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Thus had the evening passed, not long nor tediously to any of the party; and midnight was at hand; when there entered from the atrium a grey-headed slave bearing a tray covered with light refreshmentsfresh herbs, endive and mallows sprinkled with snow, ripe figs, eggs and anchovies, dried grapes, and cakes of candied honey; while two boys of rare beauty followed, one carrying a flagon of Chian wine diluted with snow water, the other a platter richly chased in gold covered with cyathi, or drinking cups, some of plain chrystal, some of that unknown myrrhine fabric, which is believed by many scholars to have been highly vitrified and half-transparent porcelain.

The high right bank, called the Hills, and the low left shore, known as the Forests, sank into half-transparent vagueness, which veiled the gray log-built villages with their tiny windows, and threw into relief against the evening sky only the green roofs and blue domes of the churches, surmounted by golden crosses, which gleamed last of all in the vanishing rays of sunset.

Nine o'clock of an April night the time when a great city has most power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night.

But all sounds fly in as boldly, Groan and song, and kiss and cry At their galleries, lifted coldly, Darkly, 'twixt the earth and sky. Beauty, thou art spent, thou knowest So, in faint, half-glad despair, From the summit thou o'erflowest In a fall of torrent hair; Hiding what thou hast created In a half-transparent shroud: Thus, with glory soft-abated, Shines the moon through vapoury cloud.

She held out her two white, half-transparent hands, took it as if it had been a human baby and looked at it lovingly till the tears came in her eyes. She would have made a tender picture, as she then lay, with her two hands up, holding the little beauty before her eyes. Then I said what I have already written about the mirror, and repeated the sonnet to her.

O'er stiller place No singing skylark ever poised himself But the dell, Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light: The gust that roared and died away To the distant tree heard and only heard In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.

The grass-spears lengthened; the moss spread in new, rain-jewelled velvet-pile over the pasture floor; the woodbine and the bramble trailed their tender shoots above the hedge; a leafy screen sheltered each woodland home; and even the narrow path from the field-voles' burrow to the corner of the copse led through a perfect bower of half-transparent greenery.

On another occasion, preaching from the text, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face," he presented the picture of a man in his last illness, seeing dimly, through a half-transparent medium, the faint, dim outline of the Divinity whom he was so rapidly nearing; and then, suddenly, death, the shattering of the glass, and the man, on the instant, standing before his Maker and seeing him "face to face."

It was Will Locke's fate to vibrate between drudgery and dreaming; always tending more inevitably towards the latter, and lapsing into more distant, absorbing trances, till he became more and more fantastic and unearthly, with his thin light hair, his half-transparent cheek, and his strained eyes.

Shrieks and cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below that sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish pother went on.