"Impalpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and empty paunch. One felt that this man's mind was destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought, just as a fruit is eaten by a worm. His craze, his idea was there in his brain, insistent, harassing, destructive. It wasted his frame little by little. It—the invisible, impalpable, intangible, immaterial idea—was mining his health, drinking his blood, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... occurred at dawn, when every one but the sentries was asleep. But even at that hour the harbour was strictly guarded. An enemy, to enter unseen, would have to be impalpable, invisible.... ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... there was a powerful machine which could work infallibly from the small to the large and the large to the small. With Whistling Dan there was no suggestion at all of mental care. She could not imagine him worrying over a problem. His knowledge was not even communicable by words; it was more impalpable than the instinct of a woman; and there was about him the wisdom and the coldness of Black ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... pleasure "that the chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, has been derived from studying the well-known and admirable 'Principles of Geology.'" He was already noting the diffusion of minute organisms and impalpable dust by winds,[4] and was much surprised to find in some dust collected on a vessel 300 miles from land particles of stone more than a thousandth of an inch square. After this, he remarks, one need not be surprised at the diffusion of the far lighter and ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... fresh from the Court of Navarre, and smelling of the lore of their foreign 'Academe,' or hot from the battles of continental freedom,—it was there, in those reunions, that our Poet caught those gracious airs of his—those delicate, thick-flowering refinements—those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding—those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. It was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travelled ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... words he uttered the hermit disappeared! The effect was so sudden, aided, in all likelihood, by the dimness and obscurity of the cell, that, to the astonished apprehension of De Whalley, Ulphilas had made himself more impalpable than the air he breathed, sinking like a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... come in contact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language or gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In its true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable shiver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and break and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is ceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is already change, since it continues and grows ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... note of the hermit thrush breaking out of the heart of the forest; the soulful melody of the nightingale, pathetic with unappeasable sorrow. In the Forest of Arden, too, there were unspoiled men and women, as indifferent to the fashion of the world and the folly of the hour as the stars to the impalpable mist of the clouds; men and women who spoke the truth, and saw the fact, and lived the right; to whom love and faith and high hopes were more real than the crowns of which they had been despoiled and the kingdoms from which they had been ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... wide awake, and the sky was changing. That which had seemed a mist now appeared more like a fine dust, that swept across the heavens and dimmed the desert sky. It occurred to him that he was at the bottom of a fairly deep canon and that that impalpable dust meant wind, A little later he heard it,—at first a faint, far-away sound like the whisper of many voices; then a soft, steady hiss as when wind-driven sand runs over sand. A hot wind sprang up suddenly and swept with a rush down the night-walled canon. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... she may to maintain her freedom, her integrity, there is always,—sometimes impalpable, sometimes not—a steady, remorseless pressure on her, forcing her unwillingly to take frightened cognisance of men;—take into account their inexorable desire for domination; the subtle cohesion existent among them which, at moments, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... tenderest sensibilities, for I was very much in love. I was also not a little disturbed when, supplemental to my reminiscences, Mary went back to the past and humorously drew pictures of me as her own early lover. There is considerable difference between the impalpable, airy spirit of the fancy and a wrinkled and austere ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." That cry of St. Augustine has found its echo in unnumbered souls, and our humanity will never be satisfied while it is offered no more than an impalpable abstraction for ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... all Egypt's own, Cairo looked like some dream-city in a forgotten world. The Mokattam Hills were like vast dun barriers guarding and shutting in the ghostly place, and, high above all, the minarets of the huge mosque upon the lofty rocks were impalpable fingers pointing an endless flight. The very trees seemed so little real and substantial that they gave the eye the impression that they might rise and float away. The Nile was hung with mist, a trailing cloud unwound from the breast ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... living. There seemed to be a sort of pressure in it which handled them more and more definitely. The sensation was interesting and acute. Each gave himself to it, and each had a, perhaps deceptive, consciousness of yielding up something, something impalpable, evanescent, fluent. Valentine, more especially, felt as if he were pouring away from himself, by this act of sitting, a vital liquid, and he thought with a ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the lashes of a whip, and beat themselves into tatters on the dry, smooth spot their blows had made beneath them; they seemed ready to turn to flame in the pitiless, furnace-like blast. Everywhere in the air was a silver-white, impalpable mist, which gave to the cloudless sky a whitish cast. The glittering gulls were the only living things that did not move listlessly and did not long for rain. They soared and swooped, exulting in the sounding wind; now throwing ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... unaccountable appearances in the cathedral, in the train, on the steamer—everything was explained. And before that coldly sneering, triumphant face, which bore the look of life, and which I yet knew to be impalpable, I shook with the ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... the world—except by the Masons themselves. Often these writers imply, if they do not actually assert, that our order begged, borrowed, or cribbed its emblems from Kabbalists or Rosicrucians, whereas the truth is exactly the other way round—those impalpable fraternities, whose vague, fantastic thought was always seeking a local habitation and a body, making use of the symbols of Masonry the better to reach the minds of men. Why all this unnecessary mystery—not to say mystification—when the facts are so plain, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but for some casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanched bodies, the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpable white dust of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, a stooped individual with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working a mass of clay over which at intervals he sprinkled water, and at intervals halted to make pliable lumps of a uniform size which he added to a pile wrapped in damp ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... half-scorched herbage still contended against the invasion of the sand, and the huge rocks, that had rolled down from the distant summits, crushed in their fall, had scattered in sharp-edged pebbles which soon again became coarse sand, and finally impalpable dust. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to pieces, and souls set right. He had no faith in your slow, impalpable cures: all reforms were to be accomplished by a wrench, from the abolition of slavery to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... certainty less than fifty. But now, though his hair was black, though his eye was bright, though his step was firm, though his gestures were free and sweeping, I had my doubts; and I thought I could perceive, one after another, many impalpable ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... doesn't matter. For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. In other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all the time inseparable companions. It has been suggested to me that this sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a religious sense, or even a social sense in a seaman. I don't know. It seems to me that a seaman's duty may be an ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... white-faced, he thought she was like a moth herself, fragile and impalpable in the gloom, a moth motionless on a flower, and when he saw her smile he thought the moth was making ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... confessed. The spiritual world seemed near; And close above them, full of fear, Its awful adumbration passed, A luminous shadow, vague and vast. They almost feared to look, lest there, Embodied from the impalpable air, They might behold the Angel stand, Holding the sword in ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the floating rumours concerning the hooded lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them in words. We then gravely called one another to ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... different, too, would have been the fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... just as you see it on the surface—a fine, almost impalpable dust. We had to exercise the greatest care in searching through it, for the moment it was disturbed with a shovel it filled the air with suffocating clouds. Of course we shall have it removed by-and-by, and carted away, but I considered it better to allow it to remain here until we had penetrated ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... impassioned discourses of Fichte, the efforts of the new patriotic league, the Tugendbund, and last, but not least, the memory of the murdered Palm, all these were influences that baffled bayonets and diplomacy. Conquer and bargain as he might, he could not grapple with the impalpable forces of the era that was now dawning. The younger generation throbbed responsive to the teachings of Fichte, the appeals of Stein, and the exploits of the Spaniards; it was blind to the splendours of Erfurt: and it heard with grief, but with ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... three individuals present of a different nation and creed, two closely resembled the others with only that vague, impalpable, but perceptible distinction of those whose rearing affords a superficial growth which overspreads but does not annihilate the original plant. The one was a young man, buoyant, flippant, and reckless ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton. Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier were dissecting the impalpable air and making the gaseous form of substances as familiar and manageable as the solid. Hence true analytic chemistry. Astronomy, an older science, had derived new precision from the first observed transit of Venus, imperfect as were the data ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... impalpable as my broomstick they won't hurt me much," he laughed. And then soberly: "Say, Una, you seem to know a lot more about me than ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... best intentions in the world could not stop further leakages and still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with the pertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled in dry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, and would lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now some fresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... no reply, for I had not yet recovered from the shock of that discovery in the deserted supper room. It was so wholly unexpected and yet it so cruelly confirmed the Inspector's undisguised suspicions that it seemed to me to have created a sort of impalpable barrier between us. Of this Gatton was evidently conscious. He endeavored to arouse my interest in the inquiries which he was conducting in the garage, but for long enough I saw nothing of the place in which we stood; I could only see that ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... glow penetrates my coat to the silky down, the impalpable colorless threads which protect my delicate skin. I feel myself swelling like a cloud. I must quite fill the room. My whiskers seem charged with electricity—a sign that I will sleep—but for the time being, the contemplation of your ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... the charm of poetry and wizardry of fairy lore, all those things which in other parts of the world remind us of a past fertile in legend and song; that is to say, must bid farewell to the attractions offered by the Beyond of History, by the hope of eventually realizing the tangible impalpable realm conjured up in the distance which time has veiled within its mists, and by the expectation of ultimately wresting some relics of antiquity every now and again from the lap ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... conceive the human soul as a little man, mostly invisible and of the bigness of a thumb, who corresponds exactly in shape, proportion, and even in complexion to the man in whose body he resides. This mannikin is of a thin, unsubstantial nature, though not so impalpable but that it may cause displacement on entering a physical object, and it can flit quickly from place to place; it is temporarily absent from the body in sleep, trance, and disease, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; something in his manner had belied his words. Did he not look for her in the morning when she entered—come very quickly to her? She thought of him as she had last seen him looking down the ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators, is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, can not be reached, can not be held to account. Democracy is in peril wherever the administration of political power is scattered among a variety of men who work in secret, whose very names are unknown to the common people. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... are many translations, notably the Elizabethan, which are extremely fine in themselves and memorable examples of English prose. Still they are not the original writings. Something escapes in the translation into another tongue, an impalpable something which can not be held or transmitted. The Bible stands alone, a great literary monument of the noblest and most beautiful English, which has formed English speech and become a part of the language as it is of the thought and emotion ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... disappeared in one of those sandstorms which are so frequent in these regions. The wind called the "tebbad" bears along the seeds of fever in the impalpable dust it raises in its passage. And many are the caravans ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... another's sins." And in each case these are reasonably valid pleas. In the hour of triumph, however, it is certain that the author is apt to be forgotten, and that the lion's share of success is popularly awarded to the players. For the dramatist is a vague, impalpable, invisible personage; whereas the actor is a vital presence upon the scene; he can be beheld, noted, and listened to; it is difficult to disconnect him from the humours he exhibits, from the pathos he displays, from the speeches he utters. Much may be due to his own merit; ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... great hall. The old woman pushed open the great doors upon their creaking hinges and lit up dimly the mighty, cavernous interior with the puny rays of their feeble torch. As they stepped cautiously within, an impalpable dust arose in little spurts from the long-rotted rushes that crumbled beneath their feet. A huge bat circled wildly with loud fluttering wings in evident remonstrance at this rude intrusion. Strange creatures of the night scurried ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all-pervasive, impalpable, blue-gray mist in the air, cold and translucent; and when he came to the foot of the grounds, and faced the western front of the Capitol building, he drew a deep breath of delight. It thrilled him. There it loomed in the misty, winter night, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... day rose up before him, but he seemed to loathe them merely because they had been of so active a character, and now he could not bear to have his brain teased even with their impalpable shadow. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... is simply that the water should move or drift transversely to lines of ore passing, while held in suspension with water, down a smooth sloping surface. In dealing with some very light classes of ore, and especially such as may naturally crush very fine—that is to say, with a large proportion of impalpable "slimes"—there is a decided advantage in causing the water to drift sidelong on the smooth shelf by other means than the motion ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... architects of the Alhambra painted on each of their bricks a graceful little poem; the gypsies adorn each note with melodious designs and luxuriant embroideries. But (we quote M. Franz throughout) who shall describe the impalpable flame of Tzigany sentiment, the strange, subjugating charm of which is a vital animation almost adequate to life itself? or the mysterious equilibrium which reigns in this undisciplined art between the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... Union, originating with some Oxford men in London, was soon reinforced from Cambridge, which had fallen under the inspiring though impalpable influence of Westcott's teaching. Westcott was, in some sense, the continuator of Mauricianism; and so, when Westcott joined the Union, the two streams, of Mauricianism and of the Oxford Movement, fused. Let Dr. Holland, with whom the work began, tell the rest of the story—"We ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... contiguity, juxtaposition, osculation, tangency; taction, tact, palpation; dash, sprinkling, soupcon, infusion; animadversion, censure, stricture, reflection, slur. Associated words: tactile, tactility, tactual, palpable, impalpable, palpability, impalpability. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted, the sunlight metallic and the shadows ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... own horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of death seemed less terrible than that of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... castle-like building, cooing and fretting. The clerks were droning everywhere, scarcely pretending to earn their salaries. Each little sound echoed hollow and loud from the bare, stone-flagged floors, the plastered walls, and the iron-joisted ceiling. The impalpable, perpetual limestone dust that never settled, whitened a long streamer of sunlight ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that I reached out my hand to touch you—but grasped only the impalpable air. All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, seeking in the ways of thought some word of comfort for the human heart, until at last my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real is ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... amount of emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... do not heed the city any more, It has given me a duty to perform. I pass along nonchalantly, Insinuating myself into self-baffling movements. Impalpable charm of back streets In which I find myself: Cool spaces filled with shadow. Passers-by, white hammocks ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... translucent and iridescent with a myriad flecks of turquoise and rose and emerald that found their reflections in the marble walls of the arena or the shining helmets of the legionaries guarding the imperial tribune; and over the whole scene an impalpable veil of gold, made of tiny, unseen atoms that danced in the heat, and merged into an exquisite glowing harmony the russets and the purples, the emeralds and rubies and the trenchant notes of sardonyx and indigo that cut across the orgy of colour like a deep, ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... days, by the aid of the trenchant sunbeam which performed the process for Marsyas. All the world has to submit to it,—kings and queens with the rest. The monuments of Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the same way. We lift an impalpable scale from the surface of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St. Peter's that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it betrays every scratch on the original. We skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... without flirtation was springing up between him and Miss Tancred. In this God-forsaken place they were comrades in boredom and isolation. She had said nothing, but in some impalpable yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the Colonel bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... allayed; thenceforward there is no relenting; and, though the world—nay! Heaven itself!—pour in, along its course, broad tributaries of reclaiming purity, the cloud upon the waters can never be dispelled. The marl and dross of Earth, impalpable, but visibly corrupting, pervade the very nature; and only when the current ceases, will ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... of an "atmosphere," and monstrous fruits of a "bad transcendental atmosphere," the brain reels in the fumes of mixed metaphors. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, "get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott," and, in fact, write about things less impalpable, as Mr. Mallock's heroine preferred to be loved, "in a more ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... significance with which he spoke—no evading the impression that some definitely evil menace lay behind the brief statement of commonplace fact. To Ann it seemed as though some horror, lurking in the shadows of the fire-lit room, had suddenly stirred and were creeping stealthily towards her—impalpable but deadly, nauseous as the poisonous miasma rising from some dark and fetid pool. She shrank back, instinctively putting out her hand as though to ward ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... puzzled Allan, was at last divined by the sure intuition of love. They met frequently at various social gatherings, but it was as though a solid sheet of glass intervened between them. Through this apparently impalpable medium they could see, and smile, and speak, but no tender touch of palm, or breath of love, or thrill of quickened heart-beat could be felt between. How many times had Allan Dunlop been tempted to outstretch his hand and shatter this glassy surface! It were easily done but at the price of possible ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... universal toleration. The new religion was, therefore, not an instrument devised by a faction, but had expanded into the atmosphere of the people's daily life. Individuals might be executed for claiming to breathe it, but it was itself impalpable to the attacks of despotism. Yet the Grand Commander persuaded himself that religion had little or nothing to do with the state of the Netherlands. Nothing more was necessary, he thought; or affected to think, in order to restore ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the English to charge so impalpable an assailant; all they could do was to protect themselves, as far as possible, by shield and coat of mail, while behind the living rampart of steel-clad warriors, the archers returned arrow for arrow, so far as time and numbers ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... to seem dream-like; and she was kind, which was more than he would have dared to hope, and her people, after their first curious chill of indifference, seemed actually to be courting him. She, the fleeting and impalpable dream-love, whom the thought of seeing ever again had been wildly absurd, was now a human creature with a local habitation, the most beautiful name in the world, and two parents whose complaisance was obvious even ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... true. Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... architect shuddered. Next second, though, his face lit up with a thought. "I remember reading that electricity will decompose bone, in time." And then he shuddered again as his foot stirred that lifeless, impalpable ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... deepen all outlines are lost, and we see vaguely the great masses of tone and color; nature becomes heroic; the petty is dissolved; the insignificant is lost; hills and trees and streams are blended in one mighty composition, in the presence of which all but the impalpable soul of man ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... The entire capacity of my thoughts was filled with that eager desire. Then suddenly another fear clutched at my heart: if I went away, Aniela would be exposed to that same impalpable danger from which I wanted to fly. I knew it was only a delusion of my brain, and that really my departure would be the best thing for her. Yet I could not get rid of the sensation that to desert her would be cowardice and meanness. All my reasoning cannot get over this. Besides, the going away ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... whose wing we find defense and shelter, thou art invisible and impalpable, even as night and the air. How can I, that am so mean and worthless, dare to appear before thy ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... of genius,—a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination." Mr. Lowell said also that Poe combined "in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united,—a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,—analysis." In Poe's hands, however, the enumeration of pins and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the public will not see lightly set at naught. Very rigid, for example, are the traditions of the theatre. If my brother were to declaim his lines at the Haymarket in the florotund manner of Macready, what a row there would be in the gallery! It is only by the impalpable process of evolution that change comes to the theatre. Likewise in the sphere of costume no swift rebellion can succeed, as was exemplified by the Princes effort to revive knee-breeches. Had his Royal Highness elected, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... which Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere closed her delicately around, an impalpable wall between her and the commonplace. Even the desiccated, material Professor was aware of this influence and took off his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put them on again ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... pretendeth to be Duke of Guildres. I dare not attempt her."[329] Here we find another princely match proposed. Thus far, to the Lady Arabella, crowns and husbands were like a fairy banquet seen at moonlight, opening on her sight, impalpable and vanishing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... strata undermined by the waters of this ancient strait, were broken up into huge fragments, and these lying scattered on the beach were reduced first to smaller blocks, then to pebbles and lastly to the most impalpable mud, which the tides drifted far into the Eastern ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... clutched a small poplar and hung fast. A driving, blinding, choking, whirling mass of whiteness hurled itself at him, buffeting him heavily, filling eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, clutching at his arms and legs and body with a thousand impalpable insistent claws. For a moment or two he lost all sense of direction, all thought of advance. One instinct only he obeyed—to hold on for dear life to the swaying quivering poplar. The icy cold struck him to the heart, his bare fingers were fast freezing. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... letter had been written, it would have greatly impressed the mind of George. Remorse for the treatment of his wife he could not have felt—he was incapable of any such emotion; and we question whether any appeal to the sentiment of the supernatural, any summons to another and an impalpable world, would have made much impression on that stolid, prosaic intelligence and that heart of lead. Besides, according to some versions of the tale, it was not, after all, a letter from his wife which impressed him, but only the warning of a fortune-teller—a woman who admonished ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... particularly mystical in the effect of the grey, dreamy atmosphere of an arctic night, through whose uncertain medium mountain and headland loom as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world, and as I kept gazing at the glimmering peaks, and monstrous crags, and shattered stratifications, heaped up along the coast in cyclopean disorder, I understood how natural it was that the Scandinavian mythology, of whose mysteries ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky and the wide earth, There was a change: the impalpable thin air 100 And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the sphered world. My vision then grew clear, and I could see Into the mysteries of the universe: 105 Dizzy as with delight ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... wee, petty, minikin[obs3], miniature, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative[obs3], portable; duodecimo[obs3]; dumpy, squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... fence this unpalatable conclusion, is to maintain that the results could not be fully tested in an examination as suggested. Some of these are so fine, impalpable, and spiritual in their texture, that they cannot be seized by any questions that can be put; and would be dropped out if the present system were changed. But results so untraceable cannot be proved to exist ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the silent immensity flowing, Journeying surgelessly on through impalpable ethers of peace. How can I think of myself when infinitude o'er me is glowing, Glowing with tokens of love from the land where my ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... dear friendships which were the solace of his life,—altogether gracious in his speech, if it were not for an apparent bashfulness among strangers; never assuming aught, deferring much to others outwardly, and showing his pride chiefly by a certain impalpable noli me tangere, which just sufficed to make itself felt and obeyed at the first approach of any personal freedom. He was a handsome man,—if an old man near to seventy may be handsome,—with grey hair, and bright, keen eyes, and arched eyebrows, with ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... Empire grew to include practically all of the known world, every waterway, river and ocean, served to spread Roman law, engineering, and ideals of practical efficiency, at the same time bringing back to the heart of the Empire not only the products of the colonies, but such impalpable treasures as the art, literature, and philosophy of Greece. This was the story ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Marcia scented disruption, where that impalpable relationship was concerned. She was ignorant as to Anne's real feelings and intentions in regard to her absentee husband. Anne never mentioned him. She bore his name, she held herself rigidly aloof from all lovers; herein one saw her sole concessions to the tie binding her. Marcia didn't see how ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... if her sweet, clean purity and womanliness took a form of its own which his accustomed senses were too gross to perceive. Only a certain vague tenderness in him went out to meet and receive this impalpable presence; a tenderness not for her only, but for all the good things of the world. Often he had experienced the same feeling when listening to music. Her sweetness, her goodness, appealed to what he guessed must be the noblest in him. And ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... from a burning temperature are augmented in places under the influence of winds, which, arising suddenly, fill the air with an impalpable sand, sometimes circling about a point, sometimes driving with furious force across a wide extent of country. The heated particles, by their contact with the atmosphere, increase its fervid glow, and, penetrating by the nose and mouth, dry up the moisture of the tongue, parch the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth century; the first suggests, the second realizes; the one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies; the Giottesque cares for the figure only, inasmuch as it displays an action, he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an idea; the man of the Renaissance ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... tendency to lose themselves among the mere minutiae of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... under this impalpable distrust, which classed him with the "new fathers" of certain children; and he had a feeling that was at the same time painful and ridiculous, that he was on trial. In olden days the matter might have been settled by ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,—the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are exhalant, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble mankind, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... shining glass beneath a vertical shower of the sun's rays that, at times, rendered the deck almost unendurable. Awnings were stretched and for hours and even days the Wanderer would lie almost motionless, except for the impalpable swell from which the bosom of the ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... stood on the planet whose ruddy hue is at once the admiration and puzzle of astronomers. Its explanation I now recognized in the tint of the atmosphere, a coloring comparable to the haze of Indian summer, except that its hue was a faint rose instead of purple. Like the Indian summer haze, it was impalpable, and without impeding the view bathed all objects near and far in a glamour not to be described. As the gaze turned upward, however, the deep blue of space so far overcame the roseate tint that one might fancy he were still ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... depraved; to be elevated above themselves for a moment is a rare delight to them; and, in the second, there is a deeply implanted leaning in the heart of man toward the something beyond everything, the impalpable, impossible, imperceptible, which he cannot know and will not credit, but is nevertheless compelled to feel in some of his moods, or in certain presences, and having once felt, finds himself fascinated by it, and so returns to the subject for the sake of the sensation. In that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of Fate. Meantime a day again passed—bearing away with it the last shadow of Hope. We gasped in the rapid modification of the air. The red blood bounded tumultuously through its strict ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... a hundred square yards or so, about a hundred and fifty people were sitting or standing. At the end, on a stage, were the musicians, each with a bottle of wine at his feet, from which they refreshed themselves during the intervals. An impalpable dust, raised by the feet of the dancers, filled the air charged with acrid odors. The women in light dresses and bareheaded, and the men arrayed in their Sunday clothes, gave themselves up with frantic ardor ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... found ourselves fairly in the desert. As far as we could see away to the limitless horizon was sand—arid, parched red-brown sand without a vestige of herbage. The wind that was blowing carried grains of it, which filled one's mouth and tasted hot and gritty; again, impalpable atoms of sand were blown into the corners of one's eyes, and, besides, this injury inflicted on the organ of vision was calculated by no means to improve one's temper. However, Omar told me that a beautiful and fruitful land lay beyond, therefore we made light of these discomforts, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... leaned so gently on his arm, that not the slight pressure of her weight, but rather the impalpable shock of bliss her very nearness brought, made him aware of her approach. Toby followed, supporting her along the shelf of rock—a dark cloud in the wake of ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Ferdinand Hoefer (1811-1878), said that Van Helmont was much superior to Paracelsus, whom he took as his model. He had the permanent distinction of revealing scientifically the existence of invisible, impalpable substances, namely gases. And he was the first to employ the word gas as the name of all elastic fluids except common air.[260:1] Van Helmont graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1599, and after several years of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... light from an unshuttered window shone into the apartment and it was in his mind to wait there for Tayoga, but he stopped suddenly at the door and stared in astonishment. A shadow was moving in the room, thin, impalpable and noiseless, but it had all the seeming of a man. Moreover, it had a height and shape that were familiar, and it reminded him ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sun shines upon sings or can be made to sing, and can be heard to sing. Gases, impalpable powders, and woolen stuffs, in common with other non-conductors of sound, give forth notes of different pitches when played upon by an intermittent beam of white light. Colored stuffs will sing in lights of different ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... in the narrative of his voyage in the Beagle, states that while he was at St Jago, one of the Cape de Verd islands, in January 1832: 'The atmosphere was generally very hazy; this appears chiefly due to an impalpable dust, which is constantly falling, even on vessels far out at sea. The dust,' he goes on to say, 'is of a brown colour, and under the blow-pipe, easily fuses into a black enamel. It is produced, as I believe, from the wear and tear of volcanic rocks, and must come from the coast ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... walking, and motioned to the mutes to light us in. We entered into a small chamber similar to the one in which I had slept at our first stopping-place, only instead of one there were two stone benches or beds in it. On the benches lay figures covered with yellow linen,[*] on which a fine and impalpable dust had gathered in the course of ages, but nothing like to the extent that one would have anticipated, for in these deep-hewn caves there is no material to turn to dust. About the bodies on the stone shelves and floor of the tomb were many painted vases, but I saw ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... his senses wandered; now again his mind was calm, And he wrung from out his suffering penitential draughts of balm; Then again his senses left him, and he lay in phrenzy there, Talking wildly in his madness with the dim, impalpable air. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... no native, however daring or however wicked, would ever venture to transgress the narrow line of white coral sand which protected the castaways like an intangible wall from all outer interference. Within this impalpable ring-fence they were absolutely safe from all rude intrusion, save that of the two Shadows, who waited upon them, day ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... superincumbent mass of prejudice, envy, ignorance, folly, or uncongenial force, must ever ensure the deepest sympathy of all those who can appreciate the spirit of its qualities;" let the initiative skyward struggles towards the zenith-abysses of the inane impalpable ——, &c. &c. &c. &c. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... sparkling most conspicuously on the very centre of the arch, and wrote his own insignificant name in its place. This was his fashion of securing immortality! It is well that fairies and giants are powerless in the nineteenth century, else had the indignant genii of the cave crushed his bones to impalpable powder. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and broken in the hole, and a little tin-smith's solder run in to prevent any possible issue for the air. These are charged with a mixture of known quantities of nitre and charcoal, or any other mixture capable of deflagration, reduced to an impalpable powder, and formed into a paste with a moderate quantity of water. Every portion of the materials introduced must be rammed down with a rammer nearly of the same caliber with the barrel, four or ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... impalpable, pervading every part and pore ... Insects of all nauseous descriptions, bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, flies innumerable, gigantic as the empire they inhabit, who will take no denial. This is the land of Pharaoh ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... country boy; and he will, because of his character and office, illumine common needs and homely interests with an ever-refined and spiritual ideal. His ministry, however, cannot be all top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and vital ties ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... whom the people of Barbie made a ring. They pitted the protagonists against each other and hounded them on to rivalry by their comments and remarks, taking the side of the newcomer, less from partiality to him than from hatred of their ancient enemy. It was strange that a thing so impalpable as gossip should influence so strong a man as John Gourlay to his ruin. But it did. The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay's tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... neighborhood church—you're so damn sure. But I'd just like to see you out there, alone, with the moon setting, and all the lights gone tall and queer, and a shipmate—" He lifted his hand overhead, the finger-tips pressed together and then suddenly separated as though he had released an impalpable something into the air. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the spires and towers and roofs ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... called, will continue to occur—be as broad gauge as you will! We accept the situation, therefore, as the French say, and insure; that is to say, we book a bet at very long odds—say, three to a thousand—that we shall be rolled up, cut in two, flattened into a thin sheeting, and ground into an impalpable powder, between Croydon and Brighton. If we arrive safe, the assurance office pockets a few shillings; if we win our wager, our executor ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... gloomily, searching the southern wilderness with frowning, bloodshot eyes, and once more, far to the east where the jagged cliffs of the Superstitions sweep down to the gorge of the Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze—a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep. And as he looked upon it his melancholy gaze changed to a staring, hawk-like intentness; he leaned forward in the saddle and Chapuli stepped eagerly down the slope, head ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... increase. Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like. Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the bran-dust, or fine and dry powder, passing down or up these conductors, may be the kindling cause of the fire in these cases; but bran is not over combustible in itself, nor do we know why it should become so when thus reduced to an impalpable powder. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... subdued the country about Lima where the worship of Con and Pachacama prevailed.[176-2] The local myth represented these as father and son, or brothers, children of the sun. They were without flesh or blood, impalpable, invisible, and incredibly swift of foot. Con first possessed the land, but Pachacama attacked and drove him to the north. Irritated at his defeat he took with him the rain, and consequently to this day the sea-coast of Peru ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... covered from five to six inches deep, with an impalpable dust, so fine that the lightest footstep, or breath of air, sent it in clouds above our heads. So dense was it, that it completely enveloped our whole party, making it impossible for us to distinguish one another, at a distance even of ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... The most careless or matter-of-fact reader must see that the work, like the enigmatical "Faust," deals in types and symbols; that the writer intends to suggest to the mind something more subtle and impalpable than that which is embodied to the senses. What that something is, hardly two persons will agree. The most obvious interpretation of the types is, that in Zanoni the author depicts to us humanity, perfected, sublimed, which lives not for ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... be lonely. In that One Great Spirit meet All things mighty, grave, and sweet. Vainly strives the soul to mingle With a being of our kind; Vainly hearts with hearts are twined: For the deepest still is single. An impalpable resistance Holds like natures still at distance. Mortal: love that Holy One, Or dwell for ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... they might perhaps never see, but whose presence was nevertheless a danger. Conjectures were made about the strange vessel; it became a subject of conversation, a sort of company for them; all longing to see her, strained their eyes in vain efforts to pierce those impalpable white shrouds. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... the atmosphere—impalpable, imperceptible, but all-pervading, and the source of life itself. Most leading decisions of our courts of last resort, involving great constitutional questions, refer to the spirit of our institutions as interpreting our Constitution. It is our institutional law which, flowing like ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... mentioned. After its accession, the best treatment is to freely dust the affected portion of the lips with violet powder, finely powdered starch, prepared chalk, or French chalk or talc reduced to an impalpable powder by scraping ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... above, burst the wind in all its fury. It seemed to beat down into the garden in waves of heat. Huge leaves began to fall from the tree tops and the mast-like trunks bent before the fury from the desert. The atmosphere grew hazy with impalpable dust; and the stars ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... It would be presumptuous for any one, who has not made the Romance dialects his particular study, to attempt a discriminating criticism of these compositions, so much of the merit of which necessarily consists in the almost impalpable beauties of style and expression. The Spaniards, however, applaud, in the verses of Ausias March, the same musical combinations of sound, and the same tone of moral melancholy, which pervade the productions of Petrarch. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to fill the air ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... feeling, of perception, of intellectual grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. In addition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standard of wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effete civilization ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the general outlines of the chasm, without the minor cavities in the sides, of which there were several, each cavity having a corresponding protuberance opposite. The bottom of the gulf was covered to the depth of three or four inches with a powder almost impalpable, beneath which we found a continuation of the black granite. To the right, at the lower extremity, will be noticed the appearance of a small opening; this is the fissure alluded to above, and to examine which more minutely than before was the object of our second visit. We now pushed into ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... often very difficult to trace Rumor to his foundation. His beginning is sometimes as small as a particle of sand; the first dawning of his existence as impalpable ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... upon the sea of mist that filled the valley below and the air above. It revealed naught of the earth, save here and there a headland, as it were, thrusting out its dark, narrow, attenuated demesne into the impalpable main. Further and further one might mark this semblance of a coast-line as the vapor grew more tenuous, till far away the series of shadowy gray promontories alternating with the colorless inlets was as vague of essence as the land of a dream. Near at hand, a cucumber-tree, with its great broad ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and died upon her lips. The beautiful image of her mother, fading slowly from her memory, seemed already a vision so vague, that to name it were to lose it,—an idea too precious and too impalpable to put in words. The past, with all its love and joy and beauty, was becoming for our 'Toinette what we may fancy heaven is to a little baby, whose solemn eyes and earnest gaze seem forever attempting to recall the visions of celestial beauty it has left ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... air-bells, as the beautifully moulded hull yielded to the faint impulse of the soft breathing and began to move under it with the languorous motion of a sleeping swan! Then, as the soft, warm, star-spangled darkness of the tropics closed down upon us and wrapped us within its impalpable folds, the breeze gathered strength and weight by imperceptible degrees, until the scarcely audible tinkle under the bows merged into the sound of a knife shearing through a tautly stretched silken web, with a musical fountain-like plashing at the cutwater and a crisp, gushing curl of the glassy ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... hurl themselves against the stars and at their feet lie black and leaden seas. Above float clouds—white, gray, and inken, while the clear, impalpable air springs and sparkles like new wine. Last night we floated on the calm bosom of the sea in the southernmost haven of Mount Desert. The water flamed and sparkled. The sun had gone, but above the crooked back of cumulus clouds, dark and pink with radiance, and on the other sky aloft ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of large bricks cemented with bitumen, and measuring about 80 centimetres across each face. In the centre of each cube there was a cavity 27 centimetres long by 12 wide and 35 deep. In each case this hollow contained a small bronze statuette packed, as it were, in an impalpable dust. In one cavity the statuette was that of a kneeling man (Fig. 146), in another of a standing woman (Fig. 147), in another of a bull (Fig. 148). At the feet of each statue there were two stone tablets, set in most cases in the bitumen ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... decollete and with bare arms, glittering with jewels like the Queen of Sheba on her visit to the King of Judea. But on the left, one of these large boxes, entirely empty, attracts attention by reason of its curious decoration, lighted from the back by a Moorish lantern. Over the whole assembly is an impalpable and floating dust, the flickering of the gas, that odour that mingles with all the pleasures of Paris, its little sputterings, sharp and quick like the breaths drawn by a consumptive, accompanying the movement of opened ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... in starting at every bush, and hating every old woman for a witch! Mr Sims, from his own intellectual altitude, pronounces these faiths to be "shadows;" he does not believe—not he—in the walking about at night of impalpable white sheets; but if you should happen to be of the same opinion with himself, then the cold-blooded demon of science has seized you for his prey. In this, there are many others who resemble Mr Sims; one often meets with half-educated men and women, who would take it as an affront, an unpardonable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... command the general assent of experts that it is a food at all, and because it is claimed to diminish some of the excretions, call that a delay of metamorphosis of tissue conservative of health! The ostrich may bury his head in the sand, but science will not close its eyes before such impalpable dust." ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... resolve there was growing in poor Imogen a tossing of confused pain and alarm. She could see change so clearly, but causes were untraceable, an impalpable tangle. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... setting in for arbitrary power. The Court will grow bolder and bolder, a struggle will commence, and, if it ends as I wish, there will be Whigs again.... But when these things come to pass, you will no longer be a Warden,[67] but a brown and impalpable powder in the tombs of Dulwich. In the meantime, enough of liberty will remain to make our old-age tolerably comfortable; and to your last gasp you will remain in the perennial and pleasing delusion that the Whigs are coming in, and will expire mistaking ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... an iron instrument into the yaw; such an application would be certain death. In order to open the yaw, you take iron rust reduced to an impalpable powder, and passed through a fine search; you afterwards mix that powder with citron juice till it be of the consistence of an ointment, which you spread upon a linen cloth greased with hog's grease, ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... the softest summer breeze, or the impalpable currents of the calmest day, can be torn asunder with such suddenness and violence, by the accumulated energy that slumbers in the imaginary atoms, as to give forth a sound like the rending of mountains ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... applied to Cancerous ulcers of the face, Lupus or Noli-me-tangere, in the early stage, will in most cases effect a perfect cure, especially if for a week previously the part has been wet daily with tr. Thuja. The best mode of applying the acetate is to mix the impalpable powder, as prepared for paint, with some substance to form a cerate, as equal parts of bees-wax and mutton suet, with 1-50 to 1-100 part of the pure acetate as found in the bottom of the can, when prepared in oil for paint; heat all together and stir until cool. ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... PENETRABILITY OF MATTER: I mean chemistry. In fact, how does what is called chemical composition differ from penetration?[5]. . . . In short, we know matter only through its forms; of its substance we know nothing. How, then, is it possible to affirm the reality of an invisible, impalpable, incoercible being, ever changing, ever vanishing, impenetrable to thought alone, to which it exhibits only its disguises? Materialist! I permit you to testify to the reality of your sensations; as to what occasions them, all that you can say involves this reciprocity: ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Lucien, she had ceased to understand him. An impalpable barrier seemed to have arisen between them. The inner man had became inaccessible. Her mind was not subtle enough to grasp the real explanation of this change in her old lover. Being based upon wrong premises, her inferences were necessarily wide of the truth, and she believed that Sir Lucien ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... doubt whether it is an effect of contour or color. To these charms of feature and person were added others more—an indefinable air of purity which only the soul can impart, and of abstraction natural to such as think much of things impalpable. Often, with trembling lips, she raised her eyes to heaven, itself not more deeply blue; often she crossed her hands upon her breast, as in adoration and prayer; often she raised her head like one listening eagerly for a calling voice. Now and then ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... something almost dignified in this withdrawal into himself. For a moment I entertain an illusion that really I am unworthy to hear the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five, who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper, to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have a dozen ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... suffered much from thirst; and the former had good reason to congratulate themselves on having filled every water-skin at the first halting-place of the preceding day. Clouds of black impalpable dust rose as they rode along. The eyes, mouth, and nostrils were filled with it, and they were literally as black as the ground ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... poison history describes as either a light and almost impalpable powder, tasteless, colorless, and inodorous, or a liquid clear as a dewdrop, when in the form of the aqua tofana. It was capable of causing death either instantaneously or by slow and lingering decline at the end of a definite ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... It was all impalpable, there was nothing openly hostile, no one said anything to which he could take exception—he only wished they would; but he felt the ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... councils, a prince and a prime minister; the restorer of the dynasty under which he fell, the overthrower of the dynasty under which he rose; bearing a charmed life, and passing among the havoc of factions, and even escaping from the wrecks of empire, more like an impalpable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... know very little of arts or sciences, or the powers of nature (which, in other words, are the powers of the author of nature), will laugh at us Cardiganshire miners, who maintain the existence of Knockers in mines, a kind of good natured impalpable people not to be seen, but heard, and who seem to us to work in the mines; that is to say, they are the types or forerunners of working in mines, as dreams are of some accidents, which happen to us. The barometer falls before rain, or storms. If we do ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... he looked and spoke, this was rather impalpable, and Jeffrey began to doubt his own fitness to deal with psychologic quibbles. But his father ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... man in his climacteric years, Thoughts and remembered words have roused from sleep With knowledge that he lacked on lying down: And I, lapped in a trance of reverie, doubt Some spore of episodes Anterior far beyond this body's birth, Dispersed like puffs of dust impalpable, Wind-carried round this globe for centuries, May, breathed with common air, yet swim the blood, And striking root in this or that brain, raise Imaginations unaccountable; One such seems half-implied in all I am, And many ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... displayed on my behalf is quite amusing, not to say affecting; while the others are attending to their horses he squats down before me underneath the little goat-hair tent and gazes at me with an attention so close that one might imagine him afraid lest I should mysteriously change into some impalpable spirit and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... vague, impalpable sense of restraint and captivity seemed closing me in on every side,—I was imprisoned, as I thought, within invisible walls. Then all at once this density of atmosphere was struck asunder by a ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli |
