred and sixteen separate stones, one of which was of tremendous size, a very monarch of diamonds, holding its court among seventeen brilliants each as large as a filbert. This iridescent concentration of wealth was, as one might say, placed in my care, and I had to see to it that no harm came to the necklace or to its prospective owner until they were safely ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... that the little man had worn a brown sweater when they first met. But now, strangely enough, he was not in the least surprised to see it iridescent ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... that pierce the clouds floating along the range. At sunrise they cast immense shadows upon the mesa spreading westward from their base; and at sunset they reflect golden and purple glows upon the plain until the earth appears swimming in some iridescent sea of ether; while over them from dawn till dusk, traversed by a few fleecy clouds, lies the turquoise sky ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... sleek seacopter, its searchlight off to avoid detection, was plummeting downward through water that changed before their eyes from greenish blue to a deep-gray gloom. Iridescent fish darted past ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... white. She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the earth one may sometimes see a rusty deposit on the ground, and perhaps an iridescent scum upon the water. The scum is often mistaken for oil, but at a touch it cracks and breaks, as oil would not do. It is a film of hydrated iron oxide, or LIMONITE, and the spring is an iron, or chalybeate, spring. Compounds of iron have been taken into solution by ground ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... atmosphere; they caught gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple; took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color was always to be seen, a play of ever-shifting iridescent hues like those ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of a glaucous green showed themselves here and there, slippery and treacherous. Very calm, confident through experience that there was not the slightest danger, Tartarin walked along the verge of the crevasses with their smooth, iridescent sides stretching downward indefinitely, and made his way among the seracs, solely intent on keeping up with the Swedish student, an intrepid walker, whose long gaiters with their silver buckles marched, thin and lank, beside his alpenstock, which looked like a third leg. ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... which is of a softer nature, are such as Alcyonium and Pennatula. All these belong to the "class" Actinozoa. There are other coelenterates of an active free-swimming habit, such as Beroee and Cydippe, which are balls of glassy transparency displaying iridescent hues as they move rapidly through the water by means ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Joshua Reynolds and the founding of the Royal Society. Consider that the friends of Reynolds were of the circle of Doctor Johnson. Literary tradition had grown old. Then England had her beginning of landscape gardening. Later she saw the rise of Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their iridescent successors. Still to-day in England the average leading citizen matches word against word,—using them as algebraic formulas,—rather than picture against picture, when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves of his mind. To step into the Art world is to step out of the beaten path of ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... which we drew, not a convivial spirit, but rather a quiet, reflective gloom. All the shell shutters were drawn back; we could see the tin-roofed city gleam and crackle with the heat, and beyond the lithe line of cocoanuts, the iridescent sea, tugging the heart with offer of coolness. But, all of us, we knew the promise to be Fake, monumental Fake, knew the alluring depths to be hot as corruption, and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the head. The space between was covered and piled with Mark's kit: the socks, the pocket-handkerchiefs, the vests, the fine white pyjamas. The hanging white globes of the gaselier shone on them. All day Mary had been writing "M.E. Olivier, M.E. Olivier," in clear, hard letters, like print. The iridescent ink was grey on the white linen and lawn, black when you stamped with the hot iron: M.E. Olivier. Mamma was embroidering M.E.O. in crimson silk ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... to the ankles and girdled at the waist, its bosom a capacious pocket, the white and red striped cloak over the shoulders. She marked the material of which they were made, the shirt of selected Angora wool, the cloak of camel's hair, in its fineness iridescent and soft as velvet. She saw in the girdle an empty scabbard for a yatagan elaborately covered with brilliants. She saw on the head a kerchief of mixed silk and cotton, tasselled, heavily striated red and yellow, and secured by the usual cord; but ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... him; he was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it as they strolled in the winter sunshine on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains. He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted half a dozen stanzas to his companion. He was, as a general thing, very little of a reader; but at ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... at all. Jenny Wren was right. For the most part he was very dark green. At least, that is what Peter thought at first glance. Then, as the stranger moved, he seemed to be a rich purple in places. In short he changed color as he turned. His feathers were like those of Creaker the Grackle—iridescent. All over he was speckled with tiny light spots. Underneath he was dark brownish-gray. His wings and tail were of the same color, with little touches of buff. His ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... out to gaze upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the snow. The air is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove. The world lies about me in a "trance of snow." The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and seem the farthest possible remove from the condition of a storm,—the ghosts of clouds, the indwelling beauty freed from all dross. I see the hills, bulging with great drifts, lift themselves up cold and white against the sky, the black lines of fences here and there obliterated ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... never satisfied. He was always on the look-out for danger; and as they went on and on through the black galleries, where the iridescent tints of the shaley coal flecked with iron pyrites glittered and flashed in the dim light, he kept ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the arroyo, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not. That was his character, as she saw it, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer |
