What is "brilliancy"

Usage examples of "brilliancy".

It was not, indeed, a brilliancy that dazzled Bernard Longueville, who, however, was not easily dazzled by anything.

As Theos with some difficulty, owing to the intense brilliancy of the Veil, managed to decipher these words, he heard a solitary trumpet sounded,--a clear-blown note that echoed itself many times among the lofty arches before it finally floated into silence.

Not even flesh could subdue the sad brilliancy of her dark-blue eyes, fixed inward upon her own sad state, unregardful of the company.

Meanwhile, the side next the sun is flooded with an aerial aureole of subtle mist, a drift of liquid gold, a gush of living light, rippling from the unrisen orb, decreasing in warmth and brilliancy, paling and fading and waxing faint with infinite gradations proportioned to the increase of distance.

What Lord George Bentinck appreciated most in a parliamentary speaker was brilliancy: quickness of perception, promptness of repartee, clear and concise argument, a fresh and felicitous quotation, wit and picture, and, if necessary, a passionate appeal that should never pass the line of high-bred sentiment.

A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes but weeds and evil beasts of small dimensions, must breed different qualities in its human offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots which the wit whom I have once before noted described so happily that, if I quoted the passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as a diamond breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who might have passed for a gentleman without it.

There shouldst thou see several of the fairest beauties of France and Britain form a small circle, the brilliancy of which exceeds ten-thousandfold the lustre of mines of diamonds such as thine.

In the midst of darkness, the humblest rush-light acquires brilliancy.

But a kind of lurid brilliancy spread over the island, against which stood out confusedly the wooded masses of the heights.

And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.

That splendor came, in a red blaze of triumph the Sun rose, pouring a shower of beamy brilliancy over the white vastness of the heights covered with perpetual snow,--jagged peaks, sharp as scimetars and sparkling with ice, caught fire, and seemed to melt away in an absorbing sea of radiance, .

There is a sleekness about it quite foreign to the other, and a brilliancy of skin with a distinctness of spots which the longer, looser hair does not admit of.

Although some of the sudden flashings forth of stars from apparent small size to near the greatest brilliancy may be due to catastrophes such as might be brought about by the sudden falling in of masses of matter upon the luminous spheres, it is more likely that the changes which we observe are due to the fact that two suns revolving around a common centre are in different stages of extinction.

The mountains, in whose hearts had slumbered volcanic fires, which, from time to time, had burst forth, lighting up the great ocean with Tartarean brilliancy, and scattering red-hot lava far and wide, now stood up in sublime composure, like ramparts of protection to the lovely island formed by the upheaval.

Black smoke, as of Tophet, filling all your universe, it can yet by true heart-energy become flame, and the brilliancy of heaven.