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Disillusionment   Listen
noun
Disillusionment  n.  The act of freeing from an illusion, or the state of being freed therefrom.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Disillusionment" Quotes from Famous Books



... Goodliness being largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for John—up to the marriage-day. He who descries signs of slatternliness in his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment. As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally indifferent to what ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... the world is as vain as soap-bubbles, and your heart is full of disillusionment, ready to despair, then remember that you have a father and a home to return to,' said father. 'Until that time you cannot count yourself one of us. We are standing on two different paths: the one we go ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy

... only made to be broken, are somewhat exasperating, and if, as he pleaded in his own behalf, the occasion (of Napoleon's abdication) was physically irresistible, it is to be regretted that he did not swerve from his self-denying ordinance to better purpose. The note of disillusionment and disappointment in the Ode is but an echo of the sentiments of the "general." Napoleon on his own "fall" is more original and more interesting: "Il ceda," writes Leonard Gallois (Histoire de Napoleon d'apres lui-meme, 1825, pp. 546, 547), "non sans de grands combats interieurs, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... lacked appeal. The decks were crowded with passengers as the ship picked her way into Juneau, and Alan wandered among them with a gathering sense of disillusionment pressing upon him. He knew that he was looking with more than casual interest for Mary Standish, and he was glad when Stampede bumped into an old acquaintance and permitted him to be alone. He was not pleased with the discovery, and yet he was compelled ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... Victor returned home. The need for chaperonage was over, and it was abundantly evident that Pixie was in no need of consolation. The first shock of disillusionment over, it was pre-eminently relief that she felt—relief from a bond which had weighed more and more heavily as time passed by. If Stanor had come home, looking his old self, caring for her, depending on her as he had done during the days of their brief engagement, she would have been ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey

... world of disillusionment in that sigh. Armand St. Just had allowed her to speak on without interruption: he listened to her, whilst allowing his own thoughts to run riot. It was terrible to see a young and beautiful woman—a girl in all but name—still standing almost at the threshold of her life, yet bereft ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... over like a vivid nightmare her married life down to the least detail,—the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It ended in a choke rather than a sob. There was so ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... the inevitable disillusionment FitzGerald delighted in the company of the illiterate fisherman. Whether he took his protege cruising with him on the Scandal, or sat with him in his favourite corner of the kitchen of the old Suffolk Inn at Lowestoft, or played "all-fours" with him, or sat and "mardled" with him and his wife ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth

... I lay in the upper berth and recalled all the unhappy nights of the past seven years; disappointment, heartache, disillusionment, disgust; they followed each other in silent review. Every tender memory and early sentiment that might have lingered in my heart was ruthlessly murdered by some stronger memory of pain. The storm without was nothing to the storm within, I ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... dearest, sweetest child, our only child, to—a man without a heart! We were two happy parents, rich in her love—parents whom every one envied and we now are two poor bereaved wretches, who must creep away together into a corner in their unhappy disillusionment. (Sits down.) ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... enjoyed, and used, but it was not as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... man's face, as he sat sipping his ginger-ale in the club-house smoking-room, there was a look of disillusionment. "Never again!" he said. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... wanted to do something that wasn't allowed. I've met with the same disillusionment here as ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... indifferent air, but what the butler had told him was in the nature of a great shock. He felt suddenly quite sick with disillusionment. Had he been a fool all along, completely wrong in his estimate of this girl? Was she simply like so many others, possessed of two sides, one which she kept for him, and the other, perhaps, not quite so restrained? But for this story he would ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... think that this is a story of disillusionment. When I first heard the story, I thought so too. But, so far as Dunstone goes, that is not the case. It is rare that I see him now, but the other day we smoked two cigars apiece together. And in a moment of confidence he spoke of her. He said how ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... be the latest victim of The Great Aviation Hoax, and we shall watch the progressive stages of its disillusionment with sympathetic interest, or the development of its newest cult with sincere commiseration. Like many other phenomena, good and bad, this gigantic flam, it will be remembered, took its rise in the east. Its genesis was reported in Constantinople nearly a ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... of war, with all its contingent horrors, should have been before our eyes all the time. The occasion of this war was no doubt a surprise. But that it could happen at all should not be a surprise to us, still less a disillusionment. It does not mark a backward step in human civilisation. It only registers the fact that civilisation is still grievously incomplete and unconsolidated. Terrible as this war is in its effect on individual lives and happiness, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... nothing to make her Christmas different from all these other days of whose shut-in monotony she was wearying. Hope, now, and excited wonder were giving the little one new life. Dave Patton cringed within at the thought of the awakening, the disillusionment, the desolation of sorrow that would come to the baby heart with the dawn of Christmas. He was overwhelmed with self-reproach, because he had not realized all this in time to make provision, before the deep ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... The day of disillusionment had been a Wednesday. On Thursday the advertisement had duly appeared. On Friday letters might be expected ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... Huxley the sensualist, a very ardent lover of beauty, but one that shrinks from the sordid preamble of modern gallantry, one that is apprehensive of the inevitable disillusionment. As others have done, as others will do, he finds in imagination the adventure ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... mournful patience, a sense of one's sphere having somehow fallen short of one's deserts. This produces the grumpy paterfamilias who drowses over a paper or grumbles over a pipe; such a man is inimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage. That sort of ugly disillusionment, that publicity of disappointment, that frank disregard of all concerns except one's own, is one of the most hideous features of middle-class life, and it is rather characteristically English. It sometimes conceals a robust good sense and even kindliness; but it is a base thing ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... After the disillusionment of Versailles it is difficult for a German to form an unbiassed judgment of Mr. Wilson. We must not forget, however, that no serious attempt has ever been made in Germany to get an unprejudiced estimate of Mr. Wilson's personality. In the course of the war he has come to be ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... black streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older—but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him—in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the spirit which had driven them ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... brought him joy where wisdom brought him sorrow! Strange. Until then he had been existent, sentient, but never until then alive. Wonder, disillusionment, passion, tragedy, despair. In each of these moods he had had a glimpse, now and then, of an immense universal design, as a bird may have it, and its throat quivering with song, or as a salmon may have it, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... is interesting to note that Euphues embodies many of the characteristics of the Byronic hero—his sententiousness, his misogyny, his cynicism born of disillusionment, and his rhetorical flatulency; but he is no rebel like Manfred because he finds consolation in his own pre-eminence in a world of platitude. Conscious of his dearly bought wisdom, he makes it his continuous duty, if not pleasure, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... and in the cold light of the capital, his disillusionment began. Having determined to set up a regular establishment, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had sent for his wife, in order to place her at the head of his house. But when he saw that mass ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... And found a school to teach. And disillusionment. She could not teach school; she knew more than her scholars, yet not so much more of what they needed to be taught. It was not always clear in her mind whether it had been the Delaware or the Rappahannock which furnished Washington's transportation ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... and were far from deserving the reproaches now often levelled at them, I must admit that we greatly exaggerated our omniscience. I am often tempted, I confess, to draw the rather melancholy moral that some of my younger friends may be destined to disillusionment, and may be driven some thirty years hence to admit that their present confidence was a little ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of those very Bills for the interference with family life which Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the realities ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... appearance, as well as the accessories of the scene, left me for a few moments fairly dazed. Not only were my highly wrought expectations as to the present interview brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... fix that tantalising suggestion of likeness to some one he knew; his flash of illumination as he solved the puzzle and turned with that gentle, winning smile of his to herself; and then the progress of his disillusionment as, day by day, he realised more plainly the intriguing similarities of expression and gesture, until he felt that he was making love to the spirit of an aged spinster temporarily disguised behind the appearance ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... which she had given Mother, had no root in fact. These early weeks only served to reduce, bit by bit, her belief in her own knowledge. How slender this was, and of how little use to her in her new state, she did not dare to confess even to herself. Her disillusionment had begun the day after her arrival, when Dr Pughson, the Headmaster, to whom she had gone to be examined in arithmetic, flung up hands of comical dismay at her befogged attempts to solve the mysteries of long division. An upper class was taking ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... tears; he dreaded to see grief and disillusionment in the beautiful eyes which he could only remember as happy and trusting. He waited nervously till she came to him. He looked round the room apprehensively; it had an empty, unlived-in look about it, though there were various possessions of Jimmy's scattered about it—a ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres

... saw further than the flesh. In their remorse and disgust it was not mere physical disillusionment that so crushed them. They saw further. They were overcome by an impression of bleak truth, of aridity, of growing nothingness, at the thought that they had so many times grasped, rejected, and vainly grasped again ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse

... optimistic. Yet they had very glorious times after that return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still old-fashioned. They furnished their little room with quaint old Victorian furniture, and found a shop on the forty-second floor in Seventh Way where printed books of the old sort were still to be bought. It was their pet affectation to read print instead of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion than ever he ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,—she had pleasant soft hands;—she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her arm rest trustfully ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... 'you are at the beginning of a great disillusionment. I have a few things to tell you which will make you feel rather uncomfortable.' It was then that I heard for the first time that my pardon had been signed and my ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... clear, in spite of the foliage with which La Bruyere seeks to conceal it. It could only be from La Rochefoucauld that the author of "Les Caracteres" derived that sad disillusionment, lighted up by flashes of savage wit, with which he expresses his sense of the defects of human character. It may often be noted that when La Bruyere speaks of egotism, of the prevalence of amour-propre, his pungent phrases have the very sound of those ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... but in themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was La Coucaratcha or La Vigie de Koatven. They are both very nice titles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought it better to look neither ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... volunteers, issued on April 15, 1861, limited the number to 75,000, put their term of service at three months, and prescribed their duty as the enforcement of the law against combinations too powerful to be overcome by ordinary judicial process. Disillusionment swiftly followed. The terrible defeat of the Federals at Bull Run on July 21 revealed the serious character of the task before them; and by a series of measures Congress put the entire man power of the country at the President's ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... averse to her own kind. Within the restricted orbit of her own bitter thoughts she revolved towards the vanishing point of life which is the total loss of sympathy. She felt with no one but herself. She belonged to that, alas, numerous type which, with large expectations unrealised, cannot accept disillusionment with the gentle laughter it deserves. She resented the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... Reform Bill of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may confidently be anticipated in Ireland if the Home Rule Bill becomes law, and the fairy prospects held out to the Irish people by Mr. Redmond and the other stage managers of the piece are chilled by the cold ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... eternal loveliness of that vision which men have glimpsed in all ages if ever so faintly. And when he had finished, the eyes of Colombo were wet with tears, for into this poem had he woven the dreams of his disillusionment. And somewhat ironical to Colombo was the applause of those fine ladies who did ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart

... the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped disillusionment. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... John Carroll, whose twelve days of disheartening experience with the leading French-Canadian clergy had convinced him that they were impervious to any arguments or blandishments emanating from the Continental Congress. It was a sad disillusionment for the commissioners, who had expected to be settling the affairs of a fourteenth colony instead of being obliged to leave the city from which they were to have enlightened the people with a free press. In their first angry ignorance they laid the whole blame on their unfortunate ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood

... conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... those things, many's the time, and had thought nothing of it, either. But to do them while a young woman sits calmly by and makes no offer of help, but talks of many things, unconscious even of her world-old, feminine duties and privileges, that struck Andy with a cold breath of disillusionment. ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... the majority had prevailed, and that the girl's importunities had restrained her advocates from a resort to violence. She looked very forlorn, like a little child just robbed and deceived, with the shock of its first great disillusionment still ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... counted more than he had thought upon Shere Ali's co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment, and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright, inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... the period of distress and of disillusionment. Three Lusitania notes were sent and were evasively answered, and Washington still seemed to be marking time. The one event in this exciting period which gave Page satisfaction was Mr. Bryan's resignation as Secretary of State. For Mr. Bryan personally ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... husband—the Duc de Guise, the Prince de Joinville, and many another who, with one consent, fled from her advances, she resigned herself to a life of obscurity and gluttony, until death came, one day in the year 1633, to release her from a world of vanity and disillusionment. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... absolute reserve amid all his amiability. Therefore Frank would have done anything to win his esteem, while Beatrice was deferential to him. Mr Allport was tall and broad, and thin as a door; he had also a remarkably small chin. He was naive, inclined to suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable voice, was vulgar ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... days after Skippy Bedelle had seen the gilded fabric of his future greatness collapse with the failure of the Foot Regulator to revolutionize the bathtub industry the spirit of invention had risen triumphantly from the ashes of first disillusionment. After all, there were other services to render to humanity, and the mind that at the age of fifteen could have reasoned so brilliantly in theory must inevitably express itself with profit to the race and to his own individual ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... no great interest for her. Varvara Pavlovna very skilfully avoided all that could even remotely recall her position; there was no reference to love in her remarks; on the contrary, they were rather expressive of austerity in regard to the allurements of passion, of disillusionment and resignation. Panshin disputed with her; she did not agree with him.... but, strange to say!... at the very time when words of censure-often of severe censure—were coming from her lips, these words had a soft caressing sound, and her eyes spoke... precisely what ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... this proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the outset he took for granted—and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine that a great number of other people do also take for granted—that the future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... live out his days, sad as they must be, without the added burden of disillusionment; and for the rest, it was in higher Hands than hers. She resumed her seat presently very quietly and sat ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... obscurely, was aroused to full consciousness by the reading of Mapu's works. Casual acquaintance with an intelligent woman made his heart vibrate with notes unknown until then. Life in his native town became intolerable, and he left it for Odessa, the El Dorado of all ghetto dreamers. Again disillusionment was his lot. He who was ready to undergo martyrdom for his ideas, this champion of the Haskalah, his heart famishing for knowledge and justice, was not long in discerning, with his penetrating, perspicacious mind, that he had not yet reached ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... they appeared to devote their lives to the service of political ends. I even derived from my conception of their enthusiasm, strong, almost emotional interest in certain political issues, tendencies, and developments. Later, as I learned to know the men and their work better, came rather painful disillusionment. We differed fundamentally, it seemed, these eloquent fellows and myself. One actually told me in so many words, and with a cynical smile at his other companion of the moment, as who should say: 'Really, this innocent needs awakening'; that I was playing the gull's part on the surface ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... right, it is that that sustains me. This hypocritical fit has a rough disillusionment in store for it, and one will lose nothing by waiting. On the contrary, one will gain. You will see that, you who are old though still quite young. You are my son's age. You will laugh together when you see ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... forgotten, she could never forget, she had merely been successful temporarily in banishing from mind that bitter disillusionment which had poisoned what should have been ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... answered the other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once and I've never believed in it since." And he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment. ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... give her any suggestion of warning. She is deadly sure of her duty, so enthralled is she with the thought of service to her mother's people. If I am to help her, the shock of disillusionment must come from some other direction. The disillusioner is seldom forgiven. I do not know what plans are being worked out behind Uncle's lowered eyelids. But I do know his idea of duty does not include keeping such a valuable asset as a bright ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... was quite an important event in its way. At first sight it bore the semblance of a mere disillusionment such as any girl might experience under like circumstances. She had been taken from Las Flores to occupy a palace at Rio de Janeiro, and was driven from the palace to the hotel life of the Continent. During two years she had not seen either ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... sacred and august of all examples testifies. Only let us be thankful, you and I, that to us this parting, and the inevitable pain of it, comes while love is still in its full strength, having endured nothing unworthy, no shame, or diminution, or disillusionment. The more bitter the wrench, the finer the memory, and the more desirable the meeting which lies ahead, however far distant in time it may be ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... Disillusionment had come to her an instant too late. He tore himself out of his stupor, rushed to the edge of the cliff, threw himself on the ground recklessly, and looked over.... Oceaxe ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... first moment of wakening she could not distinguish realities from dreams. All the experiences of the night before seemed for the moment only the adventures of a nightmare. But disillusionment came quickly. She opened her eyes to view the cabin walls, and the full dreadfulness of her situation swept ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... also to be altered chiefly on the Dobrudsha question, as Bulgaria was already talking of the ingratitude of the Central Powers, of how Bulgaria had been disillusioned, and of the evil effects this disillusionment would have on the subsequent conduct of the war. All that Count Czernin could do was to obtain a guarantee that Roumania, in case of cession of the Dobrudsha, should at least be granted a sure way to the harbour of Kustendje. In the main the Dobrudsha question was decided at Buftea. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant direction of affairs, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... often existed between rich officers and other Cossack girls. It seemed to him that if he tried to do as his fellow officers did, he would exchange his complete enjoyment of contemplation for an abyss of suffering, disillusionment, and remorse. Besides, he had already achieved a triumph of self-sacrifice in connexion with her which had given him great pleasure, and above all he was in a way afraid of Maryanka and would not for anything have ventured to utter a word of love to ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy

... mountains of Cagayan, shone also the light of disillusionment, without proving hateful but very agreeable to rational eyes, for it caught them well disposed. The zealous workers of our Institute, shaken with the zeal of the venerable father provincial, devoted themselves to felling that bramble thicket which was filled with buckthorns ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... conception of free competition; no man should grow rich except by the free preference of a great following of customers. Such is still the American theory, and directly the intelligent young American grows up to hard facts he finds almost as much disillusionment as the intelligent young Englishman. He finds that in practice the free choice of a constituency reduces to two candidates, and no more, selected by party organizations, and the free choice of the customer ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... gate and watched the springing step with which he met the day. Her most passionate desire was that he might, throughout his life, be spared the sorrow, the disillusionment and the exhaustion which were her daily portion. But what chance was there of such a desire being fulfilled? A cry from the house, half frightened, half peevish, called her back from dreams ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... alone. Clayton was, finding his club a more comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife's disillusionment and hesitation about the future. Many weak creatures are curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence—some with fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with porcupine quills, some with a 'possumlike instinct ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... sympathetic response from Coralie. I was obliged to conclude that she considered her marriage a success; at least that it was doing what she had expected from it. At this moment she yawned in her old, pretty, lazy way. Certainly there were no signs of romantic misery or tragic disillusionment about her. Again I asked myself whether my sympathy were not more justly due to Struboff—Struboff, who sat now smoking a big cigar and wobbling his head solemnly in answer to the emphatic taps of ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... the real thing and called down blessings and kisses upon our heads; and for a time we even deceived a small boy who had been watching us eagerly. But only for a time. "Lumme," he said aloud to himself, "there's anuvver of 'em wiv knock-knees," and disillusionment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various

... such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. [Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's The Poet and his Wife. On the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, Anne Hathaway's Cottage (1914); C. J. Druce, The Dark Lady to Shakespeare (1919); Karle Wilson Baker, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... devil of a laugh, mostly made of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own mental processes—and ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... chants with livelier tone, And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue, And all is gay and cheerful:—I alone Am singularly sad; Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise: Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise: And all is grief, and disillusionment. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley

... disillusionment. The scales have fallen away. He sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must act, as well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier prepossessions about the world of men and affairs, ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson

... their ignorance of the negro and their blindness to actual conditions. They went with an ideal negro in their minds, and at first, they treated the negro as though he were their ideal of what a negro ought to be. The phases through which the majority of these teachers went were enthusiasm, doubt, disillusionment, and despair. Some left the South and their charges, holding that conditions were to blame rather than their methods; but others were clearsighted enough to realize that they had set about solving the problem in ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson

... deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of their splendour and her power. Her nature, which was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering disillusionment ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... In Rome my disillusionment came with the rainy days of winter. Then all at once it penetrated my consciousness from every side, like a cold draft through broken window panes - the realization that something was still wanting here, that in the North had been attained: an established order of institutions, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... pities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see of men, the more they amuse me—and the more I pity them." He is simpatico precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human volition and responsibility.... I have said that he does not criticize God. One may even imagine ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision. A girl of quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the comic of young women's hopes and experiences, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... unknown El {108} Dorado is always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the camp. 'The walking'—as Begbie expressed it—'was all down hill and the road was good, especially for thugs.' ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut

... physical or the moral world it is all the same. There is no goal in nature (i.): history runs on and runs nowhere. All effort is swallowed up by death. Man is no better than a beast, iii. 19; beyond the grave there is nothing. Everywhere is disillusionment, and woman is the bitterest of all, vii. 26. The moral order is turned upside down. Wrong is for ever on the throne. Providence, if there be such a thing, seems to be on the side of cruelty. Tears ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... Mankind America's Obligation The Arbiter of the World Arbitration versus War The Challenge of Thor The Conflict of War and Peace A Congress of Nations The Cost of Militarism The Cost of Peace The Crucial Parallelism The Dawn of Peace The Dawn of Universal Peace Democracy and Peace Diplomacy and Peace Disillusionment The Dominant Ideal The End; and the Means The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism The Evolution of Justice The Evolution of Law The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker The Evolution of World Peace The Fallacy ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... desolation, disaster, disillusionment overwhelmed me. I sat on the bench and burst out crying and Narcisse jumped up ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... defeat, which seemed to everybody the sudden crumbling of an edifice of effrontery, the astonishment and disillusionment were immense. There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the tumult of a vote taken on the spot, which the Nabob saw vaguely through the glass doors, as the condemned man looks down from the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... her foes. She had foes. Men, and women, too, who looked askance at her. The less they knew, the more they had to invent. The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who refused ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... two girls as they travelled, in the year 1886, from New York to Rochester. Soon, all too soon, disillusionment awaited them. The ideal conception of America was punctured already at Castle Garden, and soon burst like a soap bubble. Here Emma Goldman witnessed sights which reminded her of the terrible scenes of her childhood in Kurland. The brutality and humiliation ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... fresh branch of knowledge much followed quickly. Under my questionings, Messer Gambara very readily made me acquainted through his unsparing eyes with that cesspool that was known as the Roman Curia. And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... putting men on their guard against invisible dangers; or a promise of succor, bringing glad tidings of great joy. And its prophecy is empty and trivial if the danger or the succor can be shown to be unreal. The one unfailing bias in life is the bias for disillusionment, springing from the organic instinct for that real environment to which, whether friendly or hostile, it must adapt itself. Every man knows in his heart that he can not be saved through being deceived. Illusions can not endure, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... For Lilienthal's disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized the error of his ways. In his book, My Travels in Russia, published both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the schools he advocated were after all in the right. Education without emancipation ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... claim upon her had been loose enough. It was different now. Her woman's weakness and discontent had yielded her a ready victim to the showy promises and good looks of Hervey Garstaing. But the road they had had to travel since had been by no means easy. It had been full of disillusionment for the silly woman. They had lived in fear of the law, in fear of Steve, for over two years. And the grind of it, for the pleasure-loving wife who had buoyed herself with dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets". He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best", beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant with ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... workingman has gone in for political action and will have a try at that before he listens to the Anarchists. Slow of thought and used to compromise, he is a stern taskmaker and will exact a rigid account of the stewardship entrusted to those who sought his suffrage. When the disillusionment comes, as it surely will, real progress may come. The process of disillusionment does not come with geometrical precision. To some it comes over night, to others it is a process of years, and to some it is denied altogether. For years the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... had ever met; and the members of the Lunch Club, impressed by an encomium that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that the Professor's social sympathies would follow the line of his professional bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological member. Their disillusionment was complete. At Miss Van Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had confusedly murmured: "I know so little about metres—" and after that painful betrayal of incompetence she had prudently ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... holidays: all these experiences act as a rude shock upon the ill-balanced refinement of the Irish immigrant. Not seldom, he or she loses heart and hope and returns to Ireland mentally and physically a wreck, a sad disillusionment to those who had been comforted in the agony of the leave-taking by the assurance that to emigrate was ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... slightest idea, but her heart instead of recoiling from the sinner after all she had heard, warmed with sympathy towards him. She could not help a feeling of pity and tolerance for the unfortunate victim of deception who through disillusionment and wounded ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... has had and just how worthy of respect and veneration that father has been. A little boy is credulity itself and everything tends to make him believe in his father. But as he grows older he will surely know. Woe be it to the parent who when disillusionment comes falls below the standard the child has set. Some time the boy will know. If he has never had the pleasure that was his due, if he has never had the fun in his home that he had a right to expect, his estimate of his parent will ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... At last the disillusionment that precedes death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... the cruelty of her disillusionment, Helen was nevertheless exalted with the fierce ecstasy of power, with the knowledge that justice would at last be rendered. It would be her triumph and her expiation that she, who had been the unwitting tool of this miserable clique, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... but truths and facts. Its mind was not permitted to be befogged with fairy stories, with superstitions, with Father Christmases and the like, nor yet with religious half-truths and misty fables. These entailed not only befogging at the time, but disillusionment thereafter. Disillusionment was wicked for a child. It further was taught nothing at all (in the matter of lessons) at the grotesquely early age at which children used to be taught. It ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... words 'Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief'. His friend, Sir John Simeon, urged him to write a poem which would lead up to and explain it; and the poet, adopting the idea, used Maud as a vehicle for much which he was feeling in the disillusionment of middle life. The form of a monodrama was unfamiliar to the public and has difficulties of its own. Tennyson has combined action, proceeding somewhat spasmodically, with a skilful study of character, showing us the exaggerated sensibility of a nature which under the successive ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... the McKinley tariff bill of 1890. Many of the votes which would otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate for President went in 1892 to Grover Cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. It is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the disillusionment brought on by the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were blotted out; all prominences leveled. At first he made himself believe that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the thought that, left alone, she would recollect ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... also the affair spelled a certain disillusionment, not, it is true, in the good faith of Adams, for whom he still preserved a high regard. Russell felt that his policy of a straightforward British neutrality, his quick acquiescence in the blockade, even before actually effective, his early order closing ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... simple and unrhetorical as they are, is impressive. All that he had he gave. What also strikes the reader of his writings is the broad national spirit which he manifested. He had an immense respect for the dignity of America; he was perhaps fortunately saved from disillusionment by his distance from home. But be this as it may, the way in which he felt and therefore genuinely talked about his nation and his country was not without ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... and the jealous | |green complexion of the feminine part of her world | |bothered her not at all. | | | |And unsuspectingly Ruth came singing across the | |borders of her ain countree to the alien land of | |knowledge and disillusionment. Though she knew she | |came from God, it was gradually borne upon her that | |her girl-mother wandered a little way on the path of| |the Magdalenes. | | | |She was an interloper who had no gospel sanction in | |the world, no visible parents other than a | |foster-father and ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... subjunctives, ethical datives, and hysteron proteron to my (supposedly) admiring Latin pupils. If I were a soldier I should want to wear one of those enormous three-story military hats to render me tall and impressive. I have no desire to see a drum-major minus his plumage. The disillusionment would probably be depressing. Liking to wear my shako, I must continue to talk of objective complements instead ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... suggestions for reinvestments. But real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts. Profits for the few: disaster—or at least disillusionment—for the many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did) flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit; the ninety-and-nine, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... the clear eyes, had a sudden pang of what the morning might have been—the disillusionment and terror of this unprotected hour—that had been made instead a memory of delight—thanks to an unknown Greek named Achilles Alexandrakis, who had told her of the beauties of Greece and the Parthenon, and had given her fresh pomegranates to carry ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee

... choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her disillusionment. ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... as she had seized the significance of Monjardin's verses, had grown deathly pale; stricken by sudden disillusionment, she felt a glacial chill overwhelm her body to the very marrow; she feared that she would faint straightway and provide a spectacle for the guests, who were all drinking her health, their eyes focussed upon her. A veil of tears spread before her sight.... In vain she tried to repress ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the fond, trusting souls, half-hearted ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... to recall the distress of bitter disillusionment which has followed the collapse of some plausible system of "sweet reasonableness" under the granite-like impact of a rock of reality which has knocked the bottom out of it and left it a derelict upon the waves? This collapse of an ordered and reasonable system under ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... about Ireland is her definition of "loyalty." It is not with her a species of sentimental altruism but a plain, business-like, common-sense view of her own interests, and nothing can make her change that view, for she has through centuries of disillusionment become ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... watching her carelessly in the dimly lighted room, began to think.... "Disillusionment already. The dream has died in her. A child's brain overstuffed with slogans, it begins now to ache and grow confused. Tyranny, injustice, seem far away and vague. The revolution in the streets has blown the revolution out of her heart. There will ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... him apart from his kind; she began to see how it might be with him. She was still the woman he loved,—she believed that; he was weaker than she had thought,—that was all, weaker and not so wise. This being true, she must put aside her own pain and bewilderment, her own devastating disillusionment, and comfort him, and help him. She rose from her bed that morning firmly resolved to see him before ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general headquarters at St.-Omer, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... had responded in 1609. To the modern student all this seems so unrealistic as to be almost unbelievable, but unless one grasps the reality of the original dream he cannot hope to comprehend the extent of a later disillusionment. ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven

... sort of trance. Never had she felt surer of life and the full fruition of every hope and faith. Just how this marvelous blossoming would come, she could not guess. Her chances of meeting her Fate were no better than at any moment of the past years of drab disillusionment, and yet, for some reason, ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon

... content with a system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with systems, however logically perfect or temporarily ...
— Progress and History • Various

... but none the less erroneous impression amongst those who walk and worship in the old ways, that the newer forms in which the religious sentiment expresses itself are insensible to the more solemn aspects of life, its sins and sorrows, its disappointments and disillusionment, and most of all to the final catastrophe which men call death. Ours, they would impress upon us, is a fair weather creed, good enough when all goes well, but painfully inadequate in the storm and stress ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... such a fountain of | learning in himself, in a king, | and in a king born, is always a | miracle.' And it would appear | that he hopes at the beginning | of James's reign—long before | he suffers disillusionment | respecting his sovereign's | interest in the advance of | 'solid' knowledge—that, | whether or not he can obtain a | greater position of state | beyond that alloted to him by | Elizabeth, he may be enabled to | have the modern Hermes, king of | the ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon

... with a swelling heart. At the time, I knew not what had come over me; my feelings were indescribable. My dearest idols, riches and renown, lay shattered; one moment I was ready to shed bitter tears over the disillusionment, the next, I could have laughed for scorn of these very things, and was exulting in my escape from the murky atmosphere of my past life into the brightness of the upper air. The result was curious: I forgot all about my ophthalmic troubles, in the gradual improvement of my spiritual vision; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... say, "I don't know what use I am in the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... is spoilt by the artist who cannot be satisfied that he has made the best of his subject, and retouching his canvas to bring out some subtle charm which made the work a success loses it altogether. So in going back, the result of the inevitable disillusionment is that the early mental picture loses something of its original freshness. The very fact that the delightful place or scene was discovered by us made it the shining place it is in memory. And again, the charm we found in it may have been ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thing for Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... put it mildly, was astonishing. Let me remind the reader that for the previous four months we had been prowling through the Southern Pacific meeting everywhere with disappointment and disillusionment. We had inspected every island in every group noted on every map from Mercator to Rand-McNally without finding any variation in type from, "A," the low lying coral-atoll of the well-known broken doughnut formation, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... In our disillusionment after the last war we preferred international anarchy to international cooperation with Nations which did not see and think exactly as we did. We gave up the hope of gradually achieving a better peace because we had not the courage to fulfill our responsibilities ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry.—In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history that there is no disentangling ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, 1802-1850). A gifted musician, Lenau was also a master of the melody of words, and his nature-feeling was unusually deep and true. Abnormally proud, self-centred and sensitive as he was, Lenau was born to unhappiness and disillusionment; his journey to America, begun with the most generous anticipations, ended in homesickness and bitter disappointment. Before he had reached middle life, his genius went out in the darkness of insanity. The picturesque and the tragic fascinated Lenau; he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... friends; but to Ernest, who had lived so long in his own little socialistic set, the discovery that people could openly say such things against his chosen apostle at the very moment of his martyrdom, was a hideous and blinding disillusionment. He put the paper down upon the table once more, and buried his face helplessly ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen



Words linked to "Disillusionment" :   disenchantment, edification, sophistication



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