|
|
|
More "Impalpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little of arts or sciences, or the powers of nature (which, in other words, are the powers of the author of nature), will laugh at us Cardiganshire miners, who maintain the existence of Knockers in mines, a kind of good natured impalpable people not to be seen, but heard, and who seem to us to work in the mines; that is to say, they are the types or forerunners of working in mines, as dreams are of some accidents, which happen to us. The barometer falls before rain, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... and fragmentary classics which Greece has left us are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear, that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the half-impalpable Ideals there. It is to Greece that we must look for the external type of these Ideals, whose existence we but half suspect within us. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly unconscious of the highest capacities of our humanity, till we recognized ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience. As papyrology reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty—the Greek successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of Egypt—we are learning ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... burned them all, cleaned off all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough. Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes. I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches to herself. She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true that what she saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the spires and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... space of a hundred square yards or so, about a hundred and fifty people were sitting or standing. At the end, on a stage, were the musicians, each with a bottle of wine at his feet, from which they refreshed themselves during the intervals. An impalpable dust, raised by the feet of the dancers, filled the air charged with acrid odors. The women in light dresses and bareheaded, and the men arrayed in their Sunday clothes, gave themselves up with frantic ardor to their ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... painted with the values—that is to say, with what remains on the palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter—a delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world's colourists has never, so far ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... her fascinating person, her smiling eyes, her faultlessly sloping shoulders and rosy-tinged white hands, her light and yet languid movements, the very sound of her voice, slow and sweet, there was an impalpable, subtle charm, like a faint perfume, voluptuous, tender, soft, though still modest, something which is hard to translate into words, but which moved and kindled—and timidity! was not the feeing it ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... romance, as a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot. The most careless or matter-of-fact reader must see that the work, like the enigmatical "Faust," deals in types and symbols; that the writer intends to suggest to the mind something more subtle and impalpable than that which is embodied to the senses. What that something is, hardly two persons will agree. The most obvious interpretation of the types is, that in Zanoni the author depicts to us humanity, perfected, sublimed, which lives not for self, but for others; in Mejnour, as we have before said, cold, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... as he made his way stealthily down towards the rendezvous glanced behind him once or twice as if he were not at all certain that some impalpable pursuer were not following him, and he almost jumped out of his shoes when the Major, who had for ten minutes been pacing up and down the grass-plat in a fume of impatience, caught sight of him and suddenly shouted, "Why don't ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... did not notice the impalpable touch, neither did Brown notice it, watching them. Perhaps the Herr Professor did, but it is not at all certain, because at that moment there came flopping along over the bracken and alpenrosen a loppy winged butterfly—a large, whitish creature, seeming ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... ghosts: each event to come has also its spectrum—its shade; when the hour arrives, life enters it, the shadow becomes corporeal, and walks the world. Thus, in the land beyond the grave, are ever two impalpable and spiritual hosts—the things to be, the things that have been! If by our wisdom we can penetrate that land, we see the one as the other, and learn, as I have learned, not alone the mysteries of the dead, but also the destiny ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... to prevent the moon from leaving its orbit, there would be needed four number ten steel wires to every square inch upon the earth, and these would be strained nearly to the breaking point. Yet this stress is not only endured continually by this pliant, impalpable, transparent medium, but other bodies can move through the same space apparently as freely as if it were entirely free. In addition to this, the stress from the sun and the more variable stresses from the planets are all endured by the same medium in the same space and apparently a thousand or a ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... race lives in industrial and social captivity; not being in sufficient numbers to form an independent constituency, they whine and pine over certain abstract principles of equality and brotherhood, but which, alas, fade into impalpable air under the application of a concrete test. They sit in the shadow of the tree of liberty and boast of its protecting boughs, but must not aspire to partake of the fruit thereof. The undershrubbery purchases shade and protection at too dear a price when it sacrifices therefor the opportunity ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... power against him was the power of the universe in which he was nothing but a little, lost, whirling atom. It was all of no avail, and the moon did not even smile at his feeble efforts. He was too light to revolve round her, too impalpable to create his own orbit; he had not even the consistency of a comet; he had reached the point of stagnation, as it were—the dead level—the neutral zone where the attractions of the earth and moon meet and counterbalance ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... Provo, and Springville he went; through Spanish Fork, Payson, Salt Creek, and Fillmore. He stopped to preach at each place, but he did it perfunctorily, and with shame for himself in his secret heart. Some impalpable essence of spirituality was gone from himself and from the people. He felt himself wickedly agreeing with a pessimistic elder at Fillmore, who remarked: "I tell you what, Brother Rae, it seems like when the Book of Mormon ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... unbounded veneration for the principles of the Temperance societies, I would, with all deference, recommend, that the pure fluid be drank in very small quantities at first, and even these tempered with the most impalpable infusion possible of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... successfully as any stone. In species it is gold, more pure than the purest; it is fixed and incombustible like a stone (i.e. it contains no outward sulphur, but only inward, fixed sulphur), but its appearance is that of a very fine powder, impalpable to the touch, sweet to the taste, fragrant to the smell, in potency a most penetrative spirit, apparently dry and yet unctuous, and easily capable of tingeing a plate of metal.... If we say that its nature is spiritual, it would ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... as it were, the sensation of being touched by a breath, the approach of an impalpable being. Drops of sweat moistened Pecuchet's forehead, and Bouvard began to gnash his teeth: a cramp gripped his epigastrium; the floor, like a wave, seemed to flow under his heels; the sulphur burning in the chimney fell down in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... since the Restoration Lady Warner had been living in meek expectancy of fire from heaven; and the chastisement of this memorable year had seemed to her the inevitable realisation of her fears. The fiery rain had come down—impalpable, invisible, leaving its deadly tokens in burning plague spots, the forerunners of death. That the contagion had mostly visited that humbler class of persons who had been strangers to the excesses and pleasures of the Court made nothing against Lady Warner's conviction that this ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... applied with delicate art. Her dress seemed made of unsubstantial dream stuff—I believe they call it chiffon—and it covered her bosom and arms like the spray of a fairy sea. She had the air of an impalpable Undine, a creation of sea-foam and sea-flower; an exquisite suggestion of the ethereal which floated beauty, as it were, into her face. I know little of women, save what these past few grievous months have taught me; but I know that hours of anxious thought and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... break in that sweet, confidential intercourse between a parent and child which nothing restores. The squire hardly comprehended that there might be a secret. Charlotte was unthoughtful of wrong; but still there was a repression, a something undefinable between them, impalpable, but positive as a breath of polar air. She noticed the mountains, for he made her do so; but the birds sang sleepy songs to her unheeded, and the yellow asphodels made a kind of sunshine at her feet that she never saw; and even her father's voice disturbed the dreamy ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... coal-black with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty miles away the serrated range of the interior stretched across the horizon, its outlines and shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and the openings of the estuary appeared, shining white, like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped clean and sharp out of the body of the land ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... Nixy bestowed upon him her best gift already in permitting him to hear that exquisite ghost of a melody, that shadowy, impalpable strain, which had haunted him these many years? In pursuing that he had gained the goal of his desires, till other things he had wished for had come to him unawares, as it were, and almost without his knowing it. And now what had he to ask of the Nixy, who ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that the people of the Alps are turned into cretins. According to others, it is by the presence of a few grains of ergot in the bread, that the people of Tuscany lose their limbs in gangrene. Endemics of abortion depend on the impalpable vapors that arise from the quicksilver mines of Spain. So delicately poised are the forces of life, that an apparent trifle suffices to entirely turn the scale. It is therefore not a priori improbable, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... had learned to love this naive, insinuating woman, whose frank simplicity seemed equal to his own, without thought of reserve, secrecy, or deceit. He had gradually been led to think of the absent husband with what he believed to be her own feelings—as of some impalpable, fleshless ancestor from whose remote presence she derived power, wealth, and importance, but to whom she owed only respect and certain obligations of honor equal to his own. He had never heard her speak of her husband with love, with sympathy, with fellowship, with regret. She ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... "water is Nature's great carrier. With its currents it conveys heat away from the torrid zone, and ice from the frigid; or, bottling the caloric away in the vesicle of its vapour, it first makes it impalpable, and then conveys it by unknown paths to the most distant parts of the Earth. The materials of which the coral builds the island, and the sea-conch its shell, are gathered by this restless leveller from mountains, rocks, and valleys, in all latitudes. Some it washes down ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... nothing very cogent to say, but the dentist felt an impalpable obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination once enlisted for the plan, he held ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... from an unshuttered window shone into the apartment and it was in his mind to wait there for Tayoga, but he stopped suddenly at the door and stared in astonishment. A shadow was moving in the room, thin, impalpable and noiseless, but it had all the seeming of a man. Moreover, it had a height and shape that were familiar, and it reminded him of the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... exercised himself for an hour as the old lady requested; and it was only by instinct that he worked, hardly conscious what he was doing. The whole of passing life seemed impertinent; or if, for an instant, it seemed otherwise, then his lonely speculations and plans seemed to become impalpable, and to have only the consistency of vapor, which his utmost concentration succeeded no further than to make into the likeness of absurd faces, mopping, mowing, and ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... general propositions are expressed and, moreover (with rare exceptions), all predicates are general. For, besides these typical class-names, attributive words are general terms, such as 'royal,' 'ruling,' 'woolly,' 'bleating,' 'impalpable,' 'vanishing.' ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... to the army. But the terms of the treaty were formal, and the admiral was not one to break his word. M. de Saligny and General de Lorencez were less punctilious; they reluctantly obeyed the order of the commander-in-chief, but watched for an opportunity to break through the impalpable barrier raised—as they thought, by honor alone—between them and ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Emily, who is mercilessly doomed to sleep in a deserted apartment with a door, which, as so often in the novel of terror, bolts only on the outside. More nerve wracking than the unburied corpse or even than the ineffable horror concealed behind the black veil are the imaginary, impalpable terrors that seize on Emily's tender fancy as she crosses the hall on her way to solve the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... sky, the broad silver fringe on one edge fading off into a faint glimmering mist on the other—it was the Earth. Here and there in all directions, nebulous masses gleamed like large flakes of star dust, in which, from nadir to zenith, the eye could trace without a break that vast ring of impalpable star powder, the famous Milky Way, through the midst of which the beams of our glorious Sun struggle with the dusky pallor of a star of only ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... ingot turned out still warm from the mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its power she endowed that lump of metal with a justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergence of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... difficult to trace Rumor to his foundation. His beginning is sometimes as small as a particle of sand; the first dawning of his existence as impalpable as the air. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... That it blows to atoms the whole statement of Andrew Jackson that Erving had laid the foundation of a treaty by which our western bounds upon the Spanish possessions should be at the Rio Grande; and, of course, grinds to impalpable powder his charge that our government did give up that important territory when it was at its ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... displaying a dress of deep red, with gleams of silver and gold embroideries; she turned her face towards me; the full blaze of the chandeliers and tapers fell upon it. It was the face of Medea da Carpi! I dashed across the nave, pushing people roughly aside, or rather, it seemed to me, passing through impalpable bodies. But the lady turned and walked rapidly down the aisle towards the door. I followed close upon her, but somehow I could not get up with her. Once, at the curtain, she turned round again. She was within a few paces of me. Yes, it was Medea. Medea herself, no mistake, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and writings that the contemplation of Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us "to see into the life of things"—as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... said, to his credit, that he had by no means conducted his suit upon that narrow programme which he had drawn up at the outset. He very soon discovered that Gertrude's resentment—if resentment there was—was a substance utterly impalpable even to his most delicate tact, and he had accordingly set to work to woo her like an honest man, from day to day, from hour to hour, trusting so devoutly for success to momentary inspiration, that he felt his suit dignified by a certain flattering faux ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... necessary for him to prove before a committee that it was the spontaneous result of British feeling in his favour, and not the purchased result of British beer. He cannot safely ask any one to share his hotel dinner. Bribery hides itself now in the most impalpable shapes, and may be effected by the offer of a glass of sherry. But not the less on this account does a poor man find that he is quite unable to overcome the ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... o'clock the heat had increased to such an extent that McTeague could feel the burning of the ground come pringling and stinging through the soles of his boots. Every step he took threw up clouds of impalpable alkali dust, salty and choking, so that he strangled and ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... seat by the Serpentine was under a small and almost impalpable cloud of almond petals. The babbling of ducks somewhere in the place where the water seemed a pale and wavering fire was like the sound of the upwelling of the hidden spring of life. This was the spot where I could sit and there quietly match the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... character is Epipsychidion (1821), a rhapsody celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most characteristic, of all Shelley's works. It was inspired by a beautiful Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will, and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood. With this ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... wizardry of fairy lore, all those things which in other parts of the world remind us of a past fertile in legend and song; that is to say, must bid farewell to the attractions offered by the Beyond of History, by the hope of eventually realizing the tangible impalpable realm conjured up in the distance which time has veiled within its mists, and by the expectation of ultimately wresting some relics of antiquity every now and again from ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... that of several others like him, is absorbed into a huge WE, namely, the impalpable entity called the PRESENT—a social ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... he, how different all the colours of his mind. But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this ruin and make HIM his enemy. Richard has told Vholes the truth. Is he in a hardened or a softened ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of society, and the terror of genius. Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras, which, like the shadowy monsters opposing aeneas, are impalpable to his strokes: but remember when the sibyl bade the hero proceed without noticing them, he found these airy nothings as harmless as they were unreal. The habits of the literary character will, however, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... consultation was that very shortly afterwards queer reports began to fly about; it was whispered that the ghosts whom the pious director had expelled had again invaded the convent, under an invisible and impalpable form, and that several of the nuns had given, by their words and acts, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... would be like shining glass beneath a vertical shower of the sun's rays that, at times, rendered the deck almost unendurable. Awnings were stretched and for hours and even days the Wanderer would lie almost motionless, except for the impalpable swell from which the bosom of the ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... on the very centre of the arch, and wrote his own insignificant name in its place. This was his fashion of securing immortality! It is well that fairies and giants are powerless in the nineteenth century, else had the indignant genii of the cave crushed his bones to impalpable powder. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... dazzling the sight with its milky whiteness. The sun, reflected upward, pierced their bodies, and parched them with thirst. They breathed a hot atmosphere filled with gypsum dust, that by the trampling of the buffalo herd had been reduced to an impalpable powder, and floated about suspended in the air. This added to the agony of their thirst; and it was difficult for them to tell whether they suffered most from the want of food, or the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... the spray, as the land slowly rose), together with sulphate of soda, and muriate of lime. The rest are fragments of the underlying sand-stone, and are covered by a few inches thick of detritus. The shells higher up on this terrace could be traced scaling off in flakes, and falling into an impalpable powder; and on an upper terrace, at the height of 170 feet, and likewise at some considerably higher points, I found a layer of saline powder, of exactly similar appearance, and lying in the same relative position. I have no doubt that the upper layer originally existed on a bed of ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... range, and quit these considerations of the general march of genius and of society,—considerations which are apt to become too abstract and impalpable,—every one can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... silver and glass and table linen shall be used and set out on what occasions, to have cellar and pantry and plate-cupboard under a minutely devised and undeviating administration, to be noiseless, impalpable, omnipresent, and, as far as your ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... the mouth of the kettle is the true vapor of water, which is condensed into liquid drops by cooling; but after being diffused through the air these drops evaporate and again become true vapor. Clouds, then, are not formed of true vapor, but consist of impalpable particles of liquid water floating ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... over the town; it disturbed the silence of the most secret groves in the vast, undiscovered hearts of men and women young and old. The half-clad lovely were protected from the satyrs in the audience by an impalpable screen made of light and of ascending music in which strings, brass, and concussion exemplified the naive sensuality of lyrical niggers. The guffaw which, occasionally leaping sharply out of the dim, mysterious ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... tissues disappears, and the decomposition has been designated by me "exhausted"; nothing being left in the vessel but slightly noxious and pale gray water, charged with carbonic acid, and a fine, buff colored, impalpable sediment at the bottom. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... like ours, where so much is ideal; where so many things are feared, that never come to pass; hoped for, that are never realized; enjoyed, that are impalpable to sense; where that, which by common convention is called substantial and real, is very far inferior to that which is falsely termed illusory and vain; where life borders on immortality; and the spiritual world so closely overhangs the natural, that it is as difficult ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Masons themselves. Often these writers imply, if they do not actually assert, that our order begged, borrowed, or cribbed its emblems from Kabbalists or Rosicrucians, whereas the truth is exactly the other way round—those impalpable fraternities, whose vague, fantastic thought was always seeking a local habitation and a body, making use of the symbols of Masonry the better to reach the minds of men. Why all this unnecessary mystery—not to say mystification—when the facts are so plain, written in records and ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... in the narrative of his voyage in the Beagle, states that while he was at St Jago, one of the Cape de Verd islands, in January 1832: 'The atmosphere was generally very hazy; this appears chiefly due to an impalpable dust, which is constantly falling, even on vessels far out at sea. The dust,' he goes on to say, 'is of a brown colour, and under the blow-pipe, easily fuses into a black enamel. It is produced, as I believe, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... as either a light and almost impalpable powder, tasteless, colorless, and inodorous, or a liquid clear as a dewdrop, when in the form of the aqua tofana. It was capable of causing death either instantaneously or by slow and lingering decline ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... altitudes. The ephemeral grasses that had quickly supplanted these pools and the chocolate-colored mud, were as quickly parched and withered. The footprints of spring became vague and indefinite, and were finally lost in the impalpable dust ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... But Pierre heard a mighty flood groaning on them, and he blinded as he stretched his arm in response. He caught at Wendling's shoulder, but felt him lifted and carried away, while he himself stood still in a screeching wind and heard impalpable water rushing over him. In a minute it was gone; and he stood alone ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... boatshed, even at the risk of falling into the Inlet. But he had not proceeded very far before, suddenly, as he had hoped it would, the mist began to lift. Swiftly, before the puff of a warmer breeze, it eddied and thinned. Its soundless, impalpable pressure lessened. The wharf, the sea, the city began to steal back, sly, expressionless, pretending that they had been there all the time. Even Mr. Johnston could be clearly seen coming down from the boatshed with a curious figure beside him—a figure so odd and unfamiliar ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... entertained by Mrs. LaGrange, this fact, of itself, excited little comment; it being evident that she was as familiar with the fashionable world as was their host himself, but surrounding her was the same dim haze of mystery that seemed to envelop the entire place, impalpable, but thus ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... mutual. But now doubt had taken its place. I never knew whether the personality present was my Margaret—the old Margaret whom I had loved at the first glance—or the other new Margaret, whom I hardly understood, and whose intellectual aloofness made an impalpable barrier between us. Sometimes she would become, as it were, awake all at once. At such times, though she would say to me sweet and pleasant things which she had often said before, she would seem most unlike herself. ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... should move or drift transversely to lines of ore passing, while held in suspension with water, down a smooth sloping surface. In dealing with some very light classes of ore, and especially such as may naturally crush very fine—that is to say, with a large proportion of impalpable "slimes"—there is a decided advantage in causing the water to drift sidelong on the smooth shelf by other means than the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... hands when Auber first boarded the train; Judson is sure that he did so when he stepped across the aisle to ask about me. Yet, I tell you that would have made no difference; let him have been as impalpable as the very air of the car, those men would have felt the flesh, just as William felt his silver dollar. "Fulfilment of sure expectation on the ground of countless identical experiences," your psychologist would explain. Illusion and fact were ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... most secret beliefs with any other woman, and especially with Mary. Their points of view were absolutely and radically different. The conflict was a conflict between the natural and the spiritual law; or, in other words, between hard, brutal facts and theories as impalpable as the perfume of a flower, or the sound waves that stirred his aerophone. Moreover, he could see clearly that Mary's interpretation of this story was simple; namely, that he had fallen into temptation, and that the shock of his parting from the lady concerned, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... As the clerk shut his book and we turned to depart, I could not realize that this abrupt, informal marriage was a reality. As I passed down the aisle, a white, fluttering, impalpable, and yet clearly-defined form arose from one of the empty seats, and unobstructed by carved wood or heavy upholstery, passed out through frame and plaster! The slight figure, the golden hair, I remembered too well—it was that of ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... forthwith an abundant darkness fell to her dancing knees, almost to her tiny dancing feet, heavy as a wave, shadowy as sleeping water. As some rich weed that the warm sea holds and swings, as some fair cloud lingers in radiant atmosphere, her hair floated, every parted tress an impalpable film of gold in the crude sunlight of the ray turned upon her; and when she danced towards the footlights, the bright softness of the threads clung almost amorously about her white wrists—faint cobwebs hanging from white flowers were not more faint, fair, and soft; wonderful was ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... two months preceding Lord Roberts' departure from South Africa at the end of November, 1900, no events of great military importance occurred in the Transvaal, except De Wet's Fredrikstad raid. The opposition had, to all appearance, dissolved into impalpable matter. Here and there some Boer atoms coalesced and were not pulverized; but for many weeks there was little in the general situation to disturb the optimistic belief, which was held not only by the ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... sat there dreaming, staring at the tinted ghost of Eros, rose-hued, near-smiling, unreal, impalpable as the dusty sunbeam that slanted from her window, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... impalpable as my broomstick they won't hurt me much," he laughed. And then soberly: "Say, Una, you seem to know a lot more about me than I ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... whose waters were of turquoise; yet, as we moved down the slope, the lake was always stealing on before. It was of the things dreams are made of, that has driven men mad and to despair, its bed a level floor of alkali and clay, covered with a dry, impalpable dust that the slightest wind tossed and ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... He was wide awake, and the sky was changing. That which had seemed a mist now appeared more like a fine dust, that swept across the heavens and dimmed the desert sky. It occurred to him that he was at the bottom of a fairly deep canon and that that impalpable dust meant wind, A little later he heard it,—at first a faint, far-away sound like the whisper of many voices; then a soft, steady hiss as when wind-driven sand runs over sand. A hot wind sprang up suddenly and swept with a rush down the night-walled canon. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible and impalpable and it does ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Christian Ferdinand Hoefer (1811-1878), said that Van Helmont was much superior to Paracelsus, whom he took as his model. He had the permanent distinction of revealing scientifically the existence of invisible, impalpable substances, namely gases. And he was the first to employ the word gas as the name of all elastic fluids except common air.[260:1] Van Helmont graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1599, and after several years of study at different European ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... factor in shaping the social and religious life of the country boy; and he will, because of his character and office, illumine common needs and homely interests with an ever-refined and spiritual ideal. His ministry, however, cannot be all top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and vital ties that Goldsmith's ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... the religions of conquered provinces with their own. Thus about 1350 the Inca Pachacutec subdued the country about Lima where the worship of Con and Pachacama prevailed.[176-2] The local myth represented these as father and son, or brothers, children of the sun. They were without flesh or blood, impalpable, invisible, and incredibly swift of foot. Con first possessed the land, but Pachacama attacked and drove him to the north. Irritated at his defeat he took with him the rain, and consequently to this day the sea-coast of Peru ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... can a writer, least of all if he be a poet, forego that part of his equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to bring them into clear definition and bright concrete imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as if painting also could deal with them. Every abstract conception, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... waistcoat, but not his collar and cravat, which lay limp and dejected among his papers. Then, sheltering himself beneath a large-brimmed Panama hat, and hooking his cane on his arm, he led the way, fan in hand, into the road, tiptoeing in his tight, polished boots through the red, impalpable dust with his usual jaunty manner, yet not without a profane suggestion of burning ploughshares. The stranger strode in silence by his side in the burning sun, impenetrable in ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... moral restraint in starting at every bush, and hating every old woman for a witch! Mr Sims, from his own intellectual altitude, pronounces these faiths to be "shadows;" he does not believe—not he—in the walking about at night of impalpable white sheets; but if you should happen to be of the same opinion with himself, then the cold-blooded demon of science has seized you for his prey. In this, there are many others who resemble Mr Sims; one often meets with half-educated men and women, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... definitely evil menace lay behind the brief statement of commonplace fact. To Ann it seemed as though some horror, lurking in the shadows of the fire-lit room, had suddenly stirred and were creeping stealthily towards her—impalpable but deadly, nauseous as the poisonous miasma rising from some dark and fetid pool. She shrank back, instinctively putting out her hand as though ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... write to Lennan, one candle beside her—one pale flame for comrade, as it might be his spirit. Every evening she poured out to him her thoughts, and ended always: "Have patience!" She was still waiting for courage to pass that dark hedge of impalpable doubts and fears and scruples, of a dread that she could not make articulate even to herself. Having finished, she would lean out into the night. The Colonel, his black figure cloaked against the dew, would be pacing up and down the lawn, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nice, exquisite, excellent, recherche, elegant, splendid, admirable, choice, select, attractive, delicate, subtle, minute, capillary, tenuous, thin, subtile, ethereal, attenuated, filmy, flimsy, gossamery, slender; comminuted, bolted, pulverized, impalpable, powdered. Antonyms: coarse, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of some sort he had been progressively convinced for quite six months. Moreover, he felt equally sure that this impalpable gray cloud had not drifted even transiently between himself and his wife during the first year and a half of their marriage. They had been uncommonly happy; they were happy yet ... the difference lay not in the quality of Helene's devotion, enhanced always by an outspoken admiration ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... gives so much relief to the irritation as the abundant use of powder, either simple starch powder, or ten parts of starch powder to one of oxide of zinc, or carbonate of bismuth. All powders must be absolutely free from grit, or, in other words, quite impalpable; otherwise they irritate the surface. On the face and other parts where it can be employed, the puff may be used to apply the powder; but between the creases of the skin—which it is important to keep apart—fine linen, lint, or charpie must ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... sense of lightness and cold discomfort. Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair. What was going to become of me? Where was I going? Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable blackness that wrapped me a faint tinge of blood. It seemed extraordinarily remote, and mistlike; yet, at once, the feeling of oppression was lightened, and I ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... so. I can form no notion of a spirit, as the metaphysicians do, and certainly have no fear of one; but there may be forms of matter as invisible and impalpable to us as the animalculae to which I have compared them. The monster that lives and dies in a drop of water, carniverous, insatiable, subsisting on the creatures minuter than himself, is not less deadly in his wrath, less ferocious in his nature, than the tiger ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have I known thee, O perfect Beauty. I shall be beset with hesitations and temptation to fall away. A philosophy, perverse no doubt in its teachings, has led me to believe that good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and the ungainly, reason and folly, fade into one another by shades as impalpable as those in a dove's neck. To feel neither absolute love nor absolute hate becomes therefore wisdom. If any one society, philosophy, or religion, had possessed absolute truth, this society, philosophy, or religion, would have vanquished ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... but does not utterly confound them. His fixing upon "air" as the primal element, seems an effort to reconcile, in some apparently intermediate substance, the opposite qualities of corporeal and spiritual natures. Air is invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, and yet in some manner appreciable to sense. May not the vital transformations of this element have produced all the rest? The writer of the Article on Anaximenes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us (on what ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... more beautiful, the more imaginative and the more copious, and that sculpture is more durable, but has no other advantage. Sculpture with little labour shows what in painting seems to be a miraculous thing to do: to make impalpable objects appear palpable, to give the semblance of relief to flat objects, and distance to objects that are near. In fact painting is full of infinite resources of ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... felt that this man's mind was destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought, just as a fruit is eaten by a worm. His craze, his idea was there in his brain, insistent, harassing, destructive. It wasted his frame little by little. It—the invisible, impalpable, intangible, immaterial idea—was mining his health, drinking his blood, snuffing out ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... would have answered his purpose equally well, and have been cheaper; but, being determined to give the body of his ware as great a degree of compactness as possible, it was necessary that the materials should be reduced to the state almost of an impalpable powder; and calcined flints are much more easily brought to this state by grinding than sand would be. The perfect and equable mixture of these two ingredients being a point of great importance, he did not choose to trust to the ordinary mode of treading them together when moist, but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... move amid a world of ghosts." There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of danger to which Reuben was exposed from the hour when her indifference declared itself; it was present to her imagination when he chose to remain alone in London. But such thoughts were vague, impalpable. She had never realized a picture of such degradation as this which had just stamped itself upon her brain. In her surmises jealousy had no part, and therefore nothing was conceived in detail. In the certainty that he no longer loved her with love of ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... these afflictions of dust, in its most aggravated form, every library and every room in any building is subject to its persistent visitations. Wherever carpets or rugs cover the floors, there dust has an assured abiding-place, and it is diffused throughout the apartment in impalpable clouds, at every sweeping of the floors. Hence it would be wise to adopt in public libraries a floor-covering like linoleum, or some substance other than woolen, which would be measurably free from dust, while soft enough to deaden the sound of feet upon the floors. Even with ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. "You can never say too much about Coleridge for me," Rossetti would write, "for ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... twice heavily, for it was impossible to be in Mr Burne's company long without suffering from the impalpable dust that pervaded all his clothes; and as the old gentleman looked on with a grim smile and clapped his young companion on the shoulder, ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... a close. An ecstatic serenity reigned over the sea; the waters were so transparent that they repeated every image with absolute fidelity, and their ultimate line melted so imperceptibly into the sky that the two elements seemed as one, impalpable and supernatural. The wide amphitheatre of hills, clothed with olives, oranges and pines and all the noblest forms of Italian vegetation, embraced the silent sea, and seemed not a multiplicity of things, but a single vast ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... dust impalpable, pervading every part and pore ... Insects of all nauseous descriptions, bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, flies innumerable, gigantic as the empire they inhabit, who will take no denial. This is the land of Pharaoh and his plagues,—Egypt ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... not Brawnley, like a dozen other leading spirits—I think that's your term just the metaphysical Hamlet to drive her mad? She, poor maid! asks for marriage and smiling babes, while my lord lover stands questioning the Infinite, and rants to the Impalpable." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... place in the history of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... shape itself into Ethel, and her mysterious mother, and the vague dexterous Chaffery holding him back, entangled in an impalpable net from that bright and glorious ascent to performance and distinction. Leaky boots and the splash of cabs for all his life as his portion! Already the Forbes Medal, the immediate step, was as ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... One drachm of alum reduced to an impalpable powder, three drachms of nitrous spirits of ether—mix, and apply them to the tooth on cotton. 2. Mix a little salt and alum, equal portions, grind it fine, wet a little lock of cotton, fill it with the powder and put it in your tooth. One ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... sometimes passed entire days in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours on real life, and to cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed that he lacked nothing, he did not perceive that contemplation, thus understood, ends by becoming one of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and come home to our most intimate feelings: just where animals themselves are susceptible, more or less, to all other kinds of recompense and corporal chastisement. Moreover, it is well to notice that the custom of praising virtue, even in those who are no longer with us, impalpable as it is to them, serves as a stimulant to the living to imitate their example; just as capital sentences are carried out by the law, more for the sake of warning to others, than in relation to those who suffer. Now, commendation and its opposite being ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the talk of wayside store and highroad meeting one began to hear that name "Ku Klux" though it came vaguely from the tongue as a thing of which no man had seen any tangible evidence. If it had anywhere an actual nucleus, that centre remained as impalpable and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... uncomfortable ghost! Thou really dost annoy me with thy thin Impalpable transparency of grin; And the vague, shadowy shape of thee almost Hath vext me beyond boundary and coast Of my broad patience. Stay thy chattering chin, And reel the tauntings of thy vain tongue in, Nor tempt me further with thy vaporish ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... were sitting, towards evening, sewing at some item of the impalpable trousseau, Pauline alternating her spasmodic needle with reading over Mme. Prefontaine's letter and jumping up ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... longer upon such scenes? happiness is so transitory and impalpable that it will not bear either analysis ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... the highest and most representative products of the Greek literary genius; they show that genius at the moment when all its qualities were in harmony and perfectly balanced between the spiritual vision which it formed of life, and the art form to which it commits that precious and impalpable possession. One of the distinctive qualities of these plays is their objectivity; their detachment from the moods and experiences of the dramatist. This detachment is so complete that at first glance every trace of the dramatist seems ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... mortals bold enough to love the woman whom he had loved on earth. The death of Alresca, the unaccountable appearances in the cathedral, in the train, on the steamer—everything was explained. And before that coldly sneering, triumphant face, which bore the look of life, and which I yet knew to be impalpable, I shook with the terrified ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... lived, would undoubtedly have made good, was lost by his decease. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence, and could not be found. Still, from generation to generation, the Pyncheons cherished an absurd delusion of family importance on the strength of this impalpable claim; and from father to son they clung with tenacity to the ancestral house for the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... him; and he realized that his duty and his excuse were clear. He understood that just now he had been captured by a force undefinable in terms of the world he knew. For a moment he eluded the stealthy fleshless hands of its impalpable skirmishers. He reached impulsively out to the dead man. He was about to place his fingers in the pocket, which, after all was said and done, held ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... from his seat Did Humpty-Dumpty slip. Vainly he clutched The impalpable air. Down and down, Right to the foot of the wall, Right on to the horribly hard pavement that ran beneath it, Humpty-Dumpty, the ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... took possession of my mind. I was at liberty to work out of the crevice knees and shoulders; yet an impalpable force detained me. It was not that I was not master of my fate, but that out there in the glare of the sun was patient water, dripping for the refreshment and cleansing of my grimy lips. So enchanting a thought was not to be abruptly ended. Was it not deliciously dreamy to hold myself in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... dry period is always depressing. The bright green fades out of the landscape, the lawns and grass-plots become brown and sear, the air loses its sweet, refreshing vitality, and is often so charged with smoke from forest-fires, and impalpable dust, that respiration is not agreeable. Apart from considerations of profit and loss, the sympathy of the Clifford household was too deep with Nature to permit the indifference of those whose garden is the market stall and the florist's greenhouse, and to ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... doctor, composedly. "Let us leave the figure by the pool for the present and try if we can't pick her up again as we go on. Allow me to observe, Mr. Midwinter, that it is not very easy to identify a shadow; but we won't despair. This impalpable lady of the lake may take some consistency when we next ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the immediate foreground it rippled into defined points of blossom, which already twinkled through all the dull foliage; in the middle distance it faded; afar off it trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the summer air. A week or less would see the annual miracle peformed again and witness that spacious and solemn region in all the amethystine glories of the ling. Fiercely hot grew the day, and the distances, so distinct through mist rifts and wreaths in the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... other and cuddled each other and cried over each other, without precisely knowing why, or, at least, without troubling to put the reason into words. But the events of the past few days had, imperceptibly, wrought a change in their relations. An impalpable veil had come between them, a subtle dissonance in point of view. They were pledged, as it ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... in clay. The glare of the California sunshine, filtering through the canvas, became mellowed, warm and golden. Above the girl's head—yellow like the stalk of wheat—there hovered a kind of aureola, as if there had risen above it a haze of impalpable gold dust. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... pointing to the waters of the Darro—"yonder stream is of an element in which man cannot live nor breathe: above, in the thin and impalpable air, our steps cannot find a footing, the armies of all earth cannot build an empire. And yet, by the exercise of a little art, the fishes and the birds, the inhabitants of the air and the water, minister to our most humble wants, the most common of our ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "And now I will speak freely. There are two men upon whose lives I desire to place a spy. I want to know every act of their lives, every word they speak, every secret of their hearts—I wish to be an unseen witness of their lonely hours, an impalpable guest at every gathering in which they mingle. I want to be near them always in spirit, if not in bodily presence. I want to track them step by step, let their ways be never so dark and winding. This is the purpose of my life; but I am a woman— powerless to act freely—bound and fettered ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... partially have counteracted such bad influences. Behold here a train of house painters, all afflicted with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we will marshal those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal disorder into their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors and shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one part of the procession and march under similar banners of disease; but among them we may observe here and there a sickly student, who has left ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... transport it, you find the stones gradually rounding off in form, and diminishing in size, until they pass successively into gravel, and, in the beds of the rivers to which the torrents convey it, sand, and lastly impalpable slime. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... had come to his feet by now, and he stood there staring at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart clutched by fear of these impalpable, blasting weapons that were being used ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... half-mournful, half-triumphant exultation subside, every fibre of her body, relaxed in tenderness, go stiff in the close look she took at his face. He was different. There was something. Yes, there was something between them, something hard and impalpable, the ghost ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... everything; Sir William had been the earliest and kindest of my other friends, eager and glad always to assist, instruct, encourage me; John Butler had given me my first gun, and had petted me in his rough way from boyhood. Yet now, at a touch of that hateful, impalpable thing "class," these all vanished away from my support, and were to me as if they had never been. I saw them over on the other side, across the abyss from me, grouped smiling about this new-comer, praising his brute ability to drink and race and wrestle, complimenting ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... been met, though not wholly overcome. The widened possibilities connected with the new science of radiology, the unification of the physical forces that may ensue upon further discoveries concerning electrical action, the function in the world of the impalpable ether, the nature of gravity, are in turn discussed or adverted to; while the final chapter takes into consideration the crowning ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... whose presence had made the day to seem dream-like; and she was kind, which was more than he would have dared to hope, and her people, after their first curious chill of indifference, seemed actually to be courting him. She, the fleeting and impalpable dream-love, whom the thought of seeing ever again had been wildly absurd, was now a human creature with a local habitation, the most beautiful name in the world, and two parents whose complaisance was obvious even through the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... endeavoured to maintain that dignity which she felt to be so beneficial an example to the world. But Juanita emphasised each item of her late education with a jerk which gradually deranged Cousin Peligros' prim mantilla. Then she danced her round an impalpable mulberry bush until the poor ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... behind a cloud, the silver rays failed, and the figure of the man became more indistinct, almost a shadow, thin and impalpable. Then he bent far over in a stooping position, passed rapidly through a patch of scrub bushes, and came much nearer to ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... beauty of goodness appeals pleasurably to the most depraved; to be elevated above themselves for a moment is a rare delight to them; and, in the second, there is a deeply implanted leaning in the heart of man toward the something beyond everything, the impalpable, impossible, imperceptible, which he cannot know and will not credit, but is nevertheless compelled to feel in some of his moods, or in certain presences, and having once felt, finds himself fascinated by it, and so returns to the subject for the sake of the sensation. In that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the history of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... his enthusiasm, he was conceding greater credit to Russia. "Ah, those Cossacks!" . . . He was accustomed to speak of them as intimate friends. He loved to describe the unbridled gallop of the wild horsemen, impalpable as phantoms, and so terrible in their wrath that the enemy could not look them in the face. The concierge and the stay-at-homes used to listen to him with all the respect due to a foreign gentleman, knowing much of the great outside world with which they ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... hierarchy of Rome, whose spiritual powers still prevailed, even amidst the ruin of its temporal authority, and were slowly but surely winning back the ground lost in the Revolution. An influence so impalpable yet irresistible, that inherited from the Rome of the Caesars the gift of organization and the power of maintaining discipline, in which the Revolution was so signally lacking, might well be the ally of the man ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... plunge the massy rouleaux splashed into the water, and the boat rose lighter with an easier conscience. The sea shut close-fisted over its own, while the pursuing boat paused and eddied about it, as if held to the treasure by invisible, impalpable strands. The pursuit was abandoned, and the betrayed or treacherous diver escaped. But busy rumor reports that he returned at leisure to the spot, and that the bullion of the Golden Gate went to replenish the forfeited fortune ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... period varying from one month to two or three the entire substance of the organic tissues disappears, and the decomposition has been designated by me "exhausted"; nothing being left in the vessel but slightly noxious and pale gray water, charged with carbonic acid, and a fine, buff colored, impalpable sediment ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... ends of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the heart of the forest; the soulful melody of the nightingale, pathetic with unappeasable sorrow. In the Forest of Arden, too, there were unspoiled men and women, as indifferent to the fashion of the world and the folly of the hour as the stars to the impalpable mist of the clouds; men and women who spoke the truth, and saw the fact, and lived the right; to whom love and faith and high hopes were more real than the crowns of which they had been despoiled and the kingdoms from which they had been rejected. All this I had dreamed, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... no denying that I did somehow acquire a vague impression that Courtney is not so large a figure in his wife's eyes as he might be. I may have been biased by my previous conception of his character, or I may have misinterpreted the impalpable, indescribable signs that I remarked in her. But, once more, how do I know that her not caring for him would postulate her caring for me? Why should she care for either of us? Our old romance is to her as the memory of something read in a book, ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... the waters of the Darro—"yonder stream is of an element in which man cannot live nor breathe: above, in the thin and impalpable air, our steps cannot find a footing, the armies of all earth cannot build an empire. And yet, by the exercise of a little art, the fishes and the birds, the inhabitants of the air and the water, minister to our most humble wants, the most common of our enjoyments; so it is with the ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... important addition. He has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation of Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these; may enable us "to see into the life of things"—as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible, he must convey to us in hints and figures the conviction which we need. Prayer ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... it would not take up the burden of life again just yet. But its rest could not be long; there was someone it must find, and before he had gone again to that boundless land, whose haunting spirits were impalpable as flecks of mist. And then it moaned and wept, and seemed to live over its past, and I went back with it, or I was one with it—I cannot define. It recalled many scenes, but only one made an impression on my memory; I can recall no other." She paused abruptly, but Dartmouth made no ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... whole atmosphere seemed to tremble and quiver, while everything else was motionless. Not a breath of air was stirring to wave the grass or to ruffle the surface of the great land-drains, whose waters shone like molten silver; while the road was powdered into an almost impalpable dust, which rose in clouds as the horse's hoofs beat and the wheels spun ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to 'the riddle of the painful earth ' ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on the outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes of romance—the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... eating muffins. But I saw only a bank-bill, more or less crumpled and tattered, marked with a larger or lesser figure. If a sharp wind blew suddenly, I saw it tremble and flutter; it was thin, flat, impalpable. I removed my glasses, and looked with my eyes at the wife. I could have smiled to see the humid tenderness with which she regarded her strange vis-a-vis. Is life only a game ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... moment he regarded them merely as a natural force, to be fought against like storm or flood. His clearest sensation was one of relief at having at last some material obstacle to spend his strength against, instead of the impalpable powers which had so long beset him. He felt, too, a boyish satisfaction at his own steadiness of pulse and eye, at the absence of that fatal inertia which he had come to dread. So clear was his mental horizon that it embraced not only the present crisis, but a dozen incidents leading ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... sunken chest and empty paunch. One felt that this man's mind was destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought, just as a fruit is eaten by a worm. His craze, his idea was there in his brain, insistent, harassing, destructive. It wasted his frame little by little. It—the invisible, impalpable, intangible, immaterial idea—was mining his health, drinking his blood, snuffing out ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sky, stone dead! ... There is something thrilling in such a death—something magnificent. ... And in the exquisitely spiritual honeymoon, vague as the shadow of a rainbow, is the very essence and aroma of that impalpable Paradise we women prophesy in dreams! ... More sentiment! Heigho! My brother is the weeping crocodile, and the five winds are my wits. ... Shall we dress? Even with a maid and the electric air-blast it will take time to dry my hair ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... under this impalpable distrust, which classed him with the "new fathers" of certain children; and he had a feeling that was at the same time painful and ridiculous, that he was on trial. In olden days the matter might have been settled by a good thrashing, but now things had to be arranged so ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... opened in disaster ended in joy; and from the heart of what I deemed an irredeemable disaster rose a hope that for several days put wings to my feet. Then something began to tarnish my delight, an impalpable dread seized me, and though I worked with love and fury upon my house, which I had begun adorning for my bride, I began to question if she had played the coquette in smiling upon Edwin Urquhart, and whether in the mockery of the laugh with which she had dismissed my accusations ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... turned her face towards me; the full blaze of the chandeliers and tapers fell upon it. It was the face of Medea da Carpi! I dashed across the nave, pushing people roughly aside, or rather, it seemed to me, passing through impalpable bodies. But the lady turned and walked rapidly down the aisle towards the door. I followed close upon her, but somehow I could not get up with her. Once, at the curtain, she turned round again. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... among his papers. Then, sheltering himself beneath a large-brimmed Panama hat, and hooking his cane on his arm, he led the way, fan in hand, into the road, tiptoeing in his tight, polished boots through the red, impalpable dust with his usual jaunty manner, yet not without a profane suggestion of burning ploughshares. The stranger strode in silence by his side in the burning sun, impenetrable in his own ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky and the wide earth, There was a change: the impalpable thin air 100 And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the sphered world. My vision then grew clear, and I could see Into the mysteries of the universe: 105 Dizzy as with delight I floated down, Winnowing the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... children—went suddenly black, indistinct, and confused to his sight, so that he seemed to be falling through some depth of dark and untenanted space, while the dust, thick, stifling, clinging, fell with him, encircling, enveloping him with a horror of suffocation, of crushing, impalpable, yet unescapable, dead weight. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and the accusers were brought into the presence of the examining magistrate, and the supposed witch was ordered to look upon the afflicted persons; instantly upon coming within the glance of her eye, they would scream out, and fall down as in a fit. It was thought that an invisible and impalpable fluid darted from the eye of the witch, and penetrated the brain of the bewitched. By bringing the witch so near that she could touch the afflicted persons with her hand, the malignant fluid was attracted back ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... face which for more than half a century opium veiled to mortal eyes, and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the most fugitive and impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of mystery from which mere curiosity stands aloof. This is the head which we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a triple wreath of glory: the laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... innumerable hoofs, mingled with the bleatings and barkings of a veritable army of bucks of various descriptions. Then I knew that the dimming of the atmosphere along the summit of the western cliffs was due to a cloud of light, impalpable dust, swept along before a great migrating army of game crossing the mountain range, probably on the march in search of water, and I waited to see what would happen when the vanguard of the army should reach the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... excuse for being so. The phenomenon of death alone ought to set that matter at rest in any reasoning mind. The impalpable is gone, and the material perishes. It is so plain that he that runs might read, one would think. That sudden change from volition to inertia is, in itself, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics of Teutonic ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... very heavy with moisture, which seemed to hold all the spring odors of newly turned earth, young grass, and blossoms in solution. Squire Eben moved through it as through a scented flood in which respiration was possible. Over all the fields was a pale mist, waving and eddying in such impalpable air currents that it seemed to have a sentient life of its own. These soft rises and lapses of the mist on the fields might seemingly have been due to the efforts of prostrate shadows to gather themselves into form. Beyond the fields, against the hills and woods and clear ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. In addition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standard of wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of these children, who seemed to have faded from her memory long ago? Was her present pious mood like a remembrance of long-forgotten emotions? And did it awaken the circumstances that had accompanied those emotions? Who can understand the impalpable and invisible elements that wander and float back and forth from man to man, from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... no native, however daring or however wicked, would ever venture to transgress the narrow line of white coral sand which protected the castaways like an intangible wall from all outer interference. Within this impalpable ring-fence they were absolutely safe from all rude intrusion, save that of the two Shadows, who waited upon them, day ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... guess at the future of electrical invention. The recent marvelous development of the wireless telegraph, by which the impalpable ether is harnessed to man's service, is an indication of the wonders which may be expected in the future. It was our own Joseph Henry who, in 1842, discovered the electric wave—the "induction" upon which wireless telegraphy ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... lethargy natural to his style, and when he has merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... turned southwards at last, crossing the road again towards her own street, it seemed to her that the day even now was beginning to cloud over. Over the roofs of Kensington a haze was beginning to make itself visible, as impalpable as a skein of smoke; yet there it was. She felt a little languid, too. Perhaps she had walked too far. She would rest a little after lunch, if dearest Maud did not mind; for dearest Maud was to lunch with her, as was usual ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... pitted the protagonists against each other and hounded them on to rivalry by their comments and remarks, taking the side of the newcomer, less from partiality to him than from hatred of their ancient enemy. It was strange that a thing so impalpable as gossip should influence so strong a man as John Gourlay to his ruin. But it did. The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay's tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... in this withdrawal into himself. For a moment I entertain an illusion that really I am unworthy to hear the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of what she said ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... rivers, as the Amazon itself, do not appear to be of this hue merely because they are "muddy." On the contrary, they derive their colour, or most of it, from some impalpable substance held in a state of irreducible solution. This is proved from the fact, that even when these waters enter a reservoir, and the earthy matter is allowed to settle, they still retain the same tinge of yellowish olive. There are some white rivers, as the Rio Branco, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... objects of reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the sun shines upon sings or can be made to sing, and can be heard to sing. Gases, impalpable powders, and woolen stuffs, in common with other non-conductors of sound, give forth notes of different pitches when played upon by an intermittent beam of white light. Colored stuffs will sing in lights ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... religious life of the country boy; and he will, because of his character and office, illumine common needs and homely interests with an ever-refined and spiritual ideal. His ministry, however, cannot be all top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and vital ties ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... fine moral speeches, to herself. She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... endeavours to trace the doctrine of the Logos, as contained in Justin, to older sources than our present Fourth Gospel, particularly to Philo and the Gospel according to the Hebrews. The latter is much too impalpable to enable us to verify his statements by it; but we shall have to show his misconceptions respecting the connection of Justin's doctrine with the former. What we have now to consider is ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... the Queen of Sheba on her visit to the King of Judea. But on the left, one of these large boxes, entirely empty, attracts attention by reason of its curious decoration, lighted from the back by a Moorish lantern. Over the whole assembly is an impalpable and floating dust, the flickering of the gas, that odour that mingles with all the pleasures of Paris, its little sputterings, sharp and quick like the breaths drawn by a consumptive, accompanying the movement ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... common sense interpolates her constant 'things' between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted as denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our sensations ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... sheds about it, beneath which we took shelter. The rain fell literally in sheets of water, which quickly flooded the road; the lightning flashed with a vividness I had seldom before seen; and the thunder rattled and crashed as if huge rocks, rather than impalpable clouds, were being ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... lingered by his side all the evening; but she stole more glances at Kate's lover than she did at her own. Jules La Touche felt the impalpable change in her; and yet it would have puzzled him to define it. His nature was gentle and tender, and he loved the pretty, fickle, rosy beauty with a depth and sincerity of ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... have been eminently handsome—above all, the air of almost ferocious authority, with which she was speaking, struck him as strangely out of place in that solitary spot. Beyond this, he felt a vague impression, impalpable and formless, of some connection between that woman and former events of his own life. It might have been her dress so foreign to the place, or her humble mode of life. The Madras kerchief, folded in a turban over the black hair falling down each side of her face in the heaviest waves ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble mankind, often subject to human appetites, constantly endowed with more than human ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... a furious lashing of the fronds above, burst the wind in all its fury. It seemed to beat down into the garden in waves of heat. Huge leaves began to fall from the tree tops and the mast-like trunks bent before the fury from the desert. The atmosphere grew hazy with impalpable dust; and the stars ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... would be a highly accomplished creature, 'a vapour, film, or shadow,' yet conscious, capable of leaving the body, mostly invisible and impalpable, 'yet also manifesting physical power,' existing and appearing after the death of the body, able to act on the bodies of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of life, the destructive force of fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and the irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night and of the seasons, the solid earth and the impalpable aether, were always present ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... other compositions, preparations. They are apparently an end in themselves, flow in space, and then change hue, as a shimmering stuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... in the bomb-proofs, and a magazine, or officers' quarters turned into a cow stable by colored squatters, form an interesting feature. But, whichever way I go, I am glad I came. All roads lead up to the Jerusalem the walker seeks. There is everywhere the vigorous and masculine winter air, and the impalpable sustenance the mind draws from all ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... infallibly from the small to the large and the large to the small. With Whistling Dan there was no suggestion at all of mental care. She could not imagine him worrying over a problem. His knowledge was not even communicable by words; it was more impalpable than the instinct of a woman; and there was about him the wisdom and the coldness of Black ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... the clerk shut his book and we turned to depart, I could not realize that this abrupt, informal marriage was a reality. As I passed down the aisle, a white, fluttering, impalpable, and yet clearly-defined form arose from one of the empty seats, and unobstructed by carved wood or heavy upholstery, passed out through frame and plaster! The slight figure, the golden hair, I remembered too well—it was that of the ghost ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... cogent to say, but the dentist felt an impalpable obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination once enlisted for the plan, he held to it, arguing, counselling, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the world through the writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand! One of his points was that every thought that passed through the mind was preceded by a change in the particles of the brain; so that philosophy, and religion, and life itself were nothing but a shifting of the sand by the impalpable wind—matter and motion, that was all! Again and again he said, in his dry way, that no theory was of any use that was not supported by facts; and that though there was left a little corner of thought, which was still ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... such vast creatures of God with even a finer, freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... anxiety; and last, but worst of all, his fancy would go fluttering about the doors of the sick chamber in Grange Lane, longing and wondering. He asked himself what it could be which had raised that impalpable wall between Lucy and himself—that barrier too strong to be overthrown, too ethereal to be complained of; and wondered over and over again what her thoughts were towards him—whether she thought of him at all, whether she was offended, or simply indifferent?—a ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... conspicuously on the very centre of the arch, and wrote his own insignificant name in its place. This was his fashion of securing immortality! It is well that fairies and giants are powerless in the nineteenth century, else had the indignant genii of the cave crushed his bones to impalpable powder. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... is peculiarly unfortunate that Miss Barrett, in her opening poem, entitled a "Drama of Exile," should have ventured to tread on Miltonic ground. For, while our feelings are naturally disposed to fly off at a tangent from the vague and impalpable conceptions which form the staple of her poem, the dreamy and unpractical character of her style makes them fly still further from the subject. The force of her language is not sufficient to bind down and rivet our sympathies to the theme; and the lyrical portions of the drama, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Boomville coach had at last reached the level ridge, and sank forward upon its springs with a sigh of relief and the slow precipitation of the red dust which had hung in clouds around it. The whole coach, inside and out, was covered with this impalpable powder; it had poured into the windows that gaped widely in the insufferable heat; it lay thick upon the novel read by the passenger who had for the third or fourth time during the ascent made a gutter of the half-opened book and blown the dust away in a single puff, ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... shape, equally distinct, equally ghastly,—a man's shape, a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable,—simulacra, phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... would have been the fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... known to those who were searching for it,—or he must destroy it. His common sense told him that one alternative or the other must be chosen. He could certainly destroy it, and no one would be the wiser. He could reduce it, in the solitude of his chamber, into almost impalpable ashes, and then swallow them. He felt that, let suspicion come as it might into the minds of men, let Apjohn, and Powell, and the farmers—let Isabel herself—think what they might, no one would dare to accuse ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been. Her war with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste. Her cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love: she discovered it, half shuddering: to love, oh! no—no shape of man, nor impalpable nature either: but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted strength in something. Then, loving and being loved a little, what strength would be hers! She could utter all the words needed to Willoughby and to her father, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... native tarantula into native barbarism or emulous of the roan, "blood" asserts itself, and in a moment the peaceful servitude of years is beaten out in the music of her clattering hoofs. The creek widens to a deep gully. We dive into it and up on the opposite side, carrying a moving cloud of impalpable powder with us. Cattle are scattered over the plain, grazing quietly or banded together in vast restless herds. George makes a wide, indefinite sweep with the riata, as if to include them all in his vaquero's loop, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... delightful glow penetrates my coat to the silky down, the impalpable colorless threads which protect my delicate skin. I feel myself swelling like a cloud. I must quite fill the room. My whiskers seem charged with electricity—a sign that I will sleep—but for the time being, the contemplation of your splendor and thoughts ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... starless heaven sagging over a blank earth. It seemed an endless uphill drag to my lodging, and though my bedroom was unexpectedly dainty, and a dear old woman—St. John's mother—metaphorically tucked me in, I slept ill that night. Formless dreams tortured me with impalpable tragedies and apprehensions of horror. In the morning—after a cold sponging—the oppression lifted a little from my spirit, though the weather still seemed rather gray. St. John had already gone off to his field-work, his mother told me. She was so lovely, and the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... deep, into which you could look a hundred miles; you know the sort; dreamy, poetical, sad; oh, lovely eyes. And she used to wear her hair down her back; it was very long, and soft—soft as smoke, almost; almost impalpable. She always dressed in white—short white frocks, with broad sashes, red or blue. That was the fashion then for little girls. Perhaps it ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... for it was impossible to be in Mr Burne's company long without suffering from the impalpable dust that pervaded all his clothes; and as the old gentleman looked on with a grim smile and clapped his young companion on the ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... thoroughly understand?—absolutely melted into the robe. We will drop over the dress this crepe—yes, that one, but in small, light pleats. The crepe will be as a cloud thrown over the dress—a transparent, vapory, impalpable cloud. The arms are to be absolutely bare, as I already told you. On each shoulder there must be a simple knot, showing the upper part of the arm. Of what is the knot to be? I'm still undecided—I need to think it over—till to-morrow, ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... generosity are contagious; this man will give himself altogether because of a story of devotion, this man declares he will do nothing until Sir F.E. Smith goes to the front. And the would-be prophet of what is going to happen must guess the relative force of these most impalpable and uncertain things. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... such as his sensitive heart experienced, musical forms are, no doubt, less clumsy than verbal and pictorial ones. And if we know something of his history and that of his nation, we cannot be at a loss to give names and local habitations to the impalpable, but emotionally and intellectually-perceptible contents of his music. We have to distinguish in Chopin the personal and the national tone-poet, the singer of his own joys and sorrows and that of his country's. But, while distinguishing ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... caught her own horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of death seemed less terrible ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the Borgias, say contemporary writers, was of two kinds, powder and liquid. The poison in the form of powder was a sort of white flour, almost impalpable, with the taste of sugar, and called Contarella. ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sometimes seen which leaves the artist in doubt whether it is an effect of contour or color. To these charms of feature and person were added others more—an indefinable air of purity which only the soul can impart, and of abstraction natural to such as think much of things impalpable. Often, with trembling lips, she raised her eyes to heaven, itself not more deeply blue; often she crossed her hands upon her breast, as in adoration and prayer; often she raised her head like one listening eagerly ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of thought. There are people who collect and hold in themselves some knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to induce which is the property of the highest ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... question of a former marriage. Outside active sins, to which it may be presumed no temptation allured herself, were abominable to her. Evil thoughts, hardness of heart, suspicions, unforgivingness, hatred, being too impalpable for denunciation in the Decalogue but lying nearer to the hearts of most men than murder, theft, adultery, and perjury, were not equally abhorrent to her. She had therefore allowed herself to believe all evil of this man, and from the very first had set him down ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... female weapons, that you and I, sir, should laugh at; but they made her miserable. Cold looks; short answers; solemnity; distance; hints at ingratitude and perverseness; kisses intermitted all day, and the parting one at night degraded to a dignified ceremony. Under this impalpable persecution the young thoroughbred, that had steered the boat across the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... most romantic island in the tropical sea; but there are points of similarity, notwithstanding the geographical discrepancy—daring outlines, magnificent cloud and atmospheric effects, and a fragrance, a pungent balsamic odor ever noticeable. This impalpable, invisible balm permeates everything; it is wafted out over the sea to us, even as the breath of the Spice Islands is borne over the waves to the joy of the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal," she thought. "That glance shows the beginning ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Hitherto he had said his Offices regularly, but now he would say special prayers as well. To get the victory over his lawless and rebellious nature he would turn his eyes to the mother of the Lord. But when he tried to fix his mind on Mary there was nothing to answer to it. All was shadowy and impalpable. There was only a vague, empty cloud before his eyes, until suddenly a luminous face glided into the vacant place, and it was full of tenderness, of sweetness, of charm, of pity and womanly love—but it was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... senses wandered; now again his mind was calm, And he wrung from out his suffering penitential draughts of balm; Then again his senses left him, and he lay in phrenzy there, Talking wildly in his madness with the dim, impalpable air. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... When he is asked to reproduce things which are intrinsically beautiful—flowers, branches, buds, shells, butterflies, and the like—he begins to realise that if his work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable, though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of beauty. So the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of fidelity—fidelity to feeling rather than to fact (if I may ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... discomfort. Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair. What was going to become of me? Where was I going? Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable blackness that wrapped me a faint tinge of blood. It seemed extraordinarily remote, and mistlike; yet, at once, the feeling of oppression was lightened, and I ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... platonic seclusion he had learned to love this naive, insinuating woman, whose frank simplicity seemed equal to his own, without thought of reserve, secrecy, or deceit. He had gradually been led to think of the absent husband with what he believed to be her own feelings—as of some impalpable, fleshless ancestor from whose remote presence she derived power, wealth, and importance, but to whom she owed only respect and certain obligations of honor equal to his own. He had never heard her speak of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Here the victor and vanquished, side by side, Sleep in dreamless rest, Kings and Queens in life, Battling for power, all conquered by tyrant Death, Whose universal edict, irrevocable, Levels Prince and Peasant, in impalpable dust. Crowns to-day, coffins to-morrow, with monuments Mossed over, letter-cracked, undecipherable As the mummied remains of Egyptian Kings. Vain, vain, are all the monuments of man, The greatest only live a little span; We strut ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... rapturous vision, Oh, purple, impalpable Cow, Do you browse in a Dream Field Elysian, Are you purpling pleasantly now? By the side of wan waves do you languish? Or in the lithe lush of the grove? While vainly I search in my ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... being so, you believe in the results of Chemistry, although that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by the flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals and your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light conducted and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint. You obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... be found easy of comprehension. The local allusions, the point of view, the atmosphere that were in the mind of the savage are not in our minds to-day, and will not again be in any mind on earth; they defy our best efforts at reproduction. To conjure up the ghostly semblance of these dead impalpable things and make them live again is a problem that must be solved by each one with such aid from the divining rod of the imagination as the reader can summon ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... it blows to atoms the whole statement of Andrew Jackson that Erving had laid the foundation of a treaty by which our western bounds upon the Spanish possessions should be at the Rio Grande; and, of course, grinds to impalpable powder his charge that our government did give up that important territory when it was at ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... that. Remember the explosion in our laboratory, that blew an entire mountain into impalpable dust? Draw in your mind a nice, vivid picture of one ten times the size in each of our plants and in this building. I know that you are fool enough to go ahead with your own ideas, in spite of everything I've said; and, since I do not yet actually control Steel, I can't ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... mould—a sign that philosophy has deserted reality, but only a sign that the curves and contours and jagged edges of reality are so intricate and involved that only a very fluid element can follow their complicated shape. But these moments of difficulty and obscurity, these vague and impalpable links in the chain, are only to be found in the process by which we arrive at our conclusion. When our conclusion has been once reached it becomes suddenly manifest to us that it has been there, with us, all the while, implicit in our whole argument, the secret and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... by a real person. They attempted again and again to heighten the picture of envy, fear, ambition, rage, or love by all manner of extraordinary circumstances, but they rarely succeeded in attaching the emotion to a lifelike character. It was indeed passion, but passion painted on the void, impalpable. Consequently they almost never succeeded in maintaining complete verisimilitude, nor was their character drawing any less shadowy than in the sentimental romances of Sidney and Lodge. Compare, for example, the ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... said to you that only the Virgin of St. Saturnin was worthy of wearing it on her shoulders. I am so happy! oh, so happy! For it is true, I love beautiful things; I love them so passionately that at times I wish for impossibilities, gowns woven of sunbeams, impalpable veils made of the blue of heaven. How beautiful I am going to look! how beautiful I ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the rumor of an objection floated like an impalpable shadow of evil through the enclosure. Old Bill's seamed face shed its mask of juvenile hilarity, and furrowed back into its normal condition of disgruntled bitterness. He had seen the slight mix-up when the Indian swerved in the straight. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... out in foul, if need be, yet avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive, laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... were other children growing; and all the best intentions in the world could not stop further leakages and still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with the pertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled in dry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, and would lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now some fresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For some days the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with giant ants. Three ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... touched the deep, mysterious chords, That vibrate in each human breast Alike, but not alike confessed. The spiritual world seemed near; And close above them, full of fear, Its awful adumbration passed, A luminous shadow, vague and vast. They almost feared to look, lest there, Embodied from the impalpable air, They might behold the Angel stand, Holding the sword in his ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... you give it the structure of a living edifice? Will you inject it with a hypodermic syringe between two impalpable plates to obtain were it only the wing ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... for I had not yet recovered from the shock of that discovery in the deserted supper room. It was so wholly unexpected and yet it so cruelly confirmed the Inspector's undisguised suspicions that it seemed to me to have created a sort of impalpable barrier between us. Of this Gatton was evidently conscious. He endeavored to arouse my interest in the inquiries which he was conducting in the garage, but for long enough I saw nothing of the place in which we stood; I could only see that photograph smiling at me inquiringly through ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... faded Fay: her pretty freshness dimmed. A Fay with dark circles round her hollow eyes and all the living light gone from her abundant fair hair. It was as though her face was covered by an impalpable grey mask. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... with, they are roasted to get rid of the sulphur, arsenic, etc., which would interfere with the amalgamation or lixiviation, and then either ground to impalpable fineness in one of the many triturating pans with mercury, or treated ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
