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More "Evanescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no "portrait," but ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... occupied the imagination of French statesmen and churchmen, was rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British government, may reasonably be regarded ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of the Holy Grail was as evanescent as beautiful, and soon disappeared; but Titurel, knowing that the spot was holy, guarded it with all his might against the infidels, who would ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... less an image in my mind than a luster I see you in gleams pale as star-light on a gray wall... evanescent as the reflection of a white swan ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... engines and boilers in naval practice are always placed below the water-line and are protected by deflective deck armor and frequently by coal as well; the turret has become a permanent and accepted part of the practice of the age, while the monitor type in its essential feature seems to be evanescent. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... know the E major Scherzo, Op. 54, with its skimming, swallowlike flight, its delicate figuration, its evanescent hintings at a serious something in the major trio? Have you ever heard Pachmann purl through this exquisitely conceived, contrived and balanced composition, truly a classic? Whaur is your Willy Mendelssohn the noo? Or ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... which the sense is too subtle and evanescent to be fixed in a paraphrase; such are all those which are by the grammarians termed expletives, and, in dead languages, are suffered to pass for empty sounds, of no other use than to fill a verse, or to modulate a period, but which ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... amazement and some admiration that Mrs. Fyne's young disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows. However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that—yes, her hair was of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... fleeting have I seen Than wither'd leaves driv'n by the autumn gust:— Yea, evanescent as the whirling dust Is man's brief ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... if he hangs on, he will be accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and deceiving. So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite; for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and dislikings, its weakness ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... relief as she went upstairs. She was glad to escape the further questions concerning Mary which her mother seemed disposed to ask. Her gaiety had been evanescent and she now experienced a feeling of positive gloom as she entered her pretty room and prepared to bathe and dress for the evening. She could not resist a thrill of pleasure at the sheer beauty of the white chiffon frock spread out on her bed. She wondered if Mary would wear ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... theory demolishes the Deity with the greatest ease, and places man, fleeting or evanescent as he is, at the summit of the universe! As he expresses it, "The only intelligence in the universe worthy of the name is the intelligence of the organized beings which have been evolved; and the highest manifestations of the psychic power known to the occupants of this planet is that ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... but a few torn and faded petals. Seeing this, the king said, 'The flowers pass away and die; so is it with mankind: we are born, we grow old, we sicken and die; we are as fleeting as the lightning's flash, as evanescent as the morning dew.' I know not whether any of you here present ever fix your thoughts upon death; yet it is a rare thing for a man to live for a hundred years. How piteous a thing it is that in this short and transient life men should consume ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... copyist, always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which escaped the expression of the author of The ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying to us the opaline glories of rising or setting sun was ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Gregorian calendar; and it would have restored the Stuarts. The theory of democracy—vox populi vox dei—is a pure superstition, a belief in a divine or natural sanction which does not exist. And superstition is usually obstructive. 'We erect the temporary watchwords of evanescent politics into eternal truths; and having accepted as platitudes the paradoxes of our fathers, we perpetuate them as obstacles to ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... heart was in such a tumult that she could not have spoken a word to save her life; relieved, as one dying of thirst by unexpected water; grateful, bewildered, abashed, yet instinctively aware of something evanescent and unreal in his altruism. Daphne Wing! What ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lyly, on the exquisite snatches of Greene, on the verses, to this day the high-water mark of poetry, in which Marlowe speaks of the inexpressible beauty which is the object and the despair of the poet. This is wonderful enough. But what is more wonderful is, that these lightning flashes are as evanescent as lightning. Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe himself, in probably the very next passages, certainly in passages not very remote, tell us that this is all matter of chance, that they are all capable of sinking below the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of our position, a due sympathy for the misfortunes of others, and a grateful acknowledge to Divine Providence, require that we should be so. Life is short at best. We are here a few years—we sink into the grave—and even our memory is phantom-like and evanescent. How plain, then, is our duty! It is to be true to our position, to our conscience, and to the obligations imposed upon us by society, by circumstances, and by our responsibility to the Author of all ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... left the mother of nine, swept past Nancy whom she saw still bending over her work, and finally rested in the shadows of some cool ferns. This somewhat unexpected announcement sent a wave of pleasure—evanescent, perhaps hardly perceptible—sweeping over ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... mood, wherein all forms of beauty sped to his soul as to their own needful centre, could have lasted over many miles of his journey. But such delicate inward revelations are none the less precious that they are evanescent. Many feelings are simply too good to last—using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, expressing the conviction that God is a hard father, fond of disappointing his children, but to express the fact ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... conquests, endeavor to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come—her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all passions, give ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing instance of this ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... in the canyon country," he continued. "Withers tells me it is a country of rainbows, both in the evanescent air and in the changeless stone. Always as a boy there had been for me some haunting promise, some treasure at the foot of the rainbow. I shall expect the curve of a rainbow to lead me down into Surprise Valley. A dreamer, you will ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... versatility of intellect, the charm or assurance or magnetism of manner, the weight of social position, all of which tend to secure to an inferior man a pre-eminence in the circle in which he moves, are equally evanescent, and the shy, rugged, and tactless recluse often emerges on the strength of his genuine and abiding performances to a position in the eyes of the world which he never ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... politics, New York City was under the control of Tammany, which was from time to time opposed by some other—and evanescent—city Democratic organization. The up-country Democrats had not yet fallen under Tammany sway, and were on the point of developing a big country political boss in the shape of David B. Hill. The Republican party was split into the Stalwart and Half-Breed factions. Accordingly neither ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... that had been muffled with a thick robe of cliff herbage, were showing their chill grey substance through the withered verdure, like the background of velvet whence the pile has been fretted away. Unexpected breezes broomed and rasped the smooth bay in evanescent patches of stippled shade, and, besides the small boats, the ponderous lighters used in shipping stone were hauled up the beach in ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband. Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... General Bezan, to himself, rising and walking up and down his room in haste; "that must have come from the heart. Smiles are evanescent; kind words, even, cost nothing; but tears, they are honest, and come unbidden by aught save the heart itself. Tears, did you say?" he continued, ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... shall be. For this faith in the actual permanence of what seemed so evanescent, compare Adelaide Procter's ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... generation, or at least in two, have things again very much as they were in Shakespeare's day. It is true that men are slaves to the naturalness of what is usual with them, and unable to imagine that the actual living condition of things in their own time is evanescent: nor do even students and scholars see that in the Elizabethan literature we have a perdurable gigantic picture which, among all stages of change, will persistently reassert itself, while any special characteristics ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... American and the French Revolution. He voices the complaints, and, to some extent, the aspirations of Europe. He shows his influence in Fitz-Greene Halleck's Marco Bozzaris. Shelley, who also belongs to the school of revolt, has a peculiar position as a poet of ethereal, evanescent, and spirit-like beauty. He is heard in the voice of the West Wind, the Cloud, the unseen Skylark, the "Spirit of Night," and "the white radiance of Eternity." Bryant's call in The Evening ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... agree with you, and however it may be compared with other competing systems that have preceded it, we must all agree that it is practical, that it is benevolent, that it is serious, and that it is reverent; that it aims at the highest results in virtue; that it treats evil, not as eternal, but as evanescent, and that it expects to arrive at what is sought through the aid of the millennium—that condition of affairs in which there is the highest morality and the greatest happiness. [Applause.] And if we can come to that by these processes ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. The great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time, and yet that misery was pierced, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... This may vary from the "cold shoulder" to the complete "boycott." Losing the friendship and approval of comrades, being cut off from social sympathy, is a familiar form of group pressure. Ridicule and derision are a kind of evanescent ostracism, a temporary exclusion from the comradeship. There are many degrees in the lowering of the social temperature: coolness, formality of intercourse, averted looks, "cutting dead," "sending ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the inmost intentions of the man of twenty-five, who already stood on a pinnacle where hard heads and mature might well have been dizzy. Evidently he knew him self, and even in his brief experience with the world he understood how uncertain and evanescent are the winds of Fame. If he had ever suffered from a "swelled head," he was now cured. He felt the emptiness of life's prizes when the dearest who should have shared them with ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... distance his star has set. How many of these precocious classics are there who do not endure, and who are so only for a while! We turn round one morning and are surprised not to find them standing behind us. Madame de Sevigne would wittily say they possessed but an evanescent colour. With regard to classics, the least expected prove the best and greatest: seek them rather in the vigorous genius born immortal and flourishing for ever. Apparently the least classical of the four great poets of the age of Louis XIV. was Moliere; he was then applauded far more than ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... abandoned fields, and over those ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation; the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own; and nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... gift in any year Has e'er excelled, or equaled this; The others evanescent were While ...
— Grandfather's Love Pie • Miriam Gaines
... insert one or two phrases from Fletcher's version. Whether the composer of that song had ever met with the Latin lyric to Lydia can scarcely form the subject of critical conjecture. Yet there is a faint evanescent resemblance between ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... palpable—the clouds were very irregularly assorted—plates of cirrus above and beneath cumulus—various kinds of cirrus clouds, and that peculiar prismatic haze which is a common sign of the passage of a vortex. The appearance depicted above is a very common, although a very evanescent appearance. When the sky appears of a clear blue through the cirri, there will be generally fresh gales without any great electrical derangement; but if the clear spaces are hazy, gradually thickening towards the ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... children,—what can they know of death? Their tears over graves dry sooner than the dews. It is melancholy to compare the depth, the endurance, the far-sighted, anxious, prayerful love of a parent, with the inconsiderate, frail, and evanescent affection of the infant, whose eyes the hues of the butterfly yet dazzle with delight. It was the night of their flight, and in the open air, when Philip (his arms round Sidney's waist) told his brother-orphan that they were motherless. And the air was balmy, the skies filled with the effulgent presence ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... glinting whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole and out at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman, who was shaking the empty rifle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men running bent double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Something big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature? A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Foehn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to allegorise and sermonise is out of place here. It is but the expedient of those who cannot etch sensation ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... foundation on which this long chain of inference rested has now been shown to be evanescent. In the first place many of his irresolvable nebulae have been proved by the spectroscope to be true nebulae—masses of luminous gas, and not star clusters at all; and, in the next place, the actual distances ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one that occurs in Corot's letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... interested in young people. Anthony was very fond of his sweet, fascinating cousin—they all were. He did not know whether there was any one in Salem quite good enough for her. Saltonstall was a rather trifling fellow, whose fancies were evanescent. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming: there seemed no space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, whilst she traced his features with her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy, and he loved her to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,—we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower. Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in their relation ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... purple as to be almost black. Then, the light coming so swiftly that the eye scarcely found time to note the multitudinous changes of tint accompanying it, the sky behind the hill flushed from palest primrose to rich, glowing amber; a few evanescent shreds of cloud midway between horizon and zenith blushed rosy red at being caught unawares by the sun's first rays, then vanished; a pencil dipped in burning gold outlined the crest of the distant hill for a few seconds, and then the upper edge of the sun's disk, palpitating with living light, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... technique gave him access to an astral plane where any desire is immediately materialized. Through the agency of an astral being, Hazrat, the Mohammedan could summon the atoms of any object from etheric energy by an act of powerful will. But such astrally-produced objects are structurally evanescent; they cannot be long retained. Afzal still yearned for worldly wealth which, though more hardly earned, has a more ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... creature of an hour, Depressed by grief or blessed by power Is but a shadow and a name— A flash of evanescent fame! ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... flowers will be found excellent auxiliaries, far preferable as copies to the even surface of plates. I have myself been much gratified by furnishing flowers in wax to some of our first flower painters, who have assured me that they have proved of great utility, in cases where the evanescent properties of the flower of nature prevented the possibility of committing their similitude to canvas ere their beauty had faded. It affords me no small degree of satisfaction also, that my flowers were found ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... morals and Religion, have nothing of this luminous evidence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recognizes at one time, not at another,—discerns when it is calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and mountains are around it, but the twilight, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... workings, O gracious Nature! Thou who art but a name given by our souls, seeing and hearing through the senses, to the Being in whom all things are and have life! Ere two years old, she, whose dream is now with us, all over the small silvan world, that beheld the revelation, how evanescent! of her pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of sin—inherited from those who disobeyed in Paradise—seemed from her fair clay to have been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears. So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other children, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... The feeling was evanescent; and once more he began to reflect—not to hope—no! Hope, they say dies but with life: but that is a paradox. He still lived, but hope had died. Hope of escape there was none. He was too well guarded. His exasperated enemies, ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... our inquiries into Greek and mediaeval art, I was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that some, remaining to us from old ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... women who for so long a time, maintained such friendly and intimate relations, and yet kept up such an interminable fire of small fun and joke, puns and bon-mots, inoffensively shooting them off right and left at all times and places. Being of an evanescent nature they have mostly vanished from my mind, but the spirit ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... embroidery is thus past; the long labours of the loom have ceased. Cloth-work, crape-work, chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. A taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... are common, and gypsum often covers the ground over immense areas. These districts occupy the beds of vast ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing chotts, or very salt pools, are the last shrunken and evanescent relics. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... importance to the dispute: and I am not inclined reverently to regard the innumerable theories that have been built on so uncertain a foundation. An Egyptian may have migrated to Attica, but Egyptian influence in Attica was faint and evanescent;—arrived at the first dawn of historical fact, it is with difficulty that we discover the most dubious and shadowy vestiges of its existence. Neither Cecrops nor any other Egyptian in those ages is recorded to have founded ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came over the men of Forty-Mile. The sky drew still closer, sending down a crystal flight of frost—little geometric designs, perfect, evanescent as a breath, yet destined to exist till the returning sun had ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... counted STUPID, by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic nature, and spring from the deep places of this Universe!—My Constitutional Friend entitles his next Section CARTHAGENA; but might more fitly have headed it (for such in reality it is, Carthagena proving the evanescent point of that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... assemblage which spends the summer and gives abundant opportunity for study during the succeeding months. In May it is the migrants which we should watch, and listen to, and "ogle" with our opera glasses. Like many other evanescent things, those birds which have made their winter home in Central America—land yet beyond our travels—and which use our groves merely as half-way houses on their journey to the land of their birth, the balsams of Quebec, or the unknown wastes of Labrador, seem ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... to hale him into the full glare of the electric light. A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest degradation of the art of fiction. But 'to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion of the substance,' to quote from the preface to the 'House of the Seven Gables,' this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the unsubstantial realm of fantasy. In ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... and would doubtless have forgotten the vague, evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment after to consult a certain volume, I found but a gap in the row where it ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I had seen, or fancied I saw, the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt. Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.) And dost ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Kate, and many, many less fair; and some have crossed my path with a wild and brilliant grace, that has for a moment dazzled my sight, and perhaps for a moment lured me from my way. But these shooting stars have but glittered transiently in my heaven, and only made me, by their evanescent brilliancy, more sensible of its gloom. Let me believe then, oh! let me of all men then believe, that the forms that inspire the sculptor and the painter have no models in nature; that that combination of ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... He may find room for improvement in material too. Pottery is the most durable of fabrics so long as it is not broken. But it is fragile, as bronze is not. Why may not that defect be remedied, as other defects have been by the Japanese and our bank-note printers in that particularly evanescent texture, paper? Some day, perhaps, burnt clay will be held together by threads of asbestos as greenbacks are by threads of silk and the sun-burned Egyptian bricks were by straw. Malleable glass we have already. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... the feet of Jeanne Lange, how exquisite they had been, how fleeting in the perfection of their happiness! Now they seemed to belong to a far distant past, evanescent like the perfume of violets, swift in their flight like the winged steps of youth. Blakeney's letter had effectually taken the bitter sting from out his remorse, but it had increased his already ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... or other of the four elements, and for one month exposed to the beams of the sun. These preliminary steps being taken, the initiated immediately had a sight of innumerable beings of a luminous substance, but of thin and evanescent structure, that people the elements on all sides of us. Those who inhabited the air were called Sylphs; and those who dwelt in the earth bore the name of Gnomes; such as peopled the fire were Salamanders; and those who made their home in the waters were Undines. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... presence at the daily board perhaps sufficing. We may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that "he is the father who gives the child its morning draught." In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to many of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weird, moaning sound, scarcely perceptible, had floated to the ship, causing the mate to interrupt himself suddenly; and at the same moment a light, evanescent puff of hot air ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... time; he had nodded curtly to Trevison when he had entered to take the chair in which he now sat, and had smiled when Trevison had deliberately turned his back. He smiled when Judge Graney asked the question—a faint, evanescent smirk. But at Judge Lindman's reply he sat staring stolidly, his face an ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to talk about, even if they did not talk about themselves and their friends, for every day brought great events, fresh insurrections, new constitutions, changes of dynasties, assassinations of ministers, states of siege, evanescent empires, and premature republics. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... growing late: the sun was near the edge of the sea as we walked down the ivy-grown walls of the vanished city for the last time, and as we turned back, a red flush poured from the west, and painted the Doric temples in pallid rose against the evanescent purple of the Apennines. Already a thin mist was rising from the meadows, and the temples hung pink in the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... all the reposeful charm of Boro-Boedoer, still a sermon in stone which he who runs may read. The degenerate creed memorialised by Chandi Sewon, has failed to impress itself on the colossal pile which bears melancholy witness to the evanescent character of the heretical offshoot from the parent stem. Jungle and palm-forest in Central Java contain innumerable vestiges of pyramidal temples, palaces, and shrines; vaults hidden beneath the shrouding trees have yielded a rich store of gold, silver, and bronze ornaments, household utensils, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... scene you may behold from the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... never-ending eternity; a drop of water in the great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds; a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent, oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation, which is to subsist for ages and ages to come; oppose itself to that long line of posterity which, issuing from our loins, will endure during the existence of the world? Forbid it, God. Let us look to our country and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... secret tablets of our memory, which is the book of our life, every thought, word, and deed, good or evil, is written down indelibly and forever; and the invisible pen goes on writing day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, every thought, even the idlest, every fancy the most evanescent: nothing is left out of our book of life which will be our record in judgment! When that book is opened and no secrets are hid, what son or daughter of Adam is there who will not need to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks break into glowing ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... that I had taken the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... leaves the older tubercles blunt or retuse), 18 to 25 mm. long and about as wide at base, the upper surface almost plane and smooth, except that it is more or less pulverulent and usually bears a small tomentose pulvillus (often evanescent later) just behind the claw-like tip: flowers rose-color: fruit elongated- oval and reddish. (Ill. Lem. Cact. t. ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... his life." But though this too, was true, she hardly looked it. No one could have pointed out any sign of malady about her; only one would have said that there was nothing of her. And the colour on her face was so evanescent that he who watched her was inclined to think that she herself was like her colour. And she moved as though she was always on the vanishing point. "I'm very fond of eating," she had been heard to say. "I know it's vulgar; but it's true." No doubt she was fond of ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... reference to the audience, and even, in some cases, to the author. In other words, they are misled by the delusive term "create," so often applied to acting as well as to millinery. The word is inappropriate to the rapidly evanescent. "Original interpreters" is the highest phrase that can ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... life purpose to show mankind that there is nothing in this lie to cause fear, and that it can be overcome by overcoming the false thought which produces it. By overcoming that thought he showed men the evanescent nature of sickness and death. And sin he showed to be a missing of the mark through lack of understanding of what constitutes ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel's wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... bluish-vermilion hue which so often graces a thriving farmer's features when returning home after successful dealings in the town. Beside him sat a woman, many years his junior—almost, indeed, a girl. Her face too was fresh in colour, but it was of a totally different quality—soft and evanescent, like the light ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... no signs of rebels. What the morrow, what the night, might bring forth was all uncertainty. The night set in dark enough. But soon the sky cleared, the moon came out resplendent, and the stars looked down from their far eternal calm upon the evanescent shows of mortal conflict—the batteries of the rebellion yonder, and here the fleet, no more than the tiniest shells to those distant, serene, awful eyes of Deity. And Frank looked up at the stars; and the spirit within him said, "They will shine the same to-morrow night, and the next night, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... he regarded the cheerful, homely, and sun-lit Strand with extraordinary delight, a delight enhanced by the incorrigible conviction that in a few weeks he would quit it once more for distant shores. Yet the charm, evanescent as it was, laid an authentic hand upon his pulse and made it beat more quickly. Here he had bought his first dress-suit. The tailor's shop was gone and a restaurant with bulging glass windows thrust out a portly stomach into the street. Here again he had lunched in days gone by on Saturdays, and ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... instant her eyes dwelt upon mine with a peculiar warning expression, as evident as a wink, and the expression was evanescent as a breath. I caught on, and made my face agreeable and subservient. Immediately her own reassumed a harsh, proud set, her voice became even more ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... guardians of the health of humanity, as long as they know nothing of man except his external form and refuse to open their eyes and to see the eternal internal power, of which the external form is merely an evanescent image, a transient manifestation. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... of these desert whirlwinds is most curious, as their force is sufficient to raise dense columns of sand and dust several thousand feet high; these are not the evanescent creations of a changing wind, but they frequently exist for many hours, and travel forward, or more usually in circles, resembling in the distance solid pillars of sand. The Arab superstition invests these appearances with the supernatural, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... by going a long distance from home that we can fully understand how short-lived and empty everything near at hand is; by searching for the unknown, we perceive how commonplace and evanescent everything is; only by wandering over the face of the earth can we understand how small the world is, and how very much alike it ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... to pain and pleasure and the vice of the world influenceth him not. Of his own free will he becometh indifferent to worldly pursuits but he forsaketh not virtue. Observing that everything worldly is evanescent, he trieth to renounce everything and counting on more chance he deviseth means for the attainment of salvation. Thus doth he renounce the pursuits of the world, shunneth the ways of sin, becometh virtuous ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Colonies suffering most because these checks and restrictions produce in the country submitted to them peculiar mischiefs which exist neither under a despotic regime nor an unnatural Legislative Union, fruitful of evil as both those systems are. The damage is not evanescent, but is apt to bite deep into national character and to survive the abolition of the institutions which caused it. The Anglo-Irish Union was created and has ever since been justified by a systematic defamation of Irish character. If it is at length resolved to bury the slander ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... the like of which I had never seen. For not only were rugs and mats of outlandish Eastern design scattered over the floor, but there was vividly colored glass in the small, deeply set windows. Yet that which affected me most powerfully was a curious, clinging, evanescent odor, which came and went like a breeze through an open window. I liked it at first, but after a little it went to my head like a perfumed wine of Greece, such as the men of Venice sometimes send to our northern lands with their ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... has come from this text I do not know. But it helps to illustrate the force of these words, and to suggest that they mean this, among other things, that we have to answer for every deed, however evanescent, however long forgotten. Its guilt is on our heads. Its consequences have to be experienced by us. We drink as we have brewed. As we make our beds, so we lie on them. There is no escape from the law of consequences. 'If ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... be expected to find out much about the flowers of a tree, as they are frequently very evanescent, ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... are the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... improve, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavened our whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects and beyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting of our sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificant and evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the first chill wind from the unknown. But if the world has grown graver with this knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence. Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures of the present are ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent. Every atom in the human frame, as well as in that of animals, undergoes a periodical change by continual waste and renovation; the abode is changed, not its inhabitant. If animals have no future, the existence of many is most wretched; multitudes are starved, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... country upon all foreign questions. Nobody understands and nobody cares for them, and when any rare and occasional notice is taken of a particular point, or of some question on which a slight and evanescent interest is manifested, Palmerston has little difficulty in dealing with the matter, which he always meets with a consummate impudence and, it must be allowed, a skill and resolution, which invariably carry him through. Whether the policy which he has adopted upon the Eastern Question ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. "He may be affiliated to the police," was the thought that passed through his mind. "Who could tell?" But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped, famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... feelings, moods, and motives. The most revolting thought to me of his union with Miss Warren was that he would never appreciate her. He greatly admired and respected her, but his spiritual eyes were too dim to note the exquisite bloom on her character, or to detect the evanescent lights and shades of thought and feeling of which to me her mobile face gave so many hints. He would expect her to be like the July days now passing—warm, bright, cloudless, and in keeping with his ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... of the waves. Two years in this land of liquid light—a land of burning days and silent, sapphired nights, a land of palms and olives—two years of quiet, dreamy bliss, an idle and unsubstantial time! How evanescent it seemed, by the light of the days at home, when something had ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... blessedness; and then doth the mere suggestion of final reprobation amount to insufferable torture! Oh, that such heavenly imaginings, such divine intimations of a transcendent futurity, were more frequently vouchsafed to us, and were less evanescent. They are glimpses of everlasting day, shining on wanderers in "the valley of the shadow of death;" they are droppings from the overflowing and ineffable cup of mercy; they are presciences of eternity, inestimable, unutterable! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... simple buckle of gold. Now as I danced, myself absorbed so fully that I sought little analysis of impressions so pleasing, I became conscious dimly of a faint outline of some figure in color, deep in these folds of lacy lawn, an evanescent spot or blur of red, which, to my imagination, assumed the outline of a veritable heart, as though indeed the girl's heart quite shone through! If this were a trick I could not say, but for a long time I resisted it. Meantime, as chance offered in the dance—to which ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... convinced of that truth, learn, as soon as you have recovered the first shock of knowing how much wickedness there is on earth,—learn to turn to the future for happier and more suitable ties than those you could have formed with me. You are very young; in youth our first impressions are lively but evanescent,—you will wonder hereafter at having fancied you loved me. Another and a fairer image will replace mine. This is what I desire and pray for. As soon as I learn that you love another, that you are wedded to another, I will re-appear in the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the moon is obscured by masses of clouds; the trees no sooner blossom than their flowers are scattered by the wind. All beauty is evanescent. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... personal than political in its character. In the memorable contest for the successorship to President Monroe, Mr. Calhoun at one time seemed to be a formidable candidate; but his popularity being personal was evanescent, and failed to enlist the considerate and reflecting. Even his military hopes were soon eclipsed by General Jackson, whose bold achievements and successes in the Indian and British wars captivated the popular mind. Jackson had also, as a representative and Senator ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... excessively annoyed at the 'tone', as he calls it, of some of the communications addressed to him. But after carefully studying the papers, to catch what this offensive tone of the Neapolitan Minister was, I have found it so evanescent that I really cannot discern it, and suppose there must be something in the manner, or in Lord Napier's state of mind at ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... endures. This law is acknowledged by Goethe, when he makes Jove answer Venus, who bewailed that all that is beautiful must die,—that he had only bestowed beauty on the evanescent. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the field of battle give a better proof of their patriotism and a higher glory to their country by promoting fraternity and justice. A party success that is achieved by unfair methods or by practices that partake of revolution is hurtful and evanescent even from a party standpoint. We should hold our differing opinions in mutual respect, and, having submitted them to the arbitrament of the ballot, should accept an adverse judgment with the same respect that we would have demanded ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... appearance to the scene, although no sensible warmth proceeded from it, so cold was the air. Countless millions of icy particles covered every bush and tree, glittering tremulously in its rays like diamonds—psha! that hackneyed simile: diamonds of the purest water never shone like these evanescent little gems of nature. The air was biting cold, obliging us to walk briskly along to keep our blood in circulation; and the breath flew thick and white from our mouths and nostrils, like clouds of steam, and, condensing on our hair and the breasts of our coats, gave us the appearance of being ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... in San Francisco just below the point at which it becomes profitable to import Australian coal. Other railways are now preparing to reach the coal fields, but can we doubt that the competition to which the coal consumers are looking with eager anticipation will prove evanescent? Returning to the East, we find the coal mines of northern Illinois all held by a single company, which has full control of the traffic; while the mines of southern Illinois, on which the St. Louis consumers depend, are united as the Consolidated Coal Company. This latter ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... pleasant life she should lead as her Romany Rye's joovel, monshi, or somi. She was full of fun, yet there was nothing in her fanciful delineations which could offend us. They were but the foam of a crested wave, soon dissipated in the air. They were the evanescent creations of a lively, open-hearted girl—wild notes trilled by the bird of the forest. We came again into the open valley. Down a meadow gushed a small streamlet which splashed from a wooden spout on to the roadside." "The spot where we pitched our tents was near a sort of small natural terrace, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... contrasted strangely with his friend Darwin. Darwin was another monkey of the same species, caught about a week later. Darwin's face was sober and pondering, and his methods direct and effective. No side excursions into the brilliant though evanescent fields of fancy diverted him from his ends. These were, generally, to get the most and best food and the warmest corner for sleep. When he had acquired a nut, a kernel of corn, or a piece of fruit, he sat him down and examined it thoroughly and conscientiously and then, conscientiously ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... interest in human morality; and that all things would combine to persuade the upright among us that they merely are dupes, were it not for the fact that they have in themselves an approval words cannot describe, and a reward so intangible that we should in vain endeavour to portray its least evanescent delights. Is that all, some may ask, is that all we may hope in return for this mighty effort of ours, for our constant denial and pain, for our sacrifice of instincts, of pleasures, that seemed so legitimate, necessary even, and would certainly have added to our happiness had there ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... grandeur of mute endurance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us. Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, that, in the next generation after that which is ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... their declamation, and a stimulus to popular excitement. Public writers were employed to prevent a return of harmony between Great Britain and her colonies, and though addresses of thanks were voted by the assemblies to the king, this was but an evanescent show of gratitude. The same temper was found especially to prevail in the assembly of Massachusets against the Declaratory Act, as had been displayed against the Stamp Act, and the spirit of resistance soon spread to the other ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... without end were covered with blossoms—white, blue, yellow, and red—while, among the smooth, shining leaves of the orange and lemon trees, gleamed the swelling fruit. On a round tank close at hand some black swans were noiselessly tracing evanescent circles and uttering their strange lament. The song of birds mingled with the plash of fountains, and even the marble statues, for all that they were dumb, seemed to be enjoying the sweet morning air and the stir and voice ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... keeps silently a most exact Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item, Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism; Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and to all acts and words and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... months after that both my nephews stood up in Mrs. Rumbullion's parlor to take their several shares in a ceremony in which Miss Pilgrim was the central figure when it began, and Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove when it concluded. Time and elasticity of boyhood had so closed the sharp but evanescent wound in Billy's heart that he could stand the trial of being groomsman where he had wanted to be groom—more especially since he was supported through the emergency by a little sister of Lottie's who promised to be wondrously ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... them, I will liken him unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock." "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." Here, as well as in innumerable other places, are we told that true love is not a mere evanescent feeling of the heart, but an inwrought and abiding habit of the will. It is not a suffering, it is a doing. The most lively emotions, the most ecstatic feelings, if they lead not the will to action, can avail us nothing; for the tree will ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... for instance, sixth grade. Perhaps a little less attractive, but more easy of execution, is the "Menuet Italien," No. 2 of the same opus as the preceding. This is remarkably well worked out, however. The third piece in the same opus is a waltz, "Dance of the Flowers," bright, sparkling, evanescent; clever for the piano, and attractive if ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... strength and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of the flight of birds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed this window, on her first voyage to sea—a tall and slender ship, a being so radiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision—as inspiring and awful as the remoteness of a spiritual and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... study of savagery with ardour and diligence before it is too late, before the record is gone for ever. We are like an heir whose title-deeds must be scrutinised before he can take possession of the inheritance, but who finds the handwriting of the deeds so fading and evanescent that it threatens to disappear entirely before he can read the document to the end. With what keen attention, what eager haste, would he not scan the fast-vanishing characters? With the like attention and the like haste civilised ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Ashton from the girl her family and friends ordinarily knew. The evanescent dimple had disappeared entirely and also the indolent expression in her golden brown eyes. She was frowning and her lips were ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events, is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness—of a certain importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient the longer ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... judgment which unsteady veers And eye which gleams with inspiration— All this was novel to Eugene. The cold reply with gloomy mien He oft upon his lips would curb, Thinking: 'tis foolish to disturb This evanescent boyish bliss. Time without me will lessons give, So meantime let him joyous live And deem the world perfection is! Forgive the fever youth inspires, And youthful ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... commas, who corrupted words and sentences. Whatever could be done by adjusting points is therefore silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... of Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and evanescent as shadows. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... acted as prisms, and reflected every hue of the rainbow, and as they approached the summit the feathery frost-work grew more and more exquisitely delicate and beautiful, and yet it was proving to be as evanescent as a dream, for in all sunny place it was already vanishing. They had scarcely passed beyond the second summit when Burt uttered an exclamation of regretful disgust. "By all that's unlucky," he cried, "if there isn't an eagle sitting on yonder ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Ernest's mind, and he thought, with a little shudder, of the physical travail of the actual writing. He felt that the transcript from brain to paper would demand all his powers. For, of late, his thoughts seemed strangely evanescent; they seemed to run away from him whenever he attempted ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... neutral," said the young lady. "Besides, it really amounts to nothing. Steamer friendships are the most evanescent things on earth." ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... his lodging and packing up his clothes, he did not think how he should get to Edinburgh—it was there that she lived. He thought of her even to the exclusion of the simplest means of reaching her, and was content to walk about the streets in happy mood, waiting for glimpses of some evanescent phantom at the wood's edge wearing a star on her forehead, or catching sight in the wood's depths of a glistening shoulder and feet flying towards the reeds. Full of happy aspiration he wandered seeking the country through the many straggling villages ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... not a trace. A report has come down to us, enshrined in Newman's prose, that Napoleon once discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of Alexander and Caesar. One hopes that the words were uttered; but they conflict with Napoleon's undoubted statements. Sometimes he spoke in utter uncertainty; at others, as one who wished to believe ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... is a state of genuine nature throughout. The feelings of children are under no kind of restraint, but pure as the fire, free as the winds, honest and open as the face of heaven. Their joys incessantly flow in the thickest succession, and their griefs only seem fleeting and evanescent. To the calls of nature they are only attentive. They know no voice but hers. Their obedience to all her commands is prompt and implicit. They never anticipate her bounties, nor relinquish her pleasures. This situation renders them independent of artifice. Influenced ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... vagueness of this paragraph, big with dim possibilities, conveys the very impression to which all observations and experiences in Russia finally reduce themselves. It is the enduring residue which remains when all evanescent impressions have lapsed into the background. It expresses, too, the typical mental attitude of every Russian, be he ever so Frenchified and denationalized. The word "Virgin Soil" was a favorite phrase ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that for me he is more especially the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... gems is as much more important than that of flowers as the imperishable gem is itself more enduring than the withering, the evanescent blossom. A gentleman may not with safety present to a lady a gem of whose accompanying sentiment he is ignorant. But with the language of gems understood between them, how could a sentiment be more ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent follies. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the cone were a red-hot furnace. Sometimes the vapors were shadowy as gray phantoms, sometimes glowing red with the reflection of the fire within, and as they whirled round the dim ravine loud explosions broke the silence. The view was as fleeting and evanescent as a landscape in a dream; one minute there would be nothing but a bank of mist and deadly stillness, the next a vision of fire and sounds that ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Seistan give very large quantities of milk. They seem to be of the humped variety, but with the hump evanescent. Dairy produce is important in Afghan diet, especially the pressed and dried curd called krut (an article and name perhaps ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... at "school" that he had this experience, but at Dartmouth College. For mathematics, too, he had not the slightest taste. He humorously wrote to a fellow-student, soon after leaving college, that "all that he knew about conterminous arches or evanescent subtenses might be collected on the pupil of a gnat's eye without making him wink." At college, in fact, he was simply an omnivorous reader, studying only so much as to pass muster in the recitation-room. Every indication we possess of his college life, as well as his own repeated ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... are among the most constant manifestations. An evanescent macular rash, not unlike that of measles—roseola—is the first to appear, usually in from six to eight weeks from the date of infection; it is widely diffused over the trunk, and the original ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... old dark stables I observed the soil to be covered with a copious evanescent efflorescence of nitrate of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... asked, "that the one great drawback throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is the lack of permanent evidence? It has always been evanescent, perishable. It always rests solely upon the word of witnesses. But if I could show you a film print, then you could not doubt the ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... before the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings they seemed to rest on the evanescent spray. Their images—long-legged little figures with gray backs and snowy bosoms—were seen as distinctly as the realities in the mirror of the glistening strand. As I advanced they flew a score or two of yards, and, again alighting, recommenced their dalliance ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... passage across these belts; their first experience being a calm that lasted five days on end without a break, save for the occasional cat's-paw that came stealing from time to time over the glassy surface of the ocean, tinging it here and there with transient patches of delicate evanescent blue. And as these cat's-paws were all that they could rely upon to help them across the calm belt, it was necessary to maintain a constant watch for them, and to trim round the yards in such a manner as to make the most of them during their brief existence. This constant ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... headings; i.e. anterior, etc.: in Ephemerides, certain longitudinal veins between the 8th (anal) and 9th (1st maxillary) and not branches of either: in Diptera, the anterior intercalary (Loew) the discoidal, and the posterior intercalary the cubitus 1 of Comstock: applied to an evanescent sclerite in the embryo between antenna and mandible; ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... afterwards worked out. Nature is the great suggester. It is the artist's business to catch the suggestion and make it his own. For nature seldom works out her own suggestions. The effect as nature gives it is either not complete, or is so evanescent as to be uncopyable. But the habit of constant receptivity on the part of the artist makes nature an infinite ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... while most attractive at the time, is evanescent, but some incidents are interesting in memory. At the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee I was present where a representative of Canada was called upon for a speech. With the exception of the Canadian and myself ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Sara's Circassian orbs floated in pleasure; and for Mary herself, her breast heaved, her cheeks glowed, her hands trembled, a quick sigh fluttered in her bosom; and whilst she remained in his presence, she believed that happiness had lost its usual evanescent property, and become tangible, to hold and press ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... form, limbs, and feet, such as few possessed, and we who wore it also knew that it was not artistic. Though the martyrdom proved too much for us who had so many other measures to press on the public conscience, yet no experiment is lost, however evanescent, that rouses thought to the injurious consequences of the present style of dress, sacrificing to its absurdities so many of the most ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The artistic and aesthetic questions ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has brought a variety of this insect from New Holland, which only differs from the European specimen figured by Hubner, in the row of white points round the edge of the upper side of the lower wings being evanescent. This species is one of those which have a great range of distribution, being found in Naples, Egypt, Syria, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... himself after the manner of the carter. It was only when the dusty baker came along and repeated this procedure, preserving the same silence, that Carmichael's curiosity was enlivened. This curiosity, however, was only of the evanescent order. Undoubtedly they were socialists and this was a little conclave, and the peculiar manner of their meeting, the silence and mystery, were purely fictional. Socialism at that time revolved round the blowing up of kings, of demolishing established order. Neither kings were blown up nor order ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision, and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in an ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... introduce, at the same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... many of these precocious classics are there who do not endure, and who are so only for a while! We turn round one morning and are surprised not to find them standing behind us. Madame de Sevigne would wittily say they possessed but an evanescent colour. With regard to classics, the least expected prove the best and greatest: seek them rather in the vigorous genius born immortal and flourishing for ever. Apparently the least classical of the four ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think. And now the first endeavor to remember. And now a partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained its dominion, that, in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... French statesmen and churchmen, was rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to herself, she opened her boxes, put her things away in drawers and wardrobe, arranged her books within easy reach of the low chair Hesper had sent for from the drawing-room for her, and sat down to read a little, brood a little, and build a few castles in the air, more lovely than evanescent: no other house is so like its builder as this sort ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... but he is not, like many persons who are proud of that title, un indifferent in matters of human fortune. His earlier poems, of course, are much concerned with the matter of most early poems—with Lydia and Cynthia and their light loves. The verses of his second period often deal with the most evanescent subjects, and they now retain but a slight petulance and sparkle, as of champagne that has been too long drawn. In a prefatory plea for M. De Banville's poetry one may add that he "has loved our people," ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... evidence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recognizes at one time, not at another,—discerns when it is calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, or the sudden ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... change in her, but was too gross in his nature, too blind in his passion, and too vain in his imagined power, to comprehend it. She was a woman, and had her whims, he thought. Whims were evanescent, and this particular whim would pass away. He was vexed by seeing the boy so constantly with her. He met them walking together in the street, or straying in the park, hand in hand, or caught the lad looking at him from her window. He could not doubt that all this intimacy was approved by Mr. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... looked at her in speechless wonder. The eyes so wavering and downcast were now fixed, and steady, and burning with a passionate clear light; there was a fiery flush on her cheek, not brief and evanescent; her ripe red mouth was half open, shewing the snow white teeth biting the lower lip in the excitement of her feelings. Her whole form seemed to be dilated and more ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... servants of the King of Tyre and came to Solomon's court. And amidst these black-haired children of grey-headed Time stood the old house of Oneleigh. I know not how many centuries had lashed against it their evanescent foam of years; but it was still unshattered, and all about it were the things of long ago, as cling strange growths to some sea-defying rock. Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, too, were tapestries of many colours, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... butcher approached the same table and seated himself after the manner of the carter. It was only when the dusty baker came along and repeated this procedure, preserving the same silence, that Carmichael's curiosity was enlivened. This curiosity, however, was only of the evanescent order. Undoubtedly they were socialists and this was a little conclave, and the peculiar manner of their meeting, the silence and mystery, were purely fictional. Socialism at that time revolved round the blowing up of kings, of demolishing established order. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... they inhere are, inconceivable and contradictory. They must therefore be the property of the Divine mind; states of the everlasting intellect; ideas of the Lord and Ruler of all things, and which come before us as realities,—so forcibly do they contrast themselves with the evanescent and irregular ideas of our feeble understandings. We must, however, beware, above all things, of regarding these Divine ideas as mere ideas. An idea, as usually understood, is that from which all reality has been abstracted; but the perception of matter is a Divine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... for in Science every onward step is at least certain gain, but in Art every step is groping, and success is only another form of effort. Art, in so far as it is more divine, is more unattainable, more evanescent, more unsubstantial. It needs as much patience as Science, and the passionate devotion of an entire life is as nothing in comparison with the magnitude of the work. Self-sacrifice, self-distrust, infinite patience, infinite disappointment—such is ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... much instruction or delight, and why most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are transmitted[107] by tradition. We know how few can pourtray a living acquaintance, except by his most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser features of his mind; and it may be easily imagined how much ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... convey the same idea, nothing would be more natural than to use the graphic form of delineation which is also above described. It was but one more and an easy step to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures that still in pigments or carvings preserve their skeleton outline, and in their ideography approach, as has been shown above, the rudiments of the phonetic alphabets that have been constructed by other peoples. A transition stage between gestures and pictographs, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... success; this is the pride of life." But there is really nothing glorious about possession. It may be most inglorious and mean,—as {8} mean when the possession is brains or power as when it is bonds or wheat. Indeed, there is rarely much that is glorious or great about so slight or evanescent a thing as a human life. The glory of it lies in its being able to say, "The glory that thou hast given me I give to them." The worth of life is in its transmissive capacity. In the wonderful system of the telephone with its miracle of intercommunication there is, as you ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... fill up the interstices of the more important story, so our pages will be interspersed with trifles that have no other object than the moment's approbation—an end which will never be sought for at the expense of others, beyond the evanescent smile of a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... tell me that you are pleased, when your friends inform you of your faults. I am ignorant what they are; but I am sure they must be such evanescent trifles, compared with your personal and mental accomplishments, that I would despise the ungenerous narrow soul, who would notice any shadow of imperfections you may seem to have, any other way than in the most delicate ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... precautions. Welbeck had placed the book in his collection, purposing some time to peruse it; but, deterred by anxieties which the perusal would have dissipated, he rushed to desperation and suicide, from which some evanescent contingency, by unfolding this treasure to his view, would ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... passion and charm of the poem cast its spell over them both as they followed the fate of the unhappy lovers through the heart-ache of their evanescent dream. ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... taste for tapestry and embroidery is thus past; the long labours of the loom have ceased. Cloth-work, crape-work, chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. A taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the glowing and faithful ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... which appears in Parliament and in the country upon all foreign questions. Nobody understands and nobody cares for them, and when any rare and occasional notice is taken of a particular point, or of some question on which a slight and evanescent interest is manifested, Palmerston has little difficulty in dealing with the matter, which he always meets with a consummate impudence and, it must be allowed, a skill and resolution, which invariably carry him through. Whether the policy ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us. Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... alterations brought on by the facility of communicating knowledge; the systematical manner in which men pursue their interests, and other changes: give reason to hope that, in the present situation of things, those possessions may be rendered permanent, that have hitherto been found to be so evanescent ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... transcendent excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable, faults,—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them; he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity and baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever, like Rembrandt, knew how to improve an ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... compared to immeasurable, never-beginning, and never-ending eternity; a drop of water in the great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds; a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent, oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation, which is to subsist for ages and ages to come; oppose itself to that long line of posterity which, issuing from our loins, will endure during the existence of the world? Forbid it, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... cirrus above and beneath cumulus—various kinds of cirrus clouds, and that peculiar prismatic haze which is a common sign of the passage of a vortex. The appearance depicted above is a very common, although a very evanescent appearance. When the sky appears of a clear blue through the cirri, there will be generally fresh gales without any great electrical derangement; but if the clear spaces are hazy, gradually thickening towards the nucleus, a storm may be expected. Any one who wishes to understand the ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... pulled various journalistic wires, resulting in the suppression, in the newspapers, of the hopeless facts of his case. He did not intend, he decided, to have his boy think of him as tied to an invalid's couch. Then, knowing something of human nature, and of the evanescent character of childish fancies, he ordered shipped to Russia a variety of American mechanical toys, calculated to swell the proud bosom of the small boy who received them. This shameless bid for continued favor met with immediate success. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... enforced association with this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders, but this did not diminish Mary's joy over her restored first-born. Even its utter absence of features was no defect in a family where features were as evanescent as in hers, and the most ordinary student of evolution could see that the "Amplach" ninepins were in legitimate succession to the globular-headed "Misery." For a time I think that Mary even preferred her to the others. Howbeit it was a pretty sight to see her on a summer afternoon sitting ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... confirmed that he had ever known in his life." But though this too, was true, she hardly looked it. No one could have pointed out any sign of malady about her; only one would have said that there was nothing of her. And the colour on her face was so evanescent that he who watched her was inclined to think that she herself was like her colour. And she moved as though she was always on the vanishing point. "I'm very fond of eating," she had been heard to say. "I know it's vulgar; but it's true." No doubt she was fond of eating, but so is a sparrow. ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... children are under no kind of restraint, but pure as the fire, free as the winds, honest and open as the face of heaven. Their joys incessantly flow in the thickest succession, and their griefs only seem fleeting and evanescent. To the calls of nature they are only attentive. They know no voice but hers. Their obedience to all her commands is prompt and implicit. They never anticipate her bounties, nor relinquish her pleasures. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... on to say—the following circumstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... image hovering in the air? But this would have been incompatible with the law of gravitation and with the earthly materials of which our bodies are framed. Frequently, what is praised in art as ideal is really nothing more. But this would give us nothing more than airy evanescent shadows incapable of making any durable impression on the mind. The Greeks, however, in their artistic creations, succeeded most perfectly, in combining the ideal with the real, or, to drop school terms, an elevation more ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... spoke, there broke out behind the camp a sudden radiance which leaped from the horizon far up the sky. It had in it the scintillation of the diamond, for the flickering brilliance changed from pure white light to evanescent blue and rose. Spreading in a vast, irregular arc, it hung like a curtain, wavering to and fro and casting off luminous spears that stabbed the dark. For a time it blazed in transcendental splendor, then faded and receded, dying out with unearthly glimmering ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete—of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern lights, than in the better ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... There was a continual swell of guests dashing down and dashing away, like the ocean; brilliant as its foam, numerous as its waves. But there was one permanent inhabitant of this princely mansion far more interesting to our hero than the evanescent crowds who rose like bubbles, glittered, broke, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty—beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be largely incommunicable. "It cannot be imparted to another," says my father. The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent, inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often be found vapid. This ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... traits of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing instance of this occurred in Paris, where a Syndicalist organ[36] ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... kindly dispositions, and was much cherished for his intelligent and interesting conversation. In person he was strong built, and his complexion was fair and ruddy. He was not undesirous of reputation both as a poet and prose-writer, and has recorded his regret that he had devoted so much time to evanescent periodical literature. His poetry is replete with patriotic sentiment, and his strain is forcible and occasionally brilliant. His songs indicate a fine fancy and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... death? Their tears over graves dry sooner than the dews. It is melancholy to compare the depth, the endurance, the far-sighted, anxious, prayerful love of a parent, with the inconsiderate, frail, and evanescent affection of the infant, whose eyes the hues of the butterfly yet dazzle with delight. It was the night of their flight, and in the open air, when Philip (his arms round Sidney's waist) told his brother-orphan ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... directly behind me and gave all the light there was in the room, and yet the impression was in no respect that of a picture. Not for a moment did this interpretation occur to me, strongly as did the evanescent character of the head militate against the idea of reality. The fading was most rapid at the occiput, and may be said to have begun there, extending to the right and upward. There was no background or accessory of any kind, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... delicate in art - More delicate than Summer or than fall (Even as rugged man is more refined In vital things than woman). Winter's touch On Nature seemed most beautiful of all - That evanescent beauty of the frost On window panes; of clean, fresh, fallen snow; Of white, white sunlight on the ice-draped trees. Winter, though rude, is delicate ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the centre, was Russian—was Cossack—strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal. You could not think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and vivid, as full of energy as a healthy baby that kicks its dresses ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... alas! more fleeting have I seen Than wither'd leaves driv'n by the autumn gust:— Yea, evanescent as the whirling dust Is man's brief passage o'er this ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... and that they are getting in good measure in the non- fiction and part-fiction sections of the magazines. But they also seek, as all men seek, some literature. If, instead of imposing the "formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mechanism—and a good one—adapted for speedy and evanescent effects), if, instead of imposing the "formula" upon all the subjects they propose to have turned into fiction, the editors of these magazines should also experiment, should release some subjects from the tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its cult has kept out, the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. "He may be affiliated to the police," was the thought that passed through his mind. "Who could tell?" But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped, famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... kneeling of the West, still represented by the curtsy, we pass Eastward, and note the attitude of the Mahometan worshipper, who not only kneels but bows his head to the ground, we may infer that the curtsy also is an evanescent form of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... a single distinct glimpse of her, definite, precise, and this glimpse was enough. Hilma had changed. The change was subtle, evanescent, hard to define, but not the less unmistakable. The excitement, the enchanting delight, the delicious disturbance of "the first ball," had produced its result. Perhaps there had only been this lacking. It was hard to say, but for that brief instant ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... true place of miracles is to attract attention, to prepare to listen to the word. They are only introductory. A faith may be founded on them, but, on the other hand, the impressions which they produce may be evanescent. How subordinate then, their place at the most! And the one thing which avails is a living contact of heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... is as much more important than that of flowers as the imperishable gem is itself more enduring than the withering, the evanescent blossom. A gentleman may not with safety present to a lady a gem of whose accompanying sentiment he is ignorant. But with the language of gems understood between them, how could a sentiment be more exquisitely or more acceptably expressed than by ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... inquiries into Greek and mediaeval art, I was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that some, remaining to us ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the study of eloquence; and the perusal of Cicero's "Hortensius" (which unfortunately has been lost in the vicissitudes of time) stirred his soul to higher flights and begot a noble enthusiasm for the imperishable beauty of wisdom, made him impatient of the evanescent hopes of men, and carried him onward to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the Pacific life is of to-day; the past is dead, and the future when it comes will pass as to-day is passing. Life is a dream, an evanescent thing, all but meaningless, and real only as is the murmur of the surf when the sea-breeze comes in the morning, and man awakens from the oblivion ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... he saw him, and pulled something from his pocket. It was a watch, a repeater, in a gold filigree case of exquisite workmanship, with raised figures depicting the loves of an Arcadian shepherd and shepherdess; and, as it lay on the white hand of its owner, it bore an evanescent fragrance that seemed to recall scenes as beautiful and as completely past as the ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... be set over against the other in sterile abhorrence; nor yet that love of country and of kindred is incompatible with that toward the Supreme of thought; but it is that each of these lower, shallower, evanescent forms of emotion is and must be lost in, subordinated to, that highest form to which these words have reference. Reconciliation, not ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was already to be seen with a bottle of Pommery in each hand, and was only prevented from instantly uncorking them by the representations of his mistress and an elaborate exposition of the peculiar and evanescent virtues of champagne. Ali was humming a mysterious song about a lovesick camel-man, with which he intended to make glad the hearts of the assembly when the halting time was over. And the dining-table ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... wishes for solid happiness must rest on a broader base than that afforded by momentary enjoyment, tempting and blooming as the foliage of summer, but evanescent ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... founded on Helmholtz's splendid hydrodynamical theorems, seeks for the properties of molecules in the ring vortices of a uniform, frictionless, incompressible fluid. Such whirling rings may be seen when an experienced smoker sends out a dexterous puff of smoke into the still air, but a more evanescent phenomenon it is difficult to conceive. This evanescence is owing to the viscosity of the air; but Helmholtz has shewn that in a perfect fluid such a whirling ring, if once generated, would go on ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... and directed the hunt, I decided that he was cleverer than Rad had given him credit for. I went down stairs with my eyes and ears wide open prepared for further revelations. The problems of my profession had never led me into any consideration of the supernatural, and the rather evanescent business of hunting down a ha'nt came as a welcome contrast to the very material details of my recent forgery case. I had found what ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... objects in which we had previously failed to recognise the beautiful. To perform that duty effectually is perhaps the highest of artistic merits; and though we may complain of Hawthorne's colouring as too evanescent, its charm grows upon us ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of a hybrid character; partly of Anglo-Saxo, and partly of British origin. If so, the first syllable is obvious enough, "half" being generally pronounced as if the liquid were considered an evanescent quantity, "ha'f, heif, hav'," &c., and "iwrch" is the British word for a roe-buck. Dropping the guttural termination, therefore, and writing "ior" instead of "iwrch," we have the significant designation of the ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... but cipher, naught, or zero," Bobby observed suddenly, as he came strolling into the room at Sally's side. "You aren't a cipher, Miss Gannion. They're either evanescent or tubby, according to whether you look at their moral or their physical proportions. You don't fit either measurement. Therefore you aren't a cipher. Therefore you count. How do, Arlt? No; don't get up from the piano. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... passionate love may not be necessary in marriage, but, at least, you will admit that there should be no repugnance. Our position will not be without its dangers; in a country life, such as ours will be, ought we not to bear in mind the evanescent nature of passion? Is it not simple prudence to make provision beforehand against the calamities incident to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... was, could not forget the sight of ninety thousand dollars' worth of gold bullion he had once seen piled up at North Bloomfield, and so was persuaded to gamble with his earnings. He had lost as much as Mack. How rosy is the rainbow, and how evanescent the pot of gold at the end of it! California had swallowed up more wealth than its gold could ever repay, as Keeler well knew. It was only occasionally that some lucky devil, or some prudent, saving man like Robert Palmer, after thirty years ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... gravity; she had met it before in the course of her experiments. One of the grievances harboured by Miss Millicent Chyne against the opposite sex was that they could not settle down into a harmless, honest flirtation. Of course, this could be nothing but a flirtation of the lightest and most evanescent description. She was engaged to Jack Meredith—poor Jack, who was working for her, ever so hard, somewhere near the Equator—and if Guy Oscard did not know this he had only himself to blame. There were plenty of people ready to tell him. He had only ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with my father's habits, as described by himself. When a difficulty or an objection occurred to him, he thought it of paramount importance to make a note of it instantly because he found hostile facts to be especially evanescent. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... into the glass clearly, transparently, heavily, but still and cold as death. There was no sparkle, no cheap ebullition, no evanescent bubble. Yet it was so clear, that, but for a faint amber-tinting, the glass seemed empty. There was no aroma, no ethereal diffusion from its equable surface. Perhaps it was fancy, perhaps it was from nervous excitement; ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... so positive, were superficial and evanescent,—audible, visible, and, as it were, physical. There was always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,—that subtile, mysterious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... statesmen, kings, and warriors. The young ladies certainly bore some resemblance to the type of American girl which one never fails to meet in travelling. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, pretty with the delicate evanescent beauty of too many of our girls, and all gifted with the loud voices, shrill laughter, and free-and-easy manners which so astonish decorous English matrons and maids. Ethel was evidently impressed with their style, as they had a man and maid at their beck and call, and every sign ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... scenery which, like that of Gustave Dore's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the other species "by its inferior size, total absence of crest on its head, neck, and shoulders, by its longer tail, by the white collar of the neck being evanescent; and lastly by the inferior size and smaller quantity of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... transitory as the wind, as evanescent as the rainbow, and as tender as spring violets, is hard to portray with pen, and for that reason the summer-day nature of Alice Page is but faintly outlined. When on the morning of her departure from Boston she stood beside the train exchanging the usual good-by ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... words and sentences. Whatever could be done by adjusting points is therefore silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... untroubled assurance. While he was speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man's back—a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick—had moved through the space of seven minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is, every detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a murmur ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ran up swiftly before the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings they seemed to rest on the evanescent spray. Their images—long-legged little figures with gray backs and snowy bosoms—were seen as distinctly as the realities in the mirror of the glistening strand. As I advanced they flew a score or two ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a deified rainbow, which was given this group of plants by the ancients, shows a fine appreciation of their superb coloring, their ethereal texture, and the evanescent beauty of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... no ice-machine, and no electric light, and no water supply but the cistern of the heavens, and but one public room, and scarce a bedroom apiece? But, of course, it is well known that I have made enormous sums by my evanescent literature, and you will smile at my false humility. The point, however, is much on our minds just now. We are expecting an invasion of Kiplings; very glad we shall be to see them; but two of the party are ladies, and I tell you we had to hold a council of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps, visions of enchanting lands, and in their dreams feasted at those wonderful tables which hungry children see only in sleep, to the poor woman sitting at the failing fire there came no surcease of sorrow, and no vision threw even an evanescent brightness over the hard, cold facts of her surroundings. And the reality of her condition was dire enough, God knows. Alone in the wilderness, miles from any human habitation, the trails covered deep with snow, her provisions exhausted, ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... but of a quite different character to any we had seen before. They darted about like a comet, coming from the side by the harmonium, or near the fireplace. They were evanescent, and apparently of diffuse luminosity, within which was a nucleus of light, not, however, visible to me. We had some ten or twelve of these, some more brilliant than others, some visible both in the looking-glass and in the glass of the book-case, and they were showing ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... I asked, "that the one great drawback throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is the lack of permanent evidence? It has always been evanescent, perishable. It always rests solely upon the word of witnesses. But if I could show you a film print, then you could not doubt the existence ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... the dead is not a mere figure of speech. Heaven lies about us not only in our infancy, but all our lives. We blind ourselves with dust, and in our blindness lay hold feverishly of the outside of life, mistaking the fugitive and evanescent for the truly permanent. If we only used our capacities we would take a more enlightened view of death. We would see it to be the entrance into a more radiant and a more abundant life not only for the friend that goes first, but ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... enervate, enfilade, enigmatic, ennui, enunciate, environ, epicure, epigram, episode, epistolary, epitome, equestrian, equilibrium, equinoctial, equity, equivocate, eradicate, erosion, erotic, erudition, eruptive, eschew, esoteric, espousal, estrange, ethereal, eulogistic, euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, explicit, expunge, extant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... indeed, for two young people like Mrs. Adams and myself, who have just begun to keep house, to inherit a famine, and such a robust famine, too. It is true that I should not have set my heart upon such a transitory and evanescent terrestrial object like a pumpkin pie so near to T. Tooterson, imported pie soloist, doughnut mastro and feminine virtuoso, but I did, and so I returned from ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
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