"Impalpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meal, white as the finest wheat flour." This meal is produced by a slow and tedious process. The corn is hulled and the germ cut out, so that there is only a pure white residue. This is then reduced by mortar and pestle to an almost impalpable dust. From this flour a cake is made, which, is said to be ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... watch, I was standing on a gun well forward on the starboard side, listening to the groaning of the main—tack, as the swelling sail, the foot of which stretched transversely right athwart the ship's deck in a black arch, struggled to tear it up, like some dark impalpable spirit of the air striving to burst the chains that held him, and escape high up into the murky clouds, or a giant labouring to uproot an oak, and wondering in my innocence how hempen cord could brook such strain when just as the long waited—for strokes of the bell sounded ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sleep his face changed! Those who have watched the dying and recognized the indescribable expression which marks the countenance when it is "death-struck" will understand what alteration is meant. He waked slowly and gently,—first stirring his hands as though clutching at something impalpable, then gradually opening his eyes. They looked large and glassy, but as they fixed themselves upon Madeleine's face, bespoke ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... it can be caught; as I understand, this species of being is not like an apparition, that may be composed of thin air, and utterly impalpable to the human touch, but it consists of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... down some idols from their pedestals, and grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held men's souls in bondage. That there has been progress needs no other demonstration than that you may now reason with men, and urge upon them, without danger of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... "I'm tired of rules." She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace, burning to impalpable, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... first game in Africa. This is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes a foot high. Also in this land is thirst; so that alongside the locomotives, as they struggle up grade, in bad seasons, run natives to catch precious drops.[5] An impalpable red dust sifts through and into everything. When a man descends at Voi for dinner he finds his fellow-travellers have changed complexion. The pale clerk from indoor Mombasa has put on a fine healthy ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... then? Gone like a ghost at cockcrow. Why! a drop of blood on your brain or a crumb of bread in your windpipe, and as far as you are concerned the outward heavens and earth 'pass away with a great' silence, as the impalpable shadows that sweep ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... we must fight against our destinies, and strive not to be overcome by them. I would not yield, but to the last gasp resolutely defended my dear ones against sorrow and pain; and if I were vanquished at last, it should not be ingloriously. I stood in the gap, resisting the enemy—the impalpable, invisible foe, who had so long besieged us—as yet he had made no breach: it must be my care that he should not, secretly undermining, burst up within the very threshold of the temple of love, at whose altar ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... confidence; the second—the principal figure in the play, masterly in its truth and originality—is the brooder, a prey to inward struggle and endless distrust, brave and ambitious, with perhaps every qualification and claim to be king, but lacking the inexpressible, impalpable somewhat that would give a value to all the rest—the wonderful Lamp. "I am a king's arm," he says, "mayhap a king's brain as well; but Hakon is the whole king." "You have wisdom and courage, and all noble gifts of the mind," says Hakon to him; "you are born to stand ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... dying Not knowing the mysterious secrets of the grave. Here the victor and vanquished, side by side, Sleep in dreamless rest, Kings and Queens in life, Battling for power, all conquered by tyrant Death, Whose universal edict, irrevocable, Levels Prince and Peasant, in impalpable dust. Crowns to-day, coffins to-morrow, with monuments Mossed over, letter-cracked, undecipherable As the mummied remains of Egyptian Kings. Vain, vain, are all the monuments of man, The greatest only live a little span; We strut and shine our passing day, and then— Depart from all the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... pulses of the air, such in its transparency, such in its gossamer lightness. Does the angel touch the pillar with his foot? Oh no! Even that would be something, but even that is not allowed. In his soundless flight across it, he suffers the hem of his impalpable robe to sweep the surface as softly as a moon-beam. So much and no more of pollution he endures from contact with earthly objects. The lowest extremity of his dress, but with the delicacy of light, grazes the granite surface. And that is all the attrition which the sacred granite ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... So impalpable was the attraction that brought the world to the feet of Madame Recamier that it is interesting to analyze it. It did not lie in her beauty and wealth alone; for she lost the one, while time blighted the other. Nor was it due ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... now doubt had taken its place. I never knew whether the personality present was my Margaret—the old Margaret whom I had loved at the first glance—or the other new Margaret, whom I hardly understood, and whose intellectual aloofness made an impalpable barrier between us. Sometimes she would become, as it were, awake all at once. At such times, though she would say to me sweet and pleasant things which she had often said before, she would seem most unlike herself. It was almost as if she was speaking ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... scourge of society, and the terror of genius. Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras, which, like the shadowy monsters opposing aeneas, are impalpable to his strokes: but remember when the sibyl bade the hero proceed without noticing them, he found these airy nothings as harmless as they were unreal. The habits of the literary character will, however, be tried by the men and women of the world by ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... excellence by the poets of Valencia. [93] It would be presumptuous for any one, who has not made the Romance dialects his particular study, to attempt a discriminating criticism of these compositions, so much of the merit of which necessarily consists in the almost impalpable beauties of style and expression. The Spaniards, however, applaud, in the verses of Ausias March, the same musical combinations of sound, and the same tone of moral melancholy, which pervade the productions of Petrarch. [94] In prose too, they have (to borrow the words ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... voice there was the subtle recognition of all that she had meant to his family in the past, of all that his family had meant to her. Her claim upon him was the more authentic because it existed only in his imagination, and in hers. The tie that knit them together was woven of impalpable strands, but it was unbreakable while he and his generation ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... country boy; and he will, because of his character and office, illumine common needs and homely interests with an ever-refined and spiritual ideal. His ministry, however, cannot be all top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and vital ties that Goldsmith's ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... more than that. Remember the explosion in our laboratory, that blew an entire mountain into impalpable dust? Draw in your mind a nice, vivid picture of one ten times the size in each of our plants and in this building. I know that you are fool enough to go ahead with your own ideas, in spite of everything I've said; and, since I do not yet actually control Steel, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... a food at all, and because it is claimed to diminish some of the excretions, call that a delay of metamorphosis of tissue conservative of health! The ostrich may bury his head in the sand, but science will not close its eyes before such impalpable dust." ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... existence, for movement, and for duration, than to compel the acknowledgment, fear, admiration, and adoration of God, by that supreme sense, that sense superior to all other senses, that sense imponderable and impalpable, invisible yet beholding all things,—that ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... historians of that class devise some most obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of humanity's movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost all the historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Cancerous ulcers of the face, Lupus or Noli-me-tangere, in the early stage, will in most cases effect a perfect cure, especially if for a week previously the part has been wet daily with tr. Thuja. The best mode of applying the acetate is to mix the impalpable powder, as prepared for paint, with some substance to form a cerate, as equal parts of bees-wax and mutton suet, with 1-50 to 1-100 part of the pure acetate as found in the bottom of the can, ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... climbed higher and higher, and the day grew hotter and hotter, but Mollie, skimming along the bottom of the sea in the Nautilus was oblivious of heat. She was walking in the submarine forest of the Island of Crespo, treading on sand "sown with the impalpable dust of shells", when the sudden cracking of a sun-dried branch near at hand startled her and reminded her that time was passing. She closed her book, crept out of her tree, and set ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... construction. The baho is a prayer token; the petitioner is not satisfied by merely speaking or singing his prayer, he must have some tangible thing upon which to transmit it. He regards his prayer as a mysterious, impalpable portion of his own substance, and hence he seeks to embody it in some object, which thus becomes consecrated. The baho, which is inserted in the roof of the kiva, is a piece of willow twig about six inches long, stripped of its bark and painted. From it hang four small ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... Roby. No doubt the contact was dangerous. Injury had perhaps already been done. It may be that some slightest soil had already marred the pure white of the girl's natural character. But if so, the stain was as yet too impalpable to ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... on the other hand, there is nothing so simple that he does not contrive to distort and to confuse it. He collects shadows around him, from which shoot vivid rays. He laboriously brings to birth that morsel of truth which he has within him. He would seize and define what is most fugitive and impalpable in a work of art. Although nobody talks so much of life as he does, yet no one so much delights in decomposing and generalizing it. Having thus destroyed the particular, he is able to show you as the result of this process, final in appearance, but in reality preconceived ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... and contours and jagged edges of reality are so intricate and involved that only a very fluid element can follow their complicated shape. But these moments of difficulty and obscurity, these vague and impalpable links in the chain, are only to be found in the process by which we arrive at our conclusion. When our conclusion has been once reached it becomes suddenly manifest to us that it has been there, with us, all the while, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... and muriate of lime. The rest are fragments of the underlying sand-stone, and are covered by a few inches thick of detritus. The shells higher up on this terrace could be traced scaling off in flakes, and falling into an impalpable powder; and on an upper terrace, at the height of 170 feet, and likewise at some considerably higher points, I found a layer of saline powder, of exactly similar appearance, and lying in the same relative position. I have no doubt that the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... chords, That vibrate in each human breast Alike, but not alike confessed. The spiritual world seemed near; And close above them, full of fear, Its awful adumbration passed, A luminous shadow, vague and vast. They almost feared to look, lest there, Embodied from the impalpable air, They might behold the Angel stand, Holding the sword in ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... institution. Institutionally it was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience. As papyrology reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty—the Greek successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of Egypt—we ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... this unpalatable conclusion, is to maintain that the results could not be fully tested in an examination as suggested. Some of these are so fine, impalpable, and spiritual in their texture, that they cannot be seized by any questions that can be put; and would be dropped out if the present system were changed. But results so untraceable cannot be proved to ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... that moment, or the wonder of it. She seemed to herself to be wandering in a strange country, far, far away from the solid tangible earth—a land of darkness and dreams, of strange, numbing unreality. Her eyes were open, yet saw nothing: impalpable chains fettered her limbs, so that they grew stiff and refused to move; an icy coldness crept around her heart. Hearing, like the other senses, was dulled, yet through the throbbing silence a sound had penetrated, bringing with it a thrill of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... followed. A vague, impalpable sense of restraint and captivity seemed closing me in on every side,—I was imprisoned, as I thought, within invisible walls. Then all at once this density of atmosphere was struck asunder by a dazzling light as of cloven wings, but I could see no actual shape or even suggestion ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Nevertheless, we must believe that the strata undermined by the waters of this ancient strait, were broken up into huge fragments, and these lying scattered on the beach were reduced first to smaller blocks, then to pebbles and lastly to the most impalpable mud, which the tides drifted far into the Eastern or ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... original, and as a rule can not hope to equal it. There are many translations, notably the Elizabethan, which are extremely fine in themselves and memorable examples of English prose. Still they are not the original writings. Something escapes in the translation into another tongue, an impalpable something which can not be held or transmitted. The Bible stands alone, a great literary monument of the noblest and most beautiful English, which has formed English speech and become a part of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... a cloud, the silver rays failed, and the figure of the man became more indistinct, almost a shadow, thin and impalpable. Then he bent far over in a stooping position, passed rapidly through a patch of scrub bushes, and came much nearer to ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... same subtilty of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them in words. We then ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... midnoon than to have done it. It is an idiot blue-jay, such as you see fooling about among the shrub oaks and dwarf pitch pines in the winter. What an ignominious death to the lofty right, were it to die by such a hand; but it does not die. It is impalpable to the 'malicious mockery' of such vain blows.' We are glad it is done—done by the South—done proudly, and in slaveholding style, by the hand of a vassal. What a man does by another he does by himself, says the maxim. But they will disown the honor of it, and cast it ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... almost invariably contains some rosin, but good button-lac is free from this substance. The presence of 5 per cent. of rosin in shellac can be detected by dissolving in a little alcohol, pouring the solution into water, and drying the fine impalpable powder which separates. This powder is extracted with petroleum spirit, and the solution shaken with water containing a trace of copper acetate. If rosin be present, the petroleum spirit will be ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... little of arts or sciences, or the powers of nature (which, in other words, are the powers of the author of nature), will laugh at us Cardiganshire miners, who maintain the existence of Knockers in mines, a kind of good natured impalpable people not to be seen, but heard, and who seem to us to work in the mines; that is to say, they are the types or forerunners of working in mines, as dreams are of some accidents, which happen to us. The barometer falls before rain, or storms. If we do not know the ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... they were on their way. Gloria caught her own horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face, becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... are as impalpable as my broomstick they won't hurt me much," he laughed. And then soberly: "Say, Una, you seem to know a lot more about me than I know ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... now sombre and withdrawn. The girl clung to her mother more closely, sat for long minutes holding her hand, threw strange glances at her betrothed that would have startled him, so different were they from her old, steady regard, had not his now troubled sense of some impalpable mist that wrapped them all grown stronger every day. He avoided sitting alone with her, wondering sometimes at the ease with which such tete-a-tetes were dispensed with. Then, struck with apprehension ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... Inca Pachacutec subdued the country about Lima where the worship of Con and Pachacama prevailed.[176-2] The local myth represented these as father and son, or brothers, children of the sun. They were without flesh or blood, impalpable, invisible, and incredibly swift of foot. Con first possessed the land, but Pachacama attacked and drove him to the north. Irritated at his defeat he took with him the rain, and consequently to this day the sea-coast of Peru is largely an arid ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... discomfort. Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair. What was going to become of me? Where was I going? Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable blackness that wrapped me a faint tinge of blood. It seemed extraordinarily remote, and mistlike; yet, at once, the feeling of oppression was lightened, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... kind; yet it was not for their sake that Rickie plunged into the impalpable cloud. In the voice he had found a surer guarantee. Habits and sex may change with the new generation, features may alter with the play of a private passion, but a voice is apart from these. It lies nearer to the racial essence and ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... a fine powder as "alcohol;" and, so late as the middle of the last century, the English lexicographer, Nathan Bailey, defines "alcohol" as "the pure substance of anything separated from the more gross, a very fine and impalpable powder, or a very pure, well-rectified spirit." But, by the time of the publication of Lavoisier's "Traite Elementaire de Chimie," in 1789, the term "alcohol," "alkohol," or "alkool" (for it is spelt in all three ways), which Van Helmont had applied primarily to a fine powder, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... reveal themselves to those who will take the trouble to discover them. When he is asked to reproduce things which are intrinsically beautiful—flowers, branches, buds, shells, butterflies, and the like—he begins to realise that if his work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable, though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of beauty. So the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of fidelity—fidelity to feeling rather than to fact (if ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... took possession of my mind. I was at liberty to work out of the crevice knees and shoulders; yet an impalpable force detained me. It was not that I was not master of my fate, but that out there in the glare of the sun was patient water, dripping for the refreshment and cleansing of my grimy lips. So enchanting a thought ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... in Logic, since in them general propositions are expressed and, moreover (with rare exceptions), all predicates are general. For, besides these typical class-names, attributive words are general terms, such as 'royal,' 'ruling,' 'woolly,' 'bleating,' 'impalpable,' 'vanishing.' ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, miniature, pygmy, pigmy^, elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative^, portable; duodecimo^; dumpy, squat; short &c 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic^; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen^, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c (narrow) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a writer, least of all if he be a poet, forego that part of his equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to bring them into clear definition and bright concrete imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as if painting also could deal with ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... puzzled Allan, was at last divined by the sure intuition of love. They met frequently at various social gatherings, but it was as though a solid sheet of glass intervened between them. Through this apparently impalpable medium they could see, and smile, and speak, but no tender touch of palm, or breath of love, or thrill of quickened heart-beat could be felt between. How many times had Allan Dunlop been tempted to outstretch his hand and shatter this glassy surface! It were easily done ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... into that region of fancy and fabrication so alluring to European and American writers; for, like the eyes of huris, our vanity is soft and demure. This then is a book of travels in an impalpable country, an enchanted country, from which we have all risen, and towards which we are still rising. It is, as it were, the chart and history of one little kingdom of the Soul,—the Soul of a philosopher, poet and criminal. I am all three, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an aeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... even granite millstones finally grind themselves into impalpable powder? You give yourself no rest, Aubrey, and human machinery wears rapidly. Simply for this reason, I sent for you to come and take a ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... realized that his duty and his excuse were clear. He understood that just now he had been captured by a force undefinable in terms of the world he knew. For a moment he eluded the stealthy fleshless hands of its impalpable skirmishers. He reached impulsively out to the dead man. He was about to place his fingers in the pocket, which, after all was said ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... would be like shining glass beneath a vertical shower of the sun's rays that, at times, rendered the deck almost unendurable. Awnings were stretched and for hours and even days the Wanderer would lie almost motionless, except for the impalpable swell from which the bosom of the ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... on the couch and spread the blankets. That was to show her she was to make herself comfortable. The match-box he placed on the mantel, where it seemed likely her hand would touch it, if she thought to feel there, and beside it his torch. It might be a momentary defence against the impalpable terrors of the night. But he was not sure she would feel any terrors, save of the defined and tangible. That he considered absorbedly as he went down the path after placing the key under the stone. It was not that she was insensitive. He felt in her the alert readiness ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... true of the common diseases of scarlatina, measles and chickenpox. Of some diseases, the virus is a bacillus or coccus, excessively minute fungi recognizable only under the microscope; but the bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of viruses so impalpable that they, unlike ordinary bacteria, can go through the pores of a clay filter, are filter-passers, that is are of ultra-microscopic dimensions. Some authorities conjecture that the virus of variola belongs to the group of filter-passers. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... out there close so swiftly upon a friendless, homeless man; I pleaded with him to accept my help; I argued reasonably: and every time I looked up at that absorbed smooth face, so grave and youthful, I had a disturbing sense of being no help but rather an obstacle to some mysterious, inexplicable, impalpable striving of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... lashing of the fronds above, burst the wind in all its fury. It seemed to beat down into the garden in waves of heat. Huge leaves began to fall from the tree tops and the mast-like trunks bent before the fury from the desert. The atmosphere grew hazy with impalpable dust; and ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... own dreams, for sure enough it was but a vision, bright, mysterious, and bewitching, that enthralled her. Love weaves his chains of the gossamer's web, as well as of the unyielding adamant; and both are alike binding and inextricable. She saw neither form nor face in her visions, and yet the impalpable and glowing impression stole upon her senses like an odour, or a strain of soft and soul-thrilling music. Her heart was wrapped in a delirium of such voluptuous melody, that she chided the morning when she awoke, and longed for night and her own forgetfulness. Night ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... If what Wetzel had told him was true, if he really had not loved in vain, then his cup of happiness was overflowing. Like a far-off and almost forgotten strain of music some memory struggled to take definite shape in his mind; but it was so hazy, so vague, so impalpable, that he could remember ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... to his credit, that he had by no means conducted his suit upon that narrow programme which he had drawn up at the outset. He very soon discovered that Gertrude's resentment—if resentment there was—was a substance utterly impalpable even to his most delicate tact, and he had accordingly set to work to woo her like an honest man, from day to day, from hour to hour, trusting so devoutly for success to momentary inspiration, that he felt his suit dignified by a certain flattering faux air of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... There are people who collect and hold in themselves some knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... that light haze hanging over the enemy's trenches? It is slight, almost impalpable, but it appears to be drifting towards us. Can ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... shape itself into Ethel, and her mysterious mother, and the vague dexterous Chaffery holding him back, entangled in an impalpable net from that bright and glorious ascent to performance and distinction. Leaky boots and the splash of cabs for all his life as his portion! Already the Forbes Medal, the immediate step, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... TOOTHACHE.—1. One drachm of alum reduced to an impalpable powder, three drachms of nitrous spirits of ether—mix, and apply them to the tooth on cotton. 2. Mix a little salt and alum, equal portions, grind it fine, wet a little lock of cotton, fill it with the powder and put it in your tooth. One or two applications ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... head—one armed, the other bearing roses. Neither Mrs. Marston, with her antiphonal 'Double knit, double purl!' nor Edward, reading in his pleasant voice—he rather fancied his reading, and tried not to—saw those impalpable figures, each with a possessive hand outstretched to Hazel ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... arabic, reduce it to an impalpable powder in a brass mortar, dissolve it in strong brandy, and add a little common water to render it more liquid, provide some gold in a shell, which must be detached in order to reduce it to a powder, when this is done moisten it with the gum solution, and stir ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... Romantics go to work in other ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of the immediate presence of "that which was ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... no earthly tribunal to reach his impalpable crime, for the law recognizes only physical violence by which death is accomplished. But there is a just God, before whose high court, sooner or later, will be arraigned the bloodless murderer, whose dagger has been words—low whispers, and assassin machinations—or ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... that drawer, from the depths of his past, all these reminiscences rose like a vapor, but it was only the impalpable vapor of a reality now dead. Nevertheless, he suffered and wept over the letters, as one weeps over the dead because they ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... with bitumen, and measuring about 80 centimetres across each face. In the centre of each cube there was a cavity 27 centimetres long by 12 wide and 35 deep. In each case this hollow contained a small bronze statuette packed, as it were, in an impalpable dust. In one cavity the statuette was that of a kneeling man (Fig. 146), in another of a standing woman (Fig. 147), in another of a bull (Fig. 148). At the feet of each statue there were two stone tablets, set in most cases in the bitumen ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... it was in Blake's. Even as had Parks', his eyes wandered dreadingly about the room. The horror of it all was in his soul, too.... For a long time he said no word. He only looked. He thrust the curtains aside.... The dust, impalpable, strangling, fell ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... on the edge of the ravine, and for a long time sat on a rock, listening to the roar of the swift stream and looking up at the peaks which were still covered with heavy yellow snow, stained with the impalpable dust which the winter winds had rasped from the exposed ledges of rock. It was chill in the canyon, and the old man shivered with cold as well as with a sense of discouragement. For twenty years he had regularly gone down into the valleys in winter to earn money with ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... stood, thinking it out, feeling the wonder and the glory, at times sorry for those who can see no longer the slanting sheets of rain and the grass at the feet, at times feeling that since this is good, in some impalpable way oblivion to all this may be also good, as he stood there, flushed with the climbing and sad with great joy, the thought came: With whom? It cannot be lived alone. With whom? He turned at the touch of an arm at his shoulder to meet the smile and the look ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal," she thought. "That glance shows the beginning ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... glove possesses a peculiar charm for all men. Perhaps it suggests some of the sweet mystery of womanhood. The first action of most young men in Rallywood's place would have been to raise it at once and to examine it, as though in some impalpable manner it could tell something of its unknown wearer, who might turn out to be the Hathor, the one ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... and if God spoke to a child in the garden, the child would, of course, say that God lived in the garden. I should not think it any less likely to be true for that. If the child said: "God is everywhere; an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the Cosmos alike"—if, I say, the infant addressed me in the above terms, I should think he was much more likely to have been with the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... ends of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... put my eyes against the rays. All was blackness, and I neither saw nor felt anything. The discharge was in full force, and the rays were flying through my head, and, for all I knew, through the side of the box behind me. But they were invisible and impalpable. They gave no sensation whatever. Whatever the mysterious rays may be, they are not to be seen, and are to be judged only ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... this is true. Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Ward Beecher. That in which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,—the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are exhalant, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the membrane by which the interior of the nostrils is covered, renders them easily susceptible of irritation, even by the invisible and impalpable corpuscles that emanate from odorous bodies: by these means sensations are excited, the brain has perceptions, and generates ideas: it is this that forms the sense ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... been. Her war with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste. Her cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love: she discovered it, half shuddering: to love, oh! no—no shape of man, nor impalpable nature either: but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted strength in something. Then, loving and being loved a little, what strength would be hers! She could utter all the words needed to Willoughby ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no great fact in history so impalpable, so shadowy, so unreal, as the First Triumvirate. Every school-boy, almost every school-girl, knows that there was a First Triumvirate, and that it was a political combination made by three great Romans of the day, Julius Caesar, Pompey the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... pretend, Mr. Hart. Nevertheless, I thank you for the interest you manifest in our affairs, and am able to reassure you. The other night we made a series of decisive experiments. With only a few grains of this substance great blocks of rock were reduced to impalpable dust!" ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth century; the first suggests, the second realizes; the one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies; the Giottesque cares for the figure only, inasmuch as it displays an action, he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the sky, the sun shone on me as when I rested in the narrow valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The heat of summer is dry there as if the light carried an impalpable dust; dry, breathless heat that will not let the skin respire, but swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... heave and plunge the massy rouleaux splashed into the water, and the boat rose lighter with an easier conscience. The sea shut close-fisted over its own, while the pursuing boat paused and eddied about it, as if held to the treasure by invisible, impalpable strands. The pursuit was abandoned, and the betrayed or treacherous diver escaped. But busy rumor reports that he returned at leisure to the spot, and that the bullion of the Golden Gate went to replenish the forfeited fortune ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... of the hermit thrush breaking out of the heart of the forest; the soulful melody of the nightingale, pathetic with unappeasable sorrow. In the Forest of Arden, too, there were unspoiled men and women, as indifferent to the fashion of the world and the folly of the hour as the stars to the impalpable mist of the clouds; men and women who spoke the truth, and saw the fact, and lived the right; to whom love and faith and high hopes were more real than the crowns of which they had been despoiled and the kingdoms from which they had been rejected. All this ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of the palace, and the mighty forms of the noble Dead to walk in it. This is the imagination at play with its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression, but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... grew out another shape, equally distinct, equally ghastly,—a man's shape, a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable,—simulacra, phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in development and recognition behind other branches of medicine is due in part to the crudity of its clinical methods. The evolution of interest in science is from simple, obvious and tangible problems to more intricate and impalpable researches. Refined laboratory work has been done in psychiatric clinics, particularly along histopathological lines, but clinical studies follow antiquated methods. The internist does not say, "The patient has sugar in his urine, therefore he has diabetes and therefore he will die." He finds ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... or two things, grown up as I am, that I should like to find in the toe of my stocking on Christmas morning; only they are impalpable things that could neither be put in nor taken ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... violent sand-storms, during which travellers, in addition to all the dangers offered by snow-storms—being buried alive and losing their way—are exposed to that of suffocation not only from the furnace-like heat of the desert-wind, but from the impalpable sand, which is whirled and driven before it, and fills the eyes, mouth and nostrils of horse and rider. The three miles' ride from Layard's encampment to the mound of Nimrud must have been something more than pleasant morning exercise in such a season, and though the deep trenches and wells ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... impressed the mind of George. Remorse for the treatment of his wife he could not have felt—he was incapable of any such emotion; and we question whether any appeal to the sentiment of the supernatural, any summons to another and an impalpable world, would have made much impression on that stolid, prosaic intelligence and that heart of lead. Besides, according to some versions of the tale, it was not, after all, a letter from his wife which impressed him, but ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... result. In every case an hour's current would produce a perceptible loss of weight. My theory at that stage was that there was a loosening of the molecules caused by the electric fluid, and that a certain number of these molecules were shed off like an impalpable dust, all round the lump of earth or of metal, which remained, of course, the lighter by their loss. I had entirely accepted this theory, when a very remarkable chance led me ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be a flood of particles of matter, flowing or shot out from the Sun and Stars, and moving through space to come to us. On the theories of mechanism and force, what force of attraction here or repulsion at the Sun or at the most distant Star could draw or drive these impalpable, weightless, infinitely minute particles, appreciably by the Sense of Sight alone, so far through space? What has become of the immense aggregate of particles that have reached the earth since the creation? Have they ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things, even in Rome, which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold fountain at its base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the empire, the far-off republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a transient, visionary, and impalpable character when we think that this indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column, they whispered ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... highroad meeting one began to hear that name "Ku Klux" though it came vaguely from the tongue as a thing of which no man had seen any tangible evidence. If it had anywhere an actual nucleus, that centre remained as impalpable and unmaterial ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... prayers Of saints, that wafted outward blessing-freighted broke Around him standing at the gate alone. All down the radiant slope of golden stairs, By which he climbed so late from earth to heaven, It rolled impalpable—a fragrant cloud; And still, turned from the Alleluias loud, Beyond the portal-guarding angels seven, He listened earthward, for a voice—a sound Out of the dark that spread ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... statues and columns and traditions and fragmentary classics which Greece has left us are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear, that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the half-impalpable Ideals there. It is to Greece that we must look for the external type of these Ideals, whose existence we but half suspect within us. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly unconscious of the highest capacities of our humanity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; something in his manner had belied his words. Did he not look for her in the morning when she entered—come very quickly to her? She thought of him as she had last seen him looking down the length of the laboratory to see her ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... up all the remaining moisture of the substance of the lover, so that being all melted and turned to flame, he is no longer himself, because the fire whose property it is to resolve all bodies into their atoms, has converted him into impalpable dust, whereas by virtue of water alone, the atoms of other bodies thicken, and are welded together to make a substantial composition. Yet he is not deprived of the sense of the most intense flame. Therefore, in the sistine he would have space made for him to pass; ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... on his country: Mr. Holt observed that he thought precisely the same, which species of agreement closed the conversation. And the States'-man relieved his feelings subsequently by whittling a stick from the firewood into impalpable chips, with his heels resting on the apex of the saloon stove. Kind-hearted Hiram Holt had meanwhile more than half ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... hills the same, yet not the same as at night. A cooler, tenderer, more subdued cloak of color u on them. Far down the valley a cool, deep, impalpable, blue mist lay, under which one divined the river Ian, under its elms and basswoods and wild grapevines. On the shaven slopes of the hills cattle and sheep were feeding, their cries and bells coming to the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... had a great deal to think about of late. Affairs at the mines had been troublesome, as usual, and he had been often irritated by the stupidity of the men who were in authority over him. He began to feel, moreover, that an almost impalpable barrier had sprung up between himself and his nearest friend. When he came to face the matter, he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that there were things he had kept from Grace, though it had been without any positive intention of concealment And, perhaps, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... foreground it rippled into defined points of blossom, which already twinkled through all the dull foliage; in the middle distance it faded; afar off it trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the summer air. A week or less would see the annual miracle peformed again and witness that spacious and solemn region in all the amethystine glories of the ling. Fiercely hot grew the day, and the distances, so distinct through mist rifts and wreaths in the clearness ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... charm Awoke; 'twas not the magic of a smile, Nor playful Cupid in her cheeks, nor more, The form of peerless grace;—'twas beauty's soul, The speaking virtue, modesty inborn, That as with magic spells, impalpable To sense, my being thralled. We breathed together The air of heaven:—enough!—no utterance asked Of words, our spiritual converse;—in my heart, Though strange, yet with familiar ties inwrought She seemed, and instant spake the thought—'tis ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... selfish, seeking to save the poor thing as though it were a pearl of price. Now she saw herself as the veriest rag of flesh parading virtue, useless, comfortless, helpless, clinging to her code, and justifying all the trouble she gave to others by a reference to the impalpable, elusive and possible non-existent immortal and inner self she had held so dear. She was ashamed. Ah, now at last she would give ungrudgingly. Her feet should not falter, nor her eyes be dimmed by any ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... whole mode of feeling within a few lines. An ill-balanced nature reveals itself by a discord, as an illogical mind by a fallacy. A man need not compose an epic on a system of philosophy to write himself down an ass. And, inversely, a great mind and a noble nature may show itself by impalpable but recognisable signs within the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground.' Once more, the highest poetry must be that which expresses not only the richest but the healthiest nature. Disease means an absence or a want of balance of certain faculties, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... life-term determined by an intricate web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten. That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until the whole store in ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... old gentleman, good-humouredly; "thought is a wonderful quality of the mind—transports us in a moment from the Indies to the poles; fastens with equal facility on the substantial and the impalpable; gropes among the vague generalities of the abstract, and wriggles with ease through the thick obscurities of the concrete—eh, Queeker? Come, give us a song, like ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... is fast setting in for arbitrary power. The Court will grow bolder and bolder, a struggle will commence, and, if it ends as I wish, there will be Whigs again.... But when these things come to pass, you will no longer be a Warden,[67] but a brown and impalpable powder in the tombs of Dulwich. In the meantime, enough of liberty will remain to make our old-age tolerably comfortable; and to your last gasp you will remain in the perennial and pleasing delusion that the Whigs are coming in, and will expire ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... The impalpable powder to which calcareous sand is ground by the waves settles at some distance from shore in deeper and quieter water as a limy silt, and hardens into a dense, fine-grained limestone in which perhaps no trace of fossil is found to suggest the fact that ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... poetry and wizardry of fairy lore, all those things which in other parts of the world remind us of a past fertile in legend and song; that is to say, must bid farewell to the attractions offered by the Beyond of History, by the hope of eventually realizing the tangible impalpable realm conjured up in the distance which time has veiled within its mists, and by the expectation of ultimately wresting some relics of antiquity every now and again from ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... shines upon sings or can be made to sing, and can be heard to sing. Gases, impalpable powders, and woolen stuffs, in common with other non-conductors of sound, give forth notes of different pitches when played upon by an intermittent beam of white light. Colored stuffs will sing in lights of different colors, but refuse to sing ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... whose arms were wrapped against his chest, while the jacket's extra-long sleeves were tied behind his back. He walked where the attendants led him, but his eyes weren't looking at anything in the room. They stared at something far away and invisible, an impalpable shifting nothingness somewhere in the infinite distances ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... this consultation was that very shortly afterwards queer reports began to fly about; it was whispered that the ghosts whom the pious director had expelled had again invaded the convent, under an invisible and impalpable form, and that several of the nuns had given, by their words and acts, incontrovertible proofs of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... with dangers. And in his imagination he saw her treading the thin ice of destiny with the same glorified contempt which lured him to the poetical depths of life... And again Monet was at his side... vague, mysterious, impalpable, the essence of things unseen but hoped for, the solved riddle made spirit, the vast patience of eternity realized. And still Storch's restless eyes ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... starting at every bush, and hating every old woman for a witch! Mr Sims, from his own intellectual altitude, pronounces these faiths to be "shadows;" he does not believe—not he—in the walking about at night of impalpable white sheets; but if you should happen to be of the same opinion with himself, then the cold-blooded demon of science has seized you for his prey. In this, there are many others who resemble Mr Sims; one often meets with half-educated men and women, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... viewing things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him that ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of manner, of feeling, of perception, of intellectual grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. In addition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standard of wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a salt, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... lethargy natural to his style, and when he has merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another, and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable suggestions, with ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... listened, rapidly developed into the beat of innumerable hoofs, mingled with the bleatings and barkings of a veritable army of bucks of various descriptions. Then I knew that the dimming of the atmosphere along the summit of the western cliffs was due to a cloud of light, impalpable dust, swept along before a great migrating army of game crossing the mountain range, probably on the march in search of water, and I waited to see what would happen when the vanguard of the army should reach the edge of ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Everything else is impalpable, floating, soft, and of a light, bright, silvery grey. The air is warm, the sea is glass; it is circular, too, like a disc, and the line where it meets with the sky is imperceptible. Your little bark is the centre of a great crystal ball, the limit ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... writings that the contemplation of Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us "to see into the life of things"—as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible, he must convey to us in ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... doubt the boy was haunted in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion, changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable things very black ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... darkness, conscious that sanity and insanity were struggling for mastery in my brain, while I, like some interested spectator, watched the struggle; or, again, I was struggling in the air with some powerful but viewless monster form, that clutched my throat with iron fingers, but whose body was impalpable to the grasp of my hands. A mighty space, an eternity of time and daylight came. Then, like one in a dream, I rose mechanically, and, finding the pin I had secreted, I stood on the little wooden bench, and, impelled by some spiritual but irresistible force, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Ned calling through the fog." A simple answer, but withal enough. Their hour, which they had set themselves, was past. And lying here in the impalpable mist, slipping towards the hidden port, she was filled with ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... only a few belts of half-scorched herbage still contended against the invasion of the sand, and the huge rocks, that had rolled down from the distant summits, crushed in their fall, had scattered in sharp-edged pebbles which soon again became coarse sand, and finally impalpable dust. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... tresses Sleeked round her head, close-banded lustrously, Save where at nape and temple the smooth brown Sleaves out into a pale transparent mist Of hair and tangled light. So to exist, Poised 'twixt the deep of thought where spirits drown Life in a void impalpable nothingness, And, on the other side, the pain and stress Of clamorous action and the gnawing fire Of will, focal upon a point of earth—even thus To sit, eternally without desire And yet self-known, were ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... little they felt, as it were, the sensation of being touched by a breath, the approach of an impalpable being. Drops of sweat moistened Pecuchet's forehead, and Bouvard began to gnash his teeth: a cramp gripped his epigastrium; the floor, like a wave, seemed to flow under his heels; the sulphur burning in the chimney fell down in spirals. At the same ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sculpture of the Renaissance, not satisfied with having portrayed the real human being made of flesh and blood, of bone and skin, dark-eyed or flaxen-haired, embodied in the marble the impalpable forms of dreams. Its latest, greatest, works are those sepulchres of Michelangelo, whose pinnacle enthrones strange ghosts of warriors, and whose steep sides are the unquiet couch of divinities hewn, you would say, out of darkness and the light ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... distinct, equally ghastly—a man's shape—a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra —phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb; with its ruffles and lace ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... always more or less porous. If, however, we proceed to examine one of the smallest particles of which soil is made up, we shall find that even this is not always solid, but is much more frequently porous, like soil in the mass. A considerable proportion of this finely-divided part of soil, the impalpable matter, as it is generally called, is found, by the aid of the microscope, to consist of broken down vegetable tissue, so that when a small portion of the finest dust from a garden or field is placed under the microscope, we have exhibited to us particles of every variety of shape and structure, ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... to attribute to motion the heat propagated, through apparently empty space, from the sun. This required the supposition (already made for the explanation of the laws of light) of a subtle ether pervading space, which, though impalpable to us, must have the property which constitutes matter, that of resistance, since waves are propagated through it by an impulse from a given point. The ether must be supposed (a supposition not required by the theory of light) to penetrate ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... from an unshuttered window shone into the apartment and it was in his mind to wait there for Tayoga, but he stopped suddenly at the door and stared in astonishment. A shadow was moving in the room, thin, impalpable and noiseless, but it had all the seeming of a man. Moreover, it had a height and shape that were familiar, and it reminded him ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason, too, even the best attempts at exposition of King Lear are disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the impalpable ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to a close. An ecstatic serenity reigned over the sea; the waters were so transparent that they repeated every image with absolute fidelity, and their ultimate line melted so imperceptibly into the sky that the two elements seemed as one, impalpable and supernatural. The wide amphitheatre of hills, clothed with olives, oranges and pines and all the noblest forms of Italian vegetation, embraced the silent sea, and seemed not a multiplicity of things, but a single vast object under the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... wretched everywhere, and the wet pavement glistened in the gaslight, while the oppressive warmth of the almost impalpable rain lay heavily over the streets and seemed to obscure ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted as denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... mountains crumble, the earth finally wear away its diamond axis; but we two, we alone are immortal, for the impalpable ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... to above, may also generally be prevented by the use of glycerine, or any of the preparations just mentioned. After its accession, the best treatment is to freely dust the affected portion of the lips with violet powder, finely powdered starch, prepared chalk, or French chalk or talc reduced to an impalpable powder by ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... remarkable. Some of the porphyroids are conglomerate, but the majority are true porphyries, having a homogeneous base. Dr. T. Sterry Hunt calls them porphyroid trachytes. They have a black, rarely reddish, vitreous, or impalpable base, approaching obsidian, with a specific gravity of 2.59 in pure specimens, and holding crystals or crystalline grains of glassy feldspar, and sometimes of pyroxene and hematite. They differ from the Old World porphyries ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... folly, or uncongenial force, must ever ensure the deepest sympathy of all those who can appreciate the spirit of its qualities;" let the initiative skyward struggles towards the zenith-abysses of the inane impalpable ——, &c. &c. &c. &c. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... is more heterogeneous, and comprises all the spirits or impalpable intelligent powers that do not fall into one or other of the two preceding classes; such are the spirits very vaguely conceived as always at hand, some malevolent, some good; such also are the spirits which somehow are ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... she could possibly manage to be; for here were all the ladies to outshine, and all the gentlemen to charm,—and Mr. Lawrence, especially, to capture and subdue. Her little arts to effect his subjugation were too subtle and impalpable to attract my observation; but I thought there was a certain refined affectation of superiority, and an ungenial self-consciousness about her, that negatived all her advantages; and after she was gone, Rose ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... responsible to the people for its use. Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators, is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, can not be reached, can not be held to account. Democracy is in peril wherever the administration of political power is scattered among a variety of men who work in secret, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
