"Evanescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision, and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in an ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... introduce, at the same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... many of these precocious classics are there who do not endure, and who are so only for a while! We turn round one morning and are surprised not to find them standing behind us. Madame de Sevigne would wittily say they possessed but an evanescent colour. With regard to classics, the least expected prove the best and greatest: seek them rather in the vigorous genius born immortal and flourishing for ever. Apparently the least classical of the four ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think. And now the first endeavor to remember. And now a partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained its dominion, that, in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... French statesmen and churchmen, was rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to herself, she opened her boxes, put her things away in drawers and wardrobe, arranged her books within easy reach of the low chair Hesper had sent for from the drawing-room for her, and sat down to read a little, brood a little, and build a few castles in the air, more lovely than evanescent: no other house is so like its builder as this sort ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... but he is not, like many persons who are proud of that title, un indifferent in matters of human fortune. His earlier poems, of course, are much concerned with the matter of most early poems—with Lydia and Cynthia and their light loves. The verses of his second period often deal with the most evanescent subjects, and they now retain but a slight petulance and sparkle, as of champagne that has been too long drawn. In a prefatory plea for M. De Banville's poetry one may add that he "has loved our people," ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... evidence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recognizes at one time, not at another,—discerns when it is calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, or the sudden ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... change in her, but was too gross in his nature, too blind in his passion, and too vain in his imagined power, to comprehend it. She was a woman, and had her whims, he thought. Whims were evanescent, and this particular whim would pass away. He was vexed by seeing the boy so constantly with her. He met them walking together in the street, or straying in the park, hand in hand, or caught the lad looking at him from her window. He could not doubt that all this intimacy was approved by Mr. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... looked at her in speechless wonder. The eyes so wavering and downcast were now fixed, and steady, and burning with a passionate clear light; there was a fiery flush on her cheek, not brief and evanescent; her ripe red mouth was half open, shewing the snow white teeth biting the lower lip in the excitement of her feelings. Her whole form seemed to be dilated and more ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... servants of the King of Tyre and came to Solomon's court. And amidst these black-haired children of grey-headed Time stood the old house of Oneleigh. I know not how many centuries had lashed against it their evanescent foam of years; but it was still unshattered, and all about it were the things of long ago, as cling strange growths to some sea-defying rock. Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, too, were tapestries of many colours, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... butcher approached the same table and seated himself after the manner of the carter. It was only when the dusty baker came along and repeated this procedure, preserving the same silence, that Carmichael's curiosity was enlivened. This curiosity, however, was only of the evanescent order. Undoubtedly they were socialists and this was a little conclave, and the peculiar manner of their meeting, the silence and mystery, were purely fictional. Socialism at that time revolved round the blowing up of kings, of demolishing established order. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... they inhere are, inconceivable and contradictory. They must therefore be the property of the Divine mind; states of the everlasting intellect; ideas of the Lord and Ruler of all things, and which come before us as realities,—so forcibly do they contrast themselves with the evanescent and irregular ideas of our feeble understandings. We must, however, beware, above all things, of regarding these Divine ideas as mere ideas. An idea, as usually understood, is that from which all reality has been abstracted; but the perception of matter is a Divine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Ashton from the girl her family and friends ordinarily knew. The evanescent dimple had disappeared entirely and also the indolent expression in her golden brown eyes. She was frowning and her lips were ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... for in Science every onward step is at least certain gain, but in Art every step is groping, and success is only another form of effort. Art, in so far as it is more divine, is more unattainable, more evanescent, more unsubstantial. It needs as much patience as Science, and the passionate devotion of an entire life is as nothing in comparison with the magnitude of the work. Self-sacrifice, self-distrust, infinite patience, infinite disappointment—such is ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... much instruction or delight, and why most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are transmitted[107] by tradition. We know how few can pourtray a living acquaintance, except by his most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser features of his mind; and it may be easily imagined how much ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... convey the same idea, nothing would be more natural than to use the graphic form of delineation which is also above described. It was but one more and an easy step to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air pictures that still in pigments or carvings preserve their skeleton outline, and in their ideography approach, as has been shown above, the rudiments of the phonetic alphabets that have been constructed by other peoples. A transition stage between gestures and pictographs, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... success; this is the pride of life." But there is really nothing glorious about possession. It may be most inglorious and mean,—as {8} mean when the possession is brains or power as when it is bonds or wheat. Indeed, there is rarely much that is glorious or great about so slight or evanescent a thing as a human life. The glory of it lies in its being able to say, "The glory that thou hast given me I give to them." The worth of life is in its transmissive capacity. In the wonderful system of the telephone with its miracle of intercommunication there is, as you ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... fill up the interstices of the more important story, so our pages will be interspersed with trifles that have no other object than the moment's approbation—an end which will never be sought for at the expense of others, beyond the evanescent smile of a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... tell me that you are pleased, when your friends inform you of your faults. I am ignorant what they are; but I am sure they must be such evanescent trifles, compared with your personal and mental accomplishments, that I would despise the ungenerous narrow soul, who would notice any shadow of imperfections you may seem to have, any other way than in the most delicate ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... precautions. Welbeck had placed the book in his collection, purposing some time to peruse it; but, deterred by anxieties which the perusal would have dissipated, he rushed to desperation and suicide, from which some evanescent contingency, by unfolding this treasure to his view, would ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... passion and charm of the poem cast its spell over them both as they followed the fate of the unhappy lovers through the heart-ache of their evanescent dream. ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... taste for tapestry and embroidery is thus past; the long labours of the loom have ceased. Cloth-work, crape-work, chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. A taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the glowing and faithful ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... which appears in Parliament and in the country upon all foreign questions. Nobody understands and nobody cares for them, and when any rare and occasional notice is taken of a particular point, or of some question on which a slight and evanescent interest is manifested, Palmerston has little difficulty in dealing with the matter, which he always meets with a consummate impudence and, it must be allowed, a skill and resolution, which invariably carry him through. Whether the policy ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us. Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... alterations brought on by the facility of communicating knowledge; the systematical manner in which men pursue their interests, and other changes: give reason to hope that, in the present situation of things, those possessions may be rendered permanent, that have hitherto been found to be so evanescent ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... transcendent excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable, faults,—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them; he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity and baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever, like Rembrandt, knew how to improve an ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... compared to immeasurable, never-beginning, and never-ending eternity; a drop of water in the great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds; a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent, oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation, which is to subsist for ages and ages to come; oppose itself to that long line of posterity which, issuing from our loins, will endure during the existence of the world? Forbid it, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... cirrus above and beneath cumulus—various kinds of cirrus clouds, and that peculiar prismatic haze which is a common sign of the passage of a vortex. The appearance depicted above is a very common, although a very evanescent appearance. When the sky appears of a clear blue through the cirri, there will be generally fresh gales without any great electrical derangement; but if the clear spaces are hazy, gradually thickening towards the nucleus, a storm may be expected. Any one who wishes to understand the ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... pulled various journalistic wires, resulting in the suppression, in the newspapers, of the hopeless facts of his case. He did not intend, he decided, to have his boy think of him as tied to an invalid's couch. Then, knowing something of human nature, and of the evanescent character of childish fancies, he ordered shipped to Russia a variety of American mechanical toys, calculated to swell the proud bosom of the small boy who received them. This shameless bid for continued favor met with immediate success. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... enforced association with this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders, but this did not diminish Mary's joy over her restored first-born. Even its utter absence of features was no defect in a family where features were as evanescent as in hers, and the most ordinary student of evolution could see that the "Amplach" ninepins were in legitimate succession to the globular-headed "Misery." For a time I think that Mary even preferred her to the others. Howbeit it was a pretty sight to see her on a summer afternoon sitting ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... confirmed that he had ever known in his life." But though this too, was true, she hardly looked it. No one could have pointed out any sign of malady about her; only one would have said that there was nothing of her. And the colour on her face was so evanescent that he who watched her was inclined to think that she herself was like her colour. And she moved as though she was always on the vanishing point. "I'm very fond of eating," she had been heard to say. "I know it's vulgar; but it's true." No doubt she was fond of eating, but so is a sparrow. ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... children are under no kind of restraint, but pure as the fire, free as the winds, honest and open as the face of heaven. Their joys incessantly flow in the thickest succession, and their griefs only seem fleeting and evanescent. To the calls of nature they are only attentive. They know no voice but hers. Their obedience to all her commands is prompt and implicit. They never anticipate her bounties, nor relinquish her pleasures. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... on to say—the following circumstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... image hovering in the air? But this would have been incompatible with the law of gravitation and with the earthly materials of which our bodies are framed. Frequently, what is praised in art as ideal is really nothing more. But this would give us nothing more than airy evanescent shadows incapable of making any durable impression on the mind. The Greeks, however, in their artistic creations, succeeded most perfectly, in combining the ideal with the real, or, to drop school terms, an elevation more ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... spoke, there broke out behind the camp a sudden radiance which leaped from the horizon far up the sky. It had in it the scintillation of the diamond, for the flickering brilliance changed from pure white light to evanescent blue and rose. Spreading in a vast, irregular arc, it hung like a curtain, wavering to and fro and casting off luminous spears that stabbed the dark. For a time it blazed in transcendental splendor, then faded and receded, dying out with unearthly glimmering ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete—of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern lights, than in the better ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... There was a continual swell of guests dashing down and dashing away, like the ocean; brilliant as its foam, numerous as its waves. But there was one permanent inhabitant of this princely mansion far more interesting to our hero than the evanescent crowds who rose like bubbles, glittered, broke, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty—beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be largely incommunicable. "It cannot be imparted to another," says my father. The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent, inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often be found vapid. This ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... traits of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing instance of this occurred in Paris, where a Syndicalist organ[36] ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... kindly dispositions, and was much cherished for his intelligent and interesting conversation. In person he was strong built, and his complexion was fair and ruddy. He was not undesirous of reputation both as a poet and prose-writer, and has recorded his regret that he had devoted so much time to evanescent periodical literature. His poetry is replete with patriotic sentiment, and his strain is forcible and occasionally brilliant. His songs indicate a fine fancy and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... death? Their tears over graves dry sooner than the dews. It is melancholy to compare the depth, the endurance, the far-sighted, anxious, prayerful love of a parent, with the inconsiderate, frail, and evanescent affection of the infant, whose eyes the hues of the butterfly yet dazzle with delight. It was the night of their flight, and in the open air, when Philip (his arms round Sidney's waist) told his brother-orphan ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... directly behind me and gave all the light there was in the room, and yet the impression was in no respect that of a picture. Not for a moment did this interpretation occur to me, strongly as did the evanescent character of the head militate against the idea of reality. The fading was most rapid at the occiput, and may be said to have begun there, extending to the right and upward. There was no background or accessory of any kind, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... delicate in art - More delicate than Summer or than fall (Even as rugged man is more refined In vital things than woman). Winter's touch On Nature seemed most beautiful of all - That evanescent beauty of the frost On window panes; of clean, fresh, fallen snow; Of white, white sunlight on the ice-draped trees. Winter, though rude, is delicate ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the centre, was Russian—was Cossack—strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal. You could not think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and vivid, as full of energy as a healthy baby that kicks its dresses ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... alas! more fleeting have I seen Than wither'd leaves driv'n by the autumn gust:— Yea, evanescent as the whirling dust Is man's brief passage o'er this ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... and that they are getting in good measure in the non- fiction and part-fiction sections of the magazines. But they also seek, as all men seek, some literature. If, instead of imposing the "formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mechanism—and a good one—adapted for speedy and evanescent effects), if, instead of imposing the "formula" upon all the subjects they propose to have turned into fiction, the editors of these magazines should also experiment, should release some subjects from the tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its cult has kept out, the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. "He may be affiliated to the police," was the thought that passed through his mind. "Who could tell?" But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped, famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... kneeling of the West, still represented by the curtsy, we pass Eastward, and note the attitude of the Mahometan worshipper, who not only kneels but bows his head to the ground, we may infer that the curtsy also is an evanescent form of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... a single distinct glimpse of her, definite, precise, and this glimpse was enough. Hilma had changed. The change was subtle, evanescent, hard to define, but not the less unmistakable. The excitement, the enchanting delight, the delicious disturbance of "the first ball," had produced its result. Perhaps there had only been this lacking. It was hard to say, but for that brief instant ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... true place of miracles is to attract attention, to prepare to listen to the word. They are only introductory. A faith may be founded on them, but, on the other hand, the impressions which they produce may be evanescent. How subordinate then, their place at the most! And the one thing which avails is a living contact of heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... is as much more important than that of flowers as the imperishable gem is itself more enduring than the withering, the evanescent blossom. A gentleman may not with safety present to a lady a gem of whose accompanying sentiment he is ignorant. But with the language of gems understood between them, how could a sentiment be more exquisitely or more acceptably expressed than by ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... inquiries into Greek and mediaeval art, I was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that some, remaining to us ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the study of eloquence; and the perusal of Cicero's "Hortensius" (which unfortunately has been lost in the vicissitudes of time) stirred his soul to higher flights and begot a noble enthusiasm for the imperishable beauty of wisdom, made him impatient of the evanescent hopes of men, and carried him onward to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the Pacific life is of to-day; the past is dead, and the future when it comes will pass as to-day is passing. Life is a dream, an evanescent thing, all but meaningless, and real only as is the murmur of the surf when the sea-breeze comes in the morning, and man awakens from the oblivion ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... he saw him, and pulled something from his pocket. It was a watch, a repeater, in a gold filigree case of exquisite workmanship, with raised figures depicting the loves of an Arcadian shepherd and shepherdess; and, as it lay on the white hand of its owner, it bore an evanescent fragrance that seemed to recall scenes as beautiful and as completely past as the ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... be set over against the other in sterile abhorrence; nor yet that love of country and of kindred is incompatible with that toward the Supreme of thought; but it is that each of these lower, shallower, evanescent forms of emotion is and must be lost in, subordinated to, that highest form to which these words have reference. Reconciliation, not ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was already to be seen with a bottle of Pommery in each hand, and was only prevented from instantly uncorking them by the representations of his mistress and an elaborate exposition of the peculiar and evanescent virtues of champagne. Ali was humming a mysterious song about a lovesick camel-man, with which he intended to make glad the hearts of the assembly when the halting time was over. And the dining-table ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... wishes for solid happiness must rest on a broader base than that afforded by momentary enjoyment, tempting and blooming as the foliage of summer, but evanescent ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... founded on Helmholtz's splendid hydrodynamical theorems, seeks for the properties of molecules in the ring vortices of a uniform, frictionless, incompressible fluid. Such whirling rings may be seen when an experienced smoker sends out a dexterous puff of smoke into the still air, but a more evanescent phenomenon it is difficult to conceive. This evanescence is owing to the viscosity of the air; but Helmholtz has shewn that in a perfect fluid such a whirling ring, if once generated, would go on ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... and directed the hunt, I decided that he was cleverer than Rad had given him credit for. I went down stairs with my eyes and ears wide open prepared for further revelations. The problems of my profession had never led me into any consideration of the supernatural, and the rather evanescent business of hunting down a ha'nt came as a welcome contrast to the very material details of my recent forgery case. I had found what ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... objects in which we had previously failed to recognise the beautiful. To perform that duty effectually is perhaps the highest of artistic merits; and though we may complain of Hawthorne's colouring as too evanescent, its charm grows upon us ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of a hybrid character; partly of Anglo-Saxo, and partly of British origin. If so, the first syllable is obvious enough, "half" being generally pronounced as if the liquid were considered an evanescent quantity, "ha'f, heif, hav'," &c., and "iwrch" is the British word for a roe-buck. Dropping the guttural termination, therefore, and writing "ior" instead of "iwrch," we have the significant designation of the ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... but cipher, naught, or zero," Bobby observed suddenly, as he came strolling into the room at Sally's side. "You aren't a cipher, Miss Gannion. They're either evanescent or tubby, according to whether you look at their moral or their physical proportions. You don't fit either measurement. Therefore you aren't a cipher. Therefore you count. How do, Arlt? No; don't get up from the piano. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... passionate love may not be necessary in marriage, but, at least, you will admit that there should be no repugnance. Our position will not be without its dangers; in a country life, such as ours will be, ought we not to bear in mind the evanescent nature of passion? Is it not simple prudence to make provision beforehand against the calamities incident to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... was, could not forget the sight of ninety thousand dollars' worth of gold bullion he had once seen piled up at North Bloomfield, and so was persuaded to gamble with his earnings. He had lost as much as Mack. How rosy is the rainbow, and how evanescent the pot of gold at the end of it! California had swallowed up more wealth than its gold could ever repay, as Keeler well knew. It was only occasionally that some lucky devil, or some prudent, saving man like Robert Palmer, after thirty years ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... gravity; she had met it before in the course of her experiments. One of the grievances harboured by Miss Millicent Chyne against the opposite sex was that they could not settle down into a harmless, honest flirtation. Of course, this could be nothing but a flirtation of the lightest and most evanescent description. She was engaged to Jack Meredith—poor Jack, who was working for her, ever so hard, somewhere near the Equator—and if Guy Oscard did not know this he had only himself to blame. There were plenty of people ready to tell him. He had only ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with my father's habits, as described by himself. When a difficulty or an objection occurred to him, he thought it of paramount importance to make a note of it instantly because he found hostile facts to be especially evanescent. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... into the glass clearly, transparently, heavily, but still and cold as death. There was no sparkle, no cheap ebullition, no evanescent bubble. Yet it was so clear, that, but for a faint amber-tinting, the glass seemed empty. There was no aroma, no ethereal diffusion from its equable surface. Perhaps it was fancy, perhaps it was from nervous excitement; ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... so positive, were superficial and evanescent,—audible, visible, and, as it were, physical. There was always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,—that subtile, mysterious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... statesmen, kings, and warriors. The young ladies certainly bore some resemblance to the type of American girl which one never fails to meet in travelling. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, pretty with the delicate evanescent beauty of too many of our girls, and all gifted with the loud voices, shrill laughter, and free-and-easy manners which so astonish decorous English matrons and maids. Ethel was evidently impressed with their style, as they had a man and maid at their beck and call, and every sign ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... scenery which, like that of Gustave Dore's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the other species "by its inferior size, total absence of crest on its head, neck, and shoulders, by its longer tail, by the white collar of the neck being evanescent; and lastly by the inferior size and smaller quantity of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... transitory as the wind, as evanescent as the rainbow, and as tender as spring violets, is hard to portray with pen, and for that reason the summer-day nature of Alice Page is but faintly outlined. When on the morning of her departure from Boston she stood beside the train exchanging the usual good-by ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... words and sentences. Whatever could be done by adjusting points is therefore silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... untroubled assurance. While he was speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man's back—a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick—had moved through the space of seven minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is, every detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a murmur ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ran up swiftly before the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings they seemed to rest on the evanescent spray. Their images—long-legged little figures with gray backs and snowy bosoms—were seen as distinctly as the realities in the mirror of the glistening strand. As I advanced they flew a score or two ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a deified rainbow, which was given this group of plants by the ancients, shows a fine appreciation of their superb coloring, their ethereal texture, and the evanescent beauty of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... no ice-machine, and no electric light, and no water supply but the cistern of the heavens, and but one public room, and scarce a bedroom apiece? But, of course, it is well known that I have made enormous sums by my evanescent literature, and you will smile at my false humility. The point, however, is much on our minds just now. We are expecting an invasion of Kiplings; very glad we shall be to see them; but two of the party are ladies, and I tell you we had to hold a council of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps, visions of enchanting lands, and in their dreams feasted at those wonderful tables which hungry children see only in sleep, to the poor woman sitting at the failing fire there came no surcease of sorrow, and no vision threw even an evanescent brightness over the hard, cold facts of her surroundings. And the reality of her condition was dire enough, God knows. Alone in the wilderness, miles from any human habitation, the trails covered deep with snow, her provisions exhausted, ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... but of a quite different character to any we had seen before. They darted about like a comet, coming from the side by the harmonium, or near the fireplace. They were evanescent, and apparently of diffuse luminosity, within which was a nucleus of light, not, however, visible to me. We had some ten or twelve of these, some more brilliant than others, some visible both in the looking-glass and in the glass of the book-case, and they were showing ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... I asked, "that the one great drawback throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is the lack of permanent evidence? It has always been evanescent, perishable. It always rests solely upon the word of witnesses. But if I could show you a film print, then you could not doubt the existence ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... the dead is not a mere figure of speech. Heaven lies about us not only in our infancy, but all our lives. We blind ourselves with dust, and in our blindness lay hold feverishly of the outside of life, mistaking the fugitive and evanescent for the truly permanent. If we only used our capacities we would take a more enlightened view of death. We would see it to be the entrance into a more radiant and a more abundant life not only for the friend that goes first, but ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... enervate, enfilade, enigmatic, ennui, enunciate, environ, epicure, epigram, episode, epistolary, epitome, equestrian, equilibrium, equinoctial, equity, equivocate, eradicate, erosion, erotic, erudition, eruptive, eschew, esoteric, espousal, estrange, ethereal, eulogistic, euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, explicit, expunge, extant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... indeed, for two young people like Mrs. Adams and myself, who have just begun to keep house, to inherit a famine, and such a robust famine, too. It is true that I should not have set my heart upon such a transitory and evanescent terrestrial object like a pumpkin pie so near to T. Tooterson, imported pie soloist, doughnut mastro and feminine virtuoso, but I did, and so I returned from ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye |
