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The whole world was blurred before him, he saw nobody, he heard nothing; he saw her only lying there pale, faded, with the sweat of death upon her glorious face, with the pallor of death around her dear lips, with the refracted gleam of death in her beautiful inspired eyes. There he stood, beside the bed, unable to speak a word. His eyes were tearless.
Snell's law of refraction is one of the corner-stones of optical science, and its applications to-day are million-fold. Immediately after its discovery Descartes applied it to the explanation of the rainbow. A beam of solar light falling obliquely upon a rain-drop is refracted on entering the drop. It is in part reflected at the back of the drop, and on emerging it is again refracted.
Hardly less disturbed than the tempestuous world of waters was the assembly of human beings, that from the cliff fearfully watched its ravings. On the morning of the arrival of the emigrants under the conduct of Adrian, the sea had been serene and glassy, the slight ripples refracted the sunbeams, which shed their radiance through the clear blue frosty air.
He might question whether the mirrored image of himself that he saw daily was real or refracted light made into a roseate image of the mind, but at the very least his face, unlike many middle aged men he knew, did not look like a squished shammy that he used to burnish the shine of his Mercedes Benz GL sports utility vehicle, that same vehicle which he had abandoned in the drive a few weeks ago for that emergency taxi ride to the hospital.
A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light, a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms that the rays from the sun will pass through it as they do through the air, refracted but not reflected.
That is to say that if the ray AB in entering the transparent body is refracted into BC, then likewise CB being taken as a ray in the interior of this body will be refracted, on passing out, into BA.
After all, when we place ourselves in the perspective of homogeneous time; that is to say, when we substitute for the real and profound ego its image refracted through space, the act necessarily appears either as the resultant of a mechanical composition of elements, or as an incomprehensible creation ex nihilo.
In that consists the Platonic "non-being," the Aristotelian "matter" a metaphysical zero which, joined to the Idea, like the arithmetical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and time. By it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a movement spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be nothing but immutable Ideas, immutably fitted to each other.
But in the city things wore a different face. The sun's rays were refracted from the pavement and buildings the stoppage of the public fountains the bad quality of the food, and scarcity even of that, produced a state of suffering, which was aggravated by the scourge of disease; while the garrison arrogated every superfluity to themselves, adding by waste and riot to the necessary evils of the time.
Truth is clear and single, but the lights are parti-colored and refracted in the prism of hypocrisy. The great feature of his administration was a prolonged conflict between himself and the leading seigniors of the Netherlands. The ground of the combat was the religious question.
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