"Unsubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... depth. But still he felt the tingle of the iron rope in his clasp, and his hold tightened and he bent forward to listen. The whole bridge now audibly shook with the pulsation of a step—a soft, furtive step, as of one cautiously groping a way over the unsubstantial flooring. Then through the starlight he distinguished a woman's figure, and drew back. A loose plank in the bridge floor rattled, and as she passed it freed itself and he heard it strike the rocks ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... have traded to it successfully,—I mean that part of the terra incognita which is called the province of Utopia. Its productions, though censured by many (and some who use tea and tobacco without scruple) as idle and unsubstantial luxuries, have nevertheless, like many other luxuries, a general acceptation, and are secretly enjoyed even by those who express the greatest scorn and dislike of them in public. The dram-drinker is often ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... well progress rapidly toward health and strength. By the time the house was ready for her reception she was well enough to drive out and explore with the rest, though she looked frail and unsubstantial by contrast with Mollie's bloom and handsome Mrs. Phil's grand curves. She was gaining flesh and color every day, but the slender throat and wrists and transparent hands were a bitter reproach to Grif even then, and it would be many weeks before she could again indulge in that old harmless vanity ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Cruikshank and Browne to Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to make it popular. But the circulating libraries did not like it for obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial: and the great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of Macmillan's and the Cornhill, cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable novel that I remember seeing in the form was The Last Chronicle of Barset. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... we are girt about on all sides by water, shielded only by a frail ceiling of unsubstantial material—the air that we breathe—which bears up the clouds and carries that weight of water, not in obedience to the laws of nature, but by the command of God, or by the power ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... gave her love to me long, long before she knew the price of such a gift. She doated on her father, and it was a virtue that I understood. She was very fair to look at; timid as the fawn—as guileless; a creature of poetry, sent to be a dream, and to shed about her a beguiling unsubstantial brightness. All things looked practicable and easy in the light in which she moved. The difficulties of life were softened—its rewards and joys coloured and enhanced. I thought of her as a wife, and the tone of my existence was from the moment changed. If you could have seen her, sir—the angel ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing-place. We both saw a large pale light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attics. I followed the light, and my servant followed me. It entered, to the right of the landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open. I entered in ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... it, and had substituted Providence for it in his mind. This was not unfrequently the case with him, and may account for those vague aerial flights which his commentators have referred to. Hawthorne says, "Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp." However, it was not facts but ideas that he was in ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Arden and on Prospero's Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified. These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their reality. Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as Cressida. These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of the value of the house being counted a fair annual return. But the average citizen is also a householder, because forsooth houses are very cheap. The main cost is probably for the land. The chief material used in building, sun-dried brick, is very unsubstantial,[*] and needs frequent repairs, but is not expensive. Demosthenes the Orator speaks of a "little house" (doubtless of the kind last described) worth only seven minue [about $126.00 (1914) or $2,242.80 (2000)], and this is not the absolute minimum. A very rich banker has had one worth 100 minue ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... colonies, "had not many arguments been lately flung out... which with insolence equal to their absurdity deny them both." With this conciliatory preliminary disclaimer of any lack of intelligence on his own part, Mr. Jenyns proceeded to point out, in his most happy vein, how unsubstantial American reasoning really appeared when, brushing aside befogging irrelevancies, you once got to ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... associated with what she cared for now above all price. She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, 'All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!' And ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... especially it is the preliminary study that furnishes the chief interest; the spectacle of this so-skilled craftsman struggling to master an idea that might well, I think, have been found later too unsubstantial, too subtly fantastic, for working out. Very briefly, the theme is to treat of a young American, in whom this "Sense of the Past" is all-powerful; whom the gift of an old London house and its furnishings enables ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... and yet, And still, and ever whilst I breathe this air: Nay, after death, my unsubstantial soul, Like a good angel, shall attend on him, And keep him from all harm. But is he married? much good do his heart! Pray God, she may content him better far Than I have done; long may they live in peace, Till I disturb their solace; but because I fear some mischief doth hang o'er his head, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... chilling banks "Her limbs extending. There her very griefs, "Pour'd with her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of the nymph, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... be exchanged for a pure admiration and a well-grounded respect, when we see her nobly discharging her part in the great intellectual and moral struggles of the age, that wait their solution by a direct appeal to the ballot-box. Woman's power is, at present, poetical and unsubstantial; let it be practical and real. There is no reality in any power that can not be coined into votes. The demagogue has a sincere respect and a salutary fear of the voter; and he that can direct the lightning flash of the ballot-box is greater ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the sun. On the sudden emergency of a hasty march, they provide themselves with a sufficient quantity of little balls of cheese, or rather of hard curd, which they occasionally dissolve in water; and this unsubstantial diet will support, for many days, the life, and even the spirits, of the patient warrior. But this extraordinary abstinence, which the Stoic would approve, and the hermit might envy, is commonly succeeded by the most voracious indulgence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... his present allowance would be little more than doubled, and the receipts would be considerably diminished by an alteration of existing system of rents, such as had so long been planned. It was plain that the almshouses were the unsubstantial fabric of a dream, but no one now dared to refer to them, and Mr. Kendal desired Albinia to write to consult ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with them to the old witch for a gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in the forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings, and put them on the figure's legs, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead husband's wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin, and surmounted the whole with a dusty ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... community where during the slave system riches were especially envied and honored. He had been reared in the lower walks of life among a people peculiarly given to arbitrary social distinction and to aristocratic pretensions as positive and tenacious as they were often ill-founded and unsubstantial. From the ranks of the rich and the aristocratic in the South, Johnson had always been excluded. Even when he was governor of his State or a senator of the United States, he found himself socially inferior to many whom he excelled in intellect and character. His ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Eastern and Middle States pilgrims take up trades and mechanical occupations. All classes contribute recruits to the scattered thousands of miners. Greedy officials and sly schemers begin to prey on the vanishing property rights of the Dons. A strange, unsubstantial social fabric is hastily reared. It clusters around the western ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... over the page, and a cold air seemed to breathe on me,—cold, so cold, that my blood halted in my veins as if suddenly frozen! Involuntarily I started, and looked up, sure that some ghastly presence was in the room. And then, on the opposite side of the wall, I beheld an unsubstantial likeness of a human form. Shadow I call it, but the word is not strictly correct, for it was luminous, though with a pale shine. In some exhibition in London there is shown a curious instance of optical illusion; at the end of a corridor you ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hall windows were drawn up; carriages rolled through the park gates; young ladies, bright in Bond Street toilets, flashed like deities upon the village street; my Lady Bountiful left a quarter of a pound of tea at half a dozen cottages; and then the whole vision faded like an unsubstantial pageant. The blinds were drawn down again, the lodge-keeper went to sleep, and the monotonies of life submerged everything like a wave. The clergyman alone remained as the symbol of a fuller life, sometimes doing his ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... them. After all we have no business with aught but the music of Bruckner, whatever may have been his musical politics, his vanity, his ill judgment, or even his deliberate partisanship against his betters. But the ideas themselves are unsubstantial; on shadowy foundation they give an illusion by modern touches of harmony and rhythm that are not novel in themselves. The melodic idea is usually divided in two, as by a clever juggler. There is really no one thought, but a plenty of small ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... this Power science is of no avail—that it is 'a weapon of air.' The man of science, however, while accepting the figure, would probably reverse its application, thinking it is not science which is here the thing of air, but that unsubstantial pageant of the imagination to which the solidity of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... present, one must, if one lives in the great world, have now and then an acquaintance concerned in the drama. Whenever I happen to have one, I hope I am ready and glad to make use of such (however unsubstantial) interest to do good or to oblige; Ind this being the case at present, and truly I cannot call Mr. Grenville much more than an acquaintance, I shall be happy, Sir, if I can Contribute to your views, which I have reason to believe are those of a benevolent man and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... my fantasy a shape As of one crucified, whose visage spake Fell rancour, malice deep, wherein he died; And round him Ahasuerus the great king, Esther his bride, and Mordecai the just, Blameless in word and deed. As of itself That unsubstantial coinage of the brain Burst, like a bubble, Which the water fails That fed it; in my vision straight uprose A damsel weeping loud, and cried, "O queen! O mother! wherefore has intemperate ire Driv'n thee to loath thy being? Not to lose Lavinia, desp'rate thou hast slain ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... that seems now to be more unsubstantial than the fabric of a dream. I cannot think of Clara or of my mother without despair. For oh, Herbert, between me and them there seems to yawn a dishonored grave! Herbert, they talk, you know, of an attack upon the Molina-del-Rey, and I almost ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... thy voice of love, Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes, Or through thy frame doth burn or move, Or think or feel, awake, arise! 105 Spirit, leave for mine and me Earth's unsubstantial mimicry! ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... seance among them, honourably, with covered head. He gazes feebly there, with his old eyes, on that new wonder-scene; dreamlike to him, and uncertain, wavering amid fragments of old memories and dreams. For Time is all growing unsubstantial, dreamlike; Jean's eyes and mind are weary, and about to close,—and open on a far other wonder-scene, which shall be real. Patriot Subscription, Royal Pension was got for him, and he returned home glad; but ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... popularity, and wore his fig leaves with becoming modesty, he has never since been quite free from an overhanging doubt that the compliments and genial remarks with which he was assailed owed their modulation to an unsubstantial atmosphere of two-edged significance which for a period enveloped all whom he approached; as in the faces of maidens concealed behind fans when he passed, the down-drawn lips and up-raised eyes of those of fuller maturity, the practice in most of his own kind of turning aside, ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... vague dream, for there are things which are more real than reality, and being so, must be couched in different words from such as describe the things that one's bodily eyes behold of the grim reality of this world. Such things, being so told, may seem as strange and as unsubstantial as that which is unreal, instead of like ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... light had revealed his doubtful way clear before him. He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as he had counted on,—coldness, prejudice, disdain,—that all he had taken for these were but unsubstantial shadows. Still he showed no premature triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth, were depending upon it. And Zelma spoke at last,—briefly and coldly, but in a manner neither ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... grid floor of the largest Time-cage. The giant mechanism which had captured us sat at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... tempestuously in the sky Gordon fell across his bed, his brain tired with a thousand memories, all fugitive, all vague, all exquisitely unsubstantial. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in broken, yet magnificently suggestive forms, all over the summer sky, after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand; the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory. The beings of Greek, mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls which he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... races pass through a death-agony, and seem to die a natural death of old age like individuals. The Trilobites are quoted as another instance; and some ingenious writers add the supposed eccentricities of the Roman Empire in its senile decay and a number of other equally unsubstantial illustrations. ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... nearly noon when they drew near to the island. The weather was heavily hot, languidly hot even upon the water. There was a haze hanging over the world in which distant objects appeared like unsubstantial clouds, or dream things impregnated with a mystery that was mournful. The voice of a fisherman singing not far off came to them like the voice of Fate, issuing from the ocean to tell them of the sadness that was the doom of men. Behind them Naples ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the metal was steadfast. He would, certainly, overcome her natural revulsion from what she had just heard. The colour had left her cheeks, violet shadows gathered about her eyes; she seemed more unsubstantial than ever. He would repay again and again the suffering he had brought her. Having declared himself he was almost tranquil; there was a total absence of the impetuous emotionalism of youth, the blind tyranny of desire. His feeling was deeper, and accompanied by a far ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a fascination in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so well on such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the original disdain there grew up slowly another ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... equivalent to saying—he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... impulses By such a sentiment evoked. The thought, Bright Spirit, whose illuminings I sought, That thou unto thy worshipper might be An all-sufficient law, abode with me, Importing something more than unsubstantial dreams To vigils by lone shores and walks ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... took (for still he knew his power Not yet expir'd) and to the Wilderness Brought back the Son of God, and left him there, Feigning to disappear. Darkness now rose, As day-light sunk, and brought in lowring night Her shadowy off-spring unsubstantial both, Privation meer of light and absent day. 400 Our Saviour meek and with untroubl'd mind After his aerie jaunt, though hurried sore, Hungry and cold betook him to his rest, Wherever, under some concourse of shades Whose branching ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. This is the fairy land of philosophy. And it very frequently happens, that those pleasing impressions on the imagination subsist and produce their effect, even after the understanding has been satisfied of their unsubstantial nature. There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth. I have met with a quotation in Lord Coke's Reports that pleased me ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... now to poetry, which some people consider very unsubstantial pabulum, but which forms one of the most precious and inspiring portions of the literature of the world. In all ages, the true poet has exercised an influence upon men's minds that is unsurpassed by that of any other class of writers. And the reason is not far ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the loss of that, together with the lamp, did not drive the magician to despair; but magicians are so much used to misfortunes, and events contrary to their wishes, that they do not lay them to heart, but still feed themselves, to the end of life, with unsubstantial notions and chimeras. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... personal memories of the martyred patriot that I can recall seem almost a dream to me. It seems almost a vision of the unsubstantial imagination, when I think that I have known the one immortal man of the century, and enjoyed his friendship. He was the very impersonation of humanity; his stature was above and beyond all others. One hand reached back to the very portals of Mount Vernon, ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... a vague, unsubstantial odour that floats about, mocking every effort to identify it. It is the will-o'-the-wisp of my olfactive experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent, and I seldom find such a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place, That is fit home for thee!' II. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... suggest another parallel between things astronomical and things spiritual. He supposes an objector admits the size as proved, but demurs as to the importance of these heavenly bodies. "They are, perhaps, only unsubstantial froth, mere puffs of air, vapoury nothings." But the astronomer knows their mass and weight, as well as their size: "Long observation has taught him that planets in the neighbourhood of one given heavenly body have been turned out of their course, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, fairy place; That is fit home ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... artillery, charge to the right or the left, or straight before them, dash through the enemy's front, or scour the flanks, or sweep the rear, perambulate squares, and perforate encampments, just as if the serried ranks of the Sikhs had been unsubstantial creatures of the imagination, or mist-wreaths from the "wet nullah," which a lively fancy had invested with human form and warlike panoply. But one hundred and fifty-one gallant men killed, and four hundred and thirteen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the comfort of being in some one's charge, of having a determined man in uniform to look after one! And yet even now there was to Mrs. Bunting something dream-like, unsubstantial about ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... cloth tent, and so different was all that met my eyes to the dismal scene through which I had so lately passed, and which yet haunted my memory, that I felt that sweet feeling of relief which we experience when, waking from some horrid vision, we become convinced how unsubstantial are its terrors, and are ready to smile at the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... inaccuracy in dates or matters that are trifling or incidental. I suppose that comes from the fact that while he stores away in his mind everything that is essential, and trusts to his memory for that, he has not the time, which less busy men have, to verify every unsubstantial detail before he speaks or writes. Sir Thomas Browne put on record his opinion of such critics in the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... bed, thinking over the matter, "this once possible but now impossible child is a great comfort to the old gentleman,—a greater comfort, perhaps, than a real son would be. Maybe Andy will vanish with the shades and mists of night, he's such an unsubstantial infant; but if he doesn't, and Mr. Jaffrey finds pleasure in talking to me about his son, I shall humor the old fellow. It wouldn't be a Christian act to knock ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... skeptical about the practical value of either her social position or her wealthy acquaintances. Neither possession impressed her at the moment as marketable, except in the vivid imagination of Madame, and her social position, at least, was constructed of a very thin and unsubstantial fabric. Guided by the prudent streak in her character, she rested her hope not upon incorporeal possessions, but upon the solid bodies of her patrons that must be clothed. Her imposing acquaintances would avail her scarcely more, she suspected, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... lighted by refulgent Buddhas which are frequent in these works seem founded on astronomy vaporized under the influence of the idea that there are millions of universes all equally transitory and unsubstantial. There is no reason, so far as I see, to regard Gotama as a mythical solar hero, but the celestial Buddhas[78] clearly have many solar attributes. This is natural. Solar deities are so abundant in Vedic ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... privileges as Englishmen, and that Irishmen ought to have the same privileges as both Englishmen and Scotchmen." The sentiment was received with cheers. He further said: "I consider that the Union was but a parchment and unsubstantial union, if Ireland is not to be treated, in the hour of difficulty and distress, as an integral part of the United Kingdom; and unless we are prepared to show, that we are ready to grant to Irishmen a participation in all our rights and privileges, and to treat ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... tales. They take us into a lovely world of unreality where magic and luck hold sway and where the child is safe from human problems and from scientific laws alike. I have already said in talking of the younger children that I feel it unsafe to loose a child in this unsubstantial world before he is fairly well grounded in a sense of reality. Once he has his bearings there is a good deal he will enjoy without confusion. The common defense that the mystery of fairy tales answers to a legitimate need in children, I believe holds good for children ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... eyes glanced upward with a devout gesture of thanksgiving. I looked at him with a sort of jealous hunger gnawing at my heart. Here was another self deluded fool—a fond wretch feasting on the unsubstantial food of a pleasant dream—a poor dupe who believed in the truth ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... The Raven, Lenore, and The Bells. In his poems, as in his tales, Poe was less anxious to set forth an experience or a truth than to make an impression. His poetry aims at beauty in a purely artistic sense, unassociated with truth or morals. It is, for the most part, singularly vague, unsubstantial, and melodious. Some of his poems—and precisely those in which his genius finds its highest expression—defy complete analysis. Ulalume, for instance, remains obscure after the twentieth perusal—its meaning ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... sky the shining, ice-clad peaks of Kinchinjunga, a hundred miles away, towered high in air. Mystic, lovely, they seemed to float above the earth, as unsubstantial as the clouds from which they rose. They belonged to another world, a fairy world altogether apart from the rugged, tumbled masses, the awe-inspiring precipices and tremendous cliffs, of the nearer mountains. These were majestic, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... an unsubstantial, ghostly look; he might have imagined he had not really seen them had he not heard the leader's shout. Then it was hard to see why they were traveling in the dark, since they must leave the ice soon and the trail was rough. He thought ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... favour that no room is left for doubt or suspicion:—That there is not so much as one of the Fathers, early or late, who gives it as his opinion that these verses are spurious:—and, That the argument derived from internal considerations proves on inquiry to be baseless and unsubstantial ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... spectacle. Against the background of the enormous room, drowned in shadow and hardly lighted save through the round window from without, where the moon was climbing upward in a deep blue sky, a typical operatic sky, the famous dancer's figure stood out all white, a light, airy unsubstantial ghost, flying, rather than springing, through the air; then, standing upon her slender toes, upheld in the air by naught but her outstretched arms, her face raised in a fleeting attitude in which nothing was visible ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... in regard to Gregory weighed upon her like a chill depressing shadow. She had seen very little of him, and he had not been effusive then. What he felt she could not tell, but it had been a relief to her when he had ridden away again. Then for a while he faded to an unsubstantial, shadowy figure in the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of the nobleman she had loved. It is certain that, after his death, she never regained her spirits, and that a deep melancholy was visible in her countenance. All her actions showed a deeply-settled inward grief, and that she longed for death, having tasted the unsubstantial nature of human greatness. She survived the execution of Essex two years, but lived long enough to see the neglect into which she was every day falling, and to feel that, in spite of all her glory and power, she was not exempted from ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... enough among themselves they never found it worth their while to offer us any conversation but such as was very like the champagne and ice-cream they brought us,—sparkling, sweet, and unsubstantial. Almost all of them wore the superior air they put on before women, an air that says as plainly as words, 'I may ask you and I may not.' Now that is very exasperating to those who care no more for them than so many grasshoppers, and I often longed to take the conceit out ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... passion, and it argued a great nature in him, that at the moment when his wishes were to be crowned, he should look with such slight touches of spleen at the gorgeous composite fabric of Parisian cookery and Roman antiquities crumbling into unsubstantial mockery. Assuredly very few even of the philosophers would have turned away uncomplainingly to meaner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... burning of the woman and the toad was regarded as damning proof, nor is there any reason to believe that the court deemed it necessary to go behind the mere say-so of a single witness for the fact. Along with this sort of unsubstantial testimony there was presented a monotonous mass of spectral evidence. Apparitions of the witches were the constant occasions for the paroxysms of the children. In another connection it will be observed that this form of proof was becoming increasingly common in the last part of the seventeenth ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... set of busy-idlers amongst us, a sort of newsmongers, fault-finders, and predictors, who are continually bothering[L] us with unsubstantial rumors. The newspapers we take, are enough to confound any man; but these creatures are worse than the London news-writers. Sometimes we are told that Baltimore is burnt; and then that New York is taken; and we have been ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... connection between Dogmatics and Ethics cannot be ignored without loss to both. It tends only to confusion to speak as some do of 'a creedless morality.' On the one hand, Ethics saves Dogmatics from evaporating into unsubstantial speculation, and by affording the test of workableness, keeps it upon the solid foundation of fact. On the other hand, Dogmatics supplies to Ethics its formative principles and normative standards, and preserves the moral life from degenerating into the vagaries ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... wilderness in the great West, and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places. The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... revel, for her people were called upon to preserve themselves. Her arts were forgotten; only religion held its own and that from very fear. Egypt was on her knees, but the gods were aghast and helpless in the face of the hideous power of the unsubstantial, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... we have no grosser representation of folly than that of short-sighted and credulous old men. But somehow or other I have strayed away from the friendship of the perfect, that is of the "wise" (meaning, of course, such "wisdom" as human nature is capable of), to the subject of vulgar, unsubstantial friendships. Let us then return to our original theme, and at length bring that, ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... enough to see what had occurred. In 1896 a mysterious man, named Clark, without vestige of right or title, so far as the records showed, had conveyed Ebbe Petersen's property to a man named Keilly, equally unsubstantial, who had passed it over to one O'Rourke. Then Browne had suddenly recorded Mrs. Petersen's deed giving O'Rourke the very same property. Thus this O'Rourke, whoever he may have been, held all the Petersen property by two chains of title, one through Clark and ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... from the ground, on two or more parallel branches, the shallow, unsubstantial nest is laid. Some one has cleverly described it as "a tuft of hay caught by the limb from a load driven under it," but this description omits all mention of the quantities of blossoms that must be gathered to line the cradle for ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... if one of the violet, cloud-beautified skies that we see at home over some sunsets had fallen to the ground. And the slant white sails and the black specks of boats on it hung in the sky, and were as unsubstantial as the whole pageant. Capri alone was dark and solid. And as we descended and a high wall hid it, a little handsome rascal, who had attended me for an hour, now at the head and now at the tail of my pony, recalled me to the realities by the request that I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lives being lost or buildings destroyed by the explosions, although electrical conductors have never been employed. Perhaps the paucity of inhabitants in proportion to the extent of country and the unsubstantial materials of the houses may contribute to this observation. I have seen some trees, however, that have been shattered in Sumatra by the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and bolted timbers of our youth, and to make it palatable to us that the great seas should follow each other for ever almost unopposed—instead of being broken into floods of drenching foam visitors get wet-through in—this unsubstantial-looking piece of cage-work expanded as soon as it was well out in the open channel, and almost provided John Bull with another "other island." And whereon the pier-company's sordid commercialism had suggested the construction of a Chinese joss-house, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... there that he began the beautiful replica of his Proserpina, now the property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry, every ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came out from him and shook her almost into ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... truth of this theory, I think there can be no doubt that its rival gains an enormous advantage by being able to explain why the facts are such as they are instead of being obliged to take refuge in hypothetical possibilities of a confessedly unsubstantiated and apparently unsubstantial kind. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the preceding narrative, may perhaps suppose that the materials of which it is framed, are such unsubstantial stuff as dreams are made of. I beg leave, however, at the close, to assure him of his error. With the single abatement that names are changed, and places are not precisely designated, every essential incident that I have recorded, actually ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... we turned into it we were aware of three gentlemen regarding us affectionately from beneath the shelter of a ladder on the off-side of Farringdon Street. 'That's Simmons,' quoth Mr. Bradlaugh, as we went in, and I shook my head solemnly, regarding 'Simmons' as the unsubstantial shadow of a dream. But as the two Misses Bradlaugh and myself reached the room above the shop, a gay—'I told you so', from Mr. Bradlaugh downstairs, announced a visit, and in another moment Mr. Bradlaugh came up, followed by the three ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... young lady, though it comforted herself. Perhaps it would have comforted Betty too, whose hopes rested on the very faint possibility of another summer's gathering at Seaforth. That was a very doubtful possibility; the hope built upon it was vaporously unsubstantial. She debated with herself whether the best thing were not to take the first passable offer that should present itself, marry and settle down, and so deprive herself of the power of thinking about Pitt, and him of the fancy that she ever had thought about him. Poor girl, she had verified the truth ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Dry bread was very unsubstantial food for one who could see from his casemate, at the door of his prison, a sutler selling grapes at two farthings a pound, and cooking, under the shelter of half a cask, bacon and herrings; but we had no money to bring us into connection with this merchant. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... were the extraordinary perils which menaced the individual officer. The office rose by its grandeur to a region above the clouds and vapors of earth: the officer might find his personal security as unsubstantial as those wandering vapors. Nor is it possible that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better illustrated than in this tale of Herodian. Whilst the emperor's mighty arms were stretched out to arrest some potentate in the heart of Asia, a poor slave is silently and stealthily ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... and the forms of the digger-singers seemed suddenly vague and unsubstantial, fading back rapidly through a misty veil. But the words ring strong and defiant through ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... necessarium, will busy itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more unsubstantial ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... beseech) Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more: Till Clement's, angular and cold and staid, Gleams forth in glamour's very stuffs arrayed; And Bride's, her aery, unsubstantial charm Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone Grown flushed and warm, Laughs into life full-mooded and fresh-blown; And the high majesty of Paul's Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls - Calls to his millions to behold and see ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... declared the One Thing to be Fire, but Fire of a mystical nature, "self-kindled and self-extinguished," the vital quickening power of the universe. It was that Universal Life, by participation in which all things have their being, and apart from which they are unsubstantial and unreal. This is the "Tree of Life" ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... Had it never happened that he did some good by mistake? Perhaps that would answer the purpose. Or had he been the mere shape and appearance of a man, and nothing more? He had vanished like a shadow; was he as unsubstantial? Were they not mistaken in supposing he had lived among them! Had he been ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... already said, that the people are so low, barbarous, poor, ill-favored, rude, ignorant, and unworthy of being mingled with Spanish nobility and valor. The second is, that the country is so poor, and what wealth it has is so unsubstantial; it has no roots, or anything in which it could take root and become established. For almost the only wealth of these people has been in the mines and metals, and in their personal belongings, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... Kevin Hooban. From various allusions, vague and unsubstantial, little touches in the kind, musical voices, I gathered that they believed him to be under the influence of the Good People. The sense of mystery and ill-omen came back to me, and I carried away a memory of the dark figures of ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... Asiatic birth, that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in Arcadia, and—whether they ever lived such life or not—enriched the world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a Golden Age. In those delicious times, when deities and demigods appeared familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with friend,—when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a beggar child insisted on seeing me. What was my astonishment when it proved to be our goblin boy, who had been sent to ask me to come to his father; and his father was O'Meara! It all seemed as unsubstantial as a dream. I went with the child, of course. He guided me through the dark entry where I had seen him so often, in behind a great printing house, to a foul court hidden away from the street like some criminal outlaw. I will not try to describe the noisomeness ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... alongside the ships came to beg and not to give. For, in all the ten days of our stay there, we could not buy ten fanegas of rice; and if they brought anything it was cocoanuts, bananas, tamalle, and other articles of the fruit kind, of very unsubstantial and ordinary quality. This will prove to be the truth, rather than what is said in opposition thereto. And when we arrived at these islands, we were in great need of food, as we had on board the fleet nothing but biscuit—and even that in small quantity, as it was carried only by the "Capitana" ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... hate thee," low he muttered, "It was by thee that I was always tricked, My unsubstantial bread I ate unbuttered In ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... certainly it sometimes happened that, even in his most domestic colloquialisms, my mother was in doubt whether he was the simple, straightforward person he was mostly taken for. There was, indeed, a kind of suppressed, subtle irony about him, too unsubstantial to be popularly called humor, but dimly implying some sort of jest, which he kept all to himself; and this was only noticeable when he said something that sounded very grave, or appeared to the grave very silly ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nature and towering spirit to wreak their own will. Once let them give their love to man, and it is the passion of their lives. Of gossip and the wagging tongue of scandal, and of that vague, shadowy phantom, reputation, they reck not. These unsubstantial fleeting barriers are dissipated in an instant before the mighty breath of their omnipotent passion. Their love is the great fact of their lives. Why should it yield to less powerful sentiments, to inferior satisfactions. If the laws and sentiments of the commonalty of mankind oppose, why ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... entered her head that Owen would suspect her secret. Indeed, the whole affair was so dream-like, of so unsubstantial, so gossamer a lightness, that merely to speculate upon her romance would have been to shatter it, as one might put a ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes |
