"Illusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and of carrying on life, such a splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither she nor Gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "Bob" of that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. He seemed exposed, for his pleasure—if pleasure it was!—and my wonder, to every assault of experience; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... boundless wealth, that demon king Is bounteous to each living thing. Though suppliants flock from every side The suit of none is e'er denied. Whate'er, where'er, howe'er the call, He hears the suit and gives to all. Now with thine own illusive art Perform, O Lord, the helper's part: Assume a dwarfish form, and thus From fear and danger rescue us.' Thus in their dread the Immortals sued The God, a dwarfish shape indued:— Before Virochan's son he came, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... be truly 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. In short, spiritual and manly in his habits, he was ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself. The social differences between men he found were equally arbitrary and illusive; caste bred hatred and selfishness; riches strife, envy and malice. So in founding his Faith he laid the bottom of its foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... of the frequent scenes and rehearsals in her family. After many trials, she at last engages a seamstress who promises to prove a perfect treasure,—neat, dapper, nimble, skilful, and spirited. The very soul of Mrs. Simmons rejoices in heaven. Illusive bliss! The new-comer proves to be no favorite with Madam Cook, and the domestic fates evolve the catastrophe, as follows. First, low murmur of distant thunder in the kitchen; then a day or two of sulky silence, in which the atmosphere seems heavy with an approaching ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... triumphantly, and the old man bears it in his trembling hands to the carefully prepared furnace where fire must add to its beauty of form the illusive, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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. The ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... thy solitary throne! For up the 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... 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, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... so thick a mist over the glen, he knew not how to advance. A step further might be on the firm earth, but more probably illusive, and dash him into the roaring Lynn, where he would be ingulfed at once in its furious whirlpool. He paused and looked around. The rain had ceased, but the thunder still rolled at a distance and echoed tremendously from the surrounding rocks. Halbert ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... them there, from the sunrise to its setting, the spectral illusive shapes of the mirage floated like restless spirit betwixt heaven and earth ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the fading wife of the man who had taught him all the English and the white man's etiquette that he had ever mastered. Night after night he would return from day-long hunting trips, his game-bag filled with delicate quail, rare woodcock, snowy-breasted partridge, and when the illusive appetite of the sick woman could be coaxed to partake of a morsel, he felt repaid for miles of tramping through forest trails, for ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... 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 ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... alternating states: a short one called life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called his normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... 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 are taking a step ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... 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 these had business of one kind or other; all were earnestly intent upon their ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... extensive acquaintance with the ocean, has shown that this appearance is not unique; a similar one on the coast of Patagonia, has more than once deceived both French and English navigators; and rock Dunder, in the West Indies, bears a resemblance, at a distance equally illusive. There is another recorded by Captain Hardy, in his recent travels in Mexico, near the shore of California; and the "story of the flying Dutchman," is founded on a similar appearance at the Cape of Good Hope, connected with a tradition which has been long current there among ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the proofs of a religious calling, whereas, when born, all said, these are marks of a 'great man,' who ought to receive tribute from the four seas! And now to see what he has come to! all these predictive words vain and illusive." ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... America, 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 expressions of friendship." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... 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 to analyze it ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... to find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, in this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther's theory of grace[59] no more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of history[60] reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous|, absonant[obs3]; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur[Latin: it does not follow]. deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum[Lat], evasive; irrelevant &c. 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c. (absurd) 497. foolish &c. (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; finespun[obs3], overrefined[obs3]. at the end of one's tether, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal household, of a gallant 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 father[18] ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... and the impersonal more impersonal than before. The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make himself ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... when a cone has been cut asunder, its two surfaces are alike; that the final result of human inquiry is the absolute demonstration that man is incapable of knowledge; that, even if the truth be in his possession, he can never be certain of it; that the world is an illusive phantasm, and that there ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... an affecting sight, 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
... was beautiful; her beauty 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 all ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... gathering 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 of them "seemed very happy in whist"; he proposed ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... formed a not unimportant wing of the philosophic phalanx, now in harmony with the Encyclopaedic party, now in hostility. The sense of the misery of France was present to many minds in the opening of the century, and with the death of Louis XIV. came illusive hopes of amelioration. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), filled with ardent zeal for human happiness, condemned the government of the departed Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual peace; among his dreams arose projects for the improvement of society which were justified ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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
... that you are in affluence, foretells that you will make fortunate ventures, and will be pleasantly associated with people of wealth. To young women, a vision of weird and fairy affluence is ominous of illusive and evanescent pleasure. They should study more closely their duty to friends and parents. After dreams of this nature they are warned to cultivate a love for ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... was that Maurice, there in the darkness that was instinct with life, became conscious that a great duty lay before him. He ceased to beguile himself with the illusive prospect of great victories to be gained; the march to Verdun was a march to death, and he so accepted it, since it was their lot to die, with brave ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... publication of her MS. if approved by Savarin, in the journal to be set up by the handsome-faced young author, she leapt to the conclusion that Graham had been seized with no unnatural jealousy, and was still under the illusive glamoury of that green-eyed fiend. She was confirmed in this notion, not altogether an unsound one, when asking with apparent carelessness, "And in that last interview, did you see any change in Mr. Vane's manner, especially ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very expensive-looking sable brush, lying all ready to be trodden upon by entering feet. Fresh visitors constantly attested the skillfulness of these imitations by involuntarily stooping to pick up the illusive pen and brush; Mr. Blyth always enjoying the discomfiture and astonishment of every new victim, as thoroughly as if the practical joke had been a perfectly new one on each ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... only quadruped I recollect seeing in them was a diminutive jackass, 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 did ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... known in self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no knowing except by perception—this is ever reiterated as self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By invincible necessity the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... and white, and an exquisite pink, and we drive daily over long stretches of solid rock, going down two or three hundred feet—But I shall never explore these for illusive wealth. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... just as you, viz. that the idea and contemplation of enjoying future life was absolutely necessary to present enjoyment; but I am now fully convinced, yea, more, it is absolutely known to be a fact, that the idea is altogether visionary and illusive. I admit that a knowledge of the truth, so far as the truth may be known, is perfectly congenial with the present happiness of mankind: though it is often the case that a partial knowledge of the truth, in relation to any particular subject, produces distress and misery rather than enjoyment. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... was arranged; and again in the illusive sense of deliverance, the poor vicar's hopes brightened and expanded. Hitherto his escapes had not led to safety, and he was only raised from the pit to be sold ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, continually face to face with facts, will have none of it and leaves it to the armchair naturalists, who are too prone to look at the animal world through the illusive mists ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... in the laboratory, it is easy to find some drugs which will be fatal to its growth, and these same drugs, it would seem, should be valuable as medicines in these diseases. This hope has, however, proved largely illusive. It is very easy to find some drug which proves fatal to the specific germs while growing in the culture media of the laboratory, but commonly these are of little or no use when applied as medicines. In the first place, such substances are usually very ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... of the situation, in which in spite of Shakespeare and the rest poor modern sceptics still find themselves, is an indication of how hopelessly illusive all talk of "progress" is. Between Calvin on the one hand and the Sorbonne on the other, Montaigne might well shuffle home from his municipal duties and read Horace in his tower. And we, after three hundred odd years, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... who were 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
... 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
... come up with or take possession of something departing, fugitive, or illusive. We catch a runaway horse, a flying ball, a mouse in a trap. We clutch with a swift, tenacious movement of the fingers; we grasp with a firm but moderate closure of the whole hand; we grip or gripe with the strongest muscular closure of the whole hand possible to exert. We ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated, ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... 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 remember the years of the right ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and subjective." Crushing to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his victim, the M.P., "is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this ludicrous old Shrovetide cock, whose ignorance and information leave two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... love is like the sunlight That sets the world ablaze. And love is like the moonlight With soft illusive rays. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 a knight in armor—defending their liege ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... logical category does not exist, for all our dream and illusory cognitions demonstrate it to us. They exist as they are perceived, but they do not exist since they have no other independent existence than the fact of their perception. If it has any creative function, that function is as illusive as its own nature, for the creation only lasts so long as the error lasts. Brahman, the truth, is not in any way sullied or affected by association with maya, for there can be no association of the real with the empty, the maya, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... to witness fulfilment on the part of the 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
... assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain ascendency—to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and inexorable finish—but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor—flung by at a double, in coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 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 into fantasmal appearances. Many cases could be adduced ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... ventured a boldly questioning note that lingered unfinished in the silence of indecision. Across the road hopped a young rabbit, a little rounded shadow that melted into the blur of the sage. A cold white fire, spreading behind the purple-edged ranges, enriched their somber panoply with illusive enchantments, ever changing as the dim effulgence drifted from peak to peak. Shadows grew luminous and were gone. In their stead wooded valleys and wide canons unfolded to the magic of the moon. There was no world but ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... calculation he attempted. As for Pierre, it was in silence that he gazed upon this mass of wax, destined to be burnt in open daylight to the glory of God; and although he was by no means a rigid utilitarian, and could well understand that some apparent acts of extravagance yield an illusive enjoyment and satisfaction which provide humanity with as much sustenance as bread, he could not, on the other hand, refrain from reflecting on the many benefits which might have been conferred on the poor and the ailing with the money represented by all that wax, which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... "Even your clumsy description has strangely stirred my youthful blood, and 'I longs fer ter see this hyar wonderful child dryad of ther primeval forest.' If you ever go back there, you had better wear magic armor as protection against that illusive smile which seems to have cast a spell of enchantment over ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... 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, 22, 23, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... remarkable than any or all of his achievements was the fact that Booker Washington was a gentleman. It would be difficult to find a man who better conformed to the exacting yet illusive requirements of that term. He had not only the naturalness and the goodness of heart which are the fundamentals, but he had also the breeding and the polish which distinguish the finished gentleman from the "rough diamond." This fact ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Trust not Hope's illusive ray, Trust not Joy's deceitful smiles; Oft they reckless youth betray With their ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... painted on canvas nor yet written. It was dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container. As she looked upon it, the picture grew more and more real, exceeding the proportions of the chest. It was all so illusive a breath might have blown it away; yet there it was, real as life,—a circular camp of white cone-shaped tepees, astir with Indian people. The village crier, with flowing head-dress of eagle plumes, mounted on a prancing white pony, rode within the arena. Indian men, women and children stopped in ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... God,—Para Brahm; him they cannot worship, for he is literally an unknown God. He has no qualities; no attributes, no activity. He is neither the object of hope, fear, love, nor aversion. Since there is nothing in the universe but spirit and illusive appearances, and they cannot worship spirit because it is absolutely unknown, they must worship these appearances, which are at any rate divine appearances, and which do possess some traits, qualities, character; are objects of hope and fear. But they cannot worship them as appearances, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... 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
... can be but a fancy? Clancy could not be there, either in the trees, or on the earth. She knows it is but a deception of her senses—an illusive vision—such as occur to ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... and threatening storm appear to us brooding over that doubtful sea. But something of prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive—that they will vanish as we approach—that we shall soon arrive in halcyon waters, and regions where wisdom, peace, and purity reign supreme. If we cautiously inquire after some assurance of such results, ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... 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 of its ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... unborn, and my nature is eternal, and I am the Lord also of all creatures, yet taking control of my nature-form, I am born by my illusive power. For whenever piety decays, O son of Bharata, and impiety is in the ascendant, then I produce myself. For the protection of good men, for the destruction of evildoers, for the re-establishment of piety, I am born from age to ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... world—to subjection, and reigns over it at Capua, and yet he calls upon us for corn. And then, to crown all, he sends us bushels of gold rings as a specimen of the riches he has obtained by plunder, and accompanies the offering with a demand for new supplies of money. In my opinion, his success is all illusive and hollow. There seems to be nothing substantial in his situation except his necessities, and the heavy burdens upon the state which ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... greater incongruity in the New Comedy than in the Old, and in Tragedy. But certainly it was unsuitable to the spirit of the New, that, while in other respects the representation approached nature with a more exact, nay, illusive resemblance, the masks deviated more from it than in the Old, being overcharged in the features, and almost to caricature. However singular this may appear, it is too expressly and formally attested to admit of a doubt. [Footnote: See Platonius, in Aristoph. cur. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... science, rather than the apparently fixed and passive aspects of the earth's formations and configurations which are but the products of the processes that have gone before. Even the apparent passiveness of the geologic products is illusive, for they are in reality expressions of continued internal activities of an intense, though occult, order. These escape notice largely because they are balanced against one another in a system of equilibrium which pervades them ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... had in length a magnificent and palatial effect, nor did I immediately discover the cause of its apparent grandeur. It opens into the gallery built over the arch connecting the two houses, at the end of which an immense mirror reflects the two apartments. The effect is most illusive, nor should I have guessed the truth had I not seen the reflection of my own figure ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... The flower-crowned Queen of every cultured lea, And he who walked, with monarch-tread, the sea, The awful Thunderer, threatening them aloud, God! were their vain imaginings of Thee, Who saw Thee only through the illusive cloud That sin had flung around their spirits, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... 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, as I looked up, that I was sharing a common ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... frame of man must be Bound to earth, the soul is free, But that freedom oft doth bring Discontent and sorrowing. Oh! that from each waking vision, Gorgeous vista, gleam Elysian, From ambition's dizzy height, And from hope's illusive light, Man, like thee, glad lark, could brook Upon a low green spot to look, And with home affections blest Sink into ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... think of that apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an illusion, since no being can really continue to live divorced from the source of its life. For a period in evolution the SELF took on this illusive form in consciousness, as of an ignis fatuus—the form of a being sundered from all other beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by dangers and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation in the midst of a hostile environment. Perhaps some such terrible ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... perhaps, only an illusive dream that bantered us, only a fata morgana formed by the moonbeams? Or does the serpent of evil really lurk about this paradise? Will destruction find its way into this charmed garden? Ah, no solitude and no wall can afford protection against misfortune! It creeps through the strongest ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... to let her dance with other men," he said under his breath. He balanced carefully, stretched out one arm to encircle an imaginary waist and started heavily to tread the illusive measure. Suddenly he realized that he was not alone. Farther down a couple were swaying in the shadows. Then Dolly's voice ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... chastity of Fijians is as illusive as their modesty. Girls who had been betrothed as infants were carefully guarded, and adultery savagely punished by clubbing or strangling; but, as I made clear in the chapter on jealousy, such vindictive ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... now come to the end of our difficulties? Not yet; for Berlioz is the most illusive of men, and no one has helped more than he to mislead people in their estimate of him. We know how much he has written about music and about his own life, and what wit and understanding he shows in his ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... presently when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true. His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... that it was like a moonlit 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 ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of the girl in the photograph he so faithfully cherished. Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature—a woman—had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... kept him at a distance, symptoms of a bitter rancor which was destined to bear fruit. Marie Antoinette, accustomed to a numerous family, affectionately united, sought friends who could "love her for herself," as she used to say: an illusive hope, in one of her rank, for which she was destined to pay dearly. She formed an attachment to the young Princess of Lamballe, daughter-in-law of the Duke of Penthievre, a widow at twenty years of age, affectionate and gentle, for whom she revived the post of lady-superintendent, abolished by ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... obtain shares (engraving), 18; avarice and ambition of the speculators; robberies and murders, 20; a broker murdered by Count d'Horn, and robbed of shares (engraving), 21; temporary stimulus to trade, and illusive prosperity; Law purchases estates, and turns Catholic, 24; his charity and modesty, 25; caricatures of him, as Atlas, 25; "Lucifer's new row barge," 29; in a car drawn by cocks, 40; increase of luxury in Paris, 26; the Regent purchases the great diamond, 27; symptoms ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Cabinet had made too 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 intimation was very ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... Cook's qualities as a seaman and commander more 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
... discern 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 of your ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... began, tremulously, hardly able to credit her ears, hardly able to believe that this great and almost overwhelming joy was a reality, and not some illusive dream. ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... 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 presence of ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... 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 the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... in 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, as one knows after reconciliation with a friend misapprehended and unjustly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... of Thlinget myth and legend, croaked spasmodically from the white branch of a dead spruce behind them. The damp air had in it the freshness of new-cut hemlock boughs, a wild, vigorous fragrance that stirs the imagination with strange, illusive promises ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... frequented the Bohemian regions where Philippe was still occasionally to be found, to persuade that shameless son to play, if only out of pity, a little comedy of tenderness which might wrap the mother's heart in a winding-sheet of illusive happiness. Bixiou, in his capacity as an observing and misanthropical scoffer, desired nothing better than to undertake such a mission. When he had made known Madame Bridau's condition to the Comte de Brambourg, who received him in a bedroom hung ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... tempted to fulfill my father's last wish! But at such a time it has always come to my mind that I too might have such a son, who would cast into his father's teeth that he was a coward and a selfish man; that he sacrificed a life for his illusive hopes. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Chamber of Deputies in France annually to protest at the commencement of the Session against the acts of the Emperor Nicholas, and to make a declaration in favour of the nationality of Poland. I think that such annual declarations are illusive; for while they have been made in this manner, they have been followed up by no measures; they are made by a representative assembly, without any action following on that declaration. Be it observed how great is the difference between that and a protest on the part of a Sovereign. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... 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 at his pleasure all religious celebrations. The cathedrals and ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 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 was Janet Mackay, gaunt and ugly, interposing ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the bolt of doom, and for a week after—in an agony of dread, broken by illusive glimpses of hope that our prayers might be answered—the nation waited for the end. Nothing in the glorious life we saw gradually waning was more admirable and exemplary than its close. The gentle ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... 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
... you to explain this—wait a bit. (Opens volume again.) Ah, here we are—"And these illusive and primordial cognitions, or pseud-ideas, are homogeneous entities which may be differentiated objectively or subjectively, according as they are presented as Noumenon or Phenomenon. Or, in other words, they are only cognoscible as a colligation of incongruous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... air is languid with pleasure and love, Lulling the sense to dreams Elysian, Making life seem a glorious trance, Full of bright visions of heaven, Safe from the touch of reality, Toil none—woe none—pain, Wild and illusive as sleep-revelations. Time to be poured like wine from a chalice Sparkling and joyous for aye, Drained amid mirth and music, The brows circled with ivy, And the goblet at last like a gift Thrust in ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... offering a substitute for the dead in the person of a captive. There was relief, to picture the face of the laughing cherub in the clouds, or to listen to its light footstep in the empty halls of the dwelling; for in these illusive images of the brain, suffering was confined to her own bosom. But when stern reality usurped the place of fancy, and she saw her living daughter shivering in the wintry blasts or sinking beneath the fierce heats of the climate, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... humors—in the 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 ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... generous. His good humor was regarded as an echo of his prosperity, and a lucky negro, winning at dice, would strive to imitate his manner. At planting, at plowing and at gathering, no detail was too small or too illusive to escape his eye. His interests were under a microscopic view and all plans that were drawn in the little brick office at the corner of the yard, were rigorously carried out in the fields. In the one place he was all business; in the other there was in him an admixture of good humor and executive ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... great number of unexplained facts is often interpreted by the admirers of Da Vinci, as showing an almost occult insight into science many centuries in advance of his time. Such interpretations, however, are illusive. The observation, for example, that a tube placed against the ground enables one to hear movements on the earth at a distance, is not in itself evidence of anything more than acute scientific observation, as a similar method is in use among almost ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... deceive the understanding and give the rein to imagination. Long before the discovery of the New World, it was believed that new lands in the Far West might be seen from the shores of the Canaries and the Azores. These illusive images were owing, not to any extraordinary refraction of the rays of light, but produced by an eager longing for the distant and the unattained. The philosophy of the Greeks, the physical views of the Middle Ages, and even those ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... prized of the abstruse occult arts. Monarchs, princes, the great of all countries, eagerly vied among themselves in encouraging with promises and sometimes with more substantial incentives the zeal of their illusive search; and Henry IV. of France could see no reason why, if the bread and wine were transubstantiated so miraculously, a metal could not ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... represented in miniature on the retina of the eye, seems to have given rise to this illusive oratory! It was forgot that this representation belongs rather to the laws of light, than to those of life; and may with equal elegance be seen in the camera obscura as in the eye; and that the picture vanishes for ever, when the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Heaven; 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
... in a quick, 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 was impatient at his lack of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... swaying tops of stage-coaches, from lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of "mountain schooners," and from scorching saddles that seemed to weigh down the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem that the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... races. All these 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 pre-historic vicissitudes ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... 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 to conceal ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... sense of what is illusive in the illusion of the puppets, let us sit not too far from the stage. Choosing our place carefully, we shall have the satisfaction of always seeing the wires at their work, while I think we shall lose nothing of what is most savoury in the feast of the illusion. There is not indeed the appeal to ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and graceful heads swayed alluringly toward the handsome cavaliers who momentarily had found lodgment in hearts which, like palaces, had many ante-chambers. From hidden recesses, strains of music filled the room with tinkling passages of sensuous, but illusive, harmony; a dream of ardor, masked in the daintiness ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... which I had to defend the rights of the diplomatic and commercial agents against the pretensions of military power. Marshal Brune during his government at Hamburg, went to Bremman. to watch the strict execution of the illusive blockade against England. The Marshal acting no doubt, in conformity with the instructions of Clarke, then Minister of War and Governor of Berlin, wished to arrogate the right of deciding on the captures ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... eighteen years old, drawing near the confines of illusive dreams. Elf-land behind her, the shores of Reality in front. To herself she said that night, after Robert had walked home with her to the rectory gate: "I love Robert, and I feel sure that he loves me. I have thought so many a time ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the suggestion it contained much more seriously than any of us for several years imagined; nor did we connect the long contemplativeness of the man with any definite purpose. The thing was too vague and illusive to become ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... little about him, Miss Reed," said Mark. "It is good of you to give me this interview, for we are up against a curious problem and the situation, as it appears at present, may be illusive and quite unlike the real facts. Captain Redmayne, I hear, had suffered from shell shock and a breath of poison gas also. Did you ever notice any signs that these troubles had ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... Now, as he turned half way about, looking down into the shallow hollow between him and the curve of the creek, he saw them very plainly. The fringe of the herd was some two hundred yards distant, but its farther side, in that illusive shimmer of hot surface air, seemed miles away. The sheep were spread out roughly in the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller, and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive confreres. His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes or the Inland Voyage. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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? ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tossed, they rested disheartened and hopeless. Then, as they drifted, a sound struggled to them against the wind—a faint cry, illusive and fleeting as a dream voice—and, still doubting, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach |
