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More "Illusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which she most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. "When people come chez moi, it is not to cut a figure in the world; I have never had that illusion," I remember hearing her say; "and when you pay seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look down upon the others. But there are people who, the less they pay, the more they take themselves au serieux. My most difficult boarders ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... us bitterly for our slack, sentimental pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive in this correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian utterance, that "science without conscience is the ruin of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... seem warmer and cosier to live in. But keep this illusion! There are more draughts in such apartments than in a palace, and a city of this kind is more ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... seemed ever to Mr. Chase and his youthful contemporaries, that they had come upon times when, as Sir Thomas Browne thought two hundred years ago, "it is too late to be ambitious," and "the great mutations of the world are acted," the illusion was soon dispelled. It has been sadly said of Greece in the age of Plutarch, that "all her grand but turbulent activities, all her noble agitations spent, she was only haunted by the spectres of her ancient renown." ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... that a closer relation will, ere long, exist between them. I called upon the Ellis's yesterday. Their reception was far from cordial. I tried to be self-possessed, and as chatty as usual; but it was uphill work, you may depend on it. Once I ventured an illusion to the party at Willets; but it was received with an embarrassed silence. I left early and without the usual invitation to repeat my visits. To-day I met Mr. Ellis in the street, and received from him the cut direct! So, you see, affairs are not progressing very favourably; and the worst is, I am ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... several changes they were, in May, 1848, established in the home in which they remained during Mrs. Browning's life. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Palazzo Guidi. Of the practical side of this early Florentine life, Mrs. Browning wrote, "My dear brothers have the illusion that nobody should marry on less than two thousand a year. Good heavens! how preposterous it does seem to me! We scarcely spend three hundred, and I have every luxury I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up, at need; and Robert wouldn't sleep, I think, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... lovely she seemed, so much in demand and so quietly equal to all demands. Jim flattered his vanity for a while with the assurance that she was trying to impress as well as evade him, but could not long preserve the illusion; there was no ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... its wilderness of vegetable columns. And there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree upon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflies had lighted—apparently. In fact these brilliant red butterflies were flowers, but the illusion was good. Afterward in South Africa, I saw another splendid effect made by red flowers. This flower was probably called the torch-plant—should have been so named, anyway. It had a slender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue of flame, an intensely red flower ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gambols of wizards and witches. Many a poor iniquitous old woman, from some mysterious hints of her power to tell fortunes, or to gratify the revengeful feelings of her neighbours, was put to a cruel death. More enlightened times have dissipated this illusion, and driven these imaginary imps ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... contrast between the precision of the means of research and the huge variations in the results, which were shown by mathematical law to be absurd, experimental psychology carried on extensive studies, under the illusion that it ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance. "The final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will. It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of life. Veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment that we ourselves have made. Two facts thus carefully ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... heat of the day we rested in this pleasant grove, and with sleep and conversation passed the hours away, while the sentries pacing to and fro alone disturbed the illusion that this was some picnic party in a more propitious land. Then, as the shadows lengthened, we started upon ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... is fitted to give one an idea of the descent to the shades below, and what added to the illusion was that when we arrived at the bottom of the descent and just at the entrance of the cave where the Sybil held her oracles, we discovered four fierce looking fellows with lighted torches in their hands standing at the entrance. My friend ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... to take in an idea or two of the green, woody country through which I was passing; then closed them again; transported myself back to my native hills; thought I led a choir of those I loved best through their shades; and was happy in the arms of illusion. The sun set before I recovered my senses enough to discover plainly the variegated slopes near Canterbury, waving with slender birch-trees, and gilt with a profusion of broom. I thought myself ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... and over, smashing itself into huge blocks which were forced into a rampart fifty feet high, when the enormous weight broke the ice platform on which it was piled, and the whole moved majestically off towards the Volga. Then one experienced the peculiar illusion of gliding along the river; it was necessary to plant one's feet far apart to prevent a fall. The Khama near Perm is over a mile wide, and this method of Nature to herald spring to these snow- and ice-bound regions lacks nothing so far as grandeur is concerned. During ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... have been through the artifice of the devil). Langius, Epist. med. lib. 1. Epist. 38. hath many relations to this effect, and so hath Christophorus a Vega: Wierus, Skenkius, Scribanius, all agree that they are done by the subtlety and illusion of the devil. If you shall ask a reason of this, 'tis to exercise our patience; for as [1250]Tertullian holds, Virtus non est virtus, nisi comparem habet aliquem, in quo superando vim suam ostendat 'tis to try us and our faith, 'tis for our ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... which we had taken for land disappeared suddenly, and we were convinced to our amazement that it had been only a land of fog! I have passed all my life at sea," continues Byron, "since I was twenty-seven, but I never could have conceived so complete and sustained an illusion. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... definite and elusively familiar. The swinging of lanterns helped to bring it back: I was remembering lumber-camps in the Rocky Mountains. The box-stove in the shack in which I slept that night and the roughly timbered walls served to heighten the illusion that I was in America. Next morning the illusion was completed. Here were men with mackinaws and green elk boots; here were cook-houses in which the only difference was that a soldier did the cooking ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... the condition of the perfection of the eternal order." He dismisses definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the mystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an illusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere in Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... been a book like 'A Man's World.' ... A novelist of skill and power.... His greatest gift is his power of creating the illusion of reality.... Vividness and conviction unite in the wonderful portrait of Nina.... There never has been such a character in American fiction before.... Nina will be one of the famous twentieth ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... string of fish they palled upon me and I began immediately to feel an uneasy sense of disappointment, of disillusion, knowing I had miserably failed. The bombastic brag to my mother and her praise were a kind of mockery and falsehood. Illusion followed illusion, defeat followed defeat, yet the morrow was ever to be their healer and compensation. How often have I been soothed by the waveless waters of the Charles river, its whispering ripples scarcely reaching the shores and making no impression ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... New East (Shin Toyo),[7] with for motto a sentence of my own which expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient, The real barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality and the illusion that the distrust is on one ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... came into the schoolroom, I hoped she would be mild and inoffensive, at least; but a few days, if not a few hours, sufficed to destroy the illusion: I found her a mischievous, intractable little creature, given up to falsehood and deception, young as she was, and alarmingly fond of exercising her two favourite weapons of offence and defence: that of spitting in the faces of those who incurred ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... success, but as you know I am a very stupid fellow, never pleased with a moderate triumph, nor with a large one, when there is a possible prospect of greater. I am compelled to believe that the greater I had in mind in this case was an illusion: my gentle diplomacy avails nothing against a small miser—for we have misers even in these States, though you will not believe it. I abandon him to his riches! From the success of my venture I reserved four thousand dollars to keep by me and for my expenses, and it is humiliating to relate ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... assured me he had observed five Arab horsemen within a mile of our column: we rode forward, and soon the five shadowy horsemen gave place to five black crows hopping about by the edge of the Suwaicha marsh. But the most curious illusion I have seen in this way was looking towards the Pusht-i-Kuh hills across the marsh from San-i-yat. The foothills, some thirty miles distant, had sometimes the appearance of ending in abrupt white cliffs such as one sees at Dover. The cause of this ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... he asks in all humility—is the play not enough?—or must he lift the back-drop and bring into view the net-work of pulleys and lines, the tanks of moonlight gas and fake properties of papier-mache that produce the illusion? As a compromise would it not be the better way after this for him to play the Harlequin, popping in and out at the unexpected moment, helping the plot here and there by a gesture, a whack, or a pirouette; hobnobbing with Peter or Miss ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... "L'illusion fconde habite dans mon sein: D'une prison sur moi les murs psent en vain, J'ai les ailes de l'esprance. Echappe aux rseaux de l'oiseleur cruel, Plus vive, plus heureuse, aux campagnes du ciel Philomle chante ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... after a storm; of the dashing cataract, descending in mist from stupendous heights; of the nightingale, singing in her hidden nest; of harmless sheet-lightning, suddenly revealing hills, domes, and castles in the clouds, then as suddenly dispelling the illusion. As he looked more closely, he found that, as with linked hands they glided round, their gossamer wings moving through the air waked up a melody like that of the Eolian harp; while a few, standing apart, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... and the presence of a prowler on the premises caused his heart to gallop wildly. He seized the pistol, crept to the window and peered cautiously out. Between the crash of the breakers he listened intently and had decided that the steps had been the illusion of a dream when a sound in the room below renewed his alarm. He gained the door in two jumps. He could hear the opening and closing of drawers and see the flash of an electric lamp as the thief moved swiftly about, apparently taking it for granted that he had the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... room Brantome began beating out fragments of Marco Polo. The familiar sounds took on a startling majesty in the atmosphere heavily charged with the player's exultation. One had an illusion that this music was irradiating from the house all over the earth. Then, in the silence, the rustle of the rain seemed a long murmur ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... was welcome to Fisher. The more he reflected upon the interview on the Mercuriusberg, the more strongly he felt it to be his intellectual duty to persuade himself that the whole affair was an illusion, not a reality. He would have been glad, even at the sacrifice of his confidence in his own astuteness, to believe that the Swiss doctor had been amusing himself at the expense of his credulity. But the remembrance of the scene in the Baron's bedroom ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... mythological subjects, there is little to condemn. The motives have been bravely and successfully wrought out; the work is nobly, frankly done. The superiority of methods which render the texture and quality of objects becomes apparent. There is no attempt at illusion; yet the representation of substances and spaces is faultless,—as, for instance, the sky of the "Venus leading forth the Trojans." Nor have we seen that chaste, pearly lustre of the most beautiful human skin so well rendered as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works that something of it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them. But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes,—Apollo is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. He ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... This uplifting illusion made him inquisitorial and peremptory. And as his temperament was choleric there were fellows who were actually afraid of him. He was redoubtable, not in virtue of his office, but because of his unwarrantable assumptions. I had never had anything to ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... and went towards the door. He even moved differently, like a man who has lost illusion and doubts whether it is worth while to move ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... severity. The library being our usual habitat, I inferred that our change of quarters was in honour of the day. It was much to my liking; for in that antiquely ordered room—and the presence of the Vidame helped the illusion—I felt always as though I had stepped backward into the thick of eighteenth century romance. But for the Vidame, although he also loves its old time flavour, the salon had no charms just then; and when ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... not withdrawing from her brother-in-law's roof—she should be able to hold Selina up to her duty, to drag her back into the straight path. The hopes connected with that project were now a phase that she had left behind her; she had not to-day an illusion about her sister large enough to cover a sixpence. She had passed through the period of superstition, which had lasted the longest—the time when it seemed to her, as at first, a kind of profanity to ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... queens—the only true Queen of Queens—had richer and finer taste in colour than the queens of fifty earthly kingdoms, as you will see when we come to the immense effort to gratify her in the glass of her windows. Illusion for illusion,—granting for the moment that Mary was an illusion,—the Virgin Mother in this instance repaid to her worshippers a larger return for their money than the capitalist has ever been able to get, at least in this world, from any other illusion of wealth which he has tried ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... faldettas, and black-robed priests, all helped to carry the imagination over the Mediterranean and up the Adriatic to lovely Venice. At this hour in the morning there were not many English soldiers or sailors to spoil the illusion. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of the soil, must, if attainable, be a distant blessing, and at present he saw only the obstacles to its fulfilment—prejudiced landlords, and the claims and necessities of pauper millions. He shrank from a theory which might be an illusion. He required a policy for the next post and the next division. There was in his view only one course to take, to outbid his predecessors as successfully in Irish politics as he was doing in taxes and tariffs. He resolved to appropriate the liberal party ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... by mine art) Benighted in these woods! Now to my charms, And to my wily trains: I shall ere long Be well stocked with as fair a herd as grazed About my mother Circe. Thus I hurl My dazzling spells into the spongy air, Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion, And give it false presentments, lest the place And my quaint habits breed astonishment, And put the damsel to suspicious flight; Which must not be, for that's against my course. I, under fair pretence of friendly ends, And well-placed words of glozing ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Carlyle! How pretty it sounded,—how holy it seemed! My future was as brilliant as that vast enchanted hall into which poor Nouronihar was enticed through her insane love for Vathek, and, like hers, my illusion was dispelled by a decree that strangled hope in my heart, and enveloped it ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... suffer all Fated alike, we on our Father call.... Sad is the present if no future state, No blissful retribution mortals wait, If fate's decrees the thinking being doom To lose existence in the silent tomb. All may be well; that hope can man sustain. All now is well; 'tis an illusion vain. The sages held me forth delusive light, Divine instructions only can be right. Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain, Nor more ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... most beyond In the uttermost waste of desert sky, 350 Grows a star; And over it, visible spirit of dew,— Ah, stir not, speak not, hold your breath, Or surely the miracle vanisheth,— The new moon, tranced in unspeakable blue! No frail illusion; this were true, Rather, to call it the canoe Hollowed out of a single pearl, That floats us from the Present's whirl Back to those beings which were ours, 360 When wishes were winged things like powers! Call it not light, that mystery tender, Which broods upon the brooding ocean, That flush ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being. The word had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for any!—but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... its first production. Lodovico Graziani, the tenor, who filled the role of Alfredo, was hoarse, and could not do justice to the music; Signora Salvini-Donatelli, the Violetta of the occasion, was afflicted with an amplitude of person which destroyed the illusion of the death scene and turned its pathos into absurdity. The spectacle of a lady of mature years and more than generous integumental upholstery dying of consumption was more than the Venetian sense of humor could endure with equanimity. The opera ended with shrieks of laughter instead of the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... utterance of these words and my scrutiny directed to the quarter whence they came. Yet, if a human being had been there, could he fail to have been visible? Which of my senses was the prey of a fatal illusion? The shock which the sound produced was still felt in every part of my frame. The sound, therefore, could not but be a genuine commotion. But that I had heard it was not more true than that the being who uttered it was stationed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... aware of the dangers thus impending, and adopted such vigorous measures for augmenting the army and the fleet as speedily to dispel the illusion. Catharine vigorously prosecuted the measures her husband had introduced for the promotion of the civilization and enlightenment of her subjects. She took great care of the young prince Peter, son of the deceased Alexis, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of nervous strength—an electric thing. Nonsense, of course. And it was nonsense, also, to think that the huge dog which lay staring up into the face of the master understood all this affair much better than the practiced mind of the physician. Yet the illusion held with Randall Byrne in spite ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... sure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to see how close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is a mere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that the English usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influenced railways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like carriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... view; but the queer thing about society is that the people who regard it as an end are those who are in it, and not the critics on the fence. It's just the other way with most shows—the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is on the other side of the footlights. The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life." Selden raised himself ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... departed, but with such outward impassivity that it would have been difficult to say with whom lay the victory. If Affonso Henriques thought that night that he had conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... most, loved their young wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that—very fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware—he did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... deceived by it, and from all the batteries, forts and other positions a violent fusillade greeted it. There was firing from the streets, windows, courts and roofs. I followed it through my field glass, and for a moment I thought it had been hit, for it paused in its flight. But this was an optical illusion.... The plane simply flew higher, having without doubt heard the sound of the fusillade and the bullets having perhaps whistled too close to the pilot's ears. When he was almost over my post, a light white cloud appeared under its wings ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... and dislikes," of our constituent particles, and directing them by the aggregate of conscious will-power to some preconceived end, we ourselves, on the contrary, are dominated and controlled by them; so that freedom of the will is an illusion. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... chains, so as to let their bights fall into the sea, the ship slowly drifted astern, and rode by her cables. When this was done, the two young men stood together in silence on the forecastle, as if each felt that all which had just occurred was some illusion. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the other, and a hall and staircase in the middle, was extraordinarily unconvincing. The partition walls came to an end at quite a long distance from the front; and, with the general company spreading themselves at large over the whole width of the foreground, it was very difficult to entertain any illusion of that privacy which is of the essence of the cabinet particulier. I say nothing of the bedroom, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... blind, but indulged in the curious habit of feigning to have an unimpaired eye sight and pretended to admire scenic objects which had been pointed out to him beforehand as though he really saw them, carrying out this illusion to the extent of ridiculousness. It is said that at a hunt-meet a courtier incurred his royal displeasure through these incautious words: "Sire, you shot this hare from a next to impossible distance, condescend to feel how fat ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... she said gaily. "You are my Three Wise Men of the West. You are all magicians. You took me out of the desert, you have made life beautiful for me. Don't dispel the illusion, Soda-Water Sam. I'd rather hear you play El Capitan than listen to the ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... he wonders, that, after all, Viennese gaiety is an illusion, a base fabrication? Is the Wiener blut, like Iowan blood, calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, a delusion for the unsophisticated? Where is that far-renowned gemuethlichkeit? ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... one at least, and praised in terms that thrilled through and through the mother's heart in their truth and simplicity, for that sincerity, generosity, and unselfishness. It was her own daughter, her real Rachel, no illusion, that she heard described in those grave earnest words, only while the whole world saw the errors and exaggerated them, here was one who sank them all in the sterling worth that so few would recognise. The dear old lady forgot all her prudence, and would hardly let him speak of his means; but she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intended that he had not been able to write them without borrowing. And, as to offer me some consolation, he told me that, in recopying the lines, he would take care to make a few mistakes in the rhythm to complete the illusion. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... made a bolt away from the handles, tottering and jostling against each other, and positively flung themselves over upon our very heads. The clatter they made tumbling into the boats had an extraordinarily destructive effect upon the illusion of tragic dignity our self-esteem had thrown over the contests of mankind with the sea. On that exquisite day of gently breathing peace and veiled sunshine perished my romantic love to what men's imagination had proclaimed ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... traditionally Buddhist and Confucianist, some Christian and syncretic Chondogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way) note: autonomous religious activities now almost nonexistent; government-sponsored religious groups exist to provide illusion of religious freedom ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the utmost, modify or slacken it according to her interests. She understood what kind of concessions the genius of the Spanish nation demanded, and also what reforms it permitted. She judged at a glance of the disposition of the grandees, and yielded to no illusion relative to the degree of support she might expect from them. "With these sort of folks," she wrote to the Marquis de Torcy, "the surest way is to show firmness. The closer I observe them, the less do I ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... she, too, saw the charm and came under the spell, that Rachael suffered to-night. If she could have laughed it to scorn, could have admired the surface prettiness, and congratulated Magsie upon the almost perfect illusion, then she would have had the most effective of all medicines with which ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... country squire. If she were the heiress of a rich brewer, that is, of a brewer rich enough, his aunt would, like the rest of them, get over it fast enough! In the meantime he would, as Cornelius, after the first burst of his rage was over, had begged him, be careful to make no illusion to the matter. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... he, "it will avail nothing for any one to follow yonder lady. I know of no horse in these realms swifter than this, and it availed me not to pursue her." "Of a truth," said Pwyll, "there must be some illusion here. Let us go towards the palace." So to the palace they went, and they spent that day. And the next day they arose, and that also they spent until it was time to go to meat. And after the first meal, "Verily," said Pwyll, "we will go the same party as yesterday to the top of the mound. And do ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression under ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Ransome was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. It was its triumph ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... 1529 was wasted in fruitless efforts to obtain the brief. At length, in May, the proceedings were commenced; but they were commenced only in form, and were never more than an illusion. Catherine had been instructed in the course which she was to pursue. She appealed from the judgment of the legates to that of the pope; and the pope, with the plea of the new feature which had arisen in the case, declared that he could not refuse to revoke his promise. Having ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... conspicuous either by its utter absence or by its unwanted appearance. He could speak, when describing the Ragnall pictures, in rotund and flowing periods that would scarcely have disgraced the pen of Gibbon. Then suddenly that "h" would appear or disappear, and the illusion was over. It was like a sudden shock of cold water down the back. I never discovered the origin of his family; it was a matter of which he did not speak, perhaps because he was vague about it himself; but if an earl of Norman blood had married a handsome ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... missed the cake from the pantry window, they were ten times more amazed now. What could it mean? There must be some mistake. Dotty's quick thought was that somehow their names had been connected with some other girl's cake, but in a moment that illusion was dispelled by the sight of their own beautiful white cake being brought in and placed in the very centre ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... infer that the value of our interest in it is decreased in proportion as it recedes from our view. In our politics, as in our common conduct, we shall be worse than infants, if we do not put our senses under the tuition of our judgment, and effectually cure ourselves of that optical illusion which makes a brier at our nose of greater magnitude than an oak at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... all very well for attractive young women, but what would it be for poor devils such as I am. I know that nobody can care twopence for me, but the illusion of politeness is pleasant. It is a wonderful thing how we enjoy being cheated, though we know we are cheated. A man will give a cabman sixpence more than his fare for the humbug of a compliment, and ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass. Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Prussian in political development, and while there is hardly a single German government (and this includes Austria) which is not far ahead of Prussia—for this reason alone loses all claim to representing the German working class; for such a party shows by this alone a depth of illusion, self-conceit, and incompetence drunken with the sound of its own words, which must dash all hope of expecting from it a real development of the liberty of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... can only have given you a very incomplete idea. Without self-conceit or any illusion, I think I may say that never has so striking an effect, so complete and so irresistible, been produced by an instrumentalist ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... which may at any moment be overcome by his naturally bold aggressive disposition, Not only does the vivid colour compel him to fix his attention on the being that habitually interferes with his liberty, and is consequently regarded with unfriendly eyes, but it also produces the illusion on his mind that the man is near him, that he is approaching him in an aggressive manner: it is an insult, a challenge, which, being of so explosive a temper, he is not slow ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... which it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows nothing. And I would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has almost equalled the greatness of his dream. For what else could give him the serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... a little too much of it. We live here most of the year." She had meant to give him the illusion of success, but some underlying community of instinct drew the confession ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... kumara, was now ready for gathering, and all the women were busily occupied. As I from an eminence looked down upon their labours, I could almost fancy I was in Italy, and beheld the peasantry at work in their vineyards: but the adjacent camp and naked warriors soon dissipated the illusion! ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... she studied the demure faces of her contemporaries. Now that Doggie was a soldier she held the anonymous exploit to be cowardly and brutal. What did people know of the thousand and one reasons that kept eligible young men out of the Army? What had they known of Marmaduke? As soon as the illusion of his life had been dispelled, he had marched away with as gallant a tread as anybody; and though Doggie had kept to himself his shrinkings and his terrors, she knew that what to the average hardily bred young man was a gay adventure, was to ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... mind, which rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women, one may say, have to ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... running sense of the defects. He was a ship with a fair wind, which he valued the more for the belts of calms and the adverse weather through which he had passed and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was a happy man, though one with no illusion as to the present product of his ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... reputation. After dinner, a bright fire blazing, doors and windows shutting out the cold air that whistled along the hills, they struck up in chorus some of the finest national airs, particularly the Hymn to the Rhine—so that it seemed an illusion that we were in this wild, mining district, inhabited only by the poorest Indians; and we were transported thousands of miles off, across the broad Atlantic, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every eighth person ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... difficult to see how German statesmen regarded the situation? Russia, in their eyes, was playing a game of bluff, and strong measures against her were in the interest of Germany. But, though under no illusion as to German preparations, M. Sazonof offered on July 30 to stop all military preparations if Austria 'would eliminate from her ultimatum to Servia points which violate the principle of the sovereignty of Servia'.[85] 'Preparations for general mobilization will be proceeded ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... took on the form of a tariff controversy and nullification in 1832. It appeared again after the Mexican war when the question of slavery in the new territories was raised. Again compromise—the great settlement of 1850—seemed to restore peace, only to prove an illusion. A series of startling events swept the country into war: the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854, the rise of the Republican party pledged to the prohibition of slavery in the territories, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid, the election ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... searching and terrible that it transformed her into a heroine, a being of superior clay to that of ordinary mortals. "It's her nature to be good, mine to be bad," he had said; "I'm a weed, she is a flower." But Annie herself had rudely dispelled this illusion. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... what he longed to do but because it was all he could do. He scanned again his discovery that he could never run away from Zenith and family and office, because in his own brain he bore the office and the family and every street and disquiet and illusion of Zenith. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... You fancy you are standing at the entrance of a long hall and ready to enter it; on looking at it, thro' a piece of paper rolled hi form of a speaking trumpet—which by hiding from the sight the frame of the picture, prevents the illusion from being dissipated—you suppose you could walk into the hall; and each figure of a monk therein appears a real human creature, seen from a long distance, so skilfully has the artist disposed his light and shade. This picture has excited the admiration ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... with some elemental process which puts forth the lighting. Newgate itself, without windows towards the street, a huge angle of dead walls, with heavy iron fetters suspended over the gateways, and statues so blackened in their niches as to dispel the illusion that they ever did or could suggest humanity, is a settled gloom in the midst of the city, like the thought of a discouraged and defeated man. It has a terrible suggestion that crime is established in London,—immutable methods of being guilty and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... we had gloated upon the prospect for several minutes, identified the townlet as Ibus and the city as Tarbes, and, taking out powerful binoculars, subjected the panorama to a curious scrutiny, which might have shattered the illusion, but only turned Lilliput into Utopia, that we pulled ourselves together and started to consider ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... above: Breathe on the pipe a strain of fire; Or if a graver note thou love, With Phoebus' cittern and his lyre. You hear her? or is this the play Of fond illusion? Hark! meseems Through gardens of the good I stray, 'Mid murmuring gales and purling streams. Me, as I lay on Vultur's steep, A truant past Apulia's bound, O'ertired, poor child, with play and sleep, With living green the stock-doves crown'd— A legend, nay, a ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and even the illusion of privacy, although there were TV pickups in the walls, placed so that no movement in either room would go unnoticed. The switch which cut off the soft white light from the glow plates did not cut off the infrared radiation which enabled his hosts ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... laid herself down against it. When the secretary, rising to stretch his legs, caught sight of her eyes, he stood frozen with terror. She made neither motion nor sound. Gathering courage, and taking the thing for a spectral illusion, he made a step forward. She showed her other teeth, with a growl neither more than audible nor less than horrible. The secretary sank fainting into a chair. He was not a brave man, and besides, his conscience had gone over to the enemy, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... England, as the truth dawned, there were hushed voices and an intense solemnity. The day had come, and no one doubted the severity of the ordeal. Yet neither did any one, except an unhappy few who had been nursed in folly and illusion, doubt the necessity of taking up the challenge. The country was united. Not only was the safety and existence of the British Commonwealth involved, but the great principle of civilization, difficult to name, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... dignities, captives restored to liberty; beggars saw smiling abundance, and wretchedness was banished the world. From a cloud in which she was supported by angels, Cecilia beheld these wonders, and while enjoying the glorious illusion, she was awakened by her maid, with news that Mrs Charlton ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... struggles were in the modern mode, nor would any punishment which he might inflict on Dalton help Becky in this moment of deep humiliation. He knew her pride and the hurt that had come to her, he knew her love, and the deadly inertia which had followed the loss of illusion. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... the statue take life in that action of the nostrils, acquiring attention, memory, judgment and all the psychological paraphernalia, even as still waters are aroused and rippled by the impact of a grain of sand. I recovered from my illusion under the instruction of my abler master, the animal. The Capricorn shall teach us that the problem is more obscure than the abbe led me ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... "That's a mere illusion. We live here on ambrosial distillations from the rocks and muskalunge from the lake. I never came to Canada from old Glazka town, and never saw Loch Achray, or Loch Lomond, or any body of water save this, since ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... he continues, "decently furnished, encompass me with an atmosphere of ease and respectability; and I enjoy the illusion of not having fallen ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... tableaux. My unfashionable taste approves not of a serious story being cut up into a vast number of separate and shuffled sections; and the whistle and sliding panels detract still more from the completeness of illusion: I incline as much as is possible to the Classic unities of time, place, and circumstances, wishing, moreover, every act to be a scene, and every scene an act; with a comfortable green curtain, that cool resting-place for the haggard eye, to be the grass-like drop, mildly alternating ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... intervals, a chorus of frogs in the neighboring swamp croak the refrain in unison. Sax, the great brass-founder, who made the Last Trumpets for the 'Wandering Jew,' and the instruments for the Band of the Guides, is engaged upon the frogpipes required. The illusion will be heightened by characteristic scenery and mephitic exhalations. M. Sax visited the pool in the Bois de Boulogne, known as the Maree d'Auteuil, and brought back many useful ideas in reference to the quadruped with whose vocal powers he desired to become acquainted. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... know, you don't know what it means to a man to be fired with a great idea ... whether it be love of humanity, hatred of war or any other beautiful illusion. It lights us and leads us. It is our pride and our faith. We seem to have a second life, the real life, that belongs to it, and an unknown heart that beats for it alone. And we are prepared to suffer ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... the chair before her breakfast tray and ate with an appetite which took something form this illusion, while Titine brought her letters and a long box of flowers which were unwrapped and placed in a floor-vase of silver and glass in an embrasure of the window. The envelope which accompanied the flowers ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... that sap, full of life, circulating with rapidity through this body politic. "The factions are muzzled," say they; "but the factious spirit still ferments under the curb of power; if means can be found to force it to evaporate on objects which belong to the domain of illusion and sensibility, the result will prove a great blessing to France, by carrying back to the arts and to literature, and even to commerce, that exuberance of heat and activity which can no longer be employed without ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social abasement that their very touch—the very shadow thrown ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... working career, from his study of the sciences, from his twenty-year-old dream and from his intimacy with his young brother. He had dropped everything in the intoxicating idealism of the moment, like a big crazy bird that launches out into space with the heroic and absurd illusion that his beak and his talons will put an end to the war and restore to earth the reign of peace. Since then the big bird had returned two or three times to the nest; each time, alas, a little more worn in ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... began to see that this must be the very hallucination of which he had read, a sweet illusion of green fields and crystal water, which often precedes actual death by thirst and starvation. He trembled, he prayed secretly to God to spare her, and not to kill his new-found child, his darling, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... emotion, Summer Ocean, Like thy self, 'neath cloudless skies, Glances brightly, Dances lightly Till the fond illusion flies. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, horn to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are,—to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... doubtful of their assertions, for such things were to me novel. I however determined not to overstep the bounds of prudence, and declare the work an illusion, for fear that I might blaspheme a higher power, I communicated my doubts to a few of my companions, and one, less cautious than myself, immediately broke forth in imprecations against it. I never was ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... to the deplorable tendency of your sex. All you require is moral stamina to tear yourself away from the arms of Morpheus at an earlier hour in the It is a popular illusion, you know, that work performed before sunrise takes less time to accomplish and is better done than later in the day. My mother used to affirm that she accomplished the work of two days in one when she arose at three a.m., but then my mother ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... which the moon looked down pitifully upon him in his great anguish. Yes, great. Perhaps the greatest anguish of a life. His arms on the table, his head on his arms, he thought, in the misery of that moment, that he must die, and he wished to die. The illusion of a life was destroyed, and how? So rudely, so cruelly, so heartlessly broken! He could have borne it if there had been one kind word, only a look of interest or pity; but that pride and haughtiness were like the stabs of a dagger in ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... out of the open window. Always I think of him standing there with the morning sunlight falling upon his face and shoulders. He had observed my emotion and I think it had touched him a little. There was a moment of silence. A curious illusion came to me then, for it seemed as if I heard the sound of distant music. Looking thoughtfully out of the ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... investigations until at last, with the inborn acumen peculiar to his race, he had found out everything. That he, from this time forth, would share the lot of his adored sahib appeared to him a matter of course. And Heideck had not the heart, in this hour of their meeting again, to destroy his illusion. ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... had the least illusion about their friendship, and there would never have been the smallest intimacy between them, had not Colette one day taken it into her head, out of sheer instinctive coquetry, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... surmised that he had become the soul of a world in some far realm of space. The same mental exercises which supply the barbarian superstitions reappear in disciplined minds, on a higher plane and in more refined forms. Culture and science do not deliver us from all illusion and secure us sober views conformed to fact. Still, what we think amid the solid realities of waking life, fancy in her sleep disjointedly reverberates from hollow fields of dream. The metaphysician or theologian, instead of resting ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... other members of the Congress (strangers who had appeared to him to possess suitable temperaments), it succeeded fully, and I was able to prove conclusively after three trials, and under conditions precluding all possibility of fraud or illusion, that the will of these ladies, concentrated upon a certain material object with a desire to produce a movement in it, ended by producing this movement as if by means of a fluid or an invisible force obeying their mental command." (Spiritism and ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an 'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action. Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is with all man's activities when he comes to man's ...
— Progress and History • Various
... its effects. Now, Shakespeare addresses our inward sense, absolutely; through it the realm of fancy created by the imagination is quickened into life and thus a world of impressions is produced for which we can not account, since the basis of the illusion consists in the fact that everything seems to take place before our eyes. But if we examine Shakespeare's dramas carefully, we find that they contain far less of sensuous acts than of spiritual expressions. He allows events to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... assert, that Great and Holy God never did nor ever will permit the Devil thus far to abuse an Innocent Person, affirms more than he is able to prove. The story of Germanus his discovering a Diabolical illusion of this nature, concerning a great number of Persons that seemed to be at a Feast when they were really at home and asleep, is mentioned by many Authors. But the particulars insisted on, do sufficiently evince the Truth of what we ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... Secondly, it did build up a system of thought on which, both in good days and evil, a life can be lived which is not only saintly, but practically wise and human and beneficent. It did for practical purposes solve the problem of living, without despair and without grave, or at least without gross, illusion. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... had taken his parables; there was the hill on which he delivered his most touching discourses; here was the little ship from which he taught. It was like the recommencement of a beautiful dream—like a vanished illusion which had reappeared. The enchantment seemed to revive. The sweet Galilean "Kingdom of God" had recovered its sway. The clear atmosphere, the mornings upon the shore or upon the mountain, the nights passed on the lakes watching the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... lord of mine For whom in ceaseless woe I pine, No art may soothe my wild distress Or lull me to forgetfulness. I see but him: my lips can frame No syllable but Rama's name. Each sight I see, each sound I hear, Brings Rama to mine eye or ear, The wish was in my heart, and hence The sweet illusion mocked my sense. 'Twas but a phantom of the mind, And yet the voice was soft and kind. Be glory to the Eternal Sire,(848) Be glory to the Lord of Fire, The mighty Teacher in the skies,(849) And Indra with his thousand eyes, And may they grant the truth to be ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... General McClellan finished his dispatch to the Secretary of War, in which he announced the glad tidings that he had got his pickets in the right place, preparatory to a general advance, before he was aroused from his illusion by the intelligence that the pickets on the right were being driven in. He had already, during the day, learned something of Jackson's position, and it was now easy to divine the ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... haunting fears, to resume her accustomed attitude of stoicism, of tranquil, if slightly defiant, courage. But Care, the leopard, refused to be driven away. Surely, stealthily he had followed her out of her bedchamber and now crouched at her side, making his presence felt so that all illusion of comfort speedily fled. She knew that she was alone, consciously and bitterly alone, waking in the midst of the sleeping house. No footstep would echo up the stairs, hot to find her. No voice ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... murder something more horrible than blood,—the spirit that breeds blood and plays with it. M. Jan van Beers and his kindred of the dissecting-room and accidents'-ward are passed by Mantegna, who gives no vulgar illusion of gaping wounds and jetting blood; but, instead, holds up to us a beautiful woman daintily fingering ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... where young ladies gaze, And I attempt to speak my joy, 'Hush, pray,' some lovely creature says, 'The fond illusion don't destroy!' ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Bedouin sail flashed for an hour upon the distant horizon, and then faded, and we were alone again; sometimes the west, at sunset, looked like a city with towers, and we bore down upon its glorified walls, seeking a haven; but a cold gray morning dispelled the illusion, and our hearts sank back into the illimitable sea, breathing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... a love of change, her small girlish ambitions. She wanted to plume her wings a little—to try them in flights hither and thither. The gay world seemed to her ignorance a land flowing with milk and honey. She had yet to spell the meaning of the words illusion and vanity. Bessie was fond of Christine. She loved all her sisters dearly, but there was less sympathy between them than there had been between herself ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... the existence of the visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... and I are skillful in interpreting dreams, and even entertain great fear of them; but of yours it may be said, I hope, every dream is an illusion. Adieu! Take care of yourself, and act so that we may from time to time hear ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... strain, but went on to preach a more questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its place. "We turn to poetry," he says, "not that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the realities of life in ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... would pat me gently, and smooth my hair, and offer to tell me a story, the illusion would be complete. Why don't you tell me to take myself and my books down-stairs? I am sure you must be sick of the ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... For many minutes he stood there mute and motionless, with folded hands and bowed head. Soon a snowy cloud passed before the moon and cast a dark shadow upon the ice. The imprisoned image seemed to melt away. Yet Kenric knew that what he had seen was no illusion, but that Aasta the Fair lay lifeless in ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... air began to quiver, and in consequence of an illusion of the eyes it seemed to the riders that the sands quivered. The Bedouin took his sweaty cowl from his ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... ignorance and superstition. Henceforth, when we are at our wit's end, we may apostrophize the difficulty, and exclaim, "O thou invisible spirit, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!" We hesitate to spoil this serviceable illusion: for as we have known some good people, of a sort, who would be distressed to find that there was no hell to burn up the opponents of their orthodoxy; we fear lest many would be disappointed if they found out that the infernal spirit was not ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Pickwick Papers, where Sam Weller was first discovered, described the "George" and called it after its near neighbour, the "White Hart." This contention, we submit, has no justification whatever. The only reason, therefore, for referring to it here, is with a view to dispelling the illusion. ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... may be defined as a perversion of the judgment, a chimerical thought; an illusion, an incorrect impression of the senses, counterfeit appearances; hence we speak of a delusion of the mind, an illusion of the senses. Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions as indicative of insanity. An hallucination is a sensation which is supposed by the patient to be produced by external impressions, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... first this wood; My nostrils bled three drops; then stopped the blood, And not one more would follow.— What's that, which seems to bear a mortal shape, [Sees ISA. Yet neither stirs nor speaks? or, is it some Illusion of the night? some spectre, such As in these Asian parts more frequently appear? Whate'er it be, I'll venture to approach it. [Goes near. My Isabinda bound and gagged! Ye powers, I tremble while I free her, and scarce dare Restore her liberty ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... tradition has come down to us so laden with beauty and mystery that we are apt to think, as we see it melt away, that human achievements are being permanently depreciated. That illusion occurs in every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century, which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women. To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and facile pleasure. Yet it was ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... their splendid audacity. If the attention is so feebly grasped as to permit one to reason about an impossible situation, it becomes at once extravagant and absurd. One would require to be considerably carried away by illusion to be moved by Mr. Wendell's story. The hero is a New-Englander, born of mad parents (they met while both were patients in an insane asylum); and this inherited curse would seem to be enough for any hero to totter under. It becomes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... reach you and remain." The breakers dashed among the rocks, and they Seemed full of life; the foam dissolved the sands, And the sedge trembled in the swelling tide. Was this a promise of the vaunting Sea, Or the illusion of a last despair? Either, or both, still homeward I must go, And that way turned mine eyes, and thought they met A picture,—surely so,—or I was mad. The crimson harvest-moon was rising full Above ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... reproached sometimes with a bombastic and inflated tone. Feeling that he is deficient in the necessary powers, he swells his voice, which is prejudicial to truth, and without truth, there is no theatrical illusion. Nature had intended him for the parts of young lovers, of which I shall presently speak. His features are too delicate, his countenance not sufficiently flexible, and his person bespeaks too little of the hero, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... crept and he crept across that absolutely bare, flat ground, with never a tuft of fur or a feather of a single live thing upon it to be seen, till one might have thought that he had gone mad, and was stalking an illusion—as many, not beasts, have done before him; only they were men, and blew their brains out—or went ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... evermore The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust, Strewing my bed, and, in another age, Rebuild a continent of better men. Then I unbar the doors; my paths lead out The exodus of nations; I disperse Men to all shores that front the hoary main. I too have arts and sorceries; Illusion dwells forever with the wave. I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal With credulous and imaginative man; For, though he scoop my water in his palm, A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds. Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore, I make some coast alluring, some ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... recover my liberty. The gratifying reflection that I now trod on it for the last time could with difficulty impress itself upon my mind; and I could not avoid fancying that the whole was a sleeping vision, the illusion of which I was every moment apprehensive of seeing dissipated. On our exit from the fort, we were received by a strong detachment of grenadiers, who conducted us to ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... after he had remained for two daies speechlesse, the third day after when he had laine for a time in a slumber or soft sleepe, at the time of his waking, he fetched a deepe sigh, and thus said; "Oh Lord God almightie, if this be not a vaine fantasticall illusion, but a true vision which I haue seene, grant me space to vtter the same vnto these that stand heere present, or else not." And herewith hauing his speech perfect, he declared how he had seene two moonks stand ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (8 of 8) - The Eight Booke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... delight. Looking down over the broad, oak-clad slope of the mountain, he beheld the vast sea of the prairie, stretching for leagues upon leagues away to the low horizon. From that height the view seemed limitless, and the illusion of the sea, which always hovers ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... must indeed have very earnestly longed to bring to a close the life of fatigue and danger which he had for three years led, to have been able to cherish any illusion as to the success of the steps he was about again to take. Where was the hope of regaining the Fronde which had just been outrageously deceived, after it had given itself to the Prince de Conde in his misfortune, and had extricated ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... intolerable that similar power should reside in the hands of obscure nobodies about whom no illusion could possibly exist, whose tyranny is not admitted or public at all, who do not even take the risk of exposing their features, and to ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... I saw a house which amazed me. I thought I must be mistaken: I looked at it more closely,—looked at the houses near it, compared them with the first house and then with each other, and even then I believed that it was an optical illusion. I turned hastily down a side street, and still I seemed to see the same thing. At last I was persuaded that the fault was not with my eyes, but with the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... journey through and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military turmoil to ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... as, with great difficulty, I groped my way back to the library, where I stood gazing at that strange counterpart of myself, till, under the growing horror of the situation, it seemed to my benumbed senses as though I were some disembodied spirit hovering above his own corpse. The horrible illusion was like a nightmare; I could not throw it off, and I would then and there have gone stark, staring mad, but that there came to me out of that awful chaos of fancies a suggestion which seemed like an inspiration. ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... was not yet eight, and as eight was the hour I usually indicated, the possibility suggested itself that her awakening was the result of an illusion, arising from habit, and perhaps, after all, this was a case of simple coincidence. In order to make a clean breast of it, and leave no room for doubt, I ordered the invalid to sleep until she should receive ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the donkey off the precipice, which proved to be only about two feet high, the gulf below being an illusion arranged with the aid of lights that shone ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... thirsting for poetry, and filled with the Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have angels! A lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... other religions "as high as the heaven is exalted over the earth." The other races and religions thought that behind this proud criticism of Christian Europe there must be at least a well-possessed security for the world-peace. Of course it was an illusion. On no continent was the peace of mankind more endangered than in Europe, the very metropolis of Christianity and Christian civilisation. And it has been so not only during the last few years, it has been the case during the last thousand years, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background of current events, certainly—without a knowledge of which their actions might be altogether unaccountable. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that two women should so resemble each other? Am I the victim of an illusion of the senses? Have I recovered life only to lose reason? No; I know myself, I find myself the same; my judgment is firm and accurate, and can make its way in this world so new and topsy-turvy. It is on but one point that my reason wavers—Clementine!—I seem to ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. Jane Eyre exists to prove that ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... known the truth. But they are in as great anxiety for the others as for him; so they bore them all away. In every case but one they were misled. But like the man who dreams and takes a fiction for the truth, so the shields cause them to suppose this illusion to be a reality. It is the shields, then, that cause this mistake. [222] Carrying the corpses, they move away and come to their tents, where there was a sorrowing troop. Upon hearing the lament raised by the Greeks, soon all the others gathered, until ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... to be believed—too much like a happy dream to have the stable feeling of reality—She extricated herself from his close and affectionate embrace, and held him at arm's length, to satisfy her mind that it was no illusion. But the form was indisputable—Douce David Deans himself, in his best light-blue Sunday's coat, with broad metal buttons, and waistcoat and breeches of the same, his strong gramashes or leggins of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it, leaving him only a leper's life. In the Peninsula they had dissembled among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And—famous idea!—his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe—overwhelming thought!—would ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and dangerous illusion to believe that in the present or probable condition of human society a commerce so extensive and so rich as ours could exist and be pursued in safety without the continual support of a military marine—the only arm by which the power of this Confederacy can be estimated ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... brother that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination, he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own faculty of invention was rather ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... highly educated persons, that their superior talents and education will enable them to enjoy more of heaven's happiness than those who either have no great talents or are too poor to have them developed by study. There can be no greater illusion. If it were so, the poor, who, have already suffered so much from their humble position, would seemingly have reason to complain on seeing the educated classes again above them in heaven; and that, too, merely on account of their higher education, ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... such as I have whenever I stand before a certain sixteenth-century portrait in the National Gallery: a sense or an illusion of being in the presence of a living person with whom I am engaged in a wordless conversation, and who is revealing his inmost soul to me. And it is only the work of a genius that can affect you ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... For instance, though Cardinal de Richelieu affected to humble whole bodies and societies, yet he studied to oblige individuals, which is sufficient to give you an idea of all the rest. He had indeed some unaccountable illusions, which he pushed to the utmost extremity. The most dangerous kind of illusion in State affairs is a sort of lethargy that never happens without showing pronounced symptoms. The abolishing of ancient laws, the destruction of that golden medium which was established between the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion, the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary France. [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... times. She understood very well on the contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was. Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation and died ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Voltaire—"Assis dans un fauteuil, avec un livre 'a la main, il jouc les comedies o'u1 il y a sept, huit, dix, douze personnages, si parfaitement bien, qu'on ne saurait croire, m'eme en le regardant, que ce soit le m'eme homme qui Parle. Pour moi, l'illusion est parfaitc."-E. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... illusion perfect, she sought and found an article of dress, of which the Albionic name has been forgotten, but which is known to modern women as a petticoat. It was reddish brown in colour, and, so far, in keeping with the grey ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... been a boat or the shadow of a boat, he could not be sure. In fact, there were moments when he doubted whether it was not some ocular illusion, brought about by too ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... horse-race staged in a theatre, where the horses do indeed run furiously, but where we all know well that they are not getting anywhere. There is a moving floor beneath them, and it is only the shifting of the scenery that makes them seem to go. Is human history like that? Is progress an illusion? Is it all going to end as Bertrand Russell says? Those who believe in the living God are certain of the contrary, for stability amid change is the gift of a progressive, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... wife, who will bury him," replied Georges. "The countess is still fine-looking for a woman of fifty-four years of age. She is very elegant, and, at a little distance, gives one the illusion—" ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... break the silence, "You have explained," I said, "an impression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here, and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion, though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, its tone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I should hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de la ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... more probable, harassed by persecution, by the hatred of their fellow-creatures directed against them, or by torture, actually confessed themselves guilty. These instances are too numerous, not to constitute an important chapter in the legislation of past ages. And, now that the illusion has in a manner passed away from the face of the earth, we are on that account the better qualified to investigate this error in its causes and consequences, and to look back on the tempest and hurricane from which we have escaped, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity—the recognition of the fact that there is an "I can" and an "I cannot," an "I may" and an ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... questions and answers which went to destroy the illusion that the murdered man had been universally popular. And for some time after that the trial seemed to go in Paul's favour rather than ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... held at Lima, in 1567, coca was described "as a worthless object, fitted for the misuse and superstition of the Indians;" and a royal decree of October 18, 1569, expressly declares that the notions entertained by the natives that coca gives them strength, is an "illusion of the devil" (una elusion del Demonio). The Peruvian mine owners were the first to discover the importance of the chacchar in assisting the Indians to go through their excessive labor, and they, together with the plantation owners, became ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... house did not belie the national reputation. After dinner, a bright fire blazing, doors and windows shutting out the cold air that whistled along the hills, they struck up in chorus some of the finest national airs, particularly the Hymn to the Rhine—so that it seemed an illusion that we were in this wild, mining district, inhabited only by the poorest Indians; and we were transported thousands of miles off, across the broad Atlantic, even to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... sister Elizabeth (the biggest child of the lot), absolutely depended on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife, and would have been helpless without them. But, as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. Independence ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... barn-like stage, with chairs set about to indicate properties; the stage hands coming and going, the stage manager shouting directions—it was all new to them. The members of the company were as businesslike as bank clerks. No hint of illusion, no scrap of romance! ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... has been a book like 'A Man's World.' ... A novelist of skill and power.... His greatest gift is his power of creating the illusion of reality.... Vividness and conviction unite in the wonderful portrait of Nina.... There never has been such a character in American fiction before.... Nina will be one of the famous twentieth century ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... trenches at Christmas, and in January a semi-official communiqu announced that the French had broken the German offensive and could break the German defensive whenever they chose. This pleasing illusion was maintained, not so much by a censorship of the truth as by incapacity on the part of those in authority to discern it, and by a natural tendency of the wish to be father of the thought. German ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... heart. 'If you meet with an accident,' he said, 'half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to inquire after your pure hand, or your pure foot.' 'Their temper,' he observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... compel the artist to plagiarize against his will. A scrupulous writer, being also as ingenious as Sterne, could have found some means of indicating the source from which he was borrowing without destroying the dramatic illusion of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... he had suffered from violence of any kind, his head was clear and bright, his limbs felt as elastic and virile as ever. He was like a man who had suddenly awakened from a long sleep; he was just as fresh and vigorous. The bed on which he was lying completed the illusion. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... about as well as your coat fits the chair-back. Strange and curious things in the air, and in the water, and in the earth beneath, are seen every day except by those who are looking for them, namely, the naturalists. When Wilson or Audubon gets his eye on the unknown bird, the illusion vanishes, and your phenomenon turns out to be one of the commonplaces of the ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... but for a moment, the next the blood rallied to her heart, and she told herself that Humfrey would say, that either the state of her spirits had produced an illusion, or else that some child had been left here by accident. She advanced, but as she did so the two hands were stretched out and locked together as in an agony, and the childish, feeble voice cried out, 'Oh! ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... halted, although their efforts still gave an appearance of advance. Thrashing and wrenching they urged themselves and the now burdensome ladder against the invincible wall. The only result was to give the illusion they were burying themselves in the clutching tentacles. Exertions dwindled; the struggle grew less intense; then they retreated, fighting their way out of the enveloping mass in a panic ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... in its mouth; the moon shaped like an eye, a brilliant, glowing, wondrous orb, more intensely golden for its contrast with the ominous blackness of the serpentine cloud. I felt that I had found the origin of the Oriental fable. Some minutes the illusion held, and then the cloud lowered, and the moon, alone against a pale-blue background, the horizon a mass of scudding draperies of pearly hue, lit the ocean between the ship and the edge of the world in a tremulous ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... man who is devoted to Gypsies. The "Athenaeum" reviewer {221b} begs the question by calling the Gypsy dialogues of Hindes Groome, photographic; and is plainly inaccurate in saying that if they are compared with those in "Lavengro" "the illusion in Borrow's narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers." For Borrow's dialogues do produce an effect of some kind of life; those of Hindes Groome instruct us or pique our curiosity, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... between whose mind and my own the point of contact was wanting. Of Henry, for many reasons, I had rather not talk to you. You know that I have never hesitated to tell myself the truth, or to destroy an illusion, which in the secrecy of my heart I have felt to be such; but it requires a courage and a strength which, to-day especially, I do not find in myself, to trace the progress of estrangement in an affection once as intense as a mother's; and which still ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... lifting up his eyes he would have a faint view of the night-hawks, flapping their ominous wings over his devoted head, visible only from the glimmering light of the fire-flies, which he would naturally conclude were sparks from the bottomless pit. Nothing would be wanting at this moment to complete the illusion, but one of those dreadful explosions of thunder and lightning, so extravagantly described by Lee, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there—the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... have said, "What a pleasant bucolic-this little surprise party of welcome!" But Howard with his native ear and eye had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defense; deep down ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... nowhere, and Captain Mercadier, who believed that he had found it at the Cafe Prosper, soon recovered from his illusion. ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... virtuous."—Butler's Analogy, p. 92. "From hence, to such a man, arises naturally a secret satisfaction and sense of security, and implicit hope of somewhat further."—Ib., p. 93. "So much for the third and last cause of illusion that was taken notice of, arising from the abuse of very general and abstract terms, which is the principal source of all the nonsense that hath been vented by metaphysicians, mystagogues, and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Hercules destroying the demons and other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood framed the panels, and the roof was supported by columns in the old Japanese style, the whole being a compromise between the very simple and quiet and the polychromatic. The dark woods, the lanterns, the floor tiles of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... small mirror, where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the portrait. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... must, according to them, be punctual to his hour. In the main, the latter plead a sounder cause than the more lenient critics. For the only ground of the rule is the observation of a probability which they suppose to be necessary for illusion, namely, that the actual time and that of the representation should be the same. If once a discrepancy be allowed, such as the difference between two hours and thirty, we may upon the same principle go much farther. This idea of illusion has occasioned great errors in the theory ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... could Cydaria be to me now? She flew at bigger game. She had flung me a kindly crumb of remembrance; she would think that we were well quit; nay, that I was overpaid for my bruised heart and dissipated illusion. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... purple valleys of illusion I see her waiting, like the soul of music, With deep eyes, lovelier than cerulean pansies, Shadow and fire, yet merciless as poison; With red lips, sweeter than Arabian storax, Yet bitterer than myrrh.—O tears and kisses! O eyes and lips, that ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall not be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how human they are, and how ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... if no future state, No blissful retribution mortals wait, If fate's decrees the thinking being doom To lose existence in the silent tomb. All may be well; that hope can man sustain. All now is well; 'tis an illusion vain. The sages held me forth delusive light, Divine instructions only can be right. Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain, Nor more the ways ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... Vandalism of Vauban, Cohorn, and those mechanical-pated fellows, who, with their Dutch dyke-looking parapets, made such havoc of donjons and picturesque turrets in Europe. Here is every variety of mediaeval battlement; so perfect is the illusion, that one wonders the waiter's horn should be mute, and the walls devoid of bowman, knight, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... against the wind, noticeable in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In contrast with the ardent ideality of Rabbi Ben Ezra may be set ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... accustomed to the light suddenly shed about her, she was bidden to think of what had happened as only a dream. Her heart refused to make surrender of its hope. Though it could be held only by an encouragement of recognised illusion, she preferred to dream yet a little longer. Above all, she must taste the luxury of forgiving her lover, of making sure that her image would not dwell in his mind as that of a self-righteous woman who had turned coldly from his error, perhaps ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... was an illusion—nothing more. It is useless for me to torment my soul, I have no need ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... were lying down and turning their backs on the flying drift, Wandering William, as he called himself, retired once more. But he couldn't sleep for thinking of the strange illusion he had had. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... untimely voyage. Gideon pled in vain to be allowed to join the party. 'No, Gid,' said his uncle. 'You will be watched; you must keep away from us.' Nor had the barrister ventured to contest this strange illusion; for he feared if he rubbed off any of the romance, that Mr Bloomfield might weary of the whole affair. And his discretion was rewarded; for the Squirradical, laying a heavy hand upon his nephew's ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... might be sorry to be there. They were leaving behind them all the good things, all the pleasant things, of life as, in time of peace, every one of them had learned to live it and to know it. Long, long since had the last illusion faded of the old days when war had seemed a thing of ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueller torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better part of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Gaultier had constructed an even profounder formula. The "Will-to-Live" of the one and the "Will-to- Power" of the other were, after all, only parts of de Gaultier's supreme generalization, the "Will-to-Illusion." ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... genuine critical point in nature,—a point on which our destiny and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?" ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... that the vast majority of people in Europe and America are indebted to Dr. Jameson for any knowledge which they may have acquired of the Transvaal and its Uitlander problem. Theirs is a disordered knowledge, and perhaps it is not unnatural that they should in a manner share the illusion of the worthy sailor who, after attending divine service, assaulted the first Israelite he met because he had only just heard of the Crucifixion. A number of worthy people are still disposed to excuse ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... certain one always suffered thus on those feast-days on which he had to receive Communion, his superiors, discovering that there was no fault on his part, ruled that he was not to refrain from communicating on that account, and the demoniacal illusion ceased. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... society, and was weak enough to suppose it possible. The attention of my unassuming instructor, who, without being ignorant of his own powers, possessed great simplicity of manners, strengthened the illusion. Having sometimes caught up hints for thought, from my untutored remarks, he often led me to discuss the subjects he was treating, and would read to me his productions, previous to their publication, wishing to profit by the criticism ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... modern society; from all he wrests something, from these an illusion, from those a hope; from one a catch-word, from another a mask. He ransacked vice, he dissected passion. He searched out and sounded man, soul, heart, entrails, brain,—the abyss that each one has within himself. And by grace of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... credence to the wicked gambols of wizards and witches. Many a poor iniquitous old woman, from some mysterious hints of her power to tell fortunes, or to gratify the revengeful feelings of her neighbours, was put to a cruel death. More enlightened times have dissipated this illusion, and driven these imaginary imps of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to let their bights fall into the sea, the ship slowly drifted astern, and rode by her cables. When this was done, the two young men stood together in silence on the forecastle, as if each felt that all which had just occurred was some illusion. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... deafening, reverberating roar, and Lane clutched at a piece of the rock, and closed his eyes, feeling that all was over, but opened them again directly to see that the bridge before him was not undulating, and he knew that it was an optical illusion due to the heat and the giddiness from which ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... met his gaze, the rich color flushed her soft cheeks and her eyes drooped shyly under their long lashes. Love, with her, had not yet proved an illusion,—a bright toy to be snatched hastily and played with for a brief while, and then thrown aside as broken and worthless. It seemed to her a most marvellous and splendid gift of God, increasing each day in worth and beauty,—widening upon her soul and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion, and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (c. 475 B. C.), who had begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of reasoning introduced ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... temperament, and any one on hearing him narrate would say the same; but it is supposed that, when the captain performed this first solitary excursion, his brain was affected by an excited and highly poetical imagination. After eleven months of solitude, he reached the Pacific Ocean, and awoke from his long illusion in the middle of a people whose language he could not understand; yet they were men of his colour, kind and hospitable; they gave him jewels and gold, and sent him back east of the mountains, under the protection ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... from seriously contemplating and arranging a very different kind of match. Since their father's death she had schooled them into calling her "Edith"; she had also succeeded by means of certain modifications in her appearance, not confined entirely to her raiment and her coiffure, in creating the illusion of thirty; and everything she said and did was calculated to confirm this process of self-deception. She loathed old age. The very breath of an old person in the room in which she sat was enough to oppress and stifle her. It always struck her that the bitter smell of corpses was not ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference is the same. The apparent mutual understanding, in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks down in ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... wind, sometimes with his grey eyes intently following the track, reminded me of those famous Cossacks that I had seen pass through Germany when I was a boy; and his tall, lanky horse, muscular and full-maned, its body as slender as a greyhound's, completed the illusion. ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... as a perversion of the judgment, a chimerical thought; an illusion, an incorrect impression of the senses, counterfeit appearances; hence we speak of a delusion of the mind, an illusion of the senses. Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions as indicative of insanity. An hallucination is a sensation which is supposed by the patient to be produced by external impressions, although ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the voice of M. Alexandre Ribot, the veteran minister of finance, who, having Verdun before his eyes, told the Chamber of Deputies: "We have reached the decisive hour. We can say without exaggeration, without illusion, and without vain optimism, that we now see the end of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... quite dark when the curtain goes up, and turn up a lamp very slowly behind the scene, so that it shines on my face. A lamp being turned up very slowly is wonderfully effective. It produces a perfect illusion. Could you manage that with one hand and play the music of the awakening ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... have come over to try and reason with this bunch of nuts. Don't you know they are so damn conceited that if you were to tell them that every time you look at a German you see two men, they would believe you; and then as if they hated to lie to themselves, they would say perhaps it was an optical illusion. Tell them that God did not create anyone but the Germans and that he left the rest of the world to the students in his office, and they will give you a smile of assent." Edestone smiled indulgently. "Tell them that when the Kaiser frowns every wheel in the United States stops and refuses to move ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... I am about to relate will be interpreted in a different manner by different people. Rationalists who pin their faith on Sir Walter Scott and his "Demonology" will say it was only an optical illusion; the incredulous, who believe in nothing, will declare it was but a dream; while Spiritualists, who follow Mr. Robert Dale Owen in his "Footprints on the Boundaries of Another World," will be ready to declare that it was the apparition ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... giant about to make an attack upon you with an enormous club. You walk forward to confront the monster with perfect coolness. Why? Not because you are a Mr Greatheart, accustomed to deal with giants, but because, in fact, the illusion does not keep possession of your mind even for a moment. Imagination merely suggests the false image; but memory and reason, with a rapidity of action which cannot be described, instantly correct the mistake, and tell you it is only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Feet turned, and his large, dark eyes rested without expression upon the face of the Swede. He seemed almost literally to fold his hands and await the result of his trial. The illusion was so complete that even Riley Sinclair began to feel that the prisoner might be guilty—of an act which he himself had done! The opportunity was indeed too perfect to be dismissed without consideration. It was in his power definitely to put the blame on another man; then he could remain in ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... choice of being, When the sap begins to climb,— Strong insistence, sweet intrusion, Vasts and verges of illusion,— So I win, to time's confusion, The one perfect pearl of time, Joy and joy and joy forever, Till the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... they do; during the representation of the fable, but we love, or hate them for what they have done before their appearance; and we dread, or warmly expect the consequences of their resolutions after they depart the stage. The illusion would not be sufficiently strong, if we did not suppose the dramatic persons equally accountable to the powers above us, as we are ourselves. This Shakespear has taken care forcibly to impress upon his audience, in making the ghost of the murthered king of Denmark, charge his son not ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... We thought, at first sight, that these luminous points, which floated in the air, indicated some new eruption of the great volcano of Lancerota; for we recollected that Bouguer and La Condamine, in scaling the volcano of Pichincha, were witnesses of the eruption of Cotopaxi. But the illusion soon ceased, and we found that the luminous points were the images of several stars magnified by the vapours. These images remained motionless at intervals, they then seemed to rise perpendicularly, descended sideways, and returned to the point whence they had departed. This motion ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... transient brass And purify and fine it that it be Worthy God's altar. My beloved friend, Such was your trial; thus have I tempted you With things averse to God, with forms and faiths Outcast and separate from Him. You have seen The whole world's vanities; you have come to know That in this world's illusion is no power Whose love is refuge: even the living death Of cold Nirvana frights you. Thus at last, Knowing that you are powerless, and the world Bare of salvation for your feebleness, You stand on this great threshold; and your eyes That see despair and loneliness shall raise Their ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... that all the planets had moved further from each other, that all objects around us had become larger, that we ourselves had become taller, and that the distance travelled by light in the duration of a vibration had become greater, we should not hesitate to think ourselves the victims of an illusion, that in reality all these distances had remained fixed, and that all these appearances were due to a shortening of the rule which we had used as the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... violent fusillade greeted it. There was firing from the streets, windows, courts and roofs. I followed it through my field glass, and for a moment I thought it had been hit, for it paused in its flight. But this was an optical illusion.... The plane simply flew higher, having without doubt heard the sound of the fusillade and the bullets having perhaps whistled too close to the pilot's ears. When he was almost over my post, a light white cloud appeared under its ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... unionism. To secure for the workers advances of wages, which economic conditions justify, sooner than would otherwise have been obtained, is certainly no trivial or contemptible function. But it is none the less an illusion to suppose that the general wage-level can be appreciably and permanently raised by trade union action, except in so far as it increases the efficiency of the workers or incidentally stimulates the ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... we consider to be erroneous and misleading, and a perversion of the original Yogi teachings. This false teaching has taken possession of many of the Hindu teachers and people, and with its accompanying teaching of "Maya" or the complete illusion or non-existence of the Universe, has reduced millions of people to a passive, negative mental condition which undoubtedly is retarding their progress. Not only in India is this true, but the same facts may be observed among the pupils of the Western teachers ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... respects satisfactory. The States General were in the best temper; the troops, the provisions and the magazines were in the best order. Every thing was in readiness for an early campaign. William received the intelligence with the calmness of a man whose work was done. He was under no illusion as to his danger. "I am fast drawing," he said, "to my end." His end was worthy of his life. His intellect was not for a moment clouded. His fortitude was the more admirable because he was not willing to die. He had very lately said to one of those whom he most loved: "You know that I never ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... kind cannot arise without a divine fiat.' Doctor Hibbert adds in a note—'A short time before the vision, Colonel Gardiner had received a severe fall from his horse. Did the brain receive some slight degree of injury from the accident, so as to predispose him to this spiritual illusion?'—Hibbert's Philosophy of Apparitions, Edinburgh, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... business, usually do little more than procure a good comfortable living, with incidental education, to those who engage in them. That the majority of the inhabitants of Southern California will become rich by the culture of the orange and the vine is an illusion; but it is not an illusion that twenty times its present population can live there in comfort, in what might be called luxury elsewhere, by the cultivation of the soil, all far removed from poverty and much above the condition of the majority of the inhabitants ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... that in those days we had no Cavalry opponent to encounter, and that our sphere of action, owing to the want on our side of an adequate equipment of firearms, was small indeed in comparison with what we must expect in the future. We are encouraged in our illusion by the fact that in our Peace manoeuvres the strength of the opposing forces is generally nearly equal, and also because the actual demands War will make upon the Arm are still in these exercises very ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... the endless cycle of disease and misery would cease, and a new dawn of hope burst with blinding radiance upon weary humanity. And then a mood of unbelief would darken my mind and I would view the creation of the bacillus as an idle and vain dream, an illusion never to be realized.... ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the expanse of yellow broadened as luncheon went on. Perhaps it actually did. Perhaps an atmosphere of illusion was created by the port which followed an excellent bottle of sauterne. Yellow is a cheerful colour, and Sir Bartholomew's waistcoat increased the vague feeling of hopeful well-being ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... and between meal-times the Joy liked to spread her toys on it. She wore her hair cut in the Dutch fashion, and sometimes at the end of the day, as I sat by the waning embers and watched her moving to and fro between me and the fading autumn fields, I had the most precious twilight illusion of having stepped backward at least ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... happy are they for whom night exists, near whom people are shouting, making noise, beating drums; who may sit on a chair, with their feet hanging down, or lie with their feet outstretched, placing the head in a corner and covering it with the hands in order to create the illusion of darkness. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
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