"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corporations in this country are eating the life out of it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... away and motioned him to sit beside me on the sofa. In the firelit room faint fragrance of the flowers with which he kept it filled crept to us, and around it we both glanced as if its spirit were not intangible; and at unspoken thought his hands ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... endocarditis may develop insidiously on a previously presumably healed endocardial lesion and cause symptoms which would not be associated with the heart, if an examination were not made. Sometimes such a slow-going inflammatory process will be associated with irregular and intangible chest pains, with some cough or with many symptoms referred to the stomach, so that the stomach may be considered the organ which is at fault. There may be dizziness, headache, feelings of faintness, sleeplessness, ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care. The anger touched his pride, his self-esteem, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... material elements, but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may trace its action on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established—customs, institutions, the church—; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal" ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Penzance had been opened. The same year the great Duke had died, but the opening of the railway, with the mayor and all the magistrates and the volunteer band in attendance, had made far the greater stir in West Penwith. Iron Dukes were intangible creatures compared with iron engines, although the Parson had preached about the former and seemed to think, as some parishioners said, that it might have been the Almighty Himself who had passed away. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... here "lonely," is a very expressive word to a Cherokee and is of constant recurrence in the love formulas. It refers to that intangible something characteristic of certain persons which inevitably chills and depresses the spirits of all who may be so unfortunate as to come within its influence. Agisa't[)i] niges[n]na, "I never render ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... visits to the painter's lodgings? what possible reason could she have for going there? Miss Granger's suspicions were shapeless and intangible as yet, but she did suspect. More than once—many times, in fact—during the painting of the portrait, she had seen, or had imagined she could see, signs and tokens of a closer intimacy between the painter and her father's wife than was warranted by their ostensible ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... laden with moisture. Old Daniel wiped his forehead. He was heated, but so happy that he was not aware of it. He saw wonderful new lights over everything. He had wielded love, the one invincible weapon of the whole earth, and had conquered his intangible and dreadful enemy. When, for the sake of that little beloved life, his own life had become as nothing, old Daniel found himself superior to it. He sat there in the tumultuous heat of the May day, watching the child ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and shaking hands with feline amiability. "I cannot think of another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... his head with one hand, and tapped his sword against his leg with the other, to stimulate his power of seeing these intangible combinations. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... mixed with its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic precursors of American energy, something that has given this industry a wider venture, if not peculiar expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have been far beyond common, of the tangible at least; and as to the intangible, the day that I last spent on this portage an art league was being formed to foster an interest in art and bring the best examples available to what were, but a little time ago, dreary meadows half ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... which under such circumstances is offered, is directed to an unknown intelligence, supposed to control the visible forces. As science—which is the knowledge of physical laws—extends, the object of prayer becomes more and more intangible and remote. What we formerly feared, we learn to govern. No one would pray God to avert the thunderbolt, if lightning rods invariably protected houses. The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners indifferent to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... felt justified in any unusual expenditures, and as for speculation—nothing could induce me to buy a share of stock—or even a bond (gilt-edged or otherwise), for I owned a prejudice, my father's prejudice, against all forms of intangible wealth. Evidences of wealth did not appeal to me. I wanted the real thing, I wanted the earth. Nothing but land gave me ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... much about her. Or do people leave something of themselves behind in places where they have experienced emotion? If so, churches ought to be very full of ghosts. I dare say that they are, only then no one could know it except those who had shared the emotion, and therefore they remain intangible. Still, I could have sworn that Isobel was here. Indeed, I seem to feel her now, and I hope that the dream ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of this or any occasion than she, because so thoroughly unconscious, standing on something higher. She suspected, too, he had been used to a life as cultivated as this, long ago, by the low, instructed voice, the intangible simplicity of look and word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible sense of a responsibility." ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... theme—in three portions—seems to embody different aspects of the feminine influence of Astarte. The first portion, measures 51-61, with its undulating, chromatic outline, may be said to typify the haunting apparition so real to Manfred's imagination and yet so intangible; the second, 62-67, contains a note of impassioned protest, and the third, 68-77, is a love message of tender consolation. If this interpretation seem too subjective, a careful reading of the drama where Astarte appears ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... his great love for her, in his absolute honesty and the new-found strength in him. Yet, hovering like a specter, intangible, elusive, menacing—the one disturbing element in her otherwise perfect happiness—was the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... phantom of her, the accursed phantom of her! What was she? An illusion creating illusions, a mockery, a dream, a shadow, a vanity, a vexation of spirit! The fault, the sin, was in himself, in his rebellious thought, in his untamed memory. Though mobile as water, intangible as vapor, Thought, nevertheless, may be tamed by the Will, may be harnessed to the chariot of Wisdom—must be!—that happiness be found. And he recited the blessed verses of the "Book of the Way ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Bakerian lecture, his subject being "The Theory of Light and Colors." That lecture marks an epoch in physical science; for it brought forward for the first time convincing proof of the correctness of the undulatory theory of light. The intangible substance which pulsates and undulates to produce light, Young christened the "luminiferous ether." And the term is still to be found ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... was occurring, in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feathers and fern leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible. They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and the shapes of violet mountains were softened by a veil of the tenderest blue. When the Greeley stage wagon came up, Mr. Fodder, whom I met at ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of the justice, in other words, that we mutually extend to each other through life; but we shall leave on one side legal or positive justice, which is merely the organisation of one side of social justice. We shall occupy ourselves above all with that vague but inevitable justice, intangible and yet so effective, which accompanies and sets its seal upon every action of our life; which approves or disapproves, rewards or punishes. Does this come from without? Does an inflexible, undeceivable moral principle exist, independent of man, in the universe and in things? Is there, in ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Mother Fountain. They come out to worship at the shrine of the sweet-souled, God-absorbed Rabia of Attar. In their bright, glowing faces what a delectable message from the under world of romance and enchantment! Their lips are red with the kisses of love, in whose alembics, intangible, unseen, the dark and damp of the earth are translated into warmth and colour and shade. Ay, these dear little children, unfolding their soft green scrolls and reading aloud such odes on Modesty and Beauty, are as inspiring as the star-crowned night. And every ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... efficient when it comes to tending hotbeds, giving the exact quantity of water necessary to quench the thirst of seedlings without producing dropsy, and the consequent "damping off" which, when it suddenly appears, seems as intangible and makes one feel as helpless as trying to check a backing horse by helpless force of bit. A frame for Margaret carnations, early asters, and experiments in seedling Dahlias and ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... domestic architecture from ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwelling on an obscure "back street" canal, in Basra there abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described from an architectural point of view as a great heap of insanitary and ill-built rubbish which can look collectively extraordinarily picturesque. I have seen bits on Ashar Creek (as for instance the wooden ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... of clear-cut intellectual interests—an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married." Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could, somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps if some one ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... the way, and Mannering followed. As the maid closed the door behind them Mannering felt his breath quicken—his sense of depression grew stronger. He seemed threatened by some new and intangible danger. He stood on the hearthrug while she bent over the switch and turned on the electric light in the sitting-room. Then she threw off her cloak and looked at him curiously for a moment. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for us now to make an artificial ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... sat on her bed, and later on in the train, striving to break the mental thongs which bound her to some intangible stake, Jan Cuxson was sitting in the secret places of the jungle temple, striving to break the bonds of raw hide by which he had found himself fastened to a ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... have, in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants— though this were far better than your old game of indexing your own poor photographs of them—will never give you access ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... as not had lain there on the dewy grass, looking up at the sky, as he had come on her sometimes. Poor Alicia! And once he had been within an ace of marrying her! A life spoiled! By what, if not by love of beauty! But who would have ever thought that the intangible could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame, of wealth, of health! ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... swiftness upward and outward an Aladdin edifice of illusion. It was as though indeed this genius who had waved his wand and bidden this fairy palace of chimera to arise, had used for his material the intangible, iridescent film of bubbles, light as air. Wider and wider spread the balloon of phantasm. Higher and higher it floated, on it fixed the eyes of France. And France laughed, and asked that yet other bubbles ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... scornful smile flickered for a moment in the royal eyes. It was surely news enough for any man that she was a woman—beautiful still—possessing still that intangible and fatal gift of pleasing. The woman slowly faded from her eyes as they rested on the great soldier's face, and the Queen it was who, with a gracious gesture, bade him be seated. But the General remained standing. He alone perhaps of all the men who had to deal with ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... vaguely realizing it. Intangible, but rational enemies were stealing white girls of Bermuda. Invaders from another planet? We had thought it might be that. Certainly it was nothing supernatural. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... name indicated his nature, made every one feel as though transported to a loftier atmosphere. He seemed to belong among the stars. Dawn felt at home at once in his presence, which was a mystery to her friend, to whom he seemed intangible and distant. She had never seen upon the face of Dawn such rapt admiration as she saw there, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... feels the most keenly, who sways men the most powerfully; it is the one who has most perfectly mastered the art of swaying men. Self-sacrifice and a lofty sense of duty find their rewards in the intangible realm of the spirit, but they do not find them in a brilliant society whose foundations are laid in vanity and sensualism. "The virtues, though superior to the sentiments, are not so agreeable," ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... have most to do with promoting the ascent of the soul? The first is atmosphere. In a bright, clear, sunshiny atmosphere the body attains its most healthful growth. So with the soul. Atmosphere is one of those intangible things that every one understands and no one can easily define. It is composed of a thousand different elements. The atmosphere of a household is the spirit by which it is pervaded. Are all reverent, earnest, cheerful, optimistic? Do ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... The greater size is correlated with longer life. The lessons of experience come to it over and over again, and it can and must learn them. It is the intelligent, remembering, thinking type. The insect had begun to peer into the world of invisible and intangible relations, the vertebrate will some day see them. This much is prophecied in his very structure. He must be heir to ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by various gradations on the one side ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... achievement is more complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to himself at her evident pleasure in his words, and, with much the same feeling with which he might have cuddled a purring, affectionate kitten, he went a step farther and made love—a very shadowy, intangible sort of love, in a very indefinite ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... far removed from ferocity, in the great grey eyes, so little shaded by their lids and light eyelashes that occasionally a portion of the white eyeball above the iris was revealed, and there was an intangible brooding melancholy about the autocrat whose will was still law ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... have work—lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... invigorating. The spirituous scent of melaleuca-trees burdens the air, not as an exhalation but as an arrogant physical part of the Isle, while a wattle (ACACIA CUNNINGHAMI) shyly proclaims its flowering by a scent as intangible ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... business as a stepping-stone merely to the study of the law. The old merchant eyed him askance, but made no response. Occasionally the veteran of the market evinced a glimmer of enthusiasm over a prime article of butter, but anything so intangible as a young man's ambitious dreams was looked upon with a very cynical eye. Still he could not be a part of New York life and remain wholly sceptical in regard to the possibilities it offered to a young fellow of talent and large capacity for work. He was a childless man, and if Roger had it ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... tremendous mental excitement, though one does not know what the stir is all about; and that the impression produced by this nervous, impassioned style is usually spoiled by digressions, by hairsplitting, and by something elusive, intangible, to which we can give no name, but which blurs the author's vision as a drifting fog obscures ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... and bear on their young shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody likes Abundance, while Lotus is very popular and counts one of the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... he stands looking wide-eyed into the long vistas opening before him; when he first becomes conscious of the awakening and quickening of strange desires and unknown powers; when what he sees and feels is still shadowy and mystical enough to be intangible, and, so, more beautiful; when his imagination is unsullied, and his faith new and whole—then it is that love wears a halo. The man who has not loved before he was fourteen has ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... in the domain of quite simple material things the dislike of having fixed habits of thought disturbed, leads gentlemen to resent innovations in that way, it is not astonishing that innovations of a more intangible and elusive kind should be subject to a like unconscious misrepresentation, especially by newspapers and public men pushed by commercial or political necessity to say the popular thing rather than the true thing: that contained ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... family likeness! In height, in complexion, and feature alike this man appeared diametrically the opposite of the stout little person encountered outside the inn; yet in his thin, cadaverous face there was an intangible something which marked him out as a child of the same parents. The brother on whom Margot was now gazing was considerably the younger of the two, and might have been handsome, given a trifle more flesh and animation. As it was, he looked gaunt and livid, and his shoulders were rounded, as with ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... point which we have to learn is what we owe for a kindness received. One says he owes the money which he got, another a consulship, another a province. These, however, are but the outward tokens of good services, not the services themselves. A benefit is to the hand something intangible; it is a process in the mind. There is a world of difference between the material of a benefit and the benefit itself. Hence the reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the good will of the giver. The things which ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... us success enough for our thankful confidence, more than enough for our deserts. I repeat it, it is as much as He promised, as much as we had any right to expect, and it is a vast deal more than any other system of belief or of no belief, any of your spiritualised Christianities, or still more intangible creeds has ever managed, or ever thought of trying. To those who taunt us with no success, and who perhaps would not dislike Christian missions so much if they disliked Christian truth a little less, we may very fairly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror—also a flat surface—they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows and lights, makes objects appear in relief, you, who have ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... answers of mine, nothing absolute. They are simply the opinion of one woman, founded upon personal experience and observation. We must, of course, to begin with, eliminate the glamour of the stage—that strange, false lustre, as powerful as it is intangible—and consider acting as a practical occupation, like any other. And then I find that in trying to answer the question asked, I am compelled, after all, to turn ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at most by the second or the third that appears. ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... grasping the foolscap paper as though with a desire to tear through the shield which the written words had formed about a mysterious past and disclose that which was so effectively hidden. So much had the letter told—and yet so little! Dark had been the hints of some mysterious, intangible thing, great enough in its horror and its far-reaching consequences to cause death for one who had known of it and a living panic for him who had perpetrated it. As for the man who stood now with the letter clenched before him, there was promise of wealth, and the threat of sorrow, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of a man was called KHU, and it seems to have taken form as a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body; the KHUs formed a class of celestial beings who lived with the gods, but their functions are not clear. The KHU, like the KA, could be imprisoned in the tomb, and to obviate this catastrophe special formulae were composed ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... The intangible something that places the stamp of popular approval on one musical enterprise, while another equally artistic and as cleverly managed languishes in a condition of unendorsed greatness, remains one ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... be said of the school which does not provide direct instruction in citizenship; for teaching may be given in so many indirect ways. Some consideration of what has happened in this connection both in England and America will perhaps be most helpful, although the intangible nature of the results would render dangerous any attempt to make definite pronouncements on ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of living under present conditions. With every act of perception by our senses, we have therefore not only intuition of the Visible or Finite, but we become at the same moment aware of an Invisible Infinite beyond. Time appears to us as an inconceivable, intangible something, which gives us the impression of movement without anything that moves it. Space is an omnipresent, intangible, inconceivable nothing, outside of which nothing which has existence can be even thought to exist. Let ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of these impending blows fell upon a community already gloomy and despondent. Some vague, intangible change had come over Heart's Desire. The illusion of the past was destroyed. Men rubbed their eyes, realizing that they had been asleep, that they had been dreaming. There dawned upon them the conviction that perhaps, after all, the old scheme of life had not been sufficient. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... who are never unnerved by the intangible, may gauge if they can the weirdness of this address following my first experience, and then smile their contempt of me. For I confess to a moment of uncanny chill. The voice was that of the woman who had trailed her braid of hair into my grasp, the night I first slept here. But, how ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this quality which seems so mysterious that made the Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake, just as the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned the Grand Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly spiritual quality which makes the lake impossible either to paint or ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... had brilliant, discerning governesses—or even mothers. There are not enough of either to go round. So that the seventy-five per cent., possibly more, don't know how to learn, and the mere twenty-five per cent. do. It is hard to tackle effectively so intangible a problem as the correct primary method of teaching, and the statesman, through whose instrumentality this percentage is reversed, may give up politics for gold not had brilliant, discerning governesses with a clear conscience. The first step, ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... breath. During this act occurs the church scene, which is sometimes performed after Valentine's death and sometimes before it. Margaret is kneeling in the shadowy minster, striving to pray, but the voice of conscience stifles her half-formed utterances. In Gounod's libretto, the intangible reproaches which Margaret addresses to herself are materialised in the form of Mephistopheles, a proceeding which is both meaningless and inartistic, though perhaps dramatically unavoidable. In the,' last act, after a short scene on the Brocken and a conventional ballet, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... nations as old as Phoenicia and Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the Between World. This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than that which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unattached and primitive folk-tale, Mr. Campbell's Highland Tales, Kennedy's Fireside Stories of Ireland, and those English tales which have been rescued by Mr. Clodd and others. This makes it impossible to see in the hero-legends naught else than the intangible realm of Celtic ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... character within the last week. It was a place of silences and noiseless tread, and the scent of flowers mingled with the intangible odour of medicine. A great fire burnt in the open fireplace, and heavy curtains had been hung over the door to ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... me and in her, and in my love for her and hers for me. I can't fight it in this blind, aloof way—this thing that is my rival—that stands with its claw embedded in her body warning me back! The horror of it is in the blind, intangible, abstract force that is against me. I can't fight it aloof from her; I can't take her away from it unless I have her in my arms to guard, to inspire, to comfort, to watch. Can't you see, Kathleen, that I must have her every second of ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... will object, there must be some relation between language and culture, and between language and at least that intangible aspect of race that we call "temperament". Is it not inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for the growth of a particular linguistic morphology? This question ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... clouds thickened, obscuring every ray of light, closing the avenues of sight and sound, until, isolated from the outer world by this intangible yet impenetrable barrier, Darrell was alone in a world peopled only with the phantoms of his imagination. Of the lapse of time, of the weary procession of days and nights which followed, he knew nothing. Day and night were to ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... bases flanged with rocky buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried down ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble mankind, often subject to human appetites, constantly ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... the Father (Saint Joseph), and the Child—with Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an important personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all things and the Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... much happier I am than I was last night! He came at eight punctually. I trembled all over when I shook hands with him: I think he must have seen it, but he said nothing. What a wonderful thing this thing they call high breeding is! One feels it in a moment, and yet it seems intangible, indescribable. He has it, I should think, in perfection, and he is the only person I have ever known who possessed it, except, perhaps that young girl, his cousin, whom he presented to me at the party. For a while we talked—at least he did—easily and pleasantly, and then suddenly he said, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... blood in her veins, the blood that makes men and women accept the inevitable with set teeth and a determination to do the right thing even if it hurts. Crystal, therefore, had no thought of rebellion; she only felt an infinity of regret for something sweet and intangible which she had hardly realised, hardly expected, which had been too elusive to be called hope, too remote to be termed happiness. She gave herself the luxury of this short outburst of tears—since nobody was ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... was listening to that other conversation which sounded, with its pleasant gabble and laughter, like a little musical tinkle of bells in the distance. His gall rose, and that distant talk rang in his ears like a cool but intangible insult. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Our Confederacy is perfectly illustrated by the terms and principles governing a common copartnership. There is a fund of power to be exercised under the direction of the joint councils of the allied members, but that which has been reserved by the individual members is intangible by the common Government or the individual members composing it. To attempt it finds no support in the principles ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... upon her as before. She treated him coldly and he ceased calling, his volatile and sensitive nature resenting such treatment. It is curious what little things influence the trend of human lives. Many estrangements are caused by trifles so intangible that we can scarcely locate ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... Little Fellow displayed. The Indian felt the ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is—contradictory as it may seem—utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined by both, and the Indian smelt it and tried his tongue on the broken edge. Then both fell on all fours, creeping under the branches of the thicket and pausing ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... and all our economic and social policies must recognize this. The world has discovered that cash without credit means little. One cannot use cash if one cannot use one's credit to draw it whenever and wherever needed. Credit is intangible and volatile, and may be ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... acknowledge any one's RIGHT THERETO: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively (that is to say involuntarily and from overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto been called holy, good, intangible, or divine; to whom the loftiest conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value, would already practically imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least relaxation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence, which ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... W. Bradshaw, pioneer scout of the Wolf Patrol, having attained the age of maturity and realizing that my Boy Scout days are numbered, do hereby give, devise and bequeath my scout assets, tangible and intangible, as ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... is in and of everything. Differing from many tribes, who adore material things, the Pawnees simply regarded certain localities as sacred—they became so only because they were blessed by the Divine presence. Ti-ra-wa was not personified; he was as intangible as the God of the Christian. The sacred nature of the Pawnee deity extended to all animal nature —the fish that swim in the rivers, the birds that fly in the air, and all the beasts which roam over the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... special effort to get him through on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its shining ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... tingled, an intangible jailer that bound them, more surely than steel bars, to the control room. To dare that streaming barrage meant instant impotence, and perhaps, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... and for all the tiny spark from which marital happiness might have been rekindled. As long as it survives, both man and wife feel in their inmost hearts that, no matter what his offense, to "take him to court" is treason against the intangible bonds that still hold between them. No matter how far apart they have drifted, or how unforgivable has been the deserter's offense, something irrevocable does happen to the fabric of marriage, a few poor shreds of which may still exist between the two, ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... recognized that he was neither receptive nor docile. He chafed impatiently and angrily at Mara's obduracy, which, nevertheless, only increased his love for her. The deepest instincts of his nature made him feel that she belonged to him, and he to her. The barrier between them was so intangible that he was in a sort of rage that he could not brush it aside. Reflection always brought him back to the conviction that she did love him. Her passionate words: "If my heart break a thousand times I will never speak to you again," grew more and more significant. Odd fancies, half-waking ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... pride of your caste and of your party, and how much you despise the partisan of the squalid mob of France. Have I said that I aspired to gain your love? I wonder if I have ever dreamed it? I only know, Juliette, that you are to me something akin to the angels, something white and ethereal, intangible, and perhaps ununderstandable. Yet, knowing my folly, I glory in it, my dear, and I would not let you go out of my life without telling you of that, which has made every hour of the past few weeks a paradise for me—my love for ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and the Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable preliminaries to anything like a real democracy. A democracy really educated in politics will express ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... was the state, the king was the country, the king was all. There was one king, with power not derived from his people, and too high to be questioned; and the rest were all subjects, with no political right but obedience. All above was intangible power, all below quiet subjection. A recent occurrence in the French Chambers shows us how public opinion on these subjects is changed. A minister had spoken of the "king's subjects." "There are no subjects," exclaimed hundreds ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... warrior nor solely a scholar, but a mixture of the two that gave him an aura that inspired fear, some unseen presence that filled the air around him and sent his neighbors into a reverencing awe reminiscent of a lover's sacred euphoria, intangible yet undeniable. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... compasses is drawed to the north. It is the same, Martha says, if you is on a quest fur a father or a mother, only you have got to be worthy of that there quest, she says. The first time you meet the right one you are drawed jest like the witch hazel. That is the Intangible Something working on you, she says. Martha had learnt a lot about that. The book that had fell in the crick was like that. ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... much light-hearted chatter on the parts of Violet and Max Wyndham. Colonel Campion sat in heavy silence, and Olga instinctively held aloof. There was something in Max's attitude that puzzled her, but it was something so intangible that she could not even vaguely define it to herself. All his careless banter notwithstanding, she was fully convinced in her own mind that he was not in the smallest degree dazzled or so much as attracted by the brilliant beauty that so dominated her own imagination. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... in southern Illinois he had known the hour the instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the bed-room was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the feeling—an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... copy Corot. The work that he did after he attained freedom and swung away from Claude and Constable has an illusive, intangible, subtle and spiritual quality that no imitator can ever catch on his canvas. Corot could not even copy his own pictures—his work is born of the spirit. His effects are something beyond skill of hand, something beyond mere knowledge of technique. You can copy a Claude and you can ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... relieved somewhat the present situation. Yet her avoidance of him he could construe only as contempt for a man who had played with her while bound by other ties. Sometimes he felt that he must explain to her how intangible were those bonds. Yet he was sufficiently conscious of their actual existence to feel that the difficulties of explanation were almost insurmountable. And Hilda, poor child, took his devotion ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... him in a likely place, and the rapt patience of the born angler had folded him close, she disposed herself comfortably in the thick grass, her back against a tree, and took up the shuttle of fancy to weave a wonderful daydream, as beautiful, intangible as the lacy, summer ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... has been given generally have active minds, but their minds never present anything clearly. To their mental vision all is ill-defined, chaotic. They see everything in a haze. Whether such men talk or write, they are verbose, illogical, intangible, will-o'-the-wispish. Their thoughts are phantomlike; like shadows, they continually escape their grasp. In their talk they will, after long dissertations, tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... believes him, and he is struck with madness so that no one ever shall. Since then mortals have been more or less demented, particularly those who are held to be wise, but madmen are in reality the only wise men; for they can see, hear and feel the invisible, the inaudible and the intangible, though they cannot relate their experiences to others.' Thus Zohar, the wisest of all the books of wisdom, and therefore one that no one believes. I shall build no tower of Babel, but I shall tempt the Powers into my mousetrap, and send them to the Powers below, the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... so far it was a matter of course that some people were married—their household life went unnoticed; the fact had no relation to her own intangible dreams or hopes; it was a condition inherent to these elders, and not of any particular interest to her. But Alice Wayne had been a girl like herself until now. This matter-of-fact community of living forced itself upon ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... from motives known only to itself the particular branch of legislation assigned to it. The only semblance of responsibility attaching to the committee is found in the party affiliation of the majority of its members with the majority in the House. But ineffectual and intangible as this is, it is rendered even more so by the fact that the opposition party is also represented on each committee. This allows the dominant party to escape responsibility, since it can claim that its failure to satisfy the popular ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Music is intangible and ephemeral, but it comes from the home world of the spirit and though so fleeting it is recognized by the spirit as a soul-speech fresh from the celestial realms, an echo from the home whence we are now exiled, and therefore it ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... established, M. Blanc does not doubt that production will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his SYSTEM. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These critics had not seen that, in discussing M. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... organization can be built up without spending money. The spending of money for good machinery appeals to them because they can see machines after they are bought; but putting money into anything so invisible, intangible, and to the average man so indefinite, as an organization seems ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... wedding, and a very simple one—according to Billy, and according to what Marie had said it was to be. Billy still serenely spoke of it as a "simple affair," but Marie was beginning to be fearful. As the days passed, bringing with them more and more frequent evidences either tangible or intangible of orders to stationers, caterers, and florists, her fears found voice ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... wreck on this reef of musk and bear's-grease came over Nattie with a rush, and for a moment so affected her that she could hardly restrain her tears. And yet, after all, was not "C," her "C," the "C" whom she knew by his conversation only—"picked out of books!"—an unreal, intangible being, and not this so different person who ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... one is permitted to wear it in the most law-abiding communities as well as amongst miners and backwoodsmen. If inoffensive people were ever to cast it aside, then wicked men would have everything their own way and make life intolerable. Fortunately the evil-doers always have the fear of this intangible six-shooter before them; a wholesome feeling, which restrains them more than reasonableness or the law courts, and to which we owe it that the meek are permitted to inherit the earth. But now this quarrel was with a whole nation, though certainly not with a very great one, since the population of ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... There is a subtle, intangible, but very real spirit influence breathing out of every man's presence. It is proportioned entirely to the strength of the man living within. With some it is very attractive. Sometimes it is positively repulsive. ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... it has been seldom exhibited, and the photograph by which it is usually judged is taken from a reproduction moulded a generation ago. The original, of rather slaty Lavagna stone, has never been photographed, and the cast, many thousands of which exist, entirely fails to show the intangible and diaphanous qualities of the original. The widespread popularity of the St. Cecilia would (if possible) be enhanced were we more familiar with the genuine work itself. It is certainly one of the most accomplished examples of Italian plastic art; not, indeed, by Donatello ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... she gave him a smile over her shoulder, however, that was at once full of mirth and something more—something that he could not explain or grasp any more than he could the soft, silvery light of the moon that filled the sky, and was as real as it was intangible. He walked away as if in a dream; he continued his aimless wanderings for hours, but swift as were his strides a swifter current of passion, deep and strong, was sweeping him away from Jennie Burton ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... quietly dignified. It was the intangible good breeding that distinguished her from the ordinary country-folk. She had a small tin kettle in her hand, and her manner ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of those forces? Do they, or either of them, belong to the domain of the supernatural? Are they the products of some supreme force, or forces, heretofore unappreciated? The reply is clear and unquestionable. The supernatural must necessarily be a part of the Divine Essence, and consequently intangible. Not so the subjects of our inquiry. They are natural products, therefore, and the result of the operation of some power commensurate with the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... memory of the Dead.—Religion seems to have very little place in the Athenian funeral: there are no priests present, no prayers, no religious hymns. But the dead man is now conceived as being, in a very humble and intangible way, a deity himself: his good will is worth propitiating; his memory is not to be forgotten. On the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral there are simple religious ceremonies with offerings ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... rush, will call into being memories the tenderest, the deepest, the saddest? It may be a worthless little book, a withered flower ghastly in its brown grave clothes, a cheap, tawdry trinket; it may be something as intangible as a few bars of a hackneyed song ground out on a wheezy, asthmatic hand organ. But just so surely as one has lived—and therefore loved—one knows the inherent power to sting and wound in things the most pitiably commonplace. De Musset ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... to see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. Nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. It must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same time increase his ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." The higher class Egyptians, however, fearing that their existence would continue to be of the same shadowy and intangible character after the second judgment, as they believed it would be in the Amenti, if worms were allowed to destroy their bodies, hoped to preserve them until that time ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... (touch): (1) tact, contact, intact, intangible, attain, taint, stain, tinge, contingent, integrity, entire, tint; (2) tactile, tactual, tangent, distain, attaint, attainder, integer, disintegrate, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... directions. If the speaker desires his thoughts to be transmitted to any given point, he leans toward the stem leading to that point. This silken web which you have admired, is a sensitive electric telegraph. It is composed of the elements of mind; in the world you have lately inhabited it would be intangible, but it has a subtle connection with the human brain, and spirit thoughts directed through it go with the promptness of electricity to their destination. Thought is electric, but its power of transmitting itself is, like that of the human voice, limited; the voice requires the artificial ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... the evidence against him was vague and intangible, it was very hard to disprove. But, in his anxiety, the criminal has drawn the net so closely that one ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... brow, the trembling restlessness of the lips, to be swayed and tyrannized over by the imaginative and ideal. Fancy, with the sister, had stopped short at the golden goal of poetry; with the brother, less happy and less restrained, it had wandered into visions more intangible and unembodied; and the faculties which gave genius to the one threatened madness to ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the field like a light cloud, with his eyes. It seemed grey at first, but the higher it flew the lighter it became, and the friendly sunshine shone through it, transforming it. It floated upwards, ever upwards, ever more immaterial, more intangible, until it flew away entirely—a puff, ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... thy gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on some unfooted ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Nothing is so pervasive as an atmospheric influence, and, in its way, nothing is so important. It is significant that foreign students rarely speak of Oxford without commenting on its atmosphere; something in the air of the old town which, although intangible in its operation, is a positive factor in the educational result. Specific courses of instruction are less numerous than in many other places, and such instruction as is offered is often defective in methods ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... saw the terrific emanation take its baleful effect. As before, the body commenced to expand and gradually took on a misty outline. Larger and larger it grew, until finally it had become a vast cloud of intangible nothingness which filled the room like ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... The rice and fish are boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the first three fingers of the right hand. The thumb is then placed behind the mass. It is raised up and poised before the mouth, with a skill coming ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... and glittering dramatic force that is felt in Othello and Macbeth. The probability is that he wrought upon the old legend of Holinshed in a mood of intellectual caprice, inclining towards sensuous and fanciful dalliance with a remote and somewhat intangible subject. Those persons who explain the immense fecundity of his creative genius by alleging that he must steadily have kept in view the needs of the contemporary theatre seem to forget that he went much further in his plays than there was any need for him to go, in the satisfaction ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... has an intangible and inexpressible beauty such as never recurs in the more mature art of greater masters. But Catullus has no narrative gift; his use of the hexameter is confined to a limited set of rhythms which ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... much," replied Prissie, half frightened at her manner, which was sweet enough but had an intangible hardness about it, which Priscilla felt, but could not fathom. "I thought you'd be so glad about the decision Miss Heath and Miss Eccleston ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... did work innumerable miracles through the interposition of Christ. Ordinary miracles, indeed, could be tested by the senses, but the essence of transubstantiation was that it eluded the senses. Thus nothing could be more convenient to the government than to make this invisible and intangible necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the flesh ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... to me, to be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and when we sat down at the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... again of an unobtrusive reserve force, whose power of endurance she could not estimate; because her dealings with Michael's shallower nature had afforded her no experience of a moral stability free from the warp of the personal equation. It was as if some intangible part of him, over which she could establish no hold, stood persistently afar ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I rode in Madam ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... disturbances, there is an unusual amount of immortal food. Should we try to resist it, there would eventually be a greater pressure without than within, and we should assimilate involuntarily. We are part of the intangible universe, and can feel no hunger that is not instantly appeased, neither can ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the fact, was a year old—a long-familiar and dreamy state—but its meaning had not been revealed to him until just a moment past. Everything had changed when she looked out with that sweet, steady gaze through the parted veil and then slowly closed it. She had changed. There was something intangible about her that last moment, baffling, haunting. He leaned against a crooked old gate-post that as a boy he had climbed, and the thought came to him that this spot would all his life be vivid and poignant in his memory. The first ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... They are her stocks and bonds, giving forth daily their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... wholly insincere, and meant only to mislead their opponents and the public. Strong proof of this is found in the careful speech of Senator Jefferson Davis, in which he lays down the issue without reserve, at the same time dealing in such vague and intangible complaints as showed intention and desire to remain unanswered and unsatisfied.. He said he believed the danger to be that a sectional hostility had been substituted for the general fraternity, and thus the Government rendered powerless ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew her to him, it ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... we are already aware, fantastic images such as he employed for the first two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz., knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things as ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness—an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as a single file of Indians, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... other to the point of idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making co-respondent. ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... summer showers and the whispering of summer winds. Everything is lifted up from the plane of labor to the plane of love, and a glory spans your life. With your friend, speech and silence are one; for a communion mysterious and intangible reaches across from heart to heart. The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though independent of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... printing, spectacles, engraving, and that latest discovery of all—the daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the Bicetre for announcing his immense ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac |
