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Opal   /ˈoʊpəl/   Listen
Opal

noun
1.
A translucent mineral consisting of hydrated silica of variable color; some varieties are used as gemstones.



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"Opal" Quotes from Famous Books



... man was about forty, with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... The wheels ground over myriads of crickets that caked in the loose soil. There was nothing to break the eye-sweep but the cones of rusted buttes, the nearer ones showing every crease and shadow thread, the farther floating detached in the faint, opal ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... did not quite leave him, for he knew that he was trying to crawl through what seemed to him to be something like soft liquid opal, with its wonderfully bright tints before his eyes, bluish, golden, creamy, fiery, and pale, then there was a darkening around them as if he were crawling into shadow; and again, directly after, as it appeared, he could see a bright glow, toward ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn

... had sheltered me, and received their last blessing in the sweet odours of decay; or, in a winter evening, frozen still, looked up, as I went home to a warm fireside, through the netted boughs and twigs to the cold, snowy moon, with her opal zone around her. At last I had fallen asleep; for I know nothing more that passed till I found myself lying under a superb beech-tree, in the clear light of the morning, just before sunrise. Around me was a girdle of fresh beech-leaves. Alas! I brought nothing with me out of Fairy Land, but ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... stratified appearance, to the sunken and deceptive masses that were difficult to perceive before they were under the bow. I have rarely seen a finer sight. The sea was literally studded with these beautiful masses, some of pure white, others showing all shades of the opal, others emerald green and occasionally, here and there, some of deep black. Our situation was critical, but the weather favored us for a few hours. On clearing these dangers we kept off to the south and west under all sail, and at 9 P.M. we counted eight large islands. ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... The interior was not less sumptuous. On the walls were inscribed verses of celebrated Chinese poems, elegantly written in perpendicular lines, with golden characters on a lacquered background. Shades of delicately carved ivory, softened the light to a faint opal tint, and all around stood pots of orchis, peonies, and daisies, which filled the air with delicious perfume. Curtains of rich silk were draped over the entrance, and on the marble tables within were scattered fans, tooth-picks, ebony pipes, and pencils ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... going to forget all about it. No siree; if there's any way I can learn whether a jeweler in Riverport or Mechanicsburg has been buying an opal lately, I'm bound ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman

... desisted; Jennie had piped through her repertoire and was now graciously accepting the support of Amiel's arm. Dorothea and the Monster, somewhat withdrawn from the circle, watched a crooked moon lift itself above the horizon and lay a trail of opal glory on the waves. Still awaiting inspiration, she regarded it with as little interest as Lucretia Borgia might have given the sunset that preceded one of her ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... saw the light, and clear clear water overhead; and up he came a thousand fathoms, among clouds of sea-moths, which fluttered round his head. There were moths with pink heads and wings and opal bodies, that flapped about slowly; moths with brown wings that flapped about quickly; yellow shrimps that hopped and skipped most quickly of all; and jellies of all the colours in the world, that neither ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... Lighting the snow-peaks with its beacon-fires, Driving before it all the fleet-winged host Of chattering birds above the Mission spires, Filling the land with light and joy, but most The savage woods with all their leafy lyres; In pearly tints and opal flame and fire The morning came, but ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... with heart-shaped leaves, so succulent and distended as to resemble green capsules, and in association with each leaf was a single semi-transparent fruit, pink with a central glow like the fire of opal, but so frail that upon touch it resolved into a dewdrop which glistened, trembled, and was gone in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... venture to think of my lost Margaret; and I did think of her, and pray for her with as fervent aspirations as ever rose from a man's faithful heart. And in the dusky stillness of the evening, with the faint odour of dewy flowers round me, and distant stars shining dimly in that far-off opal sky; against which the branches of the elms looked so black and dense, I used to beguile myself—or it may be that the influence of the scene and hour beguiled me—into the thought that my separation ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... inwardly. She saw Seraphitus standing erect, lightly swathed in an opal-tinted mist that disappeared at a little distance from the ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... same evening, when his work would be over for the day. As usual now, she was shown into his room—his only one. As usual also, she found him poring over his Greek Testament. The gracious, graceful woman looked lovelily strange in that mean chamber—like an opal in ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... was an opal sea I looked on of mist, shot along its upper surface with the rosy gold and pinks of dawn. Then, as that soft, translucent lake ebbed, jutting hills came through it, black and crimson, and as they seemed to mount into the air other lower hills showed through the veil with rounded forest knobs ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... fragrance, independent of the freshness and complexion of the rose; as the light on the cloud; as the bloom on the cheek of beauty, of which the possessor is unconscious until the charm has been seen by its influence on others; it is the internal golden flame of the opal; a something which may be abstracted from the thing in which it appears, without changing the quality of its substance, its form, or its affinities. I am not, therefore, disposed to consider the idle and reckless childhood of Byron as unfavourable to ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... "I've often thought that when one sees a beautiful man or woman, one is seeing the monument to some moment of supreme, perfect happiness. There are hours when even the meanest creatures see the islands of enchantment floating in the opal sea." ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... and curve resemble tusks. The black proboscis, however, the simply a hollow sheath, which encloses, when not in the act of biting, four reddish and sharp lancets. Under the microscope these four lancets differ in thickness, two are very thick, the third is slender, but the fourth, of an opal colour and almost transparent, is exceedingly fine. This last must be the sucker. When the fly is about to wound, the two horny antennae are made to embrace the part, the lancets are unsheathed, and on the instant the incision is performed. This I consider ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... on the window-panes sound almost pleasant as one basked in the light and warmth of the apartment and contrasted it with the state of cold and wet and misery which reigned supreme outside. A dozen opal-shaded gas- burners brilliantly lighted the room, and revealed the fact that it was handsomely and liberally furnished with luxurious divans, capacious easy-chairs, a piano, a table loaded with the papers and periodicals of the day, an enormous mirror over the black ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... hundred and forty-six years before the coming of Christ. The North African Coast, with its broad hem of golden sand, its green belt of feathery palm trees, and its background of barren, red-scarped hills, shimmered like a dream country in the opal light. Save for a narrow edge of snow-white surf, the Mediterranean lay blue and serene as far as the eye could reach. In all its vast expanse there was no break but for a single galley, which was slowly making its way from the direction of Sicily and heading for the distant ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... himself, names of glorious places—"Athens—Rome—Venice," and going there in the airship of imagination; calling up visions of rose-sunset light on the yellowing marble of the Acropolis, or moonlight in the Pincian gardens, with great umbrella-pines like blots of ink on steel, or the opal colours shimmering deep down, under the surface of the Grand Canal. He made Dierdre understand his way of "listening to a landscape," knowing by the voice of the wind what trees it touched; the buzz of olive leaves bunched like hives of silver bees against the blue; the sea-murmur of pines; ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... ruffles the sheet upon which we write, and the "white caps" are tossing up as if in greeting to Him who walks the pavements of emerald and opal: ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... being rubbed affected the needle. In this way he discovered that light substances were attracted by alum, mica, arsenic, sealing-wax, lac sulphur, slags, beryl, amethyst, rock-crystal, sapphire, jet, carbuncle, diamond, opal, Bristol stone, glass, glass of antimony, gum-mastic, hard resin, rock-salt, and, of course, amber. He discovered also that atmospheric conditions affected the production of electricity, dryness being unfavorable and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... development of a fine lamellar structure or parting due to secondary twinning and the separation of secondary products along these and other planes of chemical weakness ("solution planes") in the crystal. The secondary products consist of mixtures of various hydrated oxides—opal, goethite, limonite, &c—and appear as microscopic inclusions filling or partly filling cavities, which have definite outlines with respect to the enclosing crystal and are known as negative crystals. It is to the reflection and interference of light from these minute inclusions that the peculiar ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... stables, and another and newer-looking building with a metal roof, and several stacks of hay surrounded by a fence, and a row of portable granaries. And beyond these stretched the open prairie, limitless and beautiful in the clear morning sunshine. Above it arched a sky of robin-egg blue, melting into opal and pale gold down toward the rim of the world. I breathed in lungfuls of clear, dry, ozonic air, and I really believe it made me a little light-headed, it was so exhilarating, so champagnized with the invisible bubbles ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... in the evening sunlight as she passed through them on her way to the house. The old Manor stood out grey and ancient against an opal sky. She looked up at it with loving eyes. Her home meant very much to Sylvia Ingleton. Until the last six months she had always regarded it as her own life-long possession. For she was an only child, and for the past ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... we should meet; he would speak; a chance would be offered of reading in his eyes the riddle of his shyness. His ablutions over, he stood, slowly re-arranging his cuffs, looking at the horn of a young moon, set pale in the opal sky, and glimmering faint on the oriel of Jean Baptiste. Sylvie watched the mood contemplative; its stillness irked her; she whined and jumped to break it. He ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... towered in the suburbs, with doors and columns of pure turquoise; the windows were made of precious stones brilliantly polished. At the sumptuous feasts of the prince of the land, enchanting slaves served the most delicate dainties on golden dishes. There were mountains of opal rising above valleys reveling in jewels, with crystal streams, whose bottom ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... emptier waste, resembling air, Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide In circuit, undetermined square or round, With opal towers and battlements adorned Of living sapphire, once his native seat; And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, This pendant world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... garrets, grisettes, umbrellas, and overshoes to men who pay for their dinners with tickets; and you must also comprehend Love to be a principle which develops in all its grace only on Savonnerie carpets, beneath the opal gleams of an alabaster lamp, between guarded walls silk-hung, before gilded hearths in chambers deadened to all outward sounds by shutters and billowy curtains. Mirrors must be there to show the play of form and repeat the woman we would multiply as love itself ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... across the table. Major Jones, who was beginning to feel that his position as show guest was in danger, thrust his hand into his waistcoat pocket and produced a lady's ring, in which was set a single opal. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... and he, sitting silently opposite her, dreamed—the old dream that comes to most good men and true once in their lives. He scarcely moved until the dawn lightened with opal the dreary plain, bringing back the horizon and day, when he woke from his dream with a sigh, and then a laugh. Then he listened for the sound of distant hoofs, and hearing them, crept noiselessly from the coach. A compact body of horsemen ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... crackled pleasantly under their feet; and through the haze that is October's veil glowed a reddish sun, vague as an opal. A footpath crawled like a serpent through the woods and they followed it, kicking up the leaves before them, pausing, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... season with an infinite variety of tints; for the tender bloom of an Irish spring is only surpassed in beauty by the glories of an Irish autumn. The undulating masses that would in October glow with a myriad fires were now clad in the colours of the opal, delicate pinks and blues and greys of yet unopened buds forming a background to the pure vigorous green of larch or chestnut in full leaf, while here and there a group of wild cherry-trees—trees which in a few months would be clothed in the hues of ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun as calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock

... at the portals of deep mines of wealth, endlessly extended. Alas! the glowing splendor from the hills and valleys burned into the blue eyes of the young man; his pupils rapidly absorbed the molten torrents of gold and silver; circles of light from amethyst, opal, and emerald, bent like rainbows round the azure orbs. The subterranean flames roared and crackled; the hills were shaken to their centre; the caves were heaving in their depths, and fresh, glittering, golden, diamantine ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... and no more was said. So that at twilight they were speeding down the long, empty ocean drive with good salt air in their faces, and lights of cottages spotting the opal night with orange blurs. It was a large, gay house-party, and the person who had been called, it was told from one to another, "the young Phillips Brooks," a person who brought among them certain piquant qualities, was a lion ready to their hand. With the general ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray

... is by," he asked, stopping before Margaret, and pointing to a small Lambinet, glowing like an opal on the dull-green wall of the studio. "I so seldom see good pictures that a gem like this is a delight. By a Frenchman! Ah! Yes, I see the subtlety of coloring. Marvellous people, these Frenchmen. And this little jewel you have here? This bit of mezzo ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... exhibit local color is strangely variable. The morning light of about nine or ten is usually very pure; but the difference of its effect on different days, independently of mere brilliancy, is as inconceivable as inexplicable. Every one knows how capriciously the colors of a fine opal vary from day to day, and how rare the lights are which bring them fully out. Now the expression of the strange, penetrating, deep, neutral light, which, while it alters no color, brings every color up to the highest possible pitch and key of pure, harmonious ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... is heavy and the sky is opal in its effects. The chemists have thus far found in nature ninety elementary substances, and it is partly due to this large variety that the Zikites have surpassed their fellow men ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... pure, because of great illuminations Of dreamy doctrine caught from poets of old, Because of delicate imaginations, Because I am proud, or subtle, or merely cold. Natheless my soul's bright passions interchange As the red flames in opal drowse and speak: In beautiful twilight paths the elusive strange Phantoms of personality I seek. If better than the last embraces I Love the lit riddles of the eyes, the faint Appeal of merely courteous fingers,—why, Though 'tis a quest of souls, and ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away;—a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,—sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... soft pearly gray and tender opal tints which presage a fair noontide. Before six o'clock the children had all besieged Bessie's door, with noisy tappings and louder congratulations. At seven, they were all seated at breakfast, the table strewn with birthday gifts, mostly ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... element. The ladder we all had to walk under, the peacock's feathers, the black cat, the spilling of salt, breaking of mirrors, presenting of knives, wearing of green ties (not that I wore one—the colour doesn't suit my complexion) or opal rings, are fair fun, and I think that in future it would be as well to limit the satire to these ceremonies, to the exclusion of the funereal part of the business. For badges each wore in his button-hole a small coffin to which dangled a skeleton, and peacock's feathers. In my opinion ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... two was roosting under the date-trees; the landscape everywhere stretching away level and lonely. In the sky in the east was a long streak of greenish light, which widened and rose until it grew to be of an opal colour, then orange; then, behold, the round red disc of the sun rose flaming up above the horizon. All the water blushed as he got up; the deck was all red; the steersman gave his helm to another, and prostrated himself on the deck, and bowed his head eastward, and praised the Maker of the sun: ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... I commenced the conversation by ordering a present to be laid on the carpet of several necklaces of valuable beads, copper bars, and colored cotton handkerchiefs. It was most amusing to witness his delight at a string of fifty little "berrets" (opal beads the size of marbles) which I had brought into the country for the first time, and which were accordingly extremely valuable. No sooner had he surveyed them with undisguised delight than he requested me to give him another string ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... and told him to saddle Artemis, the slim-limbed, seal-brown filly which an English nobleman had given to her. Ten minutes later she was in the saddle, and the heaviness on her heart seemed to rise and vanish like the opal mists on the bosom of the motionless lake. A pale star blinked at her, and the day, flushed like the cheek of a waking infant, began drowsily to creep ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... I held back that last muslin of mine, the yellow one, embroidered with the Alps, and a distant view of the isles of Greece worked on the flounces, until it was impossible to wait longer. I meant to wear it at dinner the first day they came, with the pearl necklace and the opal studs, and that heavy ruby necklace (it is a low-necked dress). The dining-room at the "United States" is so large that it shows off those dresses finely, and if the waiter doesn't let the soup or the gravy slip, and your neighbor, (who is, like as not, what Tabby ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... the asphalt pavement—no pavement, indeed, and no horses, no twentieth-century rush of life. It is Venice, it is June, and the two combine to make an illuminated chapter. To live in Venice is like being domesticated in the heart of an opal. How wonderful it is to drift—a sky above and a sky below—on still waters at sunset, with the Dream City mirrored in the depths, every shade of gold and rose and amber mirrored back,—the very atmosphere a sea of color, recalling to one ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... was changing to a light more mysterious, and as we looked at each other through the opal haze I felt strangely that we were changing too. It was as if our realities were less real than the shadow pictures which were to live on here together forever—as if our bodies, which would go away and separate, to live different lives far away from one another, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... was altered; everything was altered. He remembered the ecstasy of their excursion to Switzerland. He remembered the rapture with which, on their honeymoon, he had clasped a new opal bracelet on her exciting arm. He could not possibly have such sensations now. What was the meaning of life? Was life worth living? The fact was—he was growing old. Useless to pretend to himself that it was not so. Both he ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... by ignoble intrigues of hungry heirs—after so many storms nearing the port; after so many vicissitudes, close to the unchanging home; after so many struggles, resting quietly on the breast of God: "Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace?" Into this opal calmness, as of the liquid light of sunset, all the flaming splendours of the hot day have melted. The music of his songs die away into "peace;" as when some master holds our ears captive with tones so faint that we scarce can tell sound ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... and turning with her thumb an opal ring on her finger, she began to use the blandishments which had never failed ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... vanished from the Servian shore, there follows a fresh rock corridor, which confines the Danube in a ravine five hundred fathoms wide. This mountain hall goes by the name of "Kassan." Cliffs of two to three thousand feet high rise right and left, their curves lost in opal-colored mist. From one precipice a stream falls a thousand feet out of a cave, like a delicate silver streak, dissolved in spray before it reaches the river. The two rock faces run on unbroken, only in one part the mountain is split, and through the rift laughs the blooming landscape of an alpine ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... right, into a cavern, where glowed the red embers of a fire. Here the thread began to rise. It rose as high as her head and higher still. What should she do if she lost her hold? She was pulling it down: She might break it! She could see it far up, glowing as red as her fire-opal in ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald

... little balcony of the dome late that afternoon fixing a defective wiring. Through the open windows he could see the skyline in every direction. The far-reaching gray prairie, overhung by its dome of amethyst bordered round with opal and rimmed with jasper, seemed in every blending tint and tone to call him back to Norrie. The west bluff above the old Kickapoo Corral in the autumn, the glen full of shadow-flecked light under the tender young April leaves, the December landscape as it lay beyond Dr. Fenneben's ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... blackness, fell in curls half-way down her shoulders; her brow, white as alabaster and polished as a mirror, reflected the rays of the sun; her beautiful and finely arched black eye-brows melted into the opal of her temples; her eyelids were fast down, and the curled black fringe of lashes veiled a glowing and liquid glance of divine emotion; the nose, straight, slender, and cut by two easy nostrils, gave to her profile that character of antique beauty which is vanishing day by day from ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... a balmy and fresh breeze stirred the air, purified by lightning; I felt the West behind me, where spread a sky like opal; azure immingled with crimson: the enlarged sun, glorious in Tyrian tints, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the arch of an evening rainbow; a perfect rainbow—high, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... shadows; her hair, too, seemed silkier and more restrained in tone than his first impression of it. Her gown was of a vague colour—a sort of blue-grey, in which the element of blue was suggested as a light continuous tinge. A crimson silk scarf, fastened with an opal buckle, formed a pleasing sash, and fell to the knee. As before, her feet ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... Sitting aloft, Wilmet was framed by an archway of meeting branches, with nothing but the pale opal of the evening sky behind the beautifully-shaped head and shoulders, and the clear- cut features, drooping just enough to enhance her own peculiar modest dignity, and give it a soft graciousness that had once been wanting. Her dress was the same ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to make the story prettier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, however, admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that they have many opposite lights and shades; they are as changeful as opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of noble enchantment for those who can use them; for those who cannot, I am content to repeat the words I wrote four years ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... — N. semitransparency, translucency, semiopacity; opalescence, milkiness, pearliness^; gauze, muslin; film; mica, mother-of-pearl, nacre; mist &c (cloud) 353. [opalescent jewel] opal. turbidity &c 426.1. Adj. semitransparent, translucent, semipellucid^, semidiaphanous^, semiopacous^, semiopaque; opalescent, opaline^; pearly, milky; frosted, nacreous. V. opalesce. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... was Harrie, out on a rock in the opal surf,—a little scarlet mermaid, combing her hair with her thin fingers, from which the water almost washed the wedding ring. It was—who knew how long, since the pretty bathing-suit had been taken down from the garret nails? What sudden yearning for the wash of waves, and the spring ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... were misty as they smiled an answer. Within the ship that was lifting them, they turned to watch a city of opal light grow faintly luminous in the distance ... an L-shaped continent shrunk to tiny size ... and the nebulous vapors of the cloudland that enclosed ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... about it. Beauty is an attribute of the divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman's face or form ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... in the opal sunset I shall see the Kundahs lie And the sweep of the hills shall fill my heart as the roll of the Downs my eye; And I'll see Snowdon and Staircase and the green of the Lovedale Wood, And the dear sun shining on Ooty, and oh! but I'll find it good; For ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various

... there dwelt in east a man Who from a valued hand received a ring Of endless worth: the stone of it an opal, That shot an ever-changing tint: moreover, It had the hidden virtue him to render Of God and man beloved, who in this view, And this persuasion, wore it. Was it strange The eastern man ne'er drew it off his finger, And ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

... tramp held his hand the other possessed himself of the ring. The ring contained an opal of which Tom was very proud, and to part with the article made the young ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield

... straight to the north of us, and then waver and deepen until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the ghost-dance of their gods. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going up in quivering veils of white and red and green. And when it was over I listened to ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... ones too, for that matter, who are wrinkled and colorless, should not wear diamonds. The dazzling white gems with pitiless brilliancy bring out the pasty look of the skin. The soft glow of pearls, the cloudlike effects of the opal, the unobtrusive lights of the moonstone harmonize with the tints of hair and skin ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley

... the studio which had been left open. It was a splendid sculptor's studio, the front of which, on the street corner, semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms, which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason's shed, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... rains; and I might mention that having with some difficulty interested Yamba in the subject, she was always on the look- out for the tell-tale specks and gleams. In some of the ranges, too, I found the opal in large and small quantities, but soon discovered that the material was too light and brittle for spear-heads, to which curious use I essayed to put this beautiful stone. Talking about spear-heads, in the ranges where I met Jacky Jacky there was a quarry of that kind ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... seen at midnight in the glow of a fire. And her hair was massed like that of an ascetic high over her brow, and on its dull black cloud there shone a gem that resembled a star, shooting and flickering and changing colour like a diamond mixed with an opal: while underneath, her eyes, that resembled pools filled with dusk instead of water, were fixed on me as if in meditation, as if half in doubt as to whether I was I. And yet her lips were smiling, not as if they meant to smile, but just because they could not help it, driven ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain

... went to the broken cabinet. It was evidently a receptacle for valuable curios; for in it were some great scarabs of gold, agate, green jasper, amethyst, lapis lazuli, opal, granite, and blue-green china. None of these things happily were touched. The bullet had gone through the back of the cabinet; but no other damage, save the shattering of the glass, had been done. I could not but notice the strange arrangement of the curios ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... of valley and woodland and foothill that stretched down into the opening prairie. Suddenly she realized that she was looking down upon a picture—one of Nature's obscure masterpieces—painted in brown and green and saffron against an opal canvas. It was beautiful, not with the majesty of the great mountains, nor the solemnity of the great plains, but with that nearer, more intimate relationship which is the peculiar property of the foothill country. Here was neither the flatness that, with a change of mood, could become in ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... began to grow faintly luminous, and the waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the noises in ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... after rounding the last foot hill, they saw the Acropolis across the plain. The sun fell on the red in the natural rock and intensified the white of the marbles. Against the sombre mountains the isolated citadel glowed inly, like a milk-white opal shot with rose. Paulus caught his breath. Was it here, ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... do I know deep in thine inmost folds, Within an opal hollow, there abides The lady of the mist, The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... force his eyes away from the unreal beauty of opal walls like the fairy structures they had seen. There was color everywhere that blended and fused to make glorious harmony that was pure joy to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... between the low, enclosing headlands and was out of sight. When she summoned up strength to creep to an eminence commanding the lake, it was already little more than a speck, moving rapidly northward, over the opal-tinted waters. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... yonder in the golden west, shimmering, dancing, in rosy-tinted splendor, more islands beckoned us to the final glory of a matchless day—clouds heaped on clouds, outlined in thin threads of gold, and drawing, in broad shafts of smoky flame, the vapors of an opal sea. At that time I had not seen the famous Inland Sea of Japan, but I have since passed through it twice, and feel that in beauty the Strait of San Bernardino has little to yield ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... she began to puzzle, and the old uneasiness came back. The last trailing banner of cloud vanished, and the sun rode clear in an opal sky, smiling benignly down on the forested land. She was thus enabled to locate the cardinal points of the compass. Wherefore she took to gauging their course by the shadows. And the result was what set her thinking. Over level and ridge and swampy hollow, Roaring ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... designed to perform. The only really odd things about the whole affair were that the lowest third of the case was filled with a liquid, thickish and emerald green and possessing a curious iridescence, and that just beneath the niche was fixed a strip of ebony tilted upwards and bearing in distinct opal ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... this sense of what is strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern as well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when a watery sky changes to pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and angular, as if in attitudes of agony; and here and there on benches under the trees sat men as grey and angular as they. It was cold even for me, who had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... her love; and so this opal sings With all its tints in maze, that seem to quake And leap in light, as if its heart ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... delight him. He declared it at last to be inexhaustible. It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the least particle. He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which shine with ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... numerous, exposing acres of a reddish and white soil of felspathic clay, sloping at an angle of 30 degrees. Where the angle was less than 15 degrees, rice was cultivated, and partially irrigated. The lateral streams (of a muddy opal green) had cut beds 200 feet deep in the soft earth, and were very troublesome to cross, from the crumbling cliffs on either side, and their broad ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... rainbow, rose on every side. Spires and domes of the most fantastic but graceful design seemed to soar into the clear and perfect air. All were bathed in a rosy glow, the source of which was hidden. Spacious walks paved with huge blocks of opal divided the rows of palaces. Along them grew tall and slender trees of a curious and delicate foliage. Birds of Paradise, King Fishers and doves flitted from branch to branch. The broadest of these avenues ended in a sweeping flight of steps of alabaster which led to a vast and perfectly ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various

... away so swiftly that he could at first mark nothing but the speed with which the clouds above and the dim earth below went rushing past. Soon he began to see that the sky was very lovely with mottled clouds all about the moon on which she threw faint colours like those of an opal. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald

... over me—for a hundred or two kilometres away men are killing one another—women are searching for some trace of their homes—the ground is teeming with corpses—the air is foetid with the smell of death! And yet we enjoy the opal sunset at Versailles and smile at the quaint appearance ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn

... found a red and white tortoise-shell cat with four blind, squeaking atoms beside her, and as the cat rolled over and the atoms sucked life, Joan saw her shining eyes, afore-time so bright and hard, full of a new strange light, like the cloud that glimmers over the fires of an opal. The cat's green orbs were full of mystery: of pain past, of joy present. So again Joan learned. But a black tragedy blotted out that little happy family in the pigsty, and Death, in the shape of Amos Bartlett, Mr. Chirgwin's head man, fell upon them. Then the farmer learned that ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... her gauntlet, Colina displayed to Marya a ring set with a gleaming opal. It was Marya's she let her understand, ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... streams, From science leaps the living ray; Flashed from the poet's glowing dreams The opal fires of fancy play. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... stared at the lights that outlined the yacht against the deep distance of the sky, and that seemed, as the shadowy hull swung dark on the water, to start out from nowhere in pin-pricks of diamonds set in opal moonlight. ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... not ready yet, and we sauntered about on the flat roof, white as marble in the moonlight. The sky was milk—the desert, honey —far off Cairo with its crowned citadel, pale opal veined with light, and faintly streaked with misty greens and purples; the cultivated land a deep indigo sea. The fantastically built hotel (in its ancient beginnings the palace of a Pasha) was like a closely ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... in Maryland! The air steeped in perfume and soft as a caress; the sky a luminous gray interwoven with threads of silver, flakings of pearl and tiny scales of opal. ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally mattered in this gracious scene—his figure silhouetted, vertically, against those long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away delicate junction of opal-tinted sea with ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... Horoscope Until my dream-enamoured Senses grope Towards the Light, where in her opal Shrine Smiles Hopefulness, ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin

... between close steeps, the scene opened to the wide shore of Fusina. I looked up (for I had scarcely time to look before) and beheld a troubled sky, shot with vivid red, the Lagunes tinted like the opal, and the islands of a glowing flame- colour. The lofty mountains of the distant continent appeared of a deep melancholy grey, and innumerable gondolas were passing to and fro in all their blackness. The sun, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... piled high above the peaks, and as the train crept steadily upward, feeling its way across the mountain's shoulder, we were able to look back and down and far out upon the plain which was a shoreless sea of liquid opal. At ten thousand feet the foot hills (flat as a rug) were so rich in color, so alluring in their spread that we could scarcely believe them to be composed of ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... which unknown to me had come and placed itself upon the table. "I know." And it climbed upon my arm which lay across the table. The fire shone fair upon its little form, so that in silhouette its outline was delicate and keen as an image cut from the fiery heart of a noble opal stone. ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... beat. Was it only chance that reproduced the dream-scene of the previous night, for the suite of rooms were thrown open, and through the delicate amber tints of the satin hangings gleamed the faint rose-hue of lamplight, paling into opal in the farthest chamber but giving to all the soft and glowing colouring he remembered so well. Swiftly as his eyes took in the picture, they seemed also to take in the lovely figure reclining ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... that; still, I would turn my eyes toward the graceful monument, so wickedly annexed by the three Julii, and then away over the wide plain that lay beneath this ragged spur of the Alpilles. In the distance I could see Avignon, and the pale, opal-tinted, gold-veined hills that fold in the fountain of Vaucluse. Never, since we came into Provence, had I been able so clearly to realize the wild fascination of her haggard beauty. "Here Marius stood in his camp," I thought, "shading his eyes from the fierce ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... had almost a menacing attitude as they crept along or leaped sideways after the travellers. Hazel noticed with a startled glance at the sky that the sun was low and would soon be down. And that of course where the sun hung like a great burning opal must be the west, but that told her nothing, for the sun had been high in the heavens when they had started, and she had taken no note of direction. East, west, north or south were all one to her in her happy care-free life that she had hitherto led. She tried to puzzle it out ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... they are, except it be the opal. In the opal, God seems to have fixed the evanescent and ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... plaza, covering thousands of acres. Toward it, on two sides, converged scores of streets; they stretched away from it like the ribs of a giant fan. On the remaining two sides there was a tremendously large building with a V-shaped front, opening on the square. The play of opal light on its many-bubbled roof resembled the glimmer ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... when, riding wearily on jaded horses, they came to the outskirts of Angers, and saw before them the term of their journey. The glow of sunset had faded, but the sky was still warm with the last hues of day; and against its opal light the huge mass of the Angevin castle, which even in sunshine rises dark and forbidding above the Mayenne, stood up black and sharply defined. Below it, on both banks of the river, the towers and spires of the city soared up from a sombre huddle of ridge-roofs, broken here by a round-headed ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman

... loved it with all an artist's love. She had sketched that belt of fir-trees under almost every condition—with the evening sun behind them, standing blackly out against the warm crimson light; or later, when the day had left no more than a faint opal glimmer in the western sky; later still, in the fair summer moonlight, or en a blusterous autumn afternoon, tossed by the pitiless wind. There was a poetry in the scene that seemed to inspire her pencil, and yet she could never quite satisfy herself. In short, she was not Turner; and that ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... watched it long and long Till a flying sunfish Swam through its branches. He had opal wings ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling

... the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, while not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about his mind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, the skies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flow across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has the unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in the open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions—with ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... colourless on cooling, unaltered in the reducing flame; bismuth, yellowish-brown, light-yellow or colourless on cooling; in the reducing flame, almost colourless, blackish-grey when cold; silver, light yellowish to opal, somewhat opaque when cold; whitish-grey in the reducing flame; manganese, amethyst red, colourless in the reducing flame. If the hot bead is colourless and remains clear on cooling, we may suspect the presence of antimony, aluminium, zinc, cadmium, lead, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... later, when the stars come out to envy the beauty of the City of Marvel, the King walks to another part of the garden and sits in an alcove of opal all alone by the marge of the sacred lake. This is the lake whose shores and floors are of glass, which is lit from beneath by slaves with purple lights and with green lights intermingling, and is one of the seven wonders of Babbulkund. Three of the wonders ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany

... still they say, 'Twas spread by good Sir Gregory, And that when it was ta'en away, The Ladye Olive thou might'st see, With eyne of blue so softly bright, Like those we feign in fairie dreams, Where love shines like that lambent light That in the opal softly swims. But they could carry maddening fires, As when they inspired Sir Evan's breast, And roused therein those wild desires That stole from Dowielee his rest. And led to that, oh, fatal night! When, less beguiling than beguiled, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton

... that an exquisite work of art, such as a fine intaglio or cameo, or a natural rarity, such as a black pearl, is a possession more distingue than a large brilliant which any one who has money enough can buy as well as yourself. Of all precious stones, the opal is the most lovely and commonplace. No merely vulgar ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... Dining-room; walls distempered chocolate; gaselier with opal-tinted globes; two cast-iron Cavaliers holding gas-lamps on the mantel-piece. Oil-portrait, enlarged from photograph, of Mrs. TIDMARSH, over side-board; on other walls, engravings—"Belshazzar's Feast," "The Wall of Wailing at Jerusalem," and DORE'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various

... two in a voice that seemed to come from his stomach; it sounded like, "Like you best." But Dr. Lavendar did not hear it, and David ran swiftly back to the rabbits. There Helena found him, gazing through two large tears at the opal-eyed pair behind the wooden bars. Their white shell-like ears wavered at her step, and they paused in their nibbling; then went on again with timid, jewel-like ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland

... by seas that towards the far horizon seem unfathomably blue, yet near around are patched in the sunshine with opal, with green, and with azure, and tremble like mercury under the moon ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables

... exceedingly large and fine—a hundred and ten in all, and not one of them small; eighteen rubies of remarkable brilliancy; three hundred and ten emeralds, all very beautiful; and twenty-one sapphires, with an opal. These stones had all been broken from their settings and thrown loose in the chest. The settings themselves, which we picked out from among the other gold, appeared to have been beaten up with hammers, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... dry as the finest wine came the breath of the shadowed forest. The valley below was a vision seen through an opal haze. A white mist from hidden falls blurred the green of a hand's breadth of tree tops half-way down the gorge. Youth made merry hand-in-hand with young summer. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... calling Omassa "the lantern," and would jestingly ask "when she was going to be lighted up"; but there came a time when Mrs. Holmes knew the magic word that would light the flame and make the lantern glow, like ruby, emerald, and sapphire; like opal and tourmaline. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris

... recover its scent and preserve it. His whole frame trembled with emotion at the recollection of that lovely form that he had left whiter than the sheet of the bed, in the dim light that filtered through the opal-shaded lamp. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... superlative sunsets that burn themselves into the consciousness with a joy akin to pain, and of which only a few are allotted to each human life. I stood watching the sinking sun throw a crimson net over the snow mountains as the shadow of night crept slowly up the hillside. The sky took on an opal light in which were merged and transcended all the colours of the day. Every pinnacle and rock was lit up as by a heavenly fire, the pines were outlined like black sentinels against the sky, guardians of that merciful green life ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... opal breast; And o'er the meads the bobolink, With vexed perplexity confessed His tinkling gutturals in a kink, Or ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland

... ceremony must intervene before politeness permitted them to leave. At length, however, they found themselves again on the ferry-boat. Water and sky were grey, with a dividing gleam of sunset that sent sleek opal waves in the boat's wake. The wind had a cool tarry breath, as though it had travelled over miles of shipping, and the hiss of the water about the paddles was as delicious as though it had been ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... the emotions, that something was amiss between the pair. They were left alone upon the deck. Stella by chance looking southwards to the starlit gloom, Luttrell to the north, where still the daylight played in blue and palest green and the delicate changing fires of the opal. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... in the world; with views of life as serious, and as earnest, not living for pretence or show, but for the most rational and religious ends. Now, when all this goodness is silvered over, as it were, reflecting like mother-of-pearl or opal, a thousand fanciful shades and changes, is not the result beautiful? Some families into which I have entered, some persons with whom I have talked, have left a most delightful impression upon my mind; and I have talked, by means of imperfect English, French, and interpretations, with ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... the red clay is the residue left by dissolved Foraminiferous skeletons, is correct, then all these deposits alike would be directly, or indirectly, the product of living organisms. But just as a silicious deposit may be metamorphosed into opal or quartzite, and chalk into marble, so known metamorphic agencies may metamorphose clay into schist, clay-slate, slate, gneiss, or even granite. And thus, by the agency of the lowest and simplest of organisms, our imaginary ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... clouds drifting across; the air was elixir; and the blue waters, capped here and there with white, ran joyously to meet the green sloping shores, where the haze still lingered. Ahead, an island glowed like an opal. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... Constantinople's richer tints faded into soft opal hues, and the muezzin called the people to prayer. From a window in a wing of the Embassy furthest from the banqueting hall, and overlooking the city, a woman watched the shifting panorama below. She was more beautiful than any of her ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... which we had navigated all day, gradually widened as we advanced; the shores as they receded were covered with opal tints; the vessel began to roll, and we entered the sea of Marmora. At sunset the Mussulmans with whom the deck was crowded collected in groups, and devoutly said their evening prayer. Their countenances ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... greater than the physical! If only he could see the beauty of those far lavender hazes! If only he could understand how even now she was heartsick for the night trail where one looked up into the sky as into a shadowy opal! If only he knew the peace that had dwelt with her on the holiday ledge where there were tints and beauties too deep for words! And yet with the wistfulness came a strange sense of satisfaction that all this new part of her must ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... "My opal ring!" cried Mollie, staring at it unbelievingly. "Oh, I can't believe it. Give it to me, Betty; it has my initials on the inside. Yes, that's ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope

... the inspector did not touch. There were magnificent pearl studs, a watch fob, set with a black opal and pearl cufflinks. Examination of his hat showed the pierced letters R. S., but nothing gave clue to his ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... glimmering light of evening had given place entirely to the dark of night, the sky was transfigured with the bright rays of the setting sun. The New England sky was flooded for a moment with seas of chrysolite and opal. While young Bryant stopped to enjoy the brilliant scene, a solitary bird made its way across the sky. He watched it until it was lost in the distant horizon, and then went on with new courage as he thought the thoughts ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... scorn were the burning shares over which her bare feet trod, and his bitter accents wailed up and down her lonely heart. Through the remainder of that cloudless night she wrestled silently. At last, when the sky flushed rosily, like an opal smitten with light, and holy Resignation—the blessing born only of great trial like hers—shed its heavenly chrism over the worn and weary, bruised and bleeding spirit, she gathered up the mangled hopes that might have gladdened, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... to raise my eyes level with the sill of the window. So did Uncle Jap's Lily. We both peered in. Uncle Jap was facing Leveson; in his hand he held the long-barrelled six-shooter; in his eyes were tiny pin-point flashes of light such as you see in an opal on a frosty morning. Terror had spread a grim mask upon the other; his complexion was the colour of oatmeal, his pendulous lips were quivering, his huge body seemed of a sudden to be deflated. He might have been an empty ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... convenience. I quote from 'The Symphony', and the "melting Clarionet" is speaking: "So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime, Men love not women as in olden time. Ah, not in these cold merchantable days Deem men their life an opal gray, where plays The one red sweet of gracious ladies'-praise. Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye — Says, 'Here, you lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy: Come, heart for heart — a trade? What! weeping? why?' Shame on such wooer's dapper-mercery!"*1* And then follows a wooing ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger. And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would not accept this ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... came, misty but mild, with the moon peering doubtfully through a fleecy veil of fine floating vapour, which, gathering flashes of luminance from the silver orb, turned to the witch-lights of an opal,—and Aubrey made his way to the Casa D'Angeli, which in his own mind he called the "Palais D'lffry," in memory of the old Breton song Sylvie had sung. On giving his name he was at once shown up into ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... innumerable substances, more or less, capable of talismanic virtue to particular individuals. But those gems, and similar ones, that are given in "The Light of Egypt," Vol. I, are the most powerful. To these may be added the opal, under Scorpio; the garnet, under Aries; and the turquoise, under Cancer, when Saturn is therein; and the aquamarine, under Pisces; and among the temporary talismans of vegetation we may add that, the young shoots, bearing the flower and seed vessels, are the portions of chief virtue, and the young ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne



Words linked to "Opal" :   opalize, girasol, opaque gem, mineral



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