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Filmy

adjective
1.
So thin as to transmit light.  Synonyms: cobwebby, diaphanous, gauze-like, gauzy, gossamer, see-through, sheer, transparent, vaporous, vapourous.  "Filmy wings of a moth" , "Gauzy clouds of dandelion down" , "Gossamer cobwebs" , "Sheer silk stockings" , "Transparent chiffon" , "Vaporous silks"



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"Filmy" Quotes from Famous Books



... cried the doctor, "wherever you like to go;" and he brought down his hand with a sounding slap into his friend's. "Here, Jack," he cried directly after, "shake hands too. Come, be a man. In less than six months those dull filmy eyes of yours will be flashing with health, and you'll be wondering that you could ever have sat gazing at me in this miserable woe-begone fashion. There, pluck up, my lad. You don't know what is before ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked like real fairies. It did not seem possible, when they floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by their filmy, purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying in time, that they could be anything but fairies. It seemed absurd to imagine that they were Johnny Mullens, the washwoman's son, and Polly Flinders, the charwoman's little girl, ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... whiteness as it towers through the opening cloud, and soars out of earth's range. What is this glory so remote yet impending over us? It is the Jungfrau, the incomparable virgin of the ice-world, who bares her snowy breast. She slowly parts her filmy veil, and, as we gaze, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... Avenue the other day (In the languid summertime everybody strolls down Fifth Avenue); And I passed women, dainty in their filmy frocks, And much bespatted men with canes. And great green busses lumbered past me, And impressive ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... a glorious morning when, with a package strapped to the saddle, I rode down between the pine trunks to the crossing. The river flashed like burnished silver below, and the sunlight made colored haloes in the filmy spray that drifted about the black mouth of the canyon, while rising and falling in thunderous cadence the voice of many waters rang forth from its gloomy depths. The package was a heavy one, for there were many domestic sundries as well as ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... white gills. The gills end with abrupt upward curves at the center of the cap without being attached to the stem. In the young mushroom, when the cap is folded down about the stem, the gills are not noticeable, as they are covered by a veil or filmy membrane, a part of which remains attached to the stem (when the top expands), as a ring or collar about the stem a little more than halfway up from the ground. The stem is solid and not hollow, and there is no bulbous enlargement at the base of the stem, surrounded by ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various

... little while ago drifting singly across a moonlit sky were now spread over the heavens in a vast filmy curtain, and the dim light passing through it was caught by the earth's pale coverlet of melting snow; between the two wan expanses the ranks of the forest ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon

... dear," and as she spoke, she drew over her face a light, filmy veil, effectually shielding her from the too curious gaze of the laughing throng ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark

... the morning was bitterly cold, with rime hanging like a filmy veil in the air and glistening like flakes of silver in the sunshine. Doctor Joe and Eli ran in turns by the side of the komatik, while ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... filmy white robe, is dropping flowers in the path of Apollo (the sun) as he drives his dun-colored horses above the sleeping Earth. The Horae (the hours), a gliding, dancing group of lovely beings, accompany the brilliant god. Each hour is clothed in garments of a special tint of the great ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant

... violently agitated the sand, but without obscuring the fountain or breaking the glassiness of its surface. It appeared as if some living creature were about to emerge—the naiad of the spring, perhaps, in the shape of a beautiful young woman with a gown of filmy water-moss, a belt of rainbow-drops and a cold, pure, passionless countenance. How would the beholder shiver, pleasantly yet fearfully, to see her sitting on one of the stones, paddling her white feet in the ripples and throwing up water ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... never lost for him a sense of the marvellous. "What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!" he said one day. Taking up a wineglass, he continued: "Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, almost impalpable, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could have crumpled from view in one hand. "Scorch that an' it's twenty dollars out of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... the porch and shielding her eyes with her hand from the late afternoon sun, as she seemingly looks up the Pass to the left, as if expecting the approach of someone. Her gown is simple, girlish and attractive, and made of summery, filmy stuff. Her hair is done up in the simplest fashion, with a part in the centre, and there is about her every indication of an effort to assume that girlishness of demeanour which has been her greatest asset through life. ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter

... pointed tusks and stiff, low-growing hair. The latter was longer than that of the men and much heavier. It hung about her shoulders and was confined by a colored bit of some lacy fabric. Her single garment appeared to be nothing more than a filmy scarf which was wound tightly around her body from below her naked breasts, being caught up some way at the bottom near her ankles. Bits of shiny metal resembling gold, ornamented both the headdress and the skirt. Otherwise the woman was entirely without jewelry. Her bare arms were slender ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... whom they had offered, for sake of their own health and advantage, to tend. The villagers had received them civilly, but without enthusiasm. When tackled on the subject of their religious opinions, most of them declined to answer, except Mr. Twitt, who, fixing a filmy eye sternly on the plain and gloomy face ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... of gravel, white as scattered pearls, the sequined lengths coiled on; and the snake-green water, the strange burnt-coral vegetation like a trail of blood among the pearls, the young foliage of trees, filmy as wisps of blowing gauze, were the only vestiges of colour that the moon allowed to live in the under-world which we had reached. But above, on the roof of that world—"les Causses"—where we had left ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... phantoms of the gone, Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye, As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone From the sward near me, ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... inmates, including slaves, was burst open, and in those beautiful and luxuriant courts and chambers the whole of the women were butchered with a brutality quite as fiendish as any displayed by the Arabs themselves. The handsome favourites of Samory in their filmy garments of gold tissue and girdles of precious stones were dragged by their long tresses from their hiding places and literally hacked to pieces, their magnificent and costly jewels being torn from them ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks. Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... gray-headed man, short and paunchy in build, with small, tottering, uneasy legs, skin mottled like that of a toad, cheeks drooping and shaking, chin retiring, nose bulbous, one eye a black hollow, the other filmy and yet shining, expression both dull and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... of the girl's step in the doorway Mrs. Coombe opened her eyes. They were very filmy to-night, blank, contented. Her nervousness seemed to have left her. Perhaps she was half asleep, for she yawned, an open, ugly yawn, which she did not trouble to raise her ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... paper. Salt is put in the first boil, the tea in the second. At the third boil, a dipperful of cold water is poured into the kettle to settle the tea and revive the "youth of the water." Then the beverage was poured into cups and drunk. O nectar! The filmy leaflet hung like scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like waterlilies on emerald streams. It was of such a beverage that Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote: "The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... Mr. Linden. Which rather shortly—put question brought Mr. Motley to a stand. Much as when one pushes on into daylight through the filmy finespun work of a spider, that respectable insect looks about, considering ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... and quickly and deftly began her preparations for dinner. Inga had been married a few weeks before, and so Norma had no maid. She put her new hat into its tissue paper, and tied a fresh checked apron over her filmy best waist, and stepped to and fro between stove and dining table, as efficient a little housekeeper as ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... hang their heads with thirst. All day long, the grasshopper and locust sent through the hot, panting air, their shrill notes, stinging the ear with discord. The heaven above looked like a dome of brass, and a thin, filmy smoke ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... a thing of dread, even to the skilled pilots who navigate this mighty stream. On that particular night, the fog lay low upon the water: so that in my position near the top of the tree I was entirely clear of its vapoury disc; and could look down upon its soft filmy cumuli floating gently over the surface—white and luminous under the silvery moonlight. The moon was still shining brightly; and both sky and forest could be seen as clearly as ever. The water-surface alone was hidden from my sight— the very thing I was most anxious to observe. As if by ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... her hands and raised her eyes to mine. Through the filmy lace of her veil I could see that they were very soft, almost as though tears ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... stillness of infinite ethereal space; but, as the shadows paled, there was unfolded a fairyland of enchanted wonders that I shall always remember. Invisible hands of artistry had draped the countless pines with garlands and wreaths of white with filmy aigrettes and huge, ponderous globes and festoons woven by the frost in an exquisite and fantastic handiwork; and when the sun came out, as it did for a few moments, every ornament on those decorated ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... Death came, and cried, Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmur'd like a noon-tide bee Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me?—And ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... Cynthia Lennox, fair and elegant in a filmy black gown, and a broad black hat draped with lace and violets shading her delicate, clear-cut face, and her father and mother. Fanny's eyes were red. She looked as if she had been running—in fact, one could easily hear her breathe ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... went outside and mounted his wheel he never once glanced across the square to where the car of Mr. Marsh stood. True, neither of the parties happened to be visible just then; but how was he to know but what they might be looking out from behind the filmy lace curtains with which Mine Host Barnwell ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... dropped upon the ground were lovely. Large as a lady's veil, ribbed satin, rose and purple, pink and scarlet, the filmy edges curled delicately, they hinted the elegance and luxury of a pretty woman's boudoir. And, like all such dainty trifles, the charming flower that hangs like a colored lamp in the green chapel of the banana-grove it is useless ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... vision in a filmy pink breakfast gown and cap, and as she smiled perkily at Cappy he returned her bright look with one a trifle ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... apart, the better to seize every filmy detail of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... rate, took away her evenness of poise; the freshet had frozen on the slanting stone, and was one coat of ice; poor Nest fell, and put out her hip. No more flushing rosy color on that sweet face—no more look of beaming innocent happiness;—instead, there was deadly pallor, and filmy eyes, over which dark shades seemed to chase each other as the shoots of agony grew more and more intense. She screamed once or twice; but the exertion (involuntary, and forced out of her by excessive pain) overcame her, and she fainted. A child coming ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... knew that he had lost the opportunity to recall Pierre and his companion. He looked at the handkerchief more, closely. It was a dainty fabric, so soft that it gave barely the sensation of touch when he crushed it in the palm of his hand. For a few moments he was puzzled to account for the filmy strip of lace. Then the truth came to him. Jeanne had used it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood

... enough;" and under an eddying blast of steam the massive locomotives charged past us once more, while I felt a thrill as I watched them, and envied Grant, the engineer. It was something to hold that power in the hollow of one's hand. Thick white powder whirled aloft like smoke before them, a filmy wavy mass that seemed alive rolled aside, while presently the whistle boomed in triumph, and there was an exultant shout from the passengers, for steam had vanquished the snow, and the road lay open before ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... forehead, of almost boyhood, frown, and his pleasant mouth droop, then inexplicably smooth and smile. It was a day which no man in the flush of youth could resist. That June day fairly rioted in through the open windows. Mrs. Black's muslin curtains danced in the June breeze like filmy-skirted nymphs. Wesley, whose imagination was active, seemed to see forced upon his eager, yet reluctant, eyes, radiant maidens, flinging their white draperies about, dancing a dance of the innocence which preludes the knowledge of love. Sweet scents came in through ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... an unusual hour at which to see him in the drawing-room, and Lesley looked up in surprise. Then, half unconsciously, half timidly, she drew her filmy embroidered handkerchief over the book in her lap. She had a shy dislike to letting her father see what she ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... Cornish hills: Trembling within the low moon's pallid fires, The tall corn-tassels lift their fragrant spires; From filmy spheres, a liquid starlight fills — Like dew of daffodils — The fragile dark, where multitudinous The rhythmic, intermittent silence thrills, Like song, the valleys. — "Hark!" he murmurs, "Thus May bards from crickets ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress—every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... are well lost in the lagoons—Venice no longer visible behind; the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at the mouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in silver silhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, the suggestion of coast-lines ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... harp is brought: upon the frame 36 A filmy cobweb hung; The strings were few, yet 'twas the same; The old man drawing near the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... the reflections of stars. Above these two flecks of light was perched a battered old leghorn hat after the style affected in the music halls of those days. Floating out back of this hat on the water was a long wavery coil of filmy hair, the face was shaded, but two long slim arms were thrust out of the water toward me, and following these arms down a bit I was shocked and surprised to find that further than the hat the young lady below me was apparently innocent of garments. Now ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... man might have been discovered walking past the porch of the hotel, his hands in his pockets, his eyes presumably on the stars—certainly he gave no signs of watching Claire and the man in riding-breeches as they leaned over the rail, looked at mountain-tops filmy in starlight, while in the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... leaves, it is almost unnoticeable. At night, however, it moves about more freely, seeking its food and eventually its mate. At such times it becomes distinctly more conspicuous because its wings are steadily fluttering. The hind wings are filmy and are very light green. The creature looks most ghost-like as it flies through ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... 'mid terrestrial things Transcendently forlorn, From time bound far on filmy wings ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various

... precipices which the mist left visible, while her beams seemed as it were absorbed by the fleecy whiteness of the mist, where it lay thick and condensed; and gave to the more light and vapoury specks, which were elsewhere visible, a sort of filmy transparency resembling the lightest veil of silver gauze. Despite the uncertainty of my situation, a view so romantic, joined to the active and inspiring influence of the frosty atmosphere, elevated my spirits while it braced my nerves. I felt an inclination to cast care away, and ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... screech from his antagonist rang upon his eardrums, the cub would stop a moment and gaze pensively through and beyond the end of the wood shed, as if, indeed, from far off, a certain sound, made filmy and infinitesimal by distance, had reached him. Then he would smile deprecatingly to himself, as if to say, "How ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... insolently, inkily blue, drew all about them the uncompromising wheel of the horizon. Search it as they pleased, not even the practisect eye of Captain Davis could descry the smallest interruption. A few filmy clouds were slowly melting overhead; and about the schooner, as around the only point of interest, a tropic bird, white as a snowflake, hung, and circled, and displayed, as it turned, the long ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... angels in pictures are not —they wear nothing but wings. But these Genoese women do look so charming. Most of the young demoiselles are robed in a cloud of white from head to foot, though many trick themselves out more elaborately. Nine-tenths of them wear nothing on their heads but a filmy sort of veil, which falls down their backs like a white mist. They are very fair, and many of them have blue eyes, but black and dreamy dark brown ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Of wool, silk, linen, cotton, in their hue, Of diverse dyes and colours, foul and fair. Yarns to her reel from all those fleeces drew, In the outer porch, a dame of hoary hair. On summer-day thus village wife we view, When the new silk is reeled, its filmy twine Wind from the worm, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... proprietress of a turquoise velvet walking-suit, a hat to match, a pale blue evening frock, a pale green between-dress with lovely clinging lines, and a heavenly white crepe thing with rosy ribbons and filmy shadow-laces—the negligee of one's dreams. There were also slippers and shoes and stockings and—this was really too bad of Mrs. De Guenther—a half-dozen set of lingerie, straight through. Mrs. De Guenther sat and ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... the table itself, or up in the bay-window, overlooking the gray lake, where they cosily took their coffee. This delightful function, Virgilia as much as intimated, might be but the beginning of many; this, if little Preciosa rightly understood, was only the withdrawal of the first of the filmy, silvery curtains that intervened between her and the full splendour of society. Virgilia murmured of the present opening of the golf season—it would come early this year; and she did not stop with proposing Preciosa for the Knockabout ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... palm here and there. Often they are made to look extra mean by a noble "cottonwood," or Bombax (Pentandrium), standing on its stalwart braces like an old sea-dog with parted legs; extending its roots over a square acre of soil, shedding filmy shade upon the surrounding underwood, and at all times ready, like a certain chestnut, to shelter a ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... her grasp when she opened it, and flung it against the wall with a jarring crash, while a fine powder that stung the skin unbearably drove into her face. For a few moments she could see nothing but a filmy, whirling haze, and then, as her eyes became accustomed to the change of light, she dimly made out the blurred white figures of the horses standing still, with the load of birch logs rising a shapeless mass ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... moments of regret that Lady Harman wouldn't go into that picture. She was different—if only in her simplicity. There was something about these others that put them whole worlds apart from her, who was held so tethered from all furtive adventure by her filmy tentacles of responsibility, her ties and strands of relationship, her essential delicacy. That momentary vision of Ellen as the Countess Martin broke up into absurdities directly he looked at it fully and steadfastly. From thinking of the two women ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... as we approached, "let's get this scene now—number one twenty-six. Loring—Gordon! Shake a leg—here, I'll read it again. 'Daring enters. He is scarcely seated at the desk, examining papers, when Zelda enters in a filmy negligee. Daring looks up amazed and Zelda pretends great agitation. Daring is not unkind to her. He tells her he has not discovered the will as yet. Spoken title: "I am sure that I can find a will and that ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... Linford now, one brought away the notion that in renouncing his allegiance to the Episcopal faith he had gone to the extreme of renouncing marriage, in order that the Mother Church might become his only bride. True, Linford said nothing at all like this;—the idea was fleeting, filmy, traceable to no specific words of his. Yet it left a track across the mind. It seemed to be the very spirit of his speech upon the subject. Certainly no other reason had been suggested for the regrettable, severance of this domestic tie. Conjecture was futile ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... gladness, Of filmy sun, and opal tinted skies; Of warm midsummer air that lightly lies In mystic rings, Where softly swings The music of a thousand wings ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... weighted pocket she found a belt of silver coins and a little vest of creamy lace. There were rose silk stockings stuffed into the shoes. Joan eagerly arrayed herself. She had trouble with the vest, it was so filmy, so vaguely made, it seemed to her, and to wear it at all she had to divest herself altogether of the upper part of her coarse underwear. Then it seemed to her startlingly inadequate even as an undergarment. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt

... The dim outline of her in her filmy dress and the elusive scent of her presence stirred him again. Her voice was gentle as she laughed a greeting and she gave his hand an imperceptible squeeze as he came up the steps. His stiffness vanished, but the sound of voices from back in the ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... were brought out. The lacy bridal veil, the little buckled slippers, the full, filmy petticoats and all the soft white ribbony things that it is the right of every bride to have. Down at the very bottom of the trunk were bundles of letters, some faded photographs and a little jewel box in which was a little silver ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... thrown out into relief by the gray wall of fern-draped rock behind her; her splendid hair, unbound, falling in tangled masses to her waist; her cheeks flushed, her face radiant with devout and fervent supplication, her eyes uplifted to the narrow belt of sky overhead, where filmy vapors were turning to gold, touched by a ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... of light and shade amid green surrounding fells. The sun was slipping low, and would soon have kindled all the lake into a white fire, in which its islands would have almost disappeared. But, for the moment, everything was plain:—the sky, full of light, and filmy grey cloud, the fells with their mingling of wood and purple crag, the shallow reach of the river beyond the garden, with a little family of wild duck floating upon it, and just below her a vivid splash of colour, a mass of rhododendron in bloom, setting ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a treatise on this strange "bird without father or mother," and Sir Robert Murray, in the "Philosophical Transactions," says that, "these shells are hung at the tree by a neck, longer than the shell, of a filmy substance, round and hollow and creased, not unlike the windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest where it is fastened to the tree, from which it seems to draw and convey the matter which serves for the growth and vegetation of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... of the filmy and amethyst haze that closed each forest vista, came a milk-white horse, stepping high over the fallen leaves. The rider, not tall, black-bearded, with a pale, handsome face, sat like a study for some great sculptor's ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... What happens then, brother? The wizard no sooner feels the prick than he bucks down, and flings me over his head into the mire. I get up and look about me; there stands the donkey staring at me, and there stand the whole gypsy canaille squinting at me with their filmy eyes. 'Where is the scamp who has sold me this piece of furniture?' I shout. 'He is gone to Granada, Valorous,' says one. 'He is gone to see his kindred among the Moors,' says another. 'I just saw him running over the field, in the direction of -, with the devil close behind him,' says a third. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... which she received me was a magnificent salon, with a balcony in front. When I entered, the doors and windows were wide open; the rays of the sun darted through the filmy lace curtains; it was a "tableau en plein air" that met my eye. Countess Diodora, in a mauve-coloured silk dressing-gown, rested on a settee. Before her was a little Venetian mosaic table, and on it a tea-tray. Diodora seemed to be in excellent ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... into which it eventually fell. Another artist was also on the wing early, and in pursuit of a tin pan in which to hide her precious compound, she unwittingly seized this one, and the rich white soup rolled down her raven locks like the oil on Aaron's beard, and enveloped her in a veil of filmy whiteness. I heard the splash and the exclamation of surprise and entered the butler's pantry just in time to see the heiress of the Smith estate standing like a statue, tin pan in hand, soup in her curls, her eyebrows and eyelashes,—collar, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... the bushy banks of the Elbe. Mephistopheles summons gnomes and sylphs to fill his mind with lovely fancies. They do their work so well as to entrance, not only Faust, but all who hear their strains, The instrumental ballet is a fairy waltz, a filmy musical fabric, seemingly woven of moonbeams and dewy cobwebs, over a pedal-point on the muted violoncellos, ending with drum taps and harmonics from the harp—one of the daintiest and most original orchestral effects imaginable. So dainty is the device, indeed, that one would think that ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... that his best plans might be foiled, he was furious when doubt was cast upon this pet design. Like a giant of a spider at the nucleus of his web, he watched the broad fan of radiant threads, and the hovering of filmy woof, but without the mild philosophy of that spider, who is versed in the very sad ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... summer lightning shimmered on the horizon. The wind was strong, as it nearly always is here, and shallow white surf stretched seaward across the flats. The sea roared continuously without that rise and fall of the breakers which marks a deeper coast, and from the face of the water there arose a filmy mist—part ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... Cloud's room was furnished in French gray enamel, with insets of fine cane-work. She stood a moment in the open doorway, and looked about the place; soft gray walls, with a trellis of roses at the top, filmy white draperies with a touch of rose, a gray couch luxuriously upholstered, with many pillows, some rose, some gray, a thick, gray rug under her feet, and her own little gray desk drawn out conveniently when she wanted to write. Over all a flood of autumn sunshine, and on the wall ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... flashing diamond. A solitaire diamond blazed on her left hand—those slender, delicate little hands—her engagement ring, no doubt. They were all the jewels she wore. The trimming of her dress was of filmy black lace, and all her masses of bright golden hair were twisted coronet-wise round her noble and lovely head. She was very tall, very slender; and the exquisite face just tinted with only the faintest shadow of rose. "Beautiful, and stately, and ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... with many moons to sell Opened his basket wide; Showed me the filmy crescent moons in it, And the piled discs (like silver spoons) in it That push and pull the tide, And small sweet honey-moons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various

... Like a gnat's small plaintive lay, Somewhere in the dark behind him Where the "Ancient Persons" lay, Heard a little ghostly twitter Like a voice addressing him, Turned and saw his father staring Just above the basket rim, Staring at Hasan, his strong son, With his filmy red-rimmed eyes, "What's ado, Oh! ancient father?" Cried Hasan ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson

... the heavenly visitant would but end here, I think the impression would be deeper and more abiding. The filmy, vague outline of the white figure thoroughly harmonizes with all established, orthodox notions of ghosts, and if this were all of the apparition vouchsafed to us, we might, perhaps, have a harder problem to deal with than when the Spirit actually emerges ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... during the course of the evening. The music for it was the "Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz" and the girls impersonated in their dance the Danube River, winding through its green valley. The girls, dressed in light green, were the river itself, while Gladys, in a filmy white dress with water lilies twined in her long yellow hair, was the Spirit of the Danube, and frolicked among the rhythmically swaying girls like a real river nymph on the rocking waves of the mighty stream. Their dance brought down the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey

... filmy web of Coan weave with golden broidery gleams; Her swarthy slaves the Indian sun touched with ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... he cried, and drawing from his pocket two little wisps of reddish hair, he held them to his cheeks like side-whiskers and danced about the studio with the filmy graces ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Diana ran after it, and, on reaching the upper storey, heard it making a terrific racket in the room above the one in which she now slept. Nothing daunted, however, she boldly approached, and, flinging open the door, perceived its filmy outline standing before a shadowy and very antique eight-day clock, which apparently it was in the habit of winding. A great fear now fell on Diana. What was the thing? And supposing it should ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... the daisy see Round the sunny meadows glancing? It sees the butterflies' chase And the filmy gnats ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various

... mountain in the foreground,) the granite ranges rising gradually and grim as we rode; but, further still, behind those gray and ghastly barriers, all bathed and blazing in the sun's fresh splendors, undimmed by a cloud, unveiled even by a filmy fleece of vapor, and oh, so white—so intensely, blindingly white! against the dark-blue sky, the needles, the spires, the solemn pyramid, the transfiguration cone of Mont Blanc. Higher, and still higher, those apocalyptic ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... and their skirts swished softly as they passed. Rimrock eyed them sullenly, for a black mood was on him—he was thinking of his lost mine. Their faces were powdered to an unnatural whiteness and their hair was elaborately coiffed; their dresses, too, were white and filmy and their high heels clacked as they walked. But who was keeping these women, these wives of officials, and superintendents and mining engineers? Did they glance at the man who had discovered their mine and built up the town where they lived? Well, probably ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... thoughtful, with her arms folded in front across the lines of her voluptuous form, her head poised high, erect as an arrow. Her mass of dark red hair rolled upward in a great curling wave from her face. From its crest a bunch of orange blossoms gleamed, clasping the filmy veil which fell, a white cascade, over the wilderness of delicate lace forming her train. She had turned half around, and this great train of shimmering stuff enveloped her feet and swept out in graceful ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... wear caps, in spite of her youth, I got Ludmilla to get me some bits of lace. Hope you'll like 'em'; and out of a soft paper came some filmy things, one of which soon lay like a net of snowflakes on Mrs Meg's ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... clothing. Men crawled over one another, then dropped to the first open spot, to flounder there a moment, then roar in snoring sleep. Against the wall a bearded giant half leaned, half lay, one tooth touching the ragged lips and breaking the filmy skin, while the blood dripped, slow drop after slow drop, upon his black, tousled beard. ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... embarrassment toward a secluded path just behind him, whom did he see coming toward him but Alfred, with what appeared to be a bunch of daffodils; but as Alfred drew nearer, Jimmy began to perceive at his elbow a large flower-trimmed hat, and—"horrors!"—beneath it, with a great deal of filmy white and yellow floating from it, was a ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo

... through the musical jangle of cow bells that drew nearer up the valley, and a cloud of yellow smoke curling above the dark branches spread itself across the fir tops in filmy folds. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... Wenceslaus. Shows why this son should be considered as the "Good King Wenceslaus" of our Christmas carol. Makes mention also of Sister Anne and her husband, Richard II of England. Tells about Susanna and the King. Introduces well-known names of those who pass in filmy pageant across the old historic Charles Bridge—John Nepomuk, John Hus, and others. Gives a fleeting vision of another native King, a great man, and of other rulers who had their day and passed on. Talks at some length of the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... past seven Platt and Miss Asher sat at a table in a Broadway restaurant. She was dressed in a plain, filmy black. Platt didn't know that it was all a part ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... watching the approaching punt, which was still half a mile away, and being poled steadily in and out of the winding water-lane, now hidden by the dry rustling reeds which stood covered with strands of filmy conferva or ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... spectral in the fading light. For a fleeting moment the world glowed like a huge golden ball; then the whole countryside was one vast vista of green, finally merging into a deep illimitable purple. Down the valley crept the mist, trailing its filmy veils over point and peak and ridge. The air throbbed with the cries of geese and bitterns. The hush of the spring-time night set in and covered the world—that hush that is more vibrant than thunder, that gathers the forest sounds and murmurs to itself, and weaves them all into a tense, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... examined by the whole body, we allotted the various household duties, as if we had been on a gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting party, or were shipwrecked. I then recounted the floating rumours concerning the hooded lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had communicated ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... low-pitched, mirthless laughter. Where was the filmy-eyed girl he had known? The laughter broke off ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... Dart off asunder with an angry sound, How soon to re-unite! And see! they meet, Each in the other lost and found: and see Placeless, as spirits, one soft water-sun Throbbing within them, heart at once and eye! With its soft neighbourhood of filmy clouds, The stains and shadings of forgotten tears, Dimness o'erswum with lustre! Such the hour Of deep enjoyment, following love's brief feuds; And hark, the noise of a near waterfall! I pass forth into light—I find myself Beneath a weeping birch (most beautiful Of forest ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... at the olona fibers inwrought, Like the trickling brooklets of Wai-hilau. The olona, fibers knit with strength This dainty immaculate web, the pa-u, 25 And the filmy weft of the kilo-hana. With the small bamboo ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... Kennedy attracted our attention. Caught in the filmy lace folds of the woman's dress he had found a few small and thin pieces of glass. He was regarding them with an interest that was oblivious to everything else. As he turned them over and over and tried to fit them together they seemed to form at least a part of what had once been ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... uppermost brains of the friars. Dear old fellows! in the midst of that solemn land their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily, their eyes kept flashing with joyous bonfires, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... Dorrance, Don's cousin. She stood in the doorway. Her long, filmy white summer dress fell nearly to her ankles. Her black hair was coiled on her head. In her bodice was a single red poinsettia blossom. As she stood motionless, her small slight figure framed against the dark background of the hall, ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... is in the air! The wave—there is a movement there! As if the towers had thrust aside, In slightly sinking, the dull tide— As if their tops had feebly given A void within the filmy Heaven. The waves have now a redder glow— The hours are breathing faint and low— And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... landmark to show where little Billy was hidden from their loving eyes, unless it was in the old hill of Lisnavoura, that cast its long shadow at sunset before the cabin-door; or that, white and filmy in the moonlight, in later years, would occupy his brother's gaze as he returned from fair or market, and draw from him a sigh and a prayer for the little brother he had lost so long ago, and was never to ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... excellent, recherche, elegant, splendid, admirable, choice, select, attractive, delicate, subtle, minute, capillary, tenuous, thin, subtile, ethereal, attenuated, filmy, flimsy, gossamery, slender; comminuted, bolted, pulverized, impalpable, powdered. Antonyms: coarse, crude, unbolted, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... a Well; One up, one down, one empty, and one full: Half high, half low, half witty, and half dull. So on the borders of an ancient Wood, Or where some Poplar trembles o'er the Flood, Arachne travels on her filmy thread, Now high, now low, or on ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... into play. Hell, Judgment and Death in turn began to work upon the lad's soul—these monstrous elemental Truths that underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free wills that have enslaved themselves into eternal bondage ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... immaculate, starched shirt-ruffles. Her figure, as she leaned against the chair's high back, was slender and girlish,—childish, almost, in its low-necked, short-waisted, slim-skirted, "Empire" dress, of some filmy stuff, the pale yellow of a Marshal Niel rose. Her face was a pure oval with delicate, regular features. Her reddish-brown hair, parted in the middle, was piled on top of her small head, and airy little curls hung down on her brow on either side of the part. Her eyes—the color ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... with a swing the limousine came upon another car, stationary and in trouble. A man in evening dress was holding an electric lamp for the chauffeur to peer under the bonnet, and standing beside him was a woman in black, wearing a filmy purple cloak. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... close thy filmy mourning veil, Moon, moon, conceal thy beauty sweet and pale, Wind, wind, sigh out thy most pathetic wail, My ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... in the sky, but the great heat had caused a haze to overlie the valley, gathering thickly along the winding course of the river, and hanging in little sprays and feathers over the woodlands which clothe its banks. Through this filmy vapour there broke from time to time fierce sparkles of brilliant light as the sun's rays fell upon breastplate or headpiece. Now and again the gentle summer breeze wafted up sudden pulses of martial music to our ears, with the blare of trumpets and the long ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... pain-racked body was lowered to rest, and to shelter them. But, while yet that great body hung over them in the act of descending, it had twisted and curved into the required lines, and a soft muzzle had thrust this puppy that way, and the other another way; the mother's soft, filmy eyes missing nothing before her or behind. One inch of miscalculation, and the life had been crushed out of one of those tiny creatures. But pain brought ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... they know—how could they dream the truth—or descry the hidden skeleton at the festival, wreathed in flowers and veiled with glittering, filmy draperies, which yet put forth its bony fingers to beckon ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... "up"—that is, overhead. There was nothing there but vast stretches of emptiness—at first. Then he saw that this emptiness was lined and laced with filmy striations, like cellophane. They bore a strange resemblance to his "doodlings," as though that strange faculty of his enabled him to somehow perceive this place of the fourth dimension. And instinctively Harper knew that these lacings were the boundaries ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer

... each is attached to the very summit of its peak, like a streamer at a masthead; how smooth and silky they are in texture, and how finely their fading fringes are penciled on the azure sky. See how dense and opaque they are at the point of attachment, and how filmy and translucent toward the end, so that the peaks back of them are seen dimly, as though you were looking through ground glass. Yet again observe how some of the longest, belonging to the loftiest summits, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... opposite to Jan, and he surveyed her across the sweet-peas with considerable satisfaction. He had never seen Jan in what her niece bluntly called "a nekked dless" before. To-night she wore black, in some soft, filmy stuff from which her fine arms and shoulders and beautiful neck stood out in challenging whiteness. Her hair, too, had "pretty twinkly things" in it, and she wore a long chain of small but well-matched pearls, her father's last gift to her. Yes, Jan was undoubtedly ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... time she had completed these operations a dressing-bell sounded, and quickly exchanging her travelling costume for a filmy little dinner dress of some soft, shimmering material, she sallied downstairs in search ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... and looked at the garrison. The moon had crept high and the place was very still. We were safe for the night. I lit my pipe, and the smoke that spiraled above me did not seem more filmy than the chance that had saved us. I suddenly shivered. But we were safe. I gave the troops ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... clouds settled on the topmost summits of the mountain. The wind began to blow fresh and cool, and when we had reached a height overlooking the deep valley, in the bottom of which lies the picturesque village of Ak-su, there were long showery lines coming up from the sea, and a filmy sheet of gray rain descended between us and Olympus, throwing his vast bulk far into the background. At Ak-su, the first shower met us, pouring so fast and thick that we were obliged to put on our capotes, and halt under a walnut-tree for shelter. But it soon passed over, laying the dust, for ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... and their satellites, there are two other classes of bodies which claim membership of the solar system. These are Comets and Meteors. Comets differ from the bodies which we have just been describing in that they appear filmy and transparent, whereas the others are solid and opaque. Again, the paths of the planets around the sun and of the satellites around their primaries are not actually circles; they are ovals, but their ovalness is not ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... With filmy eyes Tommy searched himself for the little pocket-book in which he took notes of such sad thoughts as these, and in place of the book he found a glove wrapped in silk paper. He sat there with it in his hand, nodding his head ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie

... of the fires, and all huddle close up to them, glad of the restful reprieve, after the worry they have endured all day. Poor patient beasts, there they stand, chewing the cud, first with one side of their body turned towards the flames and then the other, the filmy smoke, the glow of the fire and the rays of the sunlight, hiding and showing distinctly by turns the girls and their kine. The dairymaids come with their stools to milk their soft-eyed friends, and on blazing hot ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... one would stare any more. In one window there were displayed, not only gowns, but hats and cloaks, and exquisite furs, all shown on wax models with fashionably dressed hair and coquettish faces. One pink and white creature with a startlingly perfect figure wore a filmy robe of that intense indigo just taken on by the sea. Underneath a shadowlike tunic of dark blue chiffon there was a glint of pale gold, a sort of gold and silver sheath which encased the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... he rose to a filmy vapour floating away and dissolving in the sunshine. "You did not see that before because you fired. Don't you see? ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn

... her that the cold, which was already almost insupportable, suddenly increased, as it not infrequently does in that country before the snow. Then a white powder was whirled into her face, filling her eyes and searing the skin, while the horses were plunging at a gallop through a filmy haze, and Winston, whitened all over, leaned forward with lowered head hurling hoarse encouragement at them. His voice reached her fitfully through the roar of wind, until sight and hearing were lost alike as the white haze ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... sat down to rest on some scattered boulders, and gazed with wonder at the magnificent vistas of glowing peaks towering above us, and the luminous expanse of purple gorge and valley, with the white, roaring torrents below, over which wreaths of foam-like filmy mist hovered and floated continually. As I sat, lost in admiration, St. Aubyn touched my arm, and silently pointed to Theodor Raoul. He had risen, and now stood at the edge of the plateau over-hanging the lowland ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... fact, the ocean had lost its color. Heavy blue-white clouds with shredded, filmy foundations, which seemed almost to sweep the waters, moved swiftly to the westward, while in the background the wall of mist advanced silently to encompass them. They could feel its breath, heavy, ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... another person. He chatted and talked and laughed with his son, ordered a splendid luncheon for them both, swung aboard the train, and by two o'clock they were standing on the very edge of the precipice, with the glorious Falls of Niagara thundering into the basin at their feet. The column of filmy mist, the gorgeous rainbows, the stupendous cataract, leaping and snarling like a million wolves—it whirled about Jimmy's brain like a wild dream of No Man's Land, and he walked beside his father in a daze of delight. ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... plates that shine about Close up with a filmy din, Till the air is frozen out, And ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... moon at full, or swung like a white sickle in the sky to warn him that his life must be mown like grass. At night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver—a poudre day, when the face and hands are most like to be frozen, and all so still and white and passionless, yet aching with energy. Hundreds upon hundreds of miles that endless trail went ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... thought swept the filmy clouds-landed him with a bump upon hard rock. He was not supposed to know their address. How, to the dragon, could he explain the venal trick by which he had acquired it? Now he beheld a new picture. Himself in the drawing-room; to him ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... From the filmy ashes of her letter to him Stafford now turned away to his writing-table. There he sat for a while and answered several notes, among them one to Alice Mayhew, now the Countess of Tynemouth, whose red parasol still hung above the mantel-piece, a relic of the Zambesi—and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... hypocrite Fade in its greenness. Tho' his house may seem Awhile to flourish, it shall not endure. Even tho' he grasp it with despairing strength It shall deceive his trust and pass away, As fleets the spider's filmy web. Behold God will not cast away the perfect man Nor help ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest. The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end. These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows—my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... owes it's sparkling birth, And with prismatic crystals gems the earth, 145 O'er tottering domes in filmy foliage crawls, Or frosts with branching plumes the mouldering walls. As woos Azotic Gas the virgin Air, And veils in crimson clouds the yielding Fair, Indignant Fire the treacherous courtship flies, 150 Waves his light wing, and mingles ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... the penis. The microscope shows that semen involuntarily discharged may be devoid of spermatozoa, or if present, they are defective, their heads being without tails. The urine is loaded with mucus or bears up a filmy, membranous, transparent matter, or it may be covered with a thin fluid having an oily appearance, but in rare cases is clear. Again, it may hold substances in solution, which are deposited in crystals or incrust ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... evening, how the trees Stand crisp against the clear, bright-colored sky! How the white mountain-tops distinctly shine, Taking and giving radiance, and the slopes Are purpled with rich floods of peach-hued light! Thank God, my filmy, old dislustred eyes Find the same sense of exquisite delight, My heart vibrates to the same touch of joy In scenes like this, as when my pulse danced high, And youth coursed through my veins! This the one link That binds the wan old man that now I am To ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... caused a strong, deep flush to spread itself under the rouge which unevenly covered the woman's cheeks, as she bowed elaborately in return. Then, furtively, during a protracted silence, she took stock of the new-comer, from the tip of her white suede shoes to the filmy lace and pink roses upon her wide white hat; and the sidelong gaze lingered marvellingly upon the quiet, delicate hands, slender and finely expressive, in their ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... hand): Hand in hand we ever go Through the season to and fro. I breathe upon the streams. They cease Their murmurings and are at peace. Upon each window pane I trace The finest filmy glistening lace. Each boy and girl, 'tis plain to see, Hath still a welcome kind for me. For on the lake they whirl and wheel, You hear the click of polished steel As swift upon their skates they fly ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg

... were like veritable ghosts, Captain George seized me by the arm and exclaimed: "Look there!" I looked up into the northern sky. There was not a cloud visible in all that wide expanse, but something more filmy than a cloud floated like a banner among the stars. It might almost have been a cobweb stretched from star to star—each strand woven from a star beam,—but it was ever changing in form and color. Now it was scarf-like, fluttering and waving in a gentle breeze; and now ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... and it really was not quite eighteen when she stepped out on the veranda, a vision, a positively devastating vision in soft and filmy white, with a soft and filmy hat all white lace and a pink rose. It is to be hoped that she did not know how she looked. Otherwise there would have been no excuse for her and she should have been summarily haled to the nearest justice, with all other breakers of the peace, and condemned ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... I written "B," seeing the perfect filmy blue all around the horizon; but a seaman's scrutiny showed me faint fluffy wisps o'erhead, luminous and marged with palest gold; and ever must a sailor be suspicious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various

... him," said Avery. She spoke almost under her breath, her eyes upon the fire. Tudor, standing beside her with his elbow on the mantelpiece, was still conscious of that filmy veil of reserve floating between them. It chafed him, but it was too intangible a thing ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the plate ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... herself. It is for the man of her heart that she lives and has her being; it is that she may find favor in his sight that she brushes the hair he has kissed; it is with the hope that his eye may be caught, his fancy pleased, that she puts the flower at her bosom or winds the filmy lace around her neck. And it was of Drake—Drake—Drake—she thought and dreamed as she turned from the glass ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb. You see no leaves—only one great filmy mist of petals. Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... passed judgment not only on his parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations, and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... and the lips of shells, or floating in sunbeams, an identical design appears; and, on a summer morning, as the eye carefully roams over a lawn, how often do the most perfect little suspension-bridges hang from spear to spear of herbage, their filmy span embossed with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... a dress suit at dinner. A lady wears a handsome gown, "dinner dress" being "full dress;" differing, however, from the evening party or reception gown in the kind of fabrics used. The most filmy gauzes are suitable for a ball costume; while dinner dress—for any but very young ladies—is usually of more substantial materials—rich silk or velvet softened in effect with choice lace, or made brilliant with ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton

... and stagnant waters lick His feet, And from their filmy, iridescent scum Clouds of mosquitoes, gauzy in the heat, Rise with ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.

... dressed in a frock of filmy grey-green chiffon whose colour reminded him of the spiky leaves of a carnation; but he had never seen her look prettier than on that mild spring night; and his eyes unconsciously softened as they dwelt upon her face for one ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... by a corresponding number of Arachnida. On May 25 and 26 the east wall of the vicarage of Burgh-by-sands was coated with a tissue of web so delicate that it required a very close scrutiny to detect it. I could find none of the spinners. Every square inch of the building appeared coated with filmy lines, crossing in places, but mostly horizontal, from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various



Words linked to "Filmy" :   thin, film



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