"Impalpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the station platform and went ploughing up a street over shoetops with the impalpable dust and denoted by tents and white-coated shacks sparsely bordering. The air was breezeless and suffocatingly loaded with that dust not yet deposited. The noises as from a great city swelled strident: shouts, hammerings, laughter, rumble of vehicles, cracking of lashes, barkings ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... 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
... liar with his tongue does at least know that he is lying, and has or might have some faint vestige of remorse and chance of amendment; but the impalpable liar, whose tongue articulates mere accepted commonplaces, cants and babblement, which means only, "Admire me, call me an excellent stump-orator!"—of him what hope is there? His thought, what thought he had, lies dormant, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... imagination was touched by the sight of the majestic 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 who now dominated the Latin peoples. The pupil of Caesar could certainly not ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 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
... the royal days of a New England autumn; the air clear and bracing and spicy; the light golden and glowing, and yet softened to the dreamiest, richest, most bounteous aureole of hope, by a slight impalpable haze; too slight to veil anything, but giving its tender flattery to the landscape nevertheless. And through that to the mind. Who can help but receive it? Suggestions of waveless peace, of endless delight, of a world-full glory that must fill one's life with riches, come ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... 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 the forms of idleness; that he was contenting himself with conquering the first necessities ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... said Babbalanja, speaking through half of a nectarine, "defer putting that question, I beseech, till after my appetite is satisfied; for, trust me, no hungry mortal would forfeit his palate, to be resolved into the impalpable." ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... hymn Of Holy, Holy! And the cloud of smoke Went up from the waved censers, with the prayers Of saints, that wafted outward blessing-freighted broke Around him standing at the gate alone. All down the radiant slope of golden stairs, By which he climbed so late from earth to heaven, It rolled impalpable—a fragrant cloud; And still, turned from the Alleluias loud, Beyond the portal-guarding angels seven, He listened earthward, for a voice—a sound Out of the dark ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the floor; and a curious feeling would come to her of being something wandering, incomplete. She would see as through a mist the passionate, restless child with the rebellious eyes to whom the room had once belonged; and later the strangely self- possessed girl with that impalpable veil of mystery around her who would stand with folded hands, there by the window, seeming always to be listening. And she, too, had passed away. The tears would come into her eyes, and she would stretch ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... with the universe, 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 ancient authorities he saith not) that "he asserted this air ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... masses measuring 76.5 feet in circumference. On looking at this column from the side opposite the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light pouring down in a long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice made the whole appear as if it were set in a frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of the light penetrating through the ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... chorus of a musical comedy, because that profession offered more alluring wares in the way of perils than any other that was open to her. And then she discovered that her calculations had gone awry. The impalpable shield her formidable friend carried with her, turned the perils aside. The little group of half-grown boys one sometimes found waiting at the stage door, never even spoke to Rose, and Dolly, in her company, partook of this unwelcomed immunity. As for the men in the company, Dolly ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... fence this unpalatable conclusion, is to maintain that the results could not be fully tested in an examination as suggested. Some of these are so fine, impalpable, and spiritual in their texture, that they cannot be seized by any questions that can be put; and would be dropped out if the present system were changed. But results so untraceable cannot be proved to exist ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... distance; I was still in darkness, but on the borders of day. I flew, upheld by my Guide, borne along by a power akin to that which, during our dreams, wafts us to spheres invisible to the eye of the body. The halo that crowned our heads seared away the shades as we passed, like impalpable dust. Far above us the suns of all the worlds shone with scarce so much light as the twinkling fireflies of my native land. I was soaring towards the fields of air where, round about Paradise, the bodies of light are in closer ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... smell already noticed, and has become quite white. After one day's drying thus, it is taken into what may be called the manufactory, a long shed, open in front and on one side, and closed at the other and in the rear. Here the lumps of sago are broken up, and are reduced into an impalpable flour, which is passed through a sieve. The lumps, which are retained by the sieve are put back to be re-bruised, whilst that portion which has passed is collected, and is placed in a long cloth bag, the gathered ends of which, like those of a hammock, are attached to a pole, which ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... and to confuse it. He collects shadows around him, from which shoot vivid rays. He laboriously brings to birth that morsel of truth which he has within him. He would seize and define what is most fugitive and impalpable in a work of art. Although nobody talks so much of life as he does, yet no one so much delights in decomposing and generalizing it. Having thus destroyed the particular, he is able to show you as the result of this process, final in appearance, but in reality ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Prothero would discourse through the tobacco smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent—and Part Two in the Tripos a thing relatively remote. He would talk until the dimly-lit room about him became impalpable, and the young men squatting about it in elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of cities that are still to be, bridges in wild places, deserts tamed and oceans conquered, mankind no longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... series of lines, each of which ended in a droop, toward the high sky-scraper. And when his eyes reached, with the bird, the top of the building, they lit upon a cloud, a great white galleon of a cloud which, with all sails set, flanks opulently agleam with the swell of impalpable freights, went sliding by with ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... fronds above, burst the wind in all its fury. It seemed to beat down into the garden in waves of heat. Huge leaves began to fall from the tree tops and the mast-like trunks bent before the fury from the desert. The atmosphere grew hazy with impalpable dust; and ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... correct and temper the cooler Herbs, and such as abound in moisture; It is a never to be omitted Ingredient of our Sallets; provided it be not too minutely beaten (as oft we find it) to an almost impalpable Dust, which is very pernicious and frequently adheres and sticks in the folds of the Stomach, where, instead of promoting Concoction, it often causes a Cardialgium, and fires the Blood: It should therefore ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... occurring in strata, like flints.] It resembles a coarse gravel, each pebble being often as large as a walnut, and tuberculated on the surface: it binds admirably, and forms excellent roads, but pulverises into a most disagreeable impalpable dust. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; something in his manner had belied his words. Did he not look for her in the morning when she entered—come very quickly to her? She thought of him as she had last seen him looking down the length of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... Buoyant, impalpable, relentless, thin, Rise the clear, mocking walls. I strive in vain To reach the pulsing heart that beats within, Or with persistence of a cold disdain, To quell the gladness which ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... the day rose up before him, but he seemed to loathe them merely because they had been of so active a character, and now he could not bear to have his brain teased even with their impalpable shadow. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the first 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 I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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 of these ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... are other ores, in lump showing no visible gold, which contain the gold in all possible degrees of fineness, from say prills of a milligram or so down to a most impalpable powder. The treatment of these cannot be so simple and straightforward. Suppose a parcel of 1000 grams (say 2 lbs.) of such ore in fine powder, containing on an average 1 particle of 1 milligram (the presence ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... if the letter had been written, it would have greatly impressed the mind of George. Remorse for the treatment of his wife he could not have felt—he was incapable of any such emotion; and we question whether any appeal to the sentiment of the supernatural, any summons to another and an impalpable world, would have made much impression on that stolid, prosaic intelligence and that heart of lead. Besides, according to some versions of the tale, it was not, after all, a letter from his wife which impressed him, but only the warning of a fortune-teller—a ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises; ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded, analysis. It is this which distinguishes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... love-secret, makes a 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 ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... soon ended. 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 the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... 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 ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... the bigness of a thumb, who corresponds exactly in shape, proportion, and even in complexion to the man in whose body he resides. This mannikin is of a thin, unsubstantial nature, though not so impalpable but that it may cause displacement on entering a physical object, and it can flit quickly from place to place; it is temporarily absent from the body in sleep, trance, and disease, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... small mound fortunately stood between us, and as he rounded it, I jumped to one side and let fly at his flank, but without the effect of stopping him; for, as quick as thought, the huge monster was at my feet, battling with the impalpable smoke of my gun, which fortunately hung so thick on the ground at the height of his head that he could not see me, though I was so close that I might, had I been possessed of a hatchet, have chopped off his head. This was a predicament which looked very ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... happen to be full or empty. The youngest is the commercial traveller, the diplomatist, the messenger of the family, Angelus Domini. A cousin of the family, Count Dandini, reigns over the police. This little group is perpetually at work adding to a fortune which is invisible, impalpable, and incalculable. The house of Antonelli is not pitied ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... spoke—no evading the impression that some 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 to ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... knew the kind 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 nobler kind, did it matter much ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... modern inventions for inexpensive wall-coverings are found in what are called the ingrain papers. These have a variable surface, without reflections, and make not only a soft and impalpable colour effect, but, on account of their want of reflection, are good backgrounds ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... "atmosphere," and monstrous fruits of a "bad transcendental atmosphere," the brain reels in the fumes of mixed metaphors. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, "get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott," and, in fact, write about things less impalpable, as Mr. Mallock's heroine preferred to be loved, "in a more human sort ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... few belts of half-scorched herbage still contended against the invasion of the sand, and the huge rocks, that had rolled down from the distant summits, crushed in their fall, had scattered in sharp-edged pebbles which soon again became coarse sand, and finally impalpable dust. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... bewitching, that enthralled her. Love weaves his chains of the gossamer's web, as well as of the unyielding adamant; and both are alike binding and inextricable. She saw neither form nor face in her visions, and yet the impalpable and glowing impression stole upon her senses like an odour, or a strain of soft and soul-thrilling music. Her heart was wrapped in a delirium of such voluptuous melody, that she chided the morning when she awoke, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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
... to the flies came the dust. The country, in which for the time we were making our home, consisted of arable ground devoid of crops, and thoroughly cut up by the passing of transport. A breeze, that blew daily without fail, served to raise a fine impalpable dust that permeated everything. This powder dust made marching difficult, but wise forethought caused galvanized iron netting to be laid along all the principal routes, forming "wire roads" for the use of light motor-cars and "foot-sloggers." If we ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... obsidian.[62] The paucity of quartz, and the absence of basalt, are remarkable. Some of the porphyroids are conglomerate, but the majority are true porphyries, having a homogeneous base. Dr. T. Sterry Hunt calls them porphyroid trachytes. They have a black, rarely reddish, vitreous, or impalpable base, approaching obsidian, with a specific gravity of 2.59 in pure specimens, and holding crystals or crystalline grains of glassy feldspar, and sometimes of pyroxene and hematite. They differ from the Old World porphyries ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... light about his head. He continually shouted encouragement to his men, who were already full of fiery zeal, but it was the spirit of Jackson that urged them most. It seemed to Harry, excited and worshipping his hero, that the figure of Jackson, misty and almost impalpable, still ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... broad gauge as you will! We accept the situation, therefore, as the French say, and insure; that is to say, we book a bet at very long odds—say, three to a thousand—that we shall be rolled up, cut in two, flattened into a thin sheeting, and ground into an impalpable powder, between Croydon and Brighton. If we arrive safe, the assurance office pockets a few shillings; if we win our wager, our ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in mist and a 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 room in which I ate breakfast ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as we could see away to the limitless horizon was sand—arid, parched red-brown sand without a vestige of herbage. The wind that was blowing carried grains of it, which filled one's mouth and tasted hot and gritty; again, impalpable atoms of sand were blown into the corners of one's eyes, and, besides, this injury inflicted on the organ of vision was calculated by no means to improve one's temper. However, Omar told me that a beautiful and fruitful land lay beyond, therefore we made light of these discomforts, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... whom the people of Barbie made a ring. They 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 became also, merely by their maddening tattle, a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... trailed filmy threads of woolly black through space. His figure seemed gradually drawn within the coming night so as almost to become part of it, and the stillness around him had a touch of awe in its impalpable heaviness. One would have thought that in a place of such utter loneliness, the natural human spirit of a man would instinctively desire movement,—action of some sort, to shake off the insidious depression which crept through the air like ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Shakespeare was longing, or thought he was longing for truth and constancy, and at length he gave form and name to his desire for winnowed purity of love and perfect constancy, and this consoling but impalpable ideal he called Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. But again and again Miss Fitton reconquered him and at length his accumulated bitterness compelled him to depict his mistress realistically. Cressida is his first attempt, the first dramatic ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... But James had grown as obdurate as Elizabeth,—and with as little sense and reason. The lady might enjoy life in single blessedness as she pleased, but marry she should not. "Thus far to the Lady Arabella crowns and husbands were like a fairy banquet seen at moonlight opening on her sight, impalpable, and vanishing ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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
... concealed, impalpable, latent, secret, unknown, covert, impenetrable, obscure, undiscovered, unseen, dark, imperceptible, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... her. The motion of his body shook her lightly, and she gave forth a dry and stealthy rattling, an uneasy rustling. One hand hung down, with a loose, loose bracelet jingling on the brittle brown wrist. And her poor little feet with the rotting shoes upon them moved delicately, as if they trod the impalpable air. Once her head struck, with a hollow thud, as we turned a corner. It was almost more than flesh and blood could bear,—like things you were afraid of when you were a child in the dark—the candles melting audibly, and walls, walls, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... sewing up, weighing, and branding, were mounting high in the transepts of the building—the two arms of the capital T. The air was thick with woolly particles and the smell of sheep; the floor was dark and slippery, and everything one touched humid with the impalpable grease of the silky fleeces circulating all about the shed. Strict, downright, dirty business was ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... this time she was beset with dangers. And in his imagination he saw her treading the thin ice of destiny with the same glorified contempt which lured him to the poetical depths of life... And again Monet was at his side... vague, mysterious, impalpable, the essence of things unseen but hoped for, the solved riddle made spirit, the vast patience of eternity realized. And still Storch's restless eyes ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... what seemed such an out-of-the-way and inaccessible locality, I was served with one of the best meals on the whole journey, including claret with crushed ice in a champagne glass! What that meant to a tramp who had struggled for miles through quartz rock and impalpable dust, up a heavy grade, without shade and the thermometer well past the hundred mark, only a tramp can appreciate. I fell in love with Mokelumne Hill and, after due consultation of my map, resolved to pass the night in this picturesque ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... greater her wish, the worse was her reserve. She spent all her money upon a beautiful book as a parting gift, and kept it beside her, missing occasion after occasion of presenting it, and falling at each into a perfect agony behind that impalpable, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quicker, announcing the immediate approach of the dead. Lesbia listened, her head raised, her face, turned to open window, felt over by the clammy, impalpable ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... know. It seems to me a very silly way to be." The song had gone out of her voice, and a heaviness, an impalpable fear, had descended again on her heart. Why did one's path lead always through mazes of uncertainty and disappointment instead of straight onward toward one's desire? A passionate impulse seized her to fight for what she wanted, to grasp the fragile opportunity ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... down some idols from their pedestals, and grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held men's souls in bondage. That there has been progress needs no other demonstration than that you may now reason with men, and urge upon them, without danger of the rack or stake, that no doctrines can be apprehended as truths ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... East, 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 Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... she had ceased to understand him. An impalpable barrier seemed to have arisen between them. The inner man had became inaccessible. Her mind was not subtle enough to grasp the real explanation of this change in her old lover. Being based upon wrong premises, her inferences were necessarily wide of the truth, and she believed that ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... in for arbitrary power. The Court will grow bolder and bolder, a struggle will commence, and, if it ends as I wish, there will be Whigs again.... But when these things come to pass, you will no longer be a Warden,[67] but a brown and impalpable powder in the tombs of Dulwich. In the meantime, enough of liberty will remain to make our old-age tolerably comfortable; and to your last gasp you will remain in the perennial and pleasing delusion that the Whigs are coming in, and will expire ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... He told her nothing of his inner self, of his past life, or his dreams for the future. All that they said might have been said to each other on their first meeting in Mrs. Hartley's drawing-room. It seemed as if some vague impalpable barrier had been erected between them, and Lettice puzzled herself from time to time to know how this barrier had been ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... adventure into that region of fancy and fabrication so alluring to European and American writers; for, like the eyes of huris, our vanity is soft and demure. This then is a book of travels in an impalpable country, an enchanted country, from which we have all risen, and towards which we are still rising. It is, as it were, the chart and history of one little kingdom of the Soul,—the Soul of a philosopher, poet and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... entire space included in the first excavation was deepened by a little more than 6 feet, giving a new floor about 13 feet lower than the highest part of the talus. All the material thus removed showed that it was laid down by flowing water, sometimes so quiet as to deposit clay of impalpable fineness, sometimes with a velocity sufficient to carry stones weighing 3 or 4 pounds. The material varied—red clay, now jointed, was the topmost layer; below it, in patches and layers, were dark earth, resembling soil; clay ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... important sort of terms in Logic, since in them general propositions are expressed and, moreover (with rare exceptions), all predicates are general. For, besides these typical class-names, attributive words are general terms, such as 'royal,' 'ruling,' 'woolly,' 'bleating,' 'impalpable,' 'vanishing.' ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... from its dwelling, and her eyes They had not their own lustre, but the look Which is not of the earth; she was become The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts Were combinations of disjointed things; And forms impalpable and unperceived Of others' sight familiar were to hers. And this ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... which often entailed hours of wearing effort. The vegetation was sparse and of a faded brown color that lent to the whole landscape a most depressing aspect. Great rocks were strewn in every direction as far as the eye could see, lying partially embedded in an impalpable dust that rose in clouds about him at every step. The sun beat down mercilessly out ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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, conviction to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and ruin envelop them all. Any visible fact would be better than this impending horror of the imagination—this silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure—which encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... flooded the sparkle out of her eyes. She was statue-like in her stillness, her breaths impalpable in their softness. But the points of her knuckles were ghostly, sharp spots on her tightly clenched hands. All that Westerling could tell was that she was thinking, and thinking hard. There was a space of silence broken only by the movement ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... relates action to life. Of course it has other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right ratio of values and gives ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... 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 ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... of The Family Herald which Mr. Runciman filled in succession to Mr. Grant Allen is one which any student of human nature might envy. There is no dissecting-room of the soul like the Confessional, where the priest is quite impalpable and impersonal and the penitent secure in the privacy of an anonymous communication. The ordinary man and woman have just as much of the stuff of tragedy and comedy in their lives as the Lord Tomnoddy or Lady Fitzboodle, and as there are many more of them—thank ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... The impalpable powder to which calcareous sand is ground by the waves settles at some distance from shore in deeper and quieter water as a limy silt, and hardens into a dense, fine-grained limestone in which perhaps no trace of fossil is found to suggest the ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... are no such things as ghosts, or spiritual beings visible to mortal sight. Even Sir Walter Scott is turned renegade, and, with his stories made up of half-and-half, like Nathaniel Gow's toddy, is trying to throw cold water on the most certain, though most impalpable, phenomena of human nature. The bodies are daft. Heaven mend their wits! Before they had ventured to assert such things, I wish they had been where I have often been; or, in particular, where the Laird of Birkendelly was ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... kill it, as I could not get hold of it? Poison? But it would see me mix it with the water; and then, would our poisons have any effect on its impalpable body? No ... no ... no doubt about ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees in the De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race invisible yet real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys. When the life of the visible world is hushed, they say, there is another life in the hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug and Angus still guard the De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... of an unclouded sun were hot in the Santa Clara roads and byways, and the dry, bleached dust had become an impalpable powder, the perspiring and parched pedestrian who rashly sought relief in the shade of the wayside oak was speedily chilled to the bone by the northwest trade-winds that on those August afternoons swept through the defiles of the Coast Range, and even ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... charm of poetry and wizardry of fairy lore, all those things which in other parts of the world remind us of a past fertile in legend and song; that is to say, must bid farewell to the attractions offered by the Beyond of History, by the hope of eventually realizing the tangible impalpable realm conjured up in the distance which time has veiled within its mists, and by the expectation of ultimately wresting some relics of antiquity every now and again from the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... 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 to separate them as ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... waning, and with Froude he looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom. He had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble and Froude; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams's full sympathy with him. But from the first there seems to have been an almost impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude's apparently more violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy. Possibly, after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... 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
... sky, in the wake of the sun, a dense stratum of cloud which, blue and snow-white in colour, lay with its soft hummocks reflected in the calm Oka, and so wrought therein a secondary firmament as profound and impalpable as its original. ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... to speak in words so true and apposite to the character he conceives that we seem to know the individuals from what they say and not from what the poet wrote or said. But the poet goes much farther, and in all his works presents surroundings and accessories, impalpable but certain, which fit the characters and their moods and actions. The picture of morning in Venus and Adonis is apposite to the rich, sensuous and brilliant colorings of the queen of love; the reference in Romeo and Juliet to the song of the nightingale "on yond' ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... weight, and that of the superincumbent mass of prejudice, envy, ignorance, folly, or uncongenial force, must ever ensure the deepest sympathy of all those who can appreciate the spirit of its qualities;" let the initiative skyward struggles towards the zenith-abysses of the inane impalpable ——, &c. &c. &c. &c. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... 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 sea is ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... turnest thou, supported by the impalpable ether! It brightens about thee, and 'tis the stir of thine agitation that distributes the winds and fruitful dews. According as thou dost wax and wane the eyes of cats and spots of panthers lengthen or grow short. Wives shriek thy ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... inward charm Awoke; 'twas not the magic of a smile, Nor playful Cupid in her cheeks, nor more, The form of peerless grace;—'twas beauty's soul, The speaking virtue, modesty inborn, That as with magic spells, impalpable To sense, my being thralled. We breathed together The air of heaven:—enough!—no utterance asked Of words, our spiritual converse;—in my heart, Though strange, yet with familiar ties inwrought She seemed, and instant spake the thought—'tis ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... ever 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 ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... individual ugliness. If no one was strikingly handsome, no one was strikingly plain. And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costumes,—rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable. Everything was fresh, spotless, and in tune. It scarcely needed music to resolve all the incessant waver and shimmer into a dance; but the music came, and, like sand-grains under the magnet, the beautiful atoms ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... from one commonplace to another, and each more conventional than the last. In my nervousness, I overdid my part, and having broken the ice, proceeded to smash it to impalpable fragments. Endeavouring merely to be unemotional and to avoid undue intimacy of manner, I swung to the opposite extreme and became almost stiff; and perhaps the more so since I was writhing ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... 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 ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... raised barriers about me a little by a little, so that I must view and talk with all my fellows more and more remotely, and could not, as it were, quite touch anybody save Bettie. At all other persons I was but grimacing falsely across an impalpable barrier. And now just such a barrier was arising between Bettie and me, as I perceived in a sort of panic. Yes, it was rising resistlessly, like an augmenting mist not ever to be put aside, except by plunging forthwith into hours, or days, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... 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
... in development and recognition behind other branches of medicine is due in part to the crudity of its clinical methods. The evolution of interest in science is from simple, obvious and tangible problems to more intricate and impalpable researches. Refined laboratory work has been done in psychiatric clinics, particularly along histopathological lines, but clinical studies follow antiquated methods. The internist does not say, "The patient has sugar in his urine, therefore he has ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... drawer, from the depths of his past, all these reminiscences rose like a vapor, but it was only the impalpable vapor of a reality now dead. Nevertheless, he suffered and wept over the letters, as one weeps over the dead because they are ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... proceeded further south the icebergs increased. The sea was so rough, that the waves climbed these glacial blocks, and fell on the other side in fine impalpable dust. The scene filled the observers with admiration. But this was soon succeeded by terror, upon the reflection that if the vessel struck one of these enormous masses, she must be dashed to pieces. The presence of danger soon, however, produced indifference, and more thought ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... herself that I made my vows, and in whose service I enlisted. Was there ever a time when she needed more the loyalty of us all? While she is fashioning that Empire which shall be without limit or end and raise us to the lordship of the earth, she runs the risks of attack from impalpable enemies who shall defile her highways and debauch her sons. Arrogance, luxury, violent ambition, false desires, are more to be dreaded than a Parthian victory. The subtle wickedness of the Orient may conquer us when the spears of Britain are of no avail. Antony and Gallus are not ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... as we search for the physical seat of what we call the soul—the spiritual part of the man. And what is left then? A little blob of matter, a handful of nervous dough, a few ounces of tissue, but there—somewhere there—lurks that impalpable seed, to which the rest of our frame is but the pod. The old philosophers who put the soul in the pineal gland were not right, but after all they ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... Mistress Findlay, Lizzy's mother. Although the daughter had never confessed, the mother had yet arrived at the right conclusion concerning the father of her child—how, she could hardly herself have told, for the conviction had grown by accretion; a sign here and a sign there, impalpable save to maternal sense, had led her to the truth; and now, if anyone had a word to say against Malcolm, he had better not say it in the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... that he was an intruder, a trespasser, remained with him as he passed from room to room, throwing open windows and blinds, and now and then sneezing as the impalpable dust tickled his nostrils. In the sitting-room, as in every other apartment, everything looked as though the occupant had passed out of the room but a moment before. Wade's face grew grave and tender as he looked about him. On the sewing machine ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... could but give a certain crude emphasis to the strange spiritual bond which united these two beings. Practical as they both were in the common affairs of life, they shrank from anything which would promise to materialise the subtleties of the mind. Some thoughts, they felt, were as impalpable as sounds, and, just as music ceases to be divine when it is poured out of some mechanical contrivance, so the mysteries of the human soul become mere bodily conditions—more or less humiliating—when ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... always with the same result. In every case an hour's current would produce a perceptible loss of weight. My theory at that stage was that there was a loosening of the molecules caused by the electric fluid, and that a certain number of these molecules were shed off like an impalpable dust, all round the lump of earth or of metal, which remained, of course, the lighter by their loss. I had entirely accepted this theory, when a very remarkable chance led me to completely ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... customers. Now I am having lunch." After a period in which time ran by unnoticed, he would suddenly realize a fresh Now, and feel uneasy at the knowledge that it would shortly dissolve into another one. He tried, vainly, to swim up-stream against the smooth impalpable fatal current. He tried to dam up Time, to deepen the stream so that he could bathe in it carelessly. Time, he said, is life; and life is God; time, then, is little bits of God. Those who waste their time in vulgarity or ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Williston range, rising with immortal and changeful beauty into the purple heavens. As she watched them with incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite; watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from rose to purple, they seemed less like mountains than ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... extravagances of phrase and of fashion generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage, though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of action and character. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... 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
... the broad marble top was on the floor, and the room full of impalpable dust. The admiral and the secretary were gravely stacking the bricks, one by one, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... camp blinked through the lilac mist of the Valley. A veil impalpable as dreams hovered over the River. The boom and roll of a snow cornice falling somewhere in the Gorge behind the Holy Cross came in dull rolling muffled thunder through the spruce forests. Had her eyes flashed it in that recognition of love; or had she ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... breathes and effuses is that of real things, real men and women. It has not the perfume of the distilled and concentrated, but the all but impalpable odor of the open air, the shore, the wood, the hilltop. It aims, not to be a book, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... seek Earth's loftiest heights, and ocean's deepest caves; Go where the sea-snake and the eagle dwell, 'Midst mighty elements,—where nature is. And man is not, and ye may see afar, Impalpable as a rainbow on the clouds. The glorious vision! Liberty! I dream'd Of such a goddess once—dream'd that yon slaves Were Romans, such as rul'd the world, and I Their tribune—vain and idle dream! Take back The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... 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 Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... still remains unknown." The same, however, is true of the common diseases of scarlatina, measles and chickenpox. Of some diseases, the virus is a bacillus or coccus, excessively minute fungi recognizable only under the microscope; but the bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of viruses so impalpable that they, unlike ordinary bacteria, can go through the pores of a clay filter, are filter-passers, that is are of ultra-microscopic dimensions. Some authorities conjecture that the virus of variola belongs to the group of filter-passers. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... living. There seemed to be a sort of pressure in it which handled them more and more definitely. The sensation was interesting and acute. Each gave himself to it, and each had a, perhaps deceptive, consciousness of yielding up something, something impalpable, evanescent, fluent. Valentine, more especially, felt as if he were pouring away from himself, by this act of sitting, a vital liquid, and he thought ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... no means contemptible intellectual calibre,—since the symbol must count for more than the mere label,—think in images and pictures. Dickie belonged to the minority. And it must be conceded that his mind now projected against that shifting, impalpable background of fog, a series of pictures which in their cynical pathos, their suggestions at once voluptuous and degraded, were hardly unworthy of the great ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every one knows and takes for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall upon the mind like dust, impalpable and ever accumulating; they may be unable to converse, they may argue perversely, they may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of their way, slow to enter into the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman |
