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More "Vaporous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... orderliness, which, being heretofore known to few of them, was perhaps as much as they could well digest in the remnant of their lives. We were invited into the laundry, where a great washing and drying were in process, the whole atmosphere being hot and vaporous with the steam of wet garments and bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper-life of the past week or fortnight resolved into a gaseous state, and breathing it, however fastidiously, we were forced to inhale the strange element into our inmost being. Had the Queen ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... waywardness in the conception of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light—and some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen. These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great masters, and in those qualities no other man of their countries and epoch has equaled them, but outside of these the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... great furnaces in the neighbourhood of Glasgow glowed somewhat ominously large as the night wore on, we retired to rest rather in hope than resignation. But dismal, indeed, was the prospect when we awoke. A vaporous grey mist had entirely usurped the heavens, and the plash of weary rain resounded through the pluvious metropolis of the west. Fortunately, we were not ignorant of the fact, that Glasgow is under the peculiar tutelage of the Pleiades; and accordingly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... own adamantine conviction that I stood near by some mystery, which was about to be a big mystery, and which would pay me to pursue. 'A fine bundle of nonsense,' I hear you say; 'as silly a flight of a vaporous brain as ever man conceived'—but stay your words awhile; remember that one who is bred up at the keyhole lets himself, if he be wise, be moved by his impulses, and first opinions. He does not quit ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... will crystallize, if you let it cool slowly enough, in stars, much like snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallizes also exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallize from their vapors. Now in any of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an intermediate substance; and in crystallizing they are both brought nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as possible: the essential ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Lido through the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles— And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade," Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station." So o'er the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark How from ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... story- book, 'with what success. I go to a region which is a bit of water-side Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a garnish of Portsmouth, and I say, "Will YOU come and be idle with me?" And it answers, "No; for I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron to hammer, and steam to get up, and smoke to make, and stone to quarry, and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can't ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... remorse. Should she reach him too late for that—find this longing also part of the illusion? The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from the greenish infiltration ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... against her forehead and made an effort to rouse herself. As she did so, her face contracted with an expression of disgust, and she remembered the ether. The soft, vaporous odour drifted towards her from a small table strewn with medicine bottles, and taking care to hold the cork tightly in her fingers she squeezed it ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... bank the prospect was no less wondrous. Against the vaporous background of the Arabian chain, the gigantic pile of the Northern Palace, which distance itself could scarce diminish, reared above the flat-roofed dwellings its mountains of granite, its forest of giant pillars, rose-coloured ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... days of the Crusades, such a one as painters desire for their pictures. Surround this scene with ancient walnut-trees and slim young poplars with their pale-gold leaves; dot graceful buildings here and there along the grassy slopes where sight is lost beneath the vaporous, warm sky, and you will have some idea of one of the points of view ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... sun and of its accompanying atmosphere must increase in rapidity as its volume diminishes, the increased centrifugal force generated by the more rapid rotation, overbalancing the action of gravitation, has caused the sun to abandon successive rings of vaporous matter, which are supposed to have condensed by cooling, and to have become the planets. There is in this theory no unknown substance introduced on supposition, nor any unknown property or law ascribed to a known substance. The known laws of matter authorize us to suppose that a body which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... as usual and woke up about one, as I was in the habit of doing. I found myself in a strange state of cerebral excitement, my preception was keen, my thoughts profound; the sphere of my intelligence seemed increased, I sat up and my eyes were affected with a pale, vaporous, uncertain light, which, however, did, not enable me to ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... leg of that goat, alive, with this knife, and bring it to me?" While they all hesitated, I went myself and did it. One of them fainted at the sight. But when they saw me unmoved they took the dust of my feet, saying that I was above all human weaknesses. That is to say, they saw that day the vaporous envelope which was my idea, but failed to perceive the inner me, which by a curious freak of fate has been created ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the manifold and all particulars. Where, indeed, does individuality begin? Is it the Hidden Source and Spring alone that is the individual, the Unit, or is it the flowing fountain that fills the ocean, or the ocean itself, or its waves, or the drops, or the vaporous particles, that are the individuals? The Sea and the River—these are each One; but the drops of each are many. The tree is one; but its leaves are a multitude: they drop with the frosts, and fall upon his roots; but the tree still continues to grow, and new leaves ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and wide cloud-canopies of uncertain speculation, which also had their interests and their rainbow-colors to him, and could not fail in his life just now, did Sterling pass his year and half at Bayswater. Such vaporous speculations were inevitable for him at present; but it was to be hoped they would subside by and by, and leave the sky clear. All this was but the preliminary to whatever work might lie in him:—and, alas, much other interruption lay between him ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the mainmast were what a painter would call the deeper shades of the picture, for there the black cook and his equally sable adjunct, the cook's mate, held their vaporous and dish-washing levee; while forth from the cloudy sanctuary occasionally pealed a burst of obstreporous laughter, that the most unpractised hearer might swear came from the lungs of a negro, without the trouble of invading ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... is huge, they contain extraordinarily little substance. Their heads must contain some solid matter, but it is probably in the form of a loose aggregation of stones enveloped in vaporous material. There is some reason to suppose that comets are apt to shed some of these stones as they travel along their paths, for the orbits of the meteors that cause some of our greatest "star showers" are coincident with the paths of comets that ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... the other is not inevitably connected with the attainment of a particular degree of condensation. There is reason to believe that it is anticipated in the more massive globes, despite their comparatively slow cooling, as a consequence of the greater power of gravity over their investing vaporous envelopes. This conclusion is enforced by the relations of double-star spectra. The fact that, in unequal pairs, the chief star most frequently shows a solar, its companion a Sirian, spectrum can scarcely be otherwise explained than by admitting that, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were forming from the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of the sun, which we see, is enveloped by several layers of gases and vaporous matter, in the same manner as our globe is enveloped by its atmosphere (see Fig. 10, p. 131). These are transparent, just as our atmosphere is transparent; and so we see the white bright body of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... curled upward and played around the straight, slim figure, drew vaporous lines about the still, ivory face—the handsome, sinister face, sometimes partly veiling the long black eyes and sometimes showing them in all their unnatural brightness. So the man stood, looking towards ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... love with Julia Page; he would not admit that what he felt for Julia was love; he raged with disappointment at the mere thought of bondage so soon, and especially this bondage. But the sweetness of her stole upon his senses nevertheless, tangling about him like a drifting bit of vaporous mist; he had no sooner detached one section of it than another blew across his eyes, set pulses to beating in his temples, and shook his whole body ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... spectators. Yes, Hugh was just casting a like glance to him and now turned to invite the notice of his grandfather. The thunder-clouds had so encompassed the sun that its rays burst through them almost exclusively in one wide crater, crimsoning, bronzing, and gilding their vaporous and ever-changing walls. Thence they spread earthward, heavenward, leaving remoter masses to writhe darkly on each other and themselves, in and out, in and in, cloaking this hill in blue shadow, bathing that one in green light, while from a watery fastness somewhere hid in the depth of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Paris when you ennuied yourself so enormement?" asked a yellow-haired English girl who had painted countless vaporous and ravishing Eurydices and filmy Echoes from broad-waisted, pug-nosed Cockney models, and who always declared that she would recognize a "professional" even among the shining hosts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her one supreme moment, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... quickening sky by freshened air and light and herbage. Two centuries and a half later, long streaks of electric light would ripple on that surface, and great ships stand at ease there, and ferry-boats rush back and forth. But in this closing dusk it reflected only the gray and yellow vaporous breath of April, and shaggy edges of a wilderness. The high shores sank their shadows farther and farther from ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... planets, while in the vaporous condition to which we have just alluded, would manifestly have a central nucleus gradually increasing in magnitude and mass, and an atmosphere offering, at its successive limits, phenomena entirely similar to those which the solar atmosphere, properly ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... of quick-silver—when the track of the swift porpoises show like long furrows of dazzling flame, and over the whirling eddies of the keel's deep wake is seen to hover a strange unearthly light,—a thin bluish, devilish, vaporous haze, which, in the silent watch of night, maketh the lonely gazer's flesh to creep, and conjures through the brain every wild legend whispered of the "vasty deep," fascinating the eyes, and holding them with spell-like power, until—until what?—why, until ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... that Gorley laughed. Drake stopped on the instant, and for a while there was silence between the pair. A gray beam of light shot through a chink between the logs, and then another and another until the darkness of the hut changed to a vaporous twilight. Then of a sudden the notes of a bugle sounded the reveille. Gorley raised himself upon his elbows and thrust forward his head. Outside he heard the rattle of arms, the chatter of voices, all the ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... rising with airy lightness from the level sward by the margin of the beautiful lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre of the fells at the other side, whose snowy peaks show faintly against the sky, tinged with the vaporous red of the western light. As you descend towards the margin of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its taper chimneys and slender gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous sign, and over all the graceful tower and spire of the ancient church, at this hour or ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... amphitheatre of oak and ash and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs and bright green railings packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of courtyard; ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... now, back warping from the inclement main, Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, It swung into its azure roads again; When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid our ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... green upon a ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... lovely little blonde creature about twenty-five years old, dressed in a floating Watteau-like garment of vaporous blue, painted with faded pink roses. She was seated in a large carved and gilded chair, opposite an excessively Louis-Quinze mirror, while her pale golden hair was being brushed out by a brown, inanimate-looking ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... of times legendary, when dragons and demons moved about the earth in more palpable forms than they usually maintain to-day. A great mist overspread the Empire and men's minds were vaporous, nor was their purpose keen. Later, deities and well-disposed Forces began to exercise their powers. The mist was turned into a benevolent system of rivers and canals, and iron, rice and the silk-worm then appeared. Next, heroes and champions, whose names ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though so abundant, was quite uniform: it was a grove of machine-made foliage, a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower. The air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken. Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to be beheld. The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern kind; ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... as the temple of prayer. The forest glades echoed to the stroke of the axe as well as to hymns of praise. Yes, as Carlyle writes of the twelfth century, "these years were no chimerical vacuity and dreamland peopled with mere vaporous phantasms, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The sun shone on it, the vicissitudes of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowed fields ploughed ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... nigh. Never shall I forget my mental sufferings at night. In vain may one attempt to describe what one then goes through; only the victims know what that is. My ghost - the ghost of the Whampo Reach - the ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague amorphous dread. It may have floated with the swollen and putrid corpses which hourly came bobbing down the stream, but it never appeared; for there was nothing to appear. Still it might appear. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... territory, hemmed in on all sides by an army almost as great as that which defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, surrounded by a chain of fire from carbines, rapid-fire guns and heavy cannon, the target of thousands of the vaporous lyddite shells, his trenches enfiladed by a continuous shower of lead, his men half dead from lack of food, and stiff from the effect of their narrow quarters in the trenches, General Cronje chose to fight and to risk complete disaster by leading his four thousand ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... south and west is scarcely ever found flourishing side by side with modern sanitation. Home Rule not only, like pumpkins and vegetable marrows, requires a feculent soil, but like them, and indeed like all watery and vaporous vegetables, it needs the forcing-frame. Left to its own devices the movement would die at once. There is nothing spontaneous about it. It is a weedy sort of exotic, thriving only by filth and forcing. It cannot live ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... see reproduced there upon a great scale the image of our continents with their gulfs and islands and with the seas that surround them which are seen upon our artificial globes. Then without doubt the known forms or parts of them would be seen to appear under a vaporous veil, but a great part (perhaps one-half) of the surface would be rendered invisible by the immense fields of cloud, continually varying in density, in form, and in extent. Such a hindrance, most frequent and continuous in the polar regions, would still impede nearly half the time ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the fragrant odour of the almond-trees, the nightingales are calling to each other from the rock-crevices, behind the fortress: all breathes of life and love; and beautiful nature, full of this feeling, covers herself with a veil of mists. And how wonderfully has that vaporous ocean poured itself over the Caspian! The sea below gleams wavingly, like steel damasked with gold on an escutcheon—that above swells like a silver surge lighted by the full moon, which rolls along the sky like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... a transparent and golden varnish, all that ground covered with rapid strokes of the brush lightly laid on with a delicate touch. Notice that green of the trees shot through with red tones, penetrated with quivering air, and the vaporous light of autumn. Notice the delicate water-colour effect of thick oil, the general smoothness of the canvas, the relief of this pouch or hood; notice the full modelling of the little faces with their glances in the confused ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... cordial the odorous air which was wafted through this enchanted valley. The woman who was with us—Ellen Fox—was the first to find words. Like a prophetess in an ecstasy, she looked long at the play of the water; then, suddenly, as a stronger breath of wind completely dissipated the vaporous veil of the waterfall, which just before had formed a waving, sabre-like, shimmering band, she cried, 'Behold, the flaming sword of the archangel, guarding the gate of Paradise, has vanished at our approach! Let us ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... undercurrents of romance, and of soft and rapidly changing effects of light. I went out in the afternoon and spent an hour in the National Gallery. When I came out my mind was so full of painted canvas that I never looked at the unpainted sky, or at the vaporous Square through which streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into the stone garden of the lions. Round their feet played pigmy ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... its course, it might almost seem that, in the out-going loveliness of such productions, sentiment made substantial in language, floated abroad in natural self-delivery; as that heat which is not yet flame, gives forth in blue wreaths of vaporous grace, which unfold their delicateness for a moment upon the tranquil air, and then vanish away. It is not an artificial structure built up by intellect after a model foreshaped by fancy, or foreshadowed by the instincts of the passions; ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that still clung to the sleek upper boughs were no more than a delicate yellow cloud or glowing autumnal atmosphere suffusing the black bole of the tree with a light of pure enchantment. He was surprised that anything so vaporous and colorful should come from the same sap that circulated through the bark and body of the thick tree itself. But then he reflected that, after all, the crown and flame of Sam Dreed's life was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... [45] These great mountains of heaven were opened by the lightning. In the sudden flash he beheld the dazzling splendour within, but only for a moment, and then, with a crash, the celestial rocks closed again. Believing these vaporous piles to contain resplendent treasures of which partial glimpse was obtained by mortals in a momentary gleam, tales were speedily formed, relating the adventures of some who had succeeded in ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... overcome by his journey among the clouds, which, to a frame so earth-incrusted by long continuance in a lower region, was unavoidably more fatiguing than to younger spirits. He was therefore conducted to an easy-chair, well cushioned and stuffed with vaporous softness, and left to take a ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... In this case the sense of the whole passage may be amplified thus: The Splendour, in imprinting its caress upon the icy lips of Adonais, had its caress quenched by the cold, and was itself converted into dampness and deathliness: it was no longer a luminous Splendour, but a vaporous and clammy form of death. The assumption that 'the damp death' stands as a synonym for the 'Splendour' obtains some confirmation from the succeeding phrase about the 'dying meteor'—for this certainly seems used as a simile ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... looked coldly down. Along dark spaces Orion had drawn his glittering blade. Above the snowy mountains a melancholy waning moon was swinging. The valley was full of mist, white and shining where the light fell upon it, a vaporous purple where the shadows held sway. So still it was! the only motion in all the world the throbbing stars and her palpitating heart. So solemnly silent! It was a relief, as she trudged on and on, to note a ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... require a very high temperature to effect this reduction, as, for example, platinum. When a still higher temperature is applied, the metals may be vaporized, or reduced from a molten state to that of a vaporous condition. In the case of solids, the atoms have not a free path in which to move. It must not be thought, however, that the atoms of a solid are motionless, as there is nothing absolutely motionless ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... dressing, that there are an infinit of pores that every way pierce it, and that those pores are onely fill'd with some kind of juice, or some very pulpy soft substance, and thereby the steams may almost as easily find a passage through such a fluid vehicle as the vaporous bubbles which are generated at the bottom of a Kettle of hot water do find a passage through that fluid medium into the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... unhappy scarecrow had nothing for it, but to puff away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco-smoke, that the small cottage-kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam struggled mistily through, and could but imperfectly define the image of the cracked and dusty window-pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo, and the other stretched towards the figure, loomed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... YOUR bright forms, presiding at her birth, Clung in fond squadrons round the new-born EARTH; When high in ether, with explosion dire, From the deep craters of his realms of fire, 15 The whirling Sun this ponderous planet hurl'd, And gave the astonish'd void another world. When from it's vaporous air, condensed by cold, Descending torrents into oceans roll'd; And fierce attraction with relentless force 20 Bent the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the cattle were going home slowly from the [77] pastures below, the Alban mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses, seemed close at hand—a screen of vaporous dun purple against the setting sun—with those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary lines which indicate volcanic formation. The coolness of the little brown market-place, for profit of which even the working-people, in long file through the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... steam of 100 lbs. be expanded down to steam of 15 lbs., it will have 35 degrees of heat over that which is required for the maintenance of the vaporous state, or, in other words, it will be ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... even of the portion best known, some part or other was always wrapped in thick folds of mist from the mountain; and that, when the sun shone upon this mist, the parts of the building that appeared through the vaporous veil were strangely glorified in their indistinctness, so that they seemed to belong to some aerial abode in the land of the sunset; and the beholders could hardly tell whether they had ever seen them before, or whether ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... It is possible that the earth began as a vaporous, shining sphere, formed by the gathering together of the material of a gaseous ring which had been detached from a cooling and shrinking nebula. Such a vaporous sphere would condense to a liquid, fiery globe, whose surface would become cold and solid, while the interior would ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... bright celestial spheres, False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams, Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame, The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud, The sinking of the downward-falling star, All these are pictures of the changing moods Borne through the midnight stillness ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... does it come to pass in the body, through the motion of the blood, that the various parts are nourished, cherished, quickened by the warmer, more perfect, vaporous, spirituous, and, as I may say, alimentive blood; which, on the other hand, owing to its contact with these parts, becomes cooled, coagulated, and so to speak effete. It then returns to its sovereign, the heart, as if to its source, or to the inmost home of the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... trees. The joyous earth at the slightest provocation seemed to smile and dimple with fruit and flowers. Everywhere the rare beatitudes of Todos Santos revealed and repeated its simple story. The fructifying influence of earth and sky; the intervention of a vaporous veil between a fiery sun and fiery soil; the combination of heat and moisture, purified of feverish exhalations, and made sweet and wholesome by the saline breath of the mighty sea, had been the beneficent legacy of their isolation, the munificent ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... prolonged. I wake to hear The distant fog-horn peal: before mine eyes Stands the white wall of mist, Blending with vaporous skies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the weather, as: 'The moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes the air'; 'The moon, one thinks, looks with a watery eye; and when she weeps, weeps every little flower'; 'Upon the corner of the moon there hangs a vaporous drop profound'; and so forth. Then we have the old proverb: 'So many days old the moon is on Michaelmas Day, so many floods after.' Other beliefs are mentioned by Mr. Harley, such as, that if Christmas comes during a waning moon, we shall have a good year, and ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... fretted with tiny scales and exquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as if panting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in the sunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid and vaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... icicle-drops in a rock cavern. People passed and repassed in the streets like ghosts in a bad dream; the twinkling gas-light showed them at one moment rising out of the fog, and then disappearing from view as though suddenly engulfed in a vaporous ebon sea. With muffled, angry shrieks, the metropolitan trains deposited their shoals of shivering, coughing travelers at the several stations, where sleepy officials, rendered vicious by the weather, snatched the tickets from their hands with offensive haste and roughness. Omnibus conductors ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... he went, that infernal gong A-ringin' "good-day" as he flew along, An' the smoke from his cigarette came back Like a vaporous snicker along his track. On an' on he sped, gettin' further ahead, His feet keepin' up that onceaseable tread, Till he faded away in the distance, an' when I seed the condemned Eastern rooster again He war thar with the boys at the end ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... from these various facts is irresistible. They tell us that the visible surface of the sun is not a solid mass, is not even a liquid mass, but that the globe, so far as we can see it, consists of matter in the gaseous, or vaporous, condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... ordinary sources of radiant heat, bisulphide of carbon, both in the liquid and vaporous form, is one of the most diathermanous bodies ever known. I thought it worth while to try whether a body reputed to be analogous to carbonic acid, and so pervious to most kinds of heat, would show any change of deportment when presented to the radiation from hot ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling, white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals a flushing rod was withdrawn from a fire ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... or warfare; "they say," the thief of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not been ever known to touch ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the sun was dying out in a riot of colour, and its level rays fell kindlily upon the gaunt pines that were thick about us two, converting them into endless aisles of vaporous gold. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... yesterday, that seemed to shake earth and heaven, to-day is beautiful. Soft glistening steams are rising from every hill and bog and valley, as the hot sun's rays beat upon them. The world seems wrapped in one vast vaporous mist, most lovely to behold. All the woodland flowers are holding up their heads again, after their past smiting from the cruel rain; the trees are swaying to and fro in the fresh morning breeze, thousands of glittering ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... grim and powerful than that in The City of Dreadful Night. It has all the vaporous horror of a Dore grotesque and will bear examination better. But our poet does not as a rule write with such unrelieved gloom. He keeps a stoical cheerfulness, and even when he faces terrible things we feel encouraged to take his hand and go with him, for he ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... company, and with the general promise of destiny. Her daughter was less overtly jubilant, and distributed her greetings with impartial frigidity. She had never been so beautiful. Dressed simply in vaporous white, relieved with half a dozen white roses, the perfection of her features and of her person and the mysterious depth of her expression seemed to glow with the white light of a splendid pearl. She recognized no one individually, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... after, Madame de Frontignac and Mary went out to gather shells and seaweed on the beach. It was four o'clock; and the afternoon sun was hanging in the sultry sky of July with a hot and vaporous stillness. The whole air was full of blue haze, that softened the outlines of objects without hiding them. The sea lay like so much glass; every ship and boat was double; every line and rope and spar had its counterpart; and it seemed hard to say which was the more real, the under or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... semblance of a vaporous tissue—an illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private view of the favored few—till it gradually became visible to the unassisted eye of the profanum vulgus, and finally ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... wander up and down over the whole region of broad vaporous plains, and scan all the scene. And when Anchises had led his son over it, each point by each, and kindled his spirit with passion for the glories on their way, he tells him thereafter of the war he ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... marvelous phrases) is really the atmosphere which produces the exquisite haze of Morris's pictures. . . . Can any poet shoot his soul's arrow to its best height, when at once bow and string and muscle and nerve are slackened in this vaporous and relaxing air, that comes up out of the old dreams of fate that were false and of passions that ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the vaporous West The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold Behind the arm of the city, which between; With all the length of domes and minarets, Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs Like a Turk ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... was falling, the sun was shining in his vaporous strength, and the great dome of heaven stood fathomless above the pair; but to Christina the world was black and blank as the gloomy hut in which they sat. When first her love blossomed, she saw the world open; she looked into ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... boat floated on, every sight and sound appeared strange. The music from the fort came sudden and startling through the vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose instantaneously near them, like a light-house. They could see the steam of the factory floating low, seeking some outlet between cloud and water. As they drifted past ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of Creation. And if your mind is working nimble Straightway you'll recognize a symbol Of the endless and eternal ring Of God, who girdles everything— God, who in His own form and plan Moulds the fugitive life of man. These vaporous toys you watch me make, That shoot ahead, pause, turn and break— Some glide far out like sailing ships, Some weak ones fail me at my lips. He who ringed His awe in smoke, When He led forth His captive folk, In like manner, East, West, North, ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... best when he unchained his fancy. His musical grotesques are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy and the new school! But then he was an indifferent critic and an ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... day it must surely be seen that he was very seriously ill. The spirit of Tarautas would again appear to him—and not merely as a vaporous illusion—and put an end ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... clouds she referred to had been, in fact, gathering for some time. Domed, terraced and pinnacled, they rose in gloomy grandeur on the far horizon. But Miss Prescott had not been the first to notice them. For some reason Mr. Bell, after gazing at the vaporous masses for a few minutes, looked rather troubled. He summoned Juan, who was feeding his beloved burro, and waved his hand toward the clouds, the same ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... fog. At first, after the lighted cabin, I could distinguish absolutely nothing, except where the beam of light from the cabin lamp struggled past me through the open hatch into a white thickness which I can only liken to vaporous cotton-wool. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... condition which you must learn as regards the candle, without which you would not be able fully to understand the philosophy of it, and that is the vaporous condition of the fuel. In order that you may understand that, let me shew you a very pretty, but very common-place experiment. If you blow a candle out cleverly, you will see the vapour rise from it. You have, I know, often smelt the vapour of a blown-out candle—and ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... as she now joined the groups of children and scolded them for games too dangerous or too noisy; now seated herself on the grass beside their mothers and took part with grave and thoughtful interest in their talk. Nisida was more beautiful thus than she had been the day before; with the vaporous cloud of perfume that had folded her round from head to foot had disappeared all that mystic poetry which put a sort of constraint upon her admirers and obliged them to lower their glances. She had become a daughter of Eve again without losing ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... enigmatic depth of your sad look, in your playful words mocking at their own meaning, I gain glimpses of a being trying to rend asunder the languorous grace of her body, to emerge in a chaste fire of pain through a vaporous veil of smiles. Illusion is the first appearance of Truth. She advances towards her lover in disguise. But a time comes when she throws off her ornaments and veils and stands clothed in naked dignity. I grope for that ultimate you, ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... from their bruised ripeness stained the stall-front, and steamed, with a strong perfume, in the heat. She would feel quite giddy on those blazing July afternoons when the melons enveloped her with a powerful, vaporous odour of musk; and then with her loosened kerchief, fresh as she was with the springtide of life, she brought sudden temptation to all who saw her. It was she—it was her arms and necks which gave that ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the sunset! daylight's crimson veil Floats o'er the mountain tops, while twilight pale Calls up her vaporous shrouds from every ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the Merrimack. There dwelt the subject of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Esprit des Lois, where a thin vaporous smoke curled up through the noon. All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, was experience here. Every race and class of men was represented. According ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... green carpet, red or blue plush furnishings, or vivid hangings would ruin the effect. Pictures in such a room should be preferably water-colors with pale gray mats, and gold or white frames. Oil paintings are only permissible when dreamy and vaporous in tint. Light, delicate colors in upholstery, creamy madras for curtains. The carpet may be a little darker, verging on some of the delicate, woody browns. Any bric-a-brac should be in pale shades ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... of twilight blows to flame the misty skies, All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow, and silver gleam, With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes; I am one with the ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... water, broken into dazzling brilliance. A few sharks were seen occasionally, which gradually and unobserved increased to, a squadron. The waders meanwhile continued their sport until the evening waned away. Far over the dusk violet Night spread her vaporous shadows: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... this your companion by the hand Who hath a storie readie for your eare: I shall attend your leisure, but make haste The vaporous night approaches ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... their first meeting: the mysterious light of the picture gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders, all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite's mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice, whose fresh and mellow tone sent nameless delights into her heart, completed ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me—the silence ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... sap and spirit of life. The ancient stocks gnarled and knotted, and as thick as a man's arm, together with the fresh green leaves and the hanging bunches of buds that promise wine, wear a colour that cannot be rightly named—a transparent, subtle, vaporous tint of golden pink or purple, which is the gift of this warm and wonderful light. A cricket that has climbed up one of the tender shoots strikes a low note, which is like the drowsy chirrup of a roosting bird. It is the first touch of a fiddler in the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... more than usual from the profusion of oddities in the midst of which we seem to be lost. Beneath us, lies always the immense blue background: Nagasaki illumined by moonlight, and the expanse of silvered, glittering water, which seems like a vaporous vision suspended in mid-air. Behind us is the great open temple, where the bonzes officiate to the accompaniment of sacred bells and wooden clappers,—looking, from where we sit, more like puppets than anything else, some squatting in rows like peaceful mummies, others executing ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... night more than a woman. He thought of the tales he had heard as a child from the peasants on winter nights in his own country. Tales of the forests and legends of the Hartz Mountains, of lonely places haunted by nixies and wood maidens, fairy shapes with streaming hair and vaporous robes, seeing which a man would become for ever after mad with longing, ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... rose, or was torn asunder, and he saw the great wet gleam of the world below. By the time he reached the top, it was as light as it was all the day; but it was with a dull yellow glare, as if the sun were obscured by the smoke and vaporous fumes of a burning world which the rain had been sent to quench. It was a wild, hopeless scene—as if God had turned his face away from the world, and all Nature was therefore drowned in tears—no Rachel weeping ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... much like snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallizes also exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallize from their vapors. Now in any of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an intermediate substance; and in crystallizing they are both brought nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as possible: the essential part of the business being not the ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... simplicity was another sign of her strength. She was the more priceless on account of it. He went back into the hut. Through the chinks of the shutter the morning stretched a grey finger; the room was filled with a vaporous twilight. ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... He had the papers in his hand, and was running them over. Both men were pulling at their cigars with strong puffs, and the room was so vaporous with smoke that Steering was beginning to see very clearly indeed, as he went through the papers. They were couched in good, clear English, the succinct English that Carington used, with admirable changes ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... bed as usual and woke up about one, as I was in the habit of doing. I found myself in a strange state of cerebral excitement, my preception was keen, my thoughts profound; the sphere of my intelligence seemed increased, I sat up and my eyes were affected with a pale, vaporous, uncertain light, which, however, did, not enable me to ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... giant shadowed guardians of the port, With towering chimneys outlined tall and swart Against the silver pools. Two figures pace The wharf in ghostly silence, face from face. O'er the black line of mountain, silver-clear In faint rose-tint of vaporous evening air, Sinketh the bright suspicion of a wing, The slim curved moon, who in shy triumphing Hideth her face. Above, the rose-tint pales Into a silver opal, hills and dales Of cloudy glory, fading high alone Into a tender blue-grey monotone.— And then ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... and vaporous vistas of the shop, were caught by a circle of brightness that shone with a curious egg-like lustre. It was round and white, gleaming in the sheen of a hanging light, a bright island in a surf of tobacco smoke. He came more close, and found ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Riding at anchor off the orient sun, Had broken its cable, and stood out to space Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways: And now, back warping from the inclement main, Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, It swung into its azure roads again; When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... their minute particles should be disengaged, either by heat, friction, fermentation, or other means capable of decomposing those bodies which are the subjects of smell: secondly, that they may be capable of assuming the vaporous or gaseous state, by combining with caloric, or at any rate, that they should remain for a certain time dissolved or suspended in the air: thirdly, that they should not meet with any substance in their way to the nostrils, which is capable of neutralising them, or altering ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... sea—what is that vaporous Titan? And Hesper set in his rosy garland—why looks he so implacably sweet? It is that one has left that bright home to go forth and do cloudy work, and he has got a stain with which he dare not return. Far in the West fair Lucy beckons him to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exception of carbon, can be melted or reduced to a molten condition, although some of them require a very high temperature to effect this reduction, as, for example, platinum. When a still higher temperature is applied, the metals may be vaporized, or reduced from a molten state to that of a vaporous condition. In the case of solids, the atoms have not a free path in which to move. It must not be thought, however, that the atoms of a solid are motionless, as there is nothing absolutely motionless in the universe. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... mass of it had not yet settled into permanent form. The water had not yet become water; it was steam. The metals had not yet become metals; they were rather the vapor of metals. At length they were the liquids of metals, and at last the solids. So, also, the rocks were transformed from the vaporous through the liquid into the solid form—all this while the globe was in process of condensation. It grew smaller in mathematical measurements at the same time that it grew heavier by the accretion of ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... as it was day it must surely be seen that he was very seriously ill. The spirit of Tarautas would again appear to him—and not merely as a vaporous illusion—and put an end to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lies like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, . . . . . Where a soft and purple mist, Like a vaporous amethyst, Or an air-dissolved stone, Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curved horizon's bound To the point of heaven's profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath, the leaves unsodden Where the infant ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... as ever did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not been ever known to touch the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that infernal gong A-ringin' "good-day" as he flew along, An' the smoke from his cigarette came back Like a vaporous snicker along his track. On an' on he sped, gettin' further ahead, His feet keepin' up that onceaseable tread, Till he faded away in the distance, an' when I seed the condemned Eastern rooster again He war thar with the boys at the end of the race, That same keerless, onconsarned ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... the way in which they lie across and athwart each other (except where they form a sort of bridge across a spot, in which case they seem to affect a common direction, that, namely, of the bridge itself),—all these characters seem quite repugnant to the notion of their being of a vaporous, a cloudy, or a fluid nature. Nothing remains but to consider them as separate and independent sheets, flakes, or scales, having some sort of solidity. And these flakes, be they what they may, and whatever may be said about the dashing of meteoric stones into the sun's ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... than usual from the profusion of oddities in the midst of which we seem to be lost. Beneath us, lies always the immense blue background: Nagasaki illumined by moonlight, and the expanse of silvered, glittering water, which seems like a vaporous vision suspended in mid-air. Behind us is the great open temple, where the bonzes officiate to the accompaniment of sacred bells and wooden clappers,—looking, from where we sit, more like puppets than anything else, some squatting ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... infinite need, Cried out within him—rather moaned than cried. And he would sit a silent hour and gaze Upon the distant hills with dazzling snow Upon their peaks, and thence, adown their sides, Streaked vaporous, or starred in solid blue. And then a shadowy sense arose in him, As if behind those world-inclosing hills, There sat a mighty woman, with a face As calm as life, when its intensity Pushes it nigh to death, waiting for him, To make him grand for ever with a kiss, And ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... in the morning one vivid flash, followed, after the interval of a few seconds, by a loud report of thunder, announced that the storm was rapidly approaching. Suddenly the horizon was enveloped in a vaporous fog, and seemed to contract until it was close around us. At the same instant the voice of one of the sailors was heard ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... as money-needs are concerned, live under a cloudless sky of summer—dreary rather and shallow, it seems to me, however lovely its blue light; when for the poor man a breach is made through a vaporous firmament, he sees deeper into the blue because of the framing clouds—sees up to worlds invisible in the broad glare. I know not how the born-rich, still less those who have given themselves with success to the making of money, can learn that God is the all in all of men, for ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... when you ennuied yourself so enormement?" asked a yellow-haired English girl who had painted countless vaporous and ravishing Eurydices and filmy Echoes from broad-waisted, pug-nosed Cockney models, and who always declared that she would recognize a "professional" even among the shining hosts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... such romance as could creep into Limehouse Hole—and maybe sometimes of a summer evening, when she stood with folded arms at her shop-door, looking from the reeking street to the sky where the sun was setting, she may have had some vaporous visions of far-off islands in the southern seas or elsewhere (not being geographically particular), where it would be good to roam with a congenial partner among groves of bread-fruit, waiting for ships to be wafted from the hollow ports of civilization. For, sailors to be got the better of, were ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... interminable procession of figures, of memories, real yet unreal, convincing yet unconvincing. When she did at last lose all awareness of reality the effect was merely to enhance the vividness of those phantoms, to lend substance to her vaporous visions. Constant brooding over the treasure had long since affected Dona Isabel's brain, and as a consequence she often dreamed about it. She dreamed about it again to-night, and, strangely enough, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... down over the whole region of broad vaporous plains, and scan all the scene. And when Anchises had led his son over it, each point by each, and kindled his spirit with passion for the glories on their way, he tells him thereafter of the war he next must wage, and instructs him of the Laurentine ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... were so long in realizing their possibilities, in improving their advantages. The specters in classic and medieval literature were malarial, vaporous beings without energy to do anything but threaten, and mortals never would have trembled with fear at their frown if they had known how feeble they were. At best a revenant could only rattle a rusty skeleton, or shake a moldy shroud, or clank a chain—but as mortals cowered before his demonstrations, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... near daybreak; the moon shone faintly in the dull, grey heaven; a small, vaporous rain was sinking from the shapeless clouds; the waning night showed bleak and cheerless to the earth, but cast no mournful or reproving influence over the Pagan's mind. He looked round on his solitary lurking place, and beheld no ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was naturally of the ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me—the silence of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... favour. Yet even now there has been but a slight change of scene and time. If men can no longer imagine inhabitants of one planet because it is too hot, or of another because it is too cold, of one body because it is too deeply immersed in vaporous masses, or of another because it has neither atmosphere nor water, we have only to speculate about the unseen worlds which circle round those other suns, the stars; or, instead of changing the region of space where we imagine worlds, we can look backward ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... couch and stood before his window. He would go to her at once—her love he would have on any terms until she was weary of him, and the measure of his life should be the measure of those days. He would have his day and die. Then the empty streets, the curling white mists, the chill vaporous breeze, and the far-off sickly lights gleaming down the riverside reminded him that many hours must come before he could see her. And with the later morning came fresh resolutions—the moment of weakness ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... the windings and twistings of the various streams, the tracts of unreclaimed forest, and the cultivated fields. Asterabad and numerous villages dot the plain, and by taking R———'s binoculars we can make out, through the vaporous atmosphere, the shimmering surface of the Caspian Sea. It is one of the most remarkable views I ever saw, and the novelty and grandeur of it appeals the more forcibly to one's imagination, no doubt, because ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... leaves them nowhere. The sky, and the undulating mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. Sublimed into imponderable vapour, I mingle and am lost in the endless foods of those vast globular volumes of vaporous mists, which roll upon their flaming ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Bode in 1776 arrived independently at the conclusion that "the sun is neither burning nor glowing, but in its essence a dark planetary body, composed like our earth of land and water, varied by mountains and valleys, and enveloped in a vaporous atmosphere";[146] and the learned in general applauded and acquiesced. The view, however, was in 1787 still so far from popular, that the holding of it was alleged as a proof of insanity in Dr. Elliot when accused of a murderous assault on Miss Boydell. His friend Dr. Simmons stated on his behalf ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be, but not yet. In their new vaporous condition, in which both had lost some of their prominent qualities, they had acquired new relations, perhaps new duties. At all events, they did not at once ascend to their kindred ether,—but swam, glided, floated, above and around, and finally separated. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... no motion in them. Each tree stood like a delicately carven thing, silhouetted against the remote purple of the void. In the profound firmament the stars burned with a tremulous ardour they never show in northern skies. The mystery of this African night rose not from vaporous veils and the long movement of winds, but was breathed out by clearness, brightness, stillness. It was the deepest of all mystery—the mystery of vastness and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence of islands by the vaporous knobs of the mountains which were outlined on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and energy than the discovery ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inference from these various facts is irresistible. They tell us that the visible surface of the sun is not a solid mass, is not even a liquid mass, but that the globe, so far as we can see it, consists of matter in the gaseous, or vaporous, condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... as the one supremely dramatic touch in a night of wonders. The roar of voices indeed was still in his ears as he stood before the window of his compartment, looking out over the fire-hung city with its vaporous flames, its huge furnaces, its glare which was already becoming fainter. A myriad lights still twinkled upon the hillsides; the smoke-stained sky was red with the reflection of those thousand torches. Even as the train rushed on into the darkness, ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the woods before daybreak this morning, and marched up the hill in single file, under the winter stars. . . . Through openings in the woods we could see that we were marching along a high ridge, and on either hand vaporous depths and distances expanded, the darkness broken sometimes by a far light or the momentary glow of a magnesium rocket sent up from the German lines. There is something fascinating if one is stationed on sentry-duty immediately after arrival, in watching ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... smoothed by the weight of ice. The tranquillity of the water heightened the superb effects of this glacial world. Majestic tabular bergs whose crevices exhaled a vaporous azure; lofty spires, radiant turrets and splendid castles; honeycombed masses illumined by pale green light within whose fairy labyrinths the water washed and gurgled. Seals and penguins on magic gondolas were the silent denizens of this dreamy Venice. In the soft glamour ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... charming room, with pale grey walls and a pale green carpet, and very little in it except, let in as a panel, a delicate low-toned portrait of the mistress of the house, vaguely appearing through vaporous curtains, holding pale flowers, and painted with a rather mysterious effect by that talented young amateur, her cousin, Harry de Freyne. It had been his sole success in art, and had been exhibited at the Grafton Galleries under the ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... the semblance of a vaporous tissue—an illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private view of the favored few—till it gradually became visible to the unassisted eye of the profanum vulgus, and finally it flamed across the darkling spaces with its white crown of glory, its splendid wing-like train, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... effort, I slackened a little! Madame de Bergenheim's face, which I had seen but dimly during this short time, returned to me in a less vaporous form; I took extreme delight in calling to mind the slightest circumstances of our meeting, the smallest details of her features, her toilette, her manner of walking and carrying her head. What had impressed me most was the extreme softness ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... required of him. Candid readers shall accept these hints, and do their best:—Friedrich himself made not the least complaint of men's then misunderstanding him; still less will he now! We, keeping henceforth the Diplomacies, the vaporous Foreshadows, and general Dance of Unclean Spirits with their intrigues and spectralities, well underground, so far as possible, will stick to what comes up as practical Performance on Friedrich's part, and try to give ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... probable that if we could compress and condense them at the same time, we should still further increase their conducting power. Cagniard de la Tour has shown that a substance, for instance water, may be so expanded by heat whilst in the liquid state, or condensed whilst in the vaporous state, that the two states shall coincide at one point, and the transition from one to the other be so gradual that no line of demarcation can be pointed out[A]; that, in fact, the two states shall become one;—which one state presents us at different ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... between the banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the Merrimack. There dwelt the subject of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Esprit des Lois, where a thin vaporous smoke curled up through the noon. All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, was experience here. Every race and class of men was represented. According ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... realities, and wide cloud-canopies of uncertain speculation, which also had their interests and their rainbow-colors to him, and could not fail in his life just now, did Sterling pass his year and half at Bayswater. Such vaporous speculations were inevitable for him at present; but it was to be hoped they would subside by and by, and leave the sky clear. All this was but the preliminary to whatever work might lie in him:—and, alas, much other interruption ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of prophecy in the "restoration of the Jews," Such interpretation of the prophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew—"Go ye first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which he wrote after Winesburg, ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... of irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as something real, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... kingly palaces, attracted numberless visitors, who could never tire of admiring it. It was a waterfall, too beautiful for description! To form any idea of its beauty, it would be necessary to reproduce by the brush the sparkling gleam of the spray lit up by the rays of the sun, the vaporous shade of the tropical trees which dipped their branches into the water, and the fantastic display of light over a magnificent country, not yet spoiled by the hand ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... accept as winter, came on apace. For some time past the air had been full of that mild chill and vaporous murkiness, which, not cold enough to be bracing, sensibly lowered the system and depressed the spirits. The careless and jovial temperament of the people, however, was never much affected by the change of seasons—they drank more hot coffee than usual, and kept ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... charm in the tramp of its hoofs, something strange and joyous in the noisy cry of the quails. The stars disappeared in a kind of luminous mist. The moon, not yet at its full, shone with steady lustre. Its light spread in a blue stream over the sky, and fell in a streak of vaporous gold on the thin clouds which went ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... nightingales are calling to each other from the rock-crevices, behind the fortress: all breathes of life and love; and beautiful nature, full of this feeling, covers herself with a veil of mists. And how wonderfully has that vaporous ocean poured itself over the Caspian! The sea below gleams wavingly, like steel damasked with gold on an escutcheon—that above swells like a silver surge lighted by the full moon, which rolls along the sky like a cup of gold, while ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... was awake he stared with clouded, troubled eyes at the smoke-blackened ceiling or out of the door at the willows or into Sothern's rugged face. His fever raged high, his body burning with it, his brain a turbulent melting pot wherein strange fancies passed through odd, vaporous forms. He confused events of a far-off childhood with occurrences of yesterday. He was a little boy, gone black-berrying, and Ygerne Bellaire went with him. His dugout was a cabin in the Yukon where he had lived a year, or it was a speeding train carrying him away from an old home and into ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... of success. Isabel thought this unlikely; it was much more likely that Pansy had simply determined to be a good girl. She had never had such a chance, and she had a proper esteem for chances. She carried herself no less attentively than usual and kept no less anxious an eye upon her vaporous skirts; she held her bouquet very tight and counted over the flowers for the twentieth time. She made Isabel feel old; it seemed so long since she had been in a flutter about a ball. Pansy, who was greatly admired, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... phantom of geological time rises before the student of this, as of all other, fragments of the history of our earth—springing irrepressibly out of the facts, like the Djin from the jar which the fisherman so incautiously opened; and like the Djin again, being vaporous, shifting, and indefinable, but unmistakably gigantic. However modest the bases of one's calculation may be, the minimum of time assignable to the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to spread through his veins and mount up to his brain. The mad craving that he had felt outside the Criterion came back upon him with tenfold force. He raised the decanter to his nostrils and inhaled a long breath of the subtle, vaporous poison. He looked around the room with ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... seemed to have lasted half the night ere the lamps of Elverslope made constellations in the valley, and the green and red lights of the station loomed out on the hill. They drove into the circle of gaslights, among the vaporous steeds of omnibuses and flies, and entered the station, Phoebe's veil down, and Mervyn shading his dazzled eyes from the glare. They were half an hour too soon; and while waiting, it occurred to Phoebe to inquire whether a telegram for Beauchamp had ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rain ceasing for a little, the earth smoking, the west a low, vaporous yellow, the swollen river sounding, Diego de Arana had summoned by the drum every man in La Navidad. He stood beneath our banner and put his hand upon the staff and spoke earnestly to those gathered before him, in their duty ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... plush furnishings, or vivid hangings would ruin the effect. Pictures in such a room should be preferably water-colors with pale gray mats, and gold or white frames. Oil paintings are only permissible when dreamy and vaporous in tint. Light, delicate colors in upholstery, creamy madras for curtains. The carpet may be a little darker, verging on some of the delicate, woody browns. Any bric-a-brac should be in pale ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came down ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... to penetrate the secrets which the gray and shifting veil still hid from his view. Beside him lay the Italian knife, its steely surface shimmering in the vaporous light, there where a dull and ruddy stain had not dimmed its brilliant polish. The murderer gazed at his tool and shuddered feebly. But he picked up the knife and mechanically wiped it in the grass, before he restored it ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... sunken to little dainty frills of lace-like foam, broke murmuringly at their feet,—and he, turning suddenly to his companion, was all at once smitten by a sense of witchery in her looks as she stood garmented in her white, vaporous ball-gown, with diamonds in her hair and on her bosom—smitten with an overpowering lightning-stroke of passion which burnt his soul as a desert is burnt by the hot breath of the simoon, and, yielding to its force, he had caught the small, fine, fairy creature ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... thy capabilities are boundless as the vapour into which thou meltest as a holocaust for thy happy devotees. If the pipe could but speak, what mysteries could it reveal! the rapturous visions of the inspired lover, rising in the circular imageries of its vaporous fumes, to beguile his fancies in the absence of his loved one; or the workings of a deep despondency and bitter disappointment, carrying its victim with blind impetuosity to a melancholy contemplation of a drear destruction, until the spirit ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her one supreme moment, and she thought ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... She must not attract attention. She must not let the shadows that followed her know that she feared them. If they guessed her panic they would lurk no longer; they would crowd close, rush upon her in vaporous throngs, stifling her like ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... gives. Perceiving in the midst of this retreat, which had been opened to him as by a fairy's magic wand, the masterpiece of creation, this girl, whose warmly colored tints, whose soft skin—soft, but slightly gilded by the shadows, by I know not what vaporous effusion of love—gleamed as though it reflected the rays of color and light, his anger, his desire for vengeance, his ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... instant to sink down. When reduced to water they fell to the ground. There was visible the second bed, less sombre and lighter, defying the wind which chased them, and which separating at intervals sought other clouds, more coquettish and more vaporous, which they hurried into space, as if they feared to soil their white robes by coming ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... rubbed his teeth with a bit of wood, pouring over the side a bright stream of water out of his lips; the fat Rajah dozed in a shabby deck-chair,—and at the turn of every bend the two walls of leaves reappeared running parallel along the banks, with their impenetrable solidity fading at the top to a vaporous mistiness of countless slender twigs growing free, of young delicate branches shooting from the topmost limbs of hoary trunks, of feathery heads of climbers like delicate silver sprays standing up without a quiver. There was not a sign of a clearing anywhere; ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... suggests to the average mind a vaporous space where nothing happens; yet it requires only a little intelligent reflection to establish the fact that, as Paracelsus said long ago, "The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... IT was a cold, vaporous dawn, the glass rising, and the wind fallen to a light air still from the north-east. Our creased and sodden sails scarcely answered to it as we crept across the oily swell to Langeoog. 'Fogs and calms,' Davies prophesied. The Blitz was ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... figure of a lad, ragged and forlorn, lying asleep beneath some sheltering trees. At first that seems all there was to be seen upon the canvas; but if one looked closer one was able to discover another figure amid the vaporous, soft glooms of the place. It grew ever more distinct, until one had no difficulty in distinguishing the form of a maiden, fair and frail as a dream. She was bending over the slumbering body of the boy, as if to arouse him ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... affect some of the ultra-violet rays, and can therefore make a more or less definite impression upon the camera, and so provide us with what are known as "spirit photographs". When there is not sufficient power available to produce a perfect materialization we sometimes get the vaporous-looking form which constitutes our second class, and in such a case the "spirits" usually warn their sitters that the forms which appear must not be touched. In the rarer case of a full materialization there is sufficient power to hold together, at least for a few moments, a form which ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... as if fashioned by some potent incantation from the vaporous fog outside, a tall, grey figure rose out of nothingness, and stood, barring the way, on the steel floor of the ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Providence, instead of putting it down to their own want of knowledge. The idea is true. Thought is the great power of the Universe. But to make it practically available we must know something of the principles by which it works—that it is not a mere vaporous indefinable influence floating around and subject to no known laws, but that on the contrary, it follows laws as uncompromising as those of mathematics, while at the same time allowing ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... the instability of human prospects! When the House, fairly full, beheld the sunny presence at the table, watched it produce the vaporous folds of manuscript, noted the shrug of satisfaction with which it set about its self-appointed task, it folded its tent like the Arab, and, though not as silently, stole away. Trundled and bundled out, with ostentatious indifference to great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... then, this your companion by the hand, Who hath a story ready for your ear. I shall attend your leisure: but make haste; 55 The vaporous night approaches. ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... viewport and glanced at the radar-screens. There were thirteen vaporous glowings where ships had been. There were two distinct blips remaining. It could be guessed that some targets had been fired on by more than one launching-tube, leaving two ships ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... than the sweetest of our known music, ... and still I saw nothing. Presently some one called me by name —'THEOS! ... THEOS!' I strove to answer, but I had no words wherewith to match that silver-toned, far-reaching utterance; and once again the rich vibrating notes pealed through the vaporous fire-tinted air—'THEOS, MY BELOVED! HIGHER! ... HIGHER! ... All my being thrilled and quivered to that call. I yearned to obey, ... I struggled to rise—my efforts were in vain; when, to my joy and wonder, a small, invisible hand, delicate yet strong, clasped mine, and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... every day at two o'clock under the windows of the hotel, facing the tranquil sea on an open-air bench. He remained for some time without moving, in the heat of the sun gazing mournfully at the Mediterranean. Every now and then, he cast a glance at the lofty mountains with vaporous summits which shuts in Mentone: then, with a very slow movement, he crossed his long legs, so thin that they seemed two bones, around which fluttered the cloth of his trousers, and he opened a book, which was always the same. And then he did not stir any more, but read on, read on with his eye ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... stretched a vast panorama. The sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were forming from the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... love is incomplete. Sometimes in the enigmatic depth of your sad look, in your playful words mocking at their own meaning, I gain glimpses of a being trying to rend asunder the languorous grace of her body, to emerge in a chaste fire of pain through a vaporous veil of smiles. Illusion is the first appearance of Truth. She advances towards her lover in disguise. But a time comes when she throws off her ornaments and veils and stands clothed in naked dignity. I grope for that ultimate you, that bare ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... the new-born EARTH; When high in ether, with explosion dire, From the deep craters of his realms of fire, 15 The whirling Sun this ponderous planet hurl'd, And gave the astonish'd void another world. When from it's vaporous air, condensed by cold, Descending torrents into oceans roll'd; And fierce attraction with relentless force 20 Bent the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... had nothing for it, but to puff away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco-smoke, that the small cottage-kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam struggled mistily through, and could but imperfectly define the image of the cracked and dusty window-pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo, and the other stretched towards the figure, loomed grimly amid the obscurity, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... undertaker quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help if he screwed him shut in that most competent container of the mortal ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... electrical attractions and repulsions, in full operation (else we would never get a universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind, in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all there—Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists, universities ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... faster and yet faster, with a speed that pressed them heavily into their seats. Behind them was the glory of the sunlit clouds; ahead the gloomy gray-black masses that must make a stygian night sky over this lonely world—a world cut off by that vaporous shell from all communion ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... desolate, and freezing. The windward side was piled with snow, on the crest of which foam pellets lay, looking yellow by comparison, and melting small holes with their brine. At the door no foot-mark broke the drift; and against the vaporous sky no warmer vapor tufted ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Saturn is less than that of water, and its velocity of rotation so great that centrifugal force antagonizes gravitation to such an extent that bodies weigh on it about the same as on the earth. All the fine fancies of the habitability of this vaporous world, all the calculations of the number of people that could live on the square miles of the planet and its enormous rings, are only fancy. Nothing could live there with more brains than a fish, at most. It is a ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... which you must learn as regards the candle, without which you would not be able fully to understand the philosophy of it, and that is the vaporous condition of the fuel. In order that you may understand that, let me shew you a very pretty, but very common-place experiment. If you blow a candle out cleverly, you will see the vapour rise from it. You have, I know, often smelt the vapour of a blown-out candle—and a very ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... upthrust of the R. A. Effect; he felt, too, the pull of a body that had coiled about his ship. No intangible, vaporous thing, this. The glass of his control room was obscured by a clinging, glowing mass while still the little cruiser ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... many a lesson of greater value did he learn from the philosopher of the lapstone. He who understands because he endeavours, is a freed man of the realm of human effort. He who has no experience of his own, to him the experience of others is a sealed book. The convictions that in Donal rose vaporous were rapidly condensed and shaped when he found his new ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... shipping is afloat, and comes up buoyantly, to look at the wharf. Now, the carts that have come down for coals, load away as hard as they can load. Now, the steamer smokes immensely, and occasionally blows at the paddle-boxes like a vaporous whale- greatly disturbing nervous loungers. Now, both the tide and the breeze have risen, and you are holding your hat on (if you want to see how the ladies hold THEIR hats on, with a stay, passing over the broad brim and down the nose, come ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... flare. Black forms stand rigid there, Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare Of snags and tangles. Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts Gleams desolate along ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... Tomalin, he found it quite impossible; the face no longer existed for him; the voice was as utterly forgotten as any he might have chanced to hear for a few minutes on that fatal evening in Pont Street. And this was what he had seen as an object of romantic tenderness—this vaporous nothing, this glimmer in a ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... didst dare th' unknown, precarious sea, And down the unbounded winds adventurous roam, Searching the world's horizons for a home, A haven for the heart of liberty:— Boaster of freedom, found no longer free, What vaporous phantom from time's ocean-foam Blurs the translucence of th' eternal dome Where sang the burning stars that ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... depressing, and London was full of faint undercurrents of romance, and of soft and rapidly changing effects of light. I went out in the afternoon and spent an hour in the National Gallery. When I came out my mind was so full of painted canvas that I never looked at the unpainted sky, or at the vaporous Square through which streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into the stone garden of the lions. Round ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... an hour it became evident that that train had at least one great quality—it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swung along the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous mysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with increasing enthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of Galileo would never have had the audacity to deny that that train moved. And one felt, comfortably, that the whole Company, with all the Company's resources, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... is a lie, and a bad one; I'm sorry that I have nothing better ready.' Item (6): My own adamantine conviction that I stood near by some mystery, which was about to be a big mystery, and which would pay me to pursue. 'A fine bundle of nonsense,' I hear you say; 'as silly a flight of a vaporous brain as ever man conceived'—but stay your words awhile; remember that one who is bred up at the keyhole lets himself, if he be wise, be moved by his impulses, and first opinions. He does not quit them until he knows them ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... to me a horrible fancy, a monstrous thought. In order to make of Pepita this symbol, this vaporous and ethereal image, this sign and epitome of all that I can love under God, in God, and subordinate to God, I picture her to myself dead, as Beatrice was dead when Dante made her the subject of ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... dawn at last struggled through the vaporous veil that hid the landscape. Then occurred one of those magical changes peculiar to the climate, yet perhaps pre-eminently notable during that historic winter and spring. By ten o'clock on that 3d of May, 1780, a fervent ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... although the glare of the great furnaces in the neighbourhood of Glasgow glowed somewhat ominously large as the night wore on, we retired to rest rather in hope than resignation. But dismal, indeed, was the prospect when we awoke. A vaporous grey mist had entirely usurped the heavens, and the plash of weary rain resounded through the pluvious metropolis of the west. Fortunately, we were not ignorant of the fact, that Glasgow is under the peculiar tutelage of the Pleiades; and accordingly we proceeded to the railway, trusting that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... since this it is which forms such a large percentage of all kinds of coal, and which indeed forms the actual basis of it. In the shape of coke, of course, we have a fairly pure form of carbon, and this being produced, as we shall see presently, by the driving off of the volatile or vaporous constituents of coal, we are able to perceive by the residue how great a proportion of coal consists of carbon. In fact, the two have almost an identical meaning in the popular mind, and the fact that the great masses of strata, in which are contained our principal and most valuable seams of coal, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... His eye fell upon the low shelves full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even the carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have lost their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of Corot—a dance of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade—and looked at it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about the picture, a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of joy in the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of half-pleasure and half-envy. It represented something that he had never known ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . Many old rotten-timbered boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly About the great Athenian admiral's mast? What care though striding Alexander past The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? . . . Juliet ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River. When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls grew audible,—a voice at which all the weary ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of the dramatic situation, that recurrent crescendo that Rossini brought into vogue, are now an integral part of every composition; those vocal fireworks result in a sort of babbling, chattering, vaporous mucic, of which the sole merit depends on the greater or less fluency of the singer and his ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... longings he had never known till now, Awoke within him, flowers of rooted hope. For a whole silent hour he would sit and gaze Upon the distant hills, whose dazzling snow Starred the dim blue, or down their dark ravines Crept vaporous; until the fancy rose That on the other side those rampart walls, A mighty woman sat, with waiting face, Calm as that life whose rapt intensity Borders on death, silent, waiting for him, To make him grand for ever with a kiss, And send him silent through ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... Herschel in April, 1864;[436] but it first obtained general currency through Faye's more elaborate presentation. A physical basis was afforded for the view by Cagniard de la Tour's experiments in 1822,[437] proving that, under conditions of great heat and pressure, the vaporous state was compatible with a very considerable density. The position was strengthened when Andrews showed, in 1869,[438] that above a fixed limit of temperature, varying for different bodies, true liquefaction is impossible, even though the pressure be so tremendous as to retain the gas within ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, the vaporous atmosphere was palpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of an invisible musical box. The prince reclined on a couch from which a draping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor. Beside him, stretched in its open sarcophagus ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... night, and over Jerusalem's low roofs The moon floated, drifting through high vaporous woofs. The moonlight crept and glistened silent, solemn, sweet, Over dome and column, up empty, endless street; In the closed, scented gardens the rose loosed from the stem Her white showery petals; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... in it, but simply answers by a quiet statement of what the vow was pledging the rash utterer to do. Christ's words are a douche of cold water to condense the steam which was so noisily escaping, to turn the vaporous enthusiasm into something more solid, with the particles nearer each other. His object was not to repel, but to turn an ignorant, somewhat bragging vow into a calm, humble determination, with a silent 'God helping me' for its foundation. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... glow of mystery and grace came as he led his horse out upon a projecting point of rocky ledge to rest. Here the cliff descended abruptly to an enormous depth, and upon the vaporous rolling flood beneath him a dome of darker shadow rested. At the summit of this shadow an aureole of rainbow light, a complete and glorious circle rested, in the midst of which his own image was flung, grotesque ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... et contra tendentis os verberaverit. Ita, quae apud concordes vincula caritatis, incitamenta irarum apud infensos erant." (Cited in Kohler, Munzbelustiqungen, xxi. 341; who refers also to Levassor, Histoire de Louis XII.)—Pauli (iii. 542) bedomes qnite vaporous.] a slap that had ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... from which as from a flat and spacious shelf carved out of the hill, Monk Lawrence surveyed the slopes below it, the clustered village, the middle distance with its embroidery of fields and trees, with the vaporous stretches of the forest beyond, and in the far distance, a shining ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suggestive and full of mystic import,—that of Northern Odinism more than any other. In that dim Niflheim, for instance, with its well-springs of the waters of the upper world confusedly bubbling, and its metallic ore-veins, and dusk, vaporous atmosphere, whence issued the old Nibelungen heroes of the great Teutonic epos, there is much that is suggestive. May not one discover in this old cosmogonic myth a dim hint of the nebular hypothesis of creation, as it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Now she closed her eyes to shut it from her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid, that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into the red, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... The ghost was not supposed to be capable of devouring the gross material substance of the offering; but his vaporous body appropriated the smoke of the burnt sacrifice, the visible and odorous exhalations of other offerings. The blood of the victim was particularly useful because it was thought to be the special seat of its soul or life. ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... remember a denser fog. At first, after the lighted cabin, I could distinguish absolutely nothing, except where the beam of light from the cabin lamp struggled past me through the open hatch into a white thickness which I can only liken to vaporous cotton-wool. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... lightly, take supple attitudes, dance, posture, bend, or sit up straight, as now, with the perfect rigidity of an idol; a body that could wear rightly cascades of wonderfully tinted draperies, and spangled, vaporous tissues, and barbaric jewels, that do not shine brightly as if reflecting the modern, restless spirit, but that are somnolent and heavy and deep, like the eyes of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the stalwart figure, looking neither to right nor left, and behind him trailed the vaporous aroma of the fine cigar. Raising herself on her couch, the invalid ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... comet; their orbits must cross. When the comet approached the great planet, its tail seemed to divide; the attraction of Jupiter began to take effect. The great star was trying to rob its lord, the sun, of this vaporous body. The next night the comet's tail was split in two. Then the largest and most distant of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... a general way of the belts of Jupiter, and many speculate upon their causes. The reader of recent works knows that Jupiter is supposed to be not a solid mass like the earth, but a great globe of molten and vaporous matter, intermediate in constitution between the earth and the sun. The outer surface which we see is probably a hot mass of vapor hundreds of miles deep, thrown up from the heated interior. The belts are probably cloudlike forms in this vaporous mass. Certain it is that they are continually ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
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