"Bubble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can't get out; I can't get out," said the starling. I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; or do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... take it now,' said Lady Clementina, holding up to the light the little transparent capsule, with its floating bubble of liquid aconitine. I am sure it is delicious. The fact is that, though I hate doctors, I love medicines. However, I'll keep ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... change to a kinder feeling in this, the frontier of the home-land. A scent of wet birk was in the wind. The river, hurrying through grassy levels, glucked and clattered and plopped most gaily, and bubble chased bubble as if all were in a haste to reach Lochow of the bosky isles and holy. Oh! but it was heartsome, and as we rested ourselves a little on the banks we were full of content to know we were now in a friendly country, and it was a fair pleasure to think that ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... as if it were a broken soap-bubble. Gone were the trees and the flowers; gone were the fountains and the birds; gone, too, were the jewels, the candies and ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... flashed meteor-wise across the world with his huge scheme to finance France out of difficulty with his Mississippi Bubble. Among other considerations mentioned in the charter for twenty-five years, which he obtained from the gullible French government, was the stipulation that before the expiration of the charter, he must transport to Louisiana six thousand white ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... and seemed to follow his movements, but the steaming blood poured with the force of a small hose from between triple row of bayonetlike teeth that curved inward like those of a shark, to splash and bubble freely to the rock floor and to dribble horribly ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... sale to your company I was simple enough to go to Buffalo and try it again, but soon met with defeat and retired with my flag in the dust. I then went to Duluth, and was on the top wave, till the real-estate bubble broke, and I broke with it. I have had my ups and downs, but I have tried to take my medicine and look pleasant instead of sitting down under a juniper tree and blaming my losses ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... understand?—to a man who wears ready-made clothes and doesn't love you and lives in an attic boarding-house bed-room. And what is he doing with this automobile? And what is his business? Oh, he's probably a chauffeur; and he's borrowed his employer's bubble; and this other chauffeur in front's his best friend and ashamed of him on account of the beefsteak business. He'd better be. But what shall I say to him? What shall I say?—Oh—h"—heaven-sent inspiration—"I'll say nothing at all. I will ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... pointed to by rejoicing conservatives as a proof the more of that reaction which the ministerial and radical press was audacious enough to laugh at. This borough, says the local journalist, was led away by the bubble reform, to support those who by specious and showy qualification had dazzled their eyes; delusion had vanished, shadows satisfied no longer, Newark was restored to its high place in the esteem of the friends of order and good government. Of course the intimates of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... watched the ships, and thought of the woman days with Antonia before Van Corlaer came; of embroidery, and teaching the Etchemins, and bringing sweet plunder from the woods for the child's grave; of paddling on the twilight river when the tide was up, brimming and bubble-tinted; of her lord's coming home to the autumn-night hearth; of the little wheels and spinning, and Edelwald's songs—of all the common joys of that past life. The clumsy glass lately brought from France to master distances ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... sort of ornament suspended from the necks of children, which, among the wealthy, was made of gold. It was in the shape of a bubble on water, or, as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... have a niece, and I a son—a fine lad, Haredale, but foolish. They fall in love with each other, and form what this same world calls an attachment; meaning a something fanciful and false like the rest, which, if it took its own free time, would break like any other bubble. But it may not have its own free time—will not, if they are left alone—and the question is, shall we two, because society calls us enemies, stand aloof, and let them rush into each other's arms, when, by approaching each other ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... another question. Granted ten years' seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the time of night; anger would follow close on that—with Florinda, with destiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. "Surely there's enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares in gold!" Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look over your shoulder towards ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Not out of bubble blasted Pride, Doe I oppose myselfe a Bride, In scornefull manner with vpbraides: Against all modest virgin maides. As though I did dispise chast youth, This is not my intent of truth, I know they must liue single liues, Before th'are graced ...
— The Bride • Samuel Rowlands et al
... this earth, from the tiniest flower to the tallest mountain, change and change all day long. Every atom of matter moves perpetually; and nothing "continues in one stay." The solid- seeming earth on which you stand is but a heaving bubble, bursting ever and anon in this place and in that. Only above all, and through all, and with all, is One who does not move nor change, but is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And on Him, my child, and not on this bubble ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... two personages,—one the writer and the other the illustrator. If it were so he must soon have dropped the idea. In the last paragraph he has shaken off his cousin Michael. The main object of the story is to expose the villany of bubble companies, and the danger they run who venture to have dealings with city matters which they do not understand. I cannot but think that he altered his mind and changed his purpose while he was writing it, actuated probably by that editorial ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... first engine that traverses the San Francisco Railroad from end to end will be a death-warning to the disciples of Jo Smith. The moment the Mormon bubble gets touched by neighbours it will break. Similarly, the red man's course is very nearly run. A scalped stoker is the outward and visible sign of his utter extermination. Not Quakers enough to reach from here to Jerusalem ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... man who could not walk. He lay on his mat near a spring called Bethesda. It was covered by a roof, and had five porches. Here the sick were brought by their friends that they might, when they saw the waters bubble up, step in and be cured. They believed then an angel came down and made the moving of the waters, but it was probably one of the kind called intermittent springs. There is one at Jerusalem now called the "Fountain of the Virgin" which rises ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... intentions, for, thank God, I feel very well and hopeful; but taught by observation and experience the instability of all human things, and even of the life to which we are so much attached, and which is, nevertheless, a mere bubble; and knowing, moreover, that my state of health brings me more within the danger of death, I have thought proper to settle my worldly affairs, having the benefit of your advice." Then addressing himself more particularly to his uncle, "Good uncle," said he, "if I were to rehearse ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and business items, I came upon a paragraph that sent the declining thermometer of my feelings away down towards the chill of zero. It touched, in the most vital part, my scheme of gain; and the shrinking bubble burst. ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... all this?" he thought, staring downwards at the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair, disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. "Why has that meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly tale of a ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... birds are in the hedges. The lark, "from his moist cabinet rising," rains down his trills of incessant song from invisible heights of blue sky; and whenever one passes the wayside groves, a nightingale is sure to bubble into song. The oranges, too, are in blossom, perfuming the air; locust-trees are tasselled with odorous flowers; and over the walls of the Campagna villa bursts a cascade of vines covered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... similar faculty Gilderoy and Jack Rann have kept themselves and their achievements in the light of day. Had they lived in the nineteenth century they might have been the vendors of patent pills, or the chairmen of bubble companies. Whatever trade they had followed, their names would have been on every hoarding, their wares would have been puffed in every journal. They understood the art of publicity better than any of their contemporaries, and they are remembered not because ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... given worlds to have beaten a retreat to his own ship, as several officers came into the saloon while coffee was handed round, and he dreaded each moment that Jocko would disgrace himself and the bubble would burst; but no, there the admiral, would keep him, talking all the time, and directing most of his attention towards the pseudo "Senor Carrambo," for whose benefit Tom had to translate, or pretend to translate, ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... untold; A worm deemed an idol if covered with gold. A dog in a gutter—a God on a throne: In slander electric—in justice a drone: A parrot in promise, and frail as a shade; A hooded immortal in life's masquerade; A sham-lacquered bauble, a bubble, a breath: A boaster in ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... into French literature a country where many have loved to dwell, though its fauna and flora were not more accurate in some respects than the mineralogy and meteorology of the John Law scheme, known later as the "Mississippi Bubble," that made France wild with excitement once. However, I have recalled the fervid pen of Chateaubriand, not as that of a faunal or floral naturalist, but to have it rewrite these sentences: "Nothing is more surprising ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... build another huge skyscraper on Broadway, at Eleventh, and I see the political pot is beginning to bubble all ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... Prince Frederick Sound to the west coast of Admiralty Island. Our frail shell of a canoe was tossed like a bubble on the swells coming in from the ocean. Still, I suppose, the danger was not so great as it seemed. In a good canoe, skillfully handled, you may safely sail from Victoria to Chilcat, a thousand-mile voyage frequently made by Indians in their trading operations before the coming of the ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... Wonderful Visit." Artists should feel, and if necessary be told, that they are on their honour to do their best. That will do. If they flatter themselves that they are messengers from the Father of Light whenever they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any emotional hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a short time afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in a quite different direction. Sincerity of the moment is not sincerity; those who have watched England's ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the foreground, to the right, a fantastic lava formation, a hollow cone five yards in height and three yards in circumference, once an enormous lava bubble produced by gases in the liquid lava. In course of time, the roof has crumbled, also the nearest wall. The farther wall is still standing, but there is a hole in it, through which the sky can be seen. Farther back and somewhat to the left, the wall of a small hut is seen, ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... English don't seem the kind to have lost their heads over a South Sea Bubble, but they did," retorted Nell, as if she ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... like the glassy bubble, Which costs philosophers such trouble; Where, one part crack'd, the whole does fly, And wits are crack'd ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation, Ev'n in the cannon's mouth. And then, the justice, In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd; With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances, And so he plays his part. The sixth age foists Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes a little sunken, but in other respects looking as natural as if he had died yesterday. But exposure to the atmosphere appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed process of decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble; so, that, almost before there had been time to wonder at him, there was nothing left of the stalwart Earl save his hair. This sole relic the ladies of Warwick made prize of, and braided it into rings and brooches for their own adornment; and thus, with ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to this, and walked backward with her until they came to the place where the river bubbled up. It really did bubble up, Bredenbutta noticed, although she knew very well she had fallen down the Great Hole. But, then, everything was topsyturvy in this ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... great waste and national grievance, that so large a sum as the deposits which are paid on these railways should be withdrawn—it matters not how long—from practical use, and locked up to await the explosion of each particular bubble. We do think, therefore, that it is high time for the legislature to interfere, not for any purpose of opposing the progress of railways, but either by establishing a peremptory board of supervision, or portioning out the different localities with respect to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... accented syllable. The little word "also" is often called "als-o" or "als-so" or "alt-so"; chrysanthemum is pronounced "chrysant-themum"; coun-try is called "country," band so forth. In the case of doubled consonants, as in the word "mellow," "commemorate," "bubble," and the like, a momentary holding of the first consonant, so that a bit of separate impulse is given to the second, makes more perfect speaking. There is a slight difference between "mel-low" and "mel-ow," "bub-ble" and "bub-le," "com-memorate" and "com-emorate." ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... yes, for life. But what is life? A bubble that any pin may prick. Oh! I know that you do not like the subject, but it is as well to look it in the face sometimes. I'm no church-goer, but if I remember right we were taught to pray the good Lord to deliver us especially 'in all times of our wealth,' which is followed by ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... peaceful brook Through a rye-field's stubble, Stood a little boy to look At himself; his double. Sweet the picture was to see; All at once it ceased to be; Vanished like a bubble! ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fraud, trick, hoax, finesse, imposition, imposture, swindle, humbug, bubble, wile, deception, stratagem, bunko, blind, thimblerigging; impostor, deceiver, quack, mountebank, thimblerigger, charlatan, empiric, trickster, swindler, blackleg, bamboozler, sharper; delusion, chicanery, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Mary poured the sunshine of her eyes upon me, and I hope and trust she found me a presentable young man, for under the warmth of her look my heart began to bubble up like a pot of potatoes on ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... the schemes to which they subscribed; it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really credulous. So great was the confusion of the crowd in the alley, that shares in the same bubble were known to have been sold at the same instant ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other. Sensible men beheld the extraordinary infatuation of the people with sorrow and alarm. There were some both in and out of parliament ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... with image types are worth while noting. First, the question is raised by some psychologists as to whether kinaesthetic or motor images really exist. An example of such an image would be to imagine yourself as dancing, or walking downstairs, or writing your name, or saying the word "bubble." Those who object to such an image type claim that when one tries to get such an image, the attempt initiates slight muscle movements and the result is a sense experience instead of an imaged one. They ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... sun rose in the sky, casting his beams down on our heads, and making the pitch bubble up from the seams in the deck—as it had done not unfrequently during the voyage—a few cats' paws were seen playing over the mirror-like deep. The sails bulged out occasionally, again to hang down as before; then once more they swelled out with the ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... was no gainsaying, we contended that the indestructibility of the glaze, tested as it had been with aquafortis by Rossi himself, proved the genuineness of its antiquity—it proved nothing but that we had something still to learn! The nola varnish was light as a soap-bubble, but this on the Ryton was thick and substantial. How he wished we had been to stay another week to have taught us the difference! and how we wished him gone, lest he should make some new revelations of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... will never belong to his rival; but neither can it be his, even though chance might take him to Texas, or by design he should proceed thither. To what end should he? No more now can he build castles in the air, basing them on the power of creditor over debtor. That bubble has burst, leaving him only the reflection, how illusory it has been. Although, for his nefarious purpose, it has proved weak as a spider's web, it is not likely Colonel Armstrong will ever again submit himself to be so ensnared. Broken men become ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Without some practice it is difficult to teach any art; and cooks seem to suppose they must be right, if they put meat into a pot, and set it over the fire for a certain time—making no allowance, whether it simmers without a bubble, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... huge dome of the cathedral, looming like a bubble over the shadowy houses, and the weary sentinels pacing up and down on the misty terrace by the river. Far away, in an orchard, a nightingale was singing. A faint perfume of jasmine came through the open window. He brushed his brown curls back from his forehead, and taking up a lute, ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... platform, he felt the tension, the exaggerated repugnance, which any outdone suitor is bound to feel toward his successful rival. He felt sick and useless, and somehow he wished he was back aboard the train again. He had blown his dream-bubble, rapturously contemplating the shining, dancing, multicolored surface as it expanded and became of size. And this bubble had ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... company for 'the passage of the Simplon,' with twenty-franc shares; but these things do not seem to find much favour amongst the thrifty peasantry. They have, in their time, been tempted to unearth their treasures, and to invest in bubble companies like the rest of the world; but there is a reaction here, the Normans evidently thinking, like the old Colonnae, that a hole in the bottom of the garden is about the safest place after all. And they have, it is true, some other temptations which come to them with a cheap press, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... such excited waiting, you feel that the engine is slowing down. There's a hollow rumbling; you're crossing the dear old wrinkled Thames. If you looked out you'd see the dome of St. Paul's like a bubble on the sky-line and smoking chimneys sticking up like thumbs—things quite ugly and things of surpassing beauty, all of which you have never hoped to see again and which in dreams you have loved. But if you could look out, you wouldn't have the ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... for the first time I realize that this was not because you believed in it, but because you saw in it advantage to yourselves. The gratification which I have enjoyed from this supposed tribute has vanished, like the empty bubble that it was. It has been said that the Consolidated Companies was a one-man corporation, which I have denied, believing that my labors were rather those of the pioneer, showing the way to those associated with me who would naturally follow my footsteps. Again, I was ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... proportions of things (like the reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood, where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than in "Ole Lukoeie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, dewy freshness about the grass, the flowers, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... side, after giving a hasty glance at the lard moulds, now took the covers off the two pots in which the fat was simmering, and each bursting bubble discharged an acrid vapour into the kitchen. The greasy haze had been gradually rising ever since the beginning of the evening, and now it shrouded the gas and pervaded the whole room, streaming everywhere, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the water than it began to swim, by expanding, and contracting itself with such facility that, but for the meshes of the net, it would soon have taken its wondrous hanging fringes and delicate soap-bubble hues out of sight. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... head with a wild animation, and the sluggish repose in which his aged frame had been resting in the canoe was now changed to all the rapid inflections of practiced agility. The canoe whirled with each cunning evolution of the chase, like a bubble floating in a whirlpool; and when the direction of the pursuit admitted of a straight course the little bark skimmed the lake with a velocity that urged the deer to seek its ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... about by rebel agents from abroad or living in our midst; or an outbreak of indignation against a law supposed to be unjust; or a riot of thieves, whose main purpose was plunder; or a politicians' bubble merely;—whether it were any or all of these, or something different from these or more than these; in any of these cases, we are yet at the threshold of our inquiry concerning it. We must go back over some ground which we have cursorily traversed, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the dawn There came a groping shape of mystery Moving among us, that with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe, Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice, Laughing on Lethe-bank—and in my throat I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes, The bubble of godlike laughter in ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... of the question. Her brain still kept at work, elaborating the ideas already proposed and adding still others to the plan. Why hadn't she laid more stress on the Medici? How had she contrived to overlook John Law and the South Sea Bubble, with all its attendant wigs, hooped petticoats and shoe-buckles? Then the Pine-Tree Shilling jumped to her eyes, and Virginia's use of tobacco as a currency;—possibly the entire scheme might be arranged on a purely ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... latter rose first, but it was a long time before Basil came to the surface—so long that Norman and the others were beginning to feel uneasy, and to regard the water with some anxiety. At length, however, a spot was seen to bubble, several yards from where he had gone down, and the black head of Basil appeared above the surface. It was seen that he held something in his teeth, and was pushing a heavy body before him, which they ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... crew Out of a vaporous furnace of colour that wreathes Magical letters a-flicker from crimson to blue High overhead. All round him the mad world seethes. Hansoms, like cantering beetles, with diamond eyes Run through the moons of it; busses in yellow and red Hoot; and St. Paul's is a bubble afloat in the skies, Watching the pale moths flit and the dark ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... looked at his companion as if in the most perfect amazement that he did not understand fully the business which he had had no experience in. "What do you call that?" and Bob pointed to the water-pools that were covered with something which showed different colors, not unlike a soap-bubble. ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... in the year. The world frequently becomes too fast in every thing; and crises, panics, and bankruptcies follow as legitimate consequences. When a fictitious value is given to every thing, and every globule of air which one has breathed comes puffing out, a splendid bubble, a magnificent speculation, and when men have to go so fast that they need a telegraph to ride them through the world lest they get behind the heated times, no wonder that the shipper can not sit quietly down in his office and wait thirty days for a load of corn to reach England, or a load of ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... sung Her victory o'er the element, that hung, Pressing to earth the Beings, who now soar Aerial heights;—but Wisdom bids explore This vaunted skill;—if, tides of air among, We know to steer our bark.—Here Science finds Her buoyant hopes burst, like the bubble vain, Type of this art;—guilty, if still she blinds The sense of Fear; persists thy flame to fan, Sky-vaulting Pride, that to the aweless winds Throws, for an idle Show, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... curtains: a slight mist over London, purple on the horizon, closer, a mere wash of blue; here and there steeples pierced the thin veil like fingers pointing upward. On the left the dome of St. Paul's hung like a grey bubble over the city; on the right the twin towers of Westminster with the river and bridge which Wordsworth sang. Peace and beauty brooding everywhere, and down there lost in the mist the "rat pit" that men call ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... wind whistled through the blue And caught the moon and tossed it high; A bubble of pale fire it flew Across ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... was the work of a very worthy facetious old fellow, John Lapraik, late of Dalfram, near Muirkirk; which little property he was obliged to sell in consequence of some connexion as security for some persons concerned in that villanous bubble THE AYR BANK. He has often told me that he composed this song one day when his wife had been fretting ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... colonial enterprises, however, were projects for the issue of paper money rather than the creation of commercial banks. Speculative banking was checked to a large extent in the colonies by the Bubble Act (6 Geo. I. c. 18), which was passed in England after the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. This act, which forbade the formation of banking companies without a special charter, was in 1740 extended ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... as though his throat were parched with an implacable thirst. He walked about ever meditating certain fortunate turns of the cards; and when he had worked himself up to some realization of his old excitement he would remember that it was all a vain and empty bubble. He had money in his pocket, and could rush up to London if he would, and if he did so he could, no doubt, find some coarse hell at which he could stake it till it would be all gone; but the gates of the A—— and the B—— and the C—— would be closed against him; and he would then be ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... then, if that is the case . . . Agne, the Christian, in the Temple of Isis—here, here, where Bishop Theophilus is destroying all our sanctuaries and the monks outdo their master. Ah, children, children, how pretty and round and bright a soap-bubble is, and how soon it bursts. Do you know at all what it is that you are planning? If the black flies smell it out and it becomes known, by the great Apollo! we should have fared better at the hands of the pirates. And yet, and yet.—Do you know ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the side of the steep gorge, with a foaming torrent rushing along at its foot, nor yet when we forded the rocky and rapid Yellowstone. A misstep or a stumble on the part of my steed, and probably the first bubble of my confidence would have been shivered at once; but this did not happen, and in due time we reached the group of tents ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... case it is the right thing to do," he said, sighing. "As you say, we should only suffer if we thought of ourselves first. If one tries to grasp happiness at the expense of another's suffering it only collapses like a bubble, and leaves one more wretched than before. You and I are not unprincipled, Una, though we did forget ourselves for that one moment, and the remembrance of Rachel would poison everything. Perhaps, after all, it is as well that we know our danger, for we shall be more careful to keep out ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... regular spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulna. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like a bubble that's ready to burst. And, though she's a fool, she's got it into her head, "I'm the mistress," she says; "the house is mine; it's me father wanted him to marry." And she's that vicious! Lord help us, when she gets ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... business had I there trespassing on his domain, and frightening his wife and little family, for whom he was ready to lay down his life? There he would sit in spite of me, and make my ears ring with the sound of his woo-whoop, till the spring of life should cease to bubble in his ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... their separate ways, and the happy little bubble has burst and vanished, as its successors, now forming on the bosom of the deep, will burst and vanish too. What friendships, what ardent loves, what molten vows, ocean born, have begun to languish on the wharf at Liverpool, like sunfish ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... at last, toward a small green hill, bright in the last gold rays on sunset. A small domelike pink bubble rose out of the hill. Raynor Three set the copter neatly down on a platform that slid shut after them, unfastened their seat belts and gave Bart a hand to ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good bit more privacy. The thing I'm trying to figure out will burst like a bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and"—lowering his voice—"I can't trust my ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... two escaping alike. As different are they as the current of our individual lives; now quietly gliding in, but not off, the racket on either side; now confidently asserting themselves by a semi-turbulent merriness; now all babble and bubble and surface; now dark, deep, and masterful through hidden force under a calm countenance; now tearing, and dashing, and running away with ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... returns thither whence it came, with or without consciousness, a few months later or earlier, in order to be drowned in its great fountain-head, or to float for some time yet like a bubble, reflecting the clouds and an alien light—this appears to me constantly a matter of ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Pirolo lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot just underneath us, clawing high ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... in emptiness. It was a large bubble, as such things go. It was nearly a thousand feet in diameter, and it was made of multipoly plastic which is nearly as anomalous as its name. The bubble contained almost an ounce of helium. It had a three-inch ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... That is exactly what I think. I agree with you. Only, you are of a serious disposition and take the matter to heart, while I think it is great fun. What is the use of thinking so much. We are all like bubbles: we float in the air, and then the bubble bursts and this life is over. I am now a poor boy. I fear no change. In a future incarnation I may be born as the son of a king, like you. And think of it, after a few million years, this whole world, this big bulky ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... career of a foot or two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva bubbles right away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really do relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... to some busy commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... odd moments; at night voluminously—until very late, sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... mark the spot. It was sudden and silent, as though some strange monster of the marshes had seized him and dragged him down into the depths. As I stood with upraised sword still gazing upon the spot, one single great bubble rose and burst upon the surface, and then all was still once more, and the dreary fens lay stretched before me, the very home of death and of desolation. I know not whether he had indeed come upon some sudden pit which had engulfed him, or ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... present to hand a man," he answered grimly. "An' I didn't notice you bubble with enthusiasm when I spoke of givin' half the glory ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... and the Brahmaputra valley, its "desert" stretches are not the dismal solitudes of the Tarim basin or the "Black" and "Red" sands of central Asia. Water is found almost everywhere near the surface, and springs bubble up in the hollows, often encircled by exterior oases. Everywhere the ground is traversable by horses and carts. This comparatively fertile tract, cutting the Gobi into two great sections, has been, ever since its ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Newport came back to Virginia, at about the time we were gathering our scanty harvest, his dreams of sudden wealth, through the digging of gold in Virginia, had burst as does a bubble when ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... Be not so hot: the Duke dare No more stretch this finger of mine, then he Dare racke his owne: his Subiect am I not, Nor here Prouinciall: My businesse in this State Made me a looker on here in Vienna, Where I haue seene corruption boyle and bubble, Till it ore-run the Stew: Lawes, for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong Statutes Stand like the forfeites in a Barbers shop, As much in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... for Molly had picked up a Portuguese man-o'-war and sat wringing her hands with the pain of its poison. For, while nothing in nature is more exquisite, few things are more virulent than this animated, opalescent, iridescent bubble with its long, delicate, ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... metaphor is derived from a hot spring which appears to boil over at the moment of its coming to the surface. As the particles of water, when they emerge into the light, break and bubble into a seething mass; so, too, does passion chase and beget passion in the "hot throng" of general interests ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... is a devil of a laugh, mostly made of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own mental processes—and ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... fixin' fer ter pick he toof, but by dis time Brer Mink bleedz ter come up, en ole Brer Tarrypin, he tuck'n slid down in de water. He slid so slick," said Uncle Remus, with a chuckle, "dat he aint lef' a bubble. He aint stay down long, n'er, 'fo' he come up en he make lak ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... every one, including her grandfather, down whose wrinkled cheeks the tears had fallen unashamed. With a high head and her best wilful manner she had presented to them all in that old house the bluff of easy-mindedness only to burst like a bubble as soon as the car had turned the corner into the main road. She had gone to the little house in New York, and with a numbed heart and a constant pain in her soul, had packed some warm-weather clothes and, leaving her maid behind, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... with eclat; But if I fail, it does not matter, pshaw! If in this enterprise I lose my life, Present my compliments to your good wife; My horse be hers, in payment of her trouble. Heigho! this world's a dream, and life's a bubble! ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... stand out aloof in the highway of the universe, and feel yourself to be part of the all? In the midst of the immense, age-long concourse of humanity, what is Bimal to you? Your wife? What is a wife? A bubble of a name blown big with your own breath, so carefully guarded night and day, yet ready to burst at ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble were certain Masters of Chancery, who had thrown away on that wild speculation large sums of which they were the official guardians. Lord Macclesfield was one of the victims on whom the nation wreaked its wrath at a crisis when ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson |
