|
|
|
More "Evanescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron parent ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... the ancient Arabian idea that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that 'he is the father who gives the child its morning draught.' In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Assistant Commissioner began, 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 Personage ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... I seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... singer of a perishable day!" he said mournfully—"Alas for thee, that thou must die so, soon, and be so soon forgotten! Thy fame is worthless as a grain of sand blown by the breath of the sea! ... thy pride and thy triumph evanescent as the mists of the morning that vanish in the heat of the sun! Great has been the measure of thine inspiration,—yet thou hast missed its true teaching,—and of all the golden threads of poesy placed freely in thy hands thou hast ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the Creator to convey ethical, also instinctively uses them to express the facts of the moral world; and thus is born the human Word which, invisibly ploughing the waves of the unseen air, can convey the most subtile thought, the most evanescent shade of feeling, the wildest, darkest, and deepest emotion. Language is man's expression of the finite, with its infinite meanings modified by the extent of his intelligence and his power of expression. It is truly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... remains unchanged, and responds to the life and the spirit of Him who was, and remains down the ages, the Light of men. The individual virtues of humility, purity of heart, and self-sacrifice are not evanescent, but are now and always the pillars of Christian Ethics; while the great principles of human solidarity, of brotherhood and equality in Christ, of freedom, of love, and service; the New Testament ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... has been sufficiently hanged by the neck, and of it naught will remain in all the world of matter. In the world of spirit the memory of it will remain. Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on its ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... and transparency of the atmosphere in a fine autumnal day, when our 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 ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the foreground stretched the blue waters of Pensacola harbor—the sun lighting up the occasional foam-crests into evanescent diamonds—the grim fortress frowning darkly on the rebellious display, while a full band on the parapet played the "Star Spangled Banner." Over to the left, half hidden under the rolling sand hills, stood Pensacola, with the navy ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... you Ojen! How everything you write seems evanescent, ethereal! 'Mute exhalations from the crowds'—I can hear it; I can feel it! It ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... 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 nature there is no place ready in its ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... gave us the pastoral, sent to the garret now with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in worsted. Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am like"; and he who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression that reveals character—which is as much as to say, what is intrinsically human—will be found to have caught something as imperishable as human nature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of his humorous satire, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... trait revealing or suggesting character, was instantly reproduced, fixed, registered by it, the operating light being the wonderful native force of her intellect. And the photographs so produced were by no means evanescent. If ever the admirably epigrammatic phrase, "wax to receive and marble to retain," was applicable to any human mind, it was so to that of George Eliot. And not only were the enormous accumulations of stored-up impressions safe beyond reach of oblivion or confusion, but they ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... these popular and modish trifles, but by a thousand unheeded and evanescent kinds of business, are the multitudes of this city preserved from idleness, and consequently from want. In the endless variety of tastes and circumstances that diversify mankind, nothing is so superfluous, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!—beautiful forest-born!—wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked—slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... stock of knowledge. He is a young boy, with an intelligent face burnt to a dust colour by the summer sun, and with crisp hair of the same hue. He is a boy in whom I have perceived nothing incompatible with habits of studious inquiry and meditation, unless an evanescent black eye (I was delicate of inquiring how occasioned) should be so considered. To him am I indebted for ability to identify a Custom-house boat at any distance, and for acquaintance with all the forms and ceremonies observed ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... blossoms—white, blue, yellow, and red—while, among the smooth, shining leaves of the orange and lemon trees, gleamed the swelling fruit. On a round tank close at hand some black swans were noiselessly tracing evanescent circles and uttering their strange lament. The song of birds mingled with the plash of fountains, and even the marble statues, for all that they were dumb, seemed to be enjoying the sweet morning air and the stir and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... gaze of the many eyes that turn upon the speaker, especially if he permits himself to steadily return that gaze. Most speakers have been conscious of this in a nameless thrill, a real something, pervading the atmosphere, tangible, evanescent, indescribable. All writers have borne testimony to the power of a speaker's eye in impressing an audience. This influence which we are now considering is the reverse of that picture—the power their eyes may exert upon ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... 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 of joy. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... little child at play Blows upon a pipe of clay Bubbles, evanescent, bright, With their iridescent light, So I fling upon the wind Verses ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... could not explain the term but by 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
... the countryman in town thinks that there is no beauty of the world left for him to see, because the spirit there is a spirit of the hour and not of the season, and natural beauty has to be caught in evanescent appearances—a florist's window full of orchids in place of his woodlands—and his mind is too slow to catch these. This too quick or too slow habit of seeing belongs to minds as well as to callings; ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... example of how far a man may go in perceiving and acknowledging the truth without its influencing his heart. The decree enforces recognition of Daniel's God, in language which even prophets do not surpass; but it is all lip-reverence, as evanescent as superficial. It takes more than a fright caused by a miracle to make a man a true ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, in dark blue silhouettes, the evanescent forms of castles, battlements, and turrets from which some shreds of white mist waved like banners of capitulation; stupendous moats beneath them were still black with shadow; while clouds filled many of the minor canons, like vapors rising from enormous cauldrons. Gradually, as the solar ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... or whether there is in us an essence, a nature, a soul, a reality in short, with which may connect itself another future than the dissolution of the sepulchre; whether there remains another hope than annihilation as the term of our latest sorrows, or, for the aspirants after fame, only that evanescent memory which time bears away ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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 doorway. Quick steps ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... I think, than the evanescent fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is just becoming familiar with—ideas that flit across the mental sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy. Miss Sullivan sat beside me at my lessons, spelling into my hand whatever Mr. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... formal metrical patterns is a monstrous error 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 an intellectual ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... over the blue stretch of water, as it lay beneath the blazing August sun, while the sea-gulls, like streaks of white light, wheeled through the shimmering haze of the atmosphere. Her hands were loosely clasped around her knees, and a little evanescent smile played about her lips. Behind her, the great red cliffs of Culver Point reared up against the sapphire of the sky, and she was thinking dreamily of that day, nearly eighteen months ago, when she had been sitting in the self-same place, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think. And now the first endeavor to remember. And now a partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained its dominion, that, in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the rush of an ocean, my shuddering ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete—of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in the better parts ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Paul Kegworthy the heavens had opened and flooded his senses, till he nearly fainted, with the perfume of celestial lands. The intoxicating sweetness of it bewildered his young brain. It was nothing delicate, evanescent, like the smell of a flower. It as thick, pungent, cloying, compelling. Mouth agape and nostril wide, he followed the exquisite source of the emanation like one in a dream, half across the yard. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... perfect the effect, and that if he cease breathing during the operation, pain will be felt. Fully impress them with this idea, for the very good reason that they may stop when in the midst of an operation, and the fullest effects be lost. It is obligatory to do so on account of its evanescent effects, which demand that the patient be pushed by the operator's own energetic appeals to "go on." It is very difficult for any person to respire more than one hundred times to the minute, as he ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... verifying of a new truth; and every new observation, the instant it is made, passes into an act and emanation of the will. Every step is nearer what we wish, and yet there is always more to do. In spite of the facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... and the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of course, always modern, and the classic is the immortal, the timeless ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... accidental phenomenon depending upon subterraneous fire. How marvellous then are those laws by which even the humblest types of organic existence are preserved though born amidst the sources of their destruction, and by which a species of immortality is given to generations floating, as it were, like evanescent bubbles, on a stream raised from the deepest caverns of the earth, and instantly losing what may be called its spirit in the atmosphere." These last observations of the stranger recalled to my recollection some phenomena which I had observed ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... to quote its enunciation as a fact, and to note that it was the expression of a great national interest, not merely of a popular sympathy with South American revolutionists; for, had it been the latter, it would doubtless have proved as inoperative and evanescent as declarations arising from such emotions commonly are. From generation to generation we have been much stirred by the sufferings of Greeks, or Bulgarians, or Armenians, at the hands of Turkey; ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... most cowardly mode of hunting known to human experience. Buffalo-hunting is much more dignified as regards the courageous exposure of the hunter; but, from all accounts, its excitement is too momentary and evanescent; one rifle-shot, and the crisis is past. Besides that, the generous and honest character of the buffalo disturbs the cordiality of the sport. The very opposite reason disturbs the interest of lion-hunting, especially at the Cape. The lion is everywhere a cowardly wretch, unless when ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... clinging with passionate tenderness to the little helpless form of flesh that lies on her bosom, should be overwhelmed with the dark waters of sorrow when she sees it laid in the cold earth. It is well that her tears should flow and her heart ache, for only thus can she be reminded of the evanescent nature of the joys and objects of sense, and be drawn nearer to ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... Delegates demanded a republic. Kerensky, however, persuaded it to support the Provisional Government by an enormous majority and the revolution appeared to have produced a government. But even in orderly countries enormous majorities secured in moments of emotion are apt to be evanescent, and the Provisional Government had an uneasy lease of life for just two months. The Duma had not made the revolution, and the middle classes for which it stood were weak in numbers and prestige. The vast mass of the Russian people consisted ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look, a word—or less—the very refraining from some faint and most evanescent expression of countenance; these flow from a profounder source than the series of our habitual conduct, which, it has been already said, derives its origin from without. These are the actions, and such as these, which make human life what it is, and are the fountains of all the good and evil with ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter's reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... outer edge of London town. Across the white, sanded floor golden patches of light had moved with measured tread, and merry motes had danced in the golden beams, but nothing else had stirred. On the deep hearth were piled huge logs, ready to spring into a flashing evanescent life at the whim of some chance guest, for October was drawing in his breath preparatory to blowing it ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... acres but I could exist with two; an acre would seem an estate to me, and my ideas of a house, Henry, are shriveling. I did have a dream of something that must have been precious near a home. There might have been an evanescent hint of flitting draperies and inexperienced feet in it, but for the sake of living and working in such a location as Miss Linda describes, I would gladly cut my residence to a workroom and a ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband. Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the Deity with the greatest ease, and places man, fleeting or evanescent as he is, at the summit of the universe! As he expresses it, "The only intelligence in the universe worthy of the name is the intelligence of the organized beings which have been evolved; and the highest manifestations ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... grandsires of these were the servants of the King of Tyre and came to Solomon's court. And amidst these black-haired children of grey-headed Time stood the old house of Oneleigh. I know not how many centuries had lashed against it their evanescent foam of years; but it was still unshattered, and all about it were the things of long ago, as cling strange growths to some sea-defying rock. Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... throughout. The feelings of children are under no kind of restraint, but pure as the fire, free as the winds, honest and open as the face of heaven. Their joys incessantly flow in the thickest succession, and their griefs only seem fleeting and evanescent. To the calls of nature they are only attentive. They know no voice but hers. Their obedience to all her commands is prompt and implicit. They never anticipate her bounties, nor relinquish her pleasures. This situation renders them ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... her eyes over his sunburnt features, his broad shoulders, his straight, tall, motionless figure, rested at last on the ground at his feet. Then she smiled. In the sombre beauty of her face that smile was like the first ray of light on a stormy daybreak that darts evanescent and pale through the gloomy clouds: the forerunner of sunrise and ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... my father's habits, as described by himself. When a difficulty or an objection occurred to him, he thought it of paramount importance to make a note of it instantly because he found hostile facts to be especially evanescent. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him; that there had been moments when she stood with the ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... something from his pocket. It was a watch, a repeater, in a gold filigree case of exquisite workmanship, with raised figures depicting the loves of an Arcadian shepherd and shepherdess; and, as it lay on the white hand of its owner, it bore an evanescent fragrance that seemed to recall scenes as beautiful and as completely past as the days of ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... shopboard down to the depths of primal savagery,—carrying much along with him! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human Society, is indeed swift-passing, evanescent, slippery to decipher; yet significant of much, nay of all. Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned-up from the very lees, and from all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... under a different law, and for a different purpose. Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of changes in their constitution from her touch; and where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent. Directly the reverse of these are the desires and demands of the imagination. She recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite. She leaves it to fancy to describe Queen ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... and presently Adrian Torrens was conscious that her ladyship had gone hers, by the curt resurrection of sounds in abeyance somewhile since; sounds of eight hoofs and four wheels; suddenly self-assertive, soon evanescent. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... gone. But is it not a chafing under the fetters of sin? Is it not that she begins to see more clearly the fiery judgments of God which will certainly overwhelm the wrongdoers, whatever may be the unsubstantial and evanescent graces of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... 'Ha-a-a-a-ay!' Authority melts from you, apparently.—Leaves nothing but a few rudimentary theories, of no use to anyone except the owner, inasmuch as no one else can develop them properly; just a few evanescent footprints on the sands of Time, which would require only a certain combination of age and facilities for cohesion to mature into Mammoth-tracks on the sandstone of Progress. All on the debit side of Civilisation's ledger, you observe. Consequently, he doesn't long to leave ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... transitory as the wind, as evanescent as the rainbow, and as tender as spring violets, is hard to portray with pen, and for that reason the summer-day nature of Alice Page is but faintly outlined. When on the morning of her departure from Boston she stood beside the train exchanging ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... departing luminary cast their radiance, partly from behind the church, over the vast multitude in the Place. Brightly and rapidly the rich light roved over the waters that leaped towards it from the fountain in all the loveliness of natural and evanescent form. Bathed in that brilliant glow, the smooth porphyry colonnades reflected, chameleon like, ethereal and varying hues; the white marble statues became suffused in a delicate rose-colour, and the sober-tinted trees gleamed in the innermost of their leafy depths as if steeped in the exhalations ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... origin, both in their essence and their appearance. For what is more like a great Foam-Bubble than the Moon? and what is more like the delusion of love than a bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play of colour, while it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind it when it bursts and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter taste of brine? And as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merely bubbles of a bubble: for ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... attempt to elect so young a man to be Chief 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 mind. Jackson had also, as a representative and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... So Mark uses here again his favourite 'straightway' to express the swift disappearance of the seed. As soon as the preacher's voice is silent, or the book closed, the words are forgotten. The impression of a gliding keel on a smooth lake is not more evanescent. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the frailty of one unfortunate man, and learning that I had taken the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to the west of them tempted them to move onward. Indeed, this ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... glancing light of the burning wood Played over a group of jars which stood On a distant shelf, it seemed the sky Had lent the half-tones of his blazonry To paint these porcelains with unknown hues Of reds dyed purple and greens turned blues, Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen Their colours are felt, but never seen. Strange winged dragons writhe about These vases, poisoned venoms spout, Impregnate with old Chinese charms; Sealed urns containing mortal harms, They ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... of the curtained background against the folds of the woollen stuff gave him no pleasure now,—at least, he never thought of it. His whole attention was absorbed in that faint hint of resemblance to Winifred Anstice which lay chiefly in the full eyelids and the subtle, shadowy, evanescent smile which said at once ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... wealth of thick black hair, carelessly parted near the centre, was Russian—was Cossack—strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal. You could not think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and vivid, as full of energy as a healthy baby that kicks its dresses into ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... 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 ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it was wrong in principle, 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
... Kandahar and Seistan give very large quantities of milk. They seem to be of the humped variety, but with the hump evanescent. Dairy produce is important in Afghan diet, especially the pressed and dried curd called krut (an article and name perhaps introduced by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... around him affords no rest to his eye, no object to divert his attention from his own agonising sensations. When he arises from sleep half his body seems dead till quickened into feeling by the irritation of his sores. But fortunately for him no evil makes an impression so evanescent as pain. It cannot be wholly banished nor recalled by the force of reality by any act of the mind, either to affect our determinations or to sympathise with another. The traveller soon forgets his sufferings and at every future journey their recurrence is attended ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... and the ease of the flight of birds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed this window, on her first voyage to sea—a tall and slender ship, a being so radiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision—as inspiring and awful as the remoteness of a spiritual and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... for an hour it has filled a human home with its far-brought sweetness; to-morrow it will fall apart and return whence it came. As I look into its heart of passionate colour, the whole visible universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evanescent, vanishing; it is no longer a permanent order of seas and continents and rounded skies; it is a vision painted by an unseen hand against a background of mystery. Dead, cold, unchangeable as I see it in the glimpses of a single hour, it becomes warm, vital, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks break into glowing coals, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... is really nothing glorious about possession. It may be most inglorious and mean,—as {8} mean when the possession is brains or power as when it is bonds or wheat. Indeed, there is rarely much that is glorious or great about so slight or evanescent a thing as a human life. The glory of it lies in its being able to say, "The glory that thou hast given me I give to them." The worth of life is in its transmissive capacity. In the wonderful system of the telephone with its miracle of intercommunication ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock." "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." Here, as well as in innumerable other places, are we told that true love is not a mere evanescent feeling of the heart, but an inwrought and abiding habit of the will. It is not a suffering, it is a doing. The most lively emotions, the most ecstatic feelings, if they lead not the will to action, can avail us nothing; for the tree will be judged, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... immemorial and is still the most important feature of many celebrations. In the early festivals fires, candles, and oil-lamps were used and fireworks were invented for the purpose. Even to-day the pyrotechnical displays against the dark depths of the night sky hold mankind spellbound. But these evanescent notes of light have been improved upon by more permanent displays on a huge scale. Thirty years before the first practical installation of gas-lighting an exhibition of "Philosophical Fireworks" produced by ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... of the blazing day passed drowsily. Lying close together on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... alterations brought on by the facility of communicating knowledge; the systematical manner in which men pursue their interests, and other changes: give reason to hope that, in the present situation of things, those possessions may be rendered permanent, that have hitherto been found to be so evanescent and fugitive. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... 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 daylight. I suppose now, that, in ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... moaning sound, scarcely perceptible, had floated to the ship, causing the mate to interrupt himself suddenly; and at the same moment a light, evanescent puff of hot air seemed to ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... several shares in a ceremony in which Miss Pilgrim was the central figure when it began, and Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove when it concluded. Time and elasticity of boyhood had so closed the sharp but evanescent wound in Billy's heart that he could stand the trial of being groomsman where he had wanted to be groom—more especially since he was supported through the emergency by a little sister of Lottie's ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... treat it as the opposite of all reality. When we say, 'that was merely an imagination,' we dismiss the topic as not worthy of another thought. For all ordinary purposes, this mode of speaking is correct enough; but let us ask, Why is imagination so weak?—why are its suggestions so evanescent? Simply because it is under the control of reason. But if the action of reason could be suspended, we should then see how great, and even formidable, is the imaginative power. It is the most untiring of all our mental faculties, refusing to be put to rest ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... summer through, from the beginning of July till the end of September, he devoted himself to his engagements; he was a martyr to them. In the autumn he went back to London for a holiday. Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent bubble on the stream of his life; it belonged already to the past. By tea-time he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia's welcoming smile. And on Thursday morning—but that was a long, long way ahead. He would think of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... April fields, No birds awoke in darkling trees for us, Yet where we walked the city's street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel's wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... of evanescent glory, Had passed away, and all was dark once more, One golden page had lit the mournful story, Which ruthless hands with envious ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... they then appeared. He loved her past and future, as well as her present. He pictured her as a child: he loved her. He pictured her of sage years: he loved her. He pictured her in trouble; he loved her. Homely friendship entered into his love for her, without which all love was evanescent. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... colored, are scarcely inferior to the productions of his pencil. His powers of general description are not less remarkable. The waters seem to dance to his words as to music, and the lights and shades of his landscapes show the practised hand of a master. The evanescent shades of manners, also, upon the extreme frontiers, where the footprints of civilization have hardly crushed the green leaves, have been sketched with graphic ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... 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. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... to fill up the interstices of the more important story, so our pages will be interspersed with trifles that have no other object than the moment's approbation—an end which will never be sought for at the expense of others, beyond the evanescent smile of a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... odours, Clive! How the scent of the August fields, of the crisp salt hay, seemed to grip at my heart!—all the subtle, evanescent odours characteristic of that part of Long Island seemed to gather, blend, and exhale for my particular benefit ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... regret thy days that now are, and think upon my words, but there shall be no advantage in repentance; for in death there is no confession and repentance. But the present is the set time for work: the future for reward. Even if the pleasures of the present world were not evanescent and fleeting, but were to endure for ever with their owners, not even thus should any man choose them before the gifts of Christ, and the good things that pass man's understanding. Soothly, as the sun surpasseth in radiance and brightness the ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian deities—the heroes of the Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek romance—were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and fusion—how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... to paddle quietly down the little cove toward the south bay, which they reached just as the last of the daylight was fading out of the sky and the stars were beginning to twinkle out, one after the other, in swift succession, in the great purple dome of heaven above. The evanescent twilight now shrouded everything in mystery; a few boats could be seen moving about here and there, but only by the lingering golden light in the western sky reflected gleamingly from the ripple of bow or paddle, and the fugitives passed across the bay and entered the narrow channel between the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... there is light! Evanescent and tender, It glows ruby-red where 'twas now ashen-grey; And purple and scarlet and gold in its splendour— Behold, 'tis that marvel, the ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... 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
... 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 split into the Stalwart and Half-Breed factions. Accordingly ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... will employ artifice to entangle some heedless heart, when she knows that every heart which can be so won is not worth the winning?—She will not look upon our sex either as dupes or tyrants; she will be aware of the important difference between evanescent passion, and that affection founded upon mutual esteem, which forms the ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... suffices for the individual display, but in some instances it has lasted several minutes. In every climate it is witnessed, and at all times of the year, but most frequently in the autumnal months. As far back as records go, we meet with allusions to these swift and evanescent luminous travelers. Minerva's hasty flight from the peaks of Olympus to break the truce between the Greeks and Trojans, is compared by Homer to the emission of a brilliant star. Virgil, in the first book of the Georgics, mentions the shooting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... 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 a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... eager breaths like sighs of rapture. A rhapsody: the rush and growl and frown of the world (said he)—the sombre colors, the veil of mist, the everlasting hills, rising in serenity above the turmoil and evanescent rage. To this I listened in wonder. I had not for myself discovered these beauties; but thereafter, because of this teaching, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... his work, until at length he laid the sticks and fuses in the magazine, and signalling to the others, moved towards the door. The snow beat into their faces when they went outside, and the glare of the fire above the fall emphasized the obscurity. Now the flames flung an evanescent flash of radiance across the whirling pool and the dark rock's side, and then sank again to a dim smear of yellow brightness while a haze of vapour whirled amidst the snow, for a high wind swept through the canyon. Sometimes they could see the boulders among which they stumbled, and ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... becomes profitable to import Australian coal. Other railways are now preparing to reach the coal fields, but can we doubt that the competition to which the coal consumers are looking with eager anticipation will prove evanescent? Returning to the East, we find the coal mines of northern Illinois all held by a single company, which has full control of the traffic; while the mines of southern Illinois, on which the St. Louis consumers ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... also at the pictures generally, old and new. I particularly remember a spring landscape, by John Linnell the younger. It is wonderfully good; so tender and fresh that the artist seems really to have caught the evanescent April and made her permanent. Here, at least, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deep, spacious piazzas, covered with luxurious lounges, among which one capacious chair was his peculiar seat. They tell me he used sometimes to sit there for the whole day, his great, soft, brown eyes fastened upon the sea, watching the specks of sails that flashed upon the horizon, while the evanescent expressions chased each other over his placid face, as if it reflected the calm and changing sea before him. His morning costume was an ample dressing-gown of gorgeously flowered silk, and his morning was very apt ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... of fuel, employed for the external and not the internal feeding of the animal machine, and quite as evanescent as candy, claims a factory to itself. This is a French invention called the Loiseau Compressed Fuel. To bring it to Philadelphia, the mart of the anthracite region, would seem to be carrying coals to Newcastle. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... and leaves the older tubercles blunt or retuse), 18 to 25 mm. long and about as wide at base, the upper surface almost plane and smooth, except that it is more or less pulverulent and usually bears a small tomentose pulvillus (often evanescent later) just behind the claw-like tip: flowers rose-color: fruit elongated- oval and reddish. (Ill. Lem. Cact. t. 1.) ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky— Yea, I am ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... sat before it facing the wall, while beside him there stood a woman intently tuning a violin which she held tucked under her chin. Approaching middle age, she was rather stout, with a sallow, discontented face, which yet held some traces of its former evanescent prettiness. Both lashes and brows of her faded light eyes were heavily blackened, and the rouge which lay thickly on her cheeks only served to accentuate their haggard lines. The hair, dark at the roots, was blondined to a canary color where it rolled ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... burnt alive by a veld fire, he waits without water for the armistice which shall bring up the ambulances. He returns to his own land where he soon finds that he is not of much account. After a great war there may be a period of evanescent patronage; or a deed of Dargai, Rorke's Drift, or Balaklava may have temporarily thrilled the audience into Music Hall enthusiasm; but he is not greatly impressed, and stoically reflects that like the battle, the starvation, and the Field Hospital it is "all in the day's work" and will ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... moment of experience as regards the seer; but, as a moral entity, it never dies. The great Author of nature has his intention in these mysterious signs. We know only that there are two kinds of these God's finger-touches—the enduring and the evanescent. That we have now witnessed was of the latter kind, which we also call superficial in opposition to the other, which is painted on the rete mucosum, and never goes off. The difference of indications we know not, further than that a mysterious purpose is served by both. But might I ask if ever ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... indulge 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, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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 first arrests ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... plant growth; and they account for the efficacy of manures derived directly from the animal kingdom, as, for example, the droppings of animals, including guano, which consisted originally of the droppings of sea-birds. Some of the nitrogen in these substances, however, is of an evanescent character, and rapidly flies away in the form of carbonate of ammonia; hence, a heap of farmyard manure, left for several years, loses much of its value as manure, and guano should be kept in bulk as long as possible, and protected ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... remembering that 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
... head backward. Thin scuds of vapor darted across the sky, driven by the morning breeze; dissolved and reformed a little farther on. Tenuous wisps, evanescent, wraithlike. The ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... wonnered, wonnered who measured it, and if they did it with a yard stick as his ma measured cloth, and then he wonnered if his ma missed her little boy, and then he laid up aginst me and kinder cried a little, evanescent ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... hunt, I decided that he was cleverer than Rad had given him credit for. I went down stairs with my eyes and ears wide open prepared for further revelations. The problems of my profession had never led me into any consideration of the supernatural, and the rather evanescent business of hunting down a ha'nt came as a welcome contrast to the very material details of my recent forgery case. I had found what Terry would call ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... a second in time, compared to immeasurable, never-beginning, and never-ending 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 ourselves ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the sternness of a legislator for barbarians, the clemency of an idol of courtiers. One the victorious defender of his country,—a victory solid, durable, and just; the other the conquering devastator of a neighbouring people,—a victory, glittering, evanescent, and dishonourable. The one, in peace, rejecting parade, pomp, individual honours, and transforming a wilderness into an empire: the other involved in ceremony, and throned on pomp; and exhausting the produce of millions to pamper the bloated vanity of ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the flag on the field of battle give a better proof of their patriotism and a higher glory to their country by promoting fraternity and justice. A party success that is achieved by unfair methods or by practices that partake of revolution is hurtful and evanescent even from a party standpoint. We should hold our differing opinions in mutual respect, and, having submitted them to the arbitrament of the ballot, should accept an adverse judgment with the same respect that we would have demanded ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... am in the canyon country," he continued. "Withers tells me it is a country of rainbows, both in the evanescent air and in the changeless stone. Always as a boy there had been for me some haunting promise, some treasure at the foot of the rainbow. I shall expect the curve of a rainbow to lead me down into Surprise Valley. A dreamer, ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the brain; courage in the heart; and desire in the liver. The uterus, he believed, excites inordinate desires. Inflammations are due to disorders of the bile, and fevers to the influence of the elements. His theories in regard to the special senses are very fantastic, for instance, smell is evanescent because it is not founded on any external image; taste results from small vessels carrying taste atoms to the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... scenery, his microscopic 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 ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... them from the threatened punishment. Soon the terrible shadow passed away from the face of the moon; and the gratitude of the savages was as deep as their previous terror. But, being blended with much awe, it was not so evanescent as gratitude often is; and henceforward there was no failure in the regular supply of provisions to ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... shine hath birth The rainbow's evanescent glory; Heaven's light that breaks on mist of earth! Frail symbol of our human story, It flowers through showers where, looming hoary, The rain-clouds flash with April mirth, Like Life ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... upon him too suddenly to allow him 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
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... with colors the like of which I had never seen. For not only were rugs and mats of outlandish Eastern design scattered over the floor, but there was vividly colored glass in the small, deeply set windows. Yet that which affected me most powerfully was a curious, clinging, evanescent odor, which came and went like a breeze through an open window. I liked it at first, but after a little it went to my head like a perfumed wine of Greece, such as the men of Venice sometimes send to our northern lands with ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... that New York had made was neither so unpractical nor so evanescent. For me there was reserved a certain fear of those multitudes and those heaven-kissing towers, an apprehension that even a species of victory after defeat had not sufficed to dethrone. Call it perhaps awe, mingled with homage to the indomitable ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... rode on, the evanescent ardour of Don Cornelio's roadster insensibly cooled down; while the student himself, fatigued by the incessant application of whip and spur, gradually allowed to languish a conversation, that had enabled them to kill a long hour ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... outrageously late, 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 would ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... you 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 like to destroy themselves; ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... nor find fault with His works, nor endeavor to improve upon what He has done. Be modest also in your intercourse with your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant to ascribe to them evil intentions. A thousand presses, flooding the country with their evanescent leaves, are busily and incessantly engaged in maligning the motives and conduct of men and parties, and in making one man think worse of another; while, alas, scarcely one is found that ever, even accidentally, labors to make man think ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the 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; but a slight chill seemed to radiate from the still goblet, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... remained but a few torn and faded petals. Seeing this, the king said, 'The flowers pass away and die; so is it with mankind: we are born, we grow old, we sicken and die; we are as fleeting as the lightning's flash, as evanescent as the morning dew.' I know not whether any of you here present ever fix your thoughts upon death; yet it is a rare thing for a man to live for a hundred years. How piteous a thing it is that in this short and transient life men should consume themselves in a fire of lust! and if we think ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... The effect produced was tremendous. Almost all the men and women of the parish took the total abstinence pledge; and since that day drunkenness has nearly ceased in that parish. Nor was the improvement evanescent; it has lasted two or ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... backed by all his intellect and knowledge, his eloquence and his renown. The anti-slavery movement was checked for the time, and pro-slavery democracy, the only other positive political force, reigned supreme. But amid the falling ruins of the Whig party, and the evanescent success of the Native Americans, the party of human rights revived; and when it rose again, taught by the trials and misfortunes of 1850, it rose with a strength which Mr. Webster had never dreamed of, and, in 1856, polled nearly a million ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... possession of his fancy. "My first dash into poetry (he says) was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker (daughter and grand-daughter of the two Admirals Parker), one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her—her dark eyes—her long eye-lashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... be no question of the General's military qualities; he must have been especially useful in converting raw recruits into trained and efficient soldiers. But valor and martial skill are of so evanescent a character, (hardly less fleeting than a woman's beauty,) that Government has perhaps taken the safer course in assigning to this gallant officer, though distinguished in former wars, no more active duty than the guardianship of an apparently impregnable fortress. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Professor was of looking up dead 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 their style, as they had ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... pinkish or reddish elevations, of an evanescent character; as, for example, the lesions of urticaria, the lesions produced by the bite of a mosquito or by the ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... no rest to his eye, no object to divert his attention from his own agonising sensations. When he arises from sleep half his body seems dead till quickened into feeling by the irritation of his sores. But fortunately for him no evil makes an impression so evanescent as pain. It cannot be wholly banished nor recalled by the force of reality by any act of the mind, either to affect our determinations or to sympathise with another. The traveller soon forgets his ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... April had made room for the lady May. The play was almost completed in Ernest's mind, and he thought, with a little shudder, of the physical travail of the actual writing. He felt that the transcript from brain to paper would demand all his powers. For, of late, his thoughts seemed strangely evanescent; they seemed to run away from him whenever he attempted ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... 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 ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... Grail was as evanescent as beautiful, and soon disappeared; but Titurel, knowing that the spot was holy, guarded it with all his might against the infidels, who would fain have ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... daughter of Lord Hainault. There was much to talk about, even if they did not talk about themselves and their friends, for every day brought great events, fresh insurrections, new constitutions, changes of dynasties, assassinations of ministers, states of siege, evanescent empires, and premature republics. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... think upon my words, but there shall be no advantage in repentance; for in death there is no confession and repentance. But the present is the set time for work: the future for reward. Even if the pleasures of the present world were not evanescent and fleeting, but were to endure for ever with their owners, not even thus should any man choose them before the gifts of Christ, and the good things that pass man's understanding. Soothly, as the sun surpasseth in radiance and brightness the dead of night, even so, and much more so, doth the ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... 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 ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... or yellow, stuffed, bearing a slight, sometimes evanescent, ring, bulbous, at the base, the bulb slightly margined by the volva. The spores globose, ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... grotesque, that they assume. One can imagine he sees towns, hills, castles with tall towers, ships, and a thousand other objects in their flitting shapes, but yet scarcely formed ere they lose their evanescent beauty both of form and color, as the sun ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... 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
... peculiar traits of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing instance of this occurred in Paris, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... important battle, and often flash like rush-light stars across the sky of history. But this is not true of men like Jefferson and others of his class. They grow into great characters, and they build monuments to their memories which the tooth of time cannot destroy. There is nothing ephemeral or evanescent in the makeup of their records. They build not for a day nor a year, but for the centuries. Indeed, it may be said that they build for eternity, and thus many of them have builded wiser than they knew. The following is a summary of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... objects from those which attracted us upward almost invariably lure us to the descent. Happy they who exhaust in the former part of the journey all the foibles of existence! But how different is the crude and evanescent love of that age when thought has not given intensity and power to the passions, from the love which is felt, for the first time, in maturer but still youthful years! As the flame burns the brighter in proportion to the resistance ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miserable destiny of former generations: the taste for tapestry and embroidery is thus past; the long labours of the loom have ceased. Cloth-work, crape-work, chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. A taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the glowing and faithful ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... which the Count was now passing. If at one sitting he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a genuine and permanent trait, it would probably be less perceptible on a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely at a third. So evanescent a show of character threw the sculptor into despair; not marble or clay, but cloud and vapor, was the material in which it ought to be represented. Even the ponderous depression which constantly weighed upon Donatello's heart could not compel him into the kind of repose ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... city of mixed population, where the numerically predominant race felt a puzzled distrust for the nation of which it suddenly found itself an integral part, and from past experience firmly believed in the evanescent nature of any political connection it might have, whether with Spain, France, or the United States. The Creoles murmured because they were not given the same privileges as American citizens in the old States, and yet showed themselves indifferent to such privileges ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... story might have been better told of course. All one's work might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie. How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one, however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the testimony of some French readers who volunteered ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... are fleeting, Shadowy and evanescent, Scarce full orb'd before the crescent Tells us of their final setting. And soon our starry dreams are wreck'd, And all our earthly hopes sublime Lie stranded on the shores of Time, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... that these projectors would, for the most part, reduce mankind—a state where there is some shadow of thought and passion, but no will, no self-direction, no connexion between the past and present—a state aimless, evanescent, and of utter subjugation. Fortunately these social reformers, however daring, use no other instruments of warfare than speech and pamphlets; they do not betake themselves to the sharp weapons of political conspiracy. They must be permitted, therefore, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... body of men and women who for so long a time, maintained such friendly and intimate relations, and yet kept up such an interminable fire of small fun and joke, puns and bon-mots, inoffensively shooting them off right and left at all times and places. Being of an evanescent nature they have mostly vanished from my mind, but the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Pompeians, but during the heat and business of the day was seldom visited, save by some groups of playful children, some meditative poet, or some disputative philosophers. At the side farthest from the river, frequent copses of box interspersed the more delicate and evanescent foliage, and these were cut into a thousand quaint shapes, sometimes into the forms of fauns and satyrs, sometimes into the mimicry of Egyptian pyramids, sometimes into the letters that composed the name of a popular or eminent citizen. Thus ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... poem after poem, entranced with the melody of my verse ... mostly delicate, evanescent stuff ... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... employed for the external and not the internal feeding of the animal machine, and quite as evanescent as candy, claims a factory to itself. This is a French invention called the Loiseau Compressed Fuel. To bring it to Philadelphia, the mart of the anthracite region, would seem to be carrying coals to Newcastle. The relation between demand and supply in fuel is happily, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... this fallen below her ideal, she chafed again at her own irritation. The evil from which she now suffered was of the stuff of which much of the pain of life is made—a flimsy stuff that vanishes before the investigation of reason more surely than the stuff of our evanescent joys. There was nothing that could be called incompatibility of temper between these two; no one saw more clearly than Sophia the generosity and courage of Mrs. Rexford's heart; no one else sympathised so deeply with ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the other species "by its inferior size, total absence of crest on its head, neck, and shoulders, by its longer tail, by the white collar of the neck being evanescent; and lastly by the inferior size and smaller quantity ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... the first time in theatrical history, the repetition of a 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
... had it upon my mind these two or three weeks past to write to you; and I really believe that what most hindered me was that I had so many things to say. And yet, I solemnly declare that I cannot remember now what they were. They were things of evanescent meditation, phases of the Great Questions; but for a week or two I have been saying, I will not weary myself so much with them. So you have escaped this time. One thing, however, I do recall, though not of those questions; and that is, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... deductions. The way to re yourself of this law-making habit is to stop thinking of every little misdeed as the beginning of a great wrong. It is very likely an accident and a combination of circumstances such as may not happen again. To treat misdemeanors which are not habitual nor characteristic as evanescent is the best way to make them evanescent. They should not be allowed to enter too deeply into your consciousness or into ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... complex, that at some point in its development it shall have added a correspondence which organic death is powerless to arrest. We must in short pass beyond that definite region where the correspondences depend on evanescent and material media, and enter a further region where the Environment corresponded with is itself Eternal. Such an Environment exists. The Environment of the Spiritual world is outside the influence ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... 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 perverted, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... neighbours and ourselves in the many contingencies and obscurities of real life. Now this is not so with the pleasures of the senses: the pleasures of the senses do not increase by sharing, and sometimes cannot be shared at all; they are, moreover, evanescent, leaving us no richer; above all, they cultivate in ourselves qualities useful only for that particular enjoyment. Thus, a highly discriminating palate may have saved the life of animals and savages, but what can its subtleness do nowadays beyond making us into gormandisers ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... late: the sun was near the edge of the sea as we walked down the ivy-grown walls of the vanished city for the last time, and as we turned back, a red flush poured from the west, and painted the Doric temples in pallid rose against the evanescent purple of the Apennines. Already a thin mist was rising from the meadows, and the temples hung pink ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... nature and condition to the man in the pulpit 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 ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... turn a deaf ear to epithets, ostracism is brought to bear. This may vary from the "cold shoulder" to the complete "boycott." Losing the friendship and approval of comrades, being cut off from social sympathy, is a familiar form of group pressure. Ridicule and derision are a kind of evanescent ostracism, a temporary exclusion from the comradeship. There are many degrees in the lowering of the social temperature: coolness, formality of intercourse, averted looks, "cutting dead," "sending to Coventry," form a progressive ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with a young Italian who responded ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... per cent, solution of wood creosote. Take of this 10 cubic centimeters, add 1 drop of a test solution of ferric chloride; an evanescent blue color is formed, passing quickly into a red color. Phenol ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... become paramount to all others, and, in due time, inveterate; and besides perpetually stimulating one's personal vanity and desire for admiration and applause, directs whatever ambition one has to the least exalted of aims, the production of evanescent ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... General Bezan, to himself, rising and walking up and down his room in haste; "that must have come from the heart. Smiles are evanescent; kind words, even, cost nothing; but tears, they are honest, and come unbidden by aught save the heart itself. Tears, did you say?" he continued, pausing before ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... etc.: in Ephemerides, certain longitudinal veins between the 8th (anal) and 9th (1st maxillary) and not branches of either: in Diptera, the anterior intercalary (Loew) the discoidal, and the posterior intercalary the cubitus 1 of Comstock: applied to an evanescent sclerite in the embryo between antenna and mandible; ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... preceding pages. This implies, to what use you put your mind, and this is the secret of the young wife's efficiency and success. True happiness is a mind product. It is a creation of mind activity. The evanescent pleasures are not character builders, but a created thought is a pregnant possibility. The young wife who begins her wedded life with ideals with the determination to succeed, with certain well thought out plans, will progress. Her world is her husband and her ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... black hair, carelessly parted near the centre, was Russian—was Cossack—strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal. You could not think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and vivid, as full of energy ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... The wind whistled drearily across the room, carrying the evanescent flakes of soft snow over the heads of the pausing, listening crowd in the doorway. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... where the hands got to?" it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... of two kinds: Those occasioned by exposure to the sunshine, and consequently evanescent, are denominated "summer freckles"; those which are constitutional and permanent are called "cold freckles." With regard to the latter, it is impossible to give any advice which will be of value. They result from causes not to be affected ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... in my speech Or stutters in my pen, Or, claiming tribute, each to each, Rise, not to fall again, Let something lowlier far, for me, Through evanescent shades— Than which my spirit might not be Nourished in fitful ecstasy Not less to know but more to see Where ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... 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, an elevation more than human with all the truth of life, and in investing the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... instant her eyes dwelt upon mine with a peculiar warning expression, as evident as a wink, and the expression was evanescent as a breath. I caught on, and made my face agreeable and subservient. Immediately her own reassumed a harsh, proud set, her voice became even more incisive ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be largely incommunicable. "It cannot be imparted to another," says my father. The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent, inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the author's words ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as shepherd's reed, sing ocean-songs; And sometimes, in the day, above the wave I for a moment saw a lovely face, Pearled in a clinging mass of shell-wreathed hair, Peering upon me with strange, smiling eyes. Gay fishes, in the sunlight gleaming, swam With playful fires of evanescent hues; And birds did sometimes rest their weary wings Upon my shoulder, pecking at the fruit Which I did share with them, though ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... above a horizon belted with bright magenta, the cloudless sky was soft turquoise and sapphire; and abruptly, while the big unwieldy boat surged across the narrow ribbon of green water, the sun shot up with a shout and turned to an evanescent dream of fairy-land the gaunt, rock-ribbed profile of Manhattan Island, bulking above them in tier ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and defeats will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... proceed from the gaze of the many eyes that turn upon the speaker, especially if he permits himself to steadily return that gaze. Most speakers have been conscious of this in a nameless thrill, a real something, pervading the atmosphere, tangible, evanescent, indescribable. All writers have borne testimony to the power of a speaker's eye in impressing an audience. This influence which we are now considering is the reverse of that picture—the power their eyes may exert upon him, especially before he begins to speak: after the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... 2), and chides fortune for having provided for his livelihood nothing better than 'public means that public manners breed,' whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5). If such self-pity is to be literally interpreted, it only reflected an evanescent mood. His interest in all that touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active. He was a keen critic of actors' elocution, and in 'Hamlet' shrewdly denounced their common failings, but clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improvement. His highest ambitions ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... 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; and those who made their home in the waters were Undines. Each class appears ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... remain for years excited about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1857 men's minds were agitated by a great commercial depression and collapse of credit, and in 1858 there took place one of the most curious (for it would seem to have deserved this cold description) of evanescent religious revivals. Meanwhile, by 1857 the actual bloodshed in Kansas had come to an end under the administration of an able Governor; the enormous majority of settlers in Kansas were now known to be against slavery and it was probably ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of which the sense is too subtle and evanescent to be fixed in a paraphrase; such are all those which are by the grammarians termed expletives, and, in dead languages, are suffered to pass for empty sounds, of no other use than to fill a verse, or to modulate a period, but which are easily perceived ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... 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 hard for ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... tubercles blunt or retuse), 18 to 25 mm. long and about as wide at base, the upper surface almost plane and smooth, except that it is more or less pulverulent and usually bears a small tomentose pulvillus (often evanescent later) just behind the claw-like tip: flowers rose-color: fruit elongated- oval and reddish. (Ill. Lem. Cact. t. 1.) ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming: there seemed no space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, whilst she traced his features with her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy, and he loved ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... sacred charms; And shield their beauties from unhallow'd arms! Oh! may their suppliant steal a passing kiss? Alas! he pants not for superior bliss; Thrice-bless'd his virgin modesty shall be To snatch an evanescent ecstacy! The fierce extremes of superhuman love, For his frail sense too exquisite might prove; He turns, all blushing, from th' Aoenian shade, To humbler raptures ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The artistic and aesthetic ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Josephine had a shallow character; her impressions were keen, but evanescent. The pleasures of sovereignty outweighed the griefs. She felt that the crown was heavy at times, but it adorned her and kept her young; and in spite of the jealousy it gave rise to, the court satisfied her vanity and brought her sufficient consolation. To the satisfaction ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... feeling. This is one among many reasons why there is so little self-knowledge among mankind; they do not carry with them the thought of what they are or have been. The so-called 'facts of consciousness' are equally evanescent; they are facts which nobody ever saw, and which can neither be defined nor described. Of the three laws of thought the first (All A A) is an identical proposition—that is to say, a mere word or symbol claiming to be a proposition: the two others (Nothing can be A and not A, and Everything ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... unusual loveliness—a stately, candid lily, endowed with a charmed life, like its possessor. The seasons came and went without leaving a trace upon it; innocence and beauty seemed as enduring with it, as evanescent with the children of men. In equal though dissimilar loveliness its frolicsome young mistress nourished by its side. One thing alone, the oracle had declared, could prejudice either, and this was an accident to the flower. From such disaster it had long been shielded by the most ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... more so than in the rewards and punishments it gave to its citizens. To regard it as the vestibule only of another country where life should have its intricacies simplified, its injustices remedied, its evanescent beauty fixed, and its brief joy made full, became an imperious instinct that claimed satisfaction, through definite religious teaching or the dreams of philosophy or the visions of poetry. And so the last words of Greek sepulchral poetry express, through questions and doubts, in metaphor ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... light! Evanescent and tender, It glows ruby-red where 'twas now ashen-grey; And purple and scarlet and gold in its splendour— Behold, 'tis that marvel, the ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... fire. How marvellous then are those laws by which even the humblest types of organic existence are preserved though born amidst the sources of their destruction, and by which a species of immortality is given to generations floating, as it were, like evanescent bubbles, on a stream raised from the deepest caverns of the earth, and instantly losing what may be called its spirit in the atmosphere." These last observations of the stranger recalled to my recollection some phenomena which I had observed many years ago, and of ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... patterns is a monstrous error 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 an intellectual or emotional idea; all others ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... that I had taken the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to the west of them tempted them to move onward. Indeed, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... soul-like changes, evanescent moods, Upon the face of the still passive earth, Its hills, and fields, and woods, Thou with thy seasons and thy hours art ever calling forth! Even like a lord of music bent Over his instrument, Giving to carol, now ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... his attempts at a theoretic solution of the 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
... long arms opened to the wind, the rapt, dark face, the flashing eyes, the deep, eager breaths like sighs of rapture. A rhapsody: the rush and growl and frown of the world (said he)—the sombre colors, the veil of mist, the everlasting hills, rising in serenity above the turmoil and evanescent rage. To this I listened in wonder. I had not for myself discovered these beauties; but thereafter, because of this teaching, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... walked the city's street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel's wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... waist by a girdle confined by a simple buckle of gold. Now as I danced, myself absorbed so fully that I sought little analysis of impressions so pleasing, I became conscious dimly of a faint outline of some figure in color, deep in these folds of lacy lawn, an evanescent spot or blur of red, which, to my imagination, assumed the outline of a veritable heart, as though indeed the girl's heart quite shone through! If this were a trick I could not say, but for a long time I resisted ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... 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 ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... 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 sustained flight. ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... vaults from his high shopboard down to the depths of primal savagery,—carrying much along with him! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human Society, is indeed swift-passing, evanescent, slippery to decipher; yet significant of much, nay of all. Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned-up from the very lees, and from all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he, visible to the eye, of what men aimed to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... soft, fluent, changeful, and evanescent. One passes easily into another by slight deviations of pronunciation, resulting from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had not moved a muscle; the mother's was like a handsome closed book. She went on with her knitting, and only showed that she had heard the proposal by a small pretence of finding it necessary to count the stitches in the heel she was turning. Still, there had been some faint, evanescent flicker on her face, some droop or lift of the eyelids, which Joris understood; for, after a glance at her, he said slowly, "For Katherine the marriage would be good, and Lysbet and I would like it. However, we will think ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... health, especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably have been intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young American a charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that charm, and besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm, full of an airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it be? It could be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the Englishman, his progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two hundred years before, and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ancient Arabian idea that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that "he is the father who gives the child its morning draught." In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... judgment?—no! his splendid strain, In prose, 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' awards of AGES, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of mystery ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... undulations pass, the air steadies, the image shrinks and sharpens, and two points of piercing brightness, almost touching one another, dart into sight, the more brilliant one being surrounded by an evanescent circle, a tiny ripple of light, which, as it runs round the star and then recedes, alternately embraces and releases the smaller companion. The wash of the light-waves in the atmosphere provokes many expressions of impatience from the astronomer, ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... even shadow of the forest where the moon was not, a band of velvet against which the girl and the light-touched twigs and bushes and grass blades were etched like frost against a black window pane. There was something, too, of the frost-work's evanescent spiritual quality in the scene,—as though at any moment, with a puff of the balmy summer wind, the radiant glade, the hovering figure, the filagreed silver of the entire setting would melt into the accustomed stern and menacing forest of the northland, with its wolves, and its wild deer, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... They then tried the flashing of their guns; but they had no paper, and could find no dry leaves or fleecy bark of the birch, and the finest splinters or shavings they could whittle, in the dark, from the clefts of the imperfectly dry pine, would not take fire from the light, evanescent flash of the powder in their pans. Again and again did they renew the doubtful experiment; but every succeeding trial, from the dampness of their material in the driving snow, and from the unmanageable condition of their benumbed fingers and shivering frames, became ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... possession. It may be most inglorious and mean,—as {8} mean when the possession is brains or power as when it is bonds or wheat. Indeed, there is rarely much that is glorious or great about so slight or evanescent a thing as a human life. The glory of it lies in its being able to say, "The glory that thou hast given me I give to them." The worth of life is in its transmissive capacity. In the wonderful system of the telephone with its miracle of intercommunication there is, as you know, at each instrument ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... contribute not the least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points well ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Castle Raincy. Raincys would still dwell there, but this little dainty playhouse on the sands of the Abbey Burn would long ago have been swept away by centuries of Solway storms. The thought re-established him in his own esteem, and even the Ferris rule of the coveted Twin Valleys seemed evanescent and fleeting as a cloud on a mountain side beside the invincible ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... In the early festivals fires, candles, and oil-lamps were used and fireworks were invented for the purpose. Even to-day the pyrotechnical displays against the dark depths of the night sky hold mankind spellbound. But these evanescent notes of light have been improved upon by more permanent displays on a huge scale. Thirty years before the first practical installation of gas-lighting an exhibition of "Philosophical Fireworks" produced by the ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... of Pisa revealed to it the truth of its laws of being. Guido Monacco of Arezzo bestowed on it the most spiritual of all earthly joys by finding a visible record for the fugitive creations of harmony ere then impalpable and evanescent as the passing glories of the clouds. Dante Alighieri taught to it the might of that vulgar tongue in which the child babbles at its mother's knee, and the orator leads a breathless multitude at his will to death or triumph. Teofilo of Empoli discovered for it the mysteries of colour that lie in ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... book of our life, every thought, word, and deed, good or evil, is written down indelibly and forever; and the invisible pen goes on writing day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, every thought, even the idlest, every fancy the most evanescent: nothing is left out of our book of life which will be our record in judgment! When that book is opened and no secrets are hid, what son or daughter of Adam is there who will not need to say, "God ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... both my nephews stood up in Mrs. Rumbullion's parlor to take their several shares in a ceremony in which Miss Pilgrim was the central figure when it began, and Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove when it concluded. Time and elasticity of boyhood had so closed the sharp but evanescent wound in Billy's heart that he could stand the trial of being groomsman where he had wanted to be groom—more especially since he was supported through the emergency by a little sister of Lottie's who promised to be wondrously like ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
