cross-lights

• “There are so many half-lights and cross-lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of sophistry adhering — rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are so subtly intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously blend with germs of future knowledge, that agreement among interpreters is not to be expected.”

  The Symposium

• “Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement — these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive.”

  Memories and Portraits

• “These opposite windows at the ends, which fill the space with cross-lights, and around which he must place two of his pictures, must have been discouraging.”

  Barbara's Heritage Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters

• “Those still in this world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in our hands.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863

• “Then think of the cross-lights, the mingled colours, the uncalculated relations which enter into the composition of the dreamer's life, and say whether that life is not more of a chaos than a cosmos.”

  The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 An Illustrated Monthly

• “Down to its very heart, which was near to black, it was clear fire, and outward toward the facets struck flaming hyacinth hues with zigzag white cross-lights that dazzled and mesmerized.”

  The Coast of Chance

• “Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights.”

  Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873

• “It does not produce a very pleasing impression, being dark and oily-looking; and the cross-lights in the place interfere with the expression of the figures.”

  Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood

• “He is like a man who, by an ingenious system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body.”

  The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years

• “An artist would perhaps object to the cross-lights, but he needn't paint by them.”

  Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870

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