"Unsubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... M. Joyeuse had had the courage to say no. Was it not better to die of hunger than to enter the service of an unsubstantial house whose books he might some day be called upon to examine as an expert before ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a vague, unsubstantial odour that floats about, mocking every effort to identify it. It is the will-o'-the-wisp of my olfactive experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent, and I seldom find such a one lively or entertaining. On the other hand, one who has a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... that, together with the lamp, did not drive the magician to despair; but magicians are so much used to misfortunes that they do not lay them to heart, but still feed themselves, to the end of life, with unsubstantial notions and chimeras. ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... of the coincident burning of the woman and the toad was regarded as damning proof, nor is there any reason to believe that the court deemed it necessary to go behind the mere say-so of a single witness for the fact. Along with this sort of unsubstantial testimony there was presented a monotonous mass of spectral evidence. Apparitions of the witches were the constant occasions for the paroxysms of the children. In another connection it will be observed that this form of proof was becoming increasingly common in the last part of the seventeenth ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... ostentation is considered as arrogant and vain. Pageant and pageantry are inferior to pomp, denoting spectacular display designed to impress the public mind, and since the multitude is largely ignorant and thoughtless, the words pageant and pageantry have a suggestion of the transient and unsubstantial. Parade (L. paro, prepare) is an exhibition as of troops in camp going through the evolutions that are to be used in battle, and suggests a lack of earnestness and direct or immediate occasion or demand; hence, in the more general sense, a parade is an uncalled for exhibition, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... footman and outriders, and who would be made welcome at all the grand functions of life, while the Cinderellas were relegated to the chimney corner. And the godmother must come out of fairy land, if she came at all, and transformed one with a wand. That was why the glories were so unsubstantial, and why the dream must end ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... the occupant of this room come what may, happen what may. No terrors, real or unsubstantial, shall drive me from it: I will brave them all, and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... lifeless and grotesque abortions, how many monstrous and destructive chimeras. There is no place for any of these fanciful dreams in the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... personal attack on the bishop-elect, and warning the Scottish bishops of the unknown evils that would follow on his consecration. The manly uprightness and good sense of Bishop Skinner dispersed these unsubstantial mists of detraction if not of malice, and he thus disposed of the unworthy attempt to injure Seabury and intimidate his consecrators: "I cannot help considering the whole of this intelligence as a mean and silly artifice ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... mind was well stored with sailors' yarns, retells in The Phantom Ship (1839) the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. At one time the doomed vessel is an unsubstantial vision, which can pass clean through the Utrecht; at another she is a real craft, whose deck can be boarded by mortal men. The one-eyed pilot, Schriften, with his malignant hatred of the hero, Philip, is a terrifying figure. The story is embroidered ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, fairy place; That is fit home ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new, and full of natty little devices. It worked with the lightness of something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large double-pointed case-rack, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... facts, Gabriella was frankly skeptical about the practical value of either her social position or her wealthy acquaintances. Neither possession impressed her at the moment as marketable, except in the vivid imagination of Madame, and her social position, at least, was constructed of a very thin and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the prudent streak in her character, she rested her hope not upon incorporeal possessions, but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that must be clothed. Her imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely more, she suspected, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... its length and breadth, like a map. There was the level horizon, which told of the sea on the east and south, the well-known hills of New Hampshire on the north, and the misty summits of the Hoosac and Green Mountains, first made visible to us the evening before, blue and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds which the morning wind would dissipate, on the northwest and west. These last distant ranges, on which the eye rests unwearied, commence with an abrupt boulder in the north, beyond the Connecticut, and travel ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... cannot be comprehended by those who know nothing about the spiritual world and its influx into the natural world. Such think that angels can have no power because they are spiritual and are even so pure and unsubstantial that no eye can see them. But those who look more interiorly into the causes of things take a different view. Such know that all the power that a man has is from his understanding and will (for apart from these he is powerless to move a particle ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... dignified the body and glorified human faculties, these facts seemed to the monophysite mind improbable, and, if true, devoid of religious significance. It came natural to him to explain Christ's body as a phantom. He was prepared to regard the human nature as unsubstantial. The mystic's view of matter, of sense and human existence characterises the ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more unsubstantial than usual. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... not only no River, when you stand where by day is its foreshore; there is no London. Then, looking out from Limehouse, you might be the only surviving memory of a city that has vanished. You might be solitary among the unsubstantial shades, for about you are only comets passing through space, and inscrutable shapes; your neighbours are Cassiopeia and the ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... other.—They are in reality, one the detailed and particular, the other the comprehensive and universal aspect of the same world of duty and virtue. Morality without religion is a cold, dry, dreary, mass of disconnected rules and requirements. Religion without morality, is an empty, formal, unsubstantial shadow. Only when the two are united, only when we bring to the particular duties of ethics the infinite aspiration and inspiration of religion, and give to the universal forms of religion the concrete contents of human ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... that you forget your Master. Its joys may compel Him to hide His face, and may so fill your eyes that you do not care to look at His face; and so the sweet bond may be broken, and the consciousness of a living, loving Jesus may fade, and become filmy and unsubstantial, and occasional and interrupted. Do you see to it that what the world cannot do by violence and directly, it does not do by its harlot kisses and its false promises, tempting you away from the paths where alone you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... bitterly agitated. It was a vision of ignorant purity and unconsciousness rising before him, airy and glowing as a child's soap-bubble, which one touch might annihilate; but he felt a strange remorseful tenderness, a yearning admiration, at its unsubstantial purity. There is something pleading and pitiful in the simplicity of perfect ignorance,—a rare and delicate beauty in its freshness, like the morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the heat, no second morning can restore. Agnes had imparted to her confessor, by a mysterious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... had kept sounding its alarm to rise and seek Romley; and though at length she obeyed in a panic, she went as one walking in sleep. The front of the cathedral, as she came beneath its shadow, overhung her as a phantom drawn upon the morning sky, its tall towers unsubstantial, trembling against the light, but harmless even should they fall upon her. She entered as one might pass ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... men who would say these things are not natural; but if we could see all the fine relationships of one being to another, if the mortal eye refined could view the unsubstantial as well as the substantial world, could mark the keen sympathies and near associations, and all the essences which fill up the apparent gaps between being and being, we should see, undoubtedly, that these things are most natural, and wonder at the blindness with ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal obligation to meet the material ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... him until yesterday, when the office boy came in and told me a beggar child insisted on seeing me. What was my astonishment when it proved to be our goblin boy, who had been sent to ask me to come to his father; and his father was O'Meara! It all seemed as unsubstantial as a dream. I went with the child, of course. He guided me through the dark entry where I had seen him so often, in behind a great printing house, to a foul court hidden away from the street like ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... intellect—seemed, for more than fifty years, to have wholly withdrawn himself from the only field of his permanent distinction. The world heard enough of his gorgeous palace at Cintra (described in Childe Harold), afterwards of the unsubstantial pageant of his splendour at Fonthill, and latterly of his architectural caprices at Bath. But his literary name seemed to have belonged to another age; and, perhaps, in this point of view, it may not have been unnatural ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... was all but empty, unsubstantial, imperfect; incapable, then, of much life from within itself, little helped by thoughts or other aid from without. The efforts made by others to operate on it were faithful, kindly, well meant, but not adapted to its individuality. The fact is, that, so far as they had any supposed basis on system, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... with a swift smoothness, carried her along the Embankment towards the lattice bar of Charing Cross bridge and the remoter towers of the Houses of Parliament, grey now and unsubstantial against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her particular issues in life. But they were no longer the big exasperatingly important things that had seemed to hold her life by a hundred painful hooks before she went into the cathedral. They ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here and there across the sod, with a peculiar noiseless, effortless motion that made them seem as calm, lazy, and unsubstantial as the mist through which they made their way; even the sound of passing wagons was a sort of low, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the house by the time he had finished, and stood for a moment on the doorstep before entering. In Nellie's heart was such a joy that words would not come to her lips. She felt she must be asleep, and would awake to find it only an unsubstantial dream. But Stephen's arm around her, and his strong presence near, assured her that it was ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... unsubstantial nature of their food, they were comparatively strong and robust, as they proved in many a personal tussle with ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... quaking, treacherous bog, with its population of designing beaver; indeed, they would be certain to be lured by the bright, glittering green of the liverwort that clad the level where the ground was most unsubstantial. ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... afforded in obtaining loans from European capitalists, who were seized with the same speculative mania which prevailed in the United States, and the large importations of funds from abroad—the result of stock sales and loans—no one can be surprised at the apparent but unsubstantial state of prosperity which everywhere prevailed over the land; and as little cause of surprise should be felt at the present prostration of everything and the ruin which has befallen so many of our fellow-citizens in the sudden withdrawal ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... a manly and well-constituted mind, which is itself desirous to will its freedom. The memory of Augusta had long faded from Josiah's thoughts, or was remembered only as a pleasing, but melancholy and unsubstantial dream, while he was straining forward in pursuit of a yet nobler and coyer mistress, in ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In air their unsubstantial masonry. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of the State came back responses showing that the whole people felt as deeply as the citizens of San Francisco, the loss they had sustained: But sorrow was not suffered to expend itself in respectful but unsubstantial mourning emblems; and while a great multiture, from five o'clock in the afternoon to a late hour in the night, were slowly and sadly passing through the room in Montgomery Block in which their friend lay cold ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... powder-post, methinks,—which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. They do not walk without their bed. Some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are for them everlastingly settled,—as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... declared the One Thing to be Fire, but Fire of a mystical nature, "self-kindled and self-extinguished," the vital quickening power of the universe. It was that Universal Life, by participation in which all things have their being, and apart from which they are unsubstantial and unreal. This is the "Tree of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves—why is this phantom more terrible ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... seemed to find a dreamy enjoyment in working this vein of reminiscence. He sat back in his low arm-chair, his unsubstantial face turned meditatively towards the Magdalen, his hands brought together to support his delicate chin. Helwyse, apprehending that the vein might at last bring the dreamer down to the present day, encouraged ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the Forge hammer. God, how the imperfections persisted! But, he told himself savagely, in the end the metal was steadfast. He would, certainly, overcome her natural revulsion from what she had just heard. The colour had left her cheeks, violet shadows gathered about her eyes; she seemed more unsubstantial than ever. He would repay again and again the suffering he had brought her. Having declared himself he was almost tranquil; there was a total absence of the impetuous emotionalism of youth, the blind tyranny of desire. His ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... characterize the deliberate, Sovereign act of that people as a 'perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.' If you cherish these dreams, you will be awakened from them, and find them as unreal and unsubstantial as others in which ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... of an ordinary fire can still be a thing of wonder to the man whose mind is open to receive impressions even from the commonplace. How illusive it is!—dancing, darting, flickering, flashing—appearing, disappearing—unsubstantial yet active and almost miraculously potent. The effect upon the mind of primitive man must have been keen and vivid to the highest degree, and must have produced results of corresponding ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... wilderness in the great West, and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places. The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... shadows of this world, which the realities? Many a one, it may be, will find to his sorrow, when the great day shall come, that the hard, selfish, narrow fact, the reality after which his whole life was a chase, a struggle, is but the shadow of a shade; the unsubstantial good, the scholar's or the poet's dream, which he scorned as an empty nothing, is an immortal truth, an everlasting and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... I learned, love, that something had been said or done during your journey,—or perhaps only something thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, drives men to madness and self-destruction. I used to know well ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... plant corn, or beans, or potatoes? Surely he must have been able to do something. Had it never happened that he did some good by mistake? Perhaps that would answer the purpose. Or had he been the mere shape and appearance of a man, and nothing more? He had vanished like a shadow; was he as unsubstantial? Were they not mistaken in supposing he had lived among them! ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life, seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power'; Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of delightfulness, and, to those ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the one now inscribing his emotions certainly achieved a wide popularity, and wore his fig leaves with becoming modesty, he has never since been quite free from an overhanging doubt that the compliments and genial remarks with which he was assailed owed their modulation to an unsubstantial atmosphere of two-edged significance which for a period enveloped all whom he approached; as in the faces of maidens concealed behind fans when he passed, the down-drawn lips and up-raised eyes of those of fuller maturity, the practice in ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... distant meteoric glimpse of happiness as thou hadst formerly, thy beacon-light might be rekindled, thy hope fished up from the ocean in which it has sunk, and thou thyself, good knight, restored to the exercise and amusement of nourishing thy fantastic fashion upon a diet as unsubstantial as moonlight; for, if thou stood'st tomorrow fair in reputation as ever thou wert, she whom thou lovest will not be less the daughter of princes and the elected ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... banks "Her limbs extending. There her very griefs, "Pour'd with her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... natural and justifiable. After all, this second theory of inconstancy rested upon the first theory of supposed love, and that upon guesses and surmises, so that the whole edifice was just as shadowy and unsubstantial as it could well be. But then it is curious to see how much real torment people manage to extract ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... scanty nor unsubstantial, but evidently hastily prepared, being chiefly broiled slices of beef, on which salting had begun; but there was a lack of bread, even of barley, though there ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hero! scoop the soil, op'ning a trench Ell-broad on ev'ry side; then pour around Libation consecrate to all the dead, First, milk with honey mixt, then luscious wine, 630 Then water, sprinkling, last, meal over all. Next, supplicate the unsubstantial forms Fervently of the dead, vowing to slay, (Return'd to Ithaca) in thy own house, An heifer barren yet, fairest and best Of all thy herds, and to enrich the pile With delicacies such as please the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... riches were especially envied and honored. He had been reared in the lower walks of life among a people peculiarly given to arbitrary social distinction and to aristocratic pretensions as positive and tenacious as they were often ill-founded and unsubstantial. From the ranks of the rich and the aristocratic in the South, Johnson had always been excluded. Even when he was governor of his State or a senator of the United States, he found himself socially inferior to many ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably ...
— Progress and History • Various
... years apart, link themselves immediately to each other. Thus, when we have been intensely engaged with any matter before we fell asleep, we often resume the very same train of thought the instant we awake and the intervening dreams vanish into their unsubstantial obscurity. It is the same with dramatic exhibition: our imagination overleaps with ease the times which are presupposed and intimated, but which are omitted because nothing important takes place in them; it dwells solely on the decisive moments placed before it, by the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... fame is?" exclaimed the romantic boy. But he paused, convinced in a moment of the perfect futility of attempting to convey an idea of the unsubstantial phantom to the old man's intellect. Perhaps the old farmer was the better philosopher ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... "Smith is the man in the street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... you have the better reason on your side, Edith," replied her husband, his manner very much subdued. "But it is difficult for me to unclasp my hand to let fall therefrom the natural good which I can see and estimate, for the seemingly unreal and unsubstantial good that, to your purer vision, looms ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... singular to us, but is an instance of a common enough Hebrew idiom, and is equivalent to saying—he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is gone again ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was the natural product of these untoward conditions. His was a naturally observing mind, Rabelaisian in its strength and tendencies, but confused by the multiplicity of things, the vastness of the panorama of life, the glitter of its details, the unsubstantial nature of its forms, the uncertainty of their justification. Born a Catholic, he was no longer a believer in the divine inspiration of Catholicism; raised a member of the social elect, he had ceased to accept the fetish that birth and station presuppose any innate superiority; ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... his part in the great tragedy of revolution, the end of which is not yet. His mission was to give a lesson to sovereigns and people, to humble hereditary power, and to prove by his own career the unsubstantial character of a government which deludes the popular will that creates it. During his captivity, he understood the true causes of his overthrow, and talked of them with an intelligence which misfortune had saddened down into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... that seems now to be more unsubstantial than the fabric of a dream. I cannot think of Clara or of my mother without despair. For oh, Herbert, between me and them there seems to yawn a dishonored grave! Herbert, they talk, you know, of an attack ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... interposition of the State legislatures be necessary to give effect to a measure of the Union, they have only NOT TO ACT, or TO ACT EVASIVELY, and the measure is defeated. This neglect of duty may be disguised under affected but unsubstantial provisions, so as not to appear, and of course not to excite any alarm in the people for the safety of the Constitution. The State leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the appearance of explaining away Christianity altogether, or at least of making it rest upon the most shadowy and unsubstantial grounds, there is no wonder that it called forth a vehement opposition: no less than thirty-five answerers appeared within two years of its publication, among whom are found the great names of T. Sherlock, Zachary Pearce, S. Clarke, and Dr. Chandler. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... grows dimmer, and the forms of the digger-singers seemed suddenly vague and unsubstantial, fading back rapidly through a misty veil. But the words ring strong and defiant through ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... into the far Orient by the French, or the English, or any other heretical nation. This scheme—which as it proceeds acquires, like a soap-bubble, great size and brilliant coloring, and proves equally unsubstantial and transient—is signed by the governor, bishop, superiors of the religious houses, and a long array of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... a week, the young man with the eyeglasses scarcely seemed real, so that when Cis gently suggested that Johnnie had never met any leader, he was hardly able to protest that he had. By the end of a fortnight, his newest friend merged with that unsubstantial company made up of David, Aladdin, Uncas and all the rest. Then Johnnie took to telephoning him over the clothesline. Also, when Cis was home, the scout leader had a part in all those elaborate social ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... him the feeling that life is sweet and must be cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him; he embraces the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst; for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies which strive ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... her inner self and the scene without, whether in the skies and air and sunset, or in the abodes of men stretching far and near till lost amid the roofs and domes of the great city, she had fixed and riveted the link of a sympathy hitherto fluctuating, unsubstantial, evanescent, undefined. Absorbed in her revery, she did not notice the deepening of the short twilight, till the servant entering drew the curtains between her and the world without, and placed the lamp on the table beside her. Then she turned away with a restless ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... whole phenomena of so-called male superiority bears a certain stamp of spuriousness and sham. It is to natural history what chivalry was to human history; ... a sort of make-believe, play, or sport of nature of an airy unsubstantial character. The male side of nature shot up and blossomed out in an unnatural, fantastic way, cutting loose from the real business of life, and attracting a share of attention wholly disproportionate ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... condition was too much improved! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of his rank and calling; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places, even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, on certain festival days, to dress the images of the saints in peasant's clothing. History tells us of all kinds of peasant insurrections, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... exert such a spectralness .. over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves —why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as mode of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial that they are not easily retained or recovered. What can be known, will be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has much; but when an authour has engaged ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... shining on the limes, and the fresh green leaves seemed to thrill and shiver with life: a lazy breeze kept up a faint soughing, a white butterfly was hovering over the pink may, the girls' shrill voices sounded everywhere; a thousand undeveloped thoughts, vague and unsubstantial as the sunshine above us, seemed to blend with the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... what was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... summer sky, after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand; the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory. The beings of Greek, mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls which ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... and squares of the beautiful old town. Wisps of pink cloud were tangled in the narrow streets, against a background of intensely blue sky. The high-roofed burgher houses, with their decorated fronts, had an "unsubstantial faery" look, under the strange rich light; and the front of the Cathedral, with its single delicate spire, soared, one suffusion of rose, to an incredible height above the narrow ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... like a mighty river. So the Swedes, whose eyes were utterly deluded, were deceived by their misjudgment, for it seemed the roaring of an extraordinary mass of waters. Thus, the conqueror dreading the unsubstantial phantom of the waters, the Finns managed to escape. They renewed the war again on the third day; but there was no effective means of escape left any longer, for when they saw that their lines were falling back, they surrendered to the conqueror. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... been more discontented if all the wealth about her had been as unsubstantial as a dream. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to forget that by so doing they generate an unseen force which some day rends that power into pieces. The dumb fury of the downtrodden finds its awful support from the universal law of moral balance. The air which is so thin and unsubstantial gives birth to storms that nothing can resist. This has been proved in history over and over again, and stormy forces arising from the revolt of insulted humanity are openly gathering in the air ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial. Tradition may err about dates, details, and names. It is just here that antiquarian research can render valuable help. But there are occasions when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... the books had Sidney Richmond's name printed on the title-page instead of written on the flyleaf. It was a thick little volume of poems, published in his college days—musical, unsubstantial, pretty little poems, every one of which the girl Sidney loved and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fantasy a shape As of one crucified, whose visage spake Fell rancour, malice deep, wherein he died; And round him Ahasuerus the great king, Esther his bride, and Mordecai the just, Blameless in word and deed. As of itself That unsubstantial coinage of the brain Burst, like a bubble, Which the water fails That fed it; in my vision straight uprose A damsel weeping loud, and cried, "O queen! O mother! wherefore has intemperate ire Driv'n thee to loath thy being? Not to lose Lavinia, desp'rate thou hast slain thyself. Now hast thou lost ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... rapture was still mixed with apprehension, that all he had seen and heard was no more than an unsubstantial vision, raised by some gay delirium of a disordered imagination. While his breast underwent those violent, though blissful emotions of joy and admiration, his friend the Castilian spent the night in ruminating over his own calamities, and in a serious and severe review of his own conduct. ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... in his era we hear of no other priest than he. It will not avail to call him a heathen, because he personifies the sun and addresses it; and what if his heroes did "worship the ghosts of their fathers," their thin, airy, and unsubstantial forms? we worship but the ghosts of our fathers in more substantial forms. We cannot but respect the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed somewhat, and are inclined to say to the critics, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... who stood ready to flatter the empress at any price, undertook to realize, and he built her a city in the fashion in which cities were built in the times of the Arabian Nights, and made it flourish in the same unsubstantial fashion. The magnificent Potemkin never hesitated before any question of cost. Russia was rich, and could bleed freely to please the empress's whim. He therefore ordered a city to be built, with dwellings and edifices of every description common to the cities of that date,—stores, palaces, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... acceptance of his proposition. In their written replies, submitted a few days afterward, two thirds of them united in a qualified refusal, which, while recognizing the President's patriotism and reiterating their own loyalty, urged a number of rather unsubstantial excuses. The minority replies promised to submit the proposal fairly to the people of their States, but could of course give no assurance that it would be welcomed by their constituents. The interview itself only served to confirm the President ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... of his journey in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands, interspersed with apple-orchards. Here the trees, timber or fruit-bearing, as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged by their drip and shade, stretching over the road with easeful horizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequate support for their limbs. At one place, where a hill is crossed, the largest of the woods shows itself bisected by the high-way, as the head of thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting. The ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... educated in affluence; and if he touched nothing but L5000 and some very pretty ringlets, that was not his fault. Sir Franks, too, mixed his pure stream with gold. As yet, however, the gold had done little more than shine on him; and, belonging to expectancy, it might be thought unsubstantial. Beckley Court was in the hands of Mrs. Bonner, who, with the highest sense of duty toward her only living child, was the last to appreciate Lady Jocelyn's entire absence of demonstrative affection, and severely reprobated her daughter's philosophic handling of certain serious subjects. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... alone in my chamber, but these themes have taken such hold of my imagination, that I cannot sleep. The room in which I sit is just fitted to foster such a state of mind. The walls are hung with tapestry, the figures of which are faded, and look like unsubstantial shapes melting away from sight. Over the fire-place is the portrait of a lady, who, according to the housekeeper's tradition, pined to death for the loss of her lover in the battle of Blenheim. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... appear, is the only reality; it is eternal and passeth not away. The material in nature is only the garb of the spiritual, as speech is the clothing of thought. With our vulgar standards we often think of the thought as the unsubstantial and the shadowy, and the speech as the real. But speech dies upon the passing wind; the thought alone remains. We consider the sound to be the music, whereas it is only the expression of the music, and vanishes away. Behind the material world, which waxes old as a garment, there is an eternal ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... sense of selfish property in the whole scheme of Nature, the delicious discovery of the virtues of solitude, the loveliness of this most gay and youthful earth, and the tones of the pleasant-voiced and often surly sea fill me with joy and embellish hope—vague and unsubstantial—for is not this Isle the "place where one may have many thoughts and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... mechanism which had captured us sat at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... said came alongside the ships came to beg and not to give. For, in all the ten days of our stay there, we could not buy ten fanegas of rice; and if they brought anything it was cocoanuts, bananas, tamalle, and other articles of the fruit kind, of very unsubstantial and ordinary quality. This will prove to be the truth, rather than what is said in opposition thereto. And when we arrived at these islands, we were in great need of food, as we had on board the fleet nothing but biscuit—and even that in small quantity, as it ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... assumed. Then Baron Zeuill, with Brigit on his arm, followed. The Baron looked grave—too grave for the happy circumstances. Brigit seemed as pale as the lilies on the altar; she was less beautiful but more ethereal than usual. There was something frail, transparent, unsubstantial about her that day which Robert had never noticed before. Had the many emotional strains of the last year tried her delicate youth beyond endurance? She seemed very childish, too, and immature. She took Orange's hand when he met her, held it closely, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... looked on a melancholy street. The unsubstantial houses tried to seem—not respectable, no word so honest could be applied to them, but—genteel, and failed even in that miserable ambition. Percival used to watch the plastered fronts, flaking in the sun and rain, old while yet new, with no grace of bygone memory or present strength, till he fancied ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... oh, the comfort of being in some one's charge, of having a determined man in uniform to look after one! And yet even now there was to Mrs. Bunting something dream-like, unsubstantial ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief. The real Princess of Hans Andersen's story, who passed a miserable night because there was a small bean concealed beneath the twenty eider- down beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... gigantic pines, their tops, above the mist, all glowing in the morning light. The two passengers regarded this scene in silence, impressed by its savage beauty. The little pier at which they landed, neglected and unsubstantial, seemed barely strong enough to ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... it, and it is only afterwards that he perceives his chain is by this means newly forged. Emilia has fixed ideas on the usefulness of men of this sort, and puts them very clearly before Lord C. Only unsubstantial favours must ever be granted them, in order that the favours by which they see their rivals profit, may not give them too gloomy suspicions. They are very useful for defending publicly their mistress' honour; they must if ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... through the household. Julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... bird singing, or a leaf fluttering, that might not tend to direct his destiny or give warning of what was in store for him; and he watches the world of nature around him as the astrologer watches the stars. So closely is he linked with it that his guardian spirit, no unsubstantial creation of the fancy, is usually embodied in the form of some living thing—a bear, a wolf, an eagle, or a serpent; and Mene-Seela, as he gazed intently on the old pine tree, might believe it to inshrine the fancied guide and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... through the quadrangle of the schools, which, fresh as it was from the hands of the restorer, rose into the air like some dainty white piece of old-world confectionery. For the windows are set so lightly in the stone-work, and are so nearly level with the wall, that the whole great building has an unsubstantial card-board air, as if a touch ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hemispheres may enable us to do for mental traits. Only the superficial never changes its expression; the appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer. In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is unsubstantial. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of syllogisms, our hearts die within us. The hopes of men, placed in one scale to be weighed, seem to fly up against the massive weight of her evidence, placed in the other. It seems as if all our arguments were vain and unsubstantial, as if our future expectations were the foolish dreams of children, as if there could not be any other possible verdict arrived at upon the evidence ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de societe. The lines presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage—the whole teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men. The pervading characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book contained. It was placed at the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... blue sky the shining, ice-clad peaks of Kinchinjunga, a hundred miles away, towered high in air. Mystic, lovely, they seemed to float above the earth, as unsubstantial as the clouds from which they rose. They belonged to another world, a fairy world altogether apart from the rugged, tumbled masses, the awe-inspiring precipices and tremendous cliffs, of the nearer mountains. These were majestic, overpowering, but plainly of this earth, unlike the pure, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... 1677, complained of the No Popery cry, they replied that there was no question of religion, but of liberty. In the case of Oates and his comrades, the political motive faded into insignificance beside the religious. At first the evidence was unsubstantial. Oates was an ignorant man, and he obtained credit only by the excitement and distrust caused by the discovery of the premeditated coup d'etat. Godfrey, the magistrate who conducted the inquiry, warned James that the secretary of the Duchess of York, was implicated. His name was Coleman, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... frequent anonymous communications for the Morning Chronicle relative to these matters, and being unwilling to occupy the paper with vague and unsubstantial conjectures or remarks on a subject of such importance, I am induced to apply directly to yourself as an authentic source of information. I do this with the more confidence, from a persuasion that you can have no wish to suffer false reports to circulate ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... against the fever mosquito. That festive insect carries on a surreptitious guerrilla warfare low down. The English "mosquito boot" is simply an affair like a riding boot, made of suede leather, with thin soles. It is most comfortable. My objection is that it is unsubstantial and goes to pieces in a very brief time even under ordinary ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... Korosko had been taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned—all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances—were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Haifa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... short-sighted and credulous old men. But somehow or other I have strayed away from the friendship of the perfect, that is of the "wise" (meaning, of course, such "wisdom" as human nature is capable of), to the subject of vulgar, unsubstantial friendships. Let us then return to our original theme, and at length bring that, ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... obliterate, extirpate. Adj. inexistent[obs3], nonexistent &c. 1; negative, blank; missing, omitted; absent &c. 187,; insubstantial, shadowy, spectral, visionary. unreal, potential, virtual; baseless, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubstantial &c. 4; vain. unborn, uncreated[obs3], unbegotten, unconceived, unproduced, unmade. perished, annihilated, &c. v.; extinct, exhausted, gone, lost, vanished, departed, gone with the wind; defunct &c. (dead) 360. fabulous, ideal &c. (imaginary) 515, supposititious &c. 514. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... their religious opinions, met with arms in their hands, and by the side of the torrent discussed, with a turbulence which the noise of the stream could not drown, points of controversy as empty and unsubstantial as ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the death of the nobleman she had loved. It is certain that, after his death, she never regained her spirits, and that a deep melancholy was visible in her countenance. All her actions showed a deeply-settled inward grief, and that she longed for death, having tasted the unsubstantial nature of human greatness. She survived the execution of Essex two years, but lived long enough to see the neglect into which she was every day falling, and to feel that, in spite of all her glory and power, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... position, from which she never fully receded until compelled to do so by force of arms. But the colonists looked at the matter from a different point of view. They held the right of ownership by discovery to be unsubstantial; it was a mere sentiment—a matter of national pride and prestige—not to be valued when it came in conflict with the natural right conveyed by actual emigration and settlement. The man who transferred himself, with his family and property, to a virgin country. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... for so many years the abode of domestic joys, the shrine of literature, the centre of friendship and hospitality. On his arrival at Edinburgh, Wilson, already famous, though young, finding fame an unsubstantial portion for a man with a family, looked about him for something more tangible, and determined to get his livelihood by the law. Kit North a lawyer, eating bread earned by legal sweat! The very idea seems comical enough. Yet it cannot be doubted, that, with his intellect, energy, eloquence, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... abrogate &c 756; destroy &c 162; take away; remove &c (displace) 185; obliterate, extirpate. Adj. inexistent^, nonexistent &c 1; negative, blank; missing, omitted; absent &c 187; insubstantial, shadowy, spectral, visionary. unreal, potential, virtual; baseless, in nubibus [Lat.]; unsubstantial &c 4; vain. unborn, uncreated^, unbegotten, unconceived, unproduced, unmade. perished, annihilated, &c v.; extinct, exhausted, gone, lost, vanished, departed, gone with the wind; defunct &c (dead) 360. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of Roosevelt at Harvard, almost as unsubstantial as this. Late in his Senior year we had a committee meeting of the Alpha Delta Phi in Charles Washburn's room at 15 Holworthy. Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the College Yard and chatted together in the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... your company so interesting before; and I shall be equally frank in saying that—I have never been able yet to believe half the tales I have heard about the mysterious discovery of buried treasure. There is something so unsubstantial about most of them. Of course, there may be ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... it in a mist, or rather as a mist with dissolving outline; and as he saw the thing as a mist, so he ever and anon mistakes a mist for the thing. But Erasmus and Saavedra were equally indistinct; and shallow and unsubstantial to boot. In fact, till the appearance of Kant's 'Kritiques' of the pure and of the practical Reason the problem had never been accurately or ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... is rotten before it is ripe, it may be the emblem of sensual pleasure, which palls before it confers real enjoyment. The goldfinch is remarkable for the beauty of its plumage, the sprightliness of its movements, and its gay, tinkling song, and may be supposed to represent the showy and unsubstantial character of frivolous pleasures. The nightingale's sober outward appearance and impassioned song denote greater depth of feeling." The poem throughout is marked by the purest and loftiest moral tone; and it amply deserved Dryden's special recommendation, "both for the invention ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... check of $50, as a slight token of regard from our absent trio. As I hardly need tell you, the lion's share of this birthday gift is sent by my father, but neither mother nor I will admit that in the unsubstantial, and yet I hope not valueless part of the offering, the personal regard and appreciation of your noble work for woman which accompany it, our contribution is any less than his. I remain yours ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... rock that wrecked the Talleyrand ministry, and it destroyed more solid structures than that unsubstantial phantom. The plan was statesmanlike, and it marks the summit of Necker's career. But he neglected to communicate with men whom he might well have trusted, and the secret was fatal, for it was kept twelve hours too long. As the princes had refused the use of their riding-school, there were only ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream—a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"—filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... of a national instinct, so powerful and so accurate that statesmen of every school, willing or unwilling, have found themselves carried along by a tendency which no individuality can resist or greatly modify. Both unsubstantial rumor and incautious personal utterance have suggested an impatient desire in Mr. Gladstone to be rid of the occupation of Egypt; but scarcely has his long exclusion from office ended when the irony of events signalizes his return thereto by an increase in the force of ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... as an Argument, that the Authors of them were of Opinion, [such [9]] Characters might have a Place in an Epic Work. For my own part, I should be glad the Reader would think so, for the sake of the Poem I am now examining, and must further add, that if such empty unsubstantial Beings may be ever made use of on this Occasion, never were any more nicely imagined, and employed in more proper Actions, than those of which ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... spectacle. Against the background of the enormous room, drowned in shadow and hardly lighted save through the round window from without, where the moon was climbing upward in a deep blue sky, a typical operatic sky, the famous dancer's figure stood out all white, a light, airy unsubstantial ghost, flying, rather than springing, through the air; then, standing upon her slender toes, upheld in the air by naught but her outstretched arms, her face raised in a fleeting attitude in which nothing was visible but the smile, she came quickly forward toward the light, or receded with little ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. Only ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... that the story of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline's lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline. There was no opening for love. But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... would shed every drop of blood in his veins for me, will not open up before me the least corner in his heart. Friendship, I repeat, is nothing but an unsubstantial shadow—a lure, like everything else ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... unsubstantial.8 Some of these people, however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridge pictures ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that Scotchmen should have the same privileges as Englishmen, and that Irishmen ought to have the same privileges as both Englishmen and Scotchmen." The sentiment was received with cheers. He further said: "I consider that the Union was but a parchment and unsubstantial union, if Ireland is not to be treated, in the hour of difficulty and distress, as an integral part of the United Kingdom; and unless we are prepared to show, that we are ready to grant to Irishmen a participation in all our rights and privileges, and to treat them exactly as ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... man. There was no reason for doing so, however, since the subject is not essentially in David at all, but in the linked fortunes of a number of people grouped around him. David's consciousness, if we watched it instead of listening to his story, would be unsubstantial indeed; Dickens would be driven to enrich it, giving him a more complicated life within; with the result that the centre would be displaced and the subject so far obscured. A story is damaged by too much treatment as by too little, and the severely ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... anxiously expected; for, if the truth must be told, they were very hungry. So rigorous was the economy in this decayed but honorable house that the wax candles burned to-day in the oratory had scrimped their dinner, unsubstantial as it was wont to be. Think of that, you in fustian jackets who grumble after meat. The door opened, Jacintha reappeared in the light of her candle a moment with a tray in both hands, and, approaching, was lost to ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... the thousands of Kirton armed with a forest of sturdy cudgels, wherewith to terrify the bourgeoisie. Still, Francois had made up his mind to trust Jimmy Medland, in spite of sundry shortcomings of faith and practice, and having sworn by his foi—which, to tell the truth, was an unsubstantial sanction—to obey his leader, he loyally, though regretfully, promised that there should be no sticks; for, "If sticks appear," the Premier had said, "I shall not ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... aerial, aeriform, ethereal, atmospheric, pneumatic, unsubstantial; breezy, windy, ventilated; visionary, unreal; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... her; he dared not give it her. She could not cope with him. It made him ashamed. So, secretly ashamed because he was in such a mess, because his own hold on life was so unsure, because nobody held him, feeling unsubstantial, shadowy, as if he did not count for much in this concrete world, he drew himself together smaller and smaller. He did not want to die; he would not give in. But he was not afraid of death. If nobody would help, he would ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... However, that unsubstantial shadow, a name, is often more durable than the thing, especially in rural parts; but, indeed, what is there in a name for Time's teeth to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... North, for it was whilst there that he began the beautiful replica of his Proserpina, now the property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry, every line of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... asphodels, the cranberries and blueberries and bilberries, and the wonderful green mosses in all the wetter places; and, above and around all, the great mountain chains veiled in pale, ethereal atmosphere, and rising in it as airy and unsubstantial as if they could tremble in unison with every thrill of the ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... detached from the main body and put on the sick list, embarking to conquer a neighbouring kingdom, is ridiculous enough, and at the time of publication must have had great effect. The artist seemed sensible that it was necessary to account for the unsubstantial appearance of these shadows of men, and has hinted at their want of solid food, in the bare bones of beef hung up in the window, the inscription on the alehouse sign, "Soup maigre au Sabot Royal," and the spider-like officer roasting four frogs ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... gesture as he answered her, for he saw that she could be fanciful, too. "Unsubstantial moonlight, glamour, mystery—perhaps other things as well," he said. "If you are curious, why shouldn't ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... crown. It was in one of these lines that the immense and envied employment he now holds came to a certain duke,[42] who is now probably sitting quietly at a very good dinner directly under us, and acting high life below stairs, whilst we, his masters, are filling our mouths with unsubstantial sounds, and talking of hungry economy over his head. But he is the elder branch of an ancient and decayed house, joined to and repaired by the reward of services done by another. I respect the original title, and the first purchase of merited wealth and honor through all its descents, through ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... distance, were the clustered huts of a native village, and towards the reef was a canoe, sharply silhouetted, in which were a couple of natives fishing. Then, beyond, you saw the vast calmness of the Pacific and twenty miles away, airy and unsubstantial like the fabric of a poet's fancy, the unimaginable beauty of the island which is called Murea. It was all so lovely ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham |
