"Evanescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of time,' in the hope that it may blossom to purposes of great public utility. The aid of poetry has hitherto been but partially employed in the spread of a taste for Conveyancing, especially in its higher branches. Or where the Muse has shown herself, it has been but in the evanescent glimpses of a song. She has plumed her wings for no ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... whole foundation on which this long chain of inference rested has now been shown to be evanescent. In the first place many of his irresolvable nebulae have been proved by the spectroscope to be true nebulae—masses of luminous gas, and not star clusters at all; and, in the next place, the actual distances of a few of the fixed stars have been approximately ascertained, and it ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... into politics, New York City was under the control of Tammany, which was from time to time opposed by some other—and evanescent—city Democratic organization. The up-country Democrats had not yet fallen under Tammany sway, and were on the point of developing a big country political boss in the shape of David B. Hill. The Republican party was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... tattered blankets that covered them saw, perhaps, visions of enchanting lands, and in their dreams feasted at those wonderful tables which hungry children see only in sleep, to the poor woman sitting at the failing fire there came no surcease of sorrow, and no vision threw even an evanescent brightness over the hard, cold facts of her surroundings. And the reality of her condition was dire enough, God knows. Alone in the wilderness, miles from any human habitation, the trails covered ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... execution, is the "Menuet Italien," No. 2 of the same opus as the preceding. This is remarkably well worked out, however. The third piece in the same opus is a waltz, "Dance of the Flowers," bright, sparkling, evanescent; clever for the piano, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record. It ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... joy in religious exercises shall be subordinated, and (if need were) postponed, to the doing of His will. While, on the one hand, there is no more certain means of enjoying Him than that of humbly seeking to walk in the ways of His commandments, on the other hand, there is nothing more evanescent in its nature than a mere emotion, even though it be that of joy in God, unless it be turned into a spring of action for God. Such emotions, like photographs, vanish from the heart unless they be fixed. Work for God is the way to fix them. Joy in God is the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Greenlander said is corroborated by what a Kaffir said. Kaffir religion is mainly animistic, ancestral spirits receive food and sacrifice—there is but an evanescent tradition of a "Lord in Heaven". Thus a very respectable Kaffir said to M. Arbrousset, "your tidings (Christianity) are what I want; and I was seeking before I knew you.... I asked myself sorrowful questions. 'Who has touched the stars with his hands?... Who makes ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... long upright pennons of striped grass with the homely name, than I can tell what the glory of God is who made these things. The man whose poetry is like nature in this, that it produces individual, incommunicable moods and conditions of mind—a sense of elevated, tender, marvellous, and evanescent existence, must be a poet indeed. Every dawn of such a feeling is a light-brushed bubble rendering visible for a moment the dark unknown sea of our being which lies beyond the lights of our consciousness, and is the stuff and region of our ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... nature. It takes to itself wings, and flies away; and he who is an opulent tyrant to-day, may on this principle be an impoverished slave to-morrow. Does physical strength make valid this claim? This, too, is evanescent: sickness and age would ultimately degrade the most muscular tyrants to servitude; and mankind would be composed of but two parties—the strong and the weak. Can high birth annul the rights of the lower classes? There is no difference at their birth, between ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... Skin are among the most constant manifestations. An evanescent macular rash, not unlike that of measles—roseola—is the first to appear, usually in from six to eight weeks from the date of infection; it is widely diffused over the trunk, and the original dull rose-colour soon fades, leaving brownish stains, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... shadow over palaces, and the grandeur of mute endurance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us. Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with the babbling garrulity of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of the carol was evanescent and all too easily destroyed I always knew; but never realised its extreme fugacity until, some five years ago, it fell to me to prepare an anthology, which, under the title of The Oxford Book of English Verse, has since achieved some ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and the Ford made its usual comfortless speed down the mountain. When they reached Huntersville the valley was bathed in early morning sunlight, and Huntersville, asleep, shared the evanescent charm of the dawn. It was a beautiful and a peaceful scene and Clavering, whose spirits had descended into utter gloom while enwrapped in that sinister fog, accepted it as a happier portent; and when he was so fortunate as to find an ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... study of the manors of the Bishopric of Winchester during this period confirms the view of those who have protested against assigning to the Black Death the revolutionary importance which is given it by many historians. On these estates the Black Death "produced severe evanescent effects and temporary changes, with a rapid return to the status quo of 1348."[12] The great changes which are usually attributed to the plague of 1348-1350 were under way before 1348, and were not greatly accelerated until 1360, possibly not before 1370, and cannot, ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... and quiet humor.... It is the easiest thing in the world to waste time over books, which are merely tools of knowledge like any other tools.... It is the function of a good book not only to fructify, but to inspire, not only to fill the memory with evanescent treasures, but to enrich the imagination with forms of beauty and goodness which leave a lasting impression on the character."—N. ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... purpose to show mankind that there is nothing in this lie to cause fear, and that it can be overcome by overcoming the false thought which produces it. By overcoming that thought he showed men the evanescent nature of sickness and death. And sin he showed to be a missing of the mark through lack of understanding ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of another sense, in the contemplation of beauties more ethereal and evanescent than those of nature, such is the experience which in my capacity as a writer for newspapers I have made for many years. A party of people blind to form and color cannot be said to be well equipped for a Swiss journey, though loaded down ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sadness of Viola, playing around her gleeful animation and absorbing it as the cup of the white lily swallows the sunshine, might well be, for the more blunt senses of the average auditor, dim, fitful, evanescent, and ineffective. Ideal heroism and dream-like fragrance—the colours of Murillo or the poems of Heine—are truly known but to exceptional natures or in exceptional moods. The reckless, passionate idolatry ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, with a supremely prodigal magnanimity. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... glass clearly, transparently, heavily, but still and cold as death. There was no sparkle, no cheap ebullition, no evanescent bubble. Yet it was so clear, that, but for a faint amber-tinting, the glass seemed empty. There was no aroma, no ethereal diffusion from its equable surface. Perhaps it was fancy, perhaps it was from nervous excitement; ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ginger-pop is nourishing and tonic,—that thousands of weary wayfarers who could never know the taste of the costly brands, and who go sadly and wearily, will be fleeter of foot and gladder of soul because of its humble and evanescent foam. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light falling across her pale face. As she boiled the coffee and fried the eggs I studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background, and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent beauty. For beautiful Henrietta was—beautiful with a beauty quite her own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. I watched her as one horribly fascinated,—that high, wide white forehead, that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... certainly his rough treatment of others, yet all the while excessively annoyed at the 'tone', as he calls it, of some of the communications addressed to him. But after carefully studying the papers, to catch what this offensive tone of the Neapolitan Minister was, I have found it so evanescent that I really cannot discern it, and suppose there must be something in the manner, or in Lord Napier's state of mind at the time, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... nearly four, when the revelers took leave of their hostess. Merrihew was happy with that evanescent happiness which goes hand in glove with late suppers and magnums. In the morning he ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... self-consciousness we might, in one generation, or at least in two, have things again very much as they were in Shakespeare's day. It is true that men are slaves to the naturalness of what is usual with them, and unable to imagine that the actual living condition of things in their own time is evanescent: nor do even students and scholars see that in the Elizabethan literature we have a perdurable gigantic picture which, among all stages of change, will persistently reassert itself, while any special characteristics of our own day, which ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... globes should be chemically prepared with one or other of the four elements, and for one month exposed to the beams of the sun. These preliminary steps being taken, the initiated immediately had a sight of innumerable beings of a luminous substance, but of thin and evanescent structure, that people the elements on all sides of us. Those who inhabited the air were called Sylphs; and those who dwelt in the earth bore the name of Gnomes; such as peopled the fire were Salamanders; ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... problem into the real solution itself, while the constant refrain in the song of existence sounded behind him, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." The evanescent phenomena, the tragic plot and scenery of human birth, action, and death, conceived on the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... land was common to the tribe or other group occupying it, yet was defended against alien invasion; the ownership of movable property was a combination of communalism and individualism delicately adjusted to the needs and habits of the several tribes— in general, evanescent property, such as food and fuel, was shared in common (subject to carefully regulated individual claims), while permanent property, such as tipis, dogs, apparel, weapons, etc, was held by individuals. As among other ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... Magistrate, and was more personal than political in its character. In the memorable contest for the successorship to President Monroe, Mr. Calhoun at one time seemed to be a formidable candidate; but his popularity being personal was evanescent, and failed to enlist the considerate and reflecting. Even his military hopes were soon eclipsed by General Jackson, whose bold achievements and successes in the Indian and British wars captivated the popular ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... regarded as something wiser and nobler than an automaton, less perishable than a confection, more comforting and peace-producing than a fire-arm, a veritable comrade for man at his best, not so much prized for the vain and evanescent charm of her beauty as for the steadfastness and the incorruptible ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... does not appear to possess even the common law of adhesion or of chemical affinity. The reason for it is very simple. And the truth ought long ago to have dawned upon the experimentalists, since our little world (though so repeatedly visited by the hairy and bearded travelers, enveloped in the evanescent veil of their tails, and otherwise brought in contact with that matter) has neither been smothered by an addition of nitrogen gas, nor deluged by an excess of hydrogen, nor yet perceptibly affected by a surplus of oxygen. The essence of cometary matter ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... stables I observed the soil to be covered with a copious evanescent efflorescence of nitrate of lime, like ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the poorest. All these girls were well dressed, some of them tasteful, others fantastic, in their appearance. There was a great deal of beauty among the elder pupils; I only regretted that the bright bloom which many possessed should be so evanescent. The rich luxuriant hair, often of a beautiful auburn hue, was a peculiarity which could not be overlooked. There were about ten female teachers, the principal of whom played some lively airs upon the piano, during which time the pupils marched steadily in from ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... declamation, and a stimulus to popular excitement. Public writers were employed to prevent a return of harmony between Great Britain and her colonies, and though addresses of thanks were voted by the assemblies to the king, this was but an evanescent show of gratitude. The same temper was found especially to prevail in the assembly of Massachusets against the Declaratory Act, as had been displayed against the Stamp Act, and the spirit of resistance soon spread to the other colonies. The right of legislative authority assumed by Great Britain ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... place; neither can any man improve in the abyss of hell. As the horizon gradually darkens, and this soul recedes from God, the time spent in the flesh must come to seem the most infinitesimal moment, more evanescent than the tick of a clock. It seems dreadful that for such short misdoings a soul should suffer so long, but no man can be saved in spite of himself. He had the opportunities—and the knowledge of this must give a ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... varied and intensified by the usual number of flirtations, so called, more or less lasting or evanescent, from all of which I emerged, as from my religious experiences, in a more rational frame of mind. We had been too much in the society of boys and young gentlemen, and knew too well their real character, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... colours which remain in the eye after having for some time contemplated a luminous object) are more easily and more accurately ascertained, now their laws have been investigated by Dr. Darwin, than the relicts of evanescent sounds upon the ear; it is to be wished that some ingenious musician would further cultivate this curious field of science: for if visible music can be agreeably produced, it would be more easy to add sentiment to it by the representations of groves ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point. It crosses rather than follows the main current of the world's life. The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between contrasted types of character—delicate provision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmission to every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For this ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Nancy Miller "to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers." After many months there arrived in the neighborhood one Denton Offut, one of those scheming, talkative, evanescent busybodies who skim vaguely over new territories. This adventurer had a cargo of hogs, pork, and corn, which he wanted to send to New Orleans, and the engagement fell to Lincoln and two comrades at the wage of fifty cents per day and a bonus of $60 for the three. It has been said that ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... were crying. The wind whistled drearily across the room, carrying the evanescent flakes of soft snow over the heads of the pausing, listening crowd in the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... ruins—the place that once knew them, knows them no more—nay, many a race since theirs has died out and been forgotten in the very land which they occupied, with all the authority of feudal proprietors and feudal lords. What, then, would it avail the reader to know their names, or the evanescent ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Sara's Circassian orbs floated in pleasure; and for Mary herself, her breast heaved, her cheeks glowed, her hands trembled, a quick sigh fluttered in her bosom; and whilst she remained in his presence, she believed that happiness had lost its usual evanescent property, and become tangible, to hold and ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... come alone the first time, or if one of the girls would accompany him. She felt just a little afraid of Rosamund—Rosamund was so very pretty with all the added, evanescent charm of extreme youth. She told herself that it was lucky that she, Enid, and Godfrey Radmore were already friends, and good ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... with a calm and untroubled assurance. While he was speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man's back—a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick—had moved through the space of seven minutes. He spoke with a studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact—that is, every detail—fitted with delightful ease. Not a murmur nor even a movement hinted at interruption. The great ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... these words, the vision began to disappear. AEneas endeavored to clasp the beloved image in his arms to retain it, but it was intangible and evanescent, and, before he could speak to it, it was gone, and he was left standing in the desolate and gloomy street alone. He turned at length slowly away; and solitary, thoughtful and sad, he went back to the gate of the city, and thence out to the valley where he had concealed ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... should be set over against the other in sterile abhorrence; nor yet that love of country and of kindred is incompatible with that toward the Supreme of thought; but it is that each of these lower, shallower, evanescent forms of emotion is and must be lost in, subordinated to, that highest form to which these words have reference. Reconciliation, not abnegation, is what ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... statesmen, kings, and warriors. The young ladies certainly bore some resemblance to the type of American girl which one never fails to meet in travelling. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, pretty with the delicate evanescent beauty of too many of our girls, and all gifted with the loud voices, shrill laughter, and free-and-easy manners which so astonish decorous English matrons and maids. Ethel was evidently impressed with ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... known love; not even the fleeting fancy, much less the actual passion, of the sensualist, or the spiritual aspirings of true affection. Of the last, in fact, he was utterly incapable. No feeling, with him, was of an evanescent nature: under the cold austerity of the ordinary man, lay coals of living fire. It mattered not under what guise excited—hate, revenge, ambition, he was capable of all. At love, alone, he had ever laughed—exulting in ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valley floor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at any instant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... or rhyme, confutes that plea.—The pain Which writh'd o'er Garrick's fortunes, shows us clear Whence all his spleen to GENIUS.—Ill to bear A Friend's renown, that to his own must reign, Compar'd, a Meteor's evanescent train, To Jupiter's fix'd orb, proves that each sneer, Subtle and fatal to poetic Sense, Did from insidious ENVY meanly flow, Illumed with dazzling hues of eloquence, And Sophist-Wit, that labor to o'er-throw Th' ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... at every note. By degrees, however, the motions somehow cling to each other, and to the impressions of the notes, in the way of associations, the acts of volition all the while growing less and less express, until at last they become quite evanescent and imperceptible. An expert will play from notes or from memory, and with a rapidity of motion that is perfectly bewildering, while at the same time he himself is carrying on quite a different train of thoughts in his mind, or even ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Ojen, you Ojen! How everything you write seems evanescent, ethereal! 'Mute exhalations from the crowds'—I can hear it; I can ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of the question with a lissom, winsome, witching fairy like this, who played with her life as a child does with soap-bubbles, and who was as elusory and irresponsible as a summer-day rainbow. But one season at Mussoorie Miss Priest contracted an engagement somewhat less evanescent. Mussoorie of all Himalayan hill-stations is the most demure and proper. Simla occasionally is convulsed by scandals, although dispassionate inquiry invariably proves that there is nothing in them. The hot blood of the quick and fervid Punjaub—casual ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... events. These images are perceived more at night and while we sleep than in the daytime and while we are awake, because, as stated in De Somn. et Vigil. ii [*De Divinat. per somn. ii], "impressions made by day are evanescent. The night air is calmer, when silence reigns, hence bodily impressions are made in sleep, when slight internal movements are felt more than in wakefulness, and such movements produce in the imagination images from which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... however, speak more especially of his jury-trials, because in them more of his whole nature was brought into play, and because of them and of his management of them there is and can be no full record. The arguments and triumphs of the great advocate are almost as evanescent and traditionary as the conversation of great talkers like Coleridge. In what we have to say we cannot be expected to call up the arguments and cases themselves, and we must necessarily be confined to a somewhat general statement of certain mental qualities and characteristics which were ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ran up swiftly before the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings, they seemed to rest on the evanescent spray. Their images—long-legged little figures, with gray backs and snowy bosoms—were seen as distinctly as the realities in the mirror of the glistening strand. As I advanced, they flew a score or two of yards, and, again alighting, recommenced their dalliance with the surf ...
— Footprints on The Sea-Shore (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a door there once; but it has been permanently closed. With cement," he forced himself to add, his countenance losing its evanescent colour till it shone ghastly again ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... seated himself after the manner of the carter. It was only when the dusty baker came along and repeated this procedure, preserving the same silence, that Carmichael's curiosity was enlivened. This curiosity, however, was only of the evanescent order. Undoubtedly they were socialists and this was a little conclave, and the peculiar manner of their meeting, the silence and mystery, were purely fictional. Socialism at that time revolved round the blowing up of kings, of demolishing established order. Neither kings ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... Galuppi's,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting of Browning's poems, certainly one of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. It is a vision of Venice evoked from the shadowy Toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant, evanescent, worldly ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... it meant the wreckage, not the preservation of the home; that lovely home to whose occupancy she had so hopefully looked. She was too young a wife to recognize in herself the evanescent emotions of the bride. The blight had fallen upon her for all time. What had been fire was ashes; it was all over. The roseate dream had been followed by a cruel, ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... languidly from the back seat; he was on the front seat, with the middle seat for a table between them. First Mr. Boyle showed her some tricks with the cards and kindled her momentary and flashing interest in a mysteriously evoked but evanescent knave. Then they played euchre, at which Miss Cantire cheated adorably, and Mr. Boyle lost game after game shamelessly. Then once or twice Miss Cantire was fain to put her cards to her mouth to conceal an apologetic yawn, and her blue-veined eyelids grew heavy. Whereupon Mr. Boyle suggested ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it all to my imagination, and earnestly advised me not to cause any uneasiness to the count by mentioning the subject to him. I readily promised compliance with this injunction; and in the course of a few days ceased to think upon the incident which has made so strange but evanescent ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... moved to this undertaking, as I feel sure that it will be executed with vigour and thoroughness, in a patriotic spirit, and with a real affection. Our neighbours in the United States have long since seen the propriety of collecting and permanently recording the otherwise rapidly evanescent memorials of their past. The volumes put forth by their Historical Societies and State Government and by individuals amongst them, on this subject, possess extraordinary interest not only for United States' citizens, but also for the general reader, and particularly for the inhabitants of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... to the inevitable, had put the cook upon his mettle. Ouardi was already to be seen with a bottle of Pommery in each hand, and was only prevented from instantly uncorking them by the representations of his mistress and an elaborate exposition of the peculiar and evanescent virtues of champagne. Ali was humming a mysterious song about a lovesick camel-man, with which he intended to make glad the hearts of the assembly when the halting time was over. And the dining-table was ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... sat looking, till the lines of the horizon seemed grown into her mind like an etching. She watched the slow dusk swell and gather—with such delicate, soft-blending gradations in the birth of night as Edwin Waugh loves to seize and word-paint. Through all its fine evanescent change of thought and feeling she watched unconsciously; and the growth, death, and burial of that twilight were ever after a substratum to all the sadness and all the hope that visited her. Through palest eastern rose, through silvery gold and golden green and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... circumstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... by no means given up to a cheerful view of life. Many an individual is morose and dejected in the extreme. This disposition is ever stimulated by the religious teachings of Buddhism. Its great message has been the evanescent character of the present life. Life is not worth living, it urges; though life may have some pleasures, the total result is disappointment and sorrow. Buddhism has found a warm welcome in the hearts of many Japanese. For more than a thousand years it has ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... moon is obscured by masses of clouds; the trees no sooner blossom than their flowers are scattered by the wind. All beauty is evanescent. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable, faults,—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them; he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity and baldness, and plucked ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... a novel called Granby; one of that very difficult class which aspires to describe the actual current of society, whose colours are so evanescent that it is difficult to fix them on the canvas. It is well written, but over-laboured—too much attempt to put the reader exactly up to the thoughts and sentiments of the parties. The women do this better: ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... and he had grown curiously interested in young people. Anthony was very fond of his sweet, fascinating cousin—they all were. He did not know whether there was any one in Salem quite good enough for her. Saltonstall was a rather trifling fellow, whose fancies were evanescent. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and gypsum often covers the ground over immense areas. These districts occupy the beds of vast ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing chotts, or very salt pools, are the last shrunken and evanescent relics. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... power; or reflect the evanescent tints of hope fostered by thee? A despondent gloom had long obscured Maria's horizon—now the sun broke forth, the rainbow appeared, and every prospect was fair. Horror still reigned in the darkened cells, suspicion lurked in the passages, and whispered along the walls. The yells ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... prisoner and the gay palace where she was brought up, with its paradise of flowers, and aromas, and singing birds of gold and azure—far away, far away. And then that blood-written oath—oh, so literally fulfilled and obeyed! But the thought was evanescent from very fear. Nor was his nervousness unjustified; for, even as he turned his head, he saw a figure wrapped up in a dark cloak, and surmounted by a white coil of pure linen, as he thought, emerging from the clump of thick trees that stood on the north end of the burying-ground. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... poor fellow'—for, intermingled with a little contempt, was a good deal of respect for the simplicity, the unworldliness, the strength of feeling, even though the feeling was evanescent—'I will send her to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Among the evanescent controversies of that period the most conspicuous was the question of regulation by Congress of the social condition of the future States to be rounded in the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... in silence. At length he began to talk. He had travelled in many lands, and now he told of his changing fortunes in these far-off countries, always drawing a moral from his adventures—that all things earthly were evanescent as the dews of morning. The company listened attentively to the discourse of the sage; all, that is, but their hostess, who was angry and disappointed that he had said no word of the wealth and magnificence displayed in her palace, the rich fare on her table, and all ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... which can only be removed by unrestricted appreciation and application of the natural rhythms of idea and of language. There is in every thought, however simple or subtle, in every feeling, however evanescent or profound, an inherent rhythm which is as a material body to the thought's or emotion's soul. This native, inevitable rhythm—one might call it the rhythme juste, the exact rhythm—is the only fit expression for ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... lovers, with its white couches, soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new view of the lake; in the far distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of changing color and evanescent cloud; above them spread the sunny sky, before them stretched the broad sheet of water, never the same in its fitful changes. All their surroundings seemed to dream for them, all ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... Nature! Thou who art but a name given by our souls, seeing and hearing through the senses, to the Being in whom all things are and have life! Ere two years old, she, whose dream is now with us, all over the small silvan world, that beheld the revelation, how evanescent! of her pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of sin—inherited from those who disobeyed in Paradise—seemed from her fair clay to have been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears. So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... describing it as "Un Tour; JEU ITALIEN!" It was so peculiar to them, that he could only call it by their own name. It is difficult to describe that of which the whole magic consists in being seen; and what is more evanescent than the humour which consists ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... all life's possibilities! Oh no, not possibilities; for there was nothing in actual life to correspond with those imaginings. Not more unlike were those Turner canvases, daubed over with dull earthy paint, to the mysterious shadowy depths, the crystal purity, the evanescent splendours of nature at morn and noon and eventide, than was this married London life to the life she had figured in her dreams. That was the reality, the true life, and this that was called reality only a crude and base imitation. They ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... produce Change, not creation: simply what lay loose At first lies firmly after, what design Was faintly traced in hesitating line Once on a time, grows firmly resolute Henceforth and evermore. Now, could we shoot Liquidity into a mould,—some way Arrest Soul's evanescent moods, and keep Unalterably still the forms that leap To life for once by help of Art!—which yearns To save its capture: Poetry discerns, Painting is 'ware of passion's rise and fall, Bursting, subsidence, intermixture—all A-seethe within the gulf. Each Art a-strain Would stay ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... improvement in material too. Pottery is the most durable of fabrics so long as it is not broken. But it is fragile, as bronze is not. Why may not that defect be remedied, as other defects have been by the Japanese and our bank-note printers in that particularly evanescent texture, paper? Some day, perhaps, burnt clay will be held together by threads of asbestos as greenbacks are by threads of silk and the sun-burned Egyptian bricks were by straw. Malleable glass we have already. Why not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... to Congress, had never entered any wish or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and enabled me in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... and a silence came over the men of Forty-Mile. The sky drew still closer, sending down a crystal flight of frost—little geometric designs, perfect, evanescent as a breath, yet destined to exist till the returning sun had ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... hovering in the air? But this would have been incompatible with the law of gravitation and with the earthly materials of which our bodies are framed. Frequently, what is praised in art as ideal is really nothing more. But this would give us nothing more than airy evanescent shadows incapable of making any durable impression on the mind. The Greeks, however, in their artistic creations, succeeded most perfectly, in combining the ideal with the real, or, to drop school terms, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... weigh in an equitable balance the pretended advantages of man above the other animals, you will soon see how evanescent is this fictitious superiority which he has arrogated to himself. We find that all the productions of nature are submitted to the same laws; that all beings are only born to die; they produce their ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... I asked, "that the one great drawback throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is the lack of permanent evidence? It has always been evanescent, perishable. It always rests solely upon the word of witnesses. But if I could show you a film print, then you could not doubt the existence of ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... said all that we know about the matter; and this amounts to nothing more than a confession of our ignorance. Yet, if we admit in all men the existence of a natural sense of beauty, daily observation shows us that the pleasure arising from it is in most cases very feeble and evanescent. How many live in the midst of the most magnificent natural scenery, and never perceive its beauties until they are pointed out to them by some intelligent traveller! And often if admiration be professed, it is of that vague, undistinguishing ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... unattainable! Ye seem Like awful deities, at whose command Man's evanescent life,—a fretful stream, One instant murmurs and ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Religion, have nothing of this luminous evidence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recognizes at one time, not at another,—discerns when it is calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, or the sudden storm hurries away ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her mind some delightful but too evanescent impression. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Even Dr. Mason, canny Scot though he was, could not forget the sight of ninety thousand dollars' worth of gold bullion he had once seen piled up at North Bloomfield, and so was persuaded to gamble with his earnings. He had lost as much as Mack. How rosy is the rainbow, and how evanescent the pot of gold at the end of it! California had swallowed up more wealth than its gold could ever repay, as Keeler well knew. It was only occasionally that some lucky devil, or some prudent, saving man like Robert Palmer, after thirty years in the gold fields, had anything ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... our inquiries into Greek and mediaeval art, I was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that some, remaining to us from ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of the underlying grades, so just in that degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams of decaying forms. The soul that has received an illumination from the Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... to explain his precautions. Welbeck had placed the book in his collection, purposing some time to peruse it; but, deterred by anxieties which the perusal would have dissipated, he rushed to desperation and suicide, from which some evanescent contingency, by unfolding this treasure to his view, would have ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... E major Scherzo, Op. 54, with its skimming, swallowlike flight, its delicate figuration, its evanescent hintings at a serious something in the major trio? Have you ever heard Pachmann purl through this exquisitely conceived, contrived and balanced composition, truly a classic? Whaur is your Willy Mendelssohn ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... novel which, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume, the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet (forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who are curious—the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbiere, and the painted and bejewelled Theodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctive ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... than they know—even before the sermon. Their faces have fallen into the shape of their minds, for the church has an isolating as well as congregating power, and no passing emotion moulds them to an evanescent show. When Polwarth spoke to a friend, the suffering melted in issuing radiance; when he sat thus quiescent, patient endurance was the first thing to be read on his countenance. This flashed through the curate's mind in the moments ere he began to speak, and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... it spun into the court, and up to the foot of the outside stair over the baronet's workshop. Then commenced the real struggle of the evening for Gibbie—and for his father too, though the latter was aware of it only in the momentary and evanescent flashes of such enlightenment as made him just capable of yielding to the pushes and pulls of the former. All up the outside and the two inside stairs, his waking and sleeping were as the alternate tictac of a pendulum; but Gibbie stuck to his business like a man, and his resolution and perseverance ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really evanescent. It is like calculating the weight of the air on each square inch of our body to prove that it must be crushingly heavy for us. With every weight, however, there is an adjustment, and we lightly bear our ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... founded on Helmholtz's splendid hydrodynamical theorems, seeks for the properties of molecules in the ring vortices of a uniform, frictionless, incompressible fluid. Such whirling rings may be seen when an experienced smoker sends out a dexterous puff of smoke into the still air, but a more evanescent phenomenon it is difficult to conceive. This evanescence is owing to the viscosity of the air; but Helmholtz has shewn that in a perfect fluid such a whirling ring, if once generated, would go on whirling for ever, would always consist of the very same portion of the fluid which ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... "We are false and evanescent, and aware of our deceit, From the straw that is our vitals to the clay that is our feet. You may serve us if you must, and you shall have your wage of ashes, — Though arrears due thereafter may be ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... faintly disturbed. In some strange, indefinable way it seemed to him that Mary Stella was different from her usual self. The impression was vague and evanescent—gone before he could decide wherein the difference lay. He told himself that he was foolish, yet the vexing, transient feeling continued to come ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The ostent evanescent, The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long, Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils, To fashion ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... great powers of observation he added great powers of reflection, and two of the most characteristic features of his writings are immediateness and individuality in his descriptions of nature, and a remarkable power of giving permanent and clear form to the most subtle and evanescent mental impressions. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... child at play Blows upon a pipe of clay Bubbles, evanescent, bright, With their iridescent light, So I fling upon the wind Verses of the ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... eternity; a drop of water in the great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds; a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent, oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation, which is to subsist for ages and ages to come; oppose itself to that long line of posterity which, issuing from our loins, will endure during the existence of the world? Forbid it, God. Let us look to our country and our cause, elevate ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... time. The actors in its bygone scenes have passed away in their shadowy grandeur, leaving but dim footprints here and there to tell us they have been, and cause us to wonder at the mystery which veils their record, and to muse upon the evanescent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... traditional sentiment,—as a wholesome subject for school-composition,—we have spoken and written of the weariness of the world-worn heart, and the frailty of earthly things. But, O! when our hearts have actually become worn, and tried; when we begin to learn that the things of this life are evanescent,—are dropping away from us, and we slipping from them,—what inspiration of reality comes to us in the oft-heard invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!" What a depth of meaning flowing from the eternal world, in the precept ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... ending far away at the outskirts of the bush, above which could be seen giant mountains with snow-covered ranges. Over all this strange contrast of savage arid coast and peaceful upland there was a glaring red sky—not the delicate evanescent pink of an ordinary sunset—but a fierce angry crimson which turned the wet sands and dark expanse of ocean into the colour of blood. Far away westward, where the sun—a molten ball of fire—was sinking behind ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... that could be called precipitate or rash. The cautious blood and far sight of the early settlers, who had much to reckon with, were still preponderant social characteristics of the town they cleared the site for. Meanwhile, however, flowers were gathered, and all sorts of evanescent idylls came and went in the relations of young men and maidens. Alec and Oliver Murchison were already in ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... force and all the power of the state. It alone was fit to exercise them, because it alone had the intelligence necessary for the conduct of government. The people was not yet sufficiently advanced to participate in power, consequently, it was only by accident, and in the most casual and evanescent manner, that power fell into its hands; but it received civic education, and was disciplined to government in the primary assemblies, according to the true aim of society, which is not to confer its advantages as a patrimony on one particular class, but to make all share in them, when ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... vision and our thought seem carried to the third heaven; the gorgeous magnificence of the close, when the sun sinks from our view, surrounded with various masses of clouds, fringed with gold and purple, and reflecting, in evanescent tints, all the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the feeling that he was in a dream. In the realms of the subconscious he had heard just such sounds—exotic and unearthly—fleeting and evanescent. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Where all was vitreous, but in order due Convivial table and commodious seat (What seemed at least commodious seat) were there, Sofa and couch and high-built throne august. The same lubricity was found in all, And all was moist to the warm touch; a scene Of evanescent glory, once a stream, And soon to slide into a stream again. Alas, 'twas but a mortifying stroke Of undesigned severity, that glanced (Made by a monarch) on her own estate, On human grandeur and the courts of kings 'Twas transient in its nature, as in show 'Twas durable; as worthless, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... cowmen against the sheep, and then unless that formless myth, "The Government," which no man had ever seen or known, stepped in, there would be no more of the struggle; the green mesa would be stripped of its evanescent glory and the sheep would wander at will. But as long as there was still a chance and the cows had young calves that would die, there was nothing for it but to fight on, warily ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... love, I think they are, except it be the opal. In the opal, God seems to have fixed the evanescent and made ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... song was demanded. The now familiar term of "Encore!" was heard and obeyed. The queen herself was affected to tears by the enthusiastic affection displayed toward her, nor at such a moment did she suffer her feeling of the evanescent character of popularity among so light-minded a people to dwell in her mind, or to mar the pleasure which such a reception ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... prisoner, Chivers saw the certainty that he could trust him, even far more than he could trust any one within the house he had just quitted. But this very certainty, for all its assurance of safety to himself, filled him, not with remorse, which might have been an evanescent emotion, but with a sudden alarming and terrible consciousness of being in the presence of a hitherto unknown and immeasurable power! He had no pity for man who trusted him; he had no sense of shame in taking advantage of ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... favorable to the doctrine of derivation than is the general rule of a pure and simple ascending gradation. We refer to what Agassiz calls prophetic and synthetic types; for which the former name may suffice, as the difference between the two is evanescent. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... followed by sleep, which lasts for twenty-four hours. Such drugs as produce mental stupefaction, without impairing the physical powers, may have given rise to the accounts of men being transformed into brutes, so frequent in what are denominated the fabulous writers, while the evanescent but exquisite joys of an opposite description, an anticipation of what implicit obedience would ensure them for ever, produced blind, furious, devoted adherents to any philosophical speculator, who would venture to ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... your tender daughter and are laughed at as inane; Vain you face the snow, oh mirror! for it will evanescent wane, When the festival of lanterns is gone by, guard 'gainst your doom, 'Tis what time the flames will kindle, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty Farish's running commentary—"Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!" or: "That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple"—did ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... for in Science every onward step is at least certain gain, but in Art every step is groping, and success is only another form of effort. Art, in so far as it is more divine, is more unattainable, more evanescent, more unsubstantial. It needs as much patience as Science, and the passionate devotion of an entire life is as nothing in comparison with the magnitude of the work. Self-sacrifice, self-distrust, infinite patience, infinite disappointment—such is the lot of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... on the stage, and because he had seized only his raw material, the bare skeleton of intrigue, without possessing the skill or the taste needed to convey across the footlights the subtle psychology which vitalized the original tale, or the evanescent atmosphere which enveloped it in charm. Mr. Bliss Perry phrased it most felicitously when he asserted that "a novel is typically as far removed from a play as a bird is from a fish," and that "the attempt to transform one into the other is apt to result in a sort ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... was a continual swell of guests dashing down and dashing away, like the ocean; brilliant as its foam, numerous as its waves. But there was one permanent inhabitant of this princely mansion far more interesting to our hero than the evanescent crowds who rose like bubbles, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... is more especially the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Christian they are to be means to an end, and ever to be felt to be evanescent. They should differ in the motive for action, which should, for a Christian, ever be the love of God. They should differ in that a Christian abstains from much which non-Christians feel free to do, and often has ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... hears; The poet's fervid conversation And judgment which unsteady veers And eye which gleams with inspiration— All this was novel to Eugene. The cold reply with gloomy mien He oft upon his lips would curb, Thinking: 'tis foolish to disturb This evanescent boyish bliss. Time without me will lessons give, So meantime let him joyous live And deem the world perfection is! Forgive the fever youth inspires, And ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the divine Christ, there seems not a trace. A report has come down to us, enshrined in Newman's prose, that Napoleon once discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of Alexander and Caesar. One hopes that the words were uttered; but they conflict with Napoleon's undoubted statements. Sometimes he spoke in utter uncertainty; at others, as one who wished to believe in Christianity and might perhaps be converted. But in the political testament ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... she should lead as her Romany Rye's joovel, monshi, or somi. She was full of fun, yet there was nothing in her fanciful delineations which could offend us. They were but the foam of a crested wave, soon dissipated in the air. They were the evanescent creations of a lively, open-hearted girl—wild notes trilled by the bird of the forest. We came again into the open valley. Down a meadow gushed a small streamlet which splashed from a wooden spout on to the roadside." "The spot where we pitched our tents was near ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith |
