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More "Iridescent" Quotes from Famous Books



... once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a 'kept' woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the 'kept' woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched the passage of the same expressions ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... to the size of wires at the bottom where they entered the stone, the condensed breathings of generations having settled there in pools and rusted them. The panes themselves had either lost their shine altogether or become iridescent as a peacock's tail. In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an old ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy

... concern is the result of a One-Man Power. Cooeperation, technically, is an iridescent dream—things cooeperate because the man makes them. He cements them by ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... graylings to my own rod. 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 eating fit only for "anglers and other ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from the confident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties of disillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescent dreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in a ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and both ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... pompous life in the sleepy cities of dreamy lands. There was no more striking combination than a typewriting machine mounted on a magnificent table, so thick and resplendent with gold that it seemed one mass of the precious metal—not gilt, but solid bullion—and the marble top had the iridescent glow of a sea shell. This was in the residence of the General, his dining and smoking rooms and bedrooms for himself and staff, the actual headquarters being next door in the residence of the secretary-general. Here was a brilliant exhibition of mirrors, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... visited at intervals by the wolves, was to them the hub of the universe. But for a few surrounding villages, whither the calves were driven on fair days, the rest was only very vaguely known by hearsay. In this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their quagmires oozing with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the principal source of wealth, with rich, wet grass. In summer, on the short swards of the slopes, the sheep were penned day and night, protected from beasts of prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with pitchforks. When the grass was cropped close ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... 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 sea-plane which had been releasing depth-bombs and hovering eagerly above the wide iridescent and spreading stain, sheered shoreward and ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... anxiety for his companions, he mentions more than once the loveliness of the river scene or of the massed foliage along its banks. Naturalist though he was, bent first on studying the habits of birds and animals, he yet took keen delight in the iridescent plumage or graceful form or the beautiful fur ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... her finger nearer to the bird, and then a gleam of unsubdued sunlight fell on her hair and arm, and the arm at that moment appeared of a pearly whiteness, and the hair, just where the light touched it, had a strange lustre and play of iridescent colour. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... stirring her cup of tea with one of her Gorham spoons. She was quiet, she was peaceful. The evening was closing down tranquilly. Her room was the picture of calmness and order. The geraniums blooming in the starch boxes in the window, the aged goldfish occasionally turning his iridescent flank to catch a sudden glow of the setting sun. The next moment she had been all trepidation. It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to make a steaming cup of tea and carry it in to Old Grannis next door. It seemed to her that he was wanting her, that ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... the double 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

... hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... they are very similar to a salmon, but do not possess the same deepness of body and general fulness. Their heads consist of a series of long plates, and their jaws are armed with rows of serrated bone plates. In colour they are a very beautiful iridescent silver along the sides and belly, the back and head being a deep, glossy blue. When full grown their length is slightly over four feet, and weight about twenty-five pounds. They are as voracious as the pike, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... of evolutionary process developed cards monochrome and coloured, "Christmas Bell" cards, palettes, scrolls, circular and oval panels, stars, fans, crescents, and other shaped novelties; embossed cards, the iridescent series, the rustic and frosted cards, the folding series, the jewel cards, the crayons, and private cards on which the sender's name and sentiments are printed in gold, silver, or colours; hand-painted cards with landscapes, seascapes, and floral decorations; ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... path as a symbol that she wasn't cheap and easy; which would be a thing he couldn't possibly wish his future wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence—her pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty, that of her facility above all with her odd ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... classic Inland Ocean, Where the Roman world held sway, Storied shores are iridescent With ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... 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 ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... quite an ideal woman. I don't know why I should say 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 ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... the sky grew thick and heavy with clouds. The water of the lake was like molten jewels, ruby and amethyst. The boat seemed floating in some strange, ethereal substance hitherto unknown to man—translucent and iridescent. The mountains loomed like dim purple pillars at the western gate of the world, and the rays of the half-hidden sun plunging athwart these sentinels sank deep into the shining flood. Later the sky cleared, and the inverted mountains in the lake were scarcely less ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... whether immunity to blight is a possibility or only an iridescent dream, so I made no charge for these scions. The only test of a pear seedling, the same as with the apple, is that of propagation. Furthermore, if you have but the one seedling tree you may lose it by accident; whereas, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... to right), there are three narrow bands and a black tip. In the female there are five black bands (fig. 4 to left). The wings are gray with a surface texture of such a kind that at certain angles they are iridescent. The eyes are a deep, solid, brick-red. The minute hairs that cover the body have a very definite arrangement that is most obvious on the head and thorax. There is a definite number of larger hairs called bristles or chaetae which have a characteristic position and are used for diagnostic ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan

... sighed softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from out the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the plaintive coo of the wood-pigeon. In and out of the branches of the magnificent 'Fau' tree, which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally against the gray lichened cement. All around was light and life and colour, and I said to myself, 'He is made one with nature'; he is now, body and soul ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or topazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous sheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of course quite black, and so transparent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... caprices of the 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

... land was formerly given over to the cultivation of the opium poppy, and for miles over the plain the wonderful iridescent bloom gave the appearance of a sea of changing light and shade as the wind ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... 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

... blackbird pipes among the boughs, On some dim, iridescent day in spring, Then I may dream you are remembering Our ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... priestlike task Of pale ablution round earth's human shore. But they do not escape without defilement On the surface of the tide, when it ebbs from the mudbanks, there gathers an iridescent slime. Tiny particles of floating sand catch and reflect the light Fragments of dead weed, black or brown, are borne along. The tide has stolen across the beaches below the cottages and carried away the garbage cast there. It has passed where ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots—a huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid with strange ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson

... tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary, flitting, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... his most eloquent and wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. In Sordello grammar does not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of course no one but a school-master desires that poetry shall be capable of being parsed; but every one has a right to expect that he shall be left without a sense of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... a thing I am particularly proud of," said the gulled old man, reaching into one of the cases and holding out for Cleek's admiration an irregular disc of dull, hammered gold that had an iridescent beetle embedded in the flat face of it. "This scarab, Mr. Rickaby, has helped to make history, as one might say. It was once the property of Cleopatra. I was obliged to make two trips to Egypt before I could persuade the owner to part with it. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... light up the frost foliage of the maples lining St. Peter's streets when Anson, stiff with cold and haggard with a night of sleepless riding, sprang off the train and looked about him. The beauty of the morning made itself felt even through his care. These rows of resplendent maples, heavy with iridescent frost, were like fairy-land to him, fresh from the treeless prairie. As he walked on under them, showers of powdered rubies and diamonds fell down upon him; the colonnades seemed like those leading ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland

... had forgotten his quest. But once I saw him for a moment as he stood alone at sunrise, waiting at the gate of a Roman prison. He had taken from a secret resting-place in his bosom the pearl, the last of his jewels. As he looked at it, a mellower lustre, a soft and iridescent light, full of shifting gleams of azure and rose, trembled upon its surface. It seemed to have absorbed some reflection of the lost sapphire and ruby. So the secret purpose of a noble life draws into itself the memories ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... suffused a glamour of glowing color over the rich brocade of the walls of Marcus Gard's library, catching a glint here and there on iridescent plaques, or a mellow high light on the luscious patine of an antique bronze. The stillness, so characteristic of the place, seemed to isolate it from the whole world, save when a distant bell musically ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... very big, 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 all nice ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit

... bushes and barbed wire to fill up the gaps, while at least two ended in moraines of old meat tins and shards of crockery. And between these containing banks wound the canal, shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the cottage gardens not a soul was at work, nor, by their appearance, had a soul worked in them for years past. The canal, too, was deserted, save for one long monkey-boat, black as Charon's barge, that lay moored to a post on the towpath, some seventy-odd yards ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... wandered around the big studio where shadowy and strangely beautiful but incomprehensible things met her gaze, like iridescent, indefinite ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... and the still, limpid water of the pool took on all sorts of strange and wonderful hues, like the iridescent surface of a pearl-shell. It grew very still and a little bit eery as the shadows crept over the scene, and it was a relief when Cas Temple and Bert Alley brought forth their mandolins. I am sorry to say that Titania's Mirror ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour

... on the cloak beside her. The distance was now steel gray against the sky; then came a stripe of violet, and then a broad sheet of the vivid iridescent blue which one sees on the necks of peacocks, which again melted into the long line ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge

... problematical. We were a utilitarian people who would never create a great literature, and he reminded me that the days of the romantic and the picturesque had passed. He gathered that I desired to be a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals. In the face of such a philosophy as his I was mute. The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour without a spark of inspiration. And that other, the world of my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... into my half-open eyes; the vault of heaven and the iridescent snow made magical visions about me; the slight roaring in my ears lulled me like a confused melody; the wind, as it blew over the deserted plain, brought ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... elbows on its gilt arms, mother Swink surveyed me with scrutinizing calculation, and as she appraised I appraised also. Full-bosomed of body and short of leg, she looked close kin to a frog in her tight-fitting purple gown with its iridescent trimmings, and low-cut neck; and from her silver-buckled slippers to the crimped and russet-colored transformation on her head, which had slipped somewhat to one side, my eyes went up and then went down, and I knew if Harrie ever married ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... a letter, which she laid Upon the kitchen-table while she made A hasty crock of "float,"—poured thence into A deep glass dish of iridescent hue And glint and sparkle, with an overflow Of froth to crown it, foaming white as snow.— And then—poundcake, and jelly-cake as rare, For its delicious complement,—with air Of Hebe mortalized, she led her van Of votaries, ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley

... joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy balloon—red, yellow, blue, green, or purple, as the case might be. Over the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away, at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but full-pocketed, marveling at the stroke of luck ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... up to that spectral contagion. He saw the fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong, gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship. He saw himself taken in, soul ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... wind blew strongly, and he knew just how the grey street looked with its spots of yellow sparkling lamplight; its shadows, its glowing windows.... He knew the smell of the fish-shop, the strange raw sea-smell, the sight of glittering iridescent scales, the beauty of lean curved fishes, the red of broiled lobsters, the pink-cheeked swarthy fishman, the dark loveliness of Agnes.... He had written to Agnes. His mother didn't know of it, but he was done with Agnes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... When 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 out ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... three cups of strong coffee, Toomey had left the house full of hustle and hope—a state which was apt to continue until about eleven o'clock when the effect wore off, and then he might be expected home with another iridescent bubble punctured, and himself gloomy to the point ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... polished narra table, sipping a sweet, false Spanish wine from 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 full ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... One recollects her different styles. First, in the amazing delivery of almost frankly indecent songs—a delivery so extraordinarily fine as to convert them for the moment into works of art—the image of beautiful iridescent scum on foul water suggests itself. Secondly, in the presentation by short song and very sober gesture and facial expression of grim tragedies, a presentation more vivid and poignant than the ordinary theatre can give, despite its numerous aids to art. Then came the charming utterance of quaint ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... the horrible mouth: barbels that writhed incessantly, as though they sought food for the rapacious jaws they guarded. From a point slightly above and to the rear of the tiny, ruby eyes, two slim and graceful antennae, iridescent and incongruously beautiful, rose twice the height of a man. Like the antennae of a butterfly, they were surmounted by tiny knobs, ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... stupor. Sprawled thus they would lie, until the dressing machines we guided would lift them gently from their damasked couches, bathe them with warm and fragrant waters, clothe their soft carcasses in diaphanous, iridescent webs, and start them on a new ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... plot before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... 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

... convincingly as in 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 influence ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... that one 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 ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... upon the plain. Has Claude given this? Wait a little longer, and you shall see those scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you, along the winding valleys, till they couch in quiet masses, iridescent with the morning light,[42] upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues of massy undulation will melt back and back into that robe of material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again above, in the serene heaven, like a wild, bright, impossible dream, foundationless ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it is iridescent with new significance from ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... 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 ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... 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 ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... spectacles, magnificent 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 shapes—one a gigantic ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... surroundings as these in which he now found himself as a trout in a sandpile. The great room, with its costly furnishings, the tea-table crowded with silver and fragile porcelain, the kettle purring contentedly above the iridescent flame of the alcohol lamp,—above all, the subtle, indefinable suggestion of femininity which unknowably pervaded his surroundings,—all these enthralled young Nisbet beyond expression, and awed him immeasurably, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... into 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 metallic sheen on it!" ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... for whom you search is with the nixies in their palace of crystal, from which none ever return, and whose iridescent walls adjoin your kingdom." ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula's lanterns swaying softly cheek to cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... 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 ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... alive with darting forms. Harkness saw them plainly now—great trailing streamers of speed that shot downward from the heights. The sun caught them in their flight to make iridescent rainbow hues that would have been beautiful but for the hideous heads, the sucker-discs that lined the bodies and the one great disc that cupped on the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... lengths. Rusty tins and twisted, rusty sheets of shrapnel-riddled corrugated iron littered the sodden mud. Water, rust-stained or black and fetid, stagnated in pools and shell-holes. The sides of the trench were moist with iridescent slime. Dead soldiers lay everywhere with grey faces, grey hands and mouldering uniforms. Their pockets were turned inside out and mud-stained letters and postcards, and sometimes a mildewed pocket-book or a broken mirror, were dispersed ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... seen again in the Cantonment, over the massed 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 light appeared to give out heat; no breeze stirred from the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... is something to begin with," said Sir John, examining the beautifully mottled creature, as it lay in the sun, the dark, almost black ground of the skin showing up the ochre yellow markings, while in certain lights the black glistened with iridescent hues. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... three hundred feet of it rise above, forming a glorious shining palisade across the entire width of the inlet. As the sun played on the glittering facade, rays struck out from it as from a reflector, of every shade of green and blue, the deepest hue of emerald mingling with the lightest sapphire, iridescent, sparkling, wonderful. As we crept still nearer, over the living blue of the water, the continual fall of the icebergs from the front wall of the glacier became apparent. At intervals of about five minutes, with a terrific crash like thunder a great wedge of the glittering ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... 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 ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... and a hymn-book for Ann, and here's a knife for Will, and a pocket-book for Gwilym Morris, the preacher who is lodging with them. And here," he said, opening a gaily-painted box, "is something for little Morva," and he gently laid on the table a necklace of iridescent shells which fell in three ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the sky-line of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber bandages ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... we thrilled 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 ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... and grotesque adumbrations of man's modern concepts of art and god. From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mighty red-iridescent sphere. ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... state of mind there is no use in telling him that he is not the only original possessor of a bona fide broken ideal. He'll show you a little superficial scratch and say in husky tones, 'see this great wound it has made in my constitution, it will never heal. Happiness is an iridescent dream. Go and leave me to my fate! 'Then he'll heave a sigh which he thinks comes from a broken heart, but which really emanates from a dyspeptic condition, caused by lack of exercise. After a while he finds ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... Wady 'Ifriya round the north and east of the White Mountain, we fell into the Wady Simakh (of "Wild Sumach"), that drains the great gap between the Pinnacles and the Buttresses of the 'Urnub-Tihamah 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 Ballarat. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... were the strip of a peacock's feather; on the face of the air about her were phantoms of winged horses, and of racking-wheels: and from her glossy shoulders waved and quivered large dazzling wings of iridescent colours, most ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... artistic knowledge you possess will merely teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in an atmosphere full of iridescent power,—the amethysts and agates, the pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine, never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,—of climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which the city seems but a few inches long, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... lying amid rugged shapes bristling with spines and needles. We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured anemones, beneath a hedge of rosy coral. The shimmering sail and carven hull of iridescent pearl skim the water with incredible swiftness, and tack skilfully at every bend of the devious course, not even slackening speed to avoid collision with a lumbering star-fish encountered on the way. These submarine Gardens contain the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to wave ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... over the great carved table, holding it, motionless, beneath the lamp. From the bezel of the solitary ring which he wore gleamed iridescent lights, venomous as those within the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... down to Cornwall I realise the curious contradiction which lies in this region as at once a Land of Granite and a Land of Mist. On the one hand archaic rocks, primitive, mighty, unchanging, deep-rooted in the bases of the world. On the other hand, iridescent vapour, for ever changing, one moment covering the land with radiant colour, another enveloping it in ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... point of a needle, but a tree only as a blotted mass! A man's mind was meant to receive as a mirror, not to concentrate rays like a convex lens! Was it not then likely that the first reading gave the true impression of the ethereal, the vital, the flowing, the iridescent? Did not the solitary and silent night brood like a hen on the nest of the poet's imaginings? Was it not the night that waked the soul? Did not the commonplace vanish along with the "garish" day? How then could its light afford ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... business doing. The new bar fixtures, which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought down by dog team from "Up River," was established at the rear extremity ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... ceremony took place at two o'clock in the afternoon, a rather trying time to be decolletee and look your best. In my letter from Paris I told you about my dress made by Worth. It really is quite lovely—white brocade, with the tulle front—all embroidered with iridescent beads and pearls. The manteau de cour is of white satin, trimmed with Valenciennes lace and ruches of chiffon. I wore my diamond tiara, my pearls on my neck, and everything I owned in the way of jewelry pinned ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... 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 country, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various

... down a long, narrow road through which small trains were running to and fro. Some of those trains were laden with incandescent metals which made the atmosphere iridescent as they passed. We walked in single file along the narrow passage reserved for foot passengers between the rails. I did not feel at all safe, and my heart began to beat fast. Blown first one way then the other by the wind from the two trains coming in opposite directions and passing ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... this period of the year, are flooded with light, and the sun's rays, as they fall on the broken glass on the floor, produce thousands of bright star-like points, flashing and filling the cell with iridescent stars. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: the showy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, with here and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively the field of vision; the trifling touch that will disenchant the fairest patterns; the slightest change, as in chemical arithmetic, that will make the whole mixture a poison ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... and the right was exposed. A red-tinged scarf served as belt around the waist. Arms and feet were bare. The long black hair streamed loosely. Two of them wore heavy necklaces of green stones, red pebbles, and shell beads. The last comer carried only a single string of shell beads with an iridescent conch fastened to it in front. Ear-pendants of turquoises hung from ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... through a powerful lens, the heart of the flower, which, to the naked eye, lies flooded in a warm, colorless light, assumes the most exquisite iridescent hues, far more beautiful than the defined tints of the passion-flower. Melting to the eye in its juiciness and delicacy, yet firm in its pure outline and rounded finish, it bears the same relation to that chosen type of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... he spread his bow and arrows, his war club, and stone hatchet. The pipe was made of red rock like brilliantly polished marble, hollowed to hold tobacco. A stick two feet long, as thick as a cane, formed the stem. For the dance these pipes were often decked with gorgeous scarlet, green, and iridescent feathers, though white plumes alone made them the symbol of peace, and red quills ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... the beach and in the tiny main street bought meat, vegetables, and half a dozen eggs. Billy had to drag Saxon away from the window of a fascinating shop where were iridescent pearls of ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... men were generally about five and a half feet in stature: lean, muscular, and with a grayer, harder look to their skin than the iridescent quality that characterized ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his journey,—for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is cherished, all the rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey grows dull and leaden unless companioned by youth's iridescent dreams. Not only that, but the mature of each generation run a grave risk of putting their efforts in a futile direction, in a blind alley as it were, unless they can keep in touch with the youth of ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... her malice. An occasional deed of alms, done not for charity's sake, but for ostentation; an adroit deal of cards, or a horoscope cast to flatter a foolish girl; a word of sympathy, hollow as a water bubble, but colored with iridescent prettiness, averted suspicion from the darker ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... The clusters of floral ornaments and festoons reflect one of the fundamental purposes of decorative glory to which all plant life has been decreed. The bulblike glass dome is like an enormous dewdrop of beautiful proportions and iridescent color. All this beauty was conceived by Architects Bakewell and Brown, who have given full evidence of their appreciation of the purposes to which this ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... wavering and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive, imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex, innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent unmistakably grave and ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... 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 ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... the latter he was never quite able to get rid of its traces; and from this time forward there was added to his other peculiarities the fact that when the sunlight struck upon his hair at certain angles, it turned it all iridescent and shimmering. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... attention to the iridescent colors, shining green and purple in the sunshine, then sighed disconsolately. "I do wish he belonged to me." And he stroked lovingly the feathered head. "I never have had ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard

... 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 ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid

... off the beach to breathe the sweating ponies in the deep shade of a mango tree that spread high above the surrounding brush. Dismounting, they stood as in a huge green bowl: its bottom the smooth waters of the gulf, iridescent under a zenith sun and framed as far as the eye could reach with a slant of parched beach; the sides of the vast concavity were formed by the verdant mat of jungled slopes that rose with ever increasing abruptness to the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... made four days earlier. The wind having fallen, we went ahead with the sledges. While crossing the ridge of ice which led into the valley below, one man hauled the sledges while the other two prevented them from sliding sideways downhill into the open crevasse. That afternoon we noticed very fine iridescent colouring in cirro-cumulus clouds ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... are the hardest of all. Think! Imagine one of those serene, iridescent rings of land, moored close beside the cliff, at which the waves never rest from beating. Could the one forever at peace, with leave from wind and wave to grow its verdure and twine its tendrils just where it would,—could it feel for the life-points ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... 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. ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones

... classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... waited to be frightened on to the next tree. Patches of sunlight flashed vivid contrasts in their black and white plumage, and set off in a splendor of changing color the green and purple and bronze of their iridescent feathering. A deer bounded away in a blur of tan and white, and a little farther on, a porcupine lumbered lazily into the scrub. It was good to be alive! What difference did it make which direction she chose? All she ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... will, if you are not used to the work, be surprised at the simplicity of it, the few tints used, the modesty of the tints, and therewithal the clearness and precision of all boundary lines. In all fine flat colouring there are regular systems of dividing colour from colour. Above all, don't attempt iridescent blendings of colour, which look like decomposition. They are about as much as possible the reverse ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various

... 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 ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... for insects. Held up by the excitement—for by this time other birds have darted to the feast—the starlings alight among the plumes of the laburnum, interrogating in acidulous tones, their black, burnished, iridescent feathers and flame-hued eyes making a picture ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... the reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood, where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than in "Ole Lukoeie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, dewy freshness about the grass, the flowers, the very light, and the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... told to the children were usually concerned with her own childhood. She had always been of an imaginative turn of mind and the doings of her early life, seen through the long-drawn vistas of the years, had become suffused with iridescent colours. They had gathered to themselves romance as a wall overhung by trees gathers to itself moss and fern ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... charm string interestedly. Antique buttons, iridescent, golden, glimmering, some with carved flowers, others globules of colored glass, many of them with quaint filigree brass mounting over colored background, a few G. A. R. buttons from old uniforms, speckled china ones like portions of bird eggs—all strung together and each one having ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... peaks behind. And over all, hills and valley 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. Concha gazed ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... while thereafter Herzl had the following dream: "The King-Messiah came, a glorious and majestic old man, took me in his arms, and swept off with me on the wings of the wind. On one of the iridescent clouds we encountered the figure of Moses. The features were those familiar to me out of my childhood in the statue by Michelangelo. The Messiah called to Moses: It is for this child that I have ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... bestriding his aerial steed, the white-winged stork; Pou-t'ai, Lord of Contentment and of Wealth, obese and dreamy; and that fairest Goddess of Talent, from whose beneficent hands eternally streams the iridescent rain ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... the sound 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 Eastern mansion which Margaret noticed ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... the slime, inert, Bedaubed with iridescent dirt. The oil upon the puddles dries To colours like a peacock's eyes, And half-submerged tomato-cans Shine scaly, as leviathans Oozily crawling through the mud. The ground is here and there bestud With lumps of only part-burned coal. His duty is to glean the whole, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell

... form and colour. For the islands, though green intensely, are not of one, 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

... reached the lowest level of the crater, pretty nearly a mile across, presenting from above the appearance of a sea at rest, but on crossing it we found it to be an expanse of waves and convolutions of ashy-coloured lava, with huge cracks filled up with black iridescent rolls of lava, only a few weeks old. Parts of it are very rough and ridgy, jammed together like field ice, or compacted by rolls of lava which may have swelled up from beneath, but the largest part of the area presents ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... 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 ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... that Ferriday would have loved in a "close-up." Her hair was tumbling down upon and around her shoulders, and her silken nightgown shimmered blissfully about her, sketching her contours in iridescent lines. She gazed, through an Elizabethan of small panes, into a garden where sunrise bloomed rosily in petals of light. She was the prettiest thing in the pretty picture; yet she was pouting at Fate—Fate, the old scenario ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... his mate—these are facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters, and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent, splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of silver. What make you of the hoarse voice ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... 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 kali-loa are similar to ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... Living Buddha was very much excited, he ordered a basin of water brought and set before the altar. He called the Lamas and began to pray. Suddenly the altar candles and lamps lighted themselves and the water in the basin became iridescent." ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... palaces of light in the Exposition grounds below us burst into radiance. The Horticultural dome turned to a wonderful iridescent bubble and the Tower of Jewels caught and reflected the light that played upon it. Wide bands of color streaked the sombre sky, transforming the clouds to shades of violet, yellow and rose. "The rainbow ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray

... daughter, to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment; iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood—the wildest, deepest infinity of marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable, infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]—they are gone their way, and ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly and brightly endowed spirits ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... lighted 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 on each side of it. There was a certain ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... 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 ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

... not the things I hoped. Just bread and clothing, fire, and a little roof-tree; the purchased soil to make a grave, and a space of leisure, before that grave be needed, to write, myself, this book for me and for you. Hope has spread her iridescent Psyche-wings and left me; Ambition long ago shed hers to become a working-ant. Love never came to sit in the chair beside the ingle. An ocean heaves between us, only for nightly dreams and waking thoughts to span. Were those dear eyes to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... by blowing—by means of his machinery and air-pumps—several large bubbles which he allowed to float upward into the sky, where the sunshine fell upon them and gave them iridescent hues that were most beautiful. This aroused much wonder and delight, because it was a new amusement to every one present—except perhaps Dorothy and Button-Bright, and even they had never seen such big, ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum

... why this artist's admirers dwell upon his handling of fugitive surface tones, as smoke or clouds, as much as upon his more obvious excellences. In "Industrial Fire," here reproduced, the smoke rises not in fine line, but in heavy mass from a kiln. It is a rich cloud, colorful with iridescent metallic lustres. Workers feed the blaze, their warm flesh glowing in the mixed light. Whole vessels and broken bits of pottery are heaped and scattered ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... airy bubble filled with his own and Ruth's iridescent hopes,—a bubble which had floated before him as he tramped through the cool woods, and out upon the hillside, ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... awful news to Elizabeth's uncle. It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson—who had not time to read his Bible for pressure of business—had gone out into the grape-arbor in his narrow garden to feed the pigeons. There was a crowd of them about his feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray bosoms pushing and jostling against one another, and their pink feet actually touching his boots. When Miss White burst out at him, the pigeons rose in startled flight, and Mr. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... be as impossible to solve the Trentino question from the point of view of abstract right as to solve any other iridescent question in that way. The Trentino question, which was long a question of national, historical, and ethnological idealism, has now become a real question of power. The European war and its developments have placed Italy in a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the soft blue sky was fading into gray, and here and there a misty star peeped out: but to the westward, where the downs and woods of Raleigh closed in with those of Abbotsham, the blue was webbed and turfed with delicate white flakes; iridescent spots, marking the path by which the sun had sunk, showed all the colors of the dying dolphin; and low on the horizon lay a long band of grassy green. But what was the sound which troubled Mrs. Leigh? None of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... deck. The sun was pouring in an iridescent splendor over the snowy peaks of the mountains, and it seemed as if he could almost reach out his arms and touch them. The Nome appeared to be drifting in the heart of a paradise of mountains. Eastward, very near, was the mainland; so close on ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... going out, and in the little basins in the sand minute crabs and strange sea-midgets scuttled about panic-stricken at finding themselves marooned; here and there a stranded jelly-fish glowed like an iridescent soap-bubble, and, farther out, an ugly mud flat began to be revealed by the retreating water. Some distance ahead, a ridge of tumbled rocks ran from the sea-wall down into the water, and, as he drew nearer, he saw that on one of the rocks ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... more ignoble than the ordinary joys of men. They are too often like the iridescent scum on a stagnant pond, fruit and proof of corruption. They are fragile and hollow, for all the play of colour on them, like a soap bubble that breaks of its own tenuity, and is only a drop of dirty water. Joy is too often ignoble, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... rather with feathers, for he saw no wings,—with a helmet-like protuberance at the top of its head resembling mother-of-pearl darkened with black-lead. It had enormous feet and legs of a pale ash colour; the loose skin of its neck was coloured with an iridescent hue of bluish-purple, pink, and green; the body being of a rufous tinge, but of a purple-black about the neck and breast. The bird stood its ground boldly, not in the slightest degree alarmed at the appearance of the strangers, as it eyed them with a look of intense curiosity. ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... structure which 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

... 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, like ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... peoples we find local artistic types of work, of furniture, of poetic songs and popular music. This multiform creation of the inner man, then, enfolds him and protects his spirit in its intellectual needs, just as the iridescent ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... childhood are a web Of gossamer, most infinitely frail And tender, shot with gleaming threads of gold And silver, through the iridescent weft Of subtlest tints of azure and of rose; Woven of fragile nothings, yet most dear, As binding us to that dim, far-off time, When first our lungs inhaled the fragrance sweet Of a new world, where all was bright and fair. As we approach the end of mortal things, The band of comrades ever ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... tribute to womanhood which goes by the name of 'Dignity of Women'. Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry,—the chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity. Man is depicted as a wild creature, ever tossing on the sea of passion, or chasing phantoms in the empyrean. Reckless and vehement, he lives by the law of force, or, at the best, by the law of reason and logic. Woman, on the other hand, follows the better light ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... means of his machinery and air-pumps—several large bubbles which he allowed to float upward into the sky, where the sunshine fell upon them and gave them iridescent hues that were most beautiful. This aroused much wonder and delight, because it was a new amusement to every one present—except perhaps Dorothy and Button-Bright, and even they had never seen such ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum

... conglomerate, fine and coarse, in an iron-reddened matrix; hence old writers call it a 'sort of gravelly rock, a little above water.' Salsolaceae tapestry the shore, and fig-trees and young calabashes spring from the stone: the ground is strewn with white shells, tiles, bricks and iridescent bottles—the invariable concomitants and memorials of civilisation. The masonry, lime and ashlar, is excellent, but time and the portentous growth of the tropics have cracked and fissured the walls. Masses of masonry are fallen, and others are assuming the needle-shape. The ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters, and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you the fluttering moth, decked in gold and crimson, brilliant, iridescent, splendid? The beauty of it bids you bend to deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... grey eyes wandered around the big studio where shadowy and strangely beautiful but incomprehensible things met her gaze, like iridescent, indefinite ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... had been broken from it in the fragments found at its base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need not have the trouble of carrying the sculptures away before burning them. A handful of iridescent glass from a house-drain near by, where it had been thrown by the servants after breaking it, testified of the continuity of human nature in the domestics of all ages. A somewhat bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... 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 light appeared to give out heat; no breeze stirred ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... and of Rousseau. Hence the Physiocrats found economics in peasant life; and thus too Adam Smith renewed their science, with due academic logic, doubtless, but from his experience of Glasgow and Kirkcaldy manufactures and trade. Even the idealist Berkeley owed much of his theory to his iridescent tar-water; while surely the greater ethicists are those who have not only been dialecticians, but moral forces ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... of from 155 degrees to 175 degrees Fah., when it is ready for use. Silver objects, previously freed from dust and grease with soda lye and thorough rinsing in water, plunged into this bath are instantly covered with an iridescent film of silver sulphide, which in a few seconds more becomes blue black. The objects are then removed, rinsed off in plenty of fresh water, scratch brushed, and ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... 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 ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... blew strongly, and he knew just how the grey street looked with its spots of yellow sparkling lamplight; its shadows, its glowing windows.... He knew the smell of the fish-shop, the strange raw sea-smell, the sight of glittering iridescent scales, the beauty of lean curved fishes, the red of broiled lobsters, the pink-cheeked swarthy fishman, the dark loveliness of Agnes.... He had written to Agnes. His mother didn't know of it, but he was done with Agnes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the long, liquid, iridescent eyes, the sweet, indolent morbidezza, that make southern beauty so perilously fascinating, are not uncommon here, and are often united to a clearness and brilliancy of complexion scarcely to be found nearer the tropics. The Upper Ten Thousand by no means monopolize these personal advantages. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... grew thick and heavy with clouds. The water of the lake was like molten jewels, ruby and amethyst. The boat seemed floating in some strange, ethereal substance hitherto unknown to man—translucent and iridescent. The mountains loomed like dim purple pillars at the western gate of the world, and the rays of the half-hidden sun plunging athwart these sentinels sank deep into the shining flood. Later the sky cleared, and the inverted mountains in the lake were scarcely less vivid than those which ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... seas that the millionaire brings his yacht for a winter cruise; it will be in these forests that he hunts for wild boar and deer, or shoots woodcock, duck, snipe, pigeons, and pheasants; in these waters that he fishes for the iridescent silver beauties that here abound. It will be on these sunlit shores invalids seeking health will find it, and here that huge sanitariums should be built, for despite the tales of pessimistic travellers, no lovelier climate exists than can be found in Philippine coast towns ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... heart of man, and the mind of man, are as the glass of my ancestors' tear-bottles in their enduring quality and beauty. My ancestors' tear-bottles, and though buried in the earth ten thousand years, lose not a grain of their original purity and transparency, of their soft and iridescent colouring. But where is the natural colour and beauty of these human souls, buried in bunks under hatches? Or of those ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... and bitter he 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, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... dimpling with pleasure at the 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 mist, to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... The light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... shapes bristling with spines and needles. We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured anemones, beneath a hedge of rosy coral. The shimmering sail and carven hull of iridescent pearl skim the water with incredible swiftness, and tack skilfully at every bend of the devious course, not even slackening speed to avoid collision with a lumbering star-fish encountered on the way. These submarine Gardens contain the greatest natural collection of anemones, coral ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... 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. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen

... their mute intervals fell upon them. Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened—and the sea reflected it, Suddenly the world was one huge glittering ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a perfectly ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... say 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. So trying ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... He looked around wildly as the sidewalk moved swiftly through the cool evening air. Far above, he could see the shimmering, iridescent screen that still stood to protect the New City from the devastating virus attacks which might again strike down from the skies without warning. Far ahead he could see the magnificent "bridge" formed by the sidewalk crossing over to the apartment area, ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse

... quest. But once I saw him for a moment as he stood alone at sunrise, waiting at the gate of a Roman prison. He had taken from a secret resting-place in his bosom the pearl, the last of his jewels. As he looked at it, a mellower lustre, a soft and iridescent light, full of shifting gleams of azure and rose, trembled upon its surface. It seemed to have absorbed some reflection of the lost sapphire and ruby. So the secret purpose of a noble life draws into itself the memories of past joy and past sorrow. All that has helped it, all that has hindered ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... the stone exposed. The bottom row of mullioned windows opened upon a terrace, and in front of the terrace ran a low wall with a broad coping on which were placed urns bright with geraniums. It was pierced by an opening approached by shallow stairs on which an iridescent peacock stood, and in front of all that ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... 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 with new life, unfolds his larva-form; ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... are borne out of the church one after the other, while the bells peal in joyous haste. Seryozhka, trembling, pulls away the mat . . . and the people behold something extraordinary. The lectern, the wooden ring, the pegs, and the cross in the ice are iridescent with thousands of colors. The cross and the dove glitter so dazzlingly that it hurts the eyes to look at them. Merciful God, how fine it is! A murmur of wonder and delight runs through the crowd; the bells peal more loudly still, the day grows brighter; the banners ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... Wady 'Ifriy round the north and east of the White Mountain, we fell into the 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 ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... 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 out ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... The pain in his eyeballs was blinding. There was nothing he could distinguish; everything was woven together, a mere blaze of wonderful, iridescent, blazing coloration. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... light, and when glancing along the top of such a pool instead of into it, the mirror-like surface gave way to a peculiar purplish tone which seemed to cover the pool, so that one would forget it was roily water, and saw only the iridescent beauty ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... tramway—different from that miserable Olevano affair which, being narrow gauge, can go but 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

... rudely hewn granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal, iridescent ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... pointed. Above their heads the soft blue sky was fading into gray, and here and there a misty star peeped out: but to the westward, where the downs and woods of Raleigh closed in with those of Abbotsham, the blue was webbed and turfed with delicate white flakes; iridescent spots, marking the path by which the sun had sunk, showed all the colors of the dying dolphin; and low on the horizon lay a long band of grassy green. But what was the sound which troubled Mrs. Leigh? None of them, with their merry hearts, and ears dulled with the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... out. Below her a river of early sunshine was flowing through the garden, and the far-away slopes were translucent green in their splendour of young day, with gauzy, uncertain mists lingering, spiritlike, in their intervales. A bird, his sleek plumage iridescent in the sunlight, was perched on the big chestnut bough that ran squarely across the window, singing as if his heart would burst with melody and the joy of his tiny life. No bride could have wished anything fairer for her day of days, and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... 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 she scarcely more than noticed them—the air of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... when dilated, become greenish yellow. 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 ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... she came to that second birth all women know; she was born into that world of drifting sweet odours, blending and iridescent colours, evasive and enchanting sounds, that is the kingdom of the heart. Julia did not know why, from this hour on, she was no longer a little girl, she was no longer dumb and blind and unseeing. But a new and delightful consciousness woke within her, a new sense ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris

... is the result of a One-Man Power. Cooeperation, technically, is an iridescent dream—things cooeperate because the man makes them. He ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... very hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do nothing and make ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... was especially good to-day; the sun was directly reflected by a single twisted iridescent cloud in the north, a brilliant and most beautiful object. The air was still, and it was very pleasant to hear the crisp sounds of our workers abroad. The tones of voices, the swish of ski or the chipping of an ice pick carry two or three miles on such days—more than once to-day we could hear ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... good business doing. The new bar fixtures, which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... 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

... concert-room has produced no artist of her rank. One recollects her different styles. First, in the amazing delivery of almost frankly indecent songs—a delivery so extraordinarily fine as to convert them for the moment into works of art—the image of beautiful iridescent scum on foul water suggests itself. Secondly, in the presentation by short song and very sober gesture and facial expression of grim tragedies, a presentation more vivid and poignant than the ordinary theatre can give, despite its numerous ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... blazing of gigantic rainbows and prisms! There were mountains that looked to my amazed eyes as lofty as Mont Blanc, and as massive, every solid mile of which was composed of crystalline ice, refracting and reflecting the sunbeams with iridescent splendor. For now we could begin to see a part of the orb of the sun itself, prodigious in size, and poised on the edge of the gem-glittering horizon, where the jeweled summits split its beams into ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... amused ourselves by experimenting on the thinness to which its scales could be reduced by splitting. It was at Bakersville that we saw specimens of mica that resembled the delicate tracery in the moss-agate and had the iridescent sheen of the rainbow colors—the most delicate greens, reds, blues, purples, and gold, changing from one to the other in the reflected light. In the texture were the tracings of fossil forms of ferns and the most exquisite and delicate vegetable beauty of the coal age. But the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... far as he could hear the chime. It was a matter of common knowledge in the "crowd," that Morty Sands had one supreme aim in life: the courtship of Laura Nesbit. For her he lavished clothes upon himself until he became known as the iridescent dream! For her he bought a high-seated cart of great price, drawn by a black horse in white kid harness! For her he learned a whole concert of Schubert's songs upon the mandolin and organized a serenading quartette that wore the grass smooth under her window. For her candy, flowers, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... fragrance of honeysuckle—this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... formed in the electric furnace, is a beautiful crystalline semi-metallic solid, having a density of 2.22, and showing a fracture which is often shot with iridescent colours. It can be kept unaltered in dry air, but the smallest trace of moisture in the atmosphere leads to the evolution of minute quantities of acetylene and gives it a distinctive odour. It is infusible at temperatures up to 2000 deg. C., but can he fused in the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... path, and beyond, an alley of lime-trees traced a tangled pattern on the snow with the fine crossed lines of their leafless twigs. The beams of the house and its snow-laden roof looked as if they had been hewn out of a block of opal, with iridescent lights where the facets caught the silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell crashing off a tree in the garden; then all was still again. Sonia's heart beat high with gladness; as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... this commotion, I frankly admit, held me spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most enthusiastic reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I had ever read. It was a modern high romance of love and pity, of tears iridescent with laughter, of strong and beautiful though erring souls; it was at once poignant and tender; it vibrated with drama; it was instinct with calm and kindly wisdom. In my humility, I found I had not known my Adrian one little bit. As the shepherd ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... Magical Nature, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by one who remains master of his heart. Numpholeptos is the long-drawn enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell—a thing woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. In Bifurcation he puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in love's favour in The Statue ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... green and iridescent violet, weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of glittering ash of rose—then wavered, split and formed into gigantic, sparkling, marching ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... garments and sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sunbeams. So vast a fullness of light flooded the landscape that even the black cypress trees which stood, straight and tall, beyond the garden walls, seemed to glitter with a radiance of their own. The tide was silent. Only the waters of the imprisoned springs that poured, covered with iridescent bubbles, into the hollows between the rocks, ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... 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

... play Blows upon a pipe of clay Bubbles, evanescent, bright, With their iridescent light, So I fling upon the wind ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles

... feathers, abound in the forests; great, heavy-billed hornbills hop cumbrously from branch to branch, rivaling in their awkward gait the rhinoceros hornbills; the Javanese peacock, with its gorgeous tail and neck covered with iridescent green feathers instead of blue ones, moves majestically along the jungle tracks, together with the ocellated pheasant, the handsome and high-couraged jungle cock, and the glorious Argus pheasant, a bird ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten their grey shadows upon the plain.... Wait a little longer, and you shall see those scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you, along the winding valleys, till they crouch in quiet masses, iridescent with the morning light,[32] upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues of massy undulation will melt back and back into that robe of material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again above, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... 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, ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn

... themselves on a level with the top of the hills which they had seen from the lagoon, where the little river suddenly plunged down into a deep hollow a couple of hundred feet below, and from which a faint cloud of mist floated, now arched by an iridescent bow. It was a beautiful sight, but the doctor gave them little time to ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn

... style of Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is forever suggesting water—fountains and pools, the glistening spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the storm, of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... to a patch that looked like the contents of a pot, suddenly petrified in the act of boiling; sometimes the black, iridescent lava had assumed the form of waves, or more frequently of huge masses of rope, twisted and coiled together; sometimes it was piled up like a collection of organ pipes, or had gathered into mounds and ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... eastward, close-hauled, 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 of dawn appeared ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... and easy; which would be a thing he couldn't possibly wish his future wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence—her pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty, that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity, as people appeared ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... floral ornaments and festoons reflect one of the fundamental purposes of decorative glory to which all plant life has been decreed. The bulblike glass dome is like an enormous dewdrop of beautiful proportions and iridescent color. All this beauty was conceived by Architects Bakewell and Brown, who have given full evidence of their appreciation of the purposes to ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... stood upon terra-firma, if these translucent rocks could be called terra-firma which rose in glittering and polished peaks all around us. They were wonderfully iridescent, so that no bed of gorgeously-colored flowers could have filled the eye with a greater variety ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... up 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 of houses and trees, and ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... 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 ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... the joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy balloon—red, yellow, blue, green or purple, as the case might be. Over the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away, at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but full-pocketed, marvelling at the stroke of luck that enabled him to take an afternoon off and ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... touched a small disk near the button he had first pressed; a disk of some strange metal, iridescent, gleaming with a peculiar greenish patina that, even as one watched it, seemed to blend into other shades, as an oil-scum transmutes ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... infinitudes of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... to be frightened on to the next tree. Patches of sunlight flashed vivid contrasts in their black and white plumage, and set off in a splendor of changing color the green and purple and bronze of their iridescent feathering. A deer bounded away in a blur of tan and white, and a little farther on, a porcupine lumbered lazily into the scrub. It was good to be alive! What difference did it make which direction she chose? All she wanted this morning was to ride, and ride, and ride! She had her ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... club, and stone hatchet. The pipe was made of red rock like brilliantly polished marble, hollowed to hold tobacco. A stick two feet long, as thick as a cane, formed the stem. For the dance these pipes were often decked with gorgeous scarlet, green, and iridescent feathers, though white plumes alone made them the symbol of peace, and red quills bristled ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... but the solid supporting framework of 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 of their ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... be no doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page after page—full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound epigram—fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... instant later, saw that masks and dominoes had disappeared. Opposite to him stood Valerie Selpdorf in a dress of some deep velvety shade, which bore, wrought upon its texture here and there, tiny horseshoes embossed in iridescent jewels. A diadem of the same shape crowned her dark hair. Yet all the richness and delicacy of the blended colourings struck Rallywood with only one odd remembrance—his own boot-heel outlined in Revonde mud upon a long suede ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... the sleeping man beside her, listened to his breathing, touched his hair, then rose and looked fearfully about her. On the knapsack under the tree a tin cup was shining. She took it and crept down into a gulley, where, through the deep layers of dead leaves, water sparkled in a string of tiny iridescent puddles. The water, however, was sweet and cold, and, when she had satisfied her thirst and had dug into the black loam with the edge of the cup, more water, sparkling and pure, gushed up and spread out in the miniature basin. She waited for the mud and leaves to settle, and when the ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... fugitive surface tones, as smoke or clouds, as much as upon his more obvious excellences. In "Industrial Fire," here reproduced, the smoke rises not in fine line, but in heavy mass from a kiln. It is a rich cloud, colorful with iridescent metallic lustres. Workers feed the blaze, their warm flesh glowing in the mixed light. Whole vessels and broken bits of pottery are heaped ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... 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

... with darting forms. Harkness saw them plainly now—great trailing streamers of speed that shot downward from the heights. The sun caught them in their flight to make iridescent rainbow hues that would have been beautiful but for the hideous heads, the sucker-discs that lined the bodies and the one great disc that cupped on the end of ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... backs on the beach and in the tiny main street bought meat, vegetables, and half a dozen eggs. Billy had to drag Saxon away from the window of a fascinating shop where were iridescent pearls of abalone, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... 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 ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... fragments of 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 maker mislaid them in the sand ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... 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 Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... lens, the heart of the flower, which, to the naked eye, lies flooded in a warm, colorless light, assumes the most exquisite iridescent hues, far more beautiful than the defined tints of the passion-flower. Melting to the eye in its juiciness and delicacy, yet firm in its pure outline and rounded finish, it bears the same relation to that chosen type ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... long, narrow road through which small trains were running to and fro. Some of those trains were laden with incandescent metals which made the atmosphere iridescent as they passed. We walked in single file along the narrow passage reserved for foot passengers between the rails. I did not feel at all safe, and my heart began to beat fast. Blown first one way then the other ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... the butcher's boy, and romance enough in the story of the miller's daughter, to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment; iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood—the wildest, deepest infinity of marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable, infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]—they are gone their way, and ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... time for one's coffee. The little tobacco-shop and cafe around the corner I find an excellent place for cafe au lait. The coffee is delicious and made when one chooses to arrive, not stewed like soup, iridescent in color, and bitter with chicory, as one finds it in many of the small French hotels. Two crescents, flaky and hot from the bakery next door, and three generous pats of unsalted butter, complete this morning repast, and all for the modest ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... patches and soft strokes; and it is out of these that Renoir's latest works are built up. "Built up"—the expression is absurd. Rather, it is as though forms had been melted down to their component colours, and the pool of iridescent loveliness thus created fixed by a touch of the master's magic—lightly frozen over by an enchanting frost. Only ice is cold. At any rate, what happens to the spectator is that first he perceives a tangle of rather hot and apparently inharmonious tones; gradually he becomes aware of ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... opened, almost full, and Harry took admiringly into his hand the great piece of rock representing the half of a mass of stone that had been accidentally broken in two, and found to contain a considerable quantity of iridescent, many-hued crystal. The next chest contained some very fine specimens of sapphire; but it was little more than half-full, the mine having only been discovered within the last decade, and even then not very industriously worked; but there ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... 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 ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... waters, good on the table when in season, which is the spring and summer: in the winter it spawns, and is not so good. When above ten or twelve pounds in weight it is of a brilliant copper-red on back and sides: the smaller ones are of a steel-blue on the back, and iridescent when first caught. It grows to the weight of fifty or sixty pounds, runs in great schools, and in habits and play when hooked resembles the allied species Labrax lineatus, the striped bass. Cuvier named the species Corvina ocellata, from the black spot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... the most fascinating figure of Impressionism,—the one who has stated most precisely the femineity of this luminous and iridescent art. Having married Eugene Manet, the brother of the great painter, she exhibited at various private galleries, where the works of the first Impressionists were to be seen, and became as famous for her talent as for her beauty. When Manet died, she took charge of his memory and of his work, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair

... architecture. The Egyptians had had it, hot 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 ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... cried again, calling attention to the iridescent colors, shining green and purple in the sunshine, then sighed disconsolately. "I do wish he belonged to me." And he stroked lovingly the feathered head. "I never have had ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard

... content of the picture 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 reinforces ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... rock 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 ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... with the notice her party had attracted, was complacently arranging her bracelets preparatory to rising, when her eye was evidently caught by the iridescent sheen of Marcia's butterflies. She held up her glasses, the better to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... threw a dull illumination about the room. It was a picturesque apartment, carefully planned. Not an object that had not been chosen with care and the utmost discrimination. The walls had been treated with copper leaf till they produced a sombre, iridescent effect of green and faint gold, that suggested the depth of a forest glade shot through with the sunset. Shelves bearing eighteenth-century books in seal brown tree calf—Addison, the "Spectator," Junius and Racine, Rochefoucauld and Pascal hung against it here ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... turning table and placed on a cast iron or tin plate heated to not more than 40 or 50 C. A gentle heat is quite sufficient to dry the albumen quickly; a greater heat would spoil it, as it would produce coagulation. So soon as the film is dry, which will be seen by the iridescent aspect it assumes, the plate is allowed to cool to the ordinary temperature, and is then at once exposed either beneath a positive, or beneath an original drawing the lines of which have been drawn in opaque ink, so as to completely prevent the luminous rays from passing through them; the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... himself, the sun, 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

... gown one alighted,—a little grey thing wearing a pair of peacock-tinted diamonds on its forewings; and as it sat there, quivering, the iridescent incrustations changed from burnished gold ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers









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