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Rainbow   Listen
noun
Rainbow  n.  A bow or arch exhibiting, in concentric bands, the several colors of the spectrum, and formed in the part of the hemisphere opposite to the sun by the refraction and reflection of the sun's rays in drops of falling rain. Note: Besides the ordinary bow, called also primary rainbow, which is formed by two refractions and one reflection, there is also another often seen exterior to it, called the secondary rainbow, concentric with the first, and separated from it by a small interval. It is formed by two refractions and two reflections, is much fainter than the primary bow, and has its colors arranged in the reverse order from those of the latter.
Lunar rainbow, a fainter arch or rainbow, formed by the moon.
Marine rainbow, Sea bow, a similar bow seen in the spray of waves at sea.
Rainbow trout (Zool.), a bright-colored trout (Salmo irideus), native of the mountains of California, but now extensively introduced into the Eastern States, Japan, and other countries; called also brook trout, mountain trout, and golden trout.
Rainbow wrasse. (Zool.) See under Wrasse.
Supernumerary rainbow, a smaller bow, usually of red and green colors only, sometimes seen within the primary or without the secondary rainbow, and in contact with them.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rainbow" Quotes from Famous Books



... throws His shadow Into the gloom; The raindrops have caught it, And break into bloom! His light on Earth's teardrops Gems Bliss on her clouds, His rainbow of color Paints Hope ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... place where the river falls into the great sea that the sounds on the banks are unheard. It is calm above the cataract, and though there be a shock when the stream plunges over the precipice, yet a rainbow spans the fall, and the river peacefully mingles ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... minor faults a place of temporary purgation. I cannot recall any doctrine of the Christian religion more consoling to the human heart than the article of faith which teaches the efficacy of prayers for the faithful departed. It robs death of its sting. It encircles the chamber of mourning with a rainbow of hope. It assuages the bitterness of our sorrow, and reconciles us to our loss. It keeps us in touch with the departed dead as correspondence keeps us in touch with the absent living. It preserves their memory fresh and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... friend, to whom she told the story, under vows of secrecy, and so on, with the consequence that that same evening the priest received a deputation of the village elders, who requested, in the name of the community, to be allowed to kiss the feet of his mysterious son—that little, rainbow-coloured bird, which had a horn upon its head and played ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall

... is gratifying. For a month we have been a 'troupe'—in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling. Fifteen of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors with a thousand candlepower. Bradley and I will have to do most of the serious work. But I have improved—oh, a lot. You wouldn't ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... Across the river a shower had fallen, and the clouds, clearing away abruptly, had left there a twin rainbow of matchless perfection. Its double arch was poised as accurately over the town as if it had been painted there. Each hoop was flawless in form, lovely in hue, tenderly luminous, exquisite in purity. Never had I seen the double iris so ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... slowly in through the shallowing water, and at last spread it on the sand. The cook, who had followed, instantly sat down on it, and at once the copper-coloured natives, now strangely humble, formed a ring round the carpet, and fell on their faces on the rainbow-and-gold sand. The tallest savage spoke in this position, which must have been very awkward for him; and Jane noticed that it took him quite a long time to get the sand out of his ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... harsh and bitter principle; even then this Spirit withdrew its chosen ministers from the false and guilt-making centre of Self. It converted the wrath into a form and an organ of love, and on the passing storm-cloud impressed the fair rainbow of promise to all generations. Put the lust of Self in the forked lightning, and would it not be a Spirit of Moloch? But God maketh the lightnings His ministers, fire and hail, vapours and stormy winds ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land and made a rainbow of the sunlight. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... and put her arms around him, and with his mind's eye he saw the flap of the white dove's wing. She took him by the hand and led him to the window. The sun was shining, and a grand rainbow stood against the black curtain ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various

... side by which we could obtain an exit. We found the cataract perfectly bathed in light. The large upper sheet of water looked like a block of azure-stone, while the spray beneath glittered as if covered with diamonds. Above our heads a rainbow spanned the stream from bank ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... God help us. For in the short winter day of worldly wealth and prosperity, this flying arrow of the devil, this high spirit of pride, shot out of the devil's bow and piercing through our heart, beareth us up in our affection aloft into the clouds, where we think we sit on the rainbow and overlook the world under us, accounting in the regard of our own glory such other poor souls as were peradventure wont to be our fellows for ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... had she spoken these words, when the sun came out and formed a rainbow right over the mountain most pleasant to behold; and it is clear that this was a sign from the merciful God, such as He often gives us, but which we blind and unbelieving men do not rightly mark. Neither did my child heed it; for ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the invisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicate color and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalk of the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to the rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise from the flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke the supernatural ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... that, unless you would like to drive Veno in your dog-cart? However, it so happened that, soon after the Irishman's visit, Sam went away on a journey, and came back riding a new horse; which when the Major saw, he whistled, but discreetly said nothing. A very large colt it was, with a neck like a rainbow, set into a splendid shoulder, and a marvellous way of throwing his legs out;—very dark chestnut in colour, almost black, with longish ears, and an eye so full, honest, and impudent, that it made you laugh in his face. Widderin, Sam said, was his name, price ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... of Thaumus (i. e. wonder) and of the ocean nymph Electra (i. e. splendour); was the goddess of the rainbow, and as such the messenger of the gods, particularly of Zeus and Hera, the appearance of the rainbow being regarded as a sign that communications of good omen were passing between heaven and earth, as it was to Noah that they would continue ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow; And between us and it, the thunder; And down below in the green wheat, the labourers Stand like dark stumps, still in the ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence

... rainless years brought famine and distress, whereupon they besought Him to send one of His counsellors who should be their daysman, and should undertake their cause and care for them. God sent his chief minister, with a promise that He would give rain and sunshine, and He directed that His rainbow should appear in the sky.[175] The inhabitants of Tahiti have a tradition of a fall which is very striking; and Humboldt, after careful study, reached the conclusion that it had not been derived through any communication with Christian lands, but was an old native legend. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... she would scatter food upon the surface of the singing stream and the lovely fish, their sides reflecting rainbow colors, would leap from the tinkling waters and splash about to show their pleasure. And she would place food about her little garden for the birds and they in turn repaid her by ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle

... all the colors. And the white light may be broken up (separated by refraction or the turning aside of light rays from their true course) into the colors of the rainbow, which is itself only this same decomposition of light by atmospheric refraction. Black is the absence of light, and consequently of color. This is not the case with pigment, for pure pigment has never been produced. ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... slowly down her cheeks; above the drooping eyelids a deep wrinkle cut a dark line across her forehead. The diamond star flashing rainbow gleams from her hair, and the flowers, which dotted the room thickly with their pale colors, gave a background of wealth to that woman's ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... When its spirit to the Yue Ling hath flown, 'tis hard to say 'tis spring. The russet clouds across the 'Lo Fu' lie, so e'en to dreams it's closed. The green petals add grace to a coiffure, when painted candles burn. The simple elf when primed with wine doth the waning rainbow bestride. Does its appearance speak of a colour of ordinary run? Both dark and light fall of their own free will into the ice ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... its wonderful cascade, was the very gate of paradise. They passed it, and in one moment were in a bay—a sudden bay, wonderfully deep for its extent, and sheltered on three sides. Broad sands with rainbow tints, all sparkling, and dotted with birds, some white as snow, some gorgeous. A peaceful sea of exquisite blue kissing these lovely sands with myriad dimples; and, from the land side, soft emerald slopes, embroidered ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... such numerous feathered denizens. . . . The birds of this country possess, in many instances, an excessively beautiful plumage, and he alone who has traversed these wild and romantic regions, who has beheld a flock of many-coloured parrakeets sweeping like a moving rainbow through the air, can form any adequate idea of the scenes that then burst on the eye of the wondering naturalist. As to fish, the rivers abound in ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... Florimel found him, it was to her a region of confused and broken colour and form—a kind of chaos out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall—each contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to fill the space. Lenorme was seated—not at his easel, but at a grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs of it. For they had walked ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... feet perpendicular. It has been calculated, I forget by whom, that the quantity of water discharged down this mighty fall is 670,255 tons per minute. There are two large inns on the Canada side; but after you have satisfied your curiosity in viewing the falls, and in seeing the rainbow in the foam far below where you are standing, do not, I pray you, tarry long at either of them. Cross over to the American side, and there you will find a spacious inn which has nearly all the attractions: there you meet with great ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... been a hot day, with great thunderhead, black and creamy white clouds rolling down from the canyon country. No rain had fallen at the Ford, though storms near by had cooled the air. At sunset Slone saw a rainbow bending down, ruddy and gold, connecting the purple of cloud with ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... and prisms, very difficult to comprehend, but very beautiful in the result; for every ray of light from that brilliant flame is shivered into a thousand glittering arrows, reflected, refracted, tinted with all the rainbow hues, and finally projected through the clear plate-glass windows of the lantern with all the force and brilliancy of a hundred rays. If any one cares to understand more clearly the why and the how, let him either go and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... discharged at the Rats, who, terrified by the strange noise, took to flight in all haste. Thus a brilliant victory was gained, and in place of the late confusion of overturned boxes, there was now to be seen quite a new world, glittering in all the colours of the rainbow. Towns and villages, fortresses and country-houses, kitchens and drawing-rooms, lay scattered one upon another, whilst thousands of little men and animals were running about. The first thing now was, of course, ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick

... the brethren notwithstanding. I tell them that this is a part of the great doctrine of Human Rights, and can no more be separated from emancipation than the light from the heat of the sun; the rights of the slave and of woman blend like the colors of the rainbow. However, I rarely introduce this topic into my addresses, except to urge my sisters up to duty. Our brethren are dreadfully afraid of this kind of amalgamation. I am very glad to hear that Lucretia Mott addressed the Moral Reform Society, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... is the path from earth to heaven? Har answered, laughing: Foolishly do you now ask. Have you not been told that the gods made a bridge from earth to heaven, which is called Bifrost? You must have seen it. It may be that you call it the rainbow. It has three colors, is very strong, and is made with more craft and skill than other structures. Still, however strong it is, it will break when the sons of Muspel come to ride over it, and then they will have to swim their horses over great rivers in order to get on. Then said Ganglere: The ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre

... painted "The Font," which is a religious subject. It represents the sheep and lambs of the Gospel gathering round a font, upon the edge of which are doves. A rainbow spans the sky; on the sides of the font are a mask of the face of Christ and the symbols of the Atonement. This is a painful picture, for while it is exquisite in conception its execution shows the weakness of the painter, who so soon after he made it was ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement

... me. Month after month have I gazed on the white monotony of unthawing snow. No one could admire more than I the chaste beauty of the feathery flakes, or the gorgeous sparkle of trees bereft of leaves and covered with crystals that flashed every hue of the rainbow. But even in this bright September day, with the mercury among the eighties, I get chilled through and through, and shake with the "shivers" when I imagine myself once more among the hard frosts of New Hampshire. Unlike the brave soldier ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... waters; and, if possible, wash away that original sin, the gout. What would one give for a little rainbow to tell one one should never have it again! Well, but then one should have a burning fever—for I think the greatest comfort that good-natured divines give us IS, that we are not to be drowned any more, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... Man's Land, while reckless poppies scattered through the ranks of green, to be followed by the shyer starry sisters in blue and white. Irrepressibly these floral throngs advanced over the shell torn spaces, crowding, mingling and bending together in a rainbow riot beneath the winds that blew them. ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall

... season alters the bucolic character of the roads leading to Morris Park and makes them gay and noisy thoroughfares—conglomerations of smart traps and rainbow frocks. The drive to and from the track is the jolliest feature of a programme that—as is not uncommonly the case where the mighty are involved—smacks not a little of sameness. The inevitable lunch at the ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various

... Georgiana's cheek, now grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky, and you will know how that mysterious ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery, and sound, and silence, mingle together two human lives forever {'By the Fireside'}, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven {'Christmas Eve'}, when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... discourage such adventures. But Sabine is so charming, her troubles end so happily and the setting of West Country scenery is so beautiful that, taken as a whole, I should expect the book to have the opposite effect. The picture of a tall green wave propelling a very solid rainbow, which adorns the paper wrapper and as an advertisement has cheered travellers on the Tube for some weeks past, has no real connection with the story, but perhaps is meant to be symbolical of the book, which, clever and well written as it is, is almost as little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various

... darkened, and swallowed them; nor should I have known the issue, if suddenly, on the very cloud where the strife had been, there had not beamed forth a rainbow—not a common rainbow, Ebbo, but a perfect ring, a soft-glancing, many-tinted crown of victory. Then I knew the saint had won, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... answered) contained in the 'Notes and Queries.' This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its surface, during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated South Sea bubbles. The summers are oppressively hot, and the winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be ascertained precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... to study the literature of the Irish Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry. He described at some length what he thought that spirit was. "Tuned to the spiritual" was one of the phrases he used. "Desire-compelling, with the elusiveness of the rainbow's end," was another. Dr. Farelly grew despondent. If Theophilus expected life in Dunailin to be in the least like one of Mr. Yeats' plays, he was doomed to a bitter disappointment and would probably leave the place in ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham

... Wednesday night at the fork of Rainbow above the J K ranch. I was lying on a ledge close to the trail. You discussed whether to try Deer Creek or follow Rainbow to its headwaters," the ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... the most absurd and infinitesimal proportions. This wonderful garment was 314 composed of a fabric which Freddy Coleman, when he made its acquaintance some few days later, denominated the Mac Omnibus plaid, a gaudy repertoire of colours, embracing all the tints of the rainbow, and a few more besides, and was further embellished by a plentiful supply of gent.'s sporting buttons, which latter articles were not quite so large as cheese-plates, and represented in bas-relief a series ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson, and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age—and Leibnitz's Pre-established Harmony reared its arch above his head, like the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man—and then he fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless) into the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... wax sparkled like stars in chandeliers of crystal. These in turn, catching the illumination, glittered in prismatic fragments with all the varied colors of the rainbow, so that a mellow yet brilliant radiance filled the entire apartment. Polished mirrors of a spotless clearness, framed in golden frames and built into the walls, reflected the waxed floors, the rich Oriental carpets, and the sumptuous paintings that hung against ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle

... and heard the thunder's roar. Then the raging ceased, the blue sky began to re-appear, the sun shone through the rain-drops, and on the departing clouds he saw an arch of many colours, beautiful in form and brilliancy—the lovely rainbow. He gazed at it with strange new feelings till it all ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley

... displays The hero's laurel and the scholar's bays; His graceful limbs in steely mail were drest, The bright star burning on his lofty breast; His sword, high waving, flash'd the solar ray. Illumed the shrouds and rainbow'd far the spray; The smiling crew rose resolute and brave, And the glad sails hung bounding ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... evil witches! "Have you kill'd the happy, laughing Summer? "Have you slain the mother of the Flowers "With your icy spells of might and magic? "Have you laid her dead within my arms? "Wrapp'd her, mocking, in a rainbow blanket. "Drown'd her in the frost mist of your anger? "She is gone a little way before me; "Gone an arrow's flight beyond my vision; "She will turn again and come to meet me, "With the ghosts of all the slain flowers, "In ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... flight; Earth has no shades to quench that beam of heaven; Each ray that shone, in early time, to light The faltering footstep in the path of right, Each gleam of clearer brightness shed to aid In man's maturer day his bolder sight, All blended, like the rainbow's radiant braid, Pour yet, and still shall pour, the blaze ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... not venture to break heatedly in on the pause that followed those regretful words. Into the minds of the majority stole a sense, vague and indefinable it is true, that a tragic impasse was closing on a situation over which had flashed a rainbow gleam of possible solution. Ahead lay the future with its sinister shadows—darker because of the alternative they had glimpsed in ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... deserved the public and miraculous approbation of Heaven. [87] The Arians, who considered as their own the victory of Constantius, preferred his glory to that of his father. [88] Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, immediately composed the description of a celestial cross, encircled with a splendid rainbow; which during the festival of Pentecost, about the third hour of the day, had appeared over the Mount of Olives, to the edification of the devout pilgrims, and the people of the holy city. [89] The size of the meteor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... moodily. "I only thought you'd like to hear all about Grizzly Slide and how it's been cutting up this summer. The gold mine has had several adventurers trying to jump the claim, too; and Rainbow Cliffs has had an injunction served on it so that we are tied up ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... Arizona at the day's transfigured immortal passing—became a crimson coal in a lake of saffron, burning and beating like a heart, till the desert seemed no longer dead, but only asleep, and breathing out wide rays of rainbow color that rose expanded over earth ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... the tumuli testifies to the natural instinct implanted by the Creator in the human heart with regard to a future existence. The idea that the soul of the departed is about to take a long journey is constant and deeply rooted; the rainbow and the milky way have often been supposed to be the paths trod by the departed, who require sustenance for so long a journey. The Aztecs laid a water-bottle beside the bodies to be used on the way to Mictlan, the land of the ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... on anything but the eternal? Who would lean on that which has in itself no persistence? Even the closest human loves have their only endurance, only hope of perfection, in the eternal perfect love of which they are the rainbow-refractions. I cannot love son or daughter as I would, save loving them as the children of the eternal God, in whom his spirit dwells and works, making them altogether lovely, and me more and more love-capable. That they are mine is not enough ground for enough love—will ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... heavens, the earth, and the waters—would be that of two heavy rainbows, one beneath the other at some distance apart, resting upon a large body of water that flows around the horizons of both rainbows, and also fills the hollow of the second one.[739] The upper 'rainbow' is formed by one-half of the carcass of Tiamat stretched across in semi-circular shape; the lower one is the great structure Esharra made by Marduk, while the Apsu underneath is the dwelling of Ea. The ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... woefully tattered—and they were few and rudimentary indeed, for most of what had been spared by the hazards of travel were drying down below. Their hair was uncut, and beards of several days' growth ornamented their cheeks. Their hats were of incredible size and shape and all the colours of the rainbow seemed to be reproduced in them. Littered around on divers objects of furniture, they suggested to me ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... ink standpoint they are of vast interest. So extended in number are the "anilines" (they run into the thousands) that they include every shade of black and all possible tints or hues of the colors of the rainbow. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... a capricious creature, but all her changes were sudden and endearing ones, captivating those who loved her more than a monotonous and unchanging virtue. Any little shower, with Patty, always ended with a rainbow that made the landscape more enchanting than before. Of late her little coquetries and petulances had disappeared as if by magic. She had been melted somehow from irresponsible girlhood into womanhood, and that, too, by the ardent ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... where it was easy to lose one's self, small as the town really was; innumerable little toy bridges over toy canals one could have leaped at a bound, overlooked by quaint, irregular little dwellings, of colors that had once been as those of the rainbow, but which time had mellowed into divine harmonies, as it does all it touches—from grand old masters to oak palings round English parks; from Venice to Mechelen and its lace; from a disappointed first love to ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... devil flies by do not waken me. If the rainbow-colored one passes near, take the glowing poker from the stove and lay it on ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous

... successfully made are precisely those which are sufficiently obvious without a critical apparatus; and in regard to those comparisons which bear the closest affinity to the parable, and in which, on account of the rainbow-like blending of the boundaries, logical definitions are most needed, logical definitions have most signally failed. Scholars have, for example, successfully distinguished parables from myths and fables; ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... wherefore, wherefore were they made, All dyed with rainbow light, All fashioned with supremest grace, Upspringing day ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... overhung the shore, with their purple, green, orange, and yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf-tapestry. The songs of the fishermen on the beach, the peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder for the cattle, all seemed to him to have an unnatural charm. As one looking through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on every object, so he beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed to him something forever past and gone. He looked at himself as at another person, who had sinned and suffered, and was now resting in beatified repose; and he fondly thought all this was firm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... who had caroused all night on shore and now hurried on board the galleons, watched the magnificent squadron sweep into the harbour of their city. First came the 'War Sprite' itself; next the 'Mary Rose,' commanded by Sir George Carew; then Sir Francis Vere in the 'Rainbow,' carrying a sullen heart of envy with him; then Sir Robert Southwell in the 'Lion,' Sir Conyers Clifford in the 'Dreadnought,' and lastly, as Raleigh supposed, Robert Dudley (afterwards Duke of Northumberland, and a distinguished author on naval tactics) in the 'Nonparilla.' ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... and grim, her turrets in the lowering clouds on the horizon, her anchors a thousand fathoms deep. The sun was drinking water through luminous pipes. The harbor was a gleaming surface, and the reef from this height was a rainbow of color. All hues were in the water, emerald and turquoise, palest blue and gold. I sat down and closed my eyes to recall old Walt's lines ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... up in greater or less abundance, it perpetually and rapidly changes its colours, now disappearing altogether, and now beaming with the utmost vividness. The man told me that at night the moon forms a white rainbow on the hill. There is a delicious but dangerous coolness all about the cascade. All the scenery about is as beautiful as possible. Just above the great fall is the Velinus tearing along in the same channel, which was first ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... rainbow colours!' thought the little girl. And then the rainbow colours reminded her of the question that had been puzzling her when she began to watch the rosy cloud. So she repeated, out loud this time and in rather a weary voice, 'Whatever is a Saint? ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... married to foreigners; thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on the race of Counts and Freiherrs! 'I could understand the decrees of Providence before I was a parent,' said this dear old Colonel Heddon. 'I was looking up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself whether it was seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I should be out of England!' He lived abroad to be able to dower his girls. His sons-in-law were gentlemen; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... light and heat, He calls forth myriads of flowers. A heavy cloud, that contains nothing but murky vapor, by the rays of the setting sun is made to flash and glow like a burning sapphire throne. The falling shower, by another action of the sun's light, is painted with rainbow colors so pure that they seem to be reflections of heaven's own beauty. Surely God has flung these glories round about us here to give us hints and promises of the unimagined glories of the beautiful, better land. Not only so, but we have a vivid hint as to how the earthly can be transformed ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... couch of the silk sae slim, All striped wi' the bars of the rainbow's rim; And lovely beings round were rife, Who erst had travell'd mortal life; And aye they smiled and 'gan to speer, 'What spirit has brought ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... threatened, espied a bowery wreath of holly that hung around a picture of General Washington in the act of crossing a dark, green river Delaware in a court dress of red and breeches of yellow, surrounded on all sides by ice and officers in rainbow uniforms, and, as this was the only adornment of a rather bare room, it is no wonder it ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... like a rainbow, only more pointed, and my skipper said to me, 'Sir Owen, that is one of them hurricanes; if I knew which way she was going I'd try to get out of the way as fast as I could, for we shall be torn to ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... I her like ought on earth might read, I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies, Upon a virgin brydes adorned head, With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies; Or like the circlet of a Turtle true, In which all colours of the rainbow bee; Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new, In which all pure perfection one may see. But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone Of earthly things, to judge of things divine: Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none Can ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... comparisons not as a matter of necessity, but of choice and skill: nor are these metaphorical colourings so much the result of want of words, as of warmth of fancy." The note gives these examples: "Thus, a rainbow is called, the bridge of the gods. Poetry, the mead of Odin. The earth, the vessel that floats on ages. A ship, the horse of the waves. A tongue, the sword of words. Night, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby

... appearance of the most wonderful faces and figures upon the window glass of the houses in that section. The first appearance of these singular and most extraordinary pictures on the glass was at the residence of William Showalter, where the window panes all at once showed the colors of the rainbow, on which two days later the heads of people and animals were clearly visible. On the glass of another house a head and face resembling President Lincoln's were to be seen. On another the form of a young girl bending over an infant, the body of a lion, the figures twenty-two, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... received an exceptional and quasi sacred character. Our week of seven days is a result from the early worship of the five great planets and of the sun and moon. There were also the seven colours of the rainbow. From such indications as these the early architects of Assyria must have determined the number of stages to be given to a religious building; they also regulated the order of the colours, each one of which was consecrated by tradition to one ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... the drenched leaves a wee shower of liquid sparks came flashing down about her and the little boy. Some of these pattering drops were caught in the soft mesh of Miss Eastman's hair, where they trembled like rare jewels and scattered the morning sunlight into rainbow gleams. ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott

... clothing; being condemned by Nature, as it were, to a perpetual mourning-suit, they love to enliven it with all sorts of variegated stuffs of sprightly patterns, aflame with red and yellow. The considerate young man had remembered this, too, and brought home for Sophy some handkerchiefs of rainbow hues, which had been strangely overlooked till now, at the bottom of one of his trunks. Old Sophy took his gifts, but kept her black eyes open and watched every movement of the young people all the more closely. It was through her that the father had ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... houses the upholsterer has stuffed the room with useless tables. Of course there is a fender and fire-irons, and probably a black doleful-looking grate, which during two-thirds of the year is stuffed with paper shavings of all the colours of the rainbow and several others which good Mother Nature forgot to put into it. On the chimney-piece is a Louis XVI. clock and a pair of ornaments to match. A piano, tune immaterial, is a sine qua non even in a middle-class house, but when Muttonwool has got ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... eyes rested upon such scenes of splendor. Every color and gradation of their peculiar spectrum was present, in solid, liquid, and gas. The carefully-tended trees were all colors of the rainbow, as were the grasses and flowers along the walks. The fountains played streams of many and constantly-changing hues, and even the air was tinted and perfumed, swirling through metal arches in billows of ever-varying colors and scents. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark; and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... gods, so says the old superstition, do not like to behold too happy mortals. It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not. Two of that ilk descended upon Anne one violet dusk and proceeded to do what in them lay to prick the rainbow bubble of her satisfaction. If she thought she was getting any particular prize in young Dr. Blythe, or if she imagined that he was still as infatuated with her as he might have been in his salad days, it was surely their duty ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... stood the trial, partly because she had never accepted the situation as final. She would go back to Edinburgh and Cousin Griselda soon, she kept assuring herself, and though the date of her departure always moved forward, rainbow-like at her approach, she found much ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... attractions. With the infinite variety of the human face and form, of thought, feeling, and affection, we do not need gorgeous apparel to distinguish us. Moreover, if it is fitting that woman should dress in every color of the rainbow, why not man also? Clergymen, with their black clothes and white cravats, are quite ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... lightly to the Book of Revelation. With it, it may be said, the artistic side of her, that had leaped to sympathy with Larry's emotion over "Dark Rosaleen" and "The Spirit of the Nation," awakened, and her artistic life began. That glittering, prismatic chapter, that tells of the rainbow round about the Throne, in sight like unto an emerald, and the Sea of glass, like unto crystal, that was before the Throne, and the thunderings and the voices, and the Voice as it were a trumpet talking. Christian ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... his chin to hold on his hat. His hair whipped his ears like rods. Sometimes he was swept into the hedge; often he was brought to his knees. Still he toiled along through sheets of spray that glistened with the colours of a rainbow, and ran over the ground like driven rain. His eyes smarted, and the taste on his lips ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... corona is an effect of perspective, due to the apparent convergence of the parallel rays situated in the magnetic meridian; so that each observer sees his own aurora borealis, as each sees his own rainbow. The aspect of the phenomenon depends also upon the positions of the observers. The seat of the aurora borealis is in the upper regions of the atmosphere; though sometimes it appears to be produced ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... spoken prose without knowing it. The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at Hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... fit only for the dull and vulgar to live by. Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome

... chariot wheels. The Trojans rejoiced when they beheld her, for she looked both terrible and beautiful, with a frown on her brow, and fair shining eyes, and a blush on her cheeks. To the Trojans she came like Iris, the Rainbow, after a storm, and they gathered round her cheering, and throwing flowers and kissing her stirrup, as the people of Orleans welcomed Joan of Arc when she came to deliver them. Even Priam was glad, as is a man long blind, ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang

... as a maiden, is seated on a rainbow, with the eagle at her side. She holds in her left hand a cornucopia of flowers, and in her right a crown of laurel and the American shield, on which, in bend, is the word DONELSON. Below, dividing ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... seemed to burst also and throw a dark crimson over the entire hemisphere. The colors were the most magnificent that ever were seen. At half-past two o'clock the spectacle changed to darkness, which, on dispersing, displayed a luminous rainbow in the zenith of the heavens and round the ridge of darkness that overhung the southern portion of the country. Soon afterwards, columns of silvery light radiated from it; they increased wonderfully, intermingled amongst crimson vapor, which formed at the same time; ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... "merry-thought" of a canvas-back duck, the memory of this thing comes over him, and, burying his face in the costly napery, he gives himself up to grief until kind words and a celery-glass-full of turpentine, or something, bring back his buoyancy and rainbow smile. The hospitality and generous treatment of our English brother to Americans now is something beautiful, unaffected, and well worth a voyage across the qualmy sea to see, but when Cockburn burned down the Capitol ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... nothing but in the beauty of its plumage, which is as various as the rainbow. This bird, it is well known, goes always against the wind; but perhaps few people know that it preserves the same property when it is dead. I myself hung a dead one by a silk thread directly over a sea-compass, and I can declare it as a fact, that ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz

... with pinnacles sailing towards Jersey, open the skylight, and you will find some of your acquaintance. You never saw such desolation! A pigeon brings word that Mabland has fared still worse: it never came into my head before, that a rainbow-office for insuring against water might be very necessary. This is a true account of the late deluge. Witness our hands Horace Noah. Catherine Noah, her mark. Harry Shem. Louis Japhet. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... not so learned as we, yet they were wiser. They did not explain the phenomena of nature, but described with a graceful and imposing imagery. The rainbow, reduced in our colleges to a mere conformation of matter, was the scarf of Iris; the light-footed hours preceded the car of night, and the rosy-fingered Aurora opened the horizon to permit the car of Jove to pass. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... directed it toward the Atlantic horizon, without being able, however, to find the vessel, for she could distinguish nothing—nothing but blue, with a colored halo round it, a circular rainbow—and then all manner of queer things, winking eclipses which made her ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... was preceded by telegrams going in both directions, talks over the long distance 'phone, and when at last he came in all his glory, a rainbow troop consisting of honor scouts was formed to go down to Catskill Landing and greet him. One scout who would presently be handed the Gold Cross for life saving was among the number. Others were down for the Star Scout badge, and the silver and the bronze awards. Others had passed with peculiar ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... on the string provided by my predecessor, Sergeant. They will help our color scheme. That pale blue doesn't blend well in our rainbow—put it in your pocket and wear it, with my compliments; and those tan shoes are not bad for the Virginia mud—drop them here. Those gray campaign hats are comfortable—give the oldest to me. And there is a riding-cloak I had forgotten ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson

... You just wait," she continued dramatically. "The minute your arm gets so you can paint, I myself shall conduct you to your studio, thrust the brushes into your hand, fill your palette with all the colors of the rainbow, and order you to paint, my lord, paint! But—until then I'm going to have you all I like," she finished, with a complete change of manner, nestling into the ready curve ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... was standing A castle, high and grand, Broad glancing in the sunlight, Far over sea and land. And round were fragrant gardens, A rich and blooming crown; And fountains, playing in them, In rainbow brilliance shone. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... withdraw the image into its depths, now to extrude it forth to view? Why do concave mirrors when held at right angles to the rays of the sun kindle tinder set opposite them? What is the cause of the prismatic colours of the rainbow, or of the appearance in heaven of two rival images of the sun, with sundry other phenomena treated in a monumental volume by Archimedes of Syracuse, a man who showed extraordinary and unique subtlety in all branches of geometry, but was perhaps particularly remarkable for his frequent and attentive ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... many people—if they would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet; she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally have some gift? The girl was very pretty, though she ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... shoemaker, And a tailor, and a baker, Went to seek their fortunes, for they had been told, Where a rainbow touched the ground, (If it only could be found,) Was a purse that should be always ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle

... she shroud," said Letty. "She 'tends to go to glory all wrap up in a crazy quilt, jus chockfull ob all de colors of the rainbow. Aun' Patsy neber did 'tend to have a shroud o' bleached domestic like common folks. She wants to cut a shine 'mong de angels, an' her quilt's most done, jus' one corner ob it lef'. Reckon ole miss done gone to carry her de pieces fur dat corner. Dere ain't ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton



Words linked to "Rainbow" :   rainbow trout, rainbow pink, bow, hope, rainbow shower, rainbow cactus, sky, rainbow seaperch, rainbow lorikeet, arc, rainbow smelt, rainbow runner, promise, rainbow fish, rainbow perch



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