"Illusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was one at least strongly indicative of the intractable and indurated attachment which put itself forth with such vague and illusive energy on behalf of his son. At length he recovered, and on opening his eyes he fixed them with a long look of pain and distraction upon the ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... would buy wealth and worldly position, and so she cast him off. Yet partly to gratify her own lingering feeling, and partly because she could not wholly renounce what had once been hers, she kept up for years with him just that illusive simulacrum which such women call friendship; which, while constantly denying, constantly takes pains to attract, and drains the heart of ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child; and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his head, which his great height ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... industrious idleness, an attempt at a royal road to information, that habit of attending lectures. Let any man or woman say what he has brought away from any such attendance. It is attractive, that idea of being studious without any of the labor of study; but I fear it is illusive. If an evening can be so passed without ennui, I believe that that may be regarded as the best result to be gained. But then it so often happens that the evening is not passed without ennui! Of course in saying this, I am not alluding to lectures given in special places as a course of ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... the interest he took in the conversation of this seductive creature. He recalled the legends of temptations to which the Evil One used to subject the anchorites of old, by causing to appear before them the attractive but illusive forms of the heathen deities. He wondered whether he were not becoming the sport of the same baleful influence; if, like the Lamias and Dryads of antiquity, this queen of the woods were not some spirit of the elements, incarnated in human form and sent to him ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... known to Columbus or other maritime adventurers of later times, when the veil of mystery was at last lifted from the western limits of what was so long truly described as the "sea of darkness." While the subject is undoubtedly full of interest, it is at the same time as illusive as the fata morgana, or the lakes and rivers that are created by the mists of a summer's eve on the great prairies of ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... was happy and made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him "the illusive ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the purpose in this illusive talk. It argued curious impassivity in Sabina he thought, and he felt jarred to find the conventional attitude of mother to son was not acknowledged by her. Estelle had showed far more feeling, had taken a much more active part in the troubles of Abel. Estelle ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... in the valley, and you might often observe various groups clustered on the green heights above the mansion, the effect of which was most inspiriting and graceful. Sometimes in the twilight, a solitary form, magnified by the illusive hour, might be seen standing on the brink of the steep, large and black against the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... proved to be a girl, but I confess I was strangely embarrassed. My cousin seemed somehow different from any of the other girls I had met. She was not at all like those with whom I had danced at the hotel hops, and to whom I gave my brass buttons in Flirtation Walk. She was more fine, more illusive, and yet most fascinating, with a quaint old- fashioned manner that at times made her seem quite a child, and the next moment changed her into a worldly and charming young woman. She made you feel she was much older than yourself in years and in experience ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... fair, illusive vision that would vanish into air Dared I even touch the silence with ...
— An Old Sweetheart of Mine • James Whitcomb Riley
... he paused athirst And suddenly across the wastes of heat, He saw cool waters gleaming, and a sweet Green oasis upon his vision burst. A tender dream, long in his bosom nursed, Spread love's illusive verdure for his feet; The barren sands changed into golden wheat; The way grew glad ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... became greatly confused. It had been slightly confused before. The reference to the original Greek completed the process. It seems to me, looking back on it now, that we sat there, Lalage on the edge of the water tank, I in my hammock chair, and flung illusive phrases and half finished sentences at each other, getting hot by turns, and sometimes both together. At last Lalage left me, quite as abruptly as she had come. I did not know what to make of the situation. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... as I have in these letters I have necessarily followed my own taste, and taste—as I said when I first began writing to you—is illusive. I could do no more than cite that which makes my own heart beat faster from a compelling sense ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... looked a lovely creature when she came out of her room an hour or two later to show herself to her mother before she stepped into the hated jampan. Her dress was a delicate creation of white lace and chiffon, with illusive shimmerings of silver in its folds that came and went with every one of her graceful movements. She was a tall and slender girl, with a beautiful long white throat, smooth and round, that took on entrancing curves of pride and gentleness, of humility and nobleness. She had splendid rippling ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... in the garden outside. The room was reflected on the window-pane from the solid darkness behind it—the candles, the green table, the players—a fantastic, illusive scene, shimmering on the ground of night as on some sinister reality. Mrs. Fazakerly was dashing down her cards at random, and even the Colonel shuffled uneasily in his seat. At twelve he observed that none ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of the night, from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses directly into the ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... one can copy Corot. The work that he did after he attained freedom and swung away from Claude and Constable has an illusive, intangible, subtle and spiritual quality that no imitator can ever catch on his canvas. Corot could not even copy his own pictures—his work is born of the spirit. His effects are something beyond skill of hand, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... "But beyond this illusive light and these ever-changing vistas— what lies? I am weary of their vanishing glories. I would not wish to mount up through dreams to behold the true and fall away powerlessly, but would rather return ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... And as they go, one bends to take a flower, That so may be embalmed their happy hour, And in another day, a kindred mood, Haply together, or in solitude, Recovered what the teeth of Time devour, The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power, Wherewith by their young blood they are endued To move all enviable, framed in May, And of an aspect sisterly with Truth: Yet seek they with Time's laughing things to wed: Who will be prompted on some pallid day To lift the hueless flower and show that dead, Even such, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... quite the same the spring-time seems to me, Since that sad season when in separate ways Our paths diverged. There are no more such days As dawned for us in that lost time when we Dwelt in the realm of dreams, illusive dreams; Spring may be just as fair now, but it seems Not quite ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... notwithstanding the repeated intimations we have given him that such an expression of his sincerity would be agreeable to us. His Excellency, my master, is a man of great forbearance; but he knows what steps to take with nations who exhaust his patience with illusive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... probable that much of what passes for hallucination proper belongs in reality to the hybrid case, being an illusive interpretation of some induced visual cloud or blur. I spoke of the ever-varying patterns in the optical field; these, under some slight functional change, may become more consciously present, and be interpreted ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... scrutinising glance; but Ron's face was blank and unresponsive. Enshrined in his heart was a dim figure, half goddess, half fairy, a creature of thistledown, of snow, of blossom tossed before the wind; a lovely illusive vision who in due time was to appear and complete his life. It was a violation of the shrine to suggest a Mrs Macalister! He stood still, his brows knitted, his lips pressed together in a thin, warning line. Margot ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... southerly course, to enter a channel between low-lying islands, we were in Zeeland. Still, though we were skirting the shore of the island of Schouwen, it was as if it ducked its head rather than submit to the ignominy of being seen by strangers. It was just as Alb said, "Zeeland was witch-like, illusive, with the power of making herself invisible." The endless, straight lines of the dykes protecting Schouwen and Tholen from the terrible power of the sea, stretched like close-drawn ranks of devoted soldiers—each stone ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... that. But I see in it the greater reason why men like yourself should take up the investigation of these illusive and disturbing problems. These phenomena, as Flammarion says, introduce us into uncharted seas, and we need the most cautious and clearest-sighted scientists in this world as pilots. Will you ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... sufficient reprieve to keep him quiet until she could hear from her mother, and receive the expected summons to join her? Or was this but an illusive relief, a mere momentary lull in the tempest of humiliation that was ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... great prospects in the metropolis (he did not say what they were!) that had he been the craftiest impostor he could not more have taken in the rustic host. And while the landlady still cherished the illusive fancy that all gentlefolks must know each other in London, as they did in a county, the landlord believed, at least, that a young man so respectably dressed, although but a foot-traveller, who talked in so confident a tone, and who was so willing to undertake what might be ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there, from the sunrise to its setting, the spectral illusive shapes of the mirage floated like restless spirit betwixt heaven and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... while the man at her feet was pouring out a stream of rapid, fervent words. "And still you did not come! Ah, love! the long, long shadows—purple shadows—mysterious, unfathomable. No sun, no warmth, excepting when I saw you in my dreams—distant, illusive. No brightness, only darkness, until you came. But I knew you would come. Dearest, love makes no mistake, does it? Such love as mine that calling—calling—must draw you to me at the last. My beautiful Phil! my dreams of you never equalled the dear nearness ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... on paper? Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams up in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, subjective, ideal, picturesque. The adult Qui Hai attains to prose, to stern and disappointing realities; he removes the gilt from the Empire and penetrates to the brown ginger-bread of Rajas and Baboos. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... fraternity, of humanity. And to all these ideals, to all ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,—a searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away, some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their mass of alloy, and some, purged of their baser constituents, shone out with a ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... still were they amazed to learn that Earl Grey seriously professed that by sending all the convicts to Van Diemen's Land he substantially realised dispersion. He indeed promised to provide an equal amount of emigration, but they knew that these projects were illusive. They had before them the addition of convict ticket holders, by hundreds, to thousands and tens of thousands already in the colony; there to struggle with their predecessors for bread. Such was the prospect ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... year has sounded, in three or four years my youth will be as a faint haze on the sea, an illusive recollection; so now while standing on the last verge of the hill, I will look back on the valley I lingered in. Do I regret? I neither repent nor do I regret; and a fool and a weakling I should he ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... by readers); Friedrich being found ready. He signs the Oath, as well as audibly swears it: whereupon his sword is restored to him, and his prison-door opened. He steps forth to the Town Church with his Commissioners; takes the sacrament; listens, with all Custrin, to an illusive Sermon on the subject; "text happily chosen, preacher handling it well." Text was Psalm Seventy-seventh, verse eleventh (tenth of our English version), And I said, This is my infirmity; but I will ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17] Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic coloring is purely illusive. Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and poverty-stricken surroundings were about the child; and though we may gladly avail ourselves of the possibility of believing his mother to have been superior to all the rest of it, yet she could by no means leaven the mass. The ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all. At all events, the ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... readers will undergo at almost every page they read an intense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... younger of course, hardly more than a promise of the one he knew; still there would be the upward curling lashes, the suggestion of a fault in the nose, the piquant curve of the short, upper lip, and perhaps that pervading, illusive something that was the secret of her charm. "You were right, David, old man," he said at last, "it was a face to fight for, wait for. And madam, madam, a woman with a face like yours must have had some ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... America; and being absolutely cut off from these sources of wealth, would have found it impracticable either to gratify her subsidiaries, or to maintain such formidable armies to annoy her neighbours. These are truths, which will appear to the conviction of the public, when the illusive spells of unsubstantial victory are dissolved, and time shall have dispersed the thick mists of prejudice which now seem to darken and perplex the understanding of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... wished—perhaps only dreamed—and an epoch-making art project was born. Madame du Barry admired and made her own the since famous du Barry rose colour, and the Sevres porcelain factories reproduced it for her. But how to produce this particular illusive shade of deep, purplish-pink became a forgotten art, when the seductive person of the king's mistress ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... his intensity, in the over-emotion of his self-centered passion, so terribly driven to prove to himself something vague yet all-powerful, illusive yet imperious, divined what these Blue Devil soldiers had been through. His mind was more than telepathic. Almost it seemed that souls were bared to him. These soldiers, quiet, intent, made up a grim group of men. They seemed slow, thoughtful, plodding, wrapped and steeped in calm. But Dorn ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the hunt passed somewhat slowly as the hounds sought in vain for a scent, or "found," only to be rewarded by a short, illusive chase. The waits were so frequent that the riders had little chance of growing fatigued, and the Saxon contingent, being refreshed with pocketed stores of biscuits and chocolate, boldly announced its intention of following to the ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... melancholy food; Now this one, and now that, you deeply stir, Each sees the working of his heart laid bare. Their tears, their laughter, you command with ease, The lofty still they honour, the illusive love. Your finish'd gentlemen you ne'er can please; A growing mind ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... younger generation. Mere age, he saw, reduces the complexity of desire, but renders it single and intense. Whether his father was right or not in his gloomy analysis, he was deeply convinced and foiled. His last method of success had turned out illusive, yet he had not reproached, nor domineered, nor dictated, nor appealed. He had expressed a little of his keen sorrow, but insidiously this attitude had tainted the ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... intemperate, save in his passion for athletic exercises and his abomination of work. It required no great perception to see that Sabina was not the type that entangles men. She had a beautiful face and a comely figure, but she belonged not to the illusive, distracting type. She was obvious and lacked the quality which attracts men far more than open features, regular modelling and steady eyes. It was, in fact, such a face as Raymond might have admired, and Sabina ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... southern extremity of the strait. Summoning a couple of thousand field labourers, he sets them to work; here a small canal is dug—there rollers come into play; and in a few hours his small fleet is safely transported to the open water on the south side of the island. Calling off his men from the illusive battery, the Corsair is off for the Archipelago: by good luck he picks up a fine galley on the way, which was conveying news of the reinforcements coming to Doria. The old Genoese admiral never gets the message: he is rubbing his eyes ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment,—not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may come to you, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... formality of an after all impossible description; to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarme has consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible to avoid saying?) ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... commonplace despatch to Arago, and then I utilised the last days I was to spend on French soil in studying the defensive works ordered by my brother in view of that war, imminent perhaps, during which, soldiers before all as we were, we expected, in the illusive hopes of our youth, to be allowed to keep ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... like to know whether there be in the mind two sorts of decisions, one sort illusive, and the other sort free? If our folly does not carry us so far as this, we must necessarily admit, that the decision of the mind, which is believed to be free, is not distinguishable from the imagination or memory, and is nothing more than the affirmation, which ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... the illusion. The whole pose—her aspect, the contour of her head, the exquisite turn of the stately throat, the faultless symmetry of shoulder and arms—everything is in keeping with the realization of the most perfect, most beautiful, and most illusive figure that has ever been witnessed on the stage. Miss Anderson indeed is liberally endowed with physical charms, so fascinating that we can understand an audience finding it not a little difficult to refrain from giving the rein to enthusiasm in the ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... line reads, "To chase the hoop's illusive speed," which seems to us better than the revised form in ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... our agriculture, commerce, or manufactures. The operation of the tariff has not proved so injurious to the two former or as beneficial to the latter as was anticipated. Importations of foreign goods have not been sensibly diminished, while domestic competition, under an illusive excitement, has increased the production much beyond the demand for home consumption. The consequences have been low prices, temporary embarrassment, and partial loss. That such of our manufacturing establishments as are based upon capital and are prudently managed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... continued the pious man, "and the first condition of its happiness is peace. For me I am weary of battle-fields, and feel no desire to grasp after illusive flowers and fading grass. If anticipated evil is the shadow of life, the vain toils of restless ambition are its menace. Vain toil it is! To labour, to suffer, to sorely strive that we may accomplish—our destiny! ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... than sketching from nature. She could not follow the drawing, it seemed to escape her. It did not exist in lines which she could measure, which she could follow. It seemed to have grown out of the canvas rather than to have been placed there. The faces were leaned over—illusive foreshortenings which she could not hope to catch. The girl in front of her was making, it seemed to Mildred, a perfect copy. There seemed to be no difference, or very little, between her work and Reynolds's. Mildred felt that she could copy the copy easier than ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... whether she was awake or asleep. Twice a week John Henry's horse carried Oliver for a ride with Abby and Susan, and on these evenings he stayed so late that Virginia ceased presently even to make a pretence of waiting supper. Several times, on September afternoons, when the country burned with an illusive radiance as if it were seen through a mirage, she put on her old riding-habit, which she had hunted up in the attic at the rectory, and mounting one of Abby's horses, started to accompany them; but her conscience reproached her so bitterly at the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire she climbed up suddenly into a chair and with the fluffy broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildy off into space after an illusive cobweb. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... knowing whence it comes. By thought he can locate it in a certain portion of his body which can be cured, or, if necessary, torn away. He fixes the bounds of it, and separates it from himself. A child has no such illusive resource. His first encounter with suffering is more tragic and more true. Like his own being, it seems infinite. He feels that it is seated in his bosom, housed in his heart, and is mistress of his flesh. And it is so. It will not leave his body ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... filled with such happy tears as I lifted them to him, standing at his side. "If you could only trust God, believe in Him as Mr. Bowen does, you would find every other delight in life illusive, compared with the joy He ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... who abhors and forswears the sex; one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of memory, and arranged in consequent order, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... would-be axioms, theories, are based on sand. In true science the question of race as represented by the Southern school partisans of slavery, with Agassiz, the so-called professor of Charleston by European savans, at their head,—that question is at the best an illusive element, and endangers the accuracy of induction. As it presents itself to the unprejudiced investigator, race is nothing more than the single manifestation of anterior stages of existence, the aggregate expression of the ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... hilltops, its emerald loch far down at the bottom, the little clachan on the hillside and up above it the old manor-house. But ever and again his heart would pause to catch anew some flitting glance of the brown eyes, some turn of the golden head, some cadence of the soft Highland voice, some fitful illusive sweetness of the smile upon the curving lips, pause and return upon its tracks to feel anew that subtle rapture of the first poignant thrill, lingering over each separate memory as a drunkard lingers regretful over his last sweet drops ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... doctrine, which is illusive, may be thus defined: Marriage is a mere compact, and means diversity. Each family, therefore, must have a separate individual representation, out of which arises diversity or division, and discord is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... interpret such illusive predications except by cultivating our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until we are at home with them? But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound propositions, and to expand the abbreviations of literature and conversation, is a useful ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Colorado of tradition to the west, still rolling in wave after wave of stupendous altitudes, each range cutting into the sky with a purple saw-tooth edge. The landscape seems to contain nothing but rocks and towering crags, a treasure-house for those who mine. But this is illusive. Between these purple heights charming valleys wind and meadows lie in which rich ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... noon Preble and Billy returned bearing the illusive visitor; it was a large Lynx. It was very thin and yet, after bleeding, weighed 22 pounds. But why was it so far from the forest, 20 miles or more, and a couple of miles from this little grove that ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... red-cheeked maids, and something had happened to the dashing spirit of the youth. All through those long days in the forest, those short blue nights under the velvet sky, one image had stood before him, calm, smiling, quivering with that illusive light which held men's hearts. Never a day that he could win forgetfulness of the face of Maren Le Moyne, and now he glanced toward her doorway. It lay in the sunlight without a foot upon its sill, and Marc sighed unconsciously. He was not to ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... impressions reflected from one another, as light in reverberations, the blow in the counterblow, the form in the image. We would exclaim, rising by a simultaneous impulse, "We are not two; we are one single being under two illusive natures! Which will say you unto the other; which will say I? There is no I; there is no you; but only we." ... We would then sink down, overcome with admiration at this wonderful conformity, weeping with delight at this twofold existence, and at having doubled our lives by consecrating ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... loved by Lord Byron, it was requisite for a woman to live in a sort of illusive atmosphere for him, to appear somewhat like an immaterial being, not subject to vulgar corporeal necessities. Thence arose his antipathy (considered so singular) to see the woman he loved eat. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... formerly claimed indignation, and beholding Valancourt such as he had appeared, when he won her early affection, she experienced emotions of only tenderness and joy. This, alas! was but the sunshine of a few short moments; recollections rose, like clouds, upon her mind, and, darkening the illusive image, that possessed it, she again beheld Valancourt, degraded—Valancourt unworthy of the esteem and tenderness she had once bestowed upon him; her spirits faltered, and, withdrawing her hand, she turned from him ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported, with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest, of the mother country. After a fleeting illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute. I was not armed by Nature and education with the intrepid ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... usually so thin and sallow that one had to look at them twice to see them clearly. At best, they looked vague and illusive. ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... continued to gaze out over the ocean. Far away, a dark fringe broke the sea-line—a suggestion of foliage—an island, or a mirage? Tantalizing, it lay like a shadow, illusive, unattainable as the "forgotten isles." The man staggered to his feet; his garments were torn; his hair hung over his brow. He shook his arms at the island;—this phantasy, this vain, empty vision, he regarded it now as some savage ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... philosopher should be so lost in his philosophy as to aver that he, the thinker and father of his philosophy, has no real existence—is only illusion, concerning which real existence can only be assumed for practical purposes. What must be said of the philosophy begotten by such an illusive being? Shall it not also be doomed to vanish with him into the nothingness whence he came and which he now really is, if he only knew it? Sir Monier Williams aptly remarks,—"Common sense tells an Englishman that he really exists himself and that everything he sees around him ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... was an old person of Woking, Whose mind was perverse and provoking; He sate on a rail, with his head in a pail, That illusive old person of Woking. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... glorious triumphs, of laughter and uproarious fun, of sentimental passages at balls, picnics, garden parties, too, with charmingly pretty maidens who, in all probability, he would never clap eyes on again—all these, and impressions even more illusive and fugitive, playing hide-and-seek among the mazelike convolutions of his ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... carelessness of one giving himself up to the plaything of the hour. Not having, from the very first, been chary of the sidelong glance and the winning smile, and whatever grace of style or manner could tempt him to pursuit, as an illusive appearance of success seemed to beckon her onward, her heart at times grew desperate with the apprehension that all had been in vain. For Sergius, content that the wife whom he neglected did not disturb his repose with idle complaints, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement. Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... arrayed in the somber robes of a monk, a stained dagger held loosely in her fingers, an illusive, faintly mocking smile on her lips. There was a great figure in white, a bandage about its eyes, leaning negligently on a long, two-edged sword, its calm, sightless face turned toward the woman in black. There ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... junction with the Democrats, four years ago a compromise with the Republicans, and one or other of these courses is the only choice presented now. This policy can lead only to defeat or to an empty and illusive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... Christofori's claim. The hammer action was what all previous instruments lacked, and it seems strange that it took nearly two thousand years for this principle to be discovered and applied. Many times the inventors appeared to be almost upon it. They worked all around it, but the idea seemed illusive and ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... the waking consciousness. Nobody thinks 'the cognitions of which I was conscious in my dream are unreal'; what men actually think is 'the cognitions are real, but the things are not real.' In the same way the illusive state of consciousness which the magician produces in the minds of other men by means of mantras, drugs, &c., is true, and hence the cause of love and fear; for such states of consciousness also are not sublated. The cognition which, owing to some defect in the object, the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... vine-encircled heart of the tall pine! It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice, now, but to bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me that I had left duties unperformed. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... prominently to view even than the former. The conditions were very different. Instead of mapping coasts and islands, the principal duty was exploration of tempestuous seas in high latitudes, amongst ice, searching in vain for the illusive southern land. ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... Such as touch the inner heart; Not mere flitting forms of light, That please the ear and then depart; But burning words, that reach the soul, That bring the shreds of error out, That with resistless power do roll, And put the hosts of Wrong to rout. Let others tune their lyres, and sing Illusive dreams of fancied joy; But, my own harp,—its every string Shall find in Truth enough employ. It shall not breathe of Freedom here, While millions clank the galling chain; Or e'en one slave doth bow in fear, Within ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... narrow steps, winding with pain, The watch-tower's loftiest platform now we gain. Departed spirit! fruitless is the prayer, We see alone thy long-deserted chair;[63] And never more, or in the storm of night, Or by the glimmering moon's illusive light, Or when the flash, with red and hasty glance, Sudden illumes the sea's remote expanse, 260 The shores, the cliffs, the mountain, till again Deep darkness closes on the roaring main, Shalt thou, dread Angel, with unaltered mien, Sublime upon thy cloudy seat ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... assisting the nurses in their work; and in a dream he went away to his own quarters and thence out and over the dump and along the tote road that led through the straggling shacks and across the river into the forest beyond. But of neither river nor forest was he aware. Before his eyes there floated an illusive vision of masses of fluffy golden hair above a face of radiant purity, of deft fingers moving in swift and sure precision as they wound the white rolls of bandages round bloody and broken flesh, of two round capable arms whose lines suggested strength and beauty, of a firm knit, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Rights, and a resolute effort to have them recognized by the Convention. Neal Dow, as President and as a man of gallantry, decided on receiving Miss Antoinette's credentials, and for a time victory appeared to smile on the Amazons. The triumph, however, was only ephemeral and illusive. The motion was put and carried that none but the officers and invited guests of the Convention should be permitted to occupy places on the platform, and so, by this indirect movement, Miss Brown saw herself, in the moment of her brightest hopes, expelled from the stage, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... helped me to restrain and conceal all my own feelings; but if this were dispelled; if she came to greet me with the bright conscious flush of passion; if I saw reflected in her eyes the fire that burnt in me; if I were permitted to take her into my arms and cheat myself for a single illusive instant with the thought that she was mine—what would it all mean? Only giving a sharper, more cutting edge to the bit in my mouth and rousing in her a hunger I could not satisfy. She was at present devoted to her art with a devotion that left her practically indifferent to everything ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... have real scenery the most illusive method of revealing and hiding the chancel is to have the back of the hut painted on a gauze drop, which is backed by a black curtain. At the cue for showing the chancel the lights in front of the gauze go out leaving the stage ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... To Baals illusive and specious, Till chance had there voiced me That one I loved vainly in nonage Had ceased her ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... way to a new world. Their small stature, as I said, does not prove them infants, but only new-born into that other life, and contrasts their helplessness with the powers, the great presences, now around them. A cow, far enough from Myron's famous illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is [275] one of almost any number of artistic symbols of new-birth, of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is, after all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, as some have thought, the Goddess of Death; on the opposite side the Goddess of Life, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... fitted the hour, with its like touch of mysterious suggestion. As the twilight indefinite, it pervaded everything, yet was never anywhere. Deafening at a distance, it hushed at our approach only to begin again behind us. Will-o'-the-wisp of the ear, infatuating because forever illusive! And the distance and the numbers blended what had perhaps been harsh into a mellow whole that filled the gloaming with a sort of voice. I began to understand why the Japanese are so fond of it that they deem it not unworthy ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... unbought notices in the public journals. England is full of such people, and a hundred other varieties of peripatetic tricksters, higher than these, and lower, who act their parts tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive effect. I knew at once, raw Yankee as I was, that they were humbugs, almost without an exception,—rats that nibble at the honest bread and cheese of the community, and grow fat by their petty pilferings,—yet often gave them what they asked, and privately owned myself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with his dream, and spoke of it very seriously to his mother, who only laughed at it. "My son," said she to him, "would you go into Egypt on the faith of an illusive dream?" "Why not, madam," answered Zeyn, "do you imagine all dreams are chimerical? No, no, some of them are mysterious. My preceptors have told me a thousand incidents, which will not permit me to doubt of it. Besides, though I were not otherwise convinced, I could not forbear giving ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... early communism and utilitarianism, 17, 18 emancipation by Stoics of mankind from despotic rule, 24 guiding principle of Roman Republic, 13 highest teaching of classical civilisation powerless to avert despotism, 27 history of institutions often deceptive and illusive, 2 implicit opposition of Stoics to principle of slavery, 25, 26 influence of Christianity over the State, gradual, 27 infusion of Greek ideas of statesmanship among Romans, 16 liberty, highest political end, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... bowed out, to perambulate the streets in rather bitter humour. Was he to return to the poor, scantily supplied home, and continue a drag on its resources, lingering out his days in illusive hopes? Oh that his strong hands and strong heart had some scope for their energies! He paused in one mighty torrent of busy faces and eager footsteps, and despised himself for his inaction. All ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... one penny, largest circulation of any Jewish organ, continued to flutter, defying the battle, the breeze and its communal contemporaries. At Passover there had been an illusive augmentation of advertisements proclaiming the virtues of unleavened everything. With the end of the Festival, most of these fell out, staying as short a time as the daffodils. Raphael was in despair at the meagre attenuated appearance of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... deem thee a deceiving, Illusive mockery of human feeling, A body organized, by fond caress Warmed into seeming tenderness; A mere automaton, on which our love Plays, as on puppets, when their wires we move. No! when that feeling quits thy glazing eye, 'Twill live in some ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... interior. Then he stepped inside himself, and closed the door gently after him. Being a man he entirely failed to note the drift of psychological straws that indicated the sudden sharp turn of the wind, and the presage of storm in the air. He was thinking only of the illusive, desirable, maddening quality of the girl that walked beside him, filled with inexplicable forebodings for a friend, whom he knew to be invulnerable to misfortune. Certain phrases of Dick's were ringing in ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... their illusive Devachan, an ideal, a mere mystical sentiment to gush over, but a something they do not in reality comprehend. Therefore, we shall do our utmost to explain this universal law, and to point out wherein its first principles ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... look deep into her dark eyes, demanding that his imagination revive for him those moments when his heart had thrilled to the liquid languor of her gaze, and instead he saw only the world-weariness of that sphynx glance which seemed to brood on uncounted centuries, and far back in her eyes, illusive and brief as the faint, half seen shadow on a mirror, he discerned mockery ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Lady of Sorrows" stands upon the crescent moon behind a row of lighted candles raised in relief of white, gold and silver. Her little face with wide-set eyes looks down upon you from an elaborate silver crown set against a radiant halo of fine and illusive design, and her two beautiful hands clasp to her heart the shining swords that typify the Seven Sorrows. The dignity of her pose, the submission and pathos of her haunting eyes waken you to a new sense of the majesty of pain. I felt, ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... rocks, and flowed along the vales; Or that the tigers mingled with the sheep, To the same fold were led; or shepherd-boys With playful wolves would frolic at the spring; But of its own lot ignorant, and all The sufferings that were in store, devoid Of care it lived: a soft, illusive veil Of error hid the stern realities, The cruel laws of heaven and of fate. Life glided on, with cheerful hope content; And tranquil, sought the haven of ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... what? the victory Would make us slaves; and we, Who in our blindness struggle for the prize Of this illusive state Called Life, do but frustrate The higher law—refusing to ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... on a day she opened the door to come out, Tommy was standing there—she saw him there waiting for Reddy. Dry-eyed this sorrowful woman had heard the sentence pronounced, dry eyed she had followed the little coffin to its grave; tears had not come even when waking from illusive dreams she put out her hand in bed to a child who was not there; but when she saw Tommy waiting at the door for Reddy, who had been dead for a month, her bosom moved and ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... He stands above all such vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wonders outside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on our effete and discoloured language. Rather than lend an ear to illusive consolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were better for him to show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and lunch was soon spread. As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... enter into her feelings. She felt for her good-looking, helpless patient a profound and honest pity. I do not know whether she had ever heard that "pity was akin to love." She would probably have resented that utterly untenable and atrocious commonplace. There was no suggestion, real or illusive, of any previous masterful quality in the man which might have made his present dependent condition picturesque by contrast. He had come to her handicapped by an unromantic accident and a practical want of energy and intellect. He ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... with ears forward and extended nostrils, the horse gazes intently at the rippling blue waters of the mirage, that most tantalizingly deceptive phenomenon of nature. May it never be the lot of my reader to be misled by the illusive mirage as I have been. How could I mistake vapor for clear, gurgling water? Yet, how many times was I here deceived! Visions of great lakes and broad rivers rose up before me, lapping emerald green shores, where ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... battery in the army engaged in the conquest of New Mexico. His command encamped near the base of the mountain which now bears his name. Deceived by the illusive effect of the atmosphere, he started out for a morning stroll to the supposed near-by elevation, announcing that he would return in time for breakfast. The day passed with no sign of Captain Fisher, and night lengthened into a new day. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... She is illusive. She is like a succession of masks, seen at dawn. In her there always appears a terrible wanness, right upon the heels of a ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... Roberta, again engaged with the portrait above the desk, had not noticed her sister's departure. There was something peculiarly fascinating about this pictured face of Richard Kendrick's mother. Whether it was the illusive likeness to the son, showing first in the eyes, then in the mouth, which was one of extraordinary sweetness, it was hard to tell. But the attempt ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... chasms, over which trees leaned dangerously or hung out fantastically by a few roots. In the dell below there stood a small green painted table, and the young people leaning on the protecting railing wondered at this mysterious piece of furniture. There was in them and about them an illusive sense of death and the beauty of life. One slight push would hurl them headlong hundreds of feet down to the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... the human race. The liquor traffic, with its resultant poverty, hits the child in the cradle, whose innocence and helplessness makes its appeal all the stronger. The liquor traffic is a tangible, definite thing that we can locate without difficulty. Many of the causes of poverty and sin are illusive, indefinite qualities such as bad management, carelessness, laziness, extravagance, ignorance and bad judgment, which are exceedingly hard to remedy, but the liquor traffic is one of the things we can speak of definitely, and in removing it we ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... behaviour; the whole case against Perry; the illusive personage with the chestnut beard and gold tooth; Morley's suspicious story and actions; and, lastly, Maria Fulton's highly puzzling narrative of what she had seen and not seen in ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... hope of unity and political bliss, which exalted all minds to a high pitch of emotion, proved, before long, to be an illusive dream. The king was not ready to confirm the ordinance respecting priests, which made them civil officers; nor was he ready to declare the plotting emigrant nobles at Coblenz and Worms traitors. Mirabeau, who had enlisted in behalf of the king in ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... friends, Honor, Forbearance, Silence and Good Humor. Her heroic efforts to keep her four friends with her in spite of the plots of Snobbery, Gossip, Jealousy, Frivolity and Treachery, and her readiness to extend a helping hand to Diffidence, Poverty and Misunderstood, result in the creation of an illusive being known to her only as the Spirit, a white-robed apparition which visits her more frequently as she approaches the end of her pilgrimage. At the termination of Senior Lane, which is separated from the Highway of Life by the Gate of Commencement, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... darkened, not in a softening melancholy, but old bitterness and defeat. She was not always able to ignore the contrast between the spring of youth and this meagre eld. Jeffrey saw the tremendous recognition she assuredly had had, grown through the illusive fructifying of memory into something overwhelming, and he was glad starved vanity might once more be fed. She seemed to him a most piteous spectacle, youth and power in ruins, and age too poor to nourish even a vine to ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... rangers in off the line, and therefore Dick had been idle most of the time, and, though he tried hard, he had been unable to stay far from Nell's vicinity. He believed she cared for him; but he could not catch her alone long enough to verify his tormenting hope. When alone she was as illusive as a shadow, as quick as a flash, as mysterious as a Yaqui. When he tried to catch her in the garden or fields, or corner her in the patio, she eluded him, and left behind a memory of dark-blue, haunting eyes. It was that look in her eyes which lent ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... obscurely spotted. He seems to be afraid of losing his dignity, and to be conscious of the fact that his reputation—like that of some English officials—depends on the overpowering wig which he now wears, though his Macedonian forerunner had no such growth to give an illusive appearance of size and capacity to his head. However opinions may differ about these things, we will agree that the elephant (or "Oliphant," as he was called in France 400 years ago) is the most imposing, fascinating, and astonishing of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... run its course. The causes from which this peculiar lust for operation emanates would be perhaps a difficult psychological puzzle to determine; the malign impulse, as regards some special function, seems to spring, as it were, by intuition, unbidden into being from the illusive depths of some perverted intellect, to rage for a while through the medical world with a death roll deadly as the plague and as suddenly to pass into desuetude and disappear behind the impregnable ramparts of "prescriptive right" and "privilege"—terms which in plain parlance mean ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... heart, even on the verge of the grave. Eva's step was again in the garden,—in the balconies; she played and laughed again,—and her father, in a transport, declared that they should soon have her as hearty as anybody. Miss Ophelia and the physician alone felt no encouragement from this illusive truce. There was one other heart, too, that felt the same certainty, and that was the little heart of Eva. What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the resources of the island grew gradually less, the country's capital was being consumed without profit, credit became depressed, the best business forecasts turned out illusive, the most intelligent industrial efforts remained sterile. The sun of prosperity which rose over the island in 1815 set again in gloom during this period ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... many concessions in the last Consular negotiations. To begin with, it was intimated in the Norwegian papers, that the matter referring to the Consular Service and Diplomatic Department would be settled by treaty with Sweden, a most illusive moderation, considering Norway, as previously mentioned[55:1], by fixing the date when the laws would first be in force, had alone the power of considering the basis of the possible agreement. But this ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... hitherto, far from being assured or encouraged by this decree, appear to have become more timid and suspicious; for it is conceived in so narrow and paltry a spirit, and expressed in such malignant and illusive terms, that it can hardly be said to intend an indulgence. Of twelve articles of an act said to be concessive, eight are prohibitory and restrictive; and a municipal officer, or any other person "in place or office," may controul ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... year of his marriage, and he missed Babette. But then, as he often said to himself, he ought never to have married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and because he was determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, and utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted her because she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and summer winds, and other exquisite things created for the delectation of mankind. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... regarded her as a young girl; she had been part of this beautiful desert-land. But he began to see in her a responsive being, influenced by his presence. If the situation was wonderful to him what must it be for her? Like a shy, illusive creature, unused to men, she was troubled by questions, fearful of the sound of her own voice. Yet in repose, as she watched the lights and shadows, she was serene, unconscious; her dark, quiet glance was dreamy and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... and you will have no difficulty in understanding his state of mind. He shouted Christine's name, brandished his pistol, knocked his forehead against the glass in his endeavors to run down the glades of the illusive forest. In short, the torture was beginning to work its spell upon ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... O Madeline! as unaware Thou hast been followed everywhere, And girt and guarded by a love, As warm, as tender in its care, As pure, ay, powerful in prayer, As any saint above! Like the bright inmate of the skies, It only looked with friendly eyes, And still had worn the illusive guise, And thus at least been half concealed; But at this parting, painful hour, It spreads its wings, unfolds its power, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... unmistakably there; and to represent it will task the finest painter's hand. Then the spaces of water between the floes, if not too large, appeared uniformly in deep wine-color,—an effect for which one must have more science than I to account. It is attributed to contrast; but if thus illusive, it is at least an illusion not to be looked out of countenance. No local color could assert itself more firmly. One marvellous morning, too, a dense, but translucent, mist hovered closely, beneath strong sunshine, over the ice, lending to its innumerable fantastic forms a new, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... region, the terribly unattainable Causses. Our project at last began to wear the look of a nightmare, a harassing, feverish dream. We seemed to be fascinated hither and thither by an ignis fatuus, enticed into quagmires and quicksands by an altogether illusive, mocking, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... birds, and flew as fleet; While Love, around whose beauteous feet, I knew not why, hung chains of lead, Pursued me, as I trembling fled; And, strange to say, as swift as thought, Spite of my pinions, I was caught! What does the wanton Fancy mean By such a strange, illusive scene? I fear she whispers to my breast, That you, sweet maid, have stolen its rest; That though my fancy, for a while, Hath hung on many a woman's smile, I soon dissolved each passing vow, And ne'er was caught by ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... standing before a shop in "Old China Street." How he came there, or for what purpose, I could not determine. It may have been out of compliment to the "Foreign Devils," that his long ears were exhibited; but if his position was illusive, in one relation it failed; for, despite these appendages, the beast ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... small forgetfulness of sorrow, some little time to pass in sweet oblivion, fancy, still waking, wafts me home to you: I see your beloved forms, I kneel and hear the blessed words of peace and pardon. Extatic joy pervades my soul; I reach my arms to catch your dear embraces; the motion chases the illusive dream; I wake to real misery. At other times I see my father angry and frowning, point to horrid caves, where, on the cold damp ground, in the agonies of death, I see my dear mother and my revered grand-father. I strive to raise ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... spell of unemployment means starvation and despair. This is evidently a state of affairs which Socialist agitators favour because it will increase their following.—Another prominent Socialist writer says: "Among the many quack remedies for poverty, the most venerable and the most illusive is thrift or saving. The habit of saving is always represented by the rich as the highest of social virtues; but it is one they are careful rarely to practise themselves"[856]—If the rich are so wasteful, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the implication) an idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things. It implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,—find, perhaps, the suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... sort; but I was glad to learn it. I drew Minnie out a little more about the Athletics and my visit to Berry Pomeroy. She wouldn't tell me much: she was too illusive and indefinite: she never could get the notion out of her head, somehow, that I remembered all about it, and was only pretending to forgetfulness. But I gathered from what she said, that Dr. Ivor and I must have flirted a great deal; or, at least, that ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... great extent, it presents appearances which excite the admiration of the solitary voyageur, and form a frequent theme of their conversation when speaking of the wonders of the country. Sometimes it offers the perfectly illusive appearance of a large city, with numerous streets and magnificent buildings, among which the Canadians never fail to see their cabaret—and sometimes it takes the form of a solitary house, with many large chambers, into which they drive their horses at night, and sleep in these natural defences ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... best is but an enigma, and like children pursuing an Ignis Fatuus, so do we all pursue the illusive beacon light of a brighter and happier to-morrow—always hoping, never attaining, though striving ever until, wearied of the vain pursuit, at last we fall by the ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... the brilliant heiress to be a person of infinitely inferior importance to the ill-dressed and overworked Vicar's daughter. Imperial Shirley, no need to wave your majestic wand, we have bowed to it long ago unblinded; and all its illusive splendours are not so potent as that worn-down goose-quill which you used to wield in the busy kitchen ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... deemed a tragedy. But far greater is the tragedy when the illusive charm of romance departs, and love and marriage are reduced to the commonplace. Unless you find the man who carries your whole nature by storm, and who makes you feel that life without him will be insupportable, do not be led again to the ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of introducing into the region of refined feeling the cold light of scientific investigation. Lastly, there are special difficulties inherent in the subject. One serious obstacle to a scientific theory of aesthetic experience is the illusive character of many of its finer elements—-for example, the subtle differences of feeling-tone produced by the several colours as well as by their several tones and shades, by the several musical intervals, and so forth. Finally, there is the circumstance just touched ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... dimly lighted. Traffic had almost ceased. Now and then a car sped past. The thoroughfare along here is level and broad and smooth, and being skirted on one side by the park, it offers to speeding vehicles the illusive freedom of a country road. Across the street at the foot of the park a few lights gleamed scant amid the April foliage. She began at the foot of the hill and followed the line of them upward, upward over the face of the rock, leading this way and that way, but always upward. ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... recognised the genius of Carriere from the beginning. In 1904 Carriere was made honorary president of the Autumn Salon and was the chief guest of these young painters, who really adored Paul Cezanne, and not the painter of an illusive psychology. I wrote at that time: "Carriere, whose delicately clouded portraits, so intimate in their revelation of the souls of his sitters, was not seen at his best. He offered a large decorative panel for the Mairie of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... maid, though modestly in the background, was rarely out of sight; and a white-capped nurse, till now an occasional and illusive vision in the halls, blew in and out of the sick-room like a breeze, bringing liquids in glasses, which the patient obediently swallowed. Laurie, his attention once caught, took it all in. But his face gave no hint of his new knowledge, and the eyes of Louise still met his with the challenge they ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. (15) For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long to any one remedy, but is always best pleased by a novelty which has not yet proved illusive. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... intellect, why, that is a quality which it shares with Space and Time and all deep and elemental things. Your deep thinker is invariably a paradox-monger, because everything when probed to its bottom proves illusive, and is found to contain its own contradiction. Truth is not a dead butterfly, to be transfixed with a pin and labelled, but a living, airy, evasive butterfly. Perhaps that is the inner meaning of the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... ambition is well described; and I know not whether it may not be said, in defence of some parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakespeare's time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... home with a chest rounded to the deep draughts of night air which he was drinking, and a heady elation in the currents of his veins. She had slipped in and out of the room as he had talked with the patriarch, after supper, flitting like some illusive shadow of shyness. He had had hardly a score of words with her, but the future would plentifully mend ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... all things visible. He scanned the plantation, viewing it as if in some travesty of morning; he looked down upon the city, sleeping uneasily in preparation for the inevitable night of pleasure, and a sudden loathing of Paris shook him. It seemed as if some gauzy illusive garment had been lifted from a fair body and that his eyes, made free of the white ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... signalize, the offspring of his genius, the manner of his death, solemnly confirmed. By no sudden fever, such as insidiously steals from the Roman marshes and poisons the blood of its victims,—by no violent epidemic, like those which have again and again devastated the cities of Europe,—by no illusive decline, whereby vital power is sapped unconsciously and with mild gradations, and which, in that soft clime, has peopled with the dust of strangers the cemetery which the pyramid of Cestius overshadows and the heart of Shelley consecrates,—by none of these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... illusive and destructive, be banished henceforward from your thoughts for ever. Resolve, and keep your resolution; choose, and pursue your choice. If you spend this day in study, you will find yourself still more ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... engaged. No dollar slept in his possession; rather, he kept all simultaneously flying, like a conjurer with oranges. My own earnings, when I began to have a share, he would but show me for a moment, and disperse again, like those illusive money gifts which are flashed in the eyes of childhood, only to be entombed in the missionary-box. And he would come down radiant from a weekly balance-sheet, clap me on the shoulder, declare himself a winner by Gargantuan ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possess my soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in nowise if, in the world's illusive good, all men have the advantage over me. For all outward things I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or great pain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from the servitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is the privilege of not needing ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith |
